#counseling — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: November 13, 2026 at 08:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Young women widely believe that each person has a single ideal romantic partner destined for them, Turkish study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/young-women-widely-believe-that-each-person-has-a-single-ideal-romantic-partner-destined-for-them-turkish-study-finds/

A small qualitative study of young heterosexual women in Turkey found that most endorsed the “one and only” romantic belief, the idea that each person has a single ideal partner or soulmate destined for them. The women generally viewed romantic relationships portrayed on social media as artificial and unrealistic, but the findings suggest that repeated exposure to such portrayals may still shape their romantic expectations in dysfunctional ways. The paper was published in BMC Psychology.

Romantic relationships are an important part of human life, but people’s expectations about love are shaped by cultural norms, gender roles, and media portrayals. Some people develop unrealistic romantic beliefs, such as the idea that true love lasts forever, that everyone has one perfect soulmate, or that love can overcome any obstacle. Such beliefs have been linked to lower relationship satisfaction, difficulties resolving conflicts, and a greater risk of experiencing psychological dating violence.

Movies, television series, and social media frequently portray romantic relationships in idealized ways, potentially reinforcing these unrealistic expectations. According to cultivation theory, repeated exposure to media messages can shape how people perceive reality, including what they expect from romantic relationships. Social media may be particularly influential because users frequently share carefully selected, idealized representations of their relationships.

Study author Gökçe Sancak Aydın of Yozgat Bozok University argues that culture plays a central role in romantic relationships, but that most existing research has relied on Western samples and quantitative methods. As a result, the experiences of Turkish heterosexual women university students, and the meanings they attach to romance, remain underexplored. To address this, she conducted a study aiming to answer the following question: “What is the role of traditional media and social media in shaping romantic beliefs of undergraduate heterosexual women in Türkiye?”

Sancak Aydın conducted in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 20 heterosexual women undergraduates at a university in Yozgat, a small city in central Turkey. Their ages ranged from 21 to 35, with an average age of 22. Eight were studying guidance and psychological counseling, and 12 were enrolled in teacher education programs. Six had never had a committed romantic relationship, six were currently in a relationship, and 14 had been in at least one committed relationship.

All participants described their socioeconomic status as middle class and said they actively used both social media and traditional media. The interview questions focused on what romance meant to participants, its importance in relationships, how it shaped their expectations, four common romantic beliefs, and the influence of traditional and social media on those beliefs. Two coders analyzed the interview transcripts to identify common themes.

Romantic beliefs are people’s ideas and expectations about the nature of romantic love and how romantic relationships should develop and function. The study examined four such beliefs drawn from earlier research: “love conquers all,” “one and only,” “idealization,” and “love at first sight.” “Love conquers all” is the belief that romantic love can overcome any obstacle, while “one and only” is the belief that everyone has a single ideal partner or soulmate destined for them. “Idealization” is the belief that romantic partners and relationships should be nearly perfect, and “love at first sight” is the belief that people can fall in love immediately upon meeting someone.

The “one and only” belief received the strongest endorsement, followed by idealization. Participants were more divided on “love conquers all” and “love at first sight,” with about half rejecting each. Some participants linked the “one and only” belief to their religious faith, with one citing a verse from the Quran stating that people are created with their spouses.

Participants who had never been in a relationship tended to endorse the “one and only” belief more often, and several described high standards that led them to delay or avoid relationships, though the study was not designed to compare these groups. Those with relationship experience more often described how romantic expectations, such as wanting frequent gifts, compliments, and surprises, led to conflict and disappointment with their partners. Many participants expected romantic gestures to come from men, reflecting traditional gender roles.

Participants perceived both traditional and social media as influential sources of messages about romance and said they were constantly exposed to romantic narratives. Turkish television series and films were seen as promoting beliefs such as “love conquers all” and the idea of a destined partner, while social media was seen as having a stronger influence on idealization through curated posts of seemingly perfect couples and advice from relationship influencers. Some participants also described influencers who claimed they had found “the right person” by practicing manifestation.

Most participants did not describe themselves as directly adopting these messages, and many saw relationships on social media as artificial and unrealistic. Still, many said the portrayals affected them anyway. “Even if I know this, I am very affected by it,” one participant said, describing how seeing other couples’ romantic gestures led her to ask herself, “Is there something wrong with me?”

Participants also noted that the media sent mixed messages. News reports about violence against women and daytime programs focused on relationship conflict pushed some to reject the idea that love conquers all, and some influencers shared experiences that challenged the notion of love at first sight. Based on these accounts, the author concluded that repeated exposure to media messages helps construct romance as a relational necessity, potentially shaping romantic expectations in dysfunctional ways.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the ways young women in Turkey perceive romantic relationships. However, it should be noted that this was a small qualitative study involving only 20 students from one university in a small city, most of whom were studying counseling or teacher education. Studies on larger or more diverse groups, including men and LGBTQ+ individuals, may produce different results. In addition, the study relied on participants’ own perceptions of media influence and did not measure how much media they consumed, so it cannot show that media exposure caused their beliefs.

The paper, “Dysfunctional romantic beliefs of heterosexual women undergraduate students: the role of traditional media and social media,” was authored by Gökçe Sancak Aydın.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/young-women-widely-believe-that-each-person-has-a-single-ideal-romantic-partner-destined-for-them-turkish-study-finds/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Flashy courtship traits tend to evolve faster than combat weapons, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/flashy-courtship-traits-tend-to-evolve-faster-than-combat-weapons-study-finds/

Decorative traits used to attract mates tend to evolve more rapidly than physical weapons used to fight rivals, according to new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Combining a mathematical model with data from 531 species in 10 animal groups, the researchers found that ornaments evolved faster overall, and their model suggests this is largely because mating preferences in the opposite sex drift unpredictably across generations. In the researchers’ framework, those shifting tastes create a moving evolutionary target for ornaments, whereas the physical demands of male-male competition keep weapons anchored to a steadier evolutionary pace.

Many of nature’s most elaborate features, from giant antlers to intricate courtship calls, persist not because they help an animal survive longer, but because they improve its odds of reproducing. Biologists call this evolutionary process sexual selection, and it operates through two primary channels.

Direct competition within the same sex, most often males fighting or intimidating rivals for access to mates, favors the evolution of weapons: physical structures capable of overpowering opponents or inflicting bodily harm, such as tusks, spurs, leg spines, and enlarged canine teeth. Mate choice, most often females choosing among prospective partners, favors the evolution of ornaments: visual, acoustic, or anatomical traits that appeal to a chooser’s senses, such as vibrant feathers, specialized vocal pitches, expandable throat fans, and elongated eye stalks.

Traits shaped by sexual selection often change faster over evolutionary history than ordinary body parts, yet biologists have debated how the pace of ornament evolution compares with that of weapons. When females favor a flashy male decoration, their offspring inherit genes from their father for the exaggerated ornament alongside genes from their mother for preferring it. Building on an idea first proposed by biologist Ronald Fisher, a 1981 mathematical modeling study indicated that this genetic pairing can trigger rapid, self-reinforcing bursts of evolutionary change.

Even when genetic links between preferences and ornaments are modest, the authors of the new study point out that if being picky carries little survival penalty for females, random genetic changes from generation to generation can nudge female tastes in new directions and subject male ornaments to shifting evolutionary pressures.

Combat weapons face a different set of pressures. Rival males can lock into evolutionary arms races of adaptation and counter-adaptation, and some theorists have proposed that male-male competition might spark runaway escalation of its own, though other scientists, including members of the new study’s team, have challenged that idea. Weapons also must remain effective in actual fights, which may limit the range of forms they can take.

Cross-species comparisons have also suggested that the two trait types follow distinct evolutionary rules. For example, a 2019 comparative study of primates, which supplied part of the canine tooth dataset reanalyzed in the new research, found that species with more elaborate ornaments tended to have smaller testes relative to body size, whereas species with larger canine weapons tended to have larger ones.

Mohammadali Dashtbali and Jonathan M. Henshaw of the University of Freiburg, William L. Allen of Swansea University, and their colleagues set out to compare the evolutionary speeds of ornaments and weapons directly.

“The initial idea came from an excellent paper by Erin McCullough, Christine Miller, and Doug Emlen, ‘Why sexually selected weapons are not ornaments,’” Allen, an associate professor of evolutionary and sensory ecology and one of the study’s joint senior authors, told PsyPost. “Among its several important contributions was the proposal that the evolutionary dynamics of weapons should differ fundamentally from those of ornaments. In particular, because the Fisher process — positive feedback between female mating preferences and male ornament traits — does not operate in the same way for weapons, the authors predicted that weapons should evolve more slowly than ornaments. They also noted that this prediction had never been tested.”

“We thought this was a fascinating idea because it makes a clear, testable prediction about one of the fundamental differences between two major forms of sexual selection,” Allen added. “Our aim was therefore to develop a theoretical framework for asking whether ornaments and weapons should evolve at different rates, and then test that prediction using comparative data from across the animal kingdom.”

For the theoretical part of the project, for which all mathematical code, datasets, and analysis files were posted publicly online, the researchers expanded on the 1981 coevolution model to track three inherited traits across generations: male ornament size, male weapon size, and female preference strength for the ornament. The model assumed an effective population size of 1,000, roughly the number of individuals contributing genes to each new generation.

All three traits had a baseline level best suited for everyday survival, meaning that growing an oversized ornament or weapon, or paying the costs of being a picky chooser, reduced survival fitness. Larger weapons always gave males a steady mating advantage regardless of female tastes, whereas a larger ornament helped or hurt a male’s mating prospects depending on the average female preference in the population during that generation.

Alongside predictable selection from survival costs and mating benefits, the team incorporated genetic drift, the random, chance shifts in gene frequencies that occur across generations simply because finite populations do not pass down every gene in exact proportion. Over thousands of generations, this interplay between stabilizing survival pressures and random genetic drift caused population trait averages to bounce back and forth around a long-term balance point, allowing the researchers to measure short-term evolutionary speed from the width of those fluctuations.

Across a wide range of simulated conditions, the mathematical model predicted that male ornaments evolve faster than male weapons. Weapons remained relatively stable near their long-term balance point because their competitive payoff did not depend on shifting preferences in the opposite sex, whereas ornaments fluctuated widely whenever low preference costs allowed genetic drift to move average female tastes over time.

Holding female preferences artificially fixed in the model caused ornaments to slow down and match the evolutionary pace of weapons, and although strong genetic links between ornaments and preferences sped up evolution through mutual feedback, drifting preferences alone were enough to accelerate ornament evolution even without strong genetic coupling. Ornaments continued to outpace weapons in supplementary simulations where weapons shared moderate genetic links with ornaments and preferences, while enlarging the overall population weakened genetic drift and slowed fluctuations across all traits.

Still, the model identified specific conditions under which weapons evolved faster than ornaments. That reversal occurred when strong female preferences carried a heavy survival cost that kept preferences from drifting, or when growing and maintaining weapons was much cheaper for males than producing ornaments.

To test whether real animal lineages match these theoretical dynamics, the team compiled published trait measurements and time-calibrated evolutionary family trees, branching diagrams that use genetic and fossil evidence to map how species are related and estimate when they split from common ancestors. Their final sample spanned 531 unique species across 10 datasets, with individual datasets ranging from 17 to 103 species.

Many animal structures serve dual functions in both combat and courtship, such as the enlarged claw of a male fiddler crab, so the researchers limited their sample to groups where prior work indicated a trait functioned primarily as either a weapon or an ornament. Weapon datasets covered traits used in same-sex competition that can inflict physical harm on rivals and that have not been shown to sway female mate choice, whereas ornament datasets covered continuous traits shown to influence opposite-sex mating decisions without physically injuring same-sex competitors.

To account for broader biological differences such as generation time, each weapon-bearing animal group was matched with the most closely related ornament-bearing group available, producing five paired comparisons. The first two pairs matched leg spine length in leaf-footed bugs with eye-stalk span in stalk-eyed flies, and bite force in anole lizards with the length of the throat bone supporting colorful display fans in agamid lizards. The other pairs matched leg spur length with neck-feather color in landfowl such as pheasants and grouse; tusk length in even-toed hoofed mammals with vocal pitch in carnivorans; and canine tooth length with vocal pitch in primates.

After placing all measurements onto a standardized statistical scale, the scientists used evolutionary regressions to separate trait size from overall body size, alongside a parallel set of analyses on traits unadjusted for body size. They then compared evolutionary speeds using two models of trait change along a family tree: a Brownian motion model, which treats evolution as an unbounded random walk, and an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, which pairs random fluctuations with a stabilizing pull back toward an optimal trait size.

Across the 10 datasets, the stabilizing Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model fit the species data better than the unbounded random-walk model for five groups and performed similarly for four others, trailing the simpler model only for anole lizard bite force. When adjusted for body size, ornaments evolved faster than weapons in four of the five matched animal pairs under both evolutionary models, with the insect comparison standing out as the lone exception where leaf-footed bug leg spines evolved faster than stalk-eyed fly eyespans. Combining all five pairs under the better-supported Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model indicated that ornaments evolved at roughly twice the pace of weapons overall, with a standardized evolutionary rate estimate of 0.129 for ornaments compared with 0.064 for weapons.

Even with that overall gap, estimated evolutionary speeds varied widely across the 10 datasets, ranging from 0.02 to 0.19 under the stabilizing model. “We observed large differences in the rate of trait evolution in different groups of animals, only some of which was explained by whether the trait was a weapon or ornament,” Allen noted.

Meanwhile, the difference between ornaments and weapons in the strength of the stabilizing pull back toward an optimal trait value was not statistically significant. In the authors’ reading, this pattern suggests that weapons do not necessarily experience tighter selection against poorly performing forms than ornaments do. The researchers also note that because female preferences could not be measured directly across the 531 species, shifts in optimal ornament size generated by drifting preferences may be absorbed into the higher fluctuation rate estimated for ornaments.

When the combined datasets were evaluated under the unbounded Brownian motion model, or when traits were analyzed without adjusting for body size under either model, the overall rate difference between ornaments and weapons was not statistically significant. Because overall body size is not expected to evolve at different speeds in weapon-bearing versus ornament-bearing animals, the authors suggest that leaving body size in the measurements may dilute differences between the sexual traits themselves.

“More broadly, we think the study illustrates how combining theoretical and comparative approaches can reveal mechanisms that would be difficult to identify from either approach alone,” Allen explained. “The theory generates a prediction, while the comparative analysis allows us to ask whether that prediction is reflected in patterns of evolution across real animal groups.”

“Our paper shows how evolution acts on the two main kinds of sexually selected traits – weapons and ornaments – in different ways, and that this affects the rate of trait evolution,” he said. “More generally it shows how evolutionary models can help us understand the diversity of animal life in the past and present, and allow us to predict what might happen in the future.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Most notably, the overall twofold rate advantage for ornaments in the cross-species data emerged only under the stabilizing model and only after statistically removing body size using regression residuals, a common comparative method that the authors acknowledge can introduce statistical biases into evolutionary rate estimates.

Focusing strictly on traits that function primarily as either weapons or ornaments also meant excluding the many animal structures, such as the enlarged claws of fiddler crabs, that serve simultaneously in male combat, female attraction, or defense against predators, leaving open how fast multipurpose traits evolve. In addition, two of the matched animal comparisons spanned vast stretches of evolutionary time, with the two lizard families splitting roughly 146 million years ago and the ancestors of leaf-footed bugs and stalk-eyed flies diverging about 351 million years ago. Differences in population sizes or species diversification rates may have influenced those comparisons and contributed to the reversal seen in insects.

On the theoretical side, the mathematical model simplified natural populations by tracking just one ornament and one weapon in a well-mixed group with fixed genetic variation and no mechanical representation of fighting performance. Future research that incorporates multiple courtship signals, realistic combat biomechanics, local mate availability, and evolutionary episodes where traits are lost altogether could shed further light on how sexual selection shapes trait diversity across the animal kingdom.

“There are several directions we would like to pursue,” Allen said. “One is to understand in more detail why sexually selected traits evolve at different rates in different groups, and how ecological and behavioral factors influence these dynamics.”

The study, “Ornaments evolve faster than weapons,” was authored by Mohammadali Dashtbali, Louisa Hutton-Adams, Megan Watts, Jonathan M. Henshaw, and William L. Allen.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/flashy-courtship-traits-tend-to-evolve-faster-than-combat-weapons-study-finds/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Scientists built an AI called “Concept2Brain” that simulates human brain waves from pictures and text

URL: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-built-an-ai-called-concept2brain-that-simulates-human-brain-waves-from-pictures-and-text/

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence tool called Concept2Brain that predicts how human brain waves respond to photographs or written text. In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers report that the open-access platform generates synthetic electroencephalography (EEG) recordings that resemble real human brain activity during visual and emotional perception. The system could allow researchers to simulate brain-wave experiments on a computer before recruiting human volunteers.

Electroencephalography, or EEG, uses sensors placed on the head to measure tiny electrical voltage changes at the scalp produced by brain activity. Because this technique tracks neural activity millisecond by millisecond, scientists often repeat an image or event many times and average the time-locked EEG traces to isolate event-related potentials, which are characteristic wave patterns tied to seeing, thinking, or feeling.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has increasingly been paired with brain imaging to interpret what a person is experiencing. Much of that effort has focused on decoding, such as an fMRI study in which volunteers listened to stories, watched silent movies, or imagined narratives while a computer model reconstructed the general meaning of those stories from their brain scans.

Far less attention has gone to the reverse problem, known as encoding, in which a computer starts with an image or phrase and predicts the fast-moving scalp electrical waves an observer would produce. To make such predictions possible, neuroscientists first built large reference libraries linking thousands of everyday object concepts to human brain activity, including a 2023 multimodal neuroimaging project that cataloged brain scans and similarity ratings across 1,854 object categories.

Building on large visual datasets, a 2022 study showed that computer encoding models could simulate millisecond-by-millisecond EEG responses directly from object photographs. Other research has established that scalp electrical waves reflect not only what an object is, but also how emotionally intense it feels, including a 2008 EEG study co-authored by one of the same researchers that linked emotional arousal to the size of electrical brain responses.

Because recording real EEG data from human participants is costly and time-consuming, Alejandro Santos-Mayo, then at the University of Florida and the Complutense University of Madrid, and his colleagues set out to create a generative tool that bridges conceptual meaning and scalp electrical activity. By connecting a brain-wave compression network with a multimodal AI system, the team aimed to capture complex, multi-variable patterns in brain waves and predict participant-specific EEG responses from both pictures and written descriptions.

“The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has opened a new, non-linear, multivariate approach to analyzing and predicting brain data,” Santos-Mayo, the study’s lead author, now at NeuroSpin, a brain-imaging center at Université Paris-Saclay, and the Department of Psychology at the University of Florida, and author of Emociones con sentido, told PsyPost. “A fundamental objective of science is not merely to observe nature, but to understand it—and understanding any phenomenon requires being able to predict it.”

“Here, we aimed to create a new tool for predicting electroencephalography (EEG) brain signals,” he said. “By predicting these signals, we can generate synthetic EEG samples without relying on slow, costly data collection, while gaining a deeper understanding of how different neurophysiological components manifest in the brain. The ultimate goal of Concept2Brain is to offer a free, open-access tool for anyone interested in simulating EEG activity.”

To train Concept2Brain, the researchers used EEG recordings from two earlier passive picture-viewing experiments conducted by members of the same research group, encompassing 88 university volunteers receiving course credit. In the first experiment, 45 participants viewed 120 naturalistic photographs twice for one second each against a black background, while in the second, 43 participants viewed 240 different photographs once for two seconds each against a gray background.

Across both datasets, the 360 unique photographs were divided evenly among pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant scenes, and varying the screen layouts was intended to keep the model focused on picture content rather than visual borders. Brain activity was recorded from 128 scalp sensors plus a reference sensor at 500 samples per second, providing 13,640 clean 1.5-second trials after filtering out blinks and movement noise.

Concept2Brain links two deep neural networks to convert real-world concepts into brain waves. The first network, called a conditional variational autoencoder, compresses each 129-channel EEG recording into a compact summary of 256 numbers while tagging the recording with a participant identifier so it preserves individual differences in brain-wave shape. Once trained, the decoder half of this network can turn any 256-number summary back into a smooth, trial-averaged EEG pattern for any of the 88 virtual participants.

The second network serves as a translator built around OpenAI’s CLIP system, an existing AI model that maps both pictures and written words into a shared 512-number conceptual space. A three-layer neural network learns to translate those conceptual numbers into the 256-number brain-wave summary, enabling users on the public Concept2Brain website to upload an image or type text and download simulated brain responses. The authors also posted the model’s code, trained weights, and underlying EEG datasets in public repositories.

“I would like to invite readers to try the model for themselves,” Santos-Mayo said. “Our primary goal has always been to create an open, accessible tool for everyone, which is why we developed the online platform at concept2brain.brainbodybehavior.science. No installation is required, and the model can be run directly in your browser.”

To test how well the system worked, the team first ran a 10-round cross-validation check, repeatedly training the model on 80 percent of the photographs, monitoring overfitting on 10 percent, and predicting brain waves for the remaining 10 percent held out of training. They also tested whether the system reproduced classic wave landmarks, rhythmic brain oscillations, and individual participant traits, and evaluated it against independent public brain-imaging datasets and written text prompts.

When predicting responses to held-out photographs, Concept2Brain produced synthetic brain waves that closely matched real human recordings across most images, with alignment emerging around 100 milliseconds after picture onset, when visual signals reach the cortex, and remaining strong until roughly 700 milliseconds. One notable exception was an erotic photograph that showed a negative correlation with the real brain data, which the authors suggest may have occurred because CLIP’s built-in content-safety guardrails distorted how that image was represented.

When fed the 360 photographs it had been trained on, the model’s simulated waveforms closely tracked the empirical recordings across all scalp sensors and time points, reproducing early visual waves as well as the late positive potential, a slow wave over parietal sensors between 400 and 800 milliseconds linked to emotional engagement. The synthetic data also reproduced rhythmic brain changes, such as a drop in 10-hertz alpha waves after 300 milliseconds, and matched each of the 88 virtual participants most closely to their own real-world human counterpart.

Next, the researchers tested Concept2Brain on 1,078 emotional photographs from a standardized picture library that were not included in training, finding a modest positive association between the size of the simulated late positive potential and standard human ratings of emotional arousal. When given photographs of fearful and neutral expressions from 140 actors in a facial-expression database, the model also generated larger face-processing waves around 170 to 200 milliseconds and larger late emotional waves for fearful faces than for neutral faces, even though it had never been trained on facial-expression labels.

To check whether predictions generalized to other laboratories, the team tested Concept2Brain against an external multimodal dataset of everyday objects. In that dataset, 4 volunteers viewed 1,854 object concepts during magnetoencephalography, which records the tiny magnetic fields produced by brain activity, and 3 volunteers viewed 720 object concepts during functional MRI. Concept2Brain’s synthetic waves aligned with early visual and later semantic phases in the magnetic recordings, and correlated with functional MRI activity in early visual cortex around 75 milliseconds and in a face-processing region around 190 milliseconds.

In a second external test, the researchers entered stimuli from an independent EEG dataset of 40 people viewing 40 faces and 40 cars. Concept2Brain reproduced the spatial scalp map distinguishing faces from cars, though the authors note that overall associations across both external datasets were weaker than within-dataset tests.

“The model was trained in an entirely unsupervised manner—we never explicitly labeled the visual content of the images used during training,” Santos-Mayo noted. “One of the first pleasant surprises was the model’s ability to simulate synthetic EEG signals for images containing faces.”

In brain research, the face-processing region from the fMRI comparison is known as the right fusiform face area, and its rapid electrical signature is called the N170 component. “We know from existing literature that facial stimuli activate the right fusiform face area around 170 ms (the N170 component),” he said. “Despite the unsupervised setup, the model spontaneously and accurately reproduced this 170 ms component.”

Because CLIP handles both images and text, the researchers also tested Concept2Brain with 120 short written descriptions sorted into pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant categories, as well as short example prompts such as “a picture of an alligator.” Across all 88 virtual participants, pleasant and unpleasant descriptions prompted larger late emotional waves between 400 and 800 milliseconds than neutral descriptions.

As an illustration using just two statements about climate change, the model also produced stronger simulated brain responses to a statement emphasizing harmful consequences than to one describing mitigation strategies. The authors note that this pattern is consistent with negativity bias, the tendency for negative information to draw a stronger response. The paper reports the emotion, face, and text comparisons descriptively, without formal statistical tests.

“Another major surprise involved using written text to test the model,” Santos-Mayo added. “By leveraging CLIP—an OpenAI network capable of processing both images and text—we tested Concept2Brain’s performance using simple written descriptions instead of visual images. The resulting performance was remarkably similar to that achieved with real pictures, highlighting that our model opens a promising avenue for cross-modal brain signal generation.”

“From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, one of the key findings of Concept2Brain is the suitability of conditioned variational autoencoders (cVAEs)—a type of AI architecture—for analyzing and extracting the non-linear latent space of EEG data,” he explained. “The use of these advanced methods needs to become more widespread in our field. Outside our discipline, the average reader can view the Concept2Brain model as an exciting milestone in brain data simulation. Despite the current limitations of the model, this work marks the beginning of a new era in using AI techniques not only to observe the brain, but also to generate synthetic reproductions of its signals.”

There are a few important things to keep in mind when interpreting these simulations. Although Concept2Brain accepts written prompts, the model was trained exclusively on brain recordings from people viewing photographs rather than reading sentences, meaning text inputs estimate how a brain might respond to a related visual concept rather than simulating actual language comprehension. The authors caution that text-prompted predictions are less validated and may be noisier than picture-based outputs.

“While this model demonstrates the ability of AI to predict and simulate brain signals, users must interpret synthetic data with caution,” Santos-Mayo cautioned. “Synthetic data cannot replace empirical data collected from human participants, nor can it be used to draw definitive scientific conclusions. Instead, its purpose is to provide a fast method for testing hypotheses or estimating sample sizes prior to real-world data collection.”

“The current version of Concept2Brain was trained on 88 human participants across 360 distinct images,” he said. “This sample size established the viability of the AI architecture, though future iterations will require larger datasets to achieve higher fidelity.”

In addition, Concept2Brain produces smoothed waveforms that resemble averages across many repeated trials, so it cannot capture the trial-to-trial variability of raw single EEG recordings or model underlying cellular mechanisms. Its correspondence with real brain activity also weakened when tested against external datasets collected with different recording hardware and tasks.

“It is natural to feel apprehensive about rapid AI advances, especially when they touch on something as personal and complex as the human brain. However, I want to clarify that this model cannot replace a real human brain, nor can it generate a synthetic ‘brain-like’ mind. The current state of the field is nowhere near that capability,” Santos-Mayo emphasized.

“Developing such a model would require virtually impossible amounts of data from a single individual, with no guarantee of success,” he added. “Concept2Brain makes much more modest claims: it serves as a solid proof of concept and a technical milestone in brain signal simulation, but it poses no threat to society, nor should it trigger dystopian fears.”

Finally, the current model learned its concept-to-brain mapping from 88 volunteers viewing 360 photographs, which limits both the diversity of virtual brains and the range of visual concepts it represents. Because the current architecture depends on OpenAI’s CLIP to interpret stimuli, any blind spots, biases, or content filters inside that third-party system can carry into the generated brain waves, though the authors designed the framework so CLIP can be swapped out for newer AI models in future versions.

“This research opens new horizons not only for predicting brain signals, but also for enhancing our broader toolkit in cognitive neuroscience,” Santos-Mayo shared. “Currently, I am working on developing new non-linear methods based on neural networks to decode brain activity. Concept2Brain proved the suitability of cVAE architectures for extracting the latent dimensionality of EEG signals—meaning we can isolate and distill pure informational features from raw brain activity to interpret, understand, and predict cognitive variables. I am now applying similar methods to other cognitive functions and building new tools for the research community.”

“Regarding Concept2Brain specifically, we plan to release future upgrades trained on larger datasets incorporating more human participants, diverse stimulus samples, additional neuroimaging modalities, and updated AI components,” he continued. “We warmly welcome any researchers interested in collaborating on future versions.”

The study, “Concept2Brain: an AI model for predicting neurophysiological responses to text and pictures,” was authored by Alejandro Santos-Mayo, Faith Gilbert, Arash Mirifar, Anna-Lena Tebbe, Ruogu Fang, Mingzhou Ding, and Andreas Keil.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-built-an-ai-called-concept2brain-that-simulates-human-brain-waves-from-pictures-and-text/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 03:22PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Screens, inherited childhood scripts, and therapy skepticism lead this week’s psychology podcasts

URL: https://www.psypost.org/screens-inherited-childhood-scripts-and-therapy-skepticism-lead-this-weeks-psychology-podcasts/

Can you reset your brain’s reward system by unplugging for a day? One clinical psychologist argued in a rebroadcast this week that you can’t, while an addiction psychiatrist made the case for a month-long abstinence “experiment.” The two positions are not identical, but they pull in different directions on a question many listeners are asking about their phones and habits. Across 19 episodes from 13 shows, that conversation about dopamine sat alongside two other recurring threads: whether consciousness can be explained by the brain at all, and how childhood “scripts” carry into adult life.

The week’s other notable discussions include Scott Galloway putting his claim that therapy has been oversold to a psychologist, a neuroscientist explaining a theory that treats experience itself as the starting point, and a live panel making the case that fun deserves to be taken seriously.

Desire, Dopamine and Addiction

All In The Mind rebroadcast “Dopamine, detoxes and donuts”, in which clinical psychologist Dr Anastasia Hronis, author of The Dopamine Brain, explains what dopamine does for motivation, movement and behaviour. She discusses how technology platforms keep users engaged. She also argues that trendy 24-hour detoxes and “raw dogging” flights cannot reset a chemical the brain depends on.

On Huberman Lab, Stanford addiction psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke appears in “Overcome Addictions & Obsessions of All Kinds”. The long conversation covers her pleasure-pain balance model, digital media addiction among adolescents, and her argument for a 30-day abstinence period. A large part of the conversation turns to the subject of her new book, Radical Surrender: letting go of the need for control. Listeners interested in the detox debate may want to hear both episodes back to back.

