Volume 8 Issue 1, January 2024

Online health communities can provide valuable social support in China, writes Qingpeng Zhang. He argues that they offer benefits that artificial intelligence cannot match.

The Sustainable Development Goals promise to leave no one behind. Yet recent global actions have pushed disadvantaged groups further behind, writes Magda Robalo Correia e Silva.

Social and behavioural science offers a valuable toolkit for combating pandemics, but has not been broadly applied to tackle the rising pandemic of antimicrobial resistance.

Policy proposals with the most votes may not always be the most informative. A research paper now makes the case that divisive issues — those that receive much support but also much opposition — provide valuable information in democratic deliberative processes, as they help to detect relevant demands that would not emerge via agreement rankings.

As screen time becomes more and more present in the lives of children, parents need the best information to help to guide their decisions. By collating all of the meta-analytic evidence from across the field, we hope to provide that evidence.

Aggregate demand for interpersonal skills in the Australian labour market has accelerated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, there has been a high degree of complementarity between remote work and demand for interpersonal skills during this period.

Hatzenbuehler et al. argue that cognitive neuroscience should take more interest in the consequences of social inequality, and discuss various research methods for accomplishing this goal.

The authors analyse over 12 million Australian job postings and find that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an acceleration in the aggregate demand for interpersonal skills.

Combining neuroimaging, physiological and behavioural methods, Meissner et al. show that humans can self-regulate the brain’s arousal levels via a biofeedback approach that is based on measurements of the eye’s pupil.

A three-wave survey conducted before and after a major leaked and official ruling by the US Supreme Court shows that the ruling shifted views on abortion legality, had a contrasting effect on norm perceptions and polarized perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy and support for reform.

Doctorate recipients with disabilities experienced early in life (at age <25 yr) working in STEM at academic institutions earned US$10,580 less per year than non-disabled workers and were underrepresented in higher academic positions.

Findings from an umbrella review of more than 100 meta-analyses suggest that screen time can have both positive and negative associations with educational and health outcomes for youth, but effect sizes are small.

In a meta-analysis of over 50 studies, the authors explore factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine uptake in people living with HIV worldwide.

This eye-tracking study of ~500 5-month-old infant twins indicates that individual preferences for faces versus non-social objects like cars and phones are associated with genetic variation.

Zhao et al. present a model of conceptual bootstrapping through which they model learning complex concepts by recursively combining simpler concepts.

A metric of political divisiveness helps identify polarizing proposals in the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections.

Tu et al. show that the medial-dorsal thalamic nucleus and its connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex preferentially encode pain in humans and rats.

A genome-wide association study of cerebral ventricle phenotypes finds 62 unique loci and reveals a genetic overlap between ventricular and neuropsychiatric traits.