#counseling — Public Fediverse posts
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DATE: September 25, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Disgust predicts conservative views most strongly in people with low bodily awareness
People who are easily disgusted tend to hold more conservative political views, but a new study indicates that this connection depends heavily on how well individuals tune into their own bodily sensations. The research suggests that the link between feeling disgust and identifying as a conservative is strongest in those who are less aware of their internal physical states. The findings were published in Politics and the Life Sciences.
To understand these findings, it helps to look at two psychological concepts: disgust sensitivity and interoceptive sensibility. Disgust sensitivity refers to how intensely and easily a person experiences disgust in response to things like germs, taboo sexual acts, or moral violations like lying. Interoceptive sensibility is a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals. For instance, it involves noticing a racing heartbeat, a tense stomach, or shallow breathing during an emotional moment.
Early studies in political psychology suggested that visceral reactions to threat and disgust drive conservative political beliefs. A 2008 study reported that people with stronger involuntary physical reactions to startling or disturbing images leaned more politically conservative. Following this line of thought, research covered by PsyPost in 2019 found a psychological association in which higher self-reported disgust sensitivity predicted higher endorsement of conservative political beliefs.
Later large-scale replications challenged the biological aspect of this narrative, failing to find a dependable link between physical reactions and political ideology. A 2019 replication study found no evidence that conservatives and liberals actually differ in their automatic physiological responses to threats. Three studies covered by PsyPost in 2020 also failed to reproduce the idea that conservatives exhibit stronger physical threat responses.
This created a puzzle in the field of political psychology. Why do self-reported feelings of disgust consistently predict political ideology, even when automatic bodily reactions do not? The study was conducted by Mariana von Mohr, now a lecturer in social and affective neuroscience at the University of Kent, and Manos Tsakiris at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings. The researchers sought to address this stalemate by testing whether a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals explains why the connection appears in some people but not others.
“There is a long-standing idea that political attitudes are linked to emotional responses such as disgust, but this relationship has been surprisingly inconsistent across studies,” von Mohr told PsyPost. “We wondered whether interoception might help explain why.”
To explore this, the researchers recruited 632 adults from the United States through an online survey platform. The sample was evenly split by design, featuring 321 participants who identified as Democrats and 311 who identified as Republicans. The participants completed a series of questionnaires designed to measure their bodily awareness, their disgust triggers, and their political leanings.
To measure interoceptive sensibility, participants answered questions about how often they notice changes in their body, whether they trust their physical sensations, and how they use bodily cues to regulate their emotions. To measure disgust sensitivity, the researchers used a scale that divides disgust into three domains. These domains included pathogen disgust (like stepping on dog waste), sexual disgust (like hearing strangers engage in sexual acts), and moral disgust (like deceiving a friend).
Finally, the participants reported their political ideology on a seven-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. They also confirmed their political party affiliation. The researchers then used statistical models to see how disgust sensitivity, bodily awareness, and political ideology interacted with one another.
Overall, the results confirmed past findings: higher overall disgust sensitivity was associated with a greater likelihood of identifying as a Republican and holding a conservative ideology. However, the researchers found that interoceptive sensibility changed the strength of this relationship. The connection between disgust and conservatism was most prominent among individuals who reported low awareness of their bodily sensations.
Among people with low interoceptive sensibility, those who were highly sensitive to disgust were highly likely to identify as Republicans. Statistical estimates showed that a person with high disgust sensitivity and low bodily awareness had a 64.1% probability of identifying as a Republican. They also scored on the more conservative end of the ideology scale.
In contrast, this relationship weakened among people who were highly attuned to their bodily signals. For individuals with high interoceptive sensibility, having high disgust sensitivity resulted in only a 55.4% probability of identifying as a Republican. For this group, the link between feeling easily disgusted and holding conservative views was not statistically significant after certain data corrections were applied.
When the researchers looked at the three specific domains of disgust, they found that moral disgust was the primary driver of these results. Pathogen disgust and sexual disgust did not show the same interaction with bodily awareness. The tendency for low bodily awareness to strengthen the link between disgust and conservatism was specific to situations involving moral violations and broken social norms.
“The main takeaway is that the relationship between disgust and political orientation may be more conditional than is often assumed,” von Mohr noted. “More broadly, our findings suggest that understanding the link between emotions and political attitudes may require looking not only at what people feel, but also at how much they attend to the bodily signals accompanying those feelings.”
The authors suggest that when people are less tuned into their actual physical sensations, they might rely more on socially acquired meanings to interpret their feelings. Disgust is a complex emotion shaped by culture, and conservative political frameworks often place a heavy emphasis on moral purity.
“One possibility is that people who pay less attention to their internal bodily signals may rely more on socially learned expectations to interpret what they are feeling, including ideas about what is disgusting, inappropriate, or morally wrong,” von Mohr explained. “In other words, when bodily cues are less salient, contextual and socially learned information may play a greater role in shaping how an emotion is interpreted.”
If a person is not closely monitoring their internal physical state, they might lean on these cultural scripts to make sense of what they are feeling. On the other hand, individuals who are highly attuned to their internal signals might ground their emotional experiences more in their actual biology. Because they rely more on their direct physical sensations to figure out how they feel, social and political framing might play a smaller role in their emotional interpretations. This could explain why their feelings of disgust do not map as strongly onto their political party or ideology.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this research. The data is based entirely on self-reported surveys at a single point in time, which means the study cannot determine whether feeling disgusted causes someone to become conservative, or vice versa.
“It is important not to interpret these findings as showing that bodily processes determine someone’s political beliefs, or that people with one political orientation are simply more or less ‘in touch’ with their bodies,” von Mohr clarified. She emphasized that the idea that people with lower interoceptive sensibility may rely more on socially learned interpretations is just one possible explanation for the pattern they observed, rather than something they directly tested.
The researchers also note that the direction of this relationship might depend heavily on the specific culture being studied. In a different society where liberals moralize a different set of disgust triggers, the ideological pattern might look different. Additionally, the study did not measure actual physiological responses, such as heart rate or skin conductance. The researchers measured how aware people thought they were of their bodies, rather than their objective ability to detect physical changes.
“The next step is to test the mechanism more directly,” von Mohr said. “A particularly important direction is to incorporate physiological measures, for example by examining autonomic responses such as heart rate or skin conductance while people are exposed to disgust-evoking stimuli.”
“This would allow us to distinguish more clearly between the bodily response itself, how accurately or strongly people perceive that response, and how they subsequently interpret it,” she added. “Ultimately, the broader goal is to understand how physiological responses, awareness of those responses, and socially learned meanings interact in shaping political attitudes, rather than treating emotion, physiology, and ideology as separate influences.”
The study, “The embodied roots of ideology: Interoceptive sensibility moderates the link between disgust sensitivity and political orientation,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #DisgustPolitics #Interoception #Conservatism #DisgustSensitivity #PoliticalPsychology #BodyAwareness #MoralDisgust #PoliticalOrientation #PLOSStudy #EmbodiedPolitics
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DATE: September 25, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Disgust predicts conservative views most strongly in people with low bodily awareness
People who are easily disgusted tend to hold more conservative political views, but a new study indicates that this connection depends heavily on how well individuals tune into their own bodily sensations. The research suggests that the link between feeling disgust and identifying as a conservative is strongest in those who are less aware of their internal physical states. The findings were published in Politics and the Life Sciences.
To understand these findings, it helps to look at two psychological concepts: disgust sensitivity and interoceptive sensibility. Disgust sensitivity refers to how intensely and easily a person experiences disgust in response to things like germs, taboo sexual acts, or moral violations like lying. Interoceptive sensibility is a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals. For instance, it involves noticing a racing heartbeat, a tense stomach, or shallow breathing during an emotional moment.
Early studies in political psychology suggested that visceral reactions to threat and disgust drive conservative political beliefs. A 2008 study reported that people with stronger involuntary physical reactions to startling or disturbing images leaned more politically conservative. Following this line of thought, research covered by PsyPost in 2019 found a psychological association in which higher self-reported disgust sensitivity predicted higher endorsement of conservative political beliefs.
Later large-scale replications challenged the biological aspect of this narrative, failing to find a dependable link between physical reactions and political ideology. A 2019 replication study found no evidence that conservatives and liberals actually differ in their automatic physiological responses to threats. Three studies covered by PsyPost in 2020 also failed to reproduce the idea that conservatives exhibit stronger physical threat responses.
This created a puzzle in the field of political psychology. Why do self-reported feelings of disgust consistently predict political ideology, even when automatic bodily reactions do not? The study was conducted by Mariana von Mohr, now a lecturer in social and affective neuroscience at the University of Kent, and Manos Tsakiris at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings. The researchers sought to address this stalemate by testing whether a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals explains why the connection appears in some people but not others.
“There is a long-standing idea that political attitudes are linked to emotional responses such as disgust, but this relationship has been surprisingly inconsistent across studies,” von Mohr told PsyPost. “We wondered whether interoception might help explain why.”
To explore this, the researchers recruited 632 adults from the United States through an online survey platform. The sample was evenly split by design, featuring 321 participants who identified as Democrats and 311 who identified as Republicans. The participants completed a series of questionnaires designed to measure their bodily awareness, their disgust triggers, and their political leanings.
To measure interoceptive sensibility, participants answered questions about how often they notice changes in their body, whether they trust their physical sensations, and how they use bodily cues to regulate their emotions. To measure disgust sensitivity, the researchers used a scale that divides disgust into three domains. These domains included pathogen disgust (like stepping on dog waste), sexual disgust (like hearing strangers engage in sexual acts), and moral disgust (like deceiving a friend).
Finally, the participants reported their political ideology on a seven-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. They also confirmed their political party affiliation. The researchers then used statistical models to see how disgust sensitivity, bodily awareness, and political ideology interacted with one another.
Overall, the results confirmed past findings: higher overall disgust sensitivity was associated with a greater likelihood of identifying as a Republican and holding a conservative ideology. However, the researchers found that interoceptive sensibility changed the strength of this relationship. The connection between disgust and conservatism was most prominent among individuals who reported low awareness of their bodily sensations.
Among people with low interoceptive sensibility, those who were highly sensitive to disgust were highly likely to identify as Republicans. Statistical estimates showed that a person with high disgust sensitivity and low bodily awareness had a 64.1% probability of identifying as a Republican. They also scored on the more conservative end of the ideology scale.
In contrast, this relationship weakened among people who were highly attuned to their bodily signals. For individuals with high interoceptive sensibility, having high disgust sensitivity resulted in only a 55.4% probability of identifying as a Republican. For this group, the link between feeling easily disgusted and holding conservative views was not statistically significant after certain data corrections were applied.
When the researchers looked at the three specific domains of disgust, they found that moral disgust was the primary driver of these results. Pathogen disgust and sexual disgust did not show the same interaction with bodily awareness. The tendency for low bodily awareness to strengthen the link between disgust and conservatism was specific to situations involving moral violations and broken social norms.
“The main takeaway is that the relationship between disgust and political orientation may be more conditional than is often assumed,” von Mohr noted. “More broadly, our findings suggest that understanding the link between emotions and political attitudes may require looking not only at what people feel, but also at how much they attend to the bodily signals accompanying those feelings.”
The authors suggest that when people are less tuned into their actual physical sensations, they might rely more on socially acquired meanings to interpret their feelings. Disgust is a complex emotion shaped by culture, and conservative political frameworks often place a heavy emphasis on moral purity.
“One possibility is that people who pay less attention to their internal bodily signals may rely more on socially learned expectations to interpret what they are feeling, including ideas about what is disgusting, inappropriate, or morally wrong,” von Mohr explained. “In other words, when bodily cues are less salient, contextual and socially learned information may play a greater role in shaping how an emotion is interpreted.”
If a person is not closely monitoring their internal physical state, they might lean on these cultural scripts to make sense of what they are feeling. On the other hand, individuals who are highly attuned to their internal signals might ground their emotional experiences more in their actual biology. Because they rely more on their direct physical sensations to figure out how they feel, social and political framing might play a smaller role in their emotional interpretations. This could explain why their feelings of disgust do not map as strongly onto their political party or ideology.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this research. The data is based entirely on self-reported surveys at a single point in time, which means the study cannot determine whether feeling disgusted causes someone to become conservative, or vice versa.
“It is important not to interpret these findings as showing that bodily processes determine someone’s political beliefs, or that people with one political orientation are simply more or less ‘in touch’ with their bodies,” von Mohr clarified. She emphasized that the idea that people with lower interoceptive sensibility may rely more on socially learned interpretations is just one possible explanation for the pattern they observed, rather than something they directly tested.
The researchers also note that the direction of this relationship might depend heavily on the specific culture being studied. In a different society where liberals moralize a different set of disgust triggers, the ideological pattern might look different. Additionally, the study did not measure actual physiological responses, such as heart rate or skin conductance. The researchers measured how aware people thought they were of their bodies, rather than their objective ability to detect physical changes.
“The next step is to test the mechanism more directly,” von Mohr said. “A particularly important direction is to incorporate physiological measures, for example by examining autonomic responses such as heart rate or skin conductance while people are exposed to disgust-evoking stimuli.”
“This would allow us to distinguish more clearly between the bodily response itself, how accurately or strongly people perceive that response, and how they subsequently interpret it,” she added. “Ultimately, the broader goal is to understand how physiological responses, awareness of those responses, and socially learned meanings interact in shaping political attitudes, rather than treating emotion, physiology, and ideology as separate influences.”
The study, “The embodied roots of ideology: Interoceptive sensibility moderates the link between disgust sensitivity and political orientation,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #DisgustPolitics #Interoception #Conservatism #DisgustSensitivity #PoliticalPsychology #BodyAwareness #MoralDisgust #PoliticalOrientation #PLOSStudy #EmbodiedPolitics
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DATE: September 25, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Disgust predicts conservative views most strongly in people with low bodily awareness
People who are easily disgusted tend to hold more conservative political views, but a new study indicates that this connection depends heavily on how well individuals tune into their own bodily sensations. The research suggests that the link between feeling disgust and identifying as a conservative is strongest in those who are less aware of their internal physical states. The findings were published in Politics and the Life Sciences.
To understand these findings, it helps to look at two psychological concepts: disgust sensitivity and interoceptive sensibility. Disgust sensitivity refers to how intensely and easily a person experiences disgust in response to things like germs, taboo sexual acts, or moral violations like lying. Interoceptive sensibility is a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals. For instance, it involves noticing a racing heartbeat, a tense stomach, or shallow breathing during an emotional moment.
Early studies in political psychology suggested that visceral reactions to threat and disgust drive conservative political beliefs. A 2008 study reported that people with stronger involuntary physical reactions to startling or disturbing images leaned more politically conservative. Following this line of thought, research covered by PsyPost in 2019 found a psychological association in which higher self-reported disgust sensitivity predicted higher endorsement of conservative political beliefs.
Later large-scale replications challenged the biological aspect of this narrative, failing to find a dependable link between physical reactions and political ideology. A 2019 replication study found no evidence that conservatives and liberals actually differ in their automatic physiological responses to threats. Three studies covered by PsyPost in 2020 also failed to reproduce the idea that conservatives exhibit stronger physical threat responses.
This created a puzzle in the field of political psychology. Why do self-reported feelings of disgust consistently predict political ideology, even when automatic bodily reactions do not? The study was conducted by Mariana von Mohr, now a lecturer in social and affective neuroscience at the University of Kent, and Manos Tsakiris at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings. The researchers sought to address this stalemate by testing whether a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals explains why the connection appears in some people but not others.
“There is a long-standing idea that political attitudes are linked to emotional responses such as disgust, but this relationship has been surprisingly inconsistent across studies,” von Mohr told PsyPost. “We wondered whether interoception might help explain why.”
To explore this, the researchers recruited 632 adults from the United States through an online survey platform. The sample was evenly split by design, featuring 321 participants who identified as Democrats and 311 who identified as Republicans. The participants completed a series of questionnaires designed to measure their bodily awareness, their disgust triggers, and their political leanings.
To measure interoceptive sensibility, participants answered questions about how often they notice changes in their body, whether they trust their physical sensations, and how they use bodily cues to regulate their emotions. To measure disgust sensitivity, the researchers used a scale that divides disgust into three domains. These domains included pathogen disgust (like stepping on dog waste), sexual disgust (like hearing strangers engage in sexual acts), and moral disgust (like deceiving a friend).
Finally, the participants reported their political ideology on a seven-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. They also confirmed their political party affiliation. The researchers then used statistical models to see how disgust sensitivity, bodily awareness, and political ideology interacted with one another.
Overall, the results confirmed past findings: higher overall disgust sensitivity was associated with a greater likelihood of identifying as a Republican and holding a conservative ideology. However, the researchers found that interoceptive sensibility changed the strength of this relationship. The connection between disgust and conservatism was most prominent among individuals who reported low awareness of their bodily sensations.
Among people with low interoceptive sensibility, those who were highly sensitive to disgust were highly likely to identify as Republicans. Statistical estimates showed that a person with high disgust sensitivity and low bodily awareness had a 64.1% probability of identifying as a Republican. They also scored on the more conservative end of the ideology scale.
In contrast, this relationship weakened among people who were highly attuned to their bodily signals. For individuals with high interoceptive sensibility, having high disgust sensitivity resulted in only a 55.4% probability of identifying as a Republican. For this group, the link between feeling easily disgusted and holding conservative views was not statistically significant after certain data corrections were applied.
