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Childhood abuse increases the risk of early mortality. Using data from the MIDUS study, the authors show that perceived social support received in adulthood can act as a buffer against the adverse effects of childhood abuse.
Short breaks in a stimulus stream are sufficient to create event boundaries during fear conditioning, which modulate the recognition rate for in-episode stimuli.
A model of minority–majority group interactions shows that minority cultural practices can be preserved from cultural homogenization where a group boundary allows free movement of minority members, but excludes members of the more powerful majority.
Galesic et al. show that election poll questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts, in addition to their own intentions, improve predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections.
Using an imagery-perception paradigm, the authors find that imagined speech affects the perceived loudness of sound. They also show that early neural responses correlate with the loudness ratings, even without external stimulation.
Glaze et al. show that individual variability in learning from noisy evidence involves a bias–variance trade-off that is best explained by a model using a sampling algorithm that approximates optimal inference.
Using fMRI data from healthy controls, the authors construct probabilistic maps of the multiple-demand and language-selective regions in the brain to classify patient lesions. They find that only multiple-demand-weighted lesion volumes predict deficits in fluid intelligence.
Waniek and colleagues show that individuals and communities can disguise themselves from detection online by standard social network analysis tools through simple changes to their social network connections.
The authors exploit a 1972 policy that increased the minimum school leaving age to investigate the causal effects of staying in school on health. Using a large dataset, they find that remaining in school reduces the risk of diabetes and mortality.
Strimling and colleagues develop and empirically test a mathematical model of the 'civilizing process', that is, the tendency of social norms about violence and hygiene to become increasingly strict over time.
The collective wisdom of crowds often provides better answers to problems than individual judgements. Here, a large experiment that split a crowd into many small deliberative groups produced better estimates than the average of all answers in the crowd.
Field experiments and network data show that the witchcraft label ‘zhu’ influences labour-sharing and intermarriage in a large network of southwest Chinese villages. Zhu is not an indicator of pro-sociality, but may function to spite or damage rivals.
Jebb et al. use data from the Gallup World Poll to show that happiness does not rise indefinitely with income: globally, income satiation occurs at US$95,000 for life evaluation and US$60,000 to US$75,000 for emotional well-being.