What Consciousness Is

On Human Potential Lab, neuroscientist Christof Koch tells Scott Barry Kaufman that “Consciousness Isn’t in the Brain”. He explains Integrated Information Theory and argues that today’s AI systems could be intelligent without feeling anything. The conversation covers efforts to detect consciousness in unresponsive patients, and Koch describes how mystical experiences, including his own near-death experience, led him to take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental to reality. He admits that view is hard to reconcile with IIT.

A related but more philosophical angle comes from Modern Wisdom‘s “Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything)”. In this episode, mostly about religion and prayer, writer Alex O’Connor argues that consciousness is the biggest gap in materialism and “basically every worldview.”

In a Huberman Lab Essentials episode, “How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning”, USC’s Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang discusses how emotions, stories and culture shape learning and the self. She illustrates emotional development with her young daughter’s changing descriptions of love.

The Scripts We Inherit

A short Diary Of A CEO clip, “Most Replayed Moment: The Childhood Scripts Still Running Your Life! Chase Hughes”, features a former Navy behavior expert. He claims that what people call authenticity is a “costume” of childhood beliefs, and he offers exercises for loosening them.

The same show’s “How Did A Homeless 13-Year-Old Become Comedy’s Most Fearless Voice?” is mostly about Katt Williams’s life and career. Part of it turns to how early family dynamics shape relationships, with Steven Bartlett reflecting on his own avoidant tendencies.

Rapper Bugzy Malone’s Modern Wisdom episode, “How To Turn Your Pain Into Greatness”, centers on his music career. It also explores how children absorb family dysfunction and why people discredit successful peers.

On Where Should We Begin?, Esther Perel works with a couple separating after nearly 40 years while remaining legally married. In “I’ll Still Be Your Financial Partner, But I’m Done Being Your Wife”, she explores the enmeshment beneath their apparent differences.

Connection, Fun and Feeling

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant joins The Rich Roll Podcast for “Adam Grant On The Secrets Of Strong Relationships In A Lonely World”. The conversation covers his new book on human connection, including how screens offer a facsimile of it.

The Happiness Lab‘s live Aspen session, “Are You Taking Fun Seriously Enough?”, pairs journalist Catherine Price and psychologist Elizabeth Dunn. They discuss research on what makes days feel good, and Price distinguishes true flow from the “junk flow” of binge-watching.

On Speaking of Psychology, social psychologist Tim Wildschut explains in “Why nostalgia is good for you” how research has recast nostalgia as a largely beneficial emotion. He also notes the conditions under which it isn’t.

Sex and Psychology Podcast host Justin Lehmiller and coach Shelby Devlin address “What People Get Wrong About Dominance and Submission”. They contrast media portrayals of kink with the consent and communication real power exchange requires, and they discuss how abusers can misuse its language.

Therapy, Belief and Society

The Prof G Pod‘s “Is Therapy Overrated?” has Scott Galloway testing his essay “The Cult of Therapy” with Dr. Jonathan Shedler, a UCSF clinical psychologist known for research on the effectiveness of psychodynamic therapy, who agrees with much of the critique. The same show’s “Your Parents’ Wealth Matters More Than Your Salary”, with historian Eliza Filby, author of Inheritocracy, is mainly about inheritance and inequality. One segment examines the “financial nihilism” of anxious young adults.

On The Joe Rogan Experience, actor Gary Sinise’s episode (#2579) covers his career and USO tours. Several segments address veterans’ mental health, with Rogan skeptical of counseling and medication.

Comedian Jordan Klepper joins StarTalk for “Cosmic Queries – Curiosity, Conspiracies & the God Particle”. This fan-question episode includes segments on curiosity, certainty and cognitive biases, with Neil deGrasse Tyson describing how he nudges flat-Earth believers back toward curiosity.

Brain Health

In Diary Of A CEO‘s “What Are The Five Lifestyle Habits Destroying Your Brain Right Now?”, neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter argues that dementias are largely preventable metabolic conditions. A StarTalk episode with biomedical scientist Rhonda Patrick, “The Longevity Playbook”, released early to subscribers this week, focuses on healthspan, diets and exercise and includes a shorter brain-related segment.

Childhood came up repeatedly this week, from Hughes’s scripts to Bartlett’s attachment reflections to Malone’s account of absorbing family dysfunction. These were mostly framed through personal story and self-help rather than research. The skepticism about therapy voiced on both Prof G and Rogan, arriving from very different directions, is also worth listening for.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/screens-inherited-childhood-scripts-and-therapy-skepticism-lead-this-weeks-psychology-podcasts/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Coercion isn’t the only route to power among teens, study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/coercion-isnt-the-only-route-to-power-among-teens-study-suggests/

A study of Ontario high school students found that adolescents can gain social power through coercion, but also through cooperation, admired traits, friendships, and alliances, according to research published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Social power becomes especially important during adolescence, when peer status, dating opportunities, access to resources, protection from victimization, and influence within the group can all carry real social value. But power is not one dimensional. Some adolescents might gain it through dominance, intimidation, or coercion, while others may gain it through prestige, cooperation, admired qualities, or supportive relationships.

Tristan Chaderton Bowman and colleagues examined how different routes to power are connected to different forms of power-holding among adolescents. Prior research has often focused on coercive or competitive routes to adolescent power, including bullying and dominance, but whether cooperative strategies can also help adolescents gain influence in ways that benefit both the individual and the peer group is less understood.

The researchers recruited 458 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 from one high school in southern Ontario. The students were in grades 9 to 12, with an average age of 15.9 years, and 48% were girls. The study was part of the sixth wave of a larger project on peer relationships. Research assistants visited classrooms, and students completed the study on electronic tablets.

The study used peer-nomination measures, meaning students identified classmates in their grade who fit different descriptions. They could nominate up to seven peers for each item. The researchers measured three “power-enhancing processes,” including coercive strategies, cooperative strategies, and peer-valued characteristics. Coercion was measured with an item asking who forces, threatens, or tricks others to get their way. Cooperation was measured with three items about helping, cooperating, leading fairly, and being kind.

Peer-valued characteristics were measured with six items assessing traits such as being good looking, good at sports, academically successful, funny, having cool possessions, and being tough in a fight. The researchers also measured four “power-holding features,” including dominance, prestige, friendship nominations, and alliances. Dominance captured who gets what they want and gets others to do what they say; prestige captured who is admired, respected, followed, and listened to; friendships captured closest-friend nominations; and alliances captured who people tend to side with during group conflict.

The researchers found that different strategies were linked to different forms of adolescent power. Coercive strategies were strongly associated with dominance, meaning adolescents who were seen as threatening, forcing, or tricking others were also more likely to be viewed as getting their way and influencing others. This supports the idea that coercion can be one pathway to dominance. Coercion was also moderately associated with alliances and weakly associated with prestige, suggesting that coercive adolescents may sometimes gain support from others, perhaps because they are seen as powerful, useful allies, or risky to oppose.

Cooperation was also an important pathway to power. Adolescents who were seen as kind, helpful, cooperative, and fair leaders received more friendship and alliance nominations, and they were also more likely to be viewed as prestigious. Peer-valued characteristics were linked to both prestige and dominance, suggesting that admired traits can support multiple kinds of social influence.

Cooperation was especially strongly related to friendship nominations when adolescents also had more peer-valued characteristics. Cooperation was also more strongly related to alliances when coercion was low, suggesting that cooperative and coercive strategies did not combine into a stronger “best of both worlds” route to alliance-building. Instead, cooperation seemed most useful for alliances when it was not paired with high coercion.

This study was cross-sectional, meaning it can not determine whether these strategies caused later changes in social power. Further, the findings may not generalize to other cultures, regions, or age groups.

This research suggests that cooperation may offer adolescents a socially beneficial route to power, with important implications for anti-bullying programs that try to replace coercive power-seeking with meaningful, prosocial roles.

The research, “Enhancing and Holding Social Power in Adolescence: An Evolutionary Perspective,” was authored by Tristan Chaderton Bowman, Andrew V. Dane, Natalie Spadafora, and Anthony A. Volk.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/coercion-isnt-the-only-route-to-power-among-teens-study-suggests/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: People with eco-friendly habits are rated as more appealing partners

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-with-eco-friendly-habits-are-rated-as-more-appealing-partners/

People who practice environmentally friendly habits tend to be viewed as more desirable romantic partners than those who disregard the environment, according to new research published in Environmental Psychology Research. In the second of two online experiments, this appeal depended in part on the observer’s own outlook: individuals with stronger positive attitudes toward nature were especially drawn to eco-friendly partners for committed relationships and viewed environmentally wasteful people less favorably. The findings suggest that everyday green habits may act as social signals in dating, particularly among people who care about protecting the planet.

Pro-environmental behavior refers to everyday actions that reduce harm to the natural world or benefit it, such as sorting household recycling, driving an electric car, or avoiding disposable plastics. Beyond their ecological impact, visible green habits communicate information about a person’s character. Because sustainable routines often take extra time, effort, or money without an immediate personal payoff, observers tend to interpret them as signs of prosociality, meaning a willingness to cooperate and help others.

From an evolutionary perspective on human mating, cooperative and generous traits matter in partner selection because they suggest someone will be a supportive companion and dependable parent. Consistent with that idea, a 2021 two-part study found that shoppers described as buying sustainable products were seen as more generous and rated as more attractive for both casual and committed relationships. Similarly, a 2021 experimental study by the same two authors behind the new paper found that men and women alike rated people with eco-friendly routines as more desirable long-term partners than people who wasted resources.

Although women often place greater weight on general kindness in prospective mates than men do, those earlier studies on green habits found similar preferences across both sexes, which researchers link to the shared investment mothers and fathers make in raising children. Still, social signals do not register the same way with every audience. Outside dating, a 2021 experiment on grocery shopping indicated that buyers of low-carbon foods were viewed most favorably by observers who personally cared deeply about nature.

Whether an onlooker’s own environmental mindset similarly shapes who they find romantically appealing had remained open. In the new study, Daniel Farrelly, a principal lecturer in psychology at the University of Worcester, and Manpal Singh Bhogal of the University of Wolverhampton used two online experiments to check the reliability of earlier findings on green habits in dating and test how an observer’s environmental attitudes shape those preferences.

“We had previously found evidence that environmentally friendly individuals are rated more desirable as potential long-term romantic partners; however, this research in the paper is the first to show that this is affected by people’s personal attitudes toward environmental issues,” Farrelly told PsyPost.

In the first experiment, the researchers recruited 140 heterosexual adults in the United Kingdom, split evenly between 70 women and 70 men aged 18 and older, via a university psychology course and social media, and posted all study materials and data publicly on the Open Science Framework. Participants first read definitions of a short-term relationship, described as a brief affair or one-night stand, and a long-term relationship, described as a committed romantic partnership.

Participants then read eight randomized descriptions of gender-neutral individuals making either environmentally friendly or unfriendly choices across four areas: recycling household waste, printing documents, driving an electric vehicle, and using fireworks. Three topics came from the authors’ 2021 work and the firework scenario was newly added to broaden the behaviors tested. In the recycling scenario, for example, one person routinely spent time sorting metal, plastic, and cardboard waste as a worthwhile habit, while another did not want to spend time sorting trash.

For each profile, participants rated the person’s desirability as both a short-term and a long-term partner on a five-point scale from 1 (very undesirable) to 5 (very desirable). With 140 participants, the sample was large enough to reliably detect small overall differences between eco-friendly and wasteful profiles, though less suited to picking up subtle differences between men and women.

Participants in the first experiment rated individuals with eco-friendly habits as substantially more desirable partners overall than those who made wasteful choices. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations and their 2021 results, however, eco-friendly individuals were not rated detectably higher for long-term relationships than for brief flings; the difference between those ratings was not statistically significant.

Relationship length instead mattered when judging wasteful habits: individuals who disregarded the environment were rated as more desirable for a casual short-term fling than for a committed long-term partnership. Differences between men’s and women’s ratings were not statistically significant.

The second experiment directly repeated the design of the authors’ 2021 study, which included neutral comparison profiles, and added a measure of participants’ own environmental attitudes. It recruited an independent sample of 133 heterosexual adults in the United Kingdom, consisting of 103 women and 30 men with an average age of about 26, through university courses, social media, and survey platforms.

Participants first completed the 24-item Environmental Attitudes Inventory, rating their agreement on a nine-point scale with statements about enjoying nature and conserving resources, such as liking trips to forests or fields. They then rated short-term and long-term desirability across the 12 scenarios from the authors’ 2021 study: four eco-friendly profiles (recycling, reusing drink containers, printing documents, and electric cars), four wasteful counterparts, and four neutral control profiles featuring everyday details like car color, lunch choice, office habits, or calling a coin toss. Those neutral descriptions gave the researchers an ordinary baseline for comparing the green and wasteful profiles.

When the researchers statistically accounted for participants’ own environmental attitude scores, the overall difference across the three profile types was not statistically significant on its own, whereas leaving attitude scores out of the model did yield an overall difference. In the authors’ reading, this suggests that how much an observer cares about the environment accounts for a substantial share of how they judge green versus wasteful habits in prospective partners.

Even with attitude scores factored in, both men and women rated eco-friendly characters higher than wasteful ones, though comparisons with the neutral baseline differed by sex. Women rated eco-friendly individuals higher than neutral characters and wasteful individuals lower than neutral characters, whereas for men, differences from the neutral baseline were not statistically significant.

Comparing the sexes directly, women rated eco-friendly profiles higher than men did, men rated wasteful profiles higher than women did, and the difference between men’s and women’s ratings of neutral characters was not statistically significant. Overall differences between short-term and long-term ratings across the profile types were also not statistically significant. Because men made up fewer than a quarter of this second sample, the authors caution that these gender findings are preliminary.

Participants’ personal attitudes toward the environment were modestly linked to how they rated the profiles, in ways that depended on relationship type. People with stronger pro-environmental attitudes rated eco-friendly characters higher specifically as long-term partners, while rating wasteful characters lower for both casual flings and committed relationships, especially long-term ones. The authors suggest that favoring green partners may extend a person’s environmental attitudes into mate choice, as those who view conservation as a cooperative trait are more inclined to want it in a committed partner, though they caution against drawing strong conclusions across different measures of environmentalism.

That the attitude links were strongest for committed partnerships came as little surprise to Farrelly. “It fit very well with previous research that shows altruistic traits are more desirable for long-term relationships, so it was good to see that this is where the main effects of attitudes to the environment were found,” he noted.

“It shows that people’s perceptions and attitudes need to be considered when we are exploring what psychological traits we find desirable in long-term relationships,” Farrelly explained. “This can further influence the desirability of such traits, particularly when there may be some inconsistencies in how the traits are perceived. For example, in our study, it might mean that individuals with a very weak attitude to environmental issues actually find environmentally friendly individuals less desirable? This might mean that something that has been shown to be desired (such as environmentalism) is more subjective than other traits in mate choice.”

These findings align with an online experiment with heterosexual participants co-authored by Farrelly, which found that people contributed more effort to a shared charity task when paired with hypothetical opposite-sex partners than with same-sex partners, especially when opposite-sex interactions came first. Although that study examined whether people actively display more altruism, or unselfish helpfulness, around potential mates rather than how observers rate the romantic desirability of green behaviors, both are consistent with the idea that prosocial actions serve as signals in mate choice.

The link between observers’ environmental views and their partner ratings is also consistent with an earlier study of men’s and women’s mate preferences, which found that alongside sex differences in valuing physical attractiveness, conscientiousness, and earning potential, people generally prefer partners with similar personality traits and ideological values. That earlier work assessed direct ratings of broad partner traits whereas the new experiments tested desirability using descriptions of specific pro-environmental behaviors, yet both point to the appeal of shared values in prospective mates.

For everyday daters, the findings connect eco-friendly habits to broader qualities people look for when choosing a life partner. “There’s a lot of evidence that prosocial traits are very desirable in potential long-term partners, as this shows that the actor is likely to be a very good partner and possible parent to any shared offspring,” Farrelly told PsyPost. “This also extends to applied forms of prosociality, such as environmentalism, and particularly so when we consider these environmental acts more positively because of our own views and attitudes.”

There are a few caveats to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Participants evaluated brief, gender-neutral text blurbs that isolated one everyday habit from real-world factors like physical appearance, humor, or face-to-face chemistry, and their ratings captured hypothetical preferences rather than actual dating choices. Reading contrasting green and wasteful profiles in sequence, and completing the environmental attitudes questionnaire right before judging the profiles in the second experiment, may also have nudged participants to weigh environmental cues more heavily or match their ratings to the views they had just reported.

Sample size and demographics also limit how broadly the findings apply. With 140 and 133 participants, both experiments had modest samples that could miss subtle interplay among relationship length, habits, and gender, and both included only heterosexual adults in the United Kingdom, mostly university undergraduates, leaving open how these preferences look across other sexual orientations, age groups, and cultures.

Rather than viewing green behavior as a guaranteed advantage across the dating pool, Farrelly cautioned that attraction depends on the observer’s perspective as well. “We should not ignore how our own views and attitudes may shape what we find desirable in a partner,” he added.

To build on this work, the authors propose testing how eco-friendly habits interact with other attractive traits like physical appearance, and exploring whether other forms of environmentalism, such as activism or deeper ecological values, carry similar weight in dating.

“We are now looking to see if potential desirability as a long-term partner makes people behave more desirably,” Farrelly said. “We have shown in our previous work in 2021 that people self-report more environmental behaviors in the presence of potential partners, so we are now seeing if it leads to changes in actual environmental behavior. We think this is very important as any psychology research that can lead to potential interventions must show that they change behavior (rather than self-reported behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, etc.). After all, it is only changing behavior that will reduce the effects of climate change!”

The study, “The roles of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour in mate choice,” was authored by Daniel Farrelly and Manpal Singh Bhogal.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-with-eco-friendly-habits-are-rated-as-more-appealing-partners/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 10:25AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTH

TITLE: STAT+: HHS plans funding for research into ibogaine for PTSD

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/biotech-news-hhs-funding-for-research-into-ibogaine-for-ptsd/?utm_campaign=rss

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Oura deal may complicate Lilly’s GLP-1 telehealth ties

Eli Lilly already sends patients looking for a GLP-1 prescription to Counsel Health through its pharmacy platform LillyDirect. Now, smart ring maker Oura is buying Counsel, which could give Lilly a financial interest in a telehealth company it promotes. Lilly has agreed to buy $50 million in Oura stock if certain conditions are met, though the drugmaker says those conditions haven’t been met yet, STAT’s Elaine Chen writes.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/biotech-news-hhs-funding-for-research-into-ibogaine-for-ptsd/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Regret is rare among transgender youth who began hormone therapy, according to largest study of its kind

URL: https://www.psypost.org/regret-is-rare-among-transgender-youth-who-began-hormone-therapy-according-to-largest-study-of-its-kind/

Most people who began hormone therapy as teenagers at a U.S. gender clinic and answered a follow-up survey said starting treatment had been the right decision, according to a cohort study published in JAMA Pediatrics. Even among former patients who eventually stopped taking hormones, more than four out of five still reported that starting treatment had been the right choice for them. Very few respondents reported regretting the decision or feeling harmed by it, providing longer-term clinical data amid ongoing policy debates over adolescent medical care.

Gender-affirming hormone therapy involves taking prescribed estrogen or testosterone to develop physical traits that align with a person’s gender identity rather than the sex they were assigned at birth. Estrogen promotes changes such as breast growth and softer skin, whereas testosterone deepens the voice and stimulates facial and body hair growth, with some of these effects becoming permanent over time. Transgender and gender-diverse youth, whose gender identities differ from their birth-assigned sex and may be binary (male or female) or nonbinary, make up an estimated 3.3% of teenagers in the United States, though fewer than 0.1% of U.S. adolescents receive hormone therapy.

Short-term studies have consistently reported mental health improvements among teenagers receiving these medications, the new study’s authors note. For instance, a 2020 study by two of those authors followed youth at the same clinic for one year after they started hormone therapy or puberty blockers and found reductions in depression, anxiety, and distress over their physical appearance. Still, concerns about potential regret and harm have fueled restrictions on care across many U.S. states.

Prior research with adults indicates that pausing or stopping medical transition does not necessarily mean a person regrets the treatment. In a 2021 survey analysis of U.S. transgender adults, which included only people who still identified as transgender or gender-diverse, more than four-fifths of respondents who had ever halted or reversed their transition cited outside pressures, such as family rejection or social stigma, as contributing reasons.

More recently, a 2024 survey of transgender youth found high satisfaction and rare regret after adolescent medical care, though that sample consisted specifically of young people who had socially transitioned early in childhood.

Questions have persisted about whether contemporary clinic patients, many of whom first recognize or express their gender identity around or after puberty, face a higher likelihood of later regret. The research, led by Laura Kuper of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, sought to measure satisfaction, decisional regret, and perceived harm among youth who initiated hormone therapy through a multidisciplinary clinic, including former patients who were no longer taking hormones. The team also tested whether clinical factors, such as starting age or childhood signs of gender diversity, were linked to either regret or stopping treatment.

The researchers analyzed survey responses and medical records from former patients of a multidisciplinary pediatric gender program in the United States. Most patients started hormone therapy after completing a structured evaluation with a mental health professional alongside their parents or guardians (a minority began hormones before or after being seen by the program), and minors at the clinic needed consent from all parents or guardians holding legal medical decision-making rights in addition to their own assent.

Between October 2023 and October 2025, the team invited 698 former patients who had previously agreed to longitudinal research to complete annual online surveys, explicitly encouraging participation from people who had stopped taking hormones or left the clinic.

A total of 376 participants who had started estrogen or testosterone as youth completed the survey, representing just over half of all former patients invited (another 25 respondents had never started hormones). Roughly 70% of the hormone-treated sample had been assigned female at birth and initiated testosterone, while about 30% had been assigned male at birth and initiated estrogen. Nearly 92% had begun taking hormones at age 17 or younger, starting at an average age of 16, and participants ranged from 14 to 28 years old (averaging nearly 21) when surveyed.

An average of 4.9 years had passed since participants started hormone therapy, with follow-up periods spanning from just over a month to nearly 11 years. Respondents completed the Decision Regret Scale, a five-item questionnaire scored from 0 to 100 that asks patients whether starting hormone therapy was the right decision, whether they regret the choice, and whether the choice did them harm, with higher scores reflecting greater regret. Using clinic intake notes and survey answers, the authors also tracked current hormone use, binary versus nonbinary gender identity, the age patients first identified with their gender, and whether clinicians had recorded gender nonconformity or physical gender distress before puberty.

Before examining regret, the researchers checked whether survey respondents differed in their initial clinic records from former patients who did not participate. Patients who originally agreed to join the research pool did not differ in age, birth-assigned sex, or ethnicity from those who declined or could not be reached, though among enrolled patients, individuals assigned male at birth and those with documented physical gender distress before puberty were less likely to complete the follow-up survey.

Among the 372 participants who completed the regret scale, overall regret was minimal, with an average score of 4.3 out of 100 and a median score of zero, meaning most respondents reported zero regret. As a point of comparison, the authors note that this 4.3 average sits well below the 16.5 average reported across studies of other medical decisions using the same scale.

On their most recent survey, 96.8% of respondents (360 individuals) agreed or strongly agreed that starting hormone therapy had been the right decision. In contrast, 2.7% (10 participants) agreed or strongly agreed that they regretted the choice, and 1.9% (7 participants, all of whom also reported regret) agreed or strongly agreed that the choice had done them a lot of harm.

Three additional participants had reported regret or harm on an earlier annual survey wave but did not endorse those feelings on their latest questionnaire, bringing the total number of people who ever indicated regret or harm to 13. Seven of the 13 now identified exclusively with the sex they were assigned at birth. Twelve of those 13 individuals had stopped taking hormones, while the remaining person agreed with both positively and negatively worded items and may have misread the response scale, according to the authors.

Nine respondents wrote open-ended explanations of their regret or perceived harm, most commonly reporting that they had not felt adequately prepared to make an informed decision because of their age or maturity, mental health difficulties, or insufficient support from parents or therapists (7 of the 9). Six described physical hormone effects they no longer wanted, such as body hair, voice deepening, or breast growth, and four cited adverse effects including mood shifts attributed to hormones, vaginal atrophy (a thinning and drying of vaginal tissue), or concerns about possible fertility impairment.

Most participants (82.7%, or 311 individuals) were still taking hormones when surveyed, whereas 17.3% (65 individuals) were not. Regret scores were higher on average by roughly 16 points among those who had stopped taking hormones compared to ongoing users, and higher by roughly 6 points among nonbinary participants compared to those with binary male or female identities.

Among the 65 who had stopped, 9 (about 14%) agreed or strongly agreed that they regretted the decision and 6 (about 9%) that it had done them a lot of harm, while 54 (83%) still agreed or strongly agreed that starting treatment had been the right decision. The authors describe regret as low in absolute terms in both subgroups.

Former patients who had stopped taking hormones tended to be about a year older on average, had started treatment roughly a year earlier, and were much more likely than ongoing users to have taken testosterone and to identify on the nonbinary spectrum. Nearly 59% of non-cisgender participants who had discontinued hormones identified on the nonbinary spectrum, compared to roughly 14% of those still receiving hormone therapy. Differences in regret scores between testosterone and estrogen users were not statistically significant.

Neither regret nor current hormone continuation showed a statistically significant association with how old participants were when they started hormones, the age they first identified as transgender or gender-diverse, or whether they had shown signs of gender diversity prior to puberty. The authors write that their findings do not support concerns that teenagers without childhood-onset gender distress are at greater risk of regret, at least over the period studied, while acknowledging that the small number of people reporting regret likely limited their ability to detect such links.

At the same time, the researchers suggest that the accounts from the small subset reporting regret illustrate how decision-making breakdowns can still occur within structured clinical programs, pointing to a need for clinicians to emphasize that hormones can be paused or stopped at any time and to maintain ongoing support.

“Among the respondents, about five years after starting hormone therapy on average, satisfaction with the decision was very high and regret was rare (2.7%),” Aleksandra M. Rogowska, a professor and director of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Opole in Poland who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “This is the largest study to date focused specifically on decisional regret in this population, and it adds longer-term self-report data to a literature dominated by short follow-ups.” She added that the findings “largely confirm earlier clinic-based studies reporting regret rates of 0–4%.”

In prior work cited by the study’s authors, long-term clinic records from the Netherlands found that roughly 2% of adolescents who began puberty blockers and hormones later stopped treatment, whereas an analysis of U.S. military family insurance claims indicated that about a quarter discontinued hormones within four years.

“One finding deserves more attention than it receives: 17.3% of participants were no longer on hormone therapy,” Rogowska said. “That is considerably higher than the roughly 2% discontinuation reported in the Dutch cohort, and closer to US insurance-based estimates. Among those who stopped, about one in seven reported regret. The overall average conceals this subgroup.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when reading these results. Nearly 300 of the 698 former patients invited to take the survey did not respond, leaving their current hormone status and views on treatment unknown. Although respondents and non-respondents looked largely similar in their initial clinic records, the authors point out that the political climate surrounding transgender healthcare may have deterred some former patients from participating or motivated people with especially strong views in favor of or against youth access to respond.

The authors note that their response rate of roughly 57% (counting the 25 respondents who never started hormones) is in line with, or above, the averages reported for long-term follow-ups in a 2020 review of patient-outcome registries, and higher than is typical for online patient surveys. That same review cautions, however, that more satisfied patients may be overrepresented among those who respond to such surveys.

“I would describe my confidence as moderate for the descriptive findings and low for any broader generalization,” Rogowska said. “‘2.7% regret’ is not a population rate. It describes those who chose to respond.”

The study was also conducted by clinicians from the clinic where participants had received care, which the authors note may have increased trust for some former patients while deterring others from responding.

Rogowska pointed to how that arrangement could affect the results: “People who stopped treatment or regret it may be less likely to respond to the clinic that treated them, which would push the regret estimate downward.”

Because statistical power depends on having enough cases of an outcome to reliably detect differences between groups, Rogowska also cautioned against reading too much into the null findings on starting age and childhood-onset gender dysphoria, or distress over a mismatch between one’s gender identity and assigned sex. “The absence of associations with age at initiation or with childhood-onset gender dysphoria should not be read as evidence that these factors do not matter,” she said. “With only 13 participants reporting regret, the study had very little power to detect such effects.”

In addition, the survey assessed regret over the initial decision to begin hormone therapy rather than satisfaction with specific physical effects, and it did not ask the broader group of people who stopped taking hormones why they discontinued. The authors note that stopping treatment is not the same as regret and can reflect outside barriers, which they expect have grown as access has been restricted.

All participants also received care through a single multidisciplinary clinic with parental consent and more than 93% were White, meaning experiences could differ in more racially diverse populations or care settings with less family and mental health support.

Regarding the study’s timeframe, Rogowska noted, “Some regret in the broader literature has appeared years after treatment. A mean follow-up of 4.9 years, with some participants followed for only a few months, may be too short to capture it.”

Drawing on the high satisfaction and rare regret reported in the survey, the study’s authors conclude that their results provide further support for existing standards of care and do not support efforts to categorically restrict or ban adolescents’ access to hormone therapy. They also caution against making assumptions about treatment satisfaction, regret, or harm based on demographic traits or clinical history.

Rogowska cautioned against drawing broad policy conclusions from the survey. “Low decisional regret is not the same as evidence of long-term benefit or safety,” she said. “The study measures how people evaluate a past decision, not physical or mental health outcomes.” Regarding the regulatory debate, she added, “The authors’ policy conclusions go further than a single-site observational study can support, in either direction.”

To help address these open questions in future studies that track patients forward from the start of care, Rogowska said she would like to see “multi-site prospective cohorts with active follow-up of non-responders and of people who discontinue treatment, ideally run by researchers independent of the treating clinics.” She also called for “systematic assessment of the reasons for discontinuation, separating external barriers from changes in identity or adverse effects,” along with “follow-up extending to 10 years or more, and a closer look at the nonbinary subgroup.” As she noted, “In this sample, nonbinary identity was associated with almost nine times higher odds of not currently receiving therapy.”