When the researchers looked at the three specific domains of disgust, they found that moral disgust was the primary driver of these results. Pathogen disgust and sexual disgust did not show the same interaction with bodily awareness. The tendency for low bodily awareness to strengthen the link between disgust and conservatism was specific to situations involving moral violations and broken social norms.
“The main takeaway is that the relationship between disgust and political orientation may be more conditional than is often assumed,” von Mohr noted. “More broadly, our findings suggest that understanding the link between emotions and political attitudes may require looking not only at what people feel, but also at how much they attend to the bodily signals accompanying those feelings.”
The authors suggest that when people are less tuned into their actual physical sensations, they might rely more on socially acquired meanings to interpret their feelings. Disgust is a complex emotion shaped by culture, and conservative political frameworks often place a heavy emphasis on moral purity.
“One possibility is that people who pay less attention to their internal bodily signals may rely more on socially learned expectations to interpret what they are feeling, including ideas about what is disgusting, inappropriate, or morally wrong,” von Mohr explained. “In other words, when bodily cues are less salient, contextual and socially learned information may play a greater role in shaping how an emotion is interpreted.”
If a person is not closely monitoring their internal physical state, they might lean on these cultural scripts to make sense of what they are feeling. On the other hand, individuals who are highly attuned to their internal signals might ground their emotional experiences more in their actual biology. Because they rely more on their direct physical sensations to figure out how they feel, social and political framing might play a smaller role in their emotional interpretations. This could explain why their feelings of disgust do not map as strongly onto their political party or ideology.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this research. The data is based entirely on self-reported surveys at a single point in time, which means the study cannot determine whether feeling disgusted causes someone to become conservative, or vice versa.
“It is important not to interpret these findings as showing that bodily processes determine someone’s political beliefs, or that people with one political orientation are simply more or less ‘in touch’ with their bodies,” von Mohr clarified. She emphasized that the idea that people with lower interoceptive sensibility may rely more on socially learned interpretations is just one possible explanation for the pattern they observed, rather than something they directly tested.
The researchers also note that the direction of this relationship might depend heavily on the specific culture being studied. In a different society where liberals moralize a different set of disgust triggers, the ideological pattern might look different. Additionally, the study did not measure actual physiological responses, such as heart rate or skin conductance. The researchers measured how aware people thought they were of their bodies, rather than their objective ability to detect physical changes.
“The next step is to test the mechanism more directly,” von Mohr said. “A particularly important direction is to incorporate physiological measures, for example by examining autonomic responses such as heart rate or skin conductance while people are exposed to disgust-evoking stimuli.”
“This would allow us to distinguish more clearly between the bodily response itself, how accurately or strongly people perceive that response, and how they subsequently interpret it,” she added. “Ultimately, the broader goal is to understand how physiological responses, awareness of those responses, and socially learned meanings interact in shaping political attitudes, rather than treating emotion, physiology, and ideology as separate influences.”
The study, “The embodied roots of ideology: Interoceptive sensibility moderates the link between disgust sensitivity and political orientation,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #DisgustPolitics #Interoception #Conservatism #DisgustSensitivity #PoliticalPsychology #BodyAwareness #MoralDisgust #PoliticalOrientation #PLOSStudy #EmbodiedPolitics
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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 09:30PM
SOURCE: MILIARY PSYCHOLOGY JOURNAL: APA DIVISION 19TITLE: Treatment retention profiles for combat veterans in individual and group therapy following the October 7th War
URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08995605.2026.2737914?af=R
.
URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08995605.2026.2737914?af=R
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #military #militarypsych #militarypsychology #militarycounseling #APA #Division19 #militaryhealth #DeploymentPsychology #UniformServicesUniversity
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DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Plant-based meat labels make food seem less masculine, study finds
URL: https://www.psypost.org/plant-based-meat-labels-make-food-seem-less-masculine-study-finds/
A new study indicates that simply labeling a dish as a plant-based meat alternative makes meat-eaters view it as less masculine, leading to more negative evaluations. This resistance to plant-based options tends to be strongest among people who hold hostile sexist beliefs. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Animal farming places a heavy burden on the environment and raises broad ethical and public health concerns. Plant-based meat alternatives, which are foods made from textured plant protein designed to imitate the taste, appearance, and texture of real meat, offer a way to reduce this impact. But many meat-eaters remain highly resistant to these alternatives. The divide is heavily gendered. For example, a 2024 study covered by PsyPost found that vegetarianism has grown steadily among women over a 15-year period, while rates among men have barely budged.
Researchers suspect this resistance is tied to the cultural symbolism of food. A 2012 study demonstrated that people across multiple cultures subconsciously associate meat with maleness and masculinity. Because meat is symbolically linked to strength and power, cutting it out of a diet can feel like a loss of status. Building on this idea, a 2023 paper conceptualized giving up meat as a direct threat to a man’s sense of manhood, which triggers psychological resistance.
More recently, scientists have noticed that these dietary choices are linked to broader beliefs about social dominance. A 2020 study provided empirical evidence that hostile sexist attitudes are strongly tied to the belief that humans should dominate animals and the natural world. Hostile sexism involves negative evaluations of women and femininity, along with the belief that women are inferior to men.
“There is now quite a lot of evidence that meat is culturally associated with masculinity, and that vegetarians and vegans (particularly vegan men) can be perceived as less masculine,” Kristof Dhont, a reader in psychology at the University of Kent and director of the SHARK Lab, told PsyPost.
“We wanted to find out whether these associations also have implications for perceptions and evaluations of plant-based meat alternatives themselves, even when they closely resemble conventional meat,” Dhont said. “In this sense, the symbolic meaning attached to ‘plant-based’ food could be a barrier to its acceptance.”
The research, led by Alina Salmen alongside Dhont, aimed to see if merely labeling a dish as plant-based alters how people perceive its masculinity and appeal. They also wanted to test whether hostile sexism would amplify these effects, making people who endorse male dominance the most likely to reject feminine-coded alternatives.
To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, they recruited 216 university students in the United Kingdom who eat meat. Participants viewed nine images of food, such as burgers, meatballs, and tacos. The images were exactly the same for everyone, but the text labels accompanying them were randomly rotated.
A third of the participants saw a specific dish labeled as “regular meat,” another third saw it labeled as “plant-based meat,” and the final third saw it labeled as “cultured meat.” Cultured meat is real animal tissue grown in a lab from cell cultures, eliminating the need for animal slaughter. Participants rated each dish’s appeal, expected smell, expected taste, and their likelihood of eating it on a 7-point scale. They also rated the perceived masculinity of each dish on a scale ranging from extremely feminine to extremely masculine, and they completed a questionnaire measuring their endorsement of hostile sexism.
Even though the food images were identical, dishes labeled as plant-based were rated as less masculine than dishes labeled as regular meat. The plant-based label also led to worse evaluations in terms of expected taste, smell, and overall appeal. Cultured meat was also evaluated more negatively than regular meat.
When the researchers looked closer, they found that lower masculinity ratings were linked to these negative evaluations, but only for participants who scored higher in hostile sexism. Those with lower levels of sexism did not evaluate the food worse just because they perceived it as less masculine.
In the second experiment, the research team recruited a larger sample of 1,182 adults in the United States, evenly split between men and women, all of whom were meat-eaters. Participants viewed six identical food images, with the labels rotated between “regular meat” and “plant-based meat.” They rated the same qualities as in the first experiment, but the researchers also added a measure of “food distancing.” Participants indicated how much they agreed with statements like, “I would not want to be seen eating this dish in public.”
The second experiment replicated the findings of the first. On a 7-point scale, the average overall evaluation dropped from 5.64 for regular meat to 4.74 for plant-based meat. The perceived masculinity dropped from an average of 4.40 to 3.96. The participants also indicated a stronger desire to distance themselves from the dishes labeled as plant-based.
The researchers identified a psychological chain reaction in the data. The plant-based label led people to view the dish as less masculine, which prompted a desire to distance themselves from the food. This urge to avoid being associated with the dish then predicted a worse overall evaluation.
Hostile sexism played a powerful role in this chain reaction. People with higher levels of hostile sexism were especially likely to distance themselves from dishes they viewed as lacking masculinity, driving their negative evaluations.
“It is perhaps worth highlighting that the effects of the plant-based label were clearly observed not only among men but also among women,” Dhont noted. Both men and women in the study showed this pattern, suggesting that hostile sexism shapes food choices across genders.
“The size of these shifts clearly differs between people,” Dhont explained. “For the overall evaluations the effect was roughly twice the size among those higher in sexism compared with those lower in sexism. The gap between people higher and lower in sexism was even larger when it came to how strongly the label affected perceived masculinity and self-distancing.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that men who identify as more masculine consume more meat and are highly resistant to adopting plant-based diets. It is worth noting, however, that the 2023 study measured men’s personal masculine identities, whereas the new study focused on the perceived masculinity of the food itself and the observer’s sexist beliefs.
“One key takeaway is that our evaluations of food are not determined only by the food itself,” Dhont said. “The societal stigma surrounding plant-based diets and veganism, including the perceived lack of masculine value, can negatively affect evaluations of plant-based meat alternatives.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. First, the researchers measured perceived masculinity rather than actively manipulating it in a controlled way. This means they cannot say for sure that the loss of masculine symbolism directly caused the negative evaluations. Masculinity and femininity were also measured on a single continuous scale. It is possible that food can hold both masculine and feminine associations at the same time, which future studies might try to measure separately.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding the participants’ past experiences. Some people might have had prior bad experiences eating actual plant-based meats, which could have influenced their ratings of the images.
“These were judgments of images rather than actual purchasing or eating behavior, so the size of the effect in real-world food choices remains an important question for future research,” Dhont said.
“It would be interesting to see how such findings play out when people actually taste the food or in actual consumption and purchasing behavior,” he added. “For example, we could let people taste plant-based products while experimentally varying how they are labeled, or observe behavioral choices and purchases when people select items from a menu or buffet.”
To successfully promote plant-based diets, marketing strategies might need to account for these psychological barriers. The authors suggest that framing meat alternatives in ways that appeal to modern, flexible ideals of masculinity might help overcome the stigma associated with vegan and vegetarian options.
“Another big question is how we can change the symbolism surrounding meat versus plant-based products, and in turn people’s perceptions and reactions to them,” Dhont said. “What strategies can increase openness to plant-based alternatives without simply reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes?”
The study, “Masculinity Perceptions and Hostile Sexism Shape Evaluations of Plant-Based Meat Alternatives,” was authored by Alina Salmen, Nadira S. Faber, Victoria C. Krings, and Kristof Dhont.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/plant-based-meat-labels-make-food-seem-less-masculine-study-finds/
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PlantBasedMeat #MasculinityInFood #PlantBasedLunch #MeatlessMonday #SustainableEating #HostileSexism #FoodMarketing #VeganMeat #EnvironmentallyFriendly #FoodPsychology
-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Plant-based meat labels make food seem less masculine, study finds
URL: https://www.psypost.org/plant-based-meat-labels-make-food-seem-less-masculine-study-finds/
A new study indicates that simply labeling a dish as a plant-based meat alternative makes meat-eaters view it as less masculine, leading to more negative evaluations. This resistance to plant-based options tends to be strongest among people who hold hostile sexist beliefs. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Animal farming places a heavy burden on the environment and raises broad ethical and public health concerns. Plant-based meat alternatives, which are foods made from textured plant protein designed to imitate the taste, appearance, and texture of real meat, offer a way to reduce this impact. But many meat-eaters remain highly resistant to these alternatives. The divide is heavily gendered. For example, a 2024 study covered by PsyPost found that vegetarianism has grown steadily among women over a 15-year period, while rates among men have barely budged.
Researchers suspect this resistance is tied to the cultural symbolism of food. A 2012 study demonstrated that people across multiple cultures subconsciously associate meat with maleness and masculinity. Because meat is symbolically linked to strength and power, cutting it out of a diet can feel like a loss of status. Building on this idea, a 2023 paper conceptualized giving up meat as a direct threat to a man’s sense of manhood, which triggers psychological resistance.
More recently, scientists have noticed that these dietary choices are linked to broader beliefs about social dominance. A 2020 study provided empirical evidence that hostile sexist attitudes are strongly tied to the belief that humans should dominate animals and the natural world. Hostile sexism involves negative evaluations of women and femininity, along with the belief that women are inferior to men.
“There is now quite a lot of evidence that meat is culturally associated with masculinity, and that vegetarians and vegans (particularly vegan men) can be perceived as less masculine,” Kristof Dhont, a reader in psychology at the University of Kent and director of the SHARK Lab, told PsyPost.
“We wanted to find out whether these associations also have implications for perceptions and evaluations of plant-based meat alternatives themselves, even when they closely resemble conventional meat,” Dhont said. “In this sense, the symbolic meaning attached to ‘plant-based’ food could be a barrier to its acceptance.”
The research, led by Alina Salmen alongside Dhont, aimed to see if merely labeling a dish as plant-based alters how people perceive its masculinity and appeal. They also wanted to test whether hostile sexism would amplify these effects, making people who endorse male dominance the most likely to reject feminine-coded alternatives.
To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, they recruited 216 university students in the United Kingdom who eat meat. Participants viewed nine images of food, such as burgers, meatballs, and tacos. The images were exactly the same for everyone, but the text labels accompanying them were randomly rotated.
A third of the participants saw a specific dish labeled as “regular meat,” another third saw it labeled as “plant-based meat,” and the final third saw it labeled as “cultured meat.” Cultured meat is real animal tissue grown in a lab from cell cultures, eliminating the need for animal slaughter. Participants rated each dish’s appeal, expected smell, expected taste, and their likelihood of eating it on a 7-point scale. They also rated the perceived masculinity of each dish on a scale ranging from extremely feminine to extremely masculine, and they completed a questionnaire measuring their endorsement of hostile sexism.
Even though the food images were identical, dishes labeled as plant-based were rated as less masculine than dishes labeled as regular meat. The plant-based label also led to worse evaluations in terms of expected taste, smell, and overall appeal. Cultured meat was also evaluated more negatively than regular meat.
When the researchers looked closer, they found that lower masculinity ratings were linked to these negative evaluations, but only for participants who scored higher in hostile sexism. Those with lower levels of sexism did not evaluate the food worse just because they perceived it as less masculine.
In the second experiment, the research team recruited a larger sample of 1,182 adults in the United States, evenly split between men and women, all of whom were meat-eaters. Participants viewed six identical food images, with the labels rotated between “regular meat” and “plant-based meat.” They rated the same qualities as in the first experiment, but the researchers also added a measure of “food distancing.” Participants indicated how much they agreed with statements like, “I would not want to be seen eating this dish in public.”
The second experiment replicated the findings of the first. On a 7-point scale, the average overall evaluation dropped from 5.64 for regular meat to 4.74 for plant-based meat. The perceived masculinity dropped from an average of 4.40 to 3.96. The participants also indicated a stronger desire to distance themselves from the dishes labeled as plant-based.
The researchers identified a psychological chain reaction in the data. The plant-based label led people to view the dish as less masculine, which prompted a desire to distance themselves from the food. This urge to avoid being associated with the dish then predicted a worse overall evaluation.
Hostile sexism played a powerful role in this chain reaction. People with higher levels of hostile sexism were especially likely to distance themselves from dishes they viewed as lacking masculinity, driving their negative evaluations.
“It is perhaps worth highlighting that the effects of the plant-based label were clearly observed not only among men but also among women,” Dhont noted. Both men and women in the study showed this pattern, suggesting that hostile sexism shapes food choices across genders.
“The size of these shifts clearly differs between people,” Dhont explained. “For the overall evaluations the effect was roughly twice the size among those higher in sexism compared with those lower in sexism. The gap between people higher and lower in sexism was even larger when it came to how strongly the label affected perceived masculinity and self-distancing.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that men who identify as more masculine consume more meat and are highly resistant to adopting plant-based diets. It is worth noting, however, that the 2023 study measured men’s personal masculine identities, whereas the new study focused on the perceived masculinity of the food itself and the observer’s sexist beliefs.
“One key takeaway is that our evaluations of food are not determined only by the food itself,” Dhont said. “The societal stigma surrounding plant-based diets and veganism, including the perceived lack of masculine value, can negatively affect evaluations of plant-based meat alternatives.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. First, the researchers measured perceived masculinity rather than actively manipulating it in a controlled way. This means they cannot say for sure that the loss of masculine symbolism directly caused the negative evaluations. Masculinity and femininity were also measured on a single continuous scale. It is possible that food can hold both masculine and feminine associations at the same time, which future studies might try to measure separately.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding the participants’ past experiences. Some people might have had prior bad experiences eating actual plant-based meats, which could have influenced their ratings of the images.
“These were judgments of images rather than actual purchasing or eating behavior, so the size of the effect in real-world food choices remains an important question for future research,” Dhont said.
“It would be interesting to see how such findings play out when people actually taste the food or in actual consumption and purchasing behavior,” he added. “For example, we could let people taste plant-based products while experimentally varying how they are labeled, or observe behavioral choices and purchases when people select items from a menu or buffet.”
To successfully promote plant-based diets, marketing strategies might need to account for these psychological barriers. The authors suggest that framing meat alternatives in ways that appeal to modern, flexible ideals of masculinity might help overcome the stigma associated with vegan and vegetarian options.
