Reviews & Analysis

Does tweeting your feelings change how you feel? A study of over a billion tweets shows that we tend to tweet about our feelings after they have escalated. However, such ‘affect labeling’ tweets — even though they are constrained to 140 characters — lead to rapid reductions in the intensity of our emotions.

There is wide interest in the social norms construct across psychology, economics, law and social marketing. Now a study investigates an important missing piece in the social norms’ puzzle: what is the underlying process that explains how norms impact behaviour? The answer: self–other similarity (self-categorization) and internalization.

Paranoia is not only a symptom of mental disorder, but may also function as part of normal human psychology. Raihani and Bell review the evidence for an evolutionary account of paranoia in which between-group competition favours the development of psychological mechanisms to avoid social threat.

Cultural products have a life of their own: academic papers get cited and songs get downloaded. Surprisingly, public attention to these products shows a consistent pattern over time: a constant decline characterized by an inflexion point. This pattern might be due to how cultural products are discussed in the community and archived as cultural memories.

A new study shows that undergoing electroencephalography-based neurofeedback training of amygdala activity leads to an improved ability to regulate emotion in soldiers during combat training, a skill that may prevent future psychiatric disorders.

Russ et al. discuss the broad applications of data science to mental health research and consider future ways that big data can improve detection, diagnosis, treatment, healthcare provision and disease management.

Understanding what enables teams to flourish has been the focus of considerable interest across domains of human behaviour. A study finds that, in addition to recruiting and retaining highly skilled members, shared prior success significantly contributes to enhanced team performance.

How to establish causal links is a central question across scientific disciplines. Marinescu and colleagues describe methods from empirical economics and how they could be adapted across fields, for example, to psychology and neuroscience, to test causality.

Sequence learning — how we learn that one event or item follows another — has been studied mostly focusing on the effects of relatively simple relationships between elements. Using network science, a new study shows that in complex probabilistic sequences, some relationships are more easily learned than others.

It is a general principle that we learn from experience, building expectations about the future that then affect perception. A new study focuses on how expectations influence learning about pain and shows that we prioritize information that confirms our prior expectations, leading to a self-perpetuating bias in judging the intensity of pain.

A new study demonstrates a novel research strategy for studying juries, moving inquiry forward more rapidly and efficiently.

Herd and colleagues outline a framework for collaboration between social and population health scientists to better understand how the human microbiome and social environments interact and co-develop.

Influenza is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality around the world. Nudges are small changes to the environment or choice architecture that can be designed to significantly increase influenza vaccination rates.

Increasing gender diversity can bring about substantial benefits for research and society. Nielsen et al. propose a framework for increased diversity not only in the composition of teams, but also in research methods and in the questions targeted by research.

We rapidly make inferences about the moral character of others. Observing a single immoral behaviour is often sufficient to make us think of them as morally ‘unworthy’. But our beliefs about others’ ‘badness’ (as opposed to ‘goodness’) are more uncertain. That is, we allow ourselves more space to re-assess and, if needed, rectify these beliefs.

How the brain processes parallel streams of information has been widely researched, yet remains unsolved. A new study shows that the brain processes informative cues in serial even when they are presented simultaneously, and that patterns of cortical activity shift under the constraints of rapid decisions to optimize processing.

Years of research has shown that children do not learn words at random, but in distinct patterns. Why do we observe the patterns that we do? By using network science and investigating the words that children don’t learn, researchers have potentially uncovered a general property of word learning as a process of gap forming and filling.

In line with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, advantaged individuals recognize their privileged position and work to avoid collapsing a common pool resource, but they will not accept excessive free-riding by poorer individuals.

Network neuroscience has begun to generate fundamental insights into the structures and dynamics that lie beneath human cognition. Targeting the question what creates differences between humans, a study finds that individual differences in connectivity patterns in brain networks underlie individual differences in task performance.

Mental effort is traditionally a subject of psychological research. Kool and Botvinick discuss how recent attempts to study mental effort using concepts from behavioural economics have allowed researchers to better understand how costs and benefits drive when people invest mental effort.