The study, “Satisfaction, Regret, and Harm After Hormone Therapy in Youth From a Multidisciplinary Gender Clinic,” was authored by Laura Kuper, Megan Ungerman, Bree Horrocks, Diane Chen, and Ximena Lopez.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/regret-is-rare-among-transgender-youth-who-began-hormone-therapy-according-to-largest-study-of-its-kind/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 09:59AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: Opinion: New organ donation rules are unfair to families

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/organ-donation-policy-life-sustaining-treatment-brain-death/?utm_campaign=rss

I watched Hailey’s chest without pause, searching for the slightest movement, a tiny intake of breath, any sign of life.

Hailey (not her real name) was 22 years old, a college student who had suffered a catastrophic brain injury in a traffic accident. She lay before me in our neuroscience intensive care unit, her heart beating steadily, her skin warm, a ventilator breathing for her. I was performing an apnea test, the final step in determining whether she had died by neurological criteria. It’s part of my job as a neurointensivist at Oregon Health & Science University. The longest 10 minutes of my life are those I spend watching for any small chest movement as we remove a patient from a breathing machine. I can’t let my eyes wander. I can’t blink. Hailey never took a breath; she was brain dead.

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URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/organ-donation-policy-life-sustaining-treatment-brain-death/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 09:40AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTH

TITLE: Brain implant startup pauses trials

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/health-news-brain-implant-startup-pauses-trials/?utm_campaign=rss

Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.

Buongiorno! Today’s stories have me wondering what it must be like to study the human brain: Every new discovery is a breathtaking revelation, and also a reminder of how little we know, and how far the horizon of full understanding still is. It feels a little like looking at the universe, only what is infinite is, in the most literal sense, ourselves.

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URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/health-news-brain-implant-startup-pauses-trials/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 09:22AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEED

TITLE: Use Humor to Defuse Awkward Moments

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/well/laugh-humor-self-acceptance.html

If you can laugh at yourself, other people will feel more at ease around you, expert say.

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/well/laugh-humor-self-acceptance.html

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Psychedelics show anti-inflammatory effects in sick animals but not healthy ones, meta-analysis finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-show-anti-inflammatory-effects-in-sick-animals-but-not-healthy-ones-meta-analysis-finds/

A systematic review and meta-analysis found that most laboratory and animal studies report anti-inflammatory effects of psychedelics, but mainly when inflammation is already present. In mice and rats, psychedelics reduced inflammatory markers in animals with induced inflammation but not in healthy animals, while the small number of human studies produced mixed results. The paper was published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that alter perception, mood, and thought processes. Some of the most widely used psychedelics include psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Although they are illicit in most jurisdictions, they are being studied for their potential to treat conditions that do not respond to existing treatments.

Using psychedelics in controlled therapeutic settings is called psychedelic therapy. Research suggests that it may provide lasting benefits for people with psychiatric and neurological conditions such as depression, anorexia, Parkinson’s disease, and migraine. Although most research has focused on how psychedelics affect the brain, scientists are increasingly interested in their effects on other bodily systems, particularly the immune system. This is important because inflammation can influence brain function and behavior, while prolonged inflammation is associated with an increased risk of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Some researchers therefore suspect that the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics may partly result from their ability to regulate immune responses and reduce inflammation. However, different psychedelics interact with the biological systems of the body in different ways, so further research is needed to determine how their effects on the immune system contribute to potential therapeutic benefits.

Study author Anna Skovgaard Lerche and colleagues, including researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Copenhagen, wanted to investigate the effects of psychedelics on the immune system. They hypothesized that psychedelics would have anti-inflammatory effects that depend on context, such as whether inflammation is already present. To test this, they conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies.

The review included studies of cells grown in the laboratory (in vitro studies), studies of live animals (in vivo studies), and studies of humans. To be included, a study needed to examine the effects of psychedelics on the immune system and to have been published in English in a peer-reviewed journal. The researchers defined psychedelics as “drugs with primary effect on the 5-HT2AR that induce a psychedelic subjective experience in humans or head-twitch in mice.” The 5-HT2A receptor is a receptor for the neurotransmitter serotonin and the primary target through which classic psychedelics produce their psychedelic effects.

Drugs such as MDMA and ketamine, which do not act primarily through this receptor, were excluded. The researchers searched several databases of scientific literature, including PubMed and EMBASE, for studies published through February 2026. Of 9,195 records screened, 61 studies met the criteria: 24 in vitro studies, 30 studies of non-human animals, and seven human studies that included data from 10 separate trials.

For the meta-analysis, the researchers excluded some animal studies, including one conducted on zebrafish, studies that measured immune markers not examined in enough other studies, studies that used very high doses, and one study that used chronic dosing to induce a disease model. The final meta-analysis included 18 studies of mice and rats and four human studies with data from six trials.

Results of the systematic review showed that 19 of the 24 in vitro studies and 25 of the 30 animal studies reported anti-inflammatory effects of psychedelics. These effects depended on context. Among studies in which inflammation had been induced, 19 of 21 in vitro studies and all 24 animal studies reported anti-inflammatory effects. In contrast, five of the six animal studies without an inflammatory challenge reported proinflammatory effects, mostly in studies using very high doses or repeated dosing over weeks.

Human studies produced mixed results. Of the 10 human trials, three found anti-inflammatory effects, three found proinflammatory effects, and four found no effects. Only one trial included a group of participants with confirmed elevated inflammation: a study of ayahuasca in people with treatment-resistant depression, which found that ayahuasca reduced the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein compared with placebo. Some of the proinflammatory findings in humans involved short-term shifts in immune cells within hours of dosing, similar to those produced by the stimulant dextroamphetamine.

The meta-analysis of animal studies showed that psychedelics were associated with a large decrease in proinflammatory cytokines, signaling molecules that promote inflammation, in rodents with induced inflammation. In healthy rodents, psychedelics had no effect on these markers. Most of the interpretable data came from studies of DOI, a synthetic psychedelic used mainly in research, and the clearest reductions involved the cytokines IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α in the brain and blood.

There were too few human studies for a reliable meta-analysis. The researchers note that serotonin 2A receptors appear to drive the anti-inflammatory effects of DOI, while DMT appears to act mainly through a different receptor called sigma-1, suggesting that different psychedelics may influence inflammation in different ways.

“Thus, while serotonergic psychedelics reduce proinflammatory cytokines in preclinical models of increased baseline inflammation, limited human evidence precludes conclusions about their translational potential,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the immunomodulatory effects of psychedelics. However, most of the evidence for anti-inflammatory effects came from animal and laboratory studies, while human studies painted a mixed picture. Most human studies did not include people with elevated inflammation, which may have limited the opportunity to detect anti-inflammatory effects.

The animal studies also showed signs of small-study effects, meaning smaller studies tended to report larger effects, which can indicate publication bias. An adjusted estimate that accounted for this pattern was much smaller and not statistically distinguishable from zero, although that analysis combined studies of inflamed and healthy animals. The studies also varied widely in drugs, doses, timing, and immune markers, and many were rated as having a medium or high risk of bias.

Senior author Aoife O’Donovan has received funding from Silo Pharma for studies in this area, and co-author Boris Heifets serves on the scientific advisory boards of Journey Clinical and Osmind and consults for Arcadia Medicine. The authors state that the funders had no role in the review.

The paper, “Are psychedelics anti-inflammatory? A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining the immunomodulatory effects of serotonergic psychedelics,” was authored by Anna Skovgaard Lerche, D. Parker Kelley, Michael E. Benros, Gerald Billac, Ellen R. Bradley, Boris Heifets, Joshua Woolley, Kristen Nishimi, and Aoife O’Donovan.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-show-anti-inflammatory-effects-in-sick-animals-but-not-healthy-ones-meta-analysis-finds/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 07:17AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: Crows can make decisions twice as fast as humans, scientists discover

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261111005850.htm

Crows may be even smarter than we thought, and their brains are astonishingly fast. Researchers at the University of Tübingen discovered that crows can make visual decisions twice as quickly as humans and monkeys, taking just 235 milliseconds on average to identify the direction of moving dots while maintaining remarkable accuracy.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261111005850.htm

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Neuroscientists just found a hidden “fingerprint” in human memory

URL: https://www.psypost.org/neuroscientists-just-found-a-hidden-fingerprint-in-human-memory/

Electrical rhythms sweeping across the surface of the human brain do not just travel in straight lines when people form and recall memories, according to new research published in Nature Communications. Using direct brain recordings from neurosurgical patients, scientists found that these rhythms also organize into swirling spirals, expanding or contracting rings, and other intricate shapes that shift with both the stage of memory and the specific letter a person is viewing. Machine-learning models trained on these geometric patterns were able to tell apart different memory states and individual remembered items above chance levels.

The cerebral cortex, the folded outer layer of neural tissue covering the brain, plays a central role in memory, language, and perception. Within this tissue, groups of brain cells generate rhythmic electrical fluctuations called neural oscillations, which cycle several times per second. When the peak of one of these electrical cycles shifts progressively from one patch of cortex to neighboring patches over thousandths of a second, much like a ripple moving across water, neuroscientists call it a traveling wave.

Individual brain cells in the cortex are physically wired to many distant regions, and those connections cannot rewire themselves from second to second as a person’s task changes. The authors hypothesize that by sweeping across the brain’s surface in organized patterns, traveling waves may temporarily align the timing of specific neuron groups, allowing separated regions to communicate flexibly as mental demands shift.

“In this study we took an unusual approach to studying large-scale brain activity and its ability to reorganize over time,” senior author Joshua Jacobs, a professor of neurology at the University of Chicago, and lead author Anup Das, a postdoctoral researcher at the university, told PsyPost. “We probed the spatial organization of signals across multiple brain regions together, rather than the more common approach of studying individual sites separately.”

“To explain our approach, an analogy we often find useful is trying to understand an ocean by measuring the water at individual locations without ever studying the waves traveling across its surface,” Jacobs and Das explained. “You might learn a great deal about what is happening at each location, but you would miss an important dimension of how the system organizes itself as a whole. Similarly, understanding the brain requires us to look beyond how much activity occurs at individual locations and investigate how traveling waves of neural activity are spatially organized and propagate across the cortex.”

Studies of traveling waves during waking human thought previously focused on planar waves, which sweep in one straight direction across a broad stretch of cortex. In a 2024 direct brain-recording study by two of the same authors, straight-line waves changed their direction of travel between storing and recalling memories. Animal work hinted at richer shapes: a 2022 working-memory study of monkeys in PLOS Computational Biology found that frontal-lobe waves rotated in circles more often than they moved in straight planes.

Earlier human work also indicated that brain rhythms reflect individual items held in mind. A 2009 study of surgical patients co-authored by Jacobs found that localized fast electrical signals varied with the letter being viewed; that study’s verbal-memory data were reanalyzed in the new research. Building on those findings, Das and Jacobs, alongside mathematics professor Bard Ermentrout of the University of Pittsburgh and biomedical engineering researcher Erfan Zabeh of Columbia University, tested whether traveling waves across the awake human cortex form spirals, rings, and other geometries that distinguish both broad memory stages and specific remembered items.

The researchers analyzed publicly available recordings from 24 patients with drug-resistant epilepsy hospitalized for seizure monitoring before surgery, and posted their custom analysis code online. Each patient had flat sensor grids placed directly on the cortical surface beneath the skull, a clinical procedure called electrocorticography, with electrodes spaced 10 millimeters apart. Seven additional patients from the original archives were excluded because fewer than two-thirds of their sensors displayed a shared rhythm.

Patients typically had 100 to 150 sensors implanted, each roughly one square centimeter in size and capable of picking up electrical signals from up to a million brain cells. The data came from what Jacobs and Das described as “the gold standard of measuring electrical activity in the human brain: people preparing for surgery to manage severe, drug-resistant epilepsy.”

Nine patients (four women and five men, ages 20 to 57) played a laptop spatial memory game, steering across a virtual beach to open treasure chests and memorize object locations. Each round progressed through navigation, encoding an uncovered object for 1.5 seconds, a shell-game distractor, confidence ratings, location recall (averaging 41% accuracy), and score feedback. The other 15 patients (seven women and eight men, ages 20 to 58) completed a verbal working-memory task, viewing lists of one to three English letters for one second each before indicating whether a test letter matched the list (averaging 92% accuracy).

The team first identified adjacent electrode clusters pulsing at the same rhythm between 3 and 40 cycles per second, or hertz, finding oscillations on about 86% of sensors across slower theta and alpha bands (4 to 12 hertz) and faster beta bands (12 to 30 hertz). This yielded 39 clusters across the 24 patients: 13 in the spatial task and 26 in the verbal task. Comparing each sensor’s cycle timing with neighbors within 25 millimeters mapped local wave flow across stable bursts lasting at least about 50 milliseconds (62.5 in the verbal task).

To track shifting geometries, the scientists used independent component analysis, a mathematical technique that separates overlapping signals into recurring spatial patterns and scores each pattern’s strength per burst. Computer simulations and shuffled-data tests confirmed that this method extracted genuine wave shapes without inventing patterns from noise. Each pattern was classified as planar (moving in one straight direction), rotational (spiraling clockwise or counterclockwise), concentric (expanding outward as a source or contracting inward as a sink), or complex (patterns fitting none of the other categories, often mixing several local flows). Cross-validated neural networks were then trained on most of the data and tested on held-out portions to classify pairs of task stages or viewed letters from these scores.

Stable wave bursts lasted roughly 80 to 180 milliseconds on average before dissolving and reorganizing, with higher-frequency beta waves holding steady for slightly briefer windows than slower theta and alpha waves. These waves crossed the cortex at about 0.3 to 3.3 meters per second, traveling roughly twice as fast at higher frequencies than at lower ones.

Individual cortical regions did not stick to one wave geometry. Each electrode cluster cycled through an average of six recurring spatial patterns, which together accounted for more than 80% of the variation in wave movement.

Planar waves were the strongest category, with a median wave strength of 59% at lower frequencies and 43% at higher frequencies across tasks. (Wave strength reflects how closely the electrical timing across neighboring sensors fits an organized wave.) At higher beta frequencies, rotational spiral waves rose to a median strength of 37%, particularly during the spatial memory game.

Wave geometries also differed between hemispheres. Planar waves were stronger on the right side of the brain (about 64% strength) than on the left (about 42%), while left-hemisphere non-planar waves favored spirals during spatial memory and concentric rings during verbal memory.

“One of the most exciting implications of this work is that the brain may communicate through much more elaborate spatiotemporal patterns than we traditionally appreciate,” Jacobs and Das noted, referring to patterns that unfold across both space and time. “We often think about brain activity in terms of which regions become active. But our findings suggest that we also need to pay attention to the geometry of neural activity itself: how it travels, rotates, expands, and contracts across the cortex.”

“What surprised me most was the sheer diversity of traveling wave shapes that we found in the human cortex, and how meaningfully these different configurations related to behavior,” Jacobs told PsyPost. “And these patterns were observed across widespread cortical areas, including frontal, temporal, and parietal regions.”

When the researchers checked whether spiral waves spun preferentially in one direction across the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes, any preference for one rotational direction over the opposite direction was not statistically significant in either task. Concentric ring waves, by contrast, reversed their predominant flow between tasks: 7 of 9 concentric patterns (78%) radiated outward as source waves during spatial memory, whereas 15 of 22 (68%) converged inward as sink waves during verbal memory.

All four wave types could change direction, strength, or both across behaviors, and every cluster recorded during the spatial game showed such shifts. In one patient, for instance, a planar wave nearly vanished during navigation and the distractor game, strengthened during encoding, and shifted direction during recall. Across the group, both rotational and complex waves grew stronger during the distractor phase.

Similar shifts appeared at the level of individual items in the verbal working-memory task. Half of the 26 clusters altered wave direction or strength depending on the letter viewed, such as flowing toward the upper front of a grid for “G” and “Q” and reversing for “D” and “J.”

“We saw that there is a specific shape associated with a specific type of behavior,” Das said in a University of Chicago news release. “These shapes are not random. I like to think of it as a fingerprint for each person.” Regarding the shifts between individual memorized letters, Das added, “This suggests that brain waves can also encode item specific, fine-grained details in addition to broad events.”

“Another big surprise was that there was no single wave pattern that appeared in exactly the same way in every individual,” the researchers told PsyPost. “The repertoire and prevalence of these patterns varied considerably across patients. For example, the act of remembering a location in the treasure hunt task might generate a spiral wave for one person, while it produced a radiating source for another.”

“We find this heterogeneity particularly interesting,” Jacobs and Das noted. “It suggests that the human brain may not rely on one universal spatial pattern to support a particular cognitive operation. Different individuals may organize their neural activity through different dynamical configurations, even while performing similar memory tasks. Yet, within individuals, these patterns were sufficiently structured and reliable to distinguish behavioral states and, in some cases, specific memory representations.”

Because wave patterns varied so much between people, the decoders were trained separately for each person’s electrode clusters rather than across patients. Neural networks trained on wave-pattern scores distinguished both spatial-task stages and remembered letters reliably above the 50% chance level. Decoding behavior from wave shape alone succeeded about 70% of the time, according to the university’s news release.

Pairs with more distinct wave geometries yielded higher accuracy: navigation and distractor periods stood out from encoding and retrieval (but were hard to tell apart from each other), and “H,” “J,” and “Q” were the most distinguishable letters. In control tests, peak frequency differences across stages or letters were not statistically significant, and decoders trained solely on frequency or rhythm strength relative to background noise failed to beat chance.

The researchers see possible applications for brain-computer interfaces, devices that translate brain signals into commands for computers or prosthetics. “Brain–computer interfaces, for example, depend on extracting meaningful information from neural signals to infer a person’s intentions or cognitive states,” Jacobs and Das explained. “Most existing approaches focus on features such as neuronal firing rates or signal amplitudes. Our findings suggest that the spatial organization and propagation of neural activity could provide another dimension of information that could potentially complement these established approaches and could influence how we design future brain–computer interfaces.”

These findings align with an earlier direct brain-recording study of sleeping clinical patients, which examined rotating cortical waves during sleep rather than active waking memory tasks and suggested that circular traveling waves may coordinate brain regions to support memory. In that sleep study, brief bursts of sleep-related rhythms called sleep spindles swept in circular loops across the cortex hundreds of times nightly rather than peaking simultaneously, though waking spirals in the new study spun in both directions without a single preferred loop.

To explain why outward source waves appeared more often during spatial memory while inward sink waves dominated verbal memory, the authors propose that spatial navigation requires local hubs to broadcast signals across widespread networks, whereas holding a few letters in mind relies on dampening competing activity and funneling signals inward. Based on mathematical models of connected rhythmic cells, the researchers also suggest that local differences in oscillation speed shape these geometries, as waves tend to travel from faster-pulsing cortical patches toward slower-pulsing ones. More broadly, the researchers see traveling waves as one way the brain might coordinate billions of neurons spread across distinct regions, and they propose that spirals may help strengthen connections between neurons, a process called synaptic plasticity.

“What makes traveling waves particularly interesting is that they provide a potential mechanism for this coordination,” Jacobs and Das said. “For example, rotational waves such as spirals revisit the same brain areas in multiple cycles, therefore sequentially scanning distributed brain areas to help enhance synaptic plasticity for memory consolidation. Similarly, source waves can take information from one brain area and broadcast that information outward across multiple brain areas. In this sense, traveling waves offer more than another way to visualize brain activity; they may help us understand the dynamical principles through which the brain coordinates information processing.”

There are a few caveats to keep in mind regarding what these recordings can establish. Tracking and decoding wave shapes shows that cortical geometries shift alongside mental states, but this observational design cannot show that a spiral or concentric wave directly causes a memory to form or be retrieved, nor did the surface sensors record the firing of individual neurons beneath each grid. In addition, electrode grids covered only cortical regions selected for each patient’s clinical care rather than the entire brain.

Because several grids covered compact patches of the brain’s outer surface, segments of wide spirals may have resembled planar waves, potentially undercounting spirals, and surface sensors could not detect three-dimensional waves moving through deeper central relay structures such as the thalamus. Visual input, eye movements, and joystick control also accompanied memory processing. Future experiments combining single-neuron recordings, eye-tracking, and comparisons between memory and non-memory tasks with identical stimuli could help separate memory-specific wave geometries from sensory or motor activity.

Looking ahead, the team hopes to test whether targeted electrical or magnetic stimulation, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation applied from outside the skull, could nudge faltering rhythms to support memory rehabilitation in people experiencing cognitive decline. “If a traveling wave is relevant for a certain kind of memory encoding, then if you want to help a person remember things better, maybe you can apply brain stimulation that strengthens that kind of traveling wave,” Jacobs said in the news release. “Hopefully, by characterizing patterns like this, then we can go to the next step and use mathematical models of each of these waves to understand where they are coming from. And then if we understand where they’re coming from mechanistically, then we can potentially apply brain stimulation in a way to strengthen them.”

“We think we are only beginning to appreciate the computational possibilities offered by these different wave geometries,” the researchers added. “There is still a great deal to discover about how planar, spiral, and concentric waves interact, why the brain switches between these configurations, and whether these patterns provide distinct mechanisms for coordinating distributed neuronal populations. Ultimately, we hope this line of research will help establish a more comprehensive understanding of how the brain uses rich spatiotemporal dynamics to support cognition.”

The study, “Planar, spiral, and concentric traveling waves distinguish behavioral states in human memory,” was authored by Anup Das, Erfan Zabeh, Bard Ermentrout, and Joshua Jacobs.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/neuroscientists-just-found-a-hidden-fingerprint-in-human-memory/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: New study finds vulnerable narcissism is linked to harsher judgments of police stops, even polite ones

URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-study-finds-vulnerable-narcissism-is-linked-to-harsher-judgments-of-police-stops-even-polite-ones/

How people judge a traffic stop may reflect not only how the officer behaves, but also the personality traits they bring to the interaction. A new experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology suggests that people higher in vulnerable narcissism tend to view police stops less favorably even when an officer is courteous and fair, whereas those higher in grandiose narcissism respond more positively when shown respect or spared a ticket. The findings indicate that everyday psychological differences are linked to how people evaluate police encounters, although overtly rude policing drew strongly negative reactions across the board.

Nearly 50 million people in the United States aged 16 or older had contact with the police in 2022. Traffic stops are the most common type of encounter that police initiate. Research in criminology consistently indicates that these encounters go more smoothly when officers practice procedural justice, an approach to policing centered on fair decision-making and respectful interpersonal treatment. In practice, procedural justice involves four behaviors: giving citizens a voice to tell their side of the story, explaining decisions neutrally and transparently, treating people politely and with dignity, and showing genuine concern for the public.

Fair policing tends to encourage cooperation, satisfaction, and views of officers as legitimate authorities, and one proposed reason is that respectful treatment signals that a person is a valued member of society. Even so, an officer’s objective conduct does not always match how a citizen perceives a stop. In a 2021 field study of Dutch moped stops, researchers who observed officers on the street and interviewed drivers immediately afterward found no evidence that fairer officer behavior led drivers to rate the encounter as fairer.

One reason people interpret similar stops differently is that citizens do not enter police interactions as blank slates. For example, a 2022 vignette experiment with Muslim participants in Australia found that individuals who felt their community was stigmatized by police gained less trust from polite, fair conduct than those who felt less stigmatized. Broad personality traits may matter as well. An earlier study examining dark personality traits found that higher overall narcissism and more past police contacts were associated with more negative general attitudes toward police, whereas psychopathy and Machiavellianism were not.

In psychology, narcissism is not confined to narcissistic personality disorder, a formal clinical diagnosis. It also exists as an everyday personality trait that varies across the general population, reflecting how people maintain a positive self-image and seek validation from others. Psychologists divide this trait into two primary forms, grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism, which can coexist within the same person.

Grandiose narcissism is marked by assertiveness, overconfidence, feelings of superiority, and entitlement, with individuals looking for social feedback that confirms their high status. Vulnerable narcissism involves fragile self-esteem, anxiety, shame, and shyness, making people uncomfortable with direct attention, sensitive to potential criticism, and inclined to withdraw when they cannot present themselves favorably.

Because police stops involve authority, status cues, and public scrutiny, lead study author Tal Jonathan-Zamir, an associate professor at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her colleagues tested how grandiose and vulnerable narcissism relate to citizen evaluations across different styles of officer behavior. Although respectful policing might appeal to both traits’ sensitivity to status and validation, the authors noted that the unwanted attention and implied criticism of being pulled over could also alienate people higher in vulnerable narcissism even when an officer behaves politely.

“I have been investigating the procedural justice model as it applies to policing for decades, from various perspectives,” Jonathan-Zamir told PsyPost. “In a casual conversation with my husband, who is a therapist, the notion of narcissism came up, and when he explained the motivation behind it and the sensitivity to social feedback, especially to cues related to validation, status, and self-worth associated with narcissism, the similarity to common explanations in the literature for ‘why procedural justice works’ hit me. That’s when the very intuitive hypothesis that procedural justice may be more effective with individuals who score high on narcissism came to my mind.”

In November 2025, the researchers recruited a stratified sample of 2,000 English-speaking U.S. adults through the online platform Prolific, matching the adult population in age, sex, and ethnicity. After removing incomplete or low-quality responses, the final sample included 1,904 participants, who first wrote brief descriptions of a positive and a negative police interaction to encourage personal engagement with the topic.

Participants were then randomly assigned to read one of five written traffic-stop scenarios, with 367 to 404 people per group. Reviewed for realism by a retired senior police officer, every scenario asked participants to imagine being pulled over one evening for a burnt-out taillight while driving to pick up a friend, with bystanders observing the stop and the waiting friend texting because the driver was running late.

The five scenarios varied the officer’s demeanor and whether the driver received a ticket. In the full procedural justice condition, the officer greeted the driver politely, explained the reason for the stop, offered to show what needed fixing, listened attentively to the driver’s view, and issued a ticket, whereas a partial procedural justice condition included only the polite greeting and expressions of concern before issuing a ticket.

A business-like condition served as a neutral baseline in which the officer spoke in a strictly formal, matter-of-fact manner, neither polite nor rude, and issued a ticket. A favorable-outcome condition used that identical matter-of-fact script except the driver was let go without a ticket, and a procedural injustice condition depicted an officer who interrupted the driver, called the stop a waste of time, dismissed the driver’s explanation, muttered a biased remark, and issued a ticket.

After passing a comprehension check, participants rated 12 statements from 1 to 5 covering officer legitimacy, satisfaction with the stop, and willingness to obey and cooperate, which were averaged into a single encounter-outcome score. Participants also completed the 28-item Brief Pathological Narcissism Inventory, which, despite its name, has been validated for measuring narcissism as an everyday trait in the general population. On its 0-to-5 scale, sample averages were a modest 2.15 for grandiose narcissism and 1.58 for vulnerable narcissism.

Officer demeanor was the strongest predictor of how people evaluated the stop, accounting for 58 percent of the variation in outcome ratings on its own. The three relatively positive scenarios produced nearly identical favorable scores ranging from 4.18 to 4.23 on the 5-point scale, and the differences among full procedural justice, partial procedural justice, and escaping a ticket were not statistically significant. The neutral business-like stop averaged a lower 3.74, and the overtly rude stop dropped to 2.02, reflecting widespread disapproval across participants in that group.

Next, the researchers examined whether narcissism predicted stop evaluations after accounting for demographics, prior police contacts, and having close friends or relatives in policing. Together, grandiose and vulnerable narcissism explained an additional 1 percentage point of variation in ratings and worked in opposite directions.

Higher vulnerable narcissism was consistently associated with worse evaluations across four scenarios: full procedural justice, partial procedural justice, receiving no ticket, and neutral business-like conduct. Across those four stops, each one-point increase in vulnerable narcissism was associated with ratings about a fifth of a point lower on the 5-point scale. In the overtly rude stop, that association was not statistically significant.

Grandiose narcissism showed a contrasting pattern across the scenarios. Within each of the three favorable conditions, whether the officer practiced full procedural justice, showed polite manners alone, or waived the ticket, higher grandiose narcissism was associated with modestly more positive evaluations of the encounter. In both the neutral business-like stop and the overtly rude stop, that association was not statistically significant.

Formal tests of whether the grandiose narcissism link was stronger in the favorable scenarios than in the neutral stop were not statistically significant either. As a result, the study did not find firm evidence for the original idea that respectful treatment works better on people higher in narcissism.

To explain these opposing patterns, the authors point to how each trait manages self-worth in social interactions. They suggest that individuals higher in grandiose narcissism respond warmly when an officer provides cues of respect, status, or special leniency that affirm an inflated self-image. For people higher in vulnerable narcissism, the researchers propose, being stopped in front of bystanders and being unable to simply leave the interaction may feel uncomfortable even when an officer is polite. Overtly rude policing, in their view, provoked such widespread disapproval that it left little room for personality differences.

“I was not surprised by the effect of grandiose narcissism, but I was surprised that high scores on vulnerable narcissism are associated with negative encounter outcomes across all but the procedural injustice condition (in which responses show very little variance),” Jonathan-Zamir explained. “Going back to the literature, this made sense — vulnerable narcissism is associated with avoidance, withdrawal from social interactions, low tolerance for attention from others, and readiness for criticism and failure. It thus makes sense that enforcement encounters are particularly uncomfortable for individuals scoring high on vulnerable narcissism, even if the officer uses procedural justice or does not issue a ticket. But this is something we had not initially expected.”

Jonathan-Zamir sees the results as part of a broader pattern. “Our findings reinforce the idea that citizens are not ‘tabula rasa’ when entering an encounter with the police,” she noted. “Citizens bring with them things like prior attitudes toward the police, felt stigmatization, support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and more. Now we know that their personality characteristics also play a role.”

In practical terms, the authors point out that police cannot and should not try to gauge citizens’ personalities during a stop, and officers cannot always let drivers off without a ticket. In addition, the team suggests that because citizen ratings may reflect personal psychology alongside officer conduct, agencies evaluating street encounters should, where possible, combine public surveys with independent observations or camera footage.