“Another big question is how we can change the symbolism surrounding meat versus plant-based products, and in turn people’s perceptions and reactions to them,” Dhont said. “What strategies can increase openness to plant-based alternatives without simply reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes?”
The study, “Masculinity Perceptions and Hostile Sexism Shape Evaluations of Plant-Based Meat Alternatives,” was authored by Alina Salmen, Nadira S. Faber, Victoria C. Krings, and Kristof Dhont.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/plant-based-meat-labels-make-food-seem-less-masculine-study-finds/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PlantBasedMeat #MasculinityInFood #PlantBasedLunch #MeatlessMonday #SustainableEating #HostileSexism #FoodMarketing #VeganMeat #EnvironmentallyFriendly #FoodPsychology
-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Plant-based meat labels make food seem less masculine, study finds
URL: https://www.psypost.org/plant-based-meat-labels-make-food-seem-less-masculine-study-finds/
A new study indicates that simply labeling a dish as a plant-based meat alternative makes meat-eaters view it as less masculine, leading to more negative evaluations. This resistance to plant-based options tends to be strongest among people who hold hostile sexist beliefs. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Animal farming places a heavy burden on the environment and raises broad ethical and public health concerns. Plant-based meat alternatives, which are foods made from textured plant protein designed to imitate the taste, appearance, and texture of real meat, offer a way to reduce this impact. But many meat-eaters remain highly resistant to these alternatives. The divide is heavily gendered. For example, a 2024 study covered by PsyPost found that vegetarianism has grown steadily among women over a 15-year period, while rates among men have barely budged.
Researchers suspect this resistance is tied to the cultural symbolism of food. A 2012 study demonstrated that people across multiple cultures subconsciously associate meat with maleness and masculinity. Because meat is symbolically linked to strength and power, cutting it out of a diet can feel like a loss of status. Building on this idea, a 2023 paper conceptualized giving up meat as a direct threat to a man’s sense of manhood, which triggers psychological resistance.
More recently, scientists have noticed that these dietary choices are linked to broader beliefs about social dominance. A 2020 study provided empirical evidence that hostile sexist attitudes are strongly tied to the belief that humans should dominate animals and the natural world. Hostile sexism involves negative evaluations of women and femininity, along with the belief that women are inferior to men.
“There is now quite a lot of evidence that meat is culturally associated with masculinity, and that vegetarians and vegans (particularly vegan men) can be perceived as less masculine,” Kristof Dhont, a reader in psychology at the University of Kent and director of the SHARK Lab, told PsyPost.
“We wanted to find out whether these associations also have implications for perceptions and evaluations of plant-based meat alternatives themselves, even when they closely resemble conventional meat,” Dhont said. “In this sense, the symbolic meaning attached to ‘plant-based’ food could be a barrier to its acceptance.”
The research, led by Alina Salmen alongside Dhont, aimed to see if merely labeling a dish as plant-based alters how people perceive its masculinity and appeal. They also wanted to test whether hostile sexism would amplify these effects, making people who endorse male dominance the most likely to reject feminine-coded alternatives.
To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, they recruited 216 university students in the United Kingdom who eat meat. Participants viewed nine images of food, such as burgers, meatballs, and tacos. The images were exactly the same for everyone, but the text labels accompanying them were randomly rotated.
A third of the participants saw a specific dish labeled as “regular meat,” another third saw it labeled as “plant-based meat,” and the final third saw it labeled as “cultured meat.” Cultured meat is real animal tissue grown in a lab from cell cultures, eliminating the need for animal slaughter. Participants rated each dish’s appeal, expected smell, expected taste, and their likelihood of eating it on a 7-point scale. They also rated the perceived masculinity of each dish on a scale ranging from extremely feminine to extremely masculine, and they completed a questionnaire measuring their endorsement of hostile sexism.
Even though the food images were identical, dishes labeled as plant-based were rated as less masculine than dishes labeled as regular meat. The plant-based label also led to worse evaluations in terms of expected taste, smell, and overall appeal. Cultured meat was also evaluated more negatively than regular meat.
When the researchers looked closer, they found that lower masculinity ratings were linked to these negative evaluations, but only for participants who scored higher in hostile sexism. Those with lower levels of sexism did not evaluate the food worse just because they perceived it as less masculine.
In the second experiment, the research team recruited a larger sample of 1,182 adults in the United States, evenly split between men and women, all of whom were meat-eaters. Participants viewed six identical food images, with the labels rotated between “regular meat” and “plant-based meat.” They rated the same qualities as in the first experiment, but the researchers also added a measure of “food distancing.” Participants indicated how much they agreed with statements like, “I would not want to be seen eating this dish in public.”
The second experiment replicated the findings of the first. On a 7-point scale, the average overall evaluation dropped from 5.64 for regular meat to 4.74 for plant-based meat. The perceived masculinity dropped from an average of 4.40 to 3.96. The participants also indicated a stronger desire to distance themselves from the dishes labeled as plant-based.
The researchers identified a psychological chain reaction in the data. The plant-based label led people to view the dish as less masculine, which prompted a desire to distance themselves from the food. This urge to avoid being associated with the dish then predicted a worse overall evaluation.
Hostile sexism played a powerful role in this chain reaction. People with higher levels of hostile sexism were especially likely to distance themselves from dishes they viewed as lacking masculinity, driving their negative evaluations.
“It is perhaps worth highlighting that the effects of the plant-based label were clearly observed not only among men but also among women,” Dhont noted. Both men and women in the study showed this pattern, suggesting that hostile sexism shapes food choices across genders.
“The size of these shifts clearly differs between people,” Dhont explained. “For the overall evaluations the effect was roughly twice the size among those higher in sexism compared with those lower in sexism. The gap between people higher and lower in sexism was even larger when it came to how strongly the label affected perceived masculinity and self-distancing.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that men who identify as more masculine consume more meat and are highly resistant to adopting plant-based diets. It is worth noting, however, that the 2023 study measured men’s personal masculine identities, whereas the new study focused on the perceived masculinity of the food itself and the observer’s sexist beliefs.
“One key takeaway is that our evaluations of food are not determined only by the food itself,” Dhont said. “The societal stigma surrounding plant-based diets and veganism, including the perceived lack of masculine value, can negatively affect evaluations of plant-based meat alternatives.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. First, the researchers measured perceived masculinity rather than actively manipulating it in a controlled way. This means they cannot say for sure that the loss of masculine symbolism directly caused the negative evaluations. Masculinity and femininity were also measured on a single continuous scale. It is possible that food can hold both masculine and feminine associations at the same time, which future studies might try to measure separately.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding the participants’ past experiences. Some people might have had prior bad experiences eating actual plant-based meats, which could have influenced their ratings of the images.
“These were judgments of images rather than actual purchasing or eating behavior, so the size of the effect in real-world food choices remains an important question for future research,” Dhont said.
“It would be interesting to see how such findings play out when people actually taste the food or in actual consumption and purchasing behavior,” he added. “For example, we could let people taste plant-based products while experimentally varying how they are labeled, or observe behavioral choices and purchases when people select items from a menu or buffet.”
To successfully promote plant-based diets, marketing strategies might need to account for these psychological barriers. The authors suggest that framing meat alternatives in ways that appeal to modern, flexible ideals of masculinity might help overcome the stigma associated with vegan and vegetarian options.
“Another big question is how we can change the symbolism surrounding meat versus plant-based products, and in turn people’s perceptions and reactions to them,” Dhont said. “What strategies can increase openness to plant-based alternatives without simply reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes?”
The study, “Masculinity Perceptions and Hostile Sexism Shape Evaluations of Plant-Based Meat Alternatives,” was authored by Alina Salmen, Nadira S. Faber, Victoria C. Krings, and Kristof Dhont.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/plant-based-meat-labels-make-food-seem-less-masculine-study-finds/
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PlantBasedMeat #MasculinityInFood #PlantBasedLunch #MeatlessMonday #SustainableEating #HostileSexism #FoodMarketing #VeganMeat #EnvironmentallyFriendly #FoodPsychology
-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study reveals that fluctuating—not just intense—brain signals play a hidden role in overeating
URL: https://www.psypost.org/fluctuating-brain-signals-linked-to-higher-body-weight-and-erratic-eating/
A recent study found that people with higher body mass index and tendencies toward disinhibited eating experience more fluctuating brain responses to food rewards. The findings, published in Translational Psychiatry, suggest that inconsistent reward signals in the brain may play a role in overweight and overeating. Meanwhile, individuals with binge eating disorder showed specific inconsistencies in how much they consciously desired food from moment to moment.
Binge eating disorder involves recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food while experiencing a loss of control. People with this condition frequently experience high rates of overweight and obesity. Previous research into eating disorders has primarily focused on the average strength of brain signals when people encounter food cues.
One major psychological theory suggests that repeated exposure to highly rewarding foods sensitizes the brain’s motivational pathways. Over time, this sensitization could cause food cues to trigger heightened arousal and cravings. However, hunger and satiety naturally fluctuate.
If eating for pleasure repeatedly overrides the body’s natural fullness signals, a person’s response to food might become highly variable rather than uniformly strong. Instead of just looking at average brain activity, researchers suspected that fluctuations in these signals from moment to moment might better explain erratic eating patterns. To test this idea, cognitive neuroscientist Nils B. Kroemer, psychology researcher Mechteld M. van den Hoek Ostende, and their colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany investigated whether variability in reward processing is higher in people with binge eating disorder.
The researchers focused on the nucleus accumbens, a region deep in the brain that plays a central role in processing rewards, anticipating pleasure, and driving motivation. They also looked at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in cognitive control, impulse regulation, and weighing the costs and benefits of a potential action.
The researchers recruited 79 women for the study. The sample included 35 participants diagnosed with binge eating disorder, 21 with subsyndromal binge eating disorder who experienced less frequent episodes, and 23 control participants with no history of binge eating. The groups were matched so that their average body mass index was similar, allowing the researchers to separate the effects of the eating disorder from the effects of body weight.
During the first session, participants completed a behavioral experiment called a grip force effort allocation task. They were asked to squeeze a specialized handgrip device to earn either monetary rewards or small snack foods. The researchers calibrated the task to each person’s maximum grip strength.
This calibration ensured that the relative effort required was identical for everyone, regardless of their baseline physical fitness. In some trials, the required effort was explicitly shown on a screen, making the physical cost obvious. In other trials, the difficulty was hidden to create uncertainty.
After each round, participants rated how much they subjectively wanted the reward and how much effort they felt they had exerted. The points earned during the task were later exchanged for actual cash or snack calories. This allowed the researchers to quantify the physical effort participants would exert for a specific prize.
The researchers found that participants with binge eating disorder showed higher variability in their trial-by-trial ratings of wanting food. Their conscious desire for the food fluctuated widely from one moment to the next, especially during the uncertain trials. This high variability in subjective desire was not seen when they played for money.
However, their actual physical effort to obtain the rewards did not vary in the same way. The researchers noted that this disconnect might mean people with binge eating disorder rely more on external cues or habitual responses to decide how much effort to expend. This could cause their physical behavior to remain steady even while their internal feelings of desire fluctuate.
For the second phase of the study, 59 of the women returned to the laboratory after an overnight fast. They completed a similar version of the handgrip task while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This machine tracks blood flow in the brain, providing an indirect measure of neural activity in real time.
The researchers specifically measured the brain’s activity during the anticipation phase, which occurred exactly when the participants first saw the reward cue but before they started squeezing the handgrip. They calculated how much the neural signals in the nucleus accumbens and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex fluctuated across the trials.
Trial-by-trial fluctuations in the nucleus accumbens were positively associated with a higher body mass index. Across all groups, participants with higher body weight exhibited more variable reward signals in this brain region. Participants who reported higher levels of disinhibited eating on a standard eating behavior questionnaire also displayed greater variability in the nucleus accumbens.
The researchers found a similar pattern in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A higher body mass index was linked to more fluctuating activity in this cognitive control region. To ensure these fluctuations were not just random brain noise, the researchers checked control regions in the temporal lobe that are not involved in reward processing.
Those control regions did not show the same variability, indicating the effect was specific to the reward and control centers. The results for binge eating disorder specifically were less definitive. While participants with the disorder showed slightly elevated variability in the nucleus accumbens compared to the control group, the evidence was not statistically significant.
The highly variable brain responses were more closely tied to overall body weight and a general tendency to eat without restraint, rather than a clinical diagnosis of the eating disorder. The study’s design includes several limitations that affect how the results can be applied. The research only included female participants, meaning the observed patterns might not generalize to men.
Sex hormones can influence eating behaviors and reward processing, which the study could not account for. The laboratory setting also tightly controlled when participants ate and minimized changes in their mood. Real-world binge eating episodes are often triggered by shifting emotional states and metabolic changes, which the sterile experimental environment was designed to eliminate.
Additionally, the researchers did not measure actual food consumption during the experiment. The study measured the willingness to work for food and the brain’s anticipation of it, rather than how much participants actually ate. Future studies tracking daily food intake would be needed to link these fluctuating brain signals directly to binge eating episodes.
Finally, slight head movements inside a brain scanner can sometimes look like variable neural activity. People with higher body weight sometimes move slightly more in scanners. While the researchers used mathematical models to correct for head movement, imaging experts often view residual motion artifacts as a potential complication in imaging research.
The study, “Obesity is associated with greater variability of reward signals in the nucleus accumbens,” was authored by Mechteld M. van den Hoek Ostende, Anne Kühnel, Monja P. Neuser, Thomas Dresler, Jennifer Svaldi, and Nils B. Kroemer.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/fluctuating-brain-signals-linked-to-higher-body-weight-and-erratic-eating/
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Overeating #BingeEatingDisorder #RewardSignals #NucleusAccumbens #DLPFC #BrainVariability #FoodCues #ObesityResearch #EatingBehavior #TranslationalPsychiatry
-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study reveals that fluctuating—not just intense—brain signals play a hidden role in overeating
URL: https://www.psypost.org/fluctuating-brain-signals-linked-to-higher-body-weight-and-erratic-eating/
A recent study found that people with higher body mass index and tendencies toward disinhibited eating experience more fluctuating brain responses to food rewards. The findings, published in Translational Psychiatry, suggest that inconsistent reward signals in the brain may play a role in overweight and overeating. Meanwhile, individuals with binge eating disorder showed specific inconsistencies in how much they consciously desired food from moment to moment.
Binge eating disorder involves recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food while experiencing a loss of control. People with this condition frequently experience high rates of overweight and obesity. Previous research into eating disorders has primarily focused on the average strength of brain signals when people encounter food cues.
One major psychological theory suggests that repeated exposure to highly rewarding foods sensitizes the brain’s motivational pathways. Over time, this sensitization could cause food cues to trigger heightened arousal and cravings. However, hunger and satiety naturally fluctuate.
If eating for pleasure repeatedly overrides the body’s natural fullness signals, a person’s response to food might become highly variable rather than uniformly strong. Instead of just looking at average brain activity, researchers suspected that fluctuations in these signals from moment to moment might better explain erratic eating patterns. To test this idea, cognitive neuroscientist Nils B. Kroemer, psychology researcher Mechteld M. van den Hoek Ostende, and their colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany investigated whether variability in reward processing is higher in people with binge eating disorder.
The researchers focused on the nucleus accumbens, a region deep in the brain that plays a central role in processing rewards, anticipating pleasure, and driving motivation. They also looked at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in cognitive control, impulse regulation, and weighing the costs and benefits of a potential action.
The researchers recruited 79 women for the study. The sample included 35 participants diagnosed with binge eating disorder, 21 with subsyndromal binge eating disorder who experienced less frequent episodes, and 23 control participants with no history of binge eating. The groups were matched so that their average body mass index was similar, allowing the researchers to separate the effects of the eating disorder from the effects of body weight.
During the first session, participants completed a behavioral experiment called a grip force effort allocation task. They were asked to squeeze a specialized handgrip device to earn either monetary rewards or small snack foods. The researchers calibrated the task to each person’s maximum grip strength.
This calibration ensured that the relative effort required was identical for everyone, regardless of their baseline physical fitness. In some trials, the required effort was explicitly shown on a screen, making the physical cost obvious. In other trials, the difficulty was hidden to create uncertainty.
After each round, participants rated how much they subjectively wanted the reward and how much effort they felt they had exerted. The points earned during the task were later exchanged for actual cash or snack calories. This allowed the researchers to quantify the physical effort participants would exert for a specific prize.
The researchers found that participants with binge eating disorder showed higher variability in their trial-by-trial ratings of wanting food. Their conscious desire for the food fluctuated widely from one moment to the next, especially during the uncertain trials. This high variability in subjective desire was not seen when they played for money.
However, their actual physical effort to obtain the rewards did not vary in the same way. The researchers noted that this disconnect might mean people with binge eating disorder rely more on external cues or habitual responses to decide how much effort to expend. This could cause their physical behavior to remain steady even while their internal feelings of desire fluctuate.
For the second phase of the study, 59 of the women returned to the laboratory after an overnight fast. They completed a similar version of the handgrip task while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This machine tracks blood flow in the brain, providing an indirect measure of neural activity in real time.
