Psychology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooperation among humans is threatened by the free-rider problem. Here the authors identify another challenge to human cooperation: self-reliance, the ability to solve shared problems individually. The experiment reveals that self-reliance crowds out cooperation and increases wealth inequality.

    • Jörg Gross
    • , Sonja Veistola
    •  & Eric Van Dijk

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been assumed that incongruence between individuals’ values and those of their country or region is distressing, but the evidence has been mixed. Using representative samples from 29 countries, the authors show that person-country and person-region value congruence predict six well-being outcomes.

    • Paul H. P. Hanel
    • , Uwe Wolfradt
    •  & Gregory R. Maio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is often tempting for social media users to present themselves in an idealized way. Here, based on analyses of a large set of Facebook profiles together with a longitudinal experiment, the authors find evidence that more authentic self-expression may be psychologically beneficial, as it is related to greater well-being.

    • Erica R. Bailey
    • , Sandra C. Matz
    •  & Sheena S. Iyengar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Progress in eye movement research has been limited since existing eye trackers are expensive and do not scale. Here, the authors show that smartphone-based eye tracking achieves high accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art mobile eye trackers, replicating key findings from prior eye movement research.

    • Nachiappan Valliappan
    • , Na Dai
    •  & Vidhya Navalpakkam

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Having a rich negative emotion vocabulary is assumed to help cope with adversity. Here, the authors show that emotion vocabularies simply mirror life experiences, with richer negative emotion vocabularies reflecting lower mental health, and richer positive emotion vocabularies reflecting higher mental health.

    • Vera Vine
    • , Ryan L. Boyd
    •  & James W. Pennebaker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Beliefs about gods are theorized to develop from bottom-up neurocognitive processes. Here, in the U.S. and Afghanistan, the authors show that superior implicit learning of patterns in visuo-spatial stimuli predicts stronger belief in intervening gods and greater increase in belief since childhood.

    • Adam B. Weinberger
    • , Natalie M. Gallagher
    •  & Adam E. Green

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using fMRI on awake infants could help us understand the contents of a baby’s mind, long before they can speak. Here, the authors report advances in how to collect, preprocess, and analyze task-based fMRI data from infants, and they share the resulting datasets and software.

    • C. T. Ellis
    • , L. J. Skalaban
    •  & N. B. Turk-Browne

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Bayesian brain theories suggest that perception, action and cognition arise as animals minimise the mismatch between their expectations and reality. This principle could unify cognitive science with the broader natural sciences, but leave key elements of cognition and behaviour unexplained.

    • Daniel Yon
    • , Cecilia Heyes
    •  & Clare Press

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Working in military structures implies a reduction in individual autonomy, in which agents must comply with hierarchical orders. Here, the authors show that working within such a structure is associated with a reduced sense of agency and outcome processing for junior cadets, but this relationship is absent in trained officers.

    • Emilie A. Caspar
    • , Salvatore Lo Bue
    •  & Axel Cleeremans

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although everyday life unfolds continuously, we tend to remember past experiences as discrete events. Here, the authors show that dynamic, pupil-linked arousal states track the encoding of such episodes, as revealed by changes in memory for the temporal order and duration of recent event sequences.

    • David Clewett
    • , Camille Gasser
    •  & Lila Davachi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the synchronization of human networks is important in many aspects, but current research is suffering from limited control and noisy environments. Shahal et al. show a quantitative study with full control over the network connectivity, coupling strength and delay among interacting violin players.

    • Shir Shahal
    • , Ateret Wurzberg
    •  & Moti Fridman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear if rates of autism and other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses are elevated in transgender and gender-diverse individuals compared to cisgender individuals. Here, the authors use data from five different large-scale datasets to identify elevated rates of autism diagnoses, diagnoses of other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, and elevated traits related to autism in transgender and gender-diverse individuals, compared to cisgender individuals.

    • Varun Warrier
    • , David M. Greenberg
    •  & Simon Baron-Cohen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The current Syrian conflict is considered a major humanitarian crisis. Here, the authors show a decline in population well-being with the onset of the conflict, and show how this decline compares to other populations experiencing wars, civil unrest or natural disasters.

    • Felix Cheung
    • , Amanda Kube
    •  & Gabriel M. Leung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    What sensory information is available for decision making? Here, using multi-alternative decisions, the authors show that a substantial amount of information from sensory representations is lost during the transformation to a decision-level representation.

    • Jiwon Yeon
    •  & Dobromir Rahnev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is controversy about whether placebos without deception cause real psychobiological benefits. Here, the authors show that the positive effects of placebos without deception are more than response bias by providing evidence they can reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress.

    • Darwin A. Guevarra
    • , Jason S. Moser
    •  & Ethan Kross

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The vagus nerve transmits signals between the gut and the brain thereby tuning motivated behavior to physiological needs. Here, the authors show that acute non-invasive stimulation of the vagus nerve via the ear enhances the invigoration of effort for rewards.

    • Monja P. Neuser
    • , Vanessa Teckentrup
    •  & Nils B. Kroemer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forcing people to choose quickly often changes pro-social behavior, but it is unclear why. Here, the authors show that under time pressure, people engage in incomplete information searches biased by concern (or lack thereof) for others, explaining effects often attributed to automatic processing.

    • Yi Yang Teoh
    • , Ziqing Yao
    •  & Cendri A. Hutcherson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eyewitness errors contribute to wrongful convictions. Here, the authors present a lineup procedure that reveals the structure of eyewitness memory, reduces decision bias, and measures performance of individual witnesses.

    • Sergei Gepshtein
    • , Yurong Wang
    •  & Thomas D. Albright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eye movements are inhibited prior to the occurrence of predictable visual events. Here the authors show that this inhibition is also found in the auditory domain, thus revealing a multimodal perception action coupling.