“In police-citizen encounters, it is very easy to put all of the responsibility on the officer — they are the ones holding the power,” Jonathan-Zamir said. “Without detracting from the very serious responsibility police officers have in police-citizen encounters, we have to remember that the way individuals perceive and respond to police officers does not only depend on what the officer does. We bring a lot into the situation; among others, our personality characteristics, and specifically grandiose and vulnerable narcissism.”

“For the same reason, police officers should not interpret unfavorable responses from citizens as evidence that procedural justice ‘doesn’t work,'” she added. “Our findings reinforce the importance of procedural justice as a general standard of police conduct.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Because personality was measured rather than assigned, the links between narcissism and ratings are correlational. Vulnerable narcissism also overlaps with anxiety and negative mood, which the study did not separate out, so the pattern may partly reflect broader negative emotionality.

In addition, participants read and imagined a written story about a minor equipment violation rather than experiencing an actual roadside stop with flashing lights, emotional tension, and financial costs. Self-rated intentions on an online survey do not always match how people behave face-to-face with an authority figure, and personality traits accounted for a very small share of reactions compared with how the officer behaved.

Because this experiment tested a single traffic scenario among U.S. online panelists, future research will need to examine whether similar patterns hold in higher-stakes encounters or other countries. The authors suggest incorporating validated personality measures into surveys of citizens after real-world police stops and linking those surveys to body-worn camera recordings. They also suggest testing whether communication techniques that minimize feelings of public exposure help ease encounters for people sensitive to criticism.

“I find the police-citizen encounter a particularly fascinating setting,” Jonathan-Zamir reflected. “The big question in my mind is ‘what makes for a “successful” police-citizen encounter?’ Addressing this question involves taking multiple perspectives and asking, for example, what police officers and citizens define as a ‘successful encounter’ and what impacts variation in definitions; after deciding what ‘success’ would mean in a particular encounter, what impacts officers’ choices about how to achieve it; and following the officer’s action — what impacts the extent to which it would be effective for the citizen. Here the present study comes in — now we know that the citizen’s scores on grandiose and vulnerable narcissism have an effect.”

The study, “Personality traits, police demeanor, and encounter outcomes: the roles of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism,” was authored by Tal Jonathan-Zamir, Gali Perry, Naomi Kaplan-Damary, and James J. Willis.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-study-finds-vulnerable-narcissism-is-linked-to-harsher-judgments-of-police-stops-even-polite-ones/

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 05:04AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEED

TITLE: Use Humor to Defuse Awkward Moments

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/well/nl-awkward-humor-self-deprecating.html

If you can laugh at yourself, other people will feel more at ease around you, expert say.

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/well/nl-awkward-humor-self-deprecating.html

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DATE: November 13, 2026 at 04:30AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTH

TITLE: STAT+: Across the U.S., homegrown experiments aim to save kids from their phones

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/phone-addiction-young-people-fight-back-attention-activism/?utm_campaign=rss

MILWAUKEE — Kat Zilka sat on the floor of her living room, beside a glowing Christmas tree and a pile of essays, and felt like weeping. It was late in 2022, and she had asked her 12th grade digital journalism students to reflect on their relationships to devices. 

“The things they were writing were deeply disturbing,” she said. 

Teenagers quietly enduring online abuse, using their phones all night without their parents’ knowledge, or trapped in a cycle of deleting and redownloading social media. Their words made real what Zilka had been observing for years — how the light in students’ eyes was dimmer, especially since Covid — and revealed the astonishing magnitude of the problem.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/13/phone-addiction-young-people-fight-back-attention-activism/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 06:33PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: A surprising brain difference may explain why some kids struggle with math

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261112025542.htm

Stanford researchers have discovered that children who struggle persistently with math may have underlying differences in how their brains manage problem-solving strategies. Children with developmental dyscalculia were slower to switch strategies, less responsive to changes in difficulty, and less able to improve their approach over time. Distinct patterns of brain activity were linked to these difficulties and could even predict certain math-related abilities.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261112025542.htm

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 07:17AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Crows can make decisions twice as fast as humans, scientists discover

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261111005850.htm

Crows may be even smarter than we thought, and their brains are astonishingly fast. Researchers at the University of Tübingen discovered that crows can make visual decisions twice as quickly as humans and monkeys, taking just 235 milliseconds on average to identify the direction of moving dots while maintaining remarkable accuracy.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261111005850.htm

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 08:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Tracking the connection between bipolar disorder and sexual distress

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tracking-the-connection-between-bipolar-disorder-and-sexual-distress/

People with bipolar disorder often experience changes in their sex lives alongside their mood shifts, but exactly how these symptoms connect over time has rarely been measured. A recent six-month study of newly diagnosed patients found that depressive symptoms correspond with lower sexual desire and increased distress about sex, while daily mood swings are linked specifically to higher sexual distress. The research was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Bipolar disorder is a mental health condition characterized by extreme shifts in a person’s mood and energy levels. These shifts manifest as distinct clinical episodes. During depressive episodes, individuals may feel intense sadness, lethargy, and a loss of interest in daily activities. During manic or hypomanic episodes, individuals experience elevated energy, impulsivity, and sometimes a decreased need for sleep.

Clinical observations frequently note that energy fluctuations influence a patient’s sexual life. The risk of sexual dysfunction is often elevated in psychiatric populations. Sexual function generally involves multiple phases, including an initial desire phase followed by arousal and physical climax. In clinical settings, the desire phase is particularly relevant for people with bipolar disorder because a sudden increase or decrease in sexual interest is a known symptom of the condition.

Another component of sexual health is sexual distress. This concept is distinct from physical sexual dysfunction. Sexual distress encompasses feelings of inadequacy, grief, frustration, and worry that arise from a person’s sexual problems. To formally diagnose a clinical sexual dysfunction, a medical provider must confirm that the patient is experiencing distress about their symptoms.

Researchers Helle B. Krogh, Caroline Fussing Bruun, Jeff Zarp, Maria Faurholt-Jepsen, Lars Vedel Kessing, Annamaria Giraldi, and Maj Vinberg conducted the study. The team is affiliated with the Sexology Clinic at Copenhagen University Hospital and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The researchers noted a lack of longitudinal data tracking sexual health in this patient population. Most previous studies relied on cross-sectional designs, which capture a single snapshot in time. A snapshot approach can obscure how symptoms evolve. The team wanted to track patients over several months to see how formal psychiatric episodes, as well as minor daily mood changes, impact sexual desire and distress.

The researchers recruited 236 adults between the ages of 18 and 68. All participants had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder within the previous two years. The study spanned six months, with participants attending in-person clinical visits at the start of the study, at three months, and at six months.

During the clinical visits, medical professionals evaluated the participants using standardized rating scales. They used the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale to measure the severity of depressive symptoms. They used the Young Mania Rating Scale to measure the intensity of manic symptoms. These tools assign numerical scores to a patient’s psychological state based on a clinical interview.

Participants also filled out several questionnaires. They used the Changes in Sexual Functioning Questionnaire to report their levels of sexual desire. They used a separate tool called the Sexual Distress Scale to quantify their feelings of frustration or worry regarding sex. Participants also completed a general assessment of their physical, psychological, and social quality of life.

To capture the nuances of bipolar disorder between formal clinical visits, the study utilized a smartphone application. Participants logged their mood every day using a nine-point scale on their phones.

The daily check-ins allowed the researchers to measure mood instability. Mood instability refers to the day-to-day emotional turbulence that patients experience even when they are not in a full depressive or manic episode. The researchers used a statistical formula to calculate how much a participant’s mood jumped around from one day to the next based on the smartphone data.

The data showed a distinct relationship between depressive symptoms and sexual desire. Participants with higher depression scores consistently reported lower levels of sexual desire. This finding aligns with trends seen in people who have unipolar depression without manic episodes.

In contrast, higher scores on the mania scale were initially associated with increased sexual desire. To test the strength of these relationships, the researchers conducted a secondary analysis. They removed the specific questions about sexual interest from both the depression and mania rating scales, aiming to see if the overall mood state still predicted sexual desire.

When the sexual interest questions were removed, the association between depressive symptoms and reduced desire remained intact. The link between manic symptoms and increased desire was no longer statistically significant. The researchers suggest that the initial finding regarding mania might have been an artifact of overlapping questionnaire design rather than a distinct effect of the manic mood state itself.

The team found a different pattern when analyzing sexual distress. Higher depressive symptoms were strongly associated with an increase in sexual distress. Participants who were more depressed felt more frustration and worry about their sex lives. Better overall quality of life was associated with decreased sexual distress.

Higher levels of manic symptoms did not correspond with increased sexual distress. This suggests that the heightened sexual desire or activity that often accompanies manic states is not necessarily perceived as bothersome or worrying by the patient at the time it occurs.

The smartphone data revealed that mood instability is also linked to sexual health. Participants who logged more erratic daily mood changes on the app experienced higher levels of sexual distress. This suggests that day-to-day emotional fluctuations are associated with a person’s sexual well-being, even outside of severe mood episodes.

The researchers observed a massive amount of variety across the participant pool. Statistical modeling indicated that roughly two-thirds of the variation in sexual desire and distress scores was due to differences between individuals. The researchers noted that personal, societal, and relationship factors likely exert a large influence on sexual outcomes, highlighting the clinical diversity of people with bipolar disorder.

Only about 16 percent of the participants met the criteria for overall sexual dysfunction. This prevalence is remarkably low compared to previous studies, which have reported dysfunction rates nearing 50 percent in similar populations.

Several factors likely contributed to the lower rates of sexual dysfunction, creating some limitations for the study. The researchers specifically excluded individuals who were taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These medications are a common class of antidepressants known to cause high rates of sexual side effects. Excluding these patients likely removed many individuals who were experiencing medication-induced sexual dysfunction.

The participants in this study were also concurrently enrolled in a separate clinical trial testing a daily aspirin regimen. Participating in a clinical trial requires a high level of organization and compliance. This requirement may have attracted a subset of patients who were generally functioning better and experiencing less severe symptoms than the average person living with bipolar disorder.

The study only examined newly diagnosed individuals. The findings might not be generalizable to patients who have managed bipolar disorder for decades. The compounding effects of multiple hospitalizations or years of psychiatric medication could alter how mood impacts sexual health later in the course of the illness. Future research could investigate whether these patterns hold true for chronic patients or utilize qualitative interviews to explore the personal factors driving individual differences.

The study, “The impact of affective symptoms and mood instability on sexual desire and sexual distress in newly diagnosed bipolar disorder: a longitudinal study,” was authored by Helle B. Krogh, Caroline Fussing Bruun, Jeff Zarp, Maria Faurholt-Jepsen, Lars Vedel Kessing, Annamaria Giraldi, and Maj Vinberg.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tracking-the-connection-between-bipolar-disorder-and-sexual-distress/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 05:17AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: U.S. Nonprofits Sue Tech Giants to Halt AI Development

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192527&url=https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/12/us-nonprofits-sue-tech-giants-to-halt-ai-development?traffic_source=rss

Source: Al Jazeera

A coalition of digital safety and consumer watchdogs has filed a lawsuit against the world's top artificial intelligence developers, requesting a court-ordered freeze on AI model training and deployments. The suit targets five tech giants—Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and SpaceX—alleging they cannot prevent their AI creations from causing "catastrophic harm." The lawsuit calls for the companies to pause their technologies until safeguards...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192527&url=https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/12/us-nonprofits-sue-tech-giants-to-halt-ai-development?traffic_source=rss

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 05:16AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: At Summit, Leaders Warn Climate Goals Are Slipping Away

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192524&url=https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/11/12/un-cop31-burnham-thunberg-climate-change/7781794506629/

Source: United Press International - Health News

World leaders at the COP31 summit in Turkey warned Thursday that international efforts to combat climate change are falling behind. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for renewed leadership, while activist Greta Thunberg accused wealthy nations of inactivity. Thunberg, attending the summit for the first time in five years, said wealthy nations had failed to take meaningful action while vulnerable populations face increasingly severe...

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: A $1 LSD booklet from 1967 anticipated much of today’s psychedelic safety advice, study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/a-1-lsd-booklet-from-1967-anticipated-much-of-todays-psychedelic-safety-advice-study-suggests/

Nearly sixty years after an underground educator published a $1 mail-order booklet on how to avoid bad LSD trips, contemporary psychedelic users and facilitators still endorse almost all of her practical advice. A new survey study published in Psychedelics indicates that experienced users agreed on average with 18 out of 19 safety recommendations from Lisa Bieberman’s 1967 manual, suggesting that much of today’s harm reduction advice was already circulating in grassroots literature decades before modern clinical guidelines.

Psychedelics are mind-altering substances, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), that temporarily produce profound shifts in perception, emotion, and thought. Psychedelic harm reduction refers to practical strategies aimed at lowering the psychological and physical risks of taking these drugs, rather than relying solely on abstinence. In practice, harm reduction focuses on preparing one’s mindset beforehand, arranging a calm and secure physical environment, and ensuring reliable emotional support during a session.

Growing public interest in clinical trials of psychedelic-assisted therapy has coincided with rising psychedelic use in the general population, most of which still occurs outside supervised medical settings. Although classic psychedelics carry relatively low risks of organ toxicity or addiction compared to many legal and pharmaceutical drugs, unsupervised trips can provoke acute panic, paranoia, confusion, and, in rarer instances, cardiovascular strain or severe psychiatric episodes.

Difficult reactions can also linger long after the drug wears off. In an earlier study of people who experienced extended difficulties after taking psychedelics, persistent anxiety and fear were the most common post-trip challenges, reported by 67 percent of respondents, and taking substances without a guide was associated with a wider range of lasting problems.

“More people are using psychedelics now than at any other point in history, proportionally more than even in the 1960s,” study lead author Daniel J. Kruger, a research scientist and research associate professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, told PsyPost. “There are now regulated, legal pathways for psychedelic therapy in Oregon, Colorado, and soon in New Mexico. Although thousands of people have taken psychedelics in these supervised settings, there is a much larger increase in the number of people taking psychedelics outside of the regulated environments in these same states.”

“Many people are reporting seemingly miraculous recoveries from treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and other challenges,” Kruger added. “At the same time, many people have challenges during their psychedelic experiences and some people have negative effects that persist long after their trip. We have a program of research on reducing these risks for people taking psychedelics outside of regulated settings.”

Popular histories of 1960s psychedelia typically spotlight former Harvard University psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, whose mystical writings and countercultural celebrity dominated headlines before federal prohibition. Far less attention has gone to Lisa Bieberman, a 1963 graduate of Radcliffe College who worked for Leary and Alpert’s organization before founding the Psychedelic Information Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1965. Through a national bulletin and mail-order pamphlets, Bieberman sought to counter widespread rumors with level-headed safety information for ordinary people experimenting with psychedelics on their own.

In February 1967, long before the phrase “harm reduction” entered public health vocabulary, Bieberman self-published a $1 booklet titled Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD. Unlike other guides of the era that leaned heavily on Eastern mysticism and esoteric language, her manual offered a secular, down-to-earth discussion of what could go wrong during a trip and how novices could prevent trouble through sensible preparation. Borrowing the title concept of Eric Berne’s popular book on human relationships, she described unhelpful behaviors people might be tempted to act out under the influence of LSD, such as running off from companions, starting a session without enough free time, or becoming convinced they had unlocked cosmic truths that had to be announced to the world right away.

Working alongside fellow academic researchers, therapists, and community advocates, Kruger, who is also affiliated with the Michigan Psychedelic Center at the University of Michigan, set out to assess how closely Bieberman’s 1967 advice aligns with contemporary views among experienced psychedelic users. Their work formed part of a broader community-collaborative survey. A 2025 study by five of the same authors, drawing on the same survey sample, gathered open-ended safety tips for newcomers and found that modern users frequently advised novices to stay with trusted companions, have a guide or sitter, set aside recovery time, and put phones away.

Between September and October 2023, the researchers recruited adults aged 18 and older who had previously used at least one psychedelic substance, reaching participants through scannable smartphone links at Entheofest (an annual psychedelic advocacy event in Ann Arbor, Michigan) as well as online newsletters, email lists, and social media. Participation in the online questionnaire was anonymous and uncompensated. Out of 581 respondents in the broader survey, the authors restricted their analysis to the 496 adults who reported taking full doses of psychedelics. They excluded people who had only ever taken microdoses, which are tiny amounts not intended to cause noticeable perceptual changes, so that the sample matched the full-dose sessions Bieberman addressed.

The 496 participants had an average age of 43, with roughly equal proportions of women and men and a predominantly White demographic profile. Nearly everyone in the group (95.8 percent) had used psilocybin mushrooms or truffles, nearly half had taken LSD, and a similar share had used MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy or Molly). Almost nine in ten had used a psychedelic within the past year. More than half of the respondents (58.5 percent) reported holding at least one specialized role involving psychedelics, such as a trip sitter or guide, therapist, educator, health care clinician, academic researcher, or Indigenous or shamanic facilitator.

The survey asked participants, in a prompt that did not mention the manual’s origin, to think about the advice they would offer a first-time psychedelic user and rate 19 recommendations adapted from Session Games People Play. Ten statements covered preparation before a session and nine covered conduct during the trip, all displayed in random order and scored on a five-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5). The researchers ranked the items by their average scores within each set and ran statistical tests to determine which recommendations received measurably higher or lower endorsement than others.

Across the sample, average ratings fell on the side of agreement for 18 of Bieberman’s 19 recommendations, accompanied by moderate variation across individuals. Among the ten preparation items, participants most strongly backed “Be with people who all know, like, and trust each other” (averaging 4.66 out of 5) and “Be aware that even with a guide, you have to do most of the work yourself” (4.59 out of 5), two “strongly agree” scores whose slight difference was not statistically significant.

All eight remaining preparation tips landed in the “somewhat agree” tier, led by deciding well in advance who will join the session, keeping both the session day and the following day free, setting aside expectations, and having an experienced guide present. Somewhat more modest support went to reflecting beforehand on what one holds dearest and most sacred and to letting go of negative emotions such as resentment. Avoiding groups larger than five people (3.82 out of 5) and mapping out in advance how intense the drug’s effects will likely be at each hour (3.78) drew the weakest support.

Among the nine rules for an active psychedelic trip, respondents gave their highest ratings to two pieces of psychological reassurance: “Recognize that the experience will eventually end” (4.76 out of 5) and “Recognize that you may experience anxiety, which does not mean that something is wrong” (4.74 out of 5), with a tiny gap between them that was not statistically significant. Participants also strongly agreed on average with choosing a private location where they would not be disturbed (4.56 out of 5).

Five other in-session rules received moderate agreement in the “somewhat agree” range, topped by putting phones away, a contemporary counterpart to Bieberman’s 1967 instruction to disconnect landline telephones to block incoming and outgoing calls. Respondents also generally favored staying out of public places, staying together when tripping as a group, eating no more than a light snack, and taking a full dose rather than hesitating with a smaller one (3.50 out of 5).

Only one piece of advice failed to earn consensus: “Avoid looking in the mirror.” That item averaged 2.96 out of 5, landing almost squarely on the neutral midpoint of “neither agree nor disagree.” In exploratory analyses checking whether agreement with one statement went along with agreement on others, ratings across most rules showed little overlap aside from intuitive pairs, such as favoring a private location alongside staying out of public, or pairing reminders that the trip will end with reassurance about anxiety.

“In general, if we looked at advice from two generations ago on any topic, I would expect to see more of a range in agreement,” Kruger explained. “People today would agree with some things, disagree with others, and have no opinion or be neutral on some. In this case there was consistent agreement on everything but ‘Avoid looking in the mirror,’ where there is a whole range of perspectives.”

In the authors’ reading, the broad endorsement of Bieberman’s checklist illustrates how closely her practical precautions align with contemporary clinical safety protocols and community norms emphasizing mindset, physical setting, and interpersonal trust. On the one item that drew neither agreement nor disagreement on average, Bieberman had warned novices in 1967 that dilated pupils and visible skin pores often made LSD users think they looked terrible in a mirror, whereas Timothy Leary and his co-authors had encouraged mirror-gazing in their 1964 manual to help disoriented users reconnect with ordinary reality.

Examining why modern users remain divided on that rule, the researchers point to a 2023 analysis of online reports from psilocybin users, which studied Reddit posts about looking in a mirror while tripping and found wide variation from person to person, with positive emotional reactions occurring more often than negative ones. The researchers also note a separate report of a lasting traumatic reaction after looking in a mirror while tripping, alongside contemporary commentary suggesting the practice can prompt helpful insights even when frightening. The authors suggest that Bieberman and Leary may both have recognized this trade-off, and that their opposite advice reflects how much weight each placed on preventing harm versus seeking potential benefits.

“People with psychedelic experience endorsed nearly all the advice from the previous psychedelic era 60 years ago: If you are seriously considering taking a psychedelic, especially for the first time, educate yourself and prepare for the experience,” Kruger noted. “Be with people who all know, like, and trust each other. Have someone who is experienced with psychedelics there.”

“Create your own container, separate from the outside world – be in a private place where you will not be disturbed, do not go out in public, put your phones away,” he continued. “Stay together as a group. There are also practices that were not available in Bieberman’s time, like testing the substance for purity and hazardous contaminants.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when weighing these findings. Surveying experienced users and facilitators shows which historical safety tips enjoy community backing today, but agreement cannot establish whether following a given rule actually prevents bad trips or lasting psychological distress.

Determining how specific precautions affect psychological, social, or spiritual outcomes over time would require controlled trials, though the authors caution that such studies must be designed ethically so volunteers are never deprived of essential safety guidance. In addition, the survey relied on a convenience sample recruited largely through North American psychedelic networks, and nearly three-fifths of the participants served in expert or practitioner roles. Their views represent an engaged, English-speaking psychedelic subculture rather than casual novices. Bieberman’s 1967 manual likewise reflected mid-century North American norms rather than the practices of cultures with much longer histories of psychedelic use.

Her booklet also offered almost no advice on post-session “integration,” the modern practice of processing and applying insights in the days and weeks after a psychedelic experience, beyond keeping the day after the trip free. The authors suggest that future studies could examine Bieberman’s separate writings on post-session ethics, adapt safety assessments across diverse cultures and user goals, and evaluate other overlooked underground manuals from the prohibition era.

“We continue to research how to best reduce risks for people taking psychedelics outside of regulated settings,” Kruger said. “Often, the safest thing is not to do something that is risky, but people take all sorts of risks in life and an estimated 14 million adults in the U.S. took psychedelics in 2025. If people are going to take psychedelics, we want them to do it as safely as possible.”

As part of that ongoing effort, the team has launched a new phase of data collection, with background on the broader initiative posted on the Psychedelic Community Survey webpage.

“We are recruiting participants for the current round of the Psychedelic Community Survey; anyone 18 years or older can participate, whether they have experienced psychedelics or not,” Kruger shared. “We do not collect any information that could be used to identify participants and their data. This year there are different sections based on the roles and experiences people have, including the experiences of psychedelic therapy facilitators, perceptions of psychedelic clinical trials, experiences of volunteers or staff in harm reduction services, first experiences with psychedelics, memories and psychedelic use, and psychedelics and women’s health issues.”

The study, “Highlighting the legacy of a psychedelic harm reduction pioneer: Assessing contemporary agreement with advice in Lisa Bieberman’s 1967 “Session Games” manual,” was authored by Daniel J. Kruger, Paul Gillis-Smith, Jacob S. Aday, Julie Barron, Moss Herberholz, and Kevin F. Boehnke.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/a-1-lsd-booklet-from-1967-anticipated-much-of-todays-psychedelic-safety-advice-study-suggests/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Paid sexual exchanges are far more common among young adults than once thought, new study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/paid-sexual-exchanges-are-far-more-common-among-young-adults-than-once-thought-new-study-suggests/

Over one-third of young adults in the United States report having provided in-person sexual acts or virtual sexual materials for financial compensation, according to a nationally representative survey published in The Journal of Sex Research. That 36% lifetime rate is more than four times the 8.3% rate captured by a traditional single question asked in the same survey, encompassing digital and physical exchanges ranging from consensual work to coerced exploitation. Young people reporting these exchanges also faced elevated rates of trauma, mental health struggles, and substance misuse.

Providing sexual acts or materials for financial compensation covers both physical encounters and digital exchanges provided for money or other payment. Physical forms include vaginal, oral, or anal sex, sexual touching, exotic dancing, and paid companionship, while virtual forms include sexting, phone sex, explicit photos or videos, and online companionship.

Measuring how often young people participate in these exchanges has been difficult because social stigma discourages disclosure and most large surveys rely on a single blunt question. For example, a 2016 national survey of U.S. adolescents and young adults asked a single question about trading sex for money, drugs, food, or shelter and estimated that roughly 5% had done so.

Single-question surveys overlook online platforms where young people sell explicit photos, videos, or messages without physical contact. Although virtual exchanges may avoid some physical risks like sexually transmitted infections, the authors note they are still linked to stalking, harassment, nonconsensual image sharing, and doxing, the malicious posting of private identifying information online. A single question also cannot separate voluntary work from financial need or coercion.

Survey research on other sensitive topics indicates that asking multiple questions about concrete behaviors without loaded labels helps respondents report stigmatized experiences more accurately. Using that approach, two of the new study’s authors, Lara Gerassi and Kate Walsh, helped develop and test a 10-item questionnaire in a 2024 study of university students, showing that listing specific online and physical acts detected more paid sexual exchanges than a single broad question.

Applying that tool on college campuses turned up higher numbers than the 2.0% to 4.5% found in earlier single-question campus surveys, with a 2025 survey of 900 Midwestern university students by two of the same authors finding that nearly 16% had provided sexual acts or materials for pay. Because college students are less racially and economically diverse than young adults nationwide, Gerassi, of the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues examined a nationally representative sample.

In April 2026, the team surveyed English-speaking U.S. adults aged 18 to 34 online, using an analysis plan that was preregistered, meaning formally recorded before data collection. Most respondents came from AmeriSpeak, a household panel recruited through random mail, phone, and in-person outreach covering 97% of the U.S. population, supplemented with an opt-in sample from Cint. Statistical weights aligned the combined sample with U.S. young adult demographics.

The researchers excluded incomplete or rushed surveys, repetitive answer patterns, and nonsensical text, and corrected 21 records where comments showed respondents had mistakenly reported unpaid sexual behavior. The final sample of 2,935 young adults had an average age of 27.6; roughly half identified as women and non-Hispanic white, and about three-quarters identified as heterosexual and employed.

Participants completed a 10-item index covering four virtual acts (sexting or phone sex, sending or posting sexual photos, filming oneself, or online companionship) and six in-person acts (sexual touching, oral, vaginal, or anal sex, in-person companionship, or erotic dancing and stripping) provided for pay. Respondents who said yes answered follow-up questions on starting age, coercion, reasons, and consequences, and everyone answered the traditional single question on exchanging sex for drugs or money.

All participants completed brief standardized screenings for recent depression symptoms, past-month post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among trauma survivors, and problematic alcohol and drug use. Additional measures captured adverse childhood experiences before age 18, rape victimization after age 14, everyday discrimination, and social support from family and friends.

Across the weighted national sample, 36% of young adults reported providing at least one sexual act or material for financial compensation in their lifetimes, versus 8.3% on the single question about exchanging sex for drugs or money. Overall, 28% had provided virtual sexual materials or services for pay, and 26% had provided in-person sexual acts for pay.

Among the 1,142 participants reporting any compensated sexual exchange, 56% engaged in both virtual and in-person forms, 23% virtual only, and 21% in-person only. Across the full sample, paid sexting or phone sex was most common at 22%, while erotic dancing or stripping was least common at 5.8%.

Prevalence differed across identity groups, though male and female sex differences were not statistically significant. Cisgender women (whose gender aligns with their sex assigned at birth) and transgender and nonbinary young adults reported higher rates than cisgender men, bisexual and other sexual minority respondents exceeded straight peers, and non-Hispanic Black participants reported higher rates than non-Hispanic white and Asian participants.

Education, income, employment, and parenthood also tracked with higher rates. Participants with a high school education or less (compared with college graduates), part-time college students, parents, households earning $60,000 or less, and people who were self-employed or unable to work because of a disability reported higher rates, though overall disability status was not statistically significant.

Responses from those with compensated sexual experience pointed to wide variation in age of entry and coercion. About 22% started before age 18, while 75% began as adults. Nearly two-thirds (65.5%) reported experiencing force or coercion to provide sexual acts or materials at some point, including 85% of those who started as minors; meanwhile, 83% of participants who never experienced coercion began as adults.

When selecting reasons for participating, roughly four in 10 respondents cited wanting to please someone (39.7%), seeking pleasure or fantasies (38.5%), or paying for living expenses (38.3%). Many also cited wanting spending money, personal empowerment, paying off debt, or supporting family.

Far fewer participants listed feeling pressured (23.5%) or being physically forced (15.2%) as a reason for participating than the 65.5% who reported experiencing coercion at some point, and the paper does not detail how broadly the coercion item was worded.

Reported consequences showed both emotional harm and practical financial relief. Common negative experiences included guilt or shame (40.3%) and feeling objectified or sexualized (33.9%), along with lowered self-esteem, emotional abuse, unwanted sexual contact, stalking, scams, and doxing. At the same time, many used the income to pay down debt (32.1%) or cover housing, education, or healthcare (30.0%), and roughly a quarter reported identity discovery or higher self-esteem.

After adjusting for gender, race, and household income, young adults who had provided sexual acts or materials for compensation showed substantially worse mental health than peers who had not. They had about twice the odds of screening positive for depression, roughly three to four times the odds for PTSD symptoms and problematic drinking, and nearly six times the odds of problematic drug use.

In those adjusted models, participants with a history of paid sexual exchanges also had about five times the odds of reporting rape victimization after age 14 and reported nearly twice as many adverse childhood experiences on average. They experienced more frequent everyday discrimination and lower social support from family and friends as well.

The authors suggest that the 36% lifetime estimate reflects both behavior-specific questions, which detect exchanges people may not label as trading sex, and internet platforms that lower barriers to entry. They also propose that elevated rates among Black, transgender, sexual minority, and lower-income young adults may reflect systemic discrimination, family rejection, and economic obstacles limiting conventional jobs.