The researchers specifically measured the brain’s activity during the anticipation phase, which occurred exactly when the participants first saw the reward cue but before they started squeezing the handgrip. They calculated how much the neural signals in the nucleus accumbens and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex fluctuated across the trials.
Trial-by-trial fluctuations in the nucleus accumbens were positively associated with a higher body mass index. Across all groups, participants with higher body weight exhibited more variable reward signals in this brain region. Participants who reported higher levels of disinhibited eating on a standard eating behavior questionnaire also displayed greater variability in the nucleus accumbens.
The researchers found a similar pattern in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A higher body mass index was linked to more fluctuating activity in this cognitive control region. To ensure these fluctuations were not just random brain noise, the researchers checked control regions in the temporal lobe that are not involved in reward processing.
Those control regions did not show the same variability, indicating the effect was specific to the reward and control centers. The results for binge eating disorder specifically were less definitive. While participants with the disorder showed slightly elevated variability in the nucleus accumbens compared to the control group, the evidence was not statistically significant.
The highly variable brain responses were more closely tied to overall body weight and a general tendency to eat without restraint, rather than a clinical diagnosis of the eating disorder. The study’s design includes several limitations that affect how the results can be applied. The research only included female participants, meaning the observed patterns might not generalize to men.
Sex hormones can influence eating behaviors and reward processing, which the study could not account for. The laboratory setting also tightly controlled when participants ate and minimized changes in their mood. Real-world binge eating episodes are often triggered by shifting emotional states and metabolic changes, which the sterile experimental environment was designed to eliminate.
Additionally, the researchers did not measure actual food consumption during the experiment. The study measured the willingness to work for food and the brain’s anticipation of it, rather than how much participants actually ate. Future studies tracking daily food intake would be needed to link these fluctuating brain signals directly to binge eating episodes.
Finally, slight head movements inside a brain scanner can sometimes look like variable neural activity. People with higher body weight sometimes move slightly more in scanners. While the researchers used mathematical models to correct for head movement, imaging experts often view residual motion artifacts as a potential complication in imaging research.
The study, “Obesity is associated with greater variability of reward signals in the nucleus accumbens,” was authored by Mechteld M. van den Hoek Ostende, Anne Kühnel, Monja P. Neuser, Thomas Dresler, Jennifer Svaldi, and Nils B. Kroemer.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/fluctuating-brain-signals-linked-to-higher-body-weight-and-erratic-eating/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Overeating #BingeEatingDisorder #RewardSignals #NucleusAccumbens #DLPFC #BrainVariability #FoodCues #ObesityResearch #EatingBehavior #TranslationalPsychiatry
-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study reveals that fluctuating—not just intense—brain signals play a hidden role in overeating
URL: https://www.psypost.org/fluctuating-brain-signals-linked-to-higher-body-weight-and-erratic-eating/
A recent study found that people with higher body mass index and tendencies toward disinhibited eating experience more fluctuating brain responses to food rewards. The findings, published in Translational Psychiatry, suggest that inconsistent reward signals in the brain may play a role in overweight and overeating. Meanwhile, individuals with binge eating disorder showed specific inconsistencies in how much they consciously desired food from moment to moment.
Binge eating disorder involves recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food while experiencing a loss of control. People with this condition frequently experience high rates of overweight and obesity. Previous research into eating disorders has primarily focused on the average strength of brain signals when people encounter food cues.
One major psychological theory suggests that repeated exposure to highly rewarding foods sensitizes the brain’s motivational pathways. Over time, this sensitization could cause food cues to trigger heightened arousal and cravings. However, hunger and satiety naturally fluctuate.
If eating for pleasure repeatedly overrides the body’s natural fullness signals, a person’s response to food might become highly variable rather than uniformly strong. Instead of just looking at average brain activity, researchers suspected that fluctuations in these signals from moment to moment might better explain erratic eating patterns. To test this idea, cognitive neuroscientist Nils B. Kroemer, psychology researcher Mechteld M. van den Hoek Ostende, and their colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany investigated whether variability in reward processing is higher in people with binge eating disorder.
The researchers focused on the nucleus accumbens, a region deep in the brain that plays a central role in processing rewards, anticipating pleasure, and driving motivation. They also looked at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in cognitive control, impulse regulation, and weighing the costs and benefits of a potential action.
The researchers recruited 79 women for the study. The sample included 35 participants diagnosed with binge eating disorder, 21 with subsyndromal binge eating disorder who experienced less frequent episodes, and 23 control participants with no history of binge eating. The groups were matched so that their average body mass index was similar, allowing the researchers to separate the effects of the eating disorder from the effects of body weight.
During the first session, participants completed a behavioral experiment called a grip force effort allocation task. They were asked to squeeze a specialized handgrip device to earn either monetary rewards or small snack foods. The researchers calibrated the task to each person’s maximum grip strength.
This calibration ensured that the relative effort required was identical for everyone, regardless of their baseline physical fitness. In some trials, the required effort was explicitly shown on a screen, making the physical cost obvious. In other trials, the difficulty was hidden to create uncertainty.
After each round, participants rated how much they subjectively wanted the reward and how much effort they felt they had exerted. The points earned during the task were later exchanged for actual cash or snack calories. This allowed the researchers to quantify the physical effort participants would exert for a specific prize.
The researchers found that participants with binge eating disorder showed higher variability in their trial-by-trial ratings of wanting food. Their conscious desire for the food fluctuated widely from one moment to the next, especially during the uncertain trials. This high variability in subjective desire was not seen when they played for money.
However, their actual physical effort to obtain the rewards did not vary in the same way. The researchers noted that this disconnect might mean people with binge eating disorder rely more on external cues or habitual responses to decide how much effort to expend. This could cause their physical behavior to remain steady even while their internal feelings of desire fluctuate.
For the second phase of the study, 59 of the women returned to the laboratory after an overnight fast. They completed a similar version of the handgrip task while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This machine tracks blood flow in the brain, providing an indirect measure of neural activity in real time.
The researchers specifically measured the brain’s activity during the anticipation phase, which occurred exactly when the participants first saw the reward cue but before they started squeezing the handgrip. They calculated how much the neural signals in the nucleus accumbens and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex fluctuated across the trials.
Trial-by-trial fluctuations in the nucleus accumbens were positively associated with a higher body mass index. Across all groups, participants with higher body weight exhibited more variable reward signals in this brain region. Participants who reported higher levels of disinhibited eating on a standard eating behavior questionnaire also displayed greater variability in the nucleus accumbens.
The researchers found a similar pattern in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A higher body mass index was linked to more fluctuating activity in this cognitive control region. To ensure these fluctuations were not just random brain noise, the researchers checked control regions in the temporal lobe that are not involved in reward processing.
Those control regions did not show the same variability, indicating the effect was specific to the reward and control centers. The results for binge eating disorder specifically were less definitive. While participants with the disorder showed slightly elevated variability in the nucleus accumbens compared to the control group, the evidence was not statistically significant.
The highly variable brain responses were more closely tied to overall body weight and a general tendency to eat without restraint, rather than a clinical diagnosis of the eating disorder. The study’s design includes several limitations that affect how the results can be applied. The research only included female participants, meaning the observed patterns might not generalize to men.
Sex hormones can influence eating behaviors and reward processing, which the study could not account for. The laboratory setting also tightly controlled when participants ate and minimized changes in their mood. Real-world binge eating episodes are often triggered by shifting emotional states and metabolic changes, which the sterile experimental environment was designed to eliminate.
Additionally, the researchers did not measure actual food consumption during the experiment. The study measured the willingness to work for food and the brain’s anticipation of it, rather than how much participants actually ate. Future studies tracking daily food intake would be needed to link these fluctuating brain signals directly to binge eating episodes.
Finally, slight head movements inside a brain scanner can sometimes look like variable neural activity. People with higher body weight sometimes move slightly more in scanners. While the researchers used mathematical models to correct for head movement, imaging experts often view residual motion artifacts as a potential complication in imaging research.
The study, “Obesity is associated with greater variability of reward signals in the nucleus accumbens,” was authored by Mechteld M. van den Hoek Ostende, Anne Kühnel, Monja P. Neuser, Thomas Dresler, Jennifer Svaldi, and Nils B. Kroemer.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/fluctuating-brain-signals-linked-to-higher-body-weight-and-erratic-eating/
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DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Humor makes taboo words less distracting
URL: https://www.psypost.org/humor-makes-taboo-words-less-distracting/
Taboo words slowed people’s ability to identify font colors, but this distraction was reduced when the words were also funny, according to research published in Cognition & Emotion.
Taboo words—including profanity, insults, slurs, and sexual terms—can interfere with language processing. In the “taboo Stroop effect” (a variation of the standard Stroop effect, a psychological phenomenon where reading a word interferes with naming its ink color), people take longer to identify the font color of a taboo word than that of a neutral word. Researchers have generally attributed this delay to emotional arousal (a state of heightened physiological and psychological activity). Taboo words capture attention or make it harder to disengage from their meaning, leaving fewer attentional resources available for identifying their color.
However, taboo words are not exclusively offensive or unpleasant; some are also perceived as humorous. Because humor can itself be arousing but may help people shift attention more flexibly, Lise Abrams and colleagues examined whether humor would intensify or lessen the distracting effect of taboo words.
Experiment 1 involved 59 participants recruited via Prolific (an online platform used to recruit research subjects) after exclusions. Eligible participants were native English speakers living in the United States, between ages 18-29 years, and did not report color blindness, dyslexia, or ADHD. Participants saw 48 taboo and 48 neutral words, selected using previous nine-point ratings of tabooness, humor, and arousal. Each word appeared once in red, blue, green, and yellow, producing 384 randomly intermixed trials. Participants pressed one of four keys to identify the font color as quickly and accurately as possible, after completing color-key training and 40 practice trials. They also completed a demographic questionnaire.
Experiment 2 included 102 Prolific participants using the same eligibility criteria. The researchers selected 32 words divided into four groups based on the same nine-point norms: high-taboo/high-humor, high-taboo/low-humor, low-taboo/high-humor, and low-taboo/low-humor. The words were presented in separate blocks, along with neutral filler blocks, for a total of 256 trials. Participants again identified each word’s font color by keypress, and the researchers measured response time and accuracy.
In Experiment 1, participants identified the colors of taboo words more slowly than those of neutral words, demonstrating the taboo Stroop effect. This interference was strongest during the first set of trials and diminished with repeated exposure, suggesting that participants gradually became accustomed to the taboo words. Words rated as more taboo produced slower responses, but humor did not independently predict response speed or alter the effect of tabooness when taboo and neutral words were intermixed.
Experiment 2 again showed that taboo words slowed color identification. This time, however, humor changed the size of the effect: highly taboo words interfered with performance whether they were high or low in humor, but the interference was significantly smaller for the more humorous taboo words. Humor alone did not affect response times, suggesting that it did not simply make color identification easier; instead, it specifically reduced how strongly taboo content captured attention when words were presented in separate blocks.
The limited number of suitable words made it difficult to match the four word categories on characteristics such as emotional valence (the intrinsic positive or negative quality of a stimulus) and arousal. The young, US-based online sample and presentation of isolated words also limit how readily the findings can be generalized to other populations, cultures, or real-world language contexts.
Overall, the findings suggest that people’s responses to taboo language depend not only on how offensive a word is but also on whether it is funny, revealing a more complex relationship among humor, arousal, and attention.
The research, “When an F-bomb bonks your funny bone: humor attenuates the taboo Stroop effect,” was authored by Lise Abrams, Lori E. James, Maria-Elisabeth Lootus, and Meredith A. Shafto.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/humor-makes-taboo-words-less-distracting/
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-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Humor makes taboo words less distracting
URL: https://www.psypost.org/humor-makes-taboo-words-less-distracting/
Taboo words slowed people’s ability to identify font colors, but this distraction was reduced when the words were also funny, according to research published in Cognition & Emotion.
Taboo words—including profanity, insults, slurs, and sexual terms—can interfere with language processing. In the “taboo Stroop effect” (a variation of the standard Stroop effect, a psychological phenomenon where reading a word interferes with naming its ink color), people take longer to identify the font color of a taboo word than that of a neutral word. Researchers have generally attributed this delay to emotional arousal (a state of heightened physiological and psychological activity). Taboo words capture attention or make it harder to disengage from their meaning, leaving fewer attentional resources available for identifying their color.
However, taboo words are not exclusively offensive or unpleasant; some are also perceived as humorous. Because humor can itself be arousing but may help people shift attention more flexibly, Lise Abrams and colleagues examined whether humor would intensify or lessen the distracting effect of taboo words.
Experiment 1 involved 59 participants recruited via Prolific (an online platform used to recruit research subjects) after exclusions. Eligible participants were native English speakers living in the United States, between ages 18-29 years, and did not report color blindness, dyslexia, or ADHD. Participants saw 48 taboo and 48 neutral words, selected using previous nine-point ratings of tabooness, humor, and arousal. Each word appeared once in red, blue, green, and yellow, producing 384 randomly intermixed trials. Participants pressed one of four keys to identify the font color as quickly and accurately as possible, after completing color-key training and 40 practice trials. They also completed a demographic questionnaire.
Experiment 2 included 102 Prolific participants using the same eligibility criteria. The researchers selected 32 words divided into four groups based on the same nine-point norms: high-taboo/high-humor, high-taboo/low-humor, low-taboo/high-humor, and low-taboo/low-humor. The words were presented in separate blocks, along with neutral filler blocks, for a total of 256 trials. Participants again identified each word’s font color by keypress, and the researchers measured response time and accuracy.
In Experiment 1, participants identified the colors of taboo words more slowly than those of neutral words, demonstrating the taboo Stroop effect. This interference was strongest during the first set of trials and diminished with repeated exposure, suggesting that participants gradually became accustomed to the taboo words. Words rated as more taboo produced slower responses, but humor did not independently predict response speed or alter the effect of tabooness when taboo and neutral words were intermixed.
Experiment 2 again showed that taboo words slowed color identification. This time, however, humor changed the size of the effect: highly taboo words interfered with performance whether they were high or low in humor, but the interference was significantly smaller for the more humorous taboo words. Humor alone did not affect response times, suggesting that it did not simply make color identification easier; instead, it specifically reduced how strongly taboo content captured attention when words were presented in separate blocks.
The limited number of suitable words made it difficult to match the four word categories on characteristics such as emotional valence (the intrinsic positive or negative quality of a stimulus) and arousal. The young, US-based online sample and presentation of isolated words also limit how readily the findings can be generalized to other populations, cultures, or real-world language contexts.
Overall, the findings suggest that people’s responses to taboo language depend not only on how offensive a word is but also on whether it is funny, revealing a more complex relationship among humor, arousal, and attention.
The research, “When an F-bomb bonks your funny bone: humor attenuates the taboo Stroop effect,” was authored by Lise Abrams, Lori E. James, Maria-Elisabeth Lootus, and Meredith A. Shafto.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/humor-makes-taboo-words-less-distracting/
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-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Humor makes taboo words less distracting
URL: https://www.psypost.org/humor-makes-taboo-words-less-distracting/
Taboo words slowed people’s ability to identify font colors, but this distraction was reduced when the words were also funny, according to research published in Cognition & Emotion.
Taboo words—including profanity, insults, slurs, and sexual terms—can interfere with language processing. In the “taboo Stroop effect” (a variation of the standard Stroop effect, a psychological phenomenon where reading a word interferes with naming its ink color), people take longer to identify the font color of a taboo word than that of a neutral word. Researchers have generally attributed this delay to emotional arousal (a state of heightened physiological and psychological activity). Taboo words capture attention or make it harder to disengage from their meaning, leaving fewer attentional resources available for identifying their color.
However, taboo words are not exclusively offensive or unpleasant; some are also perceived as humorous. Because humor can itself be arousing but may help people shift attention more flexibly, Lise Abrams and colleagues examined whether humor would intensify or lessen the distracting effect of taboo words.
Experiment 1 involved 59 participants recruited via Prolific (an online platform used to recruit research subjects) after exclusions. Eligible participants were native English speakers living in the United States, between ages 18-29 years, and did not report color blindness, dyslexia, or ADHD. Participants saw 48 taboo and 48 neutral words, selected using previous nine-point ratings of tabooness, humor, and arousal. Each word appeared once in red, blue, green, and yellow, producing 384 randomly intermixed trials. Participants pressed one of four keys to identify the font color as quickly and accurately as possible, after completing color-key training and 40 practice trials. They also completed a demographic questionnaire.
Experiment 2 included 102 Prolific participants using the same eligibility criteria. The researchers selected 32 words divided into four groups based on the same nine-point norms: high-taboo/high-humor, high-taboo/low-humor, low-taboo/high-humor, and low-taboo/low-humor. The words were presented in separate blocks, along with neutral filler blocks, for a total of 256 trials. Participants again identified each word’s font color by keypress, and the researchers measured response time and accuracy.
In Experiment 1, participants identified the colors of taboo words more slowly than those of neutral words, demonstrating the taboo Stroop effect. This interference was strongest during the first set of trials and diminished with repeated exposure, suggesting that participants gradually became accustomed to the taboo words. Words rated as more taboo produced slower responses, but humor did not independently predict response speed or alter the effect of tabooness when taboo and neutral words were intermixed.
