Volume 3 Issue 7, July 2019

Brazil has a long history of important scientific discoveries that have contributed to the overall wealth and well-being of the country. Paulo Boggio argues that these can only be sustained if the government stops cutting the research and education budget and starts investing in human intellect and science.

Reproducibility and replicability are fundamental requirements of scientific studies. Disagreements over universal definitions for these terms have affected the interpretation of large-scale replication attempts. We provide a visual tool for representing definitions and use it to re-examine these attempts.

Although low- and middle-income countries experience more adversity, and this is associated with higher rates of mental health problems, most people in these countries cannot access evidence-based mental health care. There are opportunities to implement affordable evidence-based programs in ways that are sustainable in low- and middle-income countries.

How can we improve citizenship rates among low-income immigrants? While reducing costs helps, a new study suggests that an information nudge about eligibility for such fee waivers can result in a significant increase in naturalization applications among low-income individuals in the US.

Anxiety, ‘the disease of the 21st century’, is a clinical enigma. Using virtual predators to create real-world threat scenarios, two new studies build on prior rodent-based anxiety theory to map effects of personality and decision complexity in human prefrontal cortex. We may soon have coherent neural maps of these disabling and costly psychiatric disorders.

While simple contagions spread efficiently from highly connected ‘influencers’, new research has revealed another kind of spreading process, that of complex contagions, which follows surprisingly different pathways to disperse through social networks.

How do the arguments and insights of neoclassical and behavioural economics relate to one another? Aumann offers a synthesis of the two approaches based on the concept of rule-rationality.

Using data from Michigan, Harding et al. find no evidence that prison sentences have an effect on arrests or convictions for violent crimes after release. Imprisonment modestly reduced violence if the analysis included imprisonment’s incapacitation effects.

Through a randomized field experiment, researchers at Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab demonstrate that a low-cost nudge informing immigrants about their eligibility for a federal fee waiver increased rates of citizenship applications.

By analysing data from the Growing Up Today Studies 1 and 2, Chen et al. show that positive parenting is associated with greater emotional well-being and lower risk of mental illness, eating disorders, obesity and marijuana use.

By analysing data from more than 4,500 9- to 10-year-olds, Dick et al. found no evidence that bilingual children have an advantage in executive functions, the cognitive abilities that are central to the voluntary control of thoughts and behaviours.

Fung et al. show that participants’ trait anxiety is associated with earlier escape decisions when facing slowly approaching threats. Anxiety correlates with task-driven blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in the cognitive fear circuits.

How does the number of connections a person has online influence how news spreads? Wang et al. show that users with few connections can sometimes spread news more effectively than well-connected users, resulting in long, dendrite-like diffusion paths and a non-Gaussian distribution of node distances.

Jang and colleagues show that positive reward prediction errors elicited during incidental encoding enhance the formation of episodic memories.

Korn and Bach show that when humans have to trade off the opportunity to forage with the necessity of avoiding threat, they use a mix of optimal decision-making and heuristics. Hippocampal and medial prefrontal activity reflects these computations.

Ziegler et al. show that healthy young adults who used a meditation-inspired closed-loop app (MediTrain) for 6 weeks experienced gains in both sustained attention and working memory.