In the researchers’ reading, consensual sex work and sex trafficking should not be conflated, yet both sit along a spectrum of agency and victimization. Minors and coerced adults providing paid sexual acts or materials may qualify as trafficking victims under federal law, especially for in-person acts, whereas uncoerced adults often participate consensually to pay bills or explore their sexuality. The authors propose harm-reduction approaches, which aim to lower risks without requiring people to stop, alongside updated clinical screenings for virtual platforms and stronger economic safety nets.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Because data were collected at one point in time, the survey cannot establish whether depression, PTSD, substance misuse, or sexual assault preceded compensated sexual exchanges, resulted from them, or stemmed from shared hardships like poverty and childhood trauma. The 36% lifetime figure also combines experiences ranging from sending paid explicit messages once to ongoing sex work or coerced exploitation, and the paper does not report how often or how recently those acts occurred.

Measuring stigmatized behavior carries uncertainty in both directions: stigma may discourage disclosures, while the 21 respondents caught mistakenly reporting unpaid acts indicate a few misreadings could remain. Routing respondents to a separate university survey platform to report gender identity, alongside the current political climate, may also have discouraged some people from identifying as transgender, the authors note.

Fewer than one in 10 people contacted across all stages of panel recruitment completed the survey, and the English-only household sample likely missed unhoused or incarcerated young adults, who may be more likely to trade sex to meet basic needs. Future studies, the authors note, should use qualitative interviews and subgroup analyses to examine how starting age, online settings, and coercion shape support needs.

The study, “Prevalence of Sexual Acts and Materials Provided for Financial Compensation Among Young Adults in the United States,” was authored by Lara Gerassi, Elizabeth Inman, Cassandra Eng, and Kate Walsh.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/paid-sexual-exchanges-are-far-more-common-among-young-adults-than-once-thought-new-study-suggests/

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Linehan's mindfulness skills are making the rounds again — Wise Mind, observe, describe, non-judge. I learned the same thing in the quiet of religious life, years before I had clinical words for it: peace is a skill you practice, not a mood you wait for. Different vocabularies, same mechanics — a settled body makes room for a wise mind. It can be taught, and that's the hopeful part.
#mindfulness #contemplative #innerpeace #counseling

DATE: November 12, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Tau builds up faster in people who develop Alzheimer’s before 65, large PET study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tau-builds-up-faster-in-people-who-develop-alzheimers-before-65-large-pet-study-finds/

People who develop Alzheimer’s disease before age 65 tend to have more widespread buildup and faster spread of toxic tau protein in the brain than those who develop the condition later in life, according to a brain-imaging study published in Science Translational Medicine.

These differences persisted even after accounting for how cognitively impaired patients were at their initial scan, suggesting that early-onset Alzheimer’s involves a more aggressive form of tau accumulation. The researchers suggest the findings could have implications for how younger patients are treated, including the timing of amyloid-lowering drugs and the testing of therapies that target tau.

Symptom patterns and brain proteins in early- and late-onset Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder in which brain cells gradually deteriorate and die, causing worsening problems with memory, thinking, and daily functioning. Clinicians classify the condition as early-onset Alzheimer’s when symptoms begin before age 65 and late-onset Alzheimer’s when symptoms appear after 65. Early-onset cases account for roughly 5 percent of all diagnoses, and only about 5 percent of those younger cases stem from known inherited genetic mutations, meaning most arise sporadically without a single known trigger.

Older patients typically experience trouble forming new memories as their main early symptom, whereas younger patients more often develop early difficulties with language, visual and spatial perception, or planning and decision-making, alongside faster cognitive decline. Inside the brain, Alzheimer’s is marked by two abnormal protein deposits: sticky plaques of amyloid-beta between nerve cells and twisted fibers, or tangles, of tau inside nerve cells.

Researchers can map both proteins in living people using positron emission tomography, or PET, a scan in which a small amount of radioactive tracer is injected into the bloodstream and binds to target brain proteins so a scanner can record their three-dimensional distribution. Using this approach, an earlier brain-imaging study of living adults indicated that tau buildup in the medial temporal lobe, the inner part of the temporal lobe that is home to key memory structures, tracked with poorer episodic memory, or memory for personal events. In that earlier work, tau spread into broader regions accompanied amyloid plaques and worse overall thinking.

Autopsy studies also suggest that younger Alzheimer’s patients carry heavier amyloid and tau loads, whereas older patients more frequently harbor additional age-related conditions, such as blood vessel injury and clumps of other abnormal proteins.

Untangling delayed diagnosis from aggressive disease biology

Smaller PET studies had suggested greater tau buildup and faster tau increases over time in younger patients, yet people with early-onset Alzheimer’s are often diagnosed later in their illness because the condition is less suspected in middle age, leaving open whether heavier tau simply reflected more advanced disease at first evaluation. Konstantinos Chiotis, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at Karolinska Institutet and a cognitive neurologist at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, led the study. He is also affiliated with the University of California San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. To examine at scale whether tau behaves more aggressively in younger brains even after accounting for clinical stage, Chiotis and colleagues across multiple institutions compared initial and follow-up scans from two large cohorts.

“As a neurologist, I wanted to understand the biological basis of differences we have long recognized clinically: younger patients with Alzheimer’s often have a broader range of symptoms and a faster disease course,” Chiotis told PsyPost. “It was unclear how much these differences reflected underlying disease biology and how much could be explained by delayed diagnosis or greater disease severity when patients were assessed. Tau PET allowed us to compare the amount, distribution and subsequent accumulation of tau in large early- and late-onset cohorts.”

Comparing brain scans across two large Alzheimer’s cohorts

The team analyzed 390 sporadic early-onset patients, with an average age of 59, from the Longitudinal Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Study, or LEADS, which excludes carriers of known familial dementia mutations, alongside 211 late-onset patients, with an average age of nearly 78, from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, or ADNI. All 601 patients had amyloid plaques on PET and either mild cognitive impairment, an early stage where thinking declines noticeably without preventing independent living, or mild dementia. Researchers also examined 25 impaired patients under age 65 from the second cohort as an independent validation group and 547 cognitively unimpaired adults for comparison, using anonymized data accessible upon request through both study repositories.

Repeat tau PET scans using a tracer called flortaucipir were available for 245 early-onset patients over roughly two years and 99 late-onset patients over nearly three years, excluding scans taken after any participant began plaque-removing antibody therapy. Each scan was paired with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which uses magnetic fields and radio waves to map brain anatomy across standardized regions of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer governing complex thought, perception, and language. Because nearly three-quarters of early-onset patients already had dementia at baseline compared with just over a third of late-onset patients, analyses controlled for baseline cognitive scores, overall amyloid burden, sex, and education, and checked results after correcting for brain shrinkage.

Widespread cortical tau appears early in younger patients

At their initial scan, early-onset patients carried substantially higher tau levels than late-onset patients across nearly all cortical regions, at both the mild cognitive impairment and dementia stages. This gap held after adjusting for cognitive severity and amyloid burden and after excluding the roughly 20 percent of early-onset patients with non-memory syndromes, and a version of the gap appeared in the 25-person validation subgroup, whose tau levels fell between those of the two main groups. While tau levels in the medial temporal lobe overlapped considerably between groups, early-onset patients showed widespread tau across frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices as early as mild cognitive impairment, whereas tau in late-onset patients remained largely confined to temporal and parietal regions even in dementia.

“Most younger participants still had memory problems, but around one in five had a presentation dominated by other difficulties, including language or visuospatial symptoms,” Chiotis noted. “The wider distribution of tau helps explain this clinical diversity and reinforces the importance of assessing cognitive abilities beyond memory.”

Viewed continuously across both impaired groups, younger age corresponded to heavier cortical tau, whereas older patients showed higher tracer signal only in deep brain structures where the tracer binds to non-tau targets during normal aging. Among cognitively unimpaired adults without amyloid plaques, older age instead went with higher medial temporal tau signal. Across impaired patients, women had modestly higher baseline tau than men, and carriers of the apolipoprotein E epsilon-4 genetic risk variant showed more widespread tau increases over time, yet neither sex nor genetic status modified the gap between early- and late-onset disease, as those interactions were not statistically significant.

Tau burden also tracked more steeply with both amyloid plaques and cognitive impairment in early-onset disease. Among younger patients, whole-cortex tau rose more steeply with amyloid levels than it did among older patients. Worse thinking and daily functioning scores also corresponded to widespread cortical tau in early-onset patients, compared with mainly temporal cortex tau in late-onset patients. Although early-onset patients entered the study with modestly higher amyloid plaque levels than late-onset patients, that difference was far smaller than the disparity in tau.

Faster yearly tau accumulation over multi-year follow-up

Across follow-up scans, tau rose faster per year in early-onset than in late-onset Alzheimer’s in every target region, independent of starting tau levels, amyloid load, and baseline cognitive scores. In late-onset patients, longitudinal tau increases centered on temporoparietal areas and were not statistically significant in the frontal lobe, whereas early-onset patients accumulated tau across broad cortical regions, including frontal and occipital areas typically affected late in the illness. Mathematical trajectory modeling estimated that once patients crossed the threshold for cortical tau positivity, late-onset patients took more than five additional years to reach tau levels comparable to those in early-onset disease.

“This is the largest tau PET study to date comparing early- and late-onset Alzheimer’s, and it substantially strengthens evidence from earlier, smaller studies,” Chiotis explained. “The longitudinal data extend that evidence by showing that tau accumulated more than twice as fast in younger patients during follow-up. These differences persisted after accounting for clinical severity and amyloid burden, supporting the view that age at symptom onset is associated with meaningful biological differences in Alzheimer’s disease. The findings reinforce the importance of earlier recognition in younger patients and of considering their underlying disease burden when designing treatment trials.”

“The increasingly divergent tau trajectories were particularly striking,” he observed. “Younger patients already had more tau at study entry and continued to accumulate it faster, making delayed diagnosis alone an unlikely explanation for the differences. I was also struck by how much more pronounced the differences were for tau than for amyloid, the other major protein involved in Alzheimer’s disease.”

These results are consistent with an earlier brain-imaging and biomarker study of healthy and cognitively impaired adults, which indicated that early tau buildup on PET scans predicted rapid declines in episodic memory better than amyloid plaques or spinal fluid markers. Whereas that earlier research compared different biomarker testing methods across cognitively unimpaired and impaired individuals, the current study specifically contrasted tau dynamics between younger- and older-onset patients with amyloid-confirmed cognitive impairment.

What the findings could mean for treatment

In the authors’ reading, symptoms in late-onset Alzheimer’s may outpace cortical tau spread because older brains frequently harbor coexisting vascular injury or other abnormal proteins that impair cognition alongside modest tau levels. In younger patients, by contrast, they propose that aggressive and potentially faster-seeding tau pathology is the main driver of decline.

Because clinical trials of anti-amyloid antibody drugs such as lecanemab and donanemab, which remove amyloid plaques from the brain, suggest greater benefit when treatment starts at lower tau levels, the researchers reason that early-onset patients may need earlier intervention to benefit equally from amyloid-lowering medications. They also argue that early-onset patients, often excluded from trials due to age cutoffs or non-memory symptoms, may be strong candidates for testing therapies targeting tau directly, alone or combined with anti-amyloid drugs.

“Our findings make earlier diagnosis particularly important in younger patients,” Chiotis emphasized. “They can already have extensive tau pathology when symptoms are still mild, and tau continues to accumulate rapidly. At the same time, diagnosis is often delayed because difficulties with planning, language or work performance are attributed to depression or burnout. During that delay, the disease can continue to advance biologically, making timely recognition important for access to care, support and appropriate treatment.”

Disclosures, study caveats, and group-average limits

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Several authors disclosed financial ties to imaging and pharmaceutical companies: one co-author is an inventor on patents assigned to Eli Lilly, whose subsidiary supplied the flortaucipir tracer, and holds stock or stock options in the company, and another founded and leads a brain-imaging firm. A third co-author is a full-time employee of the Alzheimer’s Association, which helped fund the early-onset cohort, and was among those who designed the study. The tracer suppliers did not fund the work and had no role in analyzing or interpreting the data.

“The more-than-twofold difference refers to tau accumulation measured by PET; it does not mean that every younger patient experiences cognitive decline twice as fast,” Chiotis cautioned. “These are group averages, and individual patients vary considerably. Finally, this study did not test treatments and cannot establish whether younger patients benefit more or less from amyloid-lowering drugs.”

The study also did not directly measure coexisting vascular damage or non-Alzheimer’s proteins, so future work combining tau PET with blood, fluid, and vascular markers will be needed to test how much mixed pathologies shape cognitive decline in older patients. Because the two age groups came mainly from separate cohorts, age-related and cohort-related differences cannot be fully separated, though the authors note that the validation subgroup and earlier studies point the same way. Late-onset status was assigned by age at the first scan, since symptom-onset age was not reliably recorded, a choice the authors expect would shrink rather than inflate group differences.

The flortaucipir tracer also has limited sensitivity for early-stage tau deposits. In addition, more than 80 percent of participants in both cohorts were non-Hispanic white adults who averaged about 16 years of schooling, leaving open how well these patterns generalize to broader populations.

Next steps in tracking early-onset Alzheimer’s biology

Follow-up work on these questions involves the study’s senior authors, Renaud La Joie and Gil Rabinovici of the University of California San Francisco.

“We want to understand why tau accumulates so aggressively in younger patients, including possible genetic and molecular explanations,” Chiotis said. “Together with Renaud La Joie and Gil Rabinovici, we are also examining treatment outcomes among LEADS participants receiving amyloid-lowering therapies. The longer-term goal is to combine brain imaging and fluid biomarkers to recognize disease earlier and guide treatment according to each patient’s underlying biology.”

He also highlighted the contributions of the study volunteers and public and nonprofit research sponsors. “I would also like to acknowledge the participants and families in LEADS and ADNI, and the sustained support from the US National Institute on Aging/NIH and the Alzheimer’s Association that made this work possible,” he added.

The study, “Distinct tau PET dynamics in early versus late age-of-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” was authored by Konstantinos Chiotis, Ganna Blazhenets, David N. Soleimani-Meigooni, Paul S. Aisen, Alinda Amuiri, Alireza Atri, Laurel Beckett, Michael Brickhouse, David G. Clark, Jeffrey L. Dage, Gregory S. Day, Ranjan Duara, Ani Eloyan, Tatiana Foroud, Neill R. Graff-Radford, Ian M. Grant, Dustin B. Hammers, Lawrence S. Honig, Erik C. B. Johnson, David T. Jones, Kala Kirby, Robert Koeppe, Joel H. Kramer, Walter A. Kukull, Julien Lagarde, Antoine Leuzy, Piyush Maiti, Joseph C. Masdeu, Mario F. Mendez, Erik Musiek, Kelly N. Nudelman, Chiadi U. Onyike, Meghan Riddle, Salma Rocha, Emily Rogalski, Stephen Salloway, Daniel R. Schonhaut, Sharon J. Sha, Ranjani Shankar, Alexander Taurone, Maryanne Thangarajah, Arthur W. Toga, Alexandra Touroutoglou, Raymond Scott Turner, Prashanthi Vemuri, Thomas S. Wingo, David A. Wolk, Kyle Womack, Jiaxiuxiu Zhang, Maria C. Carrillo, Bradford C. Dickerson, Liana G. Apostolova, Renaud La Joie, and Gil D. Rabinovici.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tau-builds-up-faster-in-people-who-develop-alzheimers-before-65-large-pet-study-finds/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 01:30PM
SOURCE: PsiAN Psychotherapy Action Network

TITLE: Navigating AI in Your Practice: Free Resources for Therapists

URL: https://www.psian.org/blog/navigating-ai-in-your-practice-free-resources-for-therapists

Less than 24 months ago, most therapists could treat artificial intelligence as something happening somewhere else. Today, that’s not the case.AI note-takers now come built into practice management software. Clients arrive having talked through their situation with a chatbot. And in 2026, a wave of new state laws began to define what AI may and may not do in mental health care. For a clinician running a practice, keeping up with it all could be a second job.

The good news: you don't have to start from scratch. Clinicians who care about the same things Psychotherapy Action Network exists to protect have built free, independent resources to track these developments and help you navigate the next right steps. This post rounds up the tools we know can help.

A note before you dive in: some of these resources are created and maintained by others. Psychotherapy Action Network doesn't endorse specific products or vendors, and nothing here is legal advice.

1. Build a practice on your own terms

Psychotherapy Action Network's Private Practice Hub

Much of the AI showing up in therapy arrives through the companies clinicians rely on to run their practices. Psychotherapy Action Network's Private Practice Hub covers the fundamentals of independent practice, from logistics and billing to ethics and building a practice that reflects your values. It also includes guidance on evaluating practice management companies before you sign with one.

Why it's useful:

The Private Practice Hub grew out of Psychotherapy Action Network’s research survey of 667 therapists about their experiences with practice management companies. Respondents raised concerns about privacy, data, and changing terms, including the introduction of AI tools after they had joined. Knowing your options is the best protection against surprises.

2. Know what's inside your practice management softwareAI Reference Guide: EHR and Practice Management Platforms, by Mary Feamster

Many clinicians don't realize their EHR has added AI features until they see a new button in a session note. Mary Feamster, LPC maintains a free resource that breaks down which EHR and practice management platforms offer AI integrations, along with details on data security, ownership, and other questions clinicians should understand before tying their practice and client data to a platform.

Why it's useful:

Before you can decide how you feel about an AI feature, you need to know it's there. The guide gives you a side-by-side starting point.

Questions it can help you start asking: Does my platform record sessions? Who owns the company? Where does my clients' information go?

3. Understand what AI tools your clients may be usingAI Reference Guide: Chatbots, Mental Health Apps, and Startup Platforms, by Mary Feamster

Feamster's companion guide covers many of the AI tools people are using for mental health support, both those built for that purpose and general-purpose chatbots people are turning to.

Why it's useful:

When a client mentions an app or a chatbot, therapists need to know what it is. Understanding these tools makes it easier to have an open, curious conversation about them, rather than a dismissive one.

4. Follow the laws taking shape in your stateStates are moving quickly. According to Becker's, lawmakers in 47 states introduced more than 250 bills on AI in health care in 2025 alone. Several states have since passed laws that speak directly to mental health, including rules about AI presenting itself as a therapist and about how licensed providers can and cannot use AI in their own work.

Why it's useful:

Becker's summary is a concise overview of recent state laws, with links to the bills themselves. It's a quick way to see whether your state has acted and what that action means for your practice.

What to do with it: Laws vary by state and change often. If your state has passed something that affects your practice, your licensing board, an attorney, or your malpractice insurer's risk management service can tell you what it means for you and what actions you need to take.

5. Learn how policy works, and how to be heardAdvocacy Toolkit for Mental Health Professionals, created by Felecia Powell-Williams, EdD, Psychotherapy Action Network Board Secretary

Policymakers regularly make decisions about mental health care, without hearing from the people who provide it. This free, open-source toolkit, built by a member of Psychotherapy Action Network’s board, gathers what clinicians need to understand about how that process works: how to find your state and federal representatives, how a bill moves through a legislature, where to track legislation, trusted news sources on mental health policy, and data resources to inform your understanding.

Why it's useful:

It brings together dozens of resources that would otherwise take hours to find, all in one place and organized for mental health professionals.

Where to start: The section on finding state-based legislation and representatives is a good place to begin.

The relationship is still the workTechnology will continue to evolve, as it always has. What makes therapy work will not. The relationship between a client and a clinician is the heart of the work, and no tool should be allowed to quietly reshape it without your knowledge.

Staying informed is how you keep those decisions in your hands. In early 2027, PsiAN will share more on AI and clinical practice, including where we stand on AI documentation tools.

Join PsiAN to get those updates first, and to connect with clinicians who are thinking carefully about these questions.

Have a resource you rely on that belongs on this list? Let us know at [email protected].

This post is for general information. Some of the resources listed are maintained by independent creators; Psychotherapy Action Network does not endorse specific products or vendors. Nothing here is legal advice.

Sources

•Psychotherapy Action Network: Private Practice Hub

•

•Psychotherapy Action Network: Evaluating Practice Management Companies

•

•Psychotherapy Action Network: Practice Management Companies Research Report

•

•Mary Feamster: AI Reference Guide, EHR and Practice Management Platforms

•

•Mary Feamster: AI Reference Guide, Chatbots, Mental Health Apps, and Startup Platforms

•

•Mary Feamster: Human in the Loop

•

•Becker's Hospital Review: 13 State Healthcare AI Laws to Know

•

•Advocacy Toolkit for Mental Health Professionals

•

URL: https://www.psian.org/blog/navigating-ai-in-your-practice-free-resources-for-therapists

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Smartphone game shows promise as an add-on to antidepressants

URL: https://www.psypost.org/smartphone-game-shows-promise-as-an-add-on-to-antidepressants/

A smartphone game designed to support people with depression, offered together with optional online therapy modules and on-demand therapist support, reduced depression and anxiety symptoms among adults who were already taking antidepressants, according to a randomized controlled trial in Sweden. Participants who received nine weeks of access to the program also reported better adherence to their medication than those on a waitlist, but their quality of life did not differ. The paper was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Depression is a common mental disorder affecting approximately 300 million people worldwide. It reduces quality of life and creates substantial economic costs. Antidepressant medications are a common treatment for depression, but many patients continue to experience depressive symptoms despite taking them. Another major problem is that many patients do not take their prescribed medications regularly.

Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) has emerged as an accessible treatment option. Research shows that it can be as effective as face-to-face cognitive behavioral therapy in reducing depressive symptoms. Researchers are increasingly interested in combining antidepressant medications with digital psychological interventions delivered through smartphones.

One promising approach involves serious games. These games use elements of video games to encourage behaviors that support mental health. They may improve motivation and medication adherence by rewarding healthy behaviors and helping users establish daily routines. For example, a smartphone game called Fig: The Game for Depression rewards users for following routines related to medication, sleep, meals, and physical activity.

Study author Josefin Brehmer of Linköping University and colleagues wanted to examine whether Fig, offered alongside ICBT modules and therapist support available on demand, could improve mental health and medication adherence in adults who were taking antidepressants but still had depressive symptoms. They conducted a randomized controlled trial.

Study participants were 148 adults in Sweden who were receiving antidepressant medication and still had depressive symptoms. They were recruited through social media and paid advertisements. Their average age was 40 years, and 82% were women. About half (52%) were employed, 16% were students, and 17% were on extended sick leave.

Most participants (64%) reported having received a psychiatric diagnosis earlier, and most had previously undergone psychological treatment. According to a diagnostic interview, 66% were currently experiencing a major depressive episode, and 72% had recurrent depression.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Both groups were offered the same nine-week intervention, called FIGARO, which consisted of access to Fig, optional access to 25 ICBT modules, and a therapist they could contact as needed. The treatment group received access immediately, while the waitlist control group received the same intervention two weeks after the end of the intervention period.

Fig is a smartphone-based game designed to be used twice daily alongside usual medical care. It encourages healthy routines including medication adherence, sleep, meals, and physical activity. The game rewards adherence by allowing players to develop and customize virtual worlds and provides educational dialogues, mood tracking, and a diary to promote self-reflection and reinforce healthy behaviors.

Before and after the intervention, participants completed assessments of depression (the self-rated Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale), anxiety (the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale), medication adherence (the 8-item Morisky Medication Adherence Scale), and quality of life (the 12-item Brunnsviken Brief Quality of Life Scale). They also completed brief weekly symptom check-ins during the study. Participants were screened for alcohol and substance use and reported demographic information and their history of psychological treatment.

Results showed that 79% of participants in the treatment group installed the Fig game, and those who did completed 81 game sessions on average. About 32% contacted their therapist during the study period, and 28% completed at least one therapy worksheet. Compared with the waitlist group, the treatment group showed moderately greater reductions in depression and anxiety symptoms at the end of the intervention period.

About 51% of the treatment group improved their depression scores by at least 30%, compared with 19% of the waitlist group, although only 16% of the treatment group improved by at least 50%. Medication adherence also improved in the treatment group, with a small-to-moderate effect, but quality of life did not differ between the groups. The depression and anxiety results held up when the researchers used different methods to account for participants who dropped out, while the medication adherence finding weakened and was no longer statistically significant under the most conservative assumption.

How much participants used the game or the online therapy platform was not linked to how much they improved. Most participants who answered a satisfaction survey (69%) said they were fairly or very satisfied with the treatment.

“This trial provides preliminary evidence that access to a multicomponent digital intervention, comprising the CE-marked [i.e., certified under European Union medical device regulations] serious game Fig, optional ICBT modules and therapist support on demand, can produce short-term improvements in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms and medication adherence relative to a waitlist among adults receiving antidepressant medication with residual depressive symptoms,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of digital treatments for depression. However, the authors note that 41% of participants in the treatment group did not complete the post-treatment assessments, compared with 18% in the control group. Additionally, participants knew which group they were in, and all outcomes were self-reported. Finally, 21% of treatment group participants never installed the Fig game.

Because the comparison group was a waitlist, the researchers could not rule out effects of expectations or other nonspecific factors, and the effects cannot be attributed to the game alone rather than to the full package of game, therapy modules, and therapist support. The study assessed only short-term effects, and participants recruited through advertisements may be more motivated than typical patients.

The trial was registered after recruitment had begun, though the authors state that the registered outcomes did not change. The study was funded by Mindforce Game Lab, the developer of Fig, which the authors say was not involved in data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing.

The paper, “A smartphone-based serious game to improve mental health and medication adherence in adults with depression: A randomised controlled trial,” was authored by Josefin Brehmer, Matilda Berg, Gabriel Astudillo, Tomas Lindegaard, Amalie Englund Find, Per Carlbring, Mikael Ludvigsson, and Gerhard Andersson.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/smartphone-game-shows-promise-as-an-add-on-to-antidepressants/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 11:00AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTH

TITLE: STAT+: Scientists debut map of basal ganglia, a key brain region involved in an array of diseases

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/12/brain-map-basal-ganglia-offers-treatment-clues-parkinsons-schizophrenia/?utm_campaign=rss

A massive scientific collaboration meant to unravel the mysteries of the human brain has produced the most detailed map yet of the basal ganglia, a region closely associated with a wide array of psychiatric and neurologic disorders.

Researchers profiled more than 25 million cells, generating a deluge of data that allowed them to generate a “parts list” of what cells are present in the basal ganglia and how they’re arranged. In the process scientists discovered a new type of neuron that appears to play a role in schizophrenia. They also identified cell types linked to depression, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Demonstrating the value of the work, the scientists produced preliminary evidence that they can use their more detailed understanding of brain cell types to deliver therapies with increased precision. Authors working in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease showed that a gene therapy designed to work in a subset of basal ganglia cells was as effective as a blanket approach; it was also safer.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/12/brain-map-basal-ganglia-offers-treatment-clues-parkinsons-schizophrenia/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 11:00AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: STAT+: Scientists debut map of basal ganglia, a key brain region involved in an array of diseases

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/12/brain-map-basal-ganglia-offers-treatment-clues-parkinsons-schizophrenia/?utm_campaign=rss

A massive scientific collaboration meant to unravel the mysteries of the human brain has produced the most detailed map yet of the basal ganglia, a region closely associated with a wide array of psychiatric and neurologic disorders.

Researchers profiled more than 25 million cells, generating a deluge of data that allowed them to generate a “parts list” of what cells are present in the basal ganglia and how they’re arranged. In the process scientists discovered a new type of neuron that appears to play a role in schizophrenia. They also identified cell types linked to depression, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Demonstrating the value of the work, the scientists produced preliminary evidence that they can use their more detailed understanding of brain cell types to deliver therapies with increased precision. Authors working in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease showed that a gene therapy designed to work in a subset of basal ganglia cells was as effective as a blanket approach; it was also safer.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/12/brain-map-basal-ganglia-offers-treatment-clues-parkinsons-schizophrenia/?utm_campaign=rss

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STAT News reports "from the frontiers of health and medicine".

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: AI-written peer reviews outscored top human experts in blind comparisons, Harvard working paper finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/ai-written-peer-reviews-outscored-top-human-experts-in-blind-comparisons-harvard-working-paper-finds/

A new study suggests that advanced artificial intelligence models can generate more thorough, accurate, and constructive peer reviews of unpublished academic papers than well-paid human experts operating under ideal conditions. In blind comparisons judged by an AI model and by former journal editors, the AI-written reviews won the large majority of matchups and contained about a third the rate of incorrect claims, according to a working paper posted online by Harvard University researchers.

The findings point to potential changes in how scientific journals evaluate research while raising questions about whether widespread reliance on AI could make scientific thinking more uniform.

The challenges of human and AI peer review

Peer review is the standard quality-control process in scholarly publishing, in which independent researchers in the same field read a draft of a scientific paper to help the authors improve their work and advise journal editors on whether the study merits publication. Despite its central role in science, the traditional review system struggles with frustrating delays, difficulties recruiting qualified volunteers, and low agreement between different experts evaluating the same manuscript. Human referees also frequently miss major errors, offer superficial feedback, or show bias toward familiar methods and prestigious institutions.

Recently, scholars have turned their attention to large language models, which are AI systems trained on vast collections of text to analyze and generate written language. However, applying these tools to scientific work has sparked concerns about fabricated citations, excessive leniency, learned biases, vulnerability to hidden manipulation commands inside manuscripts, and false statements presented with confidence. An analysis of AI-generated research summaries, a different task from reviewing manuscripts, found that chatbots frequently overgeneralized scientific findings compared to human experts, with newer models producing up to 73% more broad generalizations.

Because of these risks, most prior analyses concluded that AI should only supplement human reviewers, and two 2026 comparisons of AI and human peer reviews yielded conflicting results. In a 2026 study of 119 manuscripts at BMJ Open, human reviewers raised more detailed and varied points than ChatGPT, whereas in a 2026 blinded study of 40 manuscripts at a cardiology journal, two editors rated reviews from Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini higher than human reviews on five of seven criteria. Against this backdrop, Gary King and Steven Worthington of Harvard University set out to test how a leading AI model compares not against rushed, unpaid journal referees, but against human peer reviewers performing at their best. Their working paper has not yet been peer reviewed.