Experiment 2 again showed that taboo words slowed color identification. This time, however, humor changed the size of the effect: highly taboo words interfered with performance whether they were high or low in humor, but the interference was significantly smaller for the more humorous taboo words. Humor alone did not affect response times, suggesting that it did not simply make color identification easier; instead, it specifically reduced how strongly taboo content captured attention when words were presented in separate blocks.
The limited number of suitable words made it difficult to match the four word categories on characteristics such as emotional valence (the intrinsic positive or negative quality of a stimulus) and arousal. The young, US-based online sample and presentation of isolated words also limit how readily the findings can be generalized to other populations, cultures, or real-world language contexts.
Overall, the findings suggest that people’s responses to taboo language depend not only on how offensive a word is but also on whether it is funny, revealing a more complex relationship among humor, arousal, and attention.
The research, “When an F-bomb bonks your funny bone: humor attenuates the taboo Stroop effect,” was authored by Lise Abrams, Lori E. James, Maria-Elisabeth Lootus, and Meredith A. Shafto.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/humor-makes-taboo-words-less-distracting/
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HumorReducesTabooStroop #TabooWordsAttention #HumorAndArousal #CognitionAndEmotion #StroopEffect #HumorInResearch #ColorIdentificationTask #TabooWordsProcessing #HumorAttenuatesDistraction #CognitivePsychology Findings
-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psilocybin restores social drive in an autism mouse model even under anesthesia
New research provides evidence that a single dose of psilocybin can durably increase social behavior in mice with genetic traits related to autism. The findings indicate that these behavioral benefits occur even if the mice are anesthetized during the drug’s acute effects, which suggests the subjective psychedelic experience is not strictly required. The study was published in Nature Communications.
Psilocybin is the primary psychoactive compound found in certain species of hallucinogenic mushrooms. In recent years, medical research has explored its potential to treat conditions like depression, anxiety, and addiction. Some experts also wonder if it could improve sociability, which refers to the innate drive and capacity to interact with others.
Reduced sociability is a prominent characteristic of autism spectrum disorder. It is also a feature sometimes observed in other conditions, such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. When considering how psychedelics alter brain function, scientists sometimes look at the idea of physiological set points. According to a 2026 review, psychedelics can push brain activity away from a rigid set point, making neural pathways more adaptable even after the drug wears off. This perspective suggests that psilocybin might help shift an out-of-balance behavioral state toward a more typical one.
Another ongoing debate in psychiatric research revolves around the psychedelic trip itself. The intense sensory and emotional alterations induced by psilocybin can be challenging to manage in clinical settings and sometimes provoke adverse psychological reactions. It has remained unknown whether this conscious experience is biologically necessary to achieve the drug’s long-lasting behavioral effects.
“We wanted to examine the lasting effects of a single dose of psilocybin beyond its established effect on depression as previously reported in the human literature,” Chenchen Song, a principal investigator at Nanyang Technological University Singapore, told PsyPost. Song led the research alongside Thomas Knöpfel, director of the JC STEM Laboratory for Neuronal Circuit Dynamics at Hong Kong Baptist University. “We conduct basic preclinical research, so we examined the lasting effects using a mouse model of altered sociability; the model was established by other labs and used by many independent labs internationally.”
“A long-standing debate in the psychedelic field is whether an awake subjective experience is required during the acute psychedelic phase (commonly known as a ‘psychedelic trip’) to achieve the therapeutic effects,” the researchers explained. “Since bad psychedelic trips have been linked to unfavorable behavioral outcomes, understanding this may have real-world implications for how psychedelic-assisted therapies are delivered.”
The researchers utilized a well-established group of mice bred without the Cntnap2 gene. In humans, variations in this gene are associated with autism. Mice lacking this gene naturally display lower levels of social interaction, hyperactivity, and repetitive behaviors. The team injected 30 adult mice with a single dose of either psilocybin or a saline solution to serve as a baseline comparison.
“We use social behavior as a behavioral readout of altered brain state,” the researchers noted. “Therefore we needed a mouse model that show altered social behavior that can potentially show an improvement in behavior, if any, upon treatment. It is for this reason that we used an established mouse model of autism which is known to show altered social behavior in the hands of many independent laboratories internationally.”
They emphasized that their focus was on understanding brain flexibility, not discovering a cure for a specific human condition. “The goal of this study is not to find a therapeutic intervention for autism per se, and we are not suggesting that autism, in and of itself, should be treated,” the team added.
The team assessed the animals’ social behavior using a standard three-chamber test. This behavioral measure records how much time a mouse chooses to spend near a cup containing an unfamiliar mouse compared to an empty cup. The psilocybin-treated mice displayed an increased preference for the social cup compared to the saline-treated mice. This enhanced social drive was detectable one day after the injection and lasted for at least two weeks.
“The sociability promoting effect of psilocybin in mice that show a low baseline sociability was an original discovery of our lab (first in the prenatal valproate exposure mouse model of autism and now in a genetic model of reduced sociability),” Song pointed out.
The differences in the total amount of time the mice spent exploring both cups and their overall movement around the testing area were not statistically significant. This indicates that the drug specifically improved the animals’ social motivation rather than merely increasing their general desire to explore. To ensure the animals were not just learning how to navigate the test over time, the researchers tested a separate group of 19 mice for the very first time two weeks after treatment and observed the same social enhancements.
To determine if psilocybin acts as a universal social enhancer, the researchers repeated the exact same procedure with 18 isogenic wild-type mice. These are genetically identical control mice that possess normal Cntnap2 genes and exhibit typical social behaviors. In these animals, a single dose of psilocybin did not increase sociability. In fact, the treated control mice showed a tendency toward reduced social behavior one day after the injection.
“Even though we observed therapeutic effects in the model mice (of altered social behavior), we observed a lack of beneficial effects in control mice that do not have a deficit to begin with,” the researchers explained. “We therefore think that psychedelic use in the absence of behavioral alterations have limited beneficial effects.”
“Further, given that a significant portion of preclinical psychedelic research is done using wild-type mice, we should highlight that we think it important that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics should be examined using models of altered states as different effects/mechanisms may be involved,” they added.
The team also looked at other behaviors associated with this genetic model, specifically repetitive self-grooming and hyperactivity. During the observation periods, mice lacking the Cntnap2 gene groomed themselves much more frequently and traveled greater distances than the typical control mice. Psilocybin treatment did not alter these specific behaviors. The hyperactive and repetitive actions remained at the same elevated levels one day and one week after the drug was administered.
Psilocybin is known to exert its primary effects by activating a specific serotonin receptor in the brain, known as the 5HT2A receptor. To confirm this biological pathway, the researchers gave a group of mice a drug that blocks 5HT2A receptors fifteen minutes before administering the psilocybin. The blocking agent completely prevented the long-term increases in sociability.
The blocking agent also stopped the mice from exhibiting head twitches, which are rapid side-to-side head movements that scientists use as an indicator of a psychedelic hallucination in rodents. Interestingly, the frequency of a mouse’s head twitches right after receiving psilocybin had no correlation with how much its sociability improved weeks later. This hint led the researchers to a final, more definitive test.
To directly test if an active, awake experience is necessary for the long-term benefits, the researchers designed an experiment where mice were given psilocybin while unconscious. The animals were placed under light isoflurane anesthesia, maintaining a steady breathing rate with no movement or conscious awareness, for two hours. During this window, the animals received their injection and experienced the entirety of the drug’s acute chemical effects without an awake psychological trip.
When these anesthetized mice were later tested awake, they still exhibited the exact same long-lasting increases in sociability as the mice treated while awake. This provides evidence that the drug’s ability to rewire social behaviors is driven by basic chemical receptor interactions, rather than profound psychological realizations.
“Our observations suggest that psilocybin even when given under anesthetized state can have long-term therapeutic potential,” the researchers noted. However, they cautioned that “our preclinical work is no substitute for human studies. As far as we are aware of, human studies at various institutions are also underway for examining the therapeutic effects when psychedelics are given under anesthesia, for different psychedelic compounds.”
These animal findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that autistic adults often reported increased social engagement and reduced distress after impactful psychedelic experiences. However, that previous study relied on human self-reporting, whereas the current research measured physical approach behaviors in an animal model.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Animal models cannot perfectly replicate complex human conditions like autism spectrum disorder. Additionally, the three-chamber test relies on measuring the physical time an animal spends near another mouse, but it cannot reveal the nuance of that interaction, meaning researchers cannot easily tell if an approach is driven by friendly interest or territorial aggression.
“The lasting effects of psychedelics remain understudied, especially at the mechanistic level,” Song said. “Nevertheless there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of lasting effects across species and across components of behavior. This is something that one should be generally aware of, especially with the increase of recreational psychedelic use.”
“Next we hope to look more mechanistically at how the lasting effects are achieved/sustained,” the researchers concluded. “Our preliminary observations suggest that epigenetic mechanisms are involved.”
The study, “Psilocybin enhances sociability only in altered behavioural state and does not need an awake experience to be effective,” was authored by Chenchen Song, Tinya Chang, Tobias Buchborn, and Thomas Knöpfel.
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-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psilocybin restores social drive in an autism mouse model even under anesthesia
New research provides evidence that a single dose of psilocybin can durably increase social behavior in mice with genetic traits related to autism. The findings indicate that these behavioral benefits occur even if the mice are anesthetized during the drug’s acute effects, which suggests the subjective psychedelic experience is not strictly required. The study was published in Nature Communications.
Psilocybin is the primary psychoactive compound found in certain species of hallucinogenic mushrooms. In recent years, medical research has explored its potential to treat conditions like depression, anxiety, and addiction. Some experts also wonder if it could improve sociability, which refers to the innate drive and capacity to interact with others.
Reduced sociability is a prominent characteristic of autism spectrum disorder. It is also a feature sometimes observed in other conditions, such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. When considering how psychedelics alter brain function, scientists sometimes look at the idea of physiological set points. According to a 2026 review, psychedelics can push brain activity away from a rigid set point, making neural pathways more adaptable even after the drug wears off. This perspective suggests that psilocybin might help shift an out-of-balance behavioral state toward a more typical one.
Another ongoing debate in psychiatric research revolves around the psychedelic trip itself. The intense sensory and emotional alterations induced by psilocybin can be challenging to manage in clinical settings and sometimes provoke adverse psychological reactions. It has remained unknown whether this conscious experience is biologically necessary to achieve the drug’s long-lasting behavioral effects.
“We wanted to examine the lasting effects of a single dose of psilocybin beyond its established effect on depression as previously reported in the human literature,” Chenchen Song, a principal investigator at Nanyang Technological University Singapore, told PsyPost. Song led the research alongside Thomas Knöpfel, director of the JC STEM Laboratory for Neuronal Circuit Dynamics at Hong Kong Baptist University. “We conduct basic preclinical research, so we examined the lasting effects using a mouse model of altered sociability; the model was established by other labs and used by many independent labs internationally.”
“A long-standing debate in the psychedelic field is whether an awake subjective experience is required during the acute psychedelic phase (commonly known as a ‘psychedelic trip’) to achieve the therapeutic effects,” the researchers explained. “Since bad psychedelic trips have been linked to unfavorable behavioral outcomes, understanding this may have real-world implications for how psychedelic-assisted therapies are delivered.”
The researchers utilized a well-established group of mice bred without the Cntnap2 gene. In humans, variations in this gene are associated with autism. Mice lacking this gene naturally display lower levels of social interaction, hyperactivity, and repetitive behaviors. The team injected 30 adult mice with a single dose of either psilocybin or a saline solution to serve as a baseline comparison.
“We use social behavior as a behavioral readout of altered brain state,” the researchers noted. “Therefore we needed a mouse model that show altered social behavior that can potentially show an improvement in behavior, if any, upon treatment. It is for this reason that we used an established mouse model of autism which is known to show altered social behavior in the hands of many independent laboratories internationally.”
They emphasized that their focus was on understanding brain flexibility, not discovering a cure for a specific human condition. “The goal of this study is not to find a therapeutic intervention for autism per se, and we are not suggesting that autism, in and of itself, should be treated,” the team added.
The team assessed the animals’ social behavior using a standard three-chamber test. This behavioral measure records how much time a mouse chooses to spend near a cup containing an unfamiliar mouse compared to an empty cup. The psilocybin-treated mice displayed an increased preference for the social cup compared to the saline-treated mice. This enhanced social drive was detectable one day after the injection and lasted for at least two weeks.
“The sociability promoting effect of psilocybin in mice that show a low baseline sociability was an original discovery of our lab (first in the prenatal valproate exposure mouse model of autism and now in a genetic model of reduced sociability),” Song pointed out.
The differences in the total amount of time the mice spent exploring both cups and their overall movement around the testing area were not statistically significant. This indicates that the drug specifically improved the animals’ social motivation rather than merely increasing their general desire to explore. To ensure the animals were not just learning how to navigate the test over time, the researchers tested a separate group of 19 mice for the very first time two weeks after treatment and observed the same social enhancements.
To determine if psilocybin acts as a universal social enhancer, the researchers repeated the exact same procedure with 18 isogenic wild-type mice. These are genetically identical control mice that possess normal Cntnap2 genes and exhibit typical social behaviors. In these animals, a single dose of psilocybin did not increase sociability. In fact, the treated control mice showed a tendency toward reduced social behavior one day after the injection.
“Even though we observed therapeutic effects in the model mice (of altered social behavior), we observed a lack of beneficial effects in control mice that do not have a deficit to begin with,” the researchers explained. “We therefore think that psychedelic use in the absence of behavioral alterations have limited beneficial effects.”
“Further, given that a significant portion of preclinical psychedelic research is done using wild-type mice, we should highlight that we think it important that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics should be examined using models of altered states as different effects/mechanisms may be involved,” they added.
The team also looked at other behaviors associated with this genetic model, specifically repetitive self-grooming and hyperactivity. During the observation periods, mice lacking the Cntnap2 gene groomed themselves much more frequently and traveled greater distances than the typical control mice. Psilocybin treatment did not alter these specific behaviors. The hyperactive and repetitive actions remained at the same elevated levels one day and one week after the drug was administered.
Psilocybin is known to exert its primary effects by activating a specific serotonin receptor in the brain, known as the 5HT2A receptor. To confirm this biological pathway, the researchers gave a group of mice a drug that blocks 5HT2A receptors fifteen minutes before administering the psilocybin. The blocking agent completely prevented the long-term increases in sociability.
The blocking agent also stopped the mice from exhibiting head twitches, which are rapid side-to-side head movements that scientists use as an indicator of a psychedelic hallucination in rodents. Interestingly, the frequency of a mouse’s head twitches right after receiving psilocybin had no correlation with how much its sociability improved weeks later. This hint led the researchers to a final, more definitive test.
To directly test if an active, awake experience is necessary for the long-term benefits, the researchers designed an experiment where mice were given psilocybin while unconscious. The animals were placed under light isoflurane anesthesia, maintaining a steady breathing rate with no movement or conscious awareness, for two hours. During this window, the animals received their injection and experienced the entirety of the drug’s acute chemical effects without an awake psychological trip.
When these anesthetized mice were later tested awake, they still exhibited the exact same long-lasting increases in sociability as the mice treated while awake. This provides evidence that the drug’s ability to rewire social behaviors is driven by basic chemical receptor interactions, rather than profound psychological realizations.
“Our observations suggest that psilocybin even when given under anesthetized state can have long-term therapeutic potential,” the researchers noted. However, they cautioned that “our preclinical work is no substitute for human studies. As far as we are aware of, human studies at various institutions are also underway for examining the therapeutic effects when psychedelics are given under anesthesia, for different psychedelic compounds.”
These animal findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that autistic adults often reported increased social engagement and reduced distress after impactful psychedelic experiences. However, that previous study relied on human self-reporting, whereas the current research measured physical approach behaviors in an animal model.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Animal models cannot perfectly replicate complex human conditions like autism spectrum disorder. Additionally, the three-chamber test relies on measuring the physical time an animal spends near another mouse, but it cannot reveal the nuance of that interaction, meaning researchers cannot easily tell if an approach is driven by friendly interest or territorial aggression.
“The lasting effects of psychedelics remain understudied, especially at the mechanistic level,” Song said. “Nevertheless there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of lasting effects across species and across components of behavior. This is something that one should be generally aware of, especially with the increase of recreational psychedelic use.”
“Next we hope to look more mechanistically at how the lasting effects are achieved/sustained,” the researchers concluded. “Our preliminary observations suggest that epigenetic mechanisms are involved.”
The study, “Psilocybin enhances sociability only in altered behavioural state and does not need an awake experience to be effective,” was authored by Chenchen Song, Tinya Chang, Tobias Buchborn, and Thomas Knöpfel.
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-
DATE: September 24, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psilocybin restores social drive in an autism mouse model even under anesthesia
New research provides evidence that a single dose of psilocybin can durably increase social behavior in mice with genetic traits related to autism. The findings indicate that these behavioral benefits occur even if the mice are anesthetized during the drug’s acute effects, which suggests the subjective psychedelic experience is not strictly required. The study was published in Nature Communications.
Psilocybin is the primary psychoactive compound found in certain species of hallucinogenic mushrooms. In recent years, medical research has explored its potential to treat conditions like depression, anxiety, and addiction. Some experts also wonder if it could improve sociability, which refers to the innate drive and capacity to interact with others.
