Volume 5 Issue 4, April 2021

Maxine Davis’ experience as a Black academic in an overwhelmingly white department took a heavy toll on her mental health. Here she argues for an active examination of anti-Black practices in organizations to promote the health and well-being of all academics.

Many US federal agencies apply principles from risk communication science across a wide variety of hazards. In so doing, they identify key research and practice gaps that, if addressed, could help better serve the nation’s communities and greatly enhance practice, research, and policy development.

Psychologists have long known that people with depression often have unhelpful, negative patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions. Bathina et al. now show that these thought patterns can be detected in the everyday language of social media and that individuals who report a diagnosis of depression express more cognitive distortions.

Cognitive epidemiology studies prospective associations between cognitive abilities and health outcomes. Deary et al. review research in this field over the past decade, synthesizing evidence and outlining open questions.

Wood et al. examine gender differences in Hadza hunter-gatherer spatial behaviour using 2,078 days of GPS-recorded travel. As predicted from principles of foraging ecology, Hadza men walked further per day, explored more land, followed more sinuous paths and were much more likely to be alone.

Ma et al. examine why and how crowd synchronization forms spontaneously under different density conditions and what functional benefit synchronization offers for the collective motion of humans.

Cognitive distortions have a central role in the development of depression. Here, the authors examine the tweets of thousands of individuals who report a diagnosis of depression, revealing significantly higher levels of distortions compared with a control group of Twitter users.

Kelly, Corbett and O’Connell use neurally informed modelling to establish that humans account for time constraints and prior probability in their perceptual decisions by adjusting multiple distinct components of a build-to-threshold process.

Accounting for the genetic effects of education and socioeconomic status, psychopathology and psychosocial factors revealed trait-specific genetic architecture, associated biological inference and correlative and putatively causal relationships.

Deco et al. use multimodal neuroimaging data to quantify the global workspace as the common ‘functional rich club’ of regions intersecting across seven tasks as well as rest.

In this Registered Report, Isler et al. test whether religious cooperation is intuitively parochial. They find evidence of religious parochialism but not intuitive cooperation. Exploratory analyses suggest that deliberation tends to promote cooperation in general.

This study introduces a public dataset that finds that school closures in the United States have been more common in schools with lower math scores and higher rates of students from racial minorities, who experience homelessness, and who have lower incomes.

The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) records data on 19 different government COVID-19 policy indicators for over 190 countries. Covering closure and containment, health and economics measures, it creates an evidence base for effective responses.