Testing AI against well-paid human experts

To establish a strong human benchmark, the researchers examined every eligible submission to rapidPeer, a pre-submission review service developed at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, which King directs. Through this service, outside experts selected by specialists in the field are paid well to read an anonymized faculty manuscript from start to finish and write at least 1.5 to 2 pages of constructive feedback before the paper is sent to a journal. These human reviews were unusually well regarded: in a survey taken a week after delivery, 88% of the 74 responding authors rated their review as high or very high quality, and former journal editors consulted by the researchers described the reports as among the strongest they had seen.

The complete dataset included 124 scholarly manuscripts and 134 human reviews collected between 2019 and 2026 across statistical, mathematical, and qualitative research fields, with 10 papers receiving two independent human reviews. For each manuscript, the researchers generated an AI review using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 at its highest reasoning setting under two distinct conditions. In the matched condition, the AI model received the anonymized paper and the exact rapidPeer reviewer instructions with no external tools. In the tuned condition, the model received a custom prompt designed prior to any judging along with internet search access, which it used an average of 12.4 times per review.

To evaluate the reviews without letting a model grade a system from its own developer, the researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 as a separate AI judge from a different company. After first identifying which of seven rapidPeer evaluation areas (theory and idea, methods, weaknesses, framing, communication, figures and tables, and sources) applied to each manuscript, the AI judge ranked each pair of reviews overall, ranked them head-to-head within each relevant area, and scored each review on a scale from 0 to 10. Every comparison was run in both presentation orders, and a review was credited with a win only when preferred in both orders. The overall ranking was based on the two reviews alone; in a later check that gave the judge the full manuscript, the AI review was still preferred in at least 132 of 134 pairs, and the human review was never preferred in both presentation orders.

In addition, three former editors of leading scholarly journals independently judged 10 randomly selected pairs of reviews through a blinded side-by-side web interface, yielding 30 human judgments.

AI reviews come out ahead by wide margins

Across all evaluations, the AI-generated reviews outperformed the human reviews by wide margins. The headline results were reported descriptively, as win percentages and average ratings, without formal statistical tests or confidence intervals. In the overall head-to-head comparisons, the AI judge preferred the AI review in 100% of decided pairs (132 out of 132), and the blinded former journal editors preferred the AI review in 87% of their judgments (26 out of 30). Notably, the human editors agreed with the AI judge an average of 87% of the time, compared to agreeing with one another 80% of the time.

When the AI judge evaluated the seven specific review areas individually, the tuned AI reviews won 100% of decided pairs in sources, weaknesses, and methods, and 99% in figures and tables. In the remaining three categories (theory and idea, framing, and communication), the AI review won 92% of the time. On the 0-to-10 scale, AI reviews averaged about 2.6 points higher than human reviews, which averaged about 6, a gap that was similar in the editors’ sample.

The researchers ran 10 sets of follow-up checks to verify that the AI model was not winning simply by writing longer reports or using a polished tone. When restricting the comparison to 44 pairs where the AI and human reviews had similar word counts, the AI review still won 100% of the time. Rewriting the human reviews to mimic an AI writing style did not improve their rankings, and the AI reviews outperformed human reviews across all subgroups of manuscript novelty, research methodology, author seniority, and the quality of the journal where the paper was eventually published. Comparing the two AI setups showed that the matched AI condition performed nearly as well as the tuned condition across every category except sources, where adding web search access raised the AI win rate from 62% to 100%.

An audit of factual accuracy against the manuscripts indicated that the web-enabled AI reviews contained zero fabricated sources, and 5.5% of their claims about the paper were judged incorrect by the AI judge, roughly one-third of the 15.9% error rate found in the human reviews. To verify that the AI judge could detect misstatements, the researchers inserted either one accurate sentence or one false sentence contradicting the paper into each review; the judge caught all 258 false statements and flagged none of the 258 accurate ones. Replicating the study across 416 comparisons using both Claude Opus and GPT models as reviewers and judges with a different prompt and scoring rubric yielded AI win rates of 97.1% under the Opus judge and 94.2% under the GPT judge.

“The article demonstrates that AI-generated reviews can now surpass even human (pre-submission) reviews across several dimensions of review quality, suggesting that recent large language models have the potential to substantially improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of manuscript evaluation,” Kilian M. Pohl, the founder of the CNS Lab and a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences and, by courtesy, in electrical engineering at Stanford University who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that expert human reviewers provide more useful manuscript feedback than AI.”

George Currie, a senior strategy advisor for open research at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the United Kingdom’s national research funding agency, who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost that the results should be weighed against the realities of traditional academic publishing. Currie noted that he was speaking for himself, not for UKRI.

“Before turning our noses up at AI-led peer review, we should be honest about the system we already have: peer review is resource intensive, largely unpaid, variable in quality, functions as journal gatekeeping as much as research improvement, and does not reliably prevent poor research from entering the literature,” Currie said. “The potential attraction of AI is not that it replaces a flawless human process, but that it could reduce burdens and increase transparency across the system while speeding up the communication and reuse of research.”

The absence of fabricated references in these reviews stands in tension with an earlier evaluation of AI-generated mental health literature reviews, which found that nearly two-thirds of citations produced by AI models were invented or contained errors, particularly for specialized topics. However, that earlier study tested literature reviews generated from scratch, whereas the new study evaluated AI critiques of existing manuscripts, with web retrieval enabled in the version reported here.

How journals might use AI and the risks of uniformity

In discussing what these findings mean for academic publishing, the authors distinguish between the two main purposes of peer review: helping authors improve their drafts and helping editors decide what to publish. Their experiment addressed only the first goal, though the authors propose several ways journals might redesign their workflows around AI feedback.

For example, journals could publish an official AI review prompt tailored to their editorial standards and ask authors to submit their manuscript alongside the resulting AI review and a response letter explaining any points where they disagree with the model. Editors could then run a second, undisclosed AI review that includes checks for hidden prompt manipulation, consulting human referees only in difficult cases while keeping final publication decisions in the hands of a human editor.

At the same time, the authors warn that widespread reliance on AI carries collective risks for science. Even if an AI reviewer helps an individual scholar spot flaws and brainstorm ideas, researchers across a field using similar models may be nudged toward conventional, mainstream arguments, making scientific literature more uniform overall.

Eyal Aharoni, an associate professor of psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience at Georgia State University who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost that the paper is likely to be of broad interest to scholars. “As an AI researcher, the basic effect doesn’t surprise me (though the magnitude of the effect does), and I am persuaded by the authors’ argument that such findings put pressure on the field to establish appropriate policies and procedures for balancing its expected benefits and risks,” Aharoni said. “I also appreciate that they sketch out a few concrete ways in which integration of this technological application might be formalized.”

Gustavo A. Patino, an associate dean for undergraduate medical education and associate professor in the Department of Medical Education at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research, told PsyPost that he expects AI review tools to become part of journal workflows within about five years as language models improve, though he pointed to a broader trade-off for scholars.

“The authors focus all the discussion around benefits of facilitating the editorial process, but that ignores the benefits that peer review has on the larger research ecosystem,” Patino said. “Serving as a peer reviewer exposes you to a diversity of ideas and scholars in the field, some of which will not end up being published at this time but that still teach you a lot. Non-reviewers will not get the chance to learn from those projects that end up in rejection.”

Caveats, ethical questions, and what to test next

There are several limitations to keep in mind when interpreting the study’s results. First, the researchers evaluated the quality of the review reports themselves, but they did not measure whether revising a paper in response to an AI review actually leads to a stronger final article than revising in response to a human expert. Second, although the full corpus covered 134 review pairs, the blinded human evaluation relied on three former editors judging a subset of 10 manuscripts overall rather than scoring each of the seven review dimensions separately. Third, the human reviews came from a pre-submission service designed to offer constructive coaching rather than gatekeeping for a selective journal.

“Given the overly broad claims made in the abstract, readers might incorrectly conclude that AI is now better than human experts at determining which scientific papers merit publication,” Pohl cautioned. “However, the authors evaluated the quality of constructive feedback, rather than AI’s ability to identify groundbreaking research, detect subtle scientific errors, or assess whether a manuscript meets the standards of a particular journal. As the authors themselves acknowledge, AI-generated reviews may also favor conventional scientific approaches, potentially discouraging innovative or unconventional research. Ultimately, more comprehensive and better-written reviews should not be conflated with superior scientific judgment.”

Pointing to the study’s design features, Pohl said he places moderate confidence in the results and noted that the three former journal editors were not necessarily specialists in the specific subject matter of every paper they rated. “Consequently, their assessments may have favored clarity, comprehensiveness, and presentation quality over the scientific substance of the feedback,” Pohl said. “Much of the evaluation relied on AI judges, potentially biasing findings to AI-generated writing.”

Michael R. Ladomery, a professor of genetics in the School of Applied Sciences at the University of the West of England who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost that he considers the lack of data on whether authors’ revisions actually strengthened their papers a key shortcoming. He also noted that pre-submission reviewers may lack a specific journal’s context, whereas referees for a submitted paper are likely to judge it against that journal’s audience and standards.

“For example, an experiment that a reviewer considers unnecessary for publication in one journal may be regarded as essential for supporting the level of mechanistic insight expected by another,” Ladomery said. He argued that differences between pre-submission coaching and formal journal refereeing may reflect their different settings and goals rather than the reviewers’ ability.

Ladomery also argued that replacing human referees raises ethical and sociological questions, since “performing peer review is an integral part of academic professional life” that helps scholars sharpen their own critical skills. “There is also a particular intellectual satisfaction in critically evaluating the work of one’s peers and in seeing authors respond constructively to that input by improving their manuscript,” he said. “This vital teamwork cannot be replaced by AI.”

Future studies will need to examine whether AI feedback improves revised manuscripts in practice and how journals can guard against authors gaming published AI prompts.

Aharoni also called for follow-up studies, citing a concern about relying on an AI judge. “The methods are appropriate for a first study of its kind,” Aharoni said, while noting that “using a separate AI does not guarantee independence since they may query each other.” He added that “the authors present a balanced tone in their discussion of implications,” and that “it will also be worth developing their brief argument that there still might be good reasons to retain human review even if AI review is better on its face.”

“It would be valuable to conduct a large-scale, prospective randomized study within established scientific journals, comparing traditional human peer review, AI-assisted human review, and fully AI-generated reviews,” Pohl said. “Such a study would move beyond assessing whether AI can produce higher-quality review reports to address the more fundamental question of whether AI-assisted peer review leads to better scientific publications and more reliable editorial decisions, without compromising scientific originality or accountability.”

The study, “AI Article Reviews Dominate Human Peer Reviews at Their Best: Evidence and Policy Choices,” was authored by Gary King and Steven Worthington.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/ai-written-peer-reviews-outscored-top-human-experts-in-blind-comparisons-harvard-working-paper-finds/

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: November 12, 2026 at 09:39AM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

Direct article link at end of text block below.

Yesterday, we observed Veterans Day by honoring all those who have sacrificed to protect our nation. Thank you for your service, dedication, and everything you do to protect our freedoms and strengthen our nation. https://t.co/NlLmsIuUnh

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Brain scans reveal structural differences in treatment-resistant schizophrenia

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-structural-differences-in-treatment-resistant-schizophrenia/

A recent study found that individuals with treatment-resistant schizophrenia exhibit specific structural differences in their brains, including a smaller hippocampus, compared to patients who respond to standard medications. These anatomical variations could eventually help doctors identify which patients are unlikely to benefit from typical antipsychotic drugs, allowing for earlier alternative interventions. The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric condition characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive impairments. Standard antipsychotic medications primarily work by blocking dopamine receptors in the brain, which effectively reduces symptoms for many individuals. However, up to 60 percent of patients do not experience adequate symptom relief from these standard drug therapies. This condition, known as treatment-resistant schizophrenia, presents major challenges in psychiatric care.

The only medication currently approved for this specific population is clozapine. Its administration requires strict blood monitoring due to the risk of severe immune system complications, and a substantial portion of patients still fail to respond to it. Medical professionals currently diagnose treatment resistance only after a patient has failed to improve following multiple trials of different antipsychotic drugs. This trial-and-error process can take months or years, during which the patient’s mental health often deteriorates.

An objective biological marker could allow doctors to bypass this waiting period and initiate specialized therapies immediately. A team of researchers led by Semra Etyemez, Kun Yang, and Akira Sawa at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine investigated whether specific brain structures differ in patients with treatment resistance. Prior smaller studies had hinted at anatomical changes, but the researchers needed a broader dataset to verify these patterns.

The research team collaborated with an international neuroimaging consortium to gather brain scan data from more than 1,200 individuals across seven sites in six countries. The dataset included 158 patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia, 599 patients whose symptoms responded to standard treatments, and 508 healthy individuals. Medical professionals at each site classified the patients based on their comprehensive clinical and medication records.

In their first analysis, the researchers conducted a meta-analysis, an approach that aggregates the results of multiple independent datasets to identify overarching trends. They compared the volume of various deep brain structures, as well as the thickness and surface area of the brain’s outer layer, between the two groups of patients. To ensure accuracy, the team adjusted their statistical models to account for variables like age, sex, race, head size, and illness duration.

The researchers found that patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia had reduced tissue volume in both the left and right sides of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure buried deep in the brain that is essential for memory and learning. The treatment-resistant group also showed reduced volume in the putamen, a round structure at the base of the brain involved in learning and motor control. Additionally, these patients had a reduced surface area in the left superior frontal gyrus, a region located near the front of the brain that plays a role in cognitive processing.

To verify these results, the team performed a mega-analysis, pooling all the raw brain scan data into one unified dataset rather than just combining the statistical summaries from each site. During this phase, they also integrated the data from the healthy individuals to establish a baseline for normal brain anatomy. This allowed the researchers to observe the anatomical trajectory across the different groups.

The mega-analysis confirmed the structural reductions in the hippocampus, putamen, and left superior frontal gyrus. When comparing all three groups, the researchers observed a sequential pattern in the hippocampus and the superior frontal gyrus. Healthy individuals had the largest tissue volumes in these areas, patients responsive to typical treatments had smaller volumes, and patients with treatment resistance had the smallest.

The putamen did not follow this stepwise pattern. The researchers observed no statistical difference in the size of the putamen between treatment-resistant patients and healthy individuals. Instead, the putamen was actually larger in patients who responded to standard treatments compared to the healthy control group.

Because the patients had taken different types and amounts of medication over varying periods, the researchers tested whether the structural differences were simply side effects of the drugs. They analyzed the relationship between the anatomical measurements and the cumulative dosage of antipsychotics each patient had received. They also specifically checked for correlations with clozapine use.

The analysis revealed that medication dosage was not statistically significant in relation to the size of the hippocampus or the surface area of the superior frontal gyrus. This lack of association suggests that the shrinkage in these areas relates to the underlying biology of treatment-resistant schizophrenia itself, rather than the medications used to treat it. The volume of the putamen did show a weak correlation with cumulative medication use, indicating that antipsychotic drugs might slightly influence the size of this specific structure.

While the study utilized data from six countries in North America, Europe, and Asia, the research team noted that the participant pool lacked representation from African and Latino populations. Expanding future neuroimaging initiatives to include more diverse demographics will help confirm whether these anatomical differences remain consistent across all human populations. Additionally, the group of patients classified as responsive to treatment might include individuals who will develop treatment resistance later in life.

The structural differences identified in the hippocampus and superior frontal gyrus are not yet sufficient to serve as a standalone diagnostic tool. When the researchers tested the predictive power of these brain measurements, the models could not reliably distinguish treatment-resistant patients from other patients with schizophrenia on an individual basis. Moving forward, scientists will likely need to combine brain imaging with other biological indicators, such as genetic profiles or metabolic markers, to create a reliable predictive test for clinical settings.

The study, “Brain structural abnormalities in treatment-resistant schizophrenia,” was authored by Semra Etyemez, Rohit Sivananthan, Andreia V. Faria, Felice Iasevoli, Giuseppe Pontillo, Annabella Di Giorgio, Young-Chul Chung, Woo-Sung Kim, Soyolsaikhan Odkhuu, Jun Soo Kwon, Minah Kim, Minji Ha, Foivos Georgiadis, Beatrice A. Milano, Matthias Kirschner, Stefan Kaiser, Diana Tordesillas-Gutiérrez, Kang Sim, Yunlong Tan, Sherry Kit Wa Chan, Jessica A. Turner, Theo G. M. van Erp, Jimmy Lee, Vince D. Calhoun, Akira Sawa, and Kun Yang.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-structural-differences-in-treatment-resistant-schizophrenia/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 01:13AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: People Project Specific Racial Identity Onto Artificial Intelligence, Study Finds

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192512&url=https://www.psypost.org/people-project-a-specific-racial-identity-onto-artificial-intelligence-study-finds/

Source: PsyPost

People tend to perceive AI systems as White, even when those systems lack a face, voice, name, or body, according to new research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across multiple studies, this racial association was linked to greater trust in AI recommendations, and systems described as trained on data from Black and Latine adults were assigned less intellectually demanding work than systems trained on White or...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192512&url=https://www.psypost.org/people-project-a-specific-racial-identity-onto-artificial-intelligence-study-finds/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 01:12AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Climate-Related Financial Pledges Fell 70% in 2026, Analysis Shows

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192495&url=https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-climate-finance-pledges-fall-70-as-countries-meet-at-cop31

Source: CarbonBrief

Public funding pledged to help developing countries tackle climate change fell by more than 70% in 2026, according to Carbon Brief. Developed countries are required under U.N. climate treaties to provide "climate finance" and have traditionally announced multi-year pledges to meet their commitments. Most of these pledges expired in 2025 and, since then, the U.S. has withdrawn from international climate efforts and many European budgets have been...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192495&url=https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-climate-finance-pledges-fall-70-as-countries-meet-at-cop31

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 01:13AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Best Conversations Often Follow Hidden Rhythm Like "Pink Noise"

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192501&url=https://www.psypost.org/the-best-conversations-may-follow-a-hidden-mathematical-rhythm-called-pink-noise-according-to-new-psychology-research/

Source: PsyPost

Enjoyable conversations rarely follow a straight line of constant agreement, nor do they jump from one unrelated remark to the next. According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, rewarding chats tend to show a version of "pink noise" in which speakers align on a topic, drift apart to bring in fresh ideas, and reconnect. This give-and-take was linked to greater enjoyment among friends and a higher chance that speed daters agreed to a...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192501&url=https://www.psypost.org/the-best-conversations-may-follow-a-hidden-mathematical-rhythm-called-pink-noise-according-to-new-psychology-research/

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DATE: November 12, 2026 at 01:11AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: United Airlines Bans AI Agents From Booking Flights for Travelers

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192509&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/united-airlines-bans-ai-agents-booking-flights/

Source: CBS News - U.S. News

United Airlines said Wednesday that it is banning AI agents from making flight reservations on behalf of travelers, citing security risks and the possibility that such actions could violate federal rules. To make an airline booking, an AI agent requires access to a customer's personal information, including credentials like payment information, and checking in for a flight requires travelers to confirm that their luggage does not contain banned...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192509&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/united-airlines-bans-ai-agents-booking-flights/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 08:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Bedroom temperature may be a hidden drag on productivity, study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/bedroom-temperature-may-be-a-hidden-drag-on-productivity-study-suggests/

Sleeping in a warmer bedroom during the summer is associated with poorer sleep quality and feeling less focused and productive the next day, according to new research published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. By combining bedroom air sensors, wearable sleep rings, and smartwatch check-ins over several weeks, the researchers found that night-to-night increases in indoor heat corresponded with more restless sleep and small dips in self-reported daytime productivity. As nighttime temperatures climb globally, the findings point to bedroom temperature as an everyday factor tied to nightly rest and daytime focus.

Perceived productivity refers to how focused and capable of completing tasks a person feels during daily activities. The authors draw on models of work recovery, which propose that people need adequate rest to replenish the attention and self-control they use up during the day. They reasoned that if warm bedrooms degrade sleep quality, meaning how continuous, deep, and restorative a night’s sleep is, people may start the morning with fewer mental resources.

Warm weather can erode nightly rest and strain daytime work output, though those problems have mostly been studied apart. Globally, a 2022 study of more than seven million wearable sleep recordings estimated that rising temperatures cost people roughly 44 hours of sleep per year, while a 2018 meta-analysis of workers exposed to occupational heat linked thermal strain to worse health and lower job productivity. Direct tests of bedroom heat, sleep, and next-day thinking have largely used small climate chambers rather than real homes.

Less was known about how night-to-night shifts in a person’s bedroom microclimate, meaning the temperature, humidity, and air quality in their sleeping space, relate to sleep quality and perceived productivity the next day. The authors also tested whether the autonomic nervous system, the nerve network that automatically regulates involuntary functions like heart rate, relates to hot nights, sleep, and focus. Christian Rominger of the University of Hildesheim in Germany and colleagues at the University of Graz and the Technical University of Vienna tracked adults at home in summer.

After excluding volunteers with sleep or cardiovascular disorders, the team analyzed data from 82 adults in Austria aged 20 to 65 (average age 28), including 56 women, 24 men, and 2 gender-diverse participants. Most worked in offices, and 33 had a cooling system at home. One participant lacked smartwatch survey data, and three lacked daytime heart rate recordings.

Data collection ran in July and August 2025 in Vienna, Graz, and nearby suburbs, where outdoor temperatures ranged from about 10 to 37 degrees Celsius (50 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit). Participants were tracked for two to three weeks within a larger Open Science Framework project that included an intervention, which had no statistically significant effects on the variables studied here and was accounted for in statistical checks. Removing sick days or nights away from home left 1,189 paired nights and following days.

Participants placed an air monitor near bed height, away from sunlit windowsills, to log bedroom temperature, relative humidity, and carbon dioxide every five seconds during sleep. Nighttime bedroom temperatures averaged 24.0 degrees Celsius (75.1 degrees Fahrenheit), spanning 18.5 to 28.7 degrees Celsius (65.4 to 83.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Participants also wore an Oura Ring, which tracks finger blood flow, skin temperature, oxygen, and movement to calculate an objective sleep score from 0 to 100 (averaging about 79, with scores typically varying by about 4.6 points). The ring estimated sleep efficiency (the share of time in bed spent asleep), time to fall asleep, restless periods, deep sleep (the restorative slow-wave stage), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (tied to dreaming and memory). Participants rated their sleep each morning and completed a sleep questionnaire after week one.

During the day, an Apple Watch recorded heart rate and steps while sending eight prompts between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Using ecological momentary assessment, which asks how people feel in real time during normal routines rather than relying on memory, each prompt asked how focused and productive participants felt on a five-point scale (averaging about 3.1, varying by about 0.8 points). Participants also rated daytime sleepiness and mood, letting the team test how nights warmer than a person’s usual bedroom average related to sleep and next-day focus.

Daily wearable sleep scores tracked with morning self-ratings and inversely with next-day sleepiness, while their link to the one-time sleep questionnaire was not statistically significant. When a person’s bedroom was warmer than their own usual average, their objective sleep score showed a small drop of about half a point on the 100-point scale per additional degree Celsius. Warmer nights also went along with worse morning sleep ratings and greater next-day sleepiness.

Among individual sleep metrics, warmer bedroom nights corresponded with more restless periods and shorter REM sleep. A tendency toward shorter deep sleep on warmer nights was not statistically significant, and light sleep, time in bed, sleep efficiency, and time to fall asleep had no statistically significant links to bedroom heat.

Sleeping in a bedroom warmer than one’s personal average predicted slightly lower self-reported focus and productivity the next day, about 0.04 points on the five-point scale for each additional degree Celsius. That dip held up after adjusting for weekends, prior-day productivity, home cooling systems, and next-day mood, suggesting that people were not just rating themselves as less focused because heat soured their mood. Average bedroom temperatures across households showed no statistically significant links to overall sleep or productivity, pointing instead to warmer-than-usual nights within a person’s own room.

Higher overnight objective sleep scores predicted higher perceived productivity the next day, even after accounting for mood and household factors. Among specific sleep stages, longer deep sleep emerged as the primary metric positively tied to next-day focus, whereas bedroom temperature’s link to deep sleep was not statistically significant. Because each link was tested in a separate analysis, the study does not show that poorer sleep is the route through which warm bedrooms relate to next-day productivity.

Day-to-day shifts in bedroom humidity were not statistically significant for sleep quality or next-day productivity, though participants with higher average bedroom humidity reported slightly higher average productivity. Unexpectedly, nights with higher bedroom carbon dioxide, a marker of stale air, went with slightly higher objective sleep scores, while their day-to-day link with next-day productivity was not statistically significant.

That carbon dioxide sleep result contrasts with controlled ventilation research, such as a 2016 field experiment in student dormitory bedrooms, which found that lowering overnight carbon dioxide via open windows or fans improved objective sleep quality and next-day mental performance. The authors note that carbon dioxide stayed relatively low overall in their Austrian bedrooms (averaging 793 parts per million), and they suggest that unmeasured factors may explain the pattern. Closing windows, for example, raises carbon dioxide but also blocks outdoor noise that could otherwise disturb sleep.

Smartwatch data did not support daytime heart rate as a bridge between hot nights and less productive days, as its links with bedroom temperature and sleep quality were not statistically significant. Instead, higher daytime heart rate went with slightly higher perceived productivity, even after adjusting for step counts and mood. Rather than indicating heat strain, the authors suggest a faster heart rate may reflect heightened alertness and task engagement.

These day-to-day patterns align with an earlier review of research on heat and mental health, which linked high temperatures to worsened psychiatric symptoms, more aggression and self-harm, and impaired thinking, and which proposed poor sleep on hot nights as one possible contributor. Whereas that broader review examined clinical mental health, mood, and objective cognitive performance, the new study specifically evaluated wearable-tracked sleep and self-reported daily productivity.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Because the study observed people naturally at home rather than assigning room temperatures, it cannot establish that bedroom heat directly caused the dips in sleep or focus. The day-to-day effects were also small, and the links with individual sleep stages were tested one by one, so the REM sleep result in particular should be treated cautiously. Productivity was measured via two self-report items rather than objective work output or cognitive tests, which the authors note do not always match subjective impressions after poor sleep.

The researchers lacked night-by-night records of bedroom habits, such as whether participants opened windows, ran a fan or air conditioner, or shared their bed with a partner, child, or pet. Data collection lasted only two to three weeks during a moderate summer period in mid-sized Austrian cities among a relatively young, mostly office-working sample. The authors note that mild heat and gradual bodily adaptation to summer warmth may have muted the effects compared with sudden early-summer heat waves or hotter regions.

Future studies could pair wearables and real-time check-ins with objective cognitive tests across seasons or years to track how heat adaptation shapes sleep and work output. Trials testing bedroom cooling strategies across broader groups could also test whether cooling sleeping spaces directly protects next-day productivity.

The study, “Rising temperatures – deteriorating productivity: An examination into day-to-day dynamics of temperature, sleep, and perceived productivity,” was authored by Christian Rominger, Martha Schneider, Gerald Schweiger, Katja Ceplak, Kristina Kirschner, Julia T. Aulehner, Ruth Höpler, Christian Peer, and Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/bedroom-temperature-may-be-a-hidden-drag-on-productivity-study-suggests/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Insecure attachment linked to reduced well-being in bisexual young adults

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-insecure-attachment-shapes-mental-health-in-young-bisexual-women/

Young bisexual women face unique social pressures that can shape their mental health in both positive and negative ways. Research published in the International Journal of Sexual Health reveals that insecure relationship patterns predict increases in psychological distress and reductions in overall well-being over time for this demographic. The findings emphasize that evaluating mental health requires looking beyond the mere presence of distress to also consider what helps people thrive.

Traditional models of mental health have historically operated on a medical framework that defines wellness simply as the absence of mental illness. Psychologists have increasingly adopted an alternative approach known as a dual-perspective model. This framework treats psychological distress and positive well-being as distinct dimensions of human experience. A person might experience symptoms of depression while still maintaining a strong sense of life purpose, or they might lack psychological distress but still feel deeply unfulfilled.

Bisexual women often report elevated levels of psychological distress compared to heterosexual individuals and other sexual minority groups. Sociologists attribute this vulnerability to unique forms of stigma known as minority stress. Bisexual individuals frequently face discrimination from the heterosexual majority and simultaneously encounter invalidation from within the broader LGBTQ community. This dual marginalization can be especially intense during a person’s late teens and twenties, a developmental period when young adults are navigating major life transitions and exploring their identities.

To understand how these social pressures affect mental health, psychologists often look to attachment theory. This theory describes how early relationships shape the way people connect emotionally with others throughout their lives. Adults generally exhibit patterns of attachment that fall along two dimensions of insecurity. Attachment anxiety involves a fear of abandonment and a strong need for validation, while attachment avoidance is characterized by emotional distancing and a reluctance to trust others.

Jennifer Marín and Mónica Guzmán-González, psychologists at the Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile, wanted to understand how these attachment styles relate to mental health in young bisexual women. They noted that previous research has mostly focused on negative mental health outcomes among sexual minorities as a broad group. By focusing specifically on young bisexual women, the researchers aimed to capture the distinct effects of attachment insecurity on both distress and positive well-being over time.

To investigate these dynamics, the researchers recruited 253 cisgender bisexual women in Chile between the ages of 18 and 29. Cisgender refers to individuals whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. The participants completed an initial online survey that assessed their adult attachment patterns. The survey included questions designed to measure both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance in close relationships.

In the same survey, the participants answered questions about their psychological distress, reporting on symptoms of depression and anxiety experienced over the previous two weeks. They also completed an extensive measure of well-being. This well-being assessment captured subjective happiness, life satisfaction, and social integration. One year after the initial survey, the participants completed the same measures of distress and well-being a second time.

At the beginning of the study, the participants reported moderate levels of both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. They also reported moderate levels of psychological distress alongside relatively high levels of overall well-being. The researchers found that distress and well-being were moderately and negatively correlated. This inverse relationship supported the dual-perspective framework, indicating that distress and well-being are related but fundamentally distinct dimensions of a person’s mental health.