Reduced sociability is a prominent characteristic of autism spectrum disorder. It is also a feature sometimes observed in other conditions, such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. When considering how psychedelics alter brain function, scientists sometimes look at the idea of physiological set points. According to a 2026 review, psychedelics can push brain activity away from a rigid set point, making neural pathways more adaptable even after the drug wears off. This perspective suggests that psilocybin might help shift an out-of-balance behavioral state toward a more typical one.
Another ongoing debate in psychiatric research revolves around the psychedelic trip itself. The intense sensory and emotional alterations induced by psilocybin can be challenging to manage in clinical settings and sometimes provoke adverse psychological reactions. It has remained unknown whether this conscious experience is biologically necessary to achieve the drug’s long-lasting behavioral effects.
“We wanted to examine the lasting effects of a single dose of psilocybin beyond its established effect on depression as previously reported in the human literature,” Chenchen Song, a principal investigator at Nanyang Technological University Singapore, told PsyPost. Song led the research alongside Thomas Knöpfel, director of the JC STEM Laboratory for Neuronal Circuit Dynamics at Hong Kong Baptist University. “We conduct basic preclinical research, so we examined the lasting effects using a mouse model of altered sociability; the model was established by other labs and used by many independent labs internationally.”
“A long-standing debate in the psychedelic field is whether an awake subjective experience is required during the acute psychedelic phase (commonly known as a ‘psychedelic trip’) to achieve the therapeutic effects,” the researchers explained. “Since bad psychedelic trips have been linked to unfavorable behavioral outcomes, understanding this may have real-world implications for how psychedelic-assisted therapies are delivered.”
The researchers utilized a well-established group of mice bred without the Cntnap2 gene. In humans, variations in this gene are associated with autism. Mice lacking this gene naturally display lower levels of social interaction, hyperactivity, and repetitive behaviors. The team injected 30 adult mice with a single dose of either psilocybin or a saline solution to serve as a baseline comparison.
“We use social behavior as a behavioral readout of altered brain state,” the researchers noted. “Therefore we needed a mouse model that show altered social behavior that can potentially show an improvement in behavior, if any, upon treatment. It is for this reason that we used an established mouse model of autism which is known to show altered social behavior in the hands of many independent laboratories internationally.”
They emphasized that their focus was on understanding brain flexibility, not discovering a cure for a specific human condition. “The goal of this study is not to find a therapeutic intervention for autism per se, and we are not suggesting that autism, in and of itself, should be treated,” the team added.
The team assessed the animals’ social behavior using a standard three-chamber test. This behavioral measure records how much time a mouse chooses to spend near a cup containing an unfamiliar mouse compared to an empty cup. The psilocybin-treated mice displayed an increased preference for the social cup compared to the saline-treated mice. This enhanced social drive was detectable one day after the injection and lasted for at least two weeks.
“The sociability promoting effect of psilocybin in mice that show a low baseline sociability was an original discovery of our lab (first in the prenatal valproate exposure mouse model of autism and now in a genetic model of reduced sociability),” Song pointed out.
The differences in the total amount of time the mice spent exploring both cups and their overall movement around the testing area were not statistically significant. This indicates that the drug specifically improved the animals’ social motivation rather than merely increasing their general desire to explore. To ensure the animals were not just learning how to navigate the test over time, the researchers tested a separate group of 19 mice for the very first time two weeks after treatment and observed the same social enhancements.
To determine if psilocybin acts as a universal social enhancer, the researchers repeated the exact same procedure with 18 isogenic wild-type mice. These are genetically identical control mice that possess normal Cntnap2 genes and exhibit typical social behaviors. In these animals, a single dose of psilocybin did not increase sociability. In fact, the treated control mice showed a tendency toward reduced social behavior one day after the injection.
“Even though we observed therapeutic effects in the model mice (of altered social behavior), we observed a lack of beneficial effects in control mice that do not have a deficit to begin with,” the researchers explained. “We therefore think that psychedelic use in the absence of behavioral alterations have limited beneficial effects.”
“Further, given that a significant portion of preclinical psychedelic research is done using wild-type mice, we should highlight that we think it important that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics should be examined using models of altered states as different effects/mechanisms may be involved,” they added.
The team also looked at other behaviors associated with this genetic model, specifically repetitive self-grooming and hyperactivity. During the observation periods, mice lacking the Cntnap2 gene groomed themselves much more frequently and traveled greater distances than the typical control mice. Psilocybin treatment did not alter these specific behaviors. The hyperactive and repetitive actions remained at the same elevated levels one day and one week after the drug was administered.
Psilocybin is known to exert its primary effects by activating a specific serotonin receptor in the brain, known as the 5HT2A receptor. To confirm this biological pathway, the researchers gave a group of mice a drug that blocks 5HT2A receptors fifteen minutes before administering the psilocybin. The blocking agent completely prevented the long-term increases in sociability.
The blocking agent also stopped the mice from exhibiting head twitches, which are rapid side-to-side head movements that scientists use as an indicator of a psychedelic hallucination in rodents. Interestingly, the frequency of a mouse’s head twitches right after receiving psilocybin had no correlation with how much its sociability improved weeks later. This hint led the researchers to a final, more definitive test.
To directly test if an active, awake experience is necessary for the long-term benefits, the researchers designed an experiment where mice were given psilocybin while unconscious. The animals were placed under light isoflurane anesthesia, maintaining a steady breathing rate with no movement or conscious awareness, for two hours. During this window, the animals received their injection and experienced the entirety of the drug’s acute chemical effects without an awake psychological trip.
When these anesthetized mice were later tested awake, they still exhibited the exact same long-lasting increases in sociability as the mice treated while awake. This provides evidence that the drug’s ability to rewire social behaviors is driven by basic chemical receptor interactions, rather than profound psychological realizations.
“Our observations suggest that psilocybin even when given under anesthetized state can have long-term therapeutic potential,” the researchers noted. However, they cautioned that “our preclinical work is no substitute for human studies. As far as we are aware of, human studies at various institutions are also underway for examining the therapeutic effects when psychedelics are given under anesthesia, for different psychedelic compounds.”
These animal findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that autistic adults often reported increased social engagement and reduced distress after impactful psychedelic experiences. However, that previous study relied on human self-reporting, whereas the current research measured physical approach behaviors in an animal model.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Animal models cannot perfectly replicate complex human conditions like autism spectrum disorder. Additionally, the three-chamber test relies on measuring the physical time an animal spends near another mouse, but it cannot reveal the nuance of that interaction, meaning researchers cannot easily tell if an approach is driven by friendly interest or territorial aggression.
“The lasting effects of psychedelics remain understudied, especially at the mechanistic level,” Song said. “Nevertheless there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of lasting effects across species and across components of behavior. This is something that one should be generally aware of, especially with the increase of recreational psychedelic use.”
“Next we hope to look more mechanistically at how the lasting effects are achieved/sustained,” the researchers concluded. “Our preliminary observations suggest that epigenetic mechanisms are involved.”
The study, “Psilocybin enhances sociability only in altered behavioural state and does not need an awake experience to be effective,” was authored by Chenchen Song, Tinya Chang, Tobias Buchborn, and Thomas Knöpfel.
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-
DATE: September 24, 2026 at 05:01AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEEDTITLE: Should I Reveal That My Partner Died by Suicide?
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/well/mind/suicide-secrecy-partner-loss.html
Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a reader who believes her partner’s family secrets may have contributed to his death.
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/well/mind/suicide-secrecy-partner-loss.html
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-
DATE: September 24, 2026 at 05:01AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEEDTITLE: Should I Reveal That My Partner Died by Suicide?
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/well/mind/suicide-secrecy-partner-loss.html
Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a reader who believes her partner’s family secrets may have contributed to his death.
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/well/mind/suicide-secrecy-partner-loss.html
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-
DATE: September 24, 2026 at 05:01AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEEDTITLE: Should I Reveal That My Partner Died by Suicide?
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/well/mind/suicide-secrecy-partner-loss.html
Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a reader who believes her partner’s family secrets may have contributed to his death.
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/well/mind/suicide-secrecy-partner-loss.html
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-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 11:58PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEEDTITLE: More REM sleep linked to lower risk of 83 diseases
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260923035930.htm
A large study tracking more than 95,000 people suggests that how you sleep may be linked to your risk of developing dozens of diseases. People who spent more time in REM sleep had lower risks of 83 conditions, including dementia, heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease, while more deep sleep was associated with lower risks of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and major depression.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260923035930.htm
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-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 11:58PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEEDTITLE: More REM sleep linked to lower risk of 83 diseases
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260923035930.htm
A large study tracking more than 95,000 people suggests that how you sleep may be linked to your risk of developing dozens of diseases. People who spent more time in REM sleep had lower risks of 83 conditions, including dementia, heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease, while more deep sleep was associated with lower risks of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and major depression.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260923035930.htm
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #REMsleep #SleepHealth #DementiaPrevention #HeartHealth #ParkinsonsDisease #DiabetesPrevention #MentalHealthAwareness #SleepScience #HealthySleepHabits #WellnessResearch
-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 11:58PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEEDTITLE: More REM sleep linked to lower risk of 83 diseases
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260923035930.htm
A large study tracking more than 95,000 people suggests that how you sleep may be linked to your risk of developing dozens of diseases. People who spent more time in REM sleep had lower risks of 83 conditions, including dementia, heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease, while more deep sleep was associated with lower risks of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and major depression.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260923035930.htm
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-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Alzheimer’s proteins predict early brain shrinkage before dementia symptoms appear
An analysis of the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study data found that, in older individuals with preserved cognition, amyloid-beta accumulation in the brain can predict future brain atrophy. In women, the association was stronger for predicting atrophy of the temporal region of the brain. It was also stronger in the frontal and lateral-temporal regions as well as the hippocampus in carriers of at least one version (allele) of the APOE-ε4 gene, a gene associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The paper was published in NeuroImage: Clinical.
As people reach advanced age, their memory, attention, and mental processing speed tend to gradually worsen. This is a normal part of aging. However, in some people these changes can be more severe, indicating that some type of dementia or neurodegenerative disease might be developing.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. It gradually disrupts memory, reasoning, language, and the ability to function independently. Other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and frontotemporal dementia, produce similar symptoms but arise from partly different biological processes.
One of the hallmark features of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of amyloid-beta protein into plaques between brain cells. Another important change is the buildup of abnormal tau protein inside neurons, which is closely associated with neuronal damage and brain atrophy. These pathological processes can begin many years before noticeable cognitive symptoms appear.
Study author Leonard Pieperhoff and his colleagues wanted to explore the influence of global accumulation levels of amyloid-beta in the brain on regional brain atrophy. To do this, they examined regional changes in brain volume and thickness in a large research sample composed of older adults without dementia.
They also explored whether the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and subsequent brain atrophy depends on an individual’s sex and on whether the person is a carrier of the APOE-ε4 gene. APOE-ε4 is a gene variant that increases a person’s genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. People with this gene variant also tend to develop Alzheimer’s disease earlier in life.
These researchers analyzed data from the Amyloid Imaging to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease (AMYPAD) Prognostic Natural History Study (PNHS). The study included 1,329 participants who were all required to have no history of dementia and be above 50 years of age at the start. Participants’ average age was 68.2 years. 56% were women. 40% had at least one version of the APOE-ε4 gene.
All participants completed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of their brains. A subgroup of 684 participants completed these scans at least once again in the years after the start. The median follow-up time for these scans was 3.4 years later.
Results showed that participants’ brain volumes generally shrank over time, suggesting that there was widespread atrophy of the brain due to aging-related factors. This effect was the most prominent in temporal and parietal regions of the brain as well as in the hippocampus and amygdala. Similar reductions were seen in cortical thickness, although the posterior and anterior cingulate cortices showed thickening over time.
Higher amyloid-beta concentrations were associated with lower volumes of multiple regions of the brain including the lateral-temporal lobes, precuneus, posterior cingulate, amygdala, and hippocampus. Cortical thickness of these regions was also associated with amyloid-beta concentrations in the same way.
Across time, higher amyloid-beta concentrations in the cortex were associated with widespread decrease of volume and thickness at follow-up scans, across different brain regions. The strongest effects were observed in the posterior cingulate, fusiform, and parahippocampal gyri, as well as the hippocampus and amygdala. Notably, atrophy in the fusiform gyrus was predicted by amyloid-beta independently of tau protein levels. This association was stronger in women when temporal regions of the brain were concerned. For carriers of at least one variant of the APOE-ε4 gene, these associations were stronger in frontal and lateral-temporal regions and the hippocampus.
“Our findings suggest that in older adults with mostly preserved cognition, baseline Aβ-PET [amyloid-beta concentrations assessed using PET] predicts future brain atrophy, with fusiform atrophy showing independence from tau pathology [accumulation of tau proteins in the brain] and Aβ-dependent atrophy being exacerbated in region-dependent manners in females and APOE-ε4 carriers. Regional cortical volume and thickness may serve as sensitive markers for early Aβ-related neurodegeneration and aid in stratifying risk in AD [Alzheimer’s disease] prevention trials,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the neural correlates of dementia and age-related brain atrophy. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any causal inferences to be derived from the results.
The paper, “Amyloid PET predicts atrophy in older adults without dementia: Results from the AMYPAD Prognostic & Natural History study,” was authored by Leonard Pieperhoff, Luigi Lorenzini, Sophie Mastenbroek, Mario Tranfa, Mahnaz Shekari, Alle Meije Wink, Robin Wolz, Sylke Grootoonk, Craig Ritchie, Mercè Boada, Marta Marquié, Wiesje van der Flier, Rik Vandenberghe, Bernard J. Hanseeuw, Pablo Martínez-Lage, Pierre Payoux, Pieter Jelle Visser, Michael Schöll, Giovanni B. Frisoni, Andrew Stephens, Christopher Buckley, Gill Farrar, Frank Jessen, Oriol Grau-Rivera, Juan Domingo Gispert, David Vállez García, Henk Mutsaerts, Frederik Barkhof, and Lyduine E. Collij, on behalf of the AMYPAD consortium.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AlzheimersDisease #AmyloidBeta #AβAtlas #APOE4 #BrainAtrophy #AmyloidPET #Neurodegeneration #FusiformGyrus #Hippocampus #AMYPAD
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Alzheimer’s proteins predict early brain shrinkage before dementia symptoms appear
An analysis of the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study data found that, in older individuals with preserved cognition, amyloid-beta accumulation in the brain can predict future brain atrophy. In women, the association was stronger for predicting atrophy of the temporal region of the brain. It was also stronger in the frontal and lateral-temporal regions as well as the hippocampus in carriers of at least one version (allele) of the APOE-ε4 gene, a gene associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The paper was published in NeuroImage: Clinical.
As people reach advanced age, their memory, attention, and mental processing speed tend to gradually worsen. This is a normal part of aging. However, in some people these changes can be more severe, indicating that some type of dementia or neurodegenerative disease might be developing.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. It gradually disrupts memory, reasoning, language, and the ability to function independently. Other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and frontotemporal dementia, produce similar symptoms but arise from partly different biological processes.
One of the hallmark features of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of amyloid-beta protein into plaques between brain cells. Another important change is the buildup of abnormal tau protein inside neurons, which is closely associated with neuronal damage and brain atrophy. These pathological processes can begin many years before noticeable cognitive symptoms appear.
Study author Leonard Pieperhoff and his colleagues wanted to explore the influence of global accumulation levels of amyloid-beta in the brain on regional brain atrophy. To do this, they examined regional changes in brain volume and thickness in a large research sample composed of older adults without dementia.
They also explored whether the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and subsequent brain atrophy depends on an individual’s sex and on whether the person is a carrier of the APOE-ε4 gene. APOE-ε4 is a gene variant that increases a person’s genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. People with this gene variant also tend to develop Alzheimer’s disease earlier in life.
These researchers analyzed data from the Amyloid Imaging to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease (AMYPAD) Prognostic Natural History Study (PNHS). The study included 1,329 participants who were all required to have no history of dementia and be above 50 years of age at the start. Participants’ average age was 68.2 years. 56% were women. 40% had at least one version of the APOE-ε4 gene.
All participants completed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of their brains. A subgroup of 684 participants completed these scans at least once again in the years after the start. The median follow-up time for these scans was 3.4 years later.
Results showed that participants’ brain volumes generally shrank over time, suggesting that there was widespread atrophy of the brain due to aging-related factors. This effect was the most prominent in temporal and parietal regions of the brain as well as in the hippocampus and amygdala. Similar reductions were seen in cortical thickness, although the posterior and anterior cingulate cortices showed thickening over time.
Higher amyloid-beta concentrations were associated with lower volumes of multiple regions of the brain including the lateral-temporal lobes, precuneus, posterior cingulate, amygdala, and hippocampus. Cortical thickness of these regions was also associated with amyloid-beta concentrations in the same way.
Across time, higher amyloid-beta concentrations in the cortex were associated with widespread decrease of volume and thickness at follow-up scans, across different brain regions. The strongest effects were observed in the posterior cingulate, fusiform, and parahippocampal gyri, as well as the hippocampus and amygdala. Notably, atrophy in the fusiform gyrus was predicted by amyloid-beta independently of tau protein levels. This association was stronger in women when temporal regions of the brain were concerned. For carriers of at least one variant of the APOE-ε4 gene, these associations were stronger in frontal and lateral-temporal regions and the hippocampus.