    • Dekel Abeles
    • , Roy Amit
    •  & Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When our expectations are violated, it is adaptive to update our internal models to improve predictions in the future. Here, the authors show that during mnemonic violations, hippocampal networks are biased towards an encoding state and away from a retrieval state to potentially update these predictions.

    • Oded Bein
    • , Katherine Duncan
    •  & Lila Davachi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People regularly punish norm violations using gossip and direct confrontation. Here, the authors show that the use of gossip versus direct confrontation is context sensitive, with confrontation used more when punishers have more to gain, and gossip used more when the costs of retaliation loom large.

    • Catherine Molho
    • , Joshua M. Tybur
    •  & Daniel Balliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In some types of decision-making, people must accept or forego an option without knowing what prospects might later be available. Here, the authors reveal how a key bias– asymmetric learning from negative versus positive outcomes – emerges in this type of decision.

    • Neil Garrett
    •  & Nathaniel D. Daw

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People are disproportionately more patient when evaluating larger rewards. Here, the authors show how this magnitude effect may reflect an adaptive response to uncertainty in mental representations of future value.

    • Samuel J. Gershman
    •  & Rahul Bhui

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decision-making is traditionally thought to be guided by memories of option values. Here, the authors challenge this view by showing that merely making a choice – even without experiencing any outcomes – alters neural representations of stimulus-reward associations and biases future decisions.

    • Lennart Luettgau
    • , Claus Tempelmann
    •  & Gerhard Jocham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humankind is in a period of unprecedented cognitive sophistication as well as globalization. Here, using an evolutionary game theory model, the authors reveal ways in which the transition from local to global interaction can have both positive and potentially negative consequences for the prevalence of cognitive sophistication in the population.

    • Mohsen Mosleh
    • , Katelynn Kyker
    •  & David G. Rand

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Music varies across cultures, but some features are widespread, consistent with biological constraints. Here, the authors report that both Western and native Amazonian listeners perceptually fuse concurrent notes related by simple-integer ratios, suggestive of one such biological constraint.

    • Malinda J. McPherson
    • , Sophia E. Dolan
    •  & Josh H. McDermott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although the feeling of being stressed is ubiquitous and clinically significant, the underlying neural mechanisms are unclear. Using a novel predictive modeling approach, the authors show that functional hippocampal networks specifically and consistently predict the feeling of stress.

    • Elizabeth V. Goldfarb
    • , Monica D. Rosenberg
    •  & Rajita Sinha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Local participatory experiences can influence broader democratic attitudes and participation. Here, in two field experiments in US and China, the authors find that participatory work meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and more willing to participate in political and social decision-making.

    • Sherry Jueyu Wu
    •  & Elizabeth Levy Paluck

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often ignore evidence that disconfirms their prior beliefs. Here, the authors investigate the underlying cognitive, computational and neuronal mechanisms of such confirmation bias, and show that high confidence induces a selective neural processing of choice-consistent information.

    • Max Rollwage
    • , Alisa Loosen
    •  & Stephen M. Fleming

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Working memory training reshapes the brain functional network reorganization. Here, the authors demonstrate an increase of the whole-brain network segregation during the n-back task, accompanied by alterations in dynamic communication between the default mode system and task-positive systems.

    • Karolina Finc
    • , Kamil Bonna
    •  & Danielle S. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans explore the world by optimistically directing choices to less familiar options and by choosing more randomly when options are uncertain. Here, the authors show that these two exploration strategies rely on distinct uncertainty estimates represented in different parts of the prefrontal cortex.

    • Momchil S. Tomov
    • , Van Q. Truong
    •  & Samuel J. Gershman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can easily uncover abstract associations. Here, the authors propose that higher-order associations arise from natural errors in learning and memory. They suggest that mental errors influence the humans’ representation of the world in significant and predictable ways.

    • Christopher W. Lynn
    • , Ari E. Kahn
    •  & Danielle S. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Divisive normalization is thought to be a ubiquitous computation in the brain, but has not been studied in decisions that require integrating evidence over time. Here, the authors show in humans that dynamic divisive normalization accounts for the uneven weighting of perceptual evidence over time.

    • Waitsang Keung
    • , Todd A. Hagen
    •  & Robert C. Wilson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often prioritize their own interests, but also like to see themselves as moral. Here the authors show how distortions in memory might resolve this tension by demonstrating that people tend to remember being more generous in the past than they actually were.

    • Ryan W. Carlson
    • , Michel André Maréchal
    •  & Molly J. Crockett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conventional theory suggests that people’s confidence about a decision reflects their subjective probability that the decision was correct. By studying decisions with multiple alternatives, the authors show that confidence reports instead reflect the difference in probabilities between the chosen and the next-best alternative.

    • Hsin-Hung Li
    •  & Wei Ji Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual cognition compensates for small changes in an object’s appearance to ensure its perceived continuity. We show that in situations with multiple objects, context features like color, temporal or spatial position are used as anchors to selectively integrate corresponding objects over time.

    • Cora Fischer
    • , Stefan Czoschke
    •  & Christoph Bledowski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When a cue is provided, people can rapidly attend to a changing scene and remember how it looked right after the cue appeared, but if the scene changes gradually, there is a delay in what we remember. Here the authors model these effects as prolonged attentional engagement.

    • Chloe Callahan-Flintoft
    • , Alex O. Holcombe
    •  & Brad Wyble

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feelings of confidence reflect the likelihood that decisions are correct. Here the authors show that confidence taps partially dissociable evidence from that used for perceptual decisions, and that, rather than passively monitoring, confidence controls the depth of sensory information processing.

    • Tarryn Balsdon
    • , Valentin Wyart
    •  & Pascal Mamassian

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