The initial survey data showed that attachment insecurity was linked to worse outcomes across the board. Participants who scored higher in attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance also reported higher levels of psychological distress. At the same time, these individuals reported lower levels of positive well-being.

The researchers then looked at the data collected a year later to see if initial attachment styles predicted changes in mental health over time. They controlled for the participants’ baseline levels of distress and well-being to isolate the effect of the attachment patterns. When looking at psychological distress, only attachment avoidance predicted an increase in symptoms. Higher initial levels of attachment anxiety did not have a statistically significant effect on future psychological distress once the baseline levels were taken into account.

The results for positive well-being showed a different pattern. Both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance at the start of the study predicted reductions in well-being one year later. The statistical models explained a much larger portion of the variance in well-being than they did for psychological distress. The researchers noted that insecure attachment styles appear to exert a stronger and more persistent negative effect on a person’s ability to maintain positive psychological resources.

The findings suggest that emotional distancing strategies might act as an initial defense mechanism against stigma, but they eventually erode a person’s mental health. Repeated exposure to discrimination or invalidation may reinforce an avoidant attachment style. Over time, this reluctance to trust others can leave individuals more vulnerable to distress and less capable of sustaining the social connections needed for positive well-being.

The study relies on self-reported data, which can occasionally introduce bias if participants misjudge their own symptoms or behaviors. The research tracked participants across two time points separated by one year. While this design allows researchers to observe changes over time, it restricts their ability to chart longer developmental trajectories. The two-wave design also limits the ability to identify reciprocal effects where poor mental health might cause subsequent changes in a person’s attachment style.

Generalizing these findings to other populations requires caution. The experiences of young bisexual women in Chile are shaped by specific cultural and social contexts that might not apply to individuals in other countries. The results may also not map perfectly onto the experiences of older adults, transgender individuals, or people with different sexual orientations. Future research will need to examine these dynamics across a broader range of communities to see if the patterns hold true.

The researchers suggest that mental health interventions for marginalized groups should focus heavily on building attachment security. Creating supportive environments that foster trust and emotional regulation could help young bisexual women manage psychological distress. Fostering these secure connections might also help them build the lasting emotional resources required to thrive.

The study, “Attachment and Mental Health in Bisexual Women During Emerging Adulthood: A Dual-Perspective,” was authored by Jennifer Marín and Mónica Guzmán-González.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-insecure-attachment-shapes-mental-health-in-young-bisexual-women/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: People project a specific racial identity onto artificial intelligence, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-project-a-specific-racial-identity-onto-artificial-intelligence-study-finds/

People tend to perceive artificial intelligence systems as White, even when those systems lack a face, voice, name, or body, according to new research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across a series of studies, this racial association was linked to greater trust in AI recommendations, and systems described as trained on data from Black and Latino adults were assigned less intellectually demanding work than identical systems trained on White or unspecified data. The findings indicate that human users project familiar social hierarchies onto emerging technologies, which may shape how much authority people grant to automated tools.

Why researchers asked whether AI has a race

Racialization is the psychological process of assigning a racial identity and its accompanying cultural stereotypes to an entity, practice, or concept that has no inherent biological race. Most public and scientific discussions of racial bias in artificial intelligence focus on how software programs treat different groups of people, such as facial recognition tools that misidentify darker skin tones or lending algorithms that penalize minority applicants. Less attention has been paid to the reverse question: whether human users view disembodied software programs, such as chatbots and recommendation engines, as possessing a racial identity of their own.

“This research grew out of a question about an assumption we often make about technology: that it’s somehow neutral or separate from the social biases and hierarchies that shape human society,” study lead author Monica Gamez-Djokic, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, told PsyPost. “If we routinely interpret other people through social categories like race, might we do the same with AI, even when it has no obvious racial identity? And if so, could those perceptions shape how much we trust AI or value its recommendations?”

The new research, conducted by Gamez-Djokic alongside Adam Waytz of Northwestern University, builds on the psychological concept of anthropomorphism, which is the human tendency to attribute minds, intentions, and personalities to non-human objects. Once people treat a responsive computer program like a social partner, their brains automatically apply the same mental shortcuts used to categorize human beings, sorting the entity by social traits like gender, age, and race. Even concepts without any physical form can acquire racial associations; for example, a series of experiments with U.S. adults found that people both explicitly and implicitly associate vegetarianism with White people, a stereotype that reduced feelings of belonging in the vegetarian community among Black adults.

Gamez-Djokic and Waytz proposed two main reasons why abstract AI systems might specifically be categorized as White. First, in Western cultures, Whiteness often operates as an unstated default identity and is stereotypically linked with high status, technical expertise, and intelligence, allowing stereotypes about intelligence to spill over onto smart technologies. Second, the authors suggested that people make inferences based on the broader ecosystem surrounding AI, forming impressions based on who they believe programs the software, who uses it, and whose knowledge is fed into its training data.

If people view AI through a racial lens, those perceptions could alter how they evaluate its advice in workplaces and daily life. In many U.S. studies, White speakers have been judged as more objective and competent than non-White speakers delivering the exact same message. Understanding what drives confidence in automated advice is increasingly relevant as organizations adopt these tools; for instance, a 2026 survey of organizational employees indicated that higher trust in AI decision-support systems is associated with a greater intention to rely on them and with people reporting that they put less effort into evaluating decisions themselves.

Asking people to name a race for everyday technologies

To test their hypotheses, the researchers conducted five primary studies and eight supplementary studies. The five primary studies were preregistered, as were some of the supplementary studies, and data, code, and materials for all of them were posted publicly on the Open Science Framework. In Study 1a, the team recruited 459 U.S. adults through CloudResearch, equally balanced across White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino participants, who indicated which racial or ethnic group from a standard list they associated with six technologies: AI, a machine learning algorithm, a robot, a computer, a chatbot, and a self-driving car.

Because forcing participants to pick from a preset list of racial labels might artificially manufacture racial judgments, the researchers changed the format in Study 1b. A separate racially balanced sample of 465 U.S. adults on Prolific answered the same question for the six technologies using an open-ended text box, allowing them to write in whatever response they wished. Independent coders then evaluated whether participants named a race and whether that race was White.

In Study 1a, participants selected White for 72% of the technologies on average, well above the 50% benchmark the researchers tested against. That is a conservative comparison, since participants could choose from six categories. In Study 1b, participants spontaneously assigned a racial identity to 75% of the technologies they evaluated, and among those racialized responses, 71% were described as White. In both studies, this pattern held regardless of the participant’s own racial background, and a supplementary study that added an explicit “no race” button showed that participants who chose a race were still more likely to pick White.

Picturing the face of artificial intelligence

Because Studies 1a and 1b directly asked participants to think about race, the authors designed Study 2 to test whether people also hold an implicit, unspoken mental image of AI as White when race is never mentioned. They used a two-phase reverse-correlation task, a technique that reconstructs what a concept looks like in a person’s imagination. In the first phase, 96 participants from the Chicago community viewed 300 pairs of blurry faces, created by layering random visual static over a neutral base photograph of a European male face, and picked which image in each pair looked more like “artificial intelligence.”

The researchers digitally averaged all the selected images into a single composite “AI face” and averaged all the rejected images into a comparison “anti-face.” In the second phase, a separate group of 172 participants, who did not know how the portraits had been created, identified the race of both composite images. In that phase, 75% of raters categorized the composite AI face as White, compared to 43% for the rejected anti-face, suggesting that participants’ selections pushed the visual representation toward stereotypically White facial features.

“What surprised me most was how little information people needed to racialize AI,” Gamez-Djokic said. “In our initial studies, the technologies had no faces, voices, names, or other obvious racial cues, yet participants consistently associated them with Whiteness.”

“I found this interesting because much of the research on how people respond socially to technology focuses on what happens when we make machines more humanlike,” she added. “Our findings suggest that people may bring human social categories to AI even when those humanlike features are absent.”

Testing the pattern in India and Japan

To see whether this tendency was strictly an American phenomenon, Study 3 expanded the categorization task to English-speaking adults living in India (147 participants) and Japan (113 participants). Participants evaluated four technologies (AI, a robot, a chatbot, and a self-driving car) by choosing from a list of six groups: White or Caucasian, Black, South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic or Latino. In Japan, 82% of participants classified AI as White, and robots, chatbots, and self-driving cars were classified as White 64% to 69% of the time, well above that 50% benchmark.

In India, 67% of participants classified the broad category of “artificial intelligence” as White. However, Indian participants’ ratings for the three specific technologies (robots, chatbots, and self-driving cars) hovered between 50% and 56%, differences from the 50% benchmark that were not statistically significant, even though White remained the single most frequently chosen option for every item. The authors suggest that the broad label “artificial intelligence” may more strongly trigger thoughts about tech companies, training data, and developers than specific everyday devices do.

Perceived Whiteness and the persuasiveness of AI advice

Study 4 shifted focus to examine whether perceiving AI as White is connected to how persuasive its advice seems. A sample of 424 U.S. adults rated how likely AI technologies would be seen as White if imagined as having a race, embedded among distractor questions about age, gender, and social class. They then read a scenario in which an AI assistant for a nonpartisan civic group fact-checked a politician’s statement about middle-class taxes, rating the claim “mostly false,” and participants judged how persuasive, credible, helpful, and fair the AI’s analysis was.

Participants who perceived AI as more White rated its fact-checking recommendation as modestly more persuasive. This relationship held even after the researchers accounted for participants’ political ideology, general attitudes toward AI, familiarity with AI tools, and demographic characteristics, though general attitudes toward AI were a much stronger predictor. Two supplementary studies found similar links between perceived Whiteness and persuasiveness in scenarios involving job candidate evaluations and consumer product recommendations, though the link was weaker in the hiring scenario once other perceived traits were taken into account.

“The association between AI and Whiteness was quite pronounced, and what I find particularly compelling is how consistently this pattern appeared across different methods and cultural contexts,” Gamez-Djokic explained. “The relationship between perceived AI Whiteness and persuasion was more modest, but we observed it across several decision-making contexts, including political fact-checking, hiring, and consumer recommendations.”

“I think the broader takeaway is that AI doesn’t necessarily escape the social biases and hierarchies that exist in society simply because it’s a technology,” she noted. “We bring our own assumptions and associations to our interactions with AI, and those perceptions can shape how we respond to it, often without our awareness.”

Tracing the association to beliefs about training data

Before testing cause and effect in their final experiment, the researchers ran two supplementary studies to explore why disembodied software is linked with Whiteness. One supplementary study across more than 40 technologies indicated that tools rated as more intelligent were also rated as more White. A second supplementary study found that people view the broader AI ecosystem, including its creators, its users, and its training data, as predominantly White, and that each of these beliefs correlated with seeing AI itself as White.

Because those supplementary surveys measured existing beliefs at a single point in time, they could not establish whether ecosystem cues actually cause people to judge an AI’s capabilities differently. Study 5 tested this causal link by experimentally manipulating a single ecosystem cue: the racial makeup of the people whose data trained the system. A sample of 568 U.S. adults read a short article ostensibly written by a system named “Nexus AI” explaining how it learns from human examples.

Participants were randomly assigned to read that a large portion of Nexus AI’s training data came from White U.S. adults, from Black and Latino U.S. adults, or simply from “people” with no race mentioned. A pilot test confirmed that the descriptions shifted how White the AI seemed, with the unspecified version falling between the other two.

Afterward, participants selected six workplace tasks for Nexus AI from a list of 26 duties that had been pre-scored by an independent group on a 1-to-7 scale for how much intelligence and analytical reasoning they required. The list ranged from routine errands like ordering office supplies to analytical work like diagnosing medical conditions and solving advanced math problems.

Participants assigned less intellectually demanding work to Nexus AI when it was described as trained on data from Black and Latino adults, giving it tasks with an average intelligence score of 4.27, compared to 4.51 for the identical AI trained on White data and 4.51 for the control AI with unspecified training data. Looking at task categories, participants assigned the Black- and Latino-trained AI fewer high-intelligence tasks (an average of 2.06 out of 6, versus about 2.5 for the other two versions) and slightly more low-intelligence tasks. Differences in medium-intelligence task selections, such as curating a music playlist or proofreading, were not statistically significant.

Notably, the White-trained AI and the control AI were treated almost identically. In the authors’ reading, this equivalence indicates that when no racial information is provided, people default to assuming an AI system reflects predominantly White sources of knowledge. At the same time, when participants were asked directly to rate how intelligent Nexus AI was on a questionnaire item, explicit intelligence ratings were similar across the three conditions, with no statistically significant differences.

Ratings of how suitable the AI was for complex tasks and how much decision-making authority it should have also showed no statistically significant differences, leading the researchers to propose that training data cues may influence practical decisions about what work an AI is trusted to handle without changing people’s conscious ratings of its overall capability.

What the studies can and cannot show

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. “An important distinction is that we’re not suggesting AI systems actually have a race,” Gamez-Djokic pointed out. “We’re studying the racial associations that people project onto them. These associations can emerge even when there are no explicit racial cues, which is precisely what makes them interesting.”

Although Study 5 demonstrated a causal effect of training data descriptions on task assignment, the link between perceived Whiteness and persuasiveness in Study 4 was correlational. Because both perceptions were measured rather than manipulated in that study, it cannot establish that seeing an AI as White causes people to find it more persuasive; the authors point out that the relationship could also run in the other direction, where finding an AI persuasive leads people to infer that it is White. As Gamez-Djokic cautioned, the correlational findings “suggest that racialized perceptions may play a role in how people evaluate AI, but they don’t establish that making someone perceive AI as White would necessarily cause them to trust it more.”

In addition, the cross-cultural samples in Study 3 were limited to English-fluent residents of India and Japan who likely had greater exposure to Western technology and media than their general populations, leaving open how native-language surveys in countries with prominent domestic AI ecosystems, such as China, might turn out. Study 5 also presented participants with an explicit description of the racial makeup of an AI system’s training data, information that everyday users rarely encounter so directly.

Meanwhile, supplementary tests of other ecosystem cues like programmer and user race varied multiple traits at once and did not yield consistent results. Future research will need to isolate those cues cleanly and examine how people infer an AI’s social identity in everyday settings, where, the authors warn, subtle perception biases could lead human users to overrely on automated systems simply because those systems feel authoritative.

Next steps for the research

Looking ahead, the researchers are investigating how these perceptions interact with broader views on social inequality and technological change. “I’m interested in understanding how the racialization of AI intersects with broader beliefs about social hierarchy and inequality,” Gamez-Djokic told PsyPost. “For example, we’re examining whether people’s attitudes toward racial hierarchies shape how much authority they’re willing to grant AI, and whether those responses change depending on the social context.”

“I’m also interested in how these perceptions might shape people’s reactions to automation, particularly who they believe will benefit from technological change and whose interests or livelihoods deserve protection,” she continued. “More broadly, I want to understand how existing social hierarchies shape the way we perceive new technologies, and whether those technologies can, in turn, reinforce or challenge those hierarchies.”

“One thing I think is important is that discussions of racial bias in AI tend to focus on what happens inside the technology: the data it’s trained on, the algorithms it uses, and the decisions it produces,” Gamez-Djokic concluded. “Those are critically important issues, but our research suggests there’s another side to the problem: the biases people bring to their interactions with AI. Even an AI system that doesn’t display obvious racial cues may not be perceived as racially neutral. Understanding bias in human–AI interactions therefore requires looking not only at the technology itself, but also at the social psychology of the people using it.”

The study, “The Perceived Whiteness of Artificial Intelligence,” was authored by Monica Gamez-Djokic and Adam Waytz.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-project-a-specific-racial-identity-onto-artificial-intelligence-study-finds/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Tuning into your body might protect against the stress of modern politics

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tuning-into-your-body-might-protect-against-the-stress-of-modern-politics/

People who are better at sensing and trusting their internal bodily signals experience fewer negative health effects from political stress without losing their drive to participate in democracy. These individuals report lower emotional and physical tolls during heated election cycles, pointing to bodily awareness as a buffer against the harms of extreme polarization. The findings were published in Political Psychology.

Politics can take a literal toll on the human body. In highly polarized environments, political stress has become a major non-medical cause of disease and suffering. Many adults report that modern political climates cause them to lose sleep, experience chronic fatigue, or suffer from damaged social relationships. Understanding how people cope with this specific brand of stress is a pressing question for public health and behavioral science.

Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris, researchers at the University of London, conducted the research to see if citizens can protect their health without abandoning their civic engagement. They focused on a concept called interoception. This term refers to how the brain senses, interprets, and regulates signals originating from within the body, such as a racing heartbeat, shallow breathing, or muscle tension.

At a basic physiological level, interoception helps the brain anticipate bodily needs before they arise, a process known as allostasis. For example, a person anticipating a long hike might eat a snack before becoming intensely hungry, preparing the body for an expected energy demand. In a similar way, the allostatic system helps the body maintain stability during stressful social events. At a psychological level, conscious awareness of these internal signals helps people regulate their everyday emotions.

Individuals differ in their interoceptive sensibility, which is their self-reported tendency to notice and respond to their own physical sensations. People with higher interoceptive sensibility are more likely to notice bodily discomfort without becoming excessively worried by it. They often experience their bodies as safe and trustworthy.

The researchers suspected that this trait might help people manage the emotional and physiological demands of contemporary politics. They hypothesized that noticing early signs of bodily arousal might allow individuals to adjust their emotional responses before distress escalates.

To test this idea, Von Mohr and Tsakiris conducted three separate studies across two major United States election cycles. The first study took place immediately following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. The researchers recruited 632 participants, split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The participants completed questionnaires designed to measure their interoceptive sensibility and the physical, emotional, behavioral, and social health costs they attributed to politics.

Physical costs might include a racing heart or lost sleep, while social costs might involve strained family ties due to political disagreements. The researchers found that individuals with greater interoceptive sensibility reported lower self-perceived harm across all four health domains. The most protective interoceptive traits were a reduced tendency to worry about bodily sensations and a greater sense of bodily trust. The researchers also checked whether these individuals simply cared less about politics. They found the opposite pattern, as people with higher interoceptive sensibility were actually more likely to be politically engaged.

Building on these initial results, the researchers launched a larger tracking study during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. They surveyed 1,050 participants across three distinct time points. The assessments occurred two weeks before the election, a few days before the election, and a few days after the polls closed. This design allowed the researchers to track how health impacts and election-related emotions changed as the political reality unfolded.

Once again, higher interoceptive sensibility predicted lower harm to physical, emotional, behavioral, and social health. This protective association held up even after adjusting for traditional emotion-regulation strategies, such as suppressing feelings or deliberately reframing negative thoughts. Many psychology studies focus on these mental strategies, but this detail suggests that bodily awareness provides a unique type of physical resilience.

The researchers also examined how voters reacted when their preferred candidate lost. Following the 2024 election, voters who supported Kamala Harris reported worse overall health outcomes and greater health deterioration compared to voters who supported Donald Trump. Independent of the electoral outcome, higher interoceptive sensibility was associated with better health across all measured domains. Among Harris voters with relatively low pre-election health costs, higher interoception was linked to less deterioration in health from the pre-election to the post-election period, but this association weakened as pre-election health costs increased.

Bodily awareness also colored how participants felt about the future of the country. Following the election, Harris voters experienced more intense negative emotions, but those with higher interoceptive sensibility were less distressed and less fearful about the nation’s future. Among Trump supporters, higher interoception predicted greater hopefulness about the future.

The final study took place four months after the 2024 presidential election. The researchers re-contacted all participants who had completed the final wave of the second study and obtained responses from 752 of them to measure their ongoing political habits. Sustained political engagement between elections is necessary for holding leaders accountable and upholding democratic values. The researchers wanted to know if the protective effects of bodily awareness eventually led to political apathy.

Four months post-election, higher interoceptive sensibility continued to predict greater political engagement. It also predicted higher levels of both internal and external political efficacy. Internal efficacy is the belief in one’s own ability to understand and influence politics. External efficacy is the belief that political institutions will actually respond to public input. These findings indicate that sensing internal bodily signals supports both health resilience and meaningful democratic participation.

The research relies on observational data, meaning it cannot prove that bodily awareness directly causes better health outcomes. It only shows that the two traits reliably appear together. The researchers measured interoceptive sensibility using self-reported questionnaires rather than tracking physiological markers like heart rate variability or stress hormones. Additionally, all the data came from adult citizens in the United States during periods of high political polarization.

The results might not translate to countries with different political systems or during less polarized historical periods. Interaction tests comparing specific voter subgroups over time were also not statistically significant in every single instance, meaning the findings are most robust when looking at the overall trends.

While interoceptive sensibility is a relatively stable trait, it is not entirely fixed. Previous research has shown that bodily awareness can be improved through specific training, such as mindfulness practices or biofeedback therapy. Future research could explore whether teaching people to tune into their bodily signals helps them manage the emotional demands of political life. If so, interoception-focused programs could eventually be used to support public health and civic resilience in divided societies.

The study, “Feeling the body politic: Interoception as a mechanism of political stress resilience,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tuning-into-your-body-might-protect-against-the-stress-of-modern-politics/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Brain wiring patterns of SuperAgers may help flag Alzheimer’s risk years before symptoms

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-wiring-patterns-of-superagers-may-help-flag-alzheimers-risk-years-before-symptoms/

A brain network pattern that separates older adults with exceptionally sharp memory from people with Alzheimer’s disease may also flag hidden risk in healthy seniors, according to a study published in Science Advances. Cognitively healthy older adults whose brain activity resembled the Alzheimer’s pattern scored similarly on memory tests at first but later tended to decline faster, accumulate Alzheimer’s-related plaques more quickly, and progress more often to mild cognitive impairment or dementia.

Between SuperAgers and Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive brain disorder that damages nerve cells and erodes memory, reasoning, and daily independence, accompanied by sticky protein clumps between cells called amyloid-beta plaques and twisted protein fibers inside cells called tau tangles. At the opposite end of aging are SuperAgers, a small subset of older adults whose episodic memory, the ability to recall personal experiences and newly learned events, stays at least as sharp as that of typical middle-aged adults.

Between those extremes sit millions of older adults who show no memory trouble at clinic visits even though their brains age along very different biological tracks. In a 2010 theoretical model in Lancet Neurology, researchers proposed that amyloid-beta plaques begin accumulating while thinking skills still look normal, whereas tau tangles and cell loss accelerate later alongside symptoms. Building on that view, 2011 diagnostic guidelines from a National Institute on Aging and Alzheimer’s Association workgroup described a long symptom-free phase before dementia and argued that predicting which cognitively normal adults will progress toward decline is key to early intervention.

One way to study those hidden differences is by mapping the functional connectome, the web of coordinated activity linking regions across the brain. Scientists measure it with resting-state functional MRI (fMRI), a non-invasive scan in which a person lies quietly inside a magnetic scanner for several minutes without doing a task. The machine tracks subtle rises and falls in blood oxygen levels, and regions whose signals rise and fall together are considered functionally connected.

Building a brain signature from two extremes

Most earlier SuperAger studies compared high-performing seniors against typical cognitively healthy older adults, which can blur signals because typical older groups mix resilient agers with people already harboring silent Alzheimer’s pathology. To avoid that pitfall, lead author Kanhao Zhao and senior author Yu Zhang of the Stanford University School of Medicine, along with their colleagues, anchored their model at the opposite ends of cognitive aging first, contrasting SuperAgers with Alzheimer’s patients before scoring cognitively healthy adults.

The team analyzed records from three public brain-aging databases and posted their analysis code online. Participants qualified as SuperAgers if they were at least 75 years old, outperformed average middle-aged adults under 65 on story or word-list recall tests, and matched healthy peers their own age on executive function, which covers planning, focused attention, and task switching.

For the discovery cohort, the researchers combined data from the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies and the Harvard Aging Brain Study to compare 180 SuperAgers with 110 age-matched Alzheimer’s patients, both with a median age of 80. Dividing the outer layer of the brain into 100 regions, they measured synchronized activity between every pair of regions on resting-state fMRI scans and trained a machine-learning model to separate the two groups.

The resulting signature, named the Alzheimer’s Resilience-Vulnerability Connectome, distinguished SuperAgers from Alzheimer’s patients with 80 percent accuracy on held-out subsets of the discovery group, well above the 62 percent mark a model would reach simply by guessing the larger SuperAger group every time. Applied unchanged to an independent replication cohort of 64 SuperAgers and 79 age-matched Alzheimer’s patients from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, the model achieved 71 percent accuracy on both SuperAgers and Alzheimer’s patients.

SuperAgers tended to show stronger synchronized activity across frontal and parietal areas near the front and top of the brain that support attention and self-control. Alzheimer’s patients instead showed heightened connectivity in the right insula, a folded region deep inside the brain involved in emotion and bodily awareness, and at the front tips of the temporal lobes near the temples. Scored on this same signature afterward, cognitively average older adults fell squarely between SuperAgers and Alzheimer’s patients.

Links to brain aging, mood, and amyloid

The researchers also trained a separate connectivity model in healthy adults to estimate biological brain age and measured the gap between predicted brain age and calendar age. Across both cohorts, the resilience-vulnerability score tracked more closely with predicted brain age than with calendar age, and more Alzheimer’s-like scores corresponded to a wider brain age gap pointing to accelerated functional aging.

More Alzheimer’s-like scores were also associated with greater apathy (loss of motivation), depressive symptoms, and difficulty with everyday tasks such as paying bills or preparing meals. Among replication participants who underwent positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which use trace radioactive compounds injected into the bloodstream to highlight abnormal brain proteins, the score tracked amyloid-beta plaque levels across amyloid-positive groups ranging from cognitively healthy adults to Alzheimer’s patients, a link that the authors note may partly reflect differences in disease stage. Corresponding links within tau-positive groups were weak or not statistically significant.

Hidden differences among healthy older adults

Next, the scientists applied their trained model to older adults without cognitive impairment at their first visit, covering 818 participants in the discovery group and 497 in the replication group. In both datasets, roughly one in four of these cognitively healthy adults (about 26 percent) showed an Alzheimer’s-like connectivity pattern, while the remaining three-quarters showed a SuperAger-like pattern.

At the initial visit, differences between those two subgroups on thinking tests and daily functioning scales were minimal overall: most comparisons were not statistically significant aside from a modest executive function gap in the replication group alone, though the Alzheimer’s-like subgroup was older on average in both datasets. Baseline PET scans likewise showed that starting differences in amyloid-beta plaques and tau tangles between the two subgroups were not statistically significant.

Over follow-up periods spanning roughly five to 15 years depending on the dataset, however, their paths diverged. Cognitively healthy adults with the Alzheimer’s-like pattern experienced faster worsening in overall clinical functioning, memory, attention, and executive function, and a larger share progressed to mild cognitive impairment, an intermediate stage of noticeable memory decline, or Alzheimer’s dementia in both cohorts.

Follow-up checks suggested the faster decline was not simply a matter of the Alzheimer’s-like group being older or having more plaques at the start. In the replication cohort, the gap in overall clinical functioning and executive function held when the researchers separated participants’ starting age from their years of follow-up. The gap in overall clinical functioning also held after adjusting for baseline clinical scores and amyloid-beta and tau levels.

Even among cognitively healthy adults who already tested positive for amyloid-beta plaques at baseline, the Alzheimer’s-like subgroup declined faster in overall clinical functioning than the SuperAger-like subgroup. Adding the connectome score also improved predictions of future progression beyond demographics, PET biomarkers, and APOE, the best-known Alzheimer’s risk gene.

Grouping those same cognitively healthy adults by clinical and cognitive test scores rather than brain connectivity produced clusters that differed initially but did not differ significantly in their later cognitive decline. Repeated PET scans also pointed to biological divergence between the connectivity-based subgroups: the Alzheimer’s-like subgroup accumulated amyloid-beta plaques faster over time, especially in frontal and temporal regions, whereas differences in tau tangle buildup were not statistically significant. The authors suggest this contrast fits the typical sequence of Alzheimer’s biology, in which amyloid spreads across outer brain networks early on while tau accelerates later in localized circuits.

An exploratory look at genetics

Finally, using blood DNA data from 506 cognitively healthy adults in the replication cohort, the team ran an exploratory genome-wide association study scanning about 3.4 million common single-letter DNA variations for links to subtype membership.

Framed as a hypothesis-generating screen without a second genetic sample for replication, the analysis found no variants meeting the strict cutoff for genome-wide confirmation, though three passed a looser suggestive threshold near the genes CLYBL and FRMD6. Drawing on cellular studies tying CLYBL to metabolism and inflammation and FRMD6 to nerve cell structure and connections, the authors propose these genes as candidate targets for future study.

What outside experts think

“This study shows that our brain’s functional ‘wiring diagram’ holds early warning signs for dementia that traditional cognitive tests simply miss,” Yoshiyuki Hirano, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Behavioral Brain Science and deputy director of the Research Center for Child Mental Development at Chiba University, who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “By benchmarking brain networks between SuperAgers and Alzheimer’s patients, the authors developed a tool that uses a single baseline MRI scan to unmask silent vulnerability in healthy seniors, predicting both future memory decline and amyloid buildup years in advance.”

Christian Habeck, a professor of neurological sciences in the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Department of Neurology at Columbia University, who was not involved in the research, highlighted how the study brought several analytical steps together. “Although individual elements of the validation strategy have precedents, the study’s strength lies in integrating them within a single, externally tested connectome framework,” Habeck said. “Its potentially distinctive contribution is the transfer of a SuperAger–Alzheimer’s disease signature to cognitively unimpaired individuals, with successful baseline distinction of subsequent cognitive and pathological trajectories.”

These results align with an earlier neuroimaging study of cognitively healthy older adults linking weaker brainstem-to-temporal-lobe connectivity to faster tissue loss and cognitive decline, especially at higher amyloid-beta levels, though that work measured targeted activity during a novelty task rather than whole-brain resting connectivity. They also fit alongside a longitudinal resting-state brain-imaging study of older adults in which frequent moment-to-moment shifting across visual networks predicted dementia risk over 11 years, whereas the new study evaluated steady network patterns anchored by SuperAgers and Alzheimer’s patients.