“Our findings suggest that in older adults with mostly preserved cognition, baseline Aβ-PET [amyloid-beta concentrations assessed using PET] predicts future brain atrophy, with fusiform atrophy showing independence from tau pathology [accumulation of tau proteins in the brain] and Aβ-dependent atrophy being exacerbated in region-dependent manners in females and APOE-ε4 carriers. Regional cortical volume and thickness may serve as sensitive markers for early Aβ-related neurodegeneration and aid in stratifying risk in AD [Alzheimer’s disease] prevention trials,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the neural correlates of dementia and age-related brain atrophy. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any causal inferences to be derived from the results.
The paper, “Amyloid PET predicts atrophy in older adults without dementia: Results from the AMYPAD Prognostic & Natural History study,” was authored by Leonard Pieperhoff, Luigi Lorenzini, Sophie Mastenbroek, Mario Tranfa, Mahnaz Shekari, Alle Meije Wink, Robin Wolz, Sylke Grootoonk, Craig Ritchie, Mercè Boada, Marta Marquié, Wiesje van der Flier, Rik Vandenberghe, Bernard J. Hanseeuw, Pablo Martínez-Lage, Pierre Payoux, Pieter Jelle Visser, Michael Schöll, Giovanni B. Frisoni, Andrew Stephens, Christopher Buckley, Gill Farrar, Frank Jessen, Oriol Grau-Rivera, Juan Domingo Gispert, David Vállez García, Henk Mutsaerts, Frederik Barkhof, and Lyduine E. Collij, on behalf of the AMYPAD consortium.
-------------------------------------------------
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DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Alzheimer’s proteins predict early brain shrinkage before dementia symptoms appear
An analysis of the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study data found that, in older individuals with preserved cognition, amyloid-beta accumulation in the brain can predict future brain atrophy. In women, the association was stronger for predicting atrophy of the temporal region of the brain. It was also stronger in the frontal and lateral-temporal regions as well as the hippocampus in carriers of at least one version (allele) of the APOE-ε4 gene, a gene associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The paper was published in NeuroImage: Clinical.
As people reach advanced age, their memory, attention, and mental processing speed tend to gradually worsen. This is a normal part of aging. However, in some people these changes can be more severe, indicating that some type of dementia or neurodegenerative disease might be developing.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. It gradually disrupts memory, reasoning, language, and the ability to function independently. Other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and frontotemporal dementia, produce similar symptoms but arise from partly different biological processes.
One of the hallmark features of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of amyloid-beta protein into plaques between brain cells. Another important change is the buildup of abnormal tau protein inside neurons, which is closely associated with neuronal damage and brain atrophy. These pathological processes can begin many years before noticeable cognitive symptoms appear.
Study author Leonard Pieperhoff and his colleagues wanted to explore the influence of global accumulation levels of amyloid-beta in the brain on regional brain atrophy. To do this, they examined regional changes in brain volume and thickness in a large research sample composed of older adults without dementia.
They also explored whether the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and subsequent brain atrophy depends on an individual’s sex and on whether the person is a carrier of the APOE-ε4 gene. APOE-ε4 is a gene variant that increases a person’s genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. People with this gene variant also tend to develop Alzheimer’s disease earlier in life.
These researchers analyzed data from the Amyloid Imaging to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease (AMYPAD) Prognostic Natural History Study (PNHS). The study included 1,329 participants who were all required to have no history of dementia and be above 50 years of age at the start. Participants’ average age was 68.2 years. 56% were women. 40% had at least one version of the APOE-ε4 gene.
All participants completed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of their brains. A subgroup of 684 participants completed these scans at least once again in the years after the start. The median follow-up time for these scans was 3.4 years later.
Results showed that participants’ brain volumes generally shrank over time, suggesting that there was widespread atrophy of the brain due to aging-related factors. This effect was the most prominent in temporal and parietal regions of the brain as well as in the hippocampus and amygdala. Similar reductions were seen in cortical thickness, although the posterior and anterior cingulate cortices showed thickening over time.
Higher amyloid-beta concentrations were associated with lower volumes of multiple regions of the brain including the lateral-temporal lobes, precuneus, posterior cingulate, amygdala, and hippocampus. Cortical thickness of these regions was also associated with amyloid-beta concentrations in the same way.
Across time, higher amyloid-beta concentrations in the cortex were associated with widespread decrease of volume and thickness at follow-up scans, across different brain regions. The strongest effects were observed in the posterior cingulate, fusiform, and parahippocampal gyri, as well as the hippocampus and amygdala. Notably, atrophy in the fusiform gyrus was predicted by amyloid-beta independently of tau protein levels. This association was stronger in women when temporal regions of the brain were concerned. For carriers of at least one variant of the APOE-ε4 gene, these associations were stronger in frontal and lateral-temporal regions and the hippocampus.
“Our findings suggest that in older adults with mostly preserved cognition, baseline Aβ-PET [amyloid-beta concentrations assessed using PET] predicts future brain atrophy, with fusiform atrophy showing independence from tau pathology [accumulation of tau proteins in the brain] and Aβ-dependent atrophy being exacerbated in region-dependent manners in females and APOE-ε4 carriers. Regional cortical volume and thickness may serve as sensitive markers for early Aβ-related neurodegeneration and aid in stratifying risk in AD [Alzheimer’s disease] prevention trials,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the neural correlates of dementia and age-related brain atrophy. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any causal inferences to be derived from the results.
The paper, “Amyloid PET predicts atrophy in older adults without dementia: Results from the AMYPAD Prognostic & Natural History study,” was authored by Leonard Pieperhoff, Luigi Lorenzini, Sophie Mastenbroek, Mario Tranfa, Mahnaz Shekari, Alle Meije Wink, Robin Wolz, Sylke Grootoonk, Craig Ritchie, Mercè Boada, Marta Marquié, Wiesje van der Flier, Rik Vandenberghe, Bernard J. Hanseeuw, Pablo Martínez-Lage, Pierre Payoux, Pieter Jelle Visser, Michael Schöll, Giovanni B. Frisoni, Andrew Stephens, Christopher Buckley, Gill Farrar, Frank Jessen, Oriol Grau-Rivera, Juan Domingo Gispert, David Vállez García, Henk Mutsaerts, Frederik Barkhof, and Lyduine E. Collij, on behalf of the AMYPAD consortium.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AlzheimersDisease #AmyloidBeta #AβAtlas #APOE4 #BrainAtrophy #AmyloidPET #Neurodegeneration #FusiformGyrus #Hippocampus #AMYPAD
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Fear of the unknown is linked to lower life satisfaction and heightened death anxiety
New psychology research indicates that a tendency to find unpredictable situations highly distressing is linked to lower overall life satisfaction. This connection appears to be driven by existential factors, with an inability to tolerate uncertainty relating to a reduced sense of life purpose and a heightened fear of death. The study was published in Psychological Reports.
Unpredictability is an inevitable part of human existence, ranging from daily inconveniences to global crises. For some people, navigating these unknowns is manageable. For others, ambiguous situations trigger a response known as intolerance of uncertainty. This psychological trait involves perceiving unpredictable events as threatening, unacceptable, and highly distressing.
Past research has established that an intolerance of uncertainty is associated with worry and anxiety. However, less attention has been given to how this trait relates to a broader evaluation of a person’s existence, known as life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is a subjective assessment of how well one’s current circumstances align with their personal goals and standards.
The research team wanted to explore whether existential concerns act as a bridge between a fear of the unknown and reduced life satisfaction. “In today’s world, individuals face unprecedented levels of unpredictability—ranging from global crises and economic shifts to personal life challenges,” Osman Hatun, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological Counseling and Guidance at Marmara University in Türkiye, told PsyPost. “While prior research has extensively shown how intolerance of uncertainty fuels anxiety and distress, very little attention was given to how it impacts overall life satisfaction through existential processes.”
Hatun and his colleagues focused on two key existential processes: meaning in life and death anxiety. Meaning in life refers to the feeling that one’s existence has purpose, value, and a sense of direction. Death anxiety involves a persistent uneasiness or fear regarding mortality, the process of dying, and what happens after death.
Because death represents the most extreme uncontrollable and uncertain event, the researchers suspected that individuals who struggle with unpredictability might be especially vulnerable to death anxiety. They proposed a potential pathway where an intolerance of uncertainty relates to a weakened sense of meaning in life, which in turn leaves a person more vulnerable to death anxiety, resulting in lower life satisfaction.
To explore these ideas, the researchers recruited 485 adults living in Türkiye through social media platforms. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 63, with an average age of about 32. Most of the sample identified as female, and all participants reported having experienced at least one adverse life event, such as a natural disaster, severe illness, or the loss of a loved one.
The volunteers completed a series of online questionnaires designed to measure the four central concepts of the study. They answered questions about how upsetting they find unforeseen events to assess their intolerance of uncertainty. To evaluate their meaning in life, they rated how strongly they felt their lives had purpose.
The participants also completed a death anxiety scale, answering questions about how much the ambiguity and inevitability of dying made them anxious. Finally, they rated their agreement with statements regarding their overall life satisfaction, providing a snapshot of their subjective well-being. The researchers then used statistical modeling techniques to observe how these four variables interacted with one another, while accounting for the participants’ age, sex, and number of prior adverse life events.
The results indicated a negative association between an intolerance of uncertainty and life satisfaction. In other words, individuals who found ambiguity highly distressing tended to report lower satisfaction with their lives. The statistical models provided evidence for the researchers’ proposed existential pathway.
A higher intolerance of uncertainty was linked to a lower sense of meaning in life. A reduced sense of meaning in life was, in turn, associated with greater death anxiety. Finally, higher death anxiety was related to lower life satisfaction. Together, an intolerance of uncertainty and meaning in life accounted for 27 percent of the variance in death anxiety among the participants. The full model explained 43 percent of the variance in life satisfaction.
Hatun noted that the size of these effects is highly meaningful. “When looking at statistical models, individual indirect pathways might appear modest in number, but the overall picture reveals strong practical significance,” he said. “In psychological research, explaining nearly half of someone’s life satisfaction through a set of related factors is quite substantial.”
The researchers were also struck by the robustness of these existential links. “It was striking that this sequential existential path remained significant even after controlling for participants’ actual cumulative experiences with adverse life events, such as natural disasters, severe illness, or bereavement,” Hatun added. “This suggests that how a person mentally relates to uncertainty can be just as decisive for their life satisfaction as the objective hardships they have lived through.”
The findings suggest that the emotional burden of uncertainty extends beyond everyday worry. People who have difficulty tolerating the unknown may find it harder to maintain a coherent and purposeful view of life. Without a strong sense of purpose to act as a psychological buffer, they may become more preoccupied with mortality, which takes a toll on their overall contentment.
This dynamic highlights the importance of anchoring oneself in everyday purpose. “Because we cannot eliminate uncertainty from the world, trying to control every unknown is often a losing battle,” the researchers explained. “Instead, our findings suggest that the key to protecting our well-being lies in actively cultivating meaning and purpose in our daily lives—whether through core values, relationships, or community connections.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which examined how self-determination and psychological need satisfaction buffer death anxiety rather than modeling an intolerance of uncertainty. That study similarly found that death-related anxiety is linked to lower life satisfaction. Additionally, a 2021 study of older Hindu pilgrims indicated that experiencing a greater sense of meaning in life is linked to lower death anxiety, mirroring the associations found in the new Turkish sample.
However, the results are in tension with a study covered by PsyPost in 2023. That research found that for individuals with high self-alienation, a greater meaning in life was actually associated with heightened death anxiety. The new study, which evaluated a sample of Turkish adults and focused on an overall pathway rather than looking at specific interactions with self-alienation, did not model this reversed effect.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on data collected at a single point in time, meaning it is impossible to determine the true sequence of events. The researchers can observe that an intolerance of uncertainty and life satisfaction are linked through meaning in life and death anxiety, but they cannot prove that one factor directly causes the other to change. Hatun emphasized this constraint, noting that “cross-sectional data show indirect associations rather than definitive cause-and-effect over time.”
He also cautioned against overinterpreting the findings as a mandate for complete control. “A common misinterpretation we would want to preempt is the belief that intolerance of uncertainty directly or inevitably ruins a person’s life satisfaction, or that individuals must eliminate all uncertainty from their lives to be happy,” Hatun said. “Eliminating uncertainty is neither realistic nor necessary; what matters most is the existential buffer—how uncertainty influences our sense of meaning and purpose.”
Another caveat is that the data came entirely from self-report questionnaires, which rely on individuals accurately perceiving and reporting their own feelings. The sample also consisted exclusively of people who had experienced at least one adverse life event. Because trauma and loss can deeply influence existential thoughts, these patterns might look slightly different in a population without a history of severe adversity.
There is also the cultural context to consider when interpreting these results. In Türkiye, family obligations, community connections, and spiritual beliefs often heavily shape a person’s sense of meaning and their attitudes toward mortality. Hatun noted that because the sample consisted of Turkish adults recruited online, “caution should be exercised when generalizing these conclusions across diverse global populations without longitudinal replication.”
To build on this work, the research team hopes to trace these mechanisms in real time and test meaning-centered interventions. “We plan to examine these pathways across diverse cultural contexts and developmental stages, specifically exploring how cultural meaning frameworks—such as family connectedness and spiritual worldviews—serve as protective buffers,” Hatun said. Ultimately, the researchers hope to inform clinical approaches, such as Logotherapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, to help individuals cultivate resilience in an unpredictable world.
Above all, they hope the research fosters a more compassionate view of human struggles with the unknown. “We would like to emphasize that facing uncertainty is a fundamental part of the human condition, rather than an individual flaw or weakness,” Hatun added. “Our study highlights that while unpredictable events are inevitable, how we actively construct meaning in our daily lives provides an essential psychological anchor.”
The study, “Intolerance of Uncertainty and Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Roles of Meaning in Life and Death Anxiety,” was authored by Osman Hatun, Mark D. Griffiths, and Tuğba Türk Kurtça.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #IntoleranceOfUncertainty #LifeSatisfaction #DeathAnxiety #MeaningInLife #ExistentialPsychology #MentalHealthResearch #Unpredictability # PurposeInLife #PsychologyStudies #PsychologicalWellBeing
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Fear of the unknown is linked to lower life satisfaction and heightened death anxiety
New psychology research indicates that a tendency to find unpredictable situations highly distressing is linked to lower overall life satisfaction. This connection appears to be driven by existential factors, with an inability to tolerate uncertainty relating to a reduced sense of life purpose and a heightened fear of death. The study was published in Psychological Reports.
Unpredictability is an inevitable part of human existence, ranging from daily inconveniences to global crises. For some people, navigating these unknowns is manageable. For others, ambiguous situations trigger a response known as intolerance of uncertainty. This psychological trait involves perceiving unpredictable events as threatening, unacceptable, and highly distressing.
Past research has established that an intolerance of uncertainty is associated with worry and anxiety. However, less attention has been given to how this trait relates to a broader evaluation of a person’s existence, known as life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is a subjective assessment of how well one’s current circumstances align with their personal goals and standards.
The research team wanted to explore whether existential concerns act as a bridge between a fear of the unknown and reduced life satisfaction. “In today’s world, individuals face unprecedented levels of unpredictability—ranging from global crises and economic shifts to personal life challenges,” Osman Hatun, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological Counseling and Guidance at Marmara University in Türkiye, told PsyPost. “While prior research has extensively shown how intolerance of uncertainty fuels anxiety and distress, very little attention was given to how it impacts overall life satisfaction through existential processes.”
Hatun and his colleagues focused on two key existential processes: meaning in life and death anxiety. Meaning in life refers to the feeling that one’s existence has purpose, value, and a sense of direction. Death anxiety involves a persistent uneasiness or fear regarding mortality, the process of dying, and what happens after death.
Because death represents the most extreme uncontrollable and uncertain event, the researchers suspected that individuals who struggle with unpredictability might be especially vulnerable to death anxiety. They proposed a potential pathway where an intolerance of uncertainty relates to a weakened sense of meaning in life, which in turn leaves a person more vulnerable to death anxiety, resulting in lower life satisfaction.
To explore these ideas, the researchers recruited 485 adults living in Türkiye through social media platforms. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 63, with an average age of about 32. Most of the sample identified as female, and all participants reported having experienced at least one adverse life event, such as a natural disaster, severe illness, or the loss of a loved one.
The volunteers completed a series of online questionnaires designed to measure the four central concepts of the study. They answered questions about how upsetting they find unforeseen events to assess their intolerance of uncertainty. To evaluate their meaning in life, they rated how strongly they felt their lives had purpose.
The participants also completed a death anxiety scale, answering questions about how much the ambiguity and inevitability of dying made them anxious. Finally, they rated their agreement with statements regarding their overall life satisfaction, providing a snapshot of their subjective well-being. The researchers then used statistical modeling techniques to observe how these four variables interacted with one another, while accounting for the participants’ age, sex, and number of prior adverse life events.
The results indicated a negative association between an intolerance of uncertainty and life satisfaction. In other words, individuals who found ambiguity highly distressing tended to report lower satisfaction with their lives. The statistical models provided evidence for the researchers’ proposed existential pathway.
A higher intolerance of uncertainty was linked to a lower sense of meaning in life. A reduced sense of meaning in life was, in turn, associated with greater death anxiety. Finally, higher death anxiety was related to lower life satisfaction. Together, an intolerance of uncertainty and meaning in life accounted for 27 percent of the variance in death anxiety among the participants. The full model explained 43 percent of the variance in life satisfaction.