Hirano uses fMRI to study how cognitive behavioral therapy and mental disorders affect brain function, including work identifying 45 brain connectivity alterations in a multicenter anorexia nervosa study and research on resting-state networks in major depression and social anxiety disorder. He noted that the baseline signature captured differences that standard protein scans did not separate on their own. “By showing that resting-state connectivity provides incremental prognostic value beyond traditional clinical assessments, PET biomarkers, and APOE status, the study demonstrates how functional network architecture complements existing diagnostic tools,” Hirano said.

Resting-state fMRI scans can pick up physiological noise from subtle head movement, breathing, and heartbeat, and machine-learning models risk overfitting when they latch onto quirks of their training sample that fail to hold up in new groups.

Habeck, who also writes about statistical pitfalls and reasoning fallacies in neuroimaging, told PsyPost that the team’s cross-cohort testing stood out despite his usual caution toward the method. “I am in general somewhat skeptical toward resting-state functional connectivity as noisy and prone to false-positive errors, but I was struck by the intuitively appealing approach regarding statistical robustness and held-out validation,” Habeck said. “While any resting-state fMRI finding warrants some caution, the methodological rigor increases confidence that the reported effects are not merely artifacts of over-fitting.”

What the study cannot show

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Because the study is observational, it cannot establish whether altered network communication contributes to plaque buildup and cognitive decline or instead reflects subtle cellular damage already underway. The model also separated SuperAgers from Alzheimer’s patients with 71 percent accuracy in the independent cohort, indicating a reproducible group-level signal but too much overlap to serve as a standalone diagnostic test for an individual, and the authors note that the score may blend resistance to developing plaques with resilience in coping with them.

Hirano echoed that caution against treating an Alzheimer’s-like network profile as a personal medical verdict. “This framework represents a research tool for statistical risk stratification across populations, not a standalone clinical test indicating that dementia is inevitable,” Hirano said.

When it comes to pinpointing the root causes of Alzheimer’s disease, Habeck noted that predicting future decline ahead of time still does not settle what drives what. “A diagnostic classifier, even for future trajectories, is still not a causal fact, although the prospective nature of the prediction makes it closer to a plausible causal candidate,” Habeck said.

“From an etiological perspective, however, the findings do not establish whether the identified network architecture is itself a causal driver of successful versus poor aging, or whether both connectivity patterns and cognitive outcomes reflect a third underlying biological process.” For diagnostic use alone, he added, “this is a bit of a moot point, but it’s good to keep this in mind when trying to understand the systems biology underlying the disease process.”

To harmonize selection across cohorts that used different memory tests, the researchers also used an adapted SuperAger definition starting at age 75 rather than the stricter age-80 cutoff used in several foundational SuperAger studies. In addition, the signature drew solely on resting-state fMRI without incorporating physical nerve-fiber wiring or markers of other common age-related brain conditions, such as small blood vessel disease, which often contribute to late-life memory loss alongside Alzheimer’s plaques. Future work integrating white-matter wiring and vascular markers alongside resting-state scans will be needed to disentangle how multiple aging processes interact.

Where the research goes next

One practical avenue for applying the signature is selecting cognitively healthy volunteers at elevated risk of decline for preventive drug studies aimed at slowing Alzheimer’s biology before symptoms start. “In the future, this framework has strong potential for clinical translation—particularly for early risk screening in asymptomatic individuals and for trial enrichment to recruit high-risk participants in preventive disease-modifying trials,” Hirano said. “Moving forward, prospective validation in larger, racially and ethnically diverse community cohorts, along with mechanistic studies on candidate genetic loci (CLYBL and FRMD6), will be critical next steps.”

The study already showed that the score added predictive value beyond demographics, PET scans, and APOE. Habeck noted that a key next test will be whether the Alzheimer’s Resilience-Vulnerability Connectome (ARC) still adds value in predicting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when brain morphometrics (structural measurements such as regional brain volume and tissue thickness) and broader genetic information are included in the same model.

“I would be really interested to see whether the ARC signature retains unique predictive utility vis-à-vis future cognition and AD status, when all the other endpoints against which it was validated are also entered as covariates in the prediction model as well,” Habeck said. “So, considering the ARC signature, amyloid and tau status, morphometrics, and any genomic information does ARC retain unique predictive utility, i.e., in that dropping it from the model would result in poorer predictions?”

The study, “A functional connectome identifies vulnerability to cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease progression,” was authored by Kanhao Zhao, Hua Xie, Gregory A. Fonzo, Nancy B. Carlisle, Tovia Jacobs, Ricardo S. Osorio, Arpana Church, Feng Vankee Lin, Yu Zhang, and Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-wiring-patterns-of-superagers-may-help-flag-alzheimers-risk-years-before-symptoms/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 10:36AM
SOURCE: PsiAN Psychotherapy Action Network

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Greater male variability may help explain persistent gender gaps in hiring, study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/greater-male-variability-may-help-explain-persistent-gender-gaps-in-hiring-study-suggests/

Even when men and women earn the same average score on a job test, differences in how widely their individual scores spread out can tilt hiring toward men whenever employers screen out most applicants. A new computer simulation study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests that some common multi-step screening setups can also leave employers with a workforce that is both mostly male and less productive than it could be. The findings point to practical adjustments in how organizations combine job tests and set screening cutoffs to improve both gender balance and expected job performance.

At the center of the research is a statistical pattern known as greater male variability. Whenever a group takes a test or is measured on a trait, the scores have two basic properties: the average (called the mean, or the “first moment” in statistics) and the variance (the “second moment,” which measures how widely individual scores spread out from that average).

Greater male variability, often abbreviated as GMV, occurs when men’s scores spread out more widely than women’s, clustering more heavily at both the extreme high and extreme low ends while women’s scores cluster closer to the middle. Under this pattern, men are overrepresented among both top and bottom scorers even when men and women share the exact same average.

Many employers struggle with gender imbalances despite diversity initiatives. Women make up roughly a third of the workforce at companies such as Apple and Google, and fewer than one in five software developers in the United States. Efforts to explain hiring gaps usually focus on evaluator bias, stereotypes, or group differences in average performance.

Yet even where average gender gaps on academic and cognitive tests have narrowed, wider male score spread has been reported in areas such as quantitative and mechanical reasoning, academic tests, personality traits like conscientiousness (being organized, dependable, and hardworking), and manager or peer ratings of social competence. Still, the size of these variance differences varies across traits and studies. A 2024 meta-analysis of creative ability, for example, found that differences between men and women in the spread of scores were small and inconsistent. Scholars have also raised concerns that research on greater male variability could be misused to justify gender discrimination.

Where wider male variability does appear, it can occur even on traits where women score higher on average. For instance, a 2021 meta-analysis in Psychological Science by three of the new study’s authors found greater male variability in cooperative workplace behaviors despite higher female averages.

“That was my first work involving greater male variability, but once I started thinking about its implications, I realized that it had huge implications for personnel selection processes,” study lead author Jose M. Cortina, a distinguished professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, told PsyPost. “And that is exactly what our simulations showed.”

Because hiring research emphasizes group averages, organizations often assume that assessments with equal averages give men and women equal hiring odds. Cortina, who was at Virginia Commonwealth University when the study was conducted, and his colleagues modeled how score variance interacts with screening rules to shape workforce gender composition and productivity.

The team used Monte Carlo simulation, a computer-based technique that generates virtual datasets to test how variables interact under controlled conditions. The study’s design and analysis were not preregistered, though the authors posted their simulation code publicly online. Each simulated pool included 20,000 virtual job applicants (10,000 women and 10,000 men), with every scenario repeated 100 times.

In the main simulations, men and women had identical average scores, bell-shaped distributions, and job performance variability, isolating the effect of test score spread. Setting women’s variance to 1.0 across all measures, the researchers set men’s test score variance either 5% higher (a small gap seen in verbal reasoning or self-reported extraversion) or 40% higher (a large gap seen in quantitative reasoning, mechanical comprehension, or manager ratings of emotional competence).

Across 112 scenarios (11,200 simulated datasets), the authors compared two common hiring systems. In a multiple-hurdle system, candidates face sequential cutoffs: everyone takes a first test, top scorers advance to a second test, and a share of those finalists get hired. In a compensatory system, all applicants complete both tests and receive one combined score weighted by how well each test predicts job performance, letting strength on one measure offset weakness on another.

One assessment was modeled as a strong predictor of job performance and the other as a moderate predictor, with test overlap ranging from zero to substantial. Hurdle pass rates ranged from a strict 10% cutoff (selecting a small shortlist) to a lenient 90% pass rate (screening out only unqualified applicants), while each compensatory model hired the exact same number of workers as its hurdle counterpart.

Whenever a hiring system paired a strict 10% cutoff with high male variability, men ended up substantially overrepresented among hires across both sequential-hurdle and combined-score systems. Even when a lenient first screen eliminated more low-scoring men and left women as 51% of advancing candidates, following it with a strict cutoff on a high-variability test reversed that edge and produced a workforce that was roughly 60% male.

When two hurdles each accepted only the top 10% on high-variability tests, women accounted for about 31% of hires in the hurdle system and only about 18% in the combined-score system, showing that combined scoring does not fix gender balance on its own. Relaxing ultra-strict cutoffs modestly did far more to boost female representation than loosening already lenient screens.

Even a 5% difference in male variance tilted selective hiring toward men, leaving women at 48.7% of hires when a strict cutoff preceded a lenient one. Assuming equal numbers of male and female applicants, the authors calculate that if all of the roughly 66 million annual U.S. hires went through such a system, close to 1 million fewer women would be hired each year. Women outnumbered men slightly, reaching at most 52% of hires, only when employers accepted nearly all applicants.

For Cortina, the central takeaway for the public is straightforward: “That GMV is real, that some tools used for selection have more of it than others, and that if such tools are used to screen out large proportions of applicants, there will be gender disparities in the workforce.”

Sequential hurdles also reduced expected productivity. Across every scenario, multiple-hurdle systems produced lower predicted job performance than combined-score systems because rigid early cutoffs eliminate candidates whose strengths on the other test would have made them strong overall performers, though the gap was sometimes slight.

Both diversity and performance suffered worst when a lenient screen on the stronger predictor preceded a strict cutoff on a weaker, high-variability predictor. In one such scenario, the two-hurdle system produced a 60% male workforce, whereas a combined-score system yielded a nearly balanced group and stronger performers, with 64% of its hires exceeding the hurdle group’s average. For a job paying $100,000 annually, the authors estimated that this hurdle setup would cost an employer about $14,400 per hired worker each year in lost productivity.

The authors stress that these workforces are not less productive because they are mostly male. The shortfall comes from how the hurdle system weighs the two tests, while the male tilt comes from a strict cutoff on a high-variability test.

Cortina observed that this dual penalty on both diversity and productivity stood out as an unexpected finding. “A multiple hurdle selection system that applies a stringent cutoff to a hurdle that has GMV and is only modestly correlated with job performance will produce a workforce that is not only mostly male but also inferior with regard to expected job performance,” he explained.

Combined-score systems did not always help gender balance, however. When the high-variability test was also the stronger performance predictor, the compensatory model weighted it heavily, boosting productivity while hiring an even smaller share of women than a hurdle system that underweighted it.

Follow-up simulations tested altered assumptions. Lowering male variance to a moderate 20% gap softened gender disparities without erasing them, while adding a third hurdle compounded the effects: following a lenient screen with two strict, high-variability hurdles reduced women to roughly 32% of hires, while 73% of workers chosen via combined scores outperformed the hurdle group’s average.

When men were given a moderate advantage in average test scores, male hiring dominance widened further; giving women that same average advantage left women in the majority, though strict, high-variability tests still chipped away noticeably at their lead. Having men make up 75% of applicants worsened women’s proportional hiring rate under selective high-variability hurdles, whereas removing the lowest-scoring 20% of candidates beforehand left the main patterns largely unchanged.

Cortina cautioned against misreading these statistical patterns as claims about superior male ability. “The misinterpretation is, Oh, so you are saying that men are better??!! We are not,” he noted. “We are saying that there is more variance in male scores on many variables, even on variables for which the female mean is higher, and those variance differences have consequences.”

In the authors’ reading, greater male variability may shape careers beyond hiring. Because promotions act like sequential hurdles with tight cutoffs at higher ranks, the researchers suggest that high-variability promotion criteria could progressively shrink female representation toward top management. They also propose that having more men at the extreme upper end of assessment distributions may yield more competing job offers and higher starting pay for men, feeding into gender wage gaps.

“Any organization that is interested in reducing gender disparities in its workforce, and particularly at the top, should try to understand the paper,” Cortina said. “The problems described in the paper can’t be solved by people who don’t know that the problem is there in the first place.”

To reduce these disparities without losing productivity, the researchers recommend avoiding strict cutoffs on high-variability tests and substituting equally predictive tools with minimal variance differences, such as structured job interviews. Organizations can also expand targeted recruitment; in one moderate-variability scenario, the authors calculated that achieving hiring parity would require attracting roughly 12 female applicants for every 10 male applicants.

Cortina also built two online resources on his personal site so employers and readers can explore these statistical patterns firsthand. “One just illustrates GMV effects,” he added. “One is a calculator that helps organizations estimate the number of qualified women that they have to recruit in order to cancel out the effects of GMV on the gender makeup of the workforce.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Most notably, the results come entirely from mathematical computer simulations rather than hiring records from actual employers. The authors also note that there is too little evidence to say how often the specific combinations they modeled occur in real hiring, and that any single combination is likely to be rare. In addition, the models assumed symmetrical bell-curve score distributions, whereas real applicant pools may be skewed and real job seekers may adapt strategically, such as declining to apply when a process seems stacked against them.

Researchers have also measured exact male-to-female score variance for only a subset of workplace tests, meaning estimation errors could shift how strongly variability operates in practice, though the authors report that the overall pattern held when they used alternative estimates. Future empirical and legal studies will need to evaluate the financial costs of expanded recruitment and examine how adjusting test weights or cutoffs interacts with antidiscrimination laws such as Title VII in the United States.

Asked about his long-term goals and next steps for this line of work, Cortina pointed to two priorities: “Raising awareness. Also, GMV effects in leadership-related phenomena.”

The study, “The Man of the (Second) Moment: How Greater Male Variability Affects the Gender Composition and Productivity of the Workforce,” was authored by Jose M. Cortina, Imran Kadolkar, Stefan Volk, and Christian Thöni.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/greater-male-variability-may-help-explain-persistent-gender-gaps-in-hiring-study-suggests/

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DATE: November 11, 2026
SOURCE: SOCIALWORKER.COM

TITLE: Cultivando Hermandad: Finding Community on the Journey to a Doctorate in Social Work

URL: https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/education--credentials/cultivando-hermandad-finding-community-doctorate-social-work/

Community can make the unfamiliar feel more possible. Hermandad can turn uncertainty into connection. Mentorship can remind us that we have something to offer even while we are still learning.

URL: https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/education--credentials/cultivando-hermandad-finding-community-doctorate-social-work/

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DATE: November 10, 2026 at 10:47PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Even occasional marijuana use linked to 40% higher odds of stroke

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261110042539.htm

New research involving more than 440,000 Americans links cannabis use to increased cardiovascular risk, with occasional users showing 40% higher odds of reporting a history of stroke. The findings suggest that even infrequent marijuana use may warrant concern, although researchers have not established that cannabis directly causes strokes or heart disease.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261110042539.htm

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 07:59AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Obesity linked to up to 27% lower risk of death in dementia

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261109205401.htm

A surprising study of more than 4,500 older adults found that people who were overweight or obese when diagnosed with dementia had a 16% to 27% lower risk of death than those at a normal weight. Researchers suspect that extra energy and muscle reserves may help patients survive the disease's toll on the body, although the reason for the survival advantage remains unclear.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261109205401.htm

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Autistic individuals show altered white matter in long-range brain pathways

URL: https://www.psypost.org/autistic-individuals-show-altered-white-matter-in-long-range-brain-pathways/

A meta-analysis of 66 studies found that autistic individuals tend to show differences in the microstructure of many of the brain’s white matter tracts. Compared with typically developing individuals, they showed moderately lower fractional anisotropy, a measure often interpreted as reflecting the organization of nerve fibers, in nine tracts, and higher mean diffusivity, indicating freer water movement, in eight tracts. The paper was published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

Researchers have long investigated whether differences in brain connectivity contribute to the characteristics of autism spectrum disorder. Some theories propose that autism involves weaker communication between distant brain regions, particularly between the front and back of the brain, alongside stronger connections between nearby regions. These differences may contribute to the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of autism.

Scientists increasingly use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to investigate the structure of brain white matter. Brain white matter is composed of nerve fibers that connect different brain regions. One widely used technique to study white matter of the brain is diffusion tensor imaging. This technique examines how water molecules move through brain tissue to provide information about its organization and structural properties.

Studies using this technique have identified differences in several white matter pathways in autistic individuals, typically indicating less directionally organized water movement and greater overall freedom of water movement. However, findings have been inconsistent, with some studies reporting widespread differences in white matter structure and others identifying only localized differences or no differences at all.

Study author Christy D. Yoon of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues aimed to pool diffusion tensor imaging data from studies of autistic individuals to clarify the findings on white matter alterations. More specifically, they wanted to quantify the size of differences in two indicators of white matter structure, fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity, across published studies. They also examined whether factors such as age, sex, IQ, publication year, and brain hemisphere influenced the size of these differences.

Fractional anisotropy measures how strongly water molecules move in a particular direction within brain tissue, which provides information about the organization and integrity of white matter nerve fibers. Mean diffusivity measures how freely water molecules move through brain tissue in general, potentially reflecting differences in tissue density and structure.

The researchers searched four databases of scientific literature (MEDLINE, PsycArticles, PsycINFO, and PubMed) for studies comparing autistic and typically developing individuals using quantitative brain imaging techniques. To be included, studies had to be published in English in peer-reviewed journals, include both an autistic group and a typically developing comparison group, derive a quantitative measure of white matter microstructure, and report enough data to calculate the size of the difference between groups.

Although the researchers initially aimed to include several imaging techniques, there were too few data from techniques other than diffusion tensor imaging, so the final analysis focused on fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity. This left 66 studies, contributing 881 effect sizes from 2,231 autistic and 1,856 typically developing participants, with study average ages ranging from 2 to 50 years. The analysis covered 12 white matter tracts.

Results showed that autistic individuals had, on average, moderately lower fractional anisotropy in nine white matter tracts: the corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s two hemispheres, the corticospinal tract, the thalamic radiation, the arcuate fasciculus, the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, the superior longitudinal fasciculus, the uncinate fasciculus, and the cingulum. For two of these tracts, the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the cingulum, the difference reached statistical significance only after the researchers removed a few unusually influential results, so the authors urge caution in interpreting them.

The researchers also found moderate-to-large differences in mean diffusivity in eight tracts: the corpus callosum, corona radiata, corticospinal tract, arcuate fasciculus, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, inferior longitudinal fasciculus, superior longitudinal fasciculus, and uncinate fasciculus. In all eight, autistic individuals had higher mean diffusivity than typically developing individuals, which may indicate lower tissue density, although other explanations are possible. The largest difference appeared in the arcuate fasciculus, a pathway involved in language, but the researchers note that an effect this large may have been inflated by factors unrelated to white matter microstructure, such as enlarged fluid-filled spaces in the brain.

Many of the differences appeared in long-range pathways connecting distant brain regions, which the authors say supports the idea that autism involves atypical long-range connectivity. No differences were found in the cerebellar peduncles or the internal capsule, though the researchers suggest this may reflect limitations of the imaging technique in those regions rather than a true absence of differences.

The size of the differences also varied with study characteristics. Fractional anisotropy differences were smaller in studies with higher average IQs in seven tracts, and smaller in older samples in two tracts. Samples with a higher proportion of males tended to show smaller differences in several tracts, a pattern the authors link to theories proposing that females require a greater genetic or environmental load to develop autism. Publication year did not affect the results, suggesting that the differences have remained stable across nearly two decades of research.

“Our findings highlight the complex, multidimensional nature of white matter microstructure alterations observed in ASD [autism spectrum disorder],” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of white matter differences in autism. However, the authors note that males were overrepresented in the included studies, limiting the generalizability of the findings to females. The age range of participants also excluded people in later adulthood, when white matter declines, limiting the generalizability of the findings to older adults.

In addition, the findings mostly represent autistic individuals with higher IQs and potentially lower support needs. Diffusion tensor imaging measures are also nonspecific, so they cannot pinpoint the biological changes underlying the differences, and the researchers could not rule out that differences in head movement during scanning inflated some effects. The meta-analysis was not preregistered, and the included studies were cross-sectional, limiting conclusions about how these differences change with age.

The paper, “Widespread alterations in white matter microstructure in autism: A multilevel meta-analysis,” was authored by Christy D. Yoon, Andrew L. Alexander, Brittany G. Travers, Janet E. Lainhart, and Douglas C. Dean III.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/autistic-individuals-show-altered-white-matter-in-long-range-brain-pathways/

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DATE: November 11, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: The best conversations may follow a hidden mathematical rhythm called pink noise, according to new psychology research

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-best-conversations-may-follow-a-hidden-mathematical-rhythm-called-pink-noise-according-to-new-psychology-research/

Enjoyable conversations rarely follow a straight line of constant agreement, nor do they jump randomly from one unrelated remark to the next. According to a new study published in Science Advances, more rewarding chats tend to show a stronger version of a mathematical pattern known as “pink noise,” in which speakers align on a topic, drift apart to bring in fresh ideas, and reconnect. This give-and-take was linked to greater enjoyment among both strangers and friends, a deeper sense of connection among strangers, and a higher chance that speed daters agreed to a second date.

One central channel in spoken conversation is semantics, which refers to the meanings of the words people choose. Past studies have often focused on linguistic entrainment, the tendency for conversation partners to gradually match each other’s word choices, speaking styles, vocal pitch, and body movements, linking higher overall similarity to romantic interest and group cohesion.

Treating similarity as a single average or a steady upward climb runs into what the authors describe as a logical limit: if two people stayed aligned on the exact same ideas the entire time, the exchange would likely grow repetitive and dull. Many traditional approaches also model dialogue as the sum of two separate speakers rather than an interactive system that evolves over time.

“When people talk about a particularly enjoyable conversation, they often use metaphors like ‘in sync’ or ‘on the same wavelength,'” first author Katie O’Nell, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, told PsyPost. “In the study of human interaction, these metaphors are often taken literally — we think about alignment and synchronization as signatures of good conversation.”

“But in the context of words and their meanings, over-synchronization can actually be a bad thing — no one wants to hold a conversation with a parrot,” O’Nell explained. “So our goal for this paper was to develop a mathematical framework for understanding how moving both toward and away from each other in meaning space can help conversationalists feel like their interactions click.”

Working with colleagues including senior author Emily Finn, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College who leads the Finn Lab, O’Nell drew on the physics concept of signal noise color to examine how alignment shifts across both brief exchanges and broader themes. Noise color describes how fluctuations in a sequence of measurements are distributed between rapid changes and slower trends.

At one extreme sits white noise, where fast and slow shifts carry equal weight and each moment varies unpredictably; in a chat, speakers might connect on one turn before abruptly pivoting to an unrelated comment on the next. At the opposite extreme sits red noise, also called Brownian drift, where slow trends dominate and speakers either repeat the same point for long stretches or drift apart without reconnecting.

Pink noise occupies a middle ground between random chaos and rigid repetition, following a pattern in which slower shifts carry proportionally more weight than rapid ones while smaller cycles of stability and change nest inside larger arcs. In a pink-noise conversation, speakers would stay aligned long enough to explore a topic, diverge when one person introduces a new angle, and realign as the other picks up that thread.

To measure this pattern, the researchers split conversation transcripts into uninterrupted speaking turns and passed each turn through a computer language program that translates sentence meaning into 768 numerical coordinates. Measuring the distance between adjacent turns on this mathematical map produced a timeline of how close or far apart the two speakers’ meanings were from turn to turn.

The scientists then analyzed how fluctuations along that timeline varied across short and long stretches of turns, yielding a noise score where 0.5 represents white noise and 1.0 represents pure pink noise. Because shorter chats can distort raw scores, the authors scrambled each conversation’s timeline 1,000 times to establish a random baseline and measured how far the real chat rose above it, posting their analysis code and publicly shareable data online.

Their first analysis examined an open dataset of 1,656 online video chats in English between strangers asked to talk for at least 25 minutes as if meeting at a social event, averaging about 320 turns. Out of all 1,656 chats, 94 percent scored above the 0.5 white-noise mark, averaging 0.62.

That average sits closer to white noise than to pure pink noise, but conversations reliably scored above their random baselines. Shuffling the real order of turns weakened the signal, indicating that the pattern depended on how remarks built on earlier ones.

Follow-up tests provided evidence that pink noise reflected joint coordination rather than an individual speaking habit. Isolating a single speaker’s turns shifted the signal toward white noise, and a model combining both partners’ individual scores explained just 1.4 percent of the variation in the pair’s joint score. Among 94 people who completed five or more chats, scores from chats involving the same person were no more alike than scores from chats involving different people, a comparison that was not statistically significant.

Scrambling where speaker handoffs occurred while keeping all words in order also weakened pink noise in joint transcripts, as did rearranging the sequence of steadier and more changeable stretches of conversation. Artificially splicing turns from two unrelated chats inflated pink noise scores because near-zero similarity flattened rapid fluctuations, prompting the authors to limit their coordination claims to real interacting pairs.

Next, the researchers compared pink noise scores against 205 survey questions covering enjoyment, connection, engagement and memory, demographics, self-rated personality traits, and partner trait ratings. Applying strict statistical adjustments for testing many questions without a pre-selected hypothesis, they identified seven outcomes positively tied to pink noise: overall enjoyment, wanting to keep talking, personal self-disclosure, perceived partner disclosure, wanting to stay rather than end early, thinking one’s partner wanted to keep talking, and chatting past 25 minutes.

Across summary scores for the six survey categories, pink noise showed a small but consistent positive relationship with enjoyment and connection, whereas links with memory and engagement, demographics, and personality traits were not statistically significant. Joint pink noise scores predicted enjoyment and connection better than individual speakers’ scores, and the links held after adjusting for basic features like chat length and word counts, as well as for simpler measures of how similar the partners’ remarks were on average and how steadily they converged.

Pink noise also explained variation in enjoyment beyond three mathematical models tracking momentum, path alignment, or shared information when tested one by one, and beyond two of the three for connection. When all three models were combined at once, pink noise was no longer a statistically significant predictor on its own, which the authors suggest is because those separate metrics divide up the fast and slow timescales that pink noise captures in one measure.

Because the stranger dataset involved casual small talk, the team tested whether the findings held in 97 video chats between Black and non-Black college friends, originally collected by one of the co-authors for a separate project. Pairs spoke for an average of 18 minutes about a formative personal experience shared by the Black friend and then completed surveys.

In these friend dialogues, pink noise showed a modest positive relationship with enjoyment, while links with connection and personal traits were not statistically significant. The enjoyment link held after adjusting for average turn length, word counts, and transcription quality, though adding total duration and turn count left the direct link not statistically significant, an outcome the authors suggest reflects friends talking well past the 10-minute minimum when enjoying themselves.

To test a concrete real-world decision rather than survey ratings, the scientists analyzed 31 ten-minute phone dates between strangers from a speed-dating podcast called Blink Date. The 19 pairs who matched by both answering “yes” or “maybe” to a second date showed stronger pink noise than the 12 pairs who did not match, even after accounting for call length and turn count, while unmatched pairs’ difference from random baselines was not statistically significant. The authors describe this finding as preliminary evidence that pink noise predicts partner choice in a natural setting.

In physical skills like walking rhythm, pink noise tends to strengthen with practice, leading the team to track 1,032 episodes across the first 50 installments of 25 free-flowing, amateur two-host podcasts, excluding married couples, scripted shows, and guest episodes. Pink noise grew stronger across those first 50 episodes even after controlling for episode length, turn and word counts, and transcription quality, a trend the authors note is consistent with co-hosts refining their conversational coordination over time.

Finally, the researchers prompted Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a large language model trained on vast amounts of human writing, to script 50 enjoyable and 50 unpleasant 100-turn coffee-shop chats between strangers without mentioning alignment or noise. Human raters scored the enjoyable scripts an average of 4.8 out of 5 compared with 2.4 out of 5 for the unpleasant ones. The enjoyable dialogues displayed stronger pink noise than the unpleasant dialogues, whose difference from random baselines was not statistically significant, which the authors suggest indicates that the model picked up this rhythm implicitly from human text.

O’Nell offered a practical suggestion for everyday conversations. “Don’t be afraid to slow your conversations down — asking follow-up questions and fully exploring a topic before you move on can yield unexpected fun and connection!” she said.

As with all research, there are some caveats to keep in mind. Every human conversation studied was observational rather than experimentally controlled, so the results cannot establish that pink noise causes people to enjoy a chat. Pairs who already click may instead settle into this rhythm naturally. The statistical links were also fairly small, indicating that word-meaning dynamics are just one piece of conversation quality alongside other verbal and nonverbal signals.

Several analyses, including the 31 speed dates and 97 friend chats, also used relatively small samples, and the podcast trend cannot distinguish adapting to one specific partner from building a generalizable social skill.

“This work is, critically, observational: we ran these analyses on existing recordings of conversations,” O’Nell emphasized. “But there are a ton of empirical questions this work opens up!”

“What kinds of interventions move conversations toward pink noise?” she asked. “Do these interventions work differently for people with social deficit disorders? How do different conversational goals (e.g., debates or tutoring sessions) shape the noise structure of a conversation?”

To address those questions, the authors note that future experiments will need to actively guide conversational pacing to test cause and effect, which they suggest could eventually inform conversational software, support tools for people who find social interaction difficult, such as individuals on the autism spectrum, or frameworks for navigating tense discussions.

The study, “Pink noise in dyads’ semantic similarity trajectories predicts conversation enjoyment,” was authored by Kathryn C. O’Nell, Kiara L. Sanchez, and Emily S. Finn.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-best-conversations-may-follow-a-hidden-mathematical-rhythm-called-pink-noise-according-to-new-psychology-research/

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