Hatun noted that the size of these effects is highly meaningful. “When looking at statistical models, individual indirect pathways might appear modest in number, but the overall picture reveals strong practical significance,” he said. “In psychological research, explaining nearly half of someone’s life satisfaction through a set of related factors is quite substantial.”
The researchers were also struck by the robustness of these existential links. “It was striking that this sequential existential path remained significant even after controlling for participants’ actual cumulative experiences with adverse life events, such as natural disasters, severe illness, or bereavement,” Hatun added. “This suggests that how a person mentally relates to uncertainty can be just as decisive for their life satisfaction as the objective hardships they have lived through.”
The findings suggest that the emotional burden of uncertainty extends beyond everyday worry. People who have difficulty tolerating the unknown may find it harder to maintain a coherent and purposeful view of life. Without a strong sense of purpose to act as a psychological buffer, they may become more preoccupied with mortality, which takes a toll on their overall contentment.
This dynamic highlights the importance of anchoring oneself in everyday purpose. “Because we cannot eliminate uncertainty from the world, trying to control every unknown is often a losing battle,” the researchers explained. “Instead, our findings suggest that the key to protecting our well-being lies in actively cultivating meaning and purpose in our daily lives—whether through core values, relationships, or community connections.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which examined how self-determination and psychological need satisfaction buffer death anxiety rather than modeling an intolerance of uncertainty. That study similarly found that death-related anxiety is linked to lower life satisfaction. Additionally, a 2021 study of older Hindu pilgrims indicated that experiencing a greater sense of meaning in life is linked to lower death anxiety, mirroring the associations found in the new Turkish sample.
However, the results are in tension with a study covered by PsyPost in 2023. That research found that for individuals with high self-alienation, a greater meaning in life was actually associated with heightened death anxiety. The new study, which evaluated a sample of Turkish adults and focused on an overall pathway rather than looking at specific interactions with self-alienation, did not model this reversed effect.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on data collected at a single point in time, meaning it is impossible to determine the true sequence of events. The researchers can observe that an intolerance of uncertainty and life satisfaction are linked through meaning in life and death anxiety, but they cannot prove that one factor directly causes the other to change. Hatun emphasized this constraint, noting that “cross-sectional data show indirect associations rather than definitive cause-and-effect over time.”
He also cautioned against overinterpreting the findings as a mandate for complete control. “A common misinterpretation we would want to preempt is the belief that intolerance of uncertainty directly or inevitably ruins a person’s life satisfaction, or that individuals must eliminate all uncertainty from their lives to be happy,” Hatun said. “Eliminating uncertainty is neither realistic nor necessary; what matters most is the existential buffer—how uncertainty influences our sense of meaning and purpose.”
Another caveat is that the data came entirely from self-report questionnaires, which rely on individuals accurately perceiving and reporting their own feelings. The sample also consisted exclusively of people who had experienced at least one adverse life event. Because trauma and loss can deeply influence existential thoughts, these patterns might look slightly different in a population without a history of severe adversity.
There is also the cultural context to consider when interpreting these results. In Türkiye, family obligations, community connections, and spiritual beliefs often heavily shape a person’s sense of meaning and their attitudes toward mortality. Hatun noted that because the sample consisted of Turkish adults recruited online, “caution should be exercised when generalizing these conclusions across diverse global populations without longitudinal replication.”
To build on this work, the research team hopes to trace these mechanisms in real time and test meaning-centered interventions. “We plan to examine these pathways across diverse cultural contexts and developmental stages, specifically exploring how cultural meaning frameworks—such as family connectedness and spiritual worldviews—serve as protective buffers,” Hatun said. Ultimately, the researchers hope to inform clinical approaches, such as Logotherapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, to help individuals cultivate resilience in an unpredictable world.
Above all, they hope the research fosters a more compassionate view of human struggles with the unknown. “We would like to emphasize that facing uncertainty is a fundamental part of the human condition, rather than an individual flaw or weakness,” Hatun added. “Our study highlights that while unpredictable events are inevitable, how we actively construct meaning in our daily lives provides an essential psychological anchor.”
The study, “Intolerance of Uncertainty and Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Roles of Meaning in Life and Death Anxiety,” was authored by Osman Hatun, Mark D. Griffiths, and Tuğba Türk Kurtça.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #IntoleranceOfUncertainty #LifeSatisfaction #DeathAnxiety #MeaningInLife #ExistentialPsychology #MentalHealthResearch #Unpredictability # PurposeInLife #PsychologyStudies #PsychologicalWellBeing
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Fear of the unknown is linked to lower life satisfaction and heightened death anxiety
New psychology research indicates that a tendency to find unpredictable situations highly distressing is linked to lower overall life satisfaction. This connection appears to be driven by existential factors, with an inability to tolerate uncertainty relating to a reduced sense of life purpose and a heightened fear of death. The study was published in Psychological Reports.
Unpredictability is an inevitable part of human existence, ranging from daily inconveniences to global crises. For some people, navigating these unknowns is manageable. For others, ambiguous situations trigger a response known as intolerance of uncertainty. This psychological trait involves perceiving unpredictable events as threatening, unacceptable, and highly distressing.
Past research has established that an intolerance of uncertainty is associated with worry and anxiety. However, less attention has been given to how this trait relates to a broader evaluation of a person’s existence, known as life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is a subjective assessment of how well one’s current circumstances align with their personal goals and standards.
The research team wanted to explore whether existential concerns act as a bridge between a fear of the unknown and reduced life satisfaction. “In today’s world, individuals face unprecedented levels of unpredictability—ranging from global crises and economic shifts to personal life challenges,” Osman Hatun, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological Counseling and Guidance at Marmara University in Türkiye, told PsyPost. “While prior research has extensively shown how intolerance of uncertainty fuels anxiety and distress, very little attention was given to how it impacts overall life satisfaction through existential processes.”
Hatun and his colleagues focused on two key existential processes: meaning in life and death anxiety. Meaning in life refers to the feeling that one’s existence has purpose, value, and a sense of direction. Death anxiety involves a persistent uneasiness or fear regarding mortality, the process of dying, and what happens after death.
Because death represents the most extreme uncontrollable and uncertain event, the researchers suspected that individuals who struggle with unpredictability might be especially vulnerable to death anxiety. They proposed a potential pathway where an intolerance of uncertainty relates to a weakened sense of meaning in life, which in turn leaves a person more vulnerable to death anxiety, resulting in lower life satisfaction.
To explore these ideas, the researchers recruited 485 adults living in Türkiye through social media platforms. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 63, with an average age of about 32. Most of the sample identified as female, and all participants reported having experienced at least one adverse life event, such as a natural disaster, severe illness, or the loss of a loved one.
The volunteers completed a series of online questionnaires designed to measure the four central concepts of the study. They answered questions about how upsetting they find unforeseen events to assess their intolerance of uncertainty. To evaluate their meaning in life, they rated how strongly they felt their lives had purpose.
The participants also completed a death anxiety scale, answering questions about how much the ambiguity and inevitability of dying made them anxious. Finally, they rated their agreement with statements regarding their overall life satisfaction, providing a snapshot of their subjective well-being. The researchers then used statistical modeling techniques to observe how these four variables interacted with one another, while accounting for the participants’ age, sex, and number of prior adverse life events.
The results indicated a negative association between an intolerance of uncertainty and life satisfaction. In other words, individuals who found ambiguity highly distressing tended to report lower satisfaction with their lives. The statistical models provided evidence for the researchers’ proposed existential pathway.
A higher intolerance of uncertainty was linked to a lower sense of meaning in life. A reduced sense of meaning in life was, in turn, associated with greater death anxiety. Finally, higher death anxiety was related to lower life satisfaction. Together, an intolerance of uncertainty and meaning in life accounted for 27 percent of the variance in death anxiety among the participants. The full model explained 43 percent of the variance in life satisfaction.
Hatun noted that the size of these effects is highly meaningful. “When looking at statistical models, individual indirect pathways might appear modest in number, but the overall picture reveals strong practical significance,” he said. “In psychological research, explaining nearly half of someone’s life satisfaction through a set of related factors is quite substantial.”
The researchers were also struck by the robustness of these existential links. “It was striking that this sequential existential path remained significant even after controlling for participants’ actual cumulative experiences with adverse life events, such as natural disasters, severe illness, or bereavement,” Hatun added. “This suggests that how a person mentally relates to uncertainty can be just as decisive for their life satisfaction as the objective hardships they have lived through.”
The findings suggest that the emotional burden of uncertainty extends beyond everyday worry. People who have difficulty tolerating the unknown may find it harder to maintain a coherent and purposeful view of life. Without a strong sense of purpose to act as a psychological buffer, they may become more preoccupied with mortality, which takes a toll on their overall contentment.
This dynamic highlights the importance of anchoring oneself in everyday purpose. “Because we cannot eliminate uncertainty from the world, trying to control every unknown is often a losing battle,” the researchers explained. “Instead, our findings suggest that the key to protecting our well-being lies in actively cultivating meaning and purpose in our daily lives—whether through core values, relationships, or community connections.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which examined how self-determination and psychological need satisfaction buffer death anxiety rather than modeling an intolerance of uncertainty. That study similarly found that death-related anxiety is linked to lower life satisfaction. Additionally, a 2021 study of older Hindu pilgrims indicated that experiencing a greater sense of meaning in life is linked to lower death anxiety, mirroring the associations found in the new Turkish sample.
However, the results are in tension with a study covered by PsyPost in 2023. That research found that for individuals with high self-alienation, a greater meaning in life was actually associated with heightened death anxiety. The new study, which evaluated a sample of Turkish adults and focused on an overall pathway rather than looking at specific interactions with self-alienation, did not model this reversed effect.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on data collected at a single point in time, meaning it is impossible to determine the true sequence of events. The researchers can observe that an intolerance of uncertainty and life satisfaction are linked through meaning in life and death anxiety, but they cannot prove that one factor directly causes the other to change. Hatun emphasized this constraint, noting that “cross-sectional data show indirect associations rather than definitive cause-and-effect over time.”
He also cautioned against overinterpreting the findings as a mandate for complete control. “A common misinterpretation we would want to preempt is the belief that intolerance of uncertainty directly or inevitably ruins a person’s life satisfaction, or that individuals must eliminate all uncertainty from their lives to be happy,” Hatun said. “Eliminating uncertainty is neither realistic nor necessary; what matters most is the existential buffer—how uncertainty influences our sense of meaning and purpose.”
Another caveat is that the data came entirely from self-report questionnaires, which rely on individuals accurately perceiving and reporting their own feelings. The sample also consisted exclusively of people who had experienced at least one adverse life event. Because trauma and loss can deeply influence existential thoughts, these patterns might look slightly different in a population without a history of severe adversity.
There is also the cultural context to consider when interpreting these results. In Türkiye, family obligations, community connections, and spiritual beliefs often heavily shape a person’s sense of meaning and their attitudes toward mortality. Hatun noted that because the sample consisted of Turkish adults recruited online, “caution should be exercised when generalizing these conclusions across diverse global populations without longitudinal replication.”
To build on this work, the research team hopes to trace these mechanisms in real time and test meaning-centered interventions. “We plan to examine these pathways across diverse cultural contexts and developmental stages, specifically exploring how cultural meaning frameworks—such as family connectedness and spiritual worldviews—serve as protective buffers,” Hatun said. Ultimately, the researchers hope to inform clinical approaches, such as Logotherapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, to help individuals cultivate resilience in an unpredictable world.
Above all, they hope the research fosters a more compassionate view of human struggles with the unknown. “We would like to emphasize that facing uncertainty is a fundamental part of the human condition, rather than an individual flaw or weakness,” Hatun added. “Our study highlights that while unpredictable events are inevitable, how we actively construct meaning in our daily lives provides an essential psychological anchor.”
The study, “Intolerance of Uncertainty and Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Roles of Meaning in Life and Death Anxiety,” was authored by Osman Hatun, Mark D. Griffiths, and Tuğba Türk Kurtça.
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-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system in the brain
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
A new study found that specialized brain cells called orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system that spikes in activity when an animal expects a reward. The research suggests that turning these cells on or off can directly adjust how hard an animal is willing to work for a goal. The findings were published in PNAS.
Orexin neurons are a small but highly influential group of cells located deep in the hypothalamus. This region at the base of the brain manages basic survival functions like body temperature, thirst, and fatigue. Originally discovered for their role in regulating sleep, wakefulness, and appetite, these neurons also play a massive role in motivated behavior.
Motivation is the internal psychological drive that initiates and sustains our actions toward a goal. To successfully reach a goal, an animal must evaluate a situation, predict the outcome, and apply the right amount of effort.
A 2014 review established the foundational idea that orexin does not just regulate sleep and hunger, but acts as a central engine for motivating animals to pursue goals. Building on this concept, a 2024 study in mice indicated that orexin neurons are essential for choosing to expend physical effort instead of settling for easy temptations.
“Orexin has traditionally been studied for its role in wakefulness, with much of the evidence coming from studies,” study author Hiroyuki Mizoguchi, an associate professor in the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Hospital Pharmacy at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “Although previous work has also implicated orexin neurons in motivated behavior in mice, exactly how their activity relates to reward prediction and effort has remained unclear.”
To bridge this gap, the research team, which also included Yutao Dong, developed a genetically modified rat model that allowed them to monitor and manipulate orexin neurons as the animals worked for food. Rats are particularly useful for this type of research because their advanced learning abilities make them well-suited for complex behavioral tests.
First, the researchers used a chemical technique called chemogenetics to selectively activate orexin neurons. They trained hungry rats to interact with a touchscreen to receive a small food pellet. To measure motivation, they used a progressive ratio test, where the amount of effort required to get a single food pellet steadily increased. For example, a rat might need to touch the screen five times for the first reward, but eventually have to touch it dozens of times for the next.
This escalating test continued until the rats gave up, providing a “breakpoint” that reflects their maximum willingness to work. When the researchers artificially activated the orexin neurons, the rats’ motivation increased. They displayed a higher breakpoint, meaning they were willing to tap the screen many more times to secure a single reward compared to their baseline performance.
Next, the team used a technique called fiber photometry to observe the natural activity of these cells in real time. When a neuron fires, calcium floods into the cell. By tracking these calcium signals, the scientists could monitor exactly when the orexin neurons were active while the rats performed tasks requiring varying levels of effort.
The researchers noticed a distinct pattern. As the rats tapped the screen and expected a food pellet, orexin neuron activity sharply increased. Once the rats received and ate the food, the cell activity dropped back down to normal levels.
The intensity of this brain signal also scaled with the amount of effort required. The neurons fired more strongly during the difficult progressive ratio test than during an easy task that required only one or two screen taps.
Additionally, the researchers tested what would happen if they tricked the rats by withholding the expected food pellet after a completed task. In these frustrating scenarios, the orexin activity stayed high. This suggests the cells maintain a state of prolonged expectation or stress when a predicted goal is not met.
“We were surprised that orexin neuronal activity changed across several distinct situations,” Mizoguchi said, noting that the neurons became active during reward prediction “rather than only when the reward was received.”
To test whether this burst of activity is directly tied to goal-directed action, the scientists used optogenetics. This method uses targeted flashes of light to turn specific brain cells on or off. The researchers trained the rats to tap the screen five times for a reward.
Right after the rats made their final tap, the researchers flashed a blue light into the brain to temporarily silence the orexin neurons during the brief window of reward anticipation. Suppressing the cells at this exact moment caused the rats to perform poorly. They took noticeably longer to complete the trials compared to when their brain activity was left alone, indicating that their drive to seek the reward had been interrupted.
“Our findings suggest that orexin neurons are part of a broader brain system that helps translate reward expectations into motivated action,” Mizoguchi explained. “Motivation does not depend on orexin alone, but these neurons may help the brain determine whether a reward is worth the effort.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2016, which found that blocking orexin signaling reduced compulsive drug-seeking behavior. A study covered by PsyPost in 2017 similarly observed that turning down these receptors lowered drug intake. It is worth noting that those earlier experiments examined extreme cocaine addiction models rather than general reward prediction, but they still point to orexin’s fundamental role in driving animals toward a desired outcome.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding the current study. The researchers only used food as a reward, so it is still unknown if orexin neurons act the same way for other types of goals. Future research will need to explore whether similar brain activity occurs during social interactions, mating behaviors, or avoiding danger.
Additionally, the light manipulation targeted the entire population of orexin neurons at once. The hypothalamus contains different sub-groups of these cells, and future studies might need to separate them to see if they handle motivation differently. The team also noted that while turning the neurons off reduced effort, artificially stimulating them with light did not reliably increase motivation. This might be because the hungry rats were already operating at near-maximum motivation, making it hard to push their effort levels even higher through artificial means.
“A key caveat is that the relationship between orexin neuronal activity and motivated behavior is not straightforward; its effects may vary with the experimental conditions and with how neuronal activity is manipulated,” Mizoguchi pointed out. “Moreover, because this was a basic study in rats, not all of the findings can necessarily be applied to humans.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to map the broader neural circuits involved in these processes. “Our long-term goal is to understand how orexin neuronal activity is regulated and how these neurons influence motivated behavior,” Mizoguchi said. “We aim to identify the signals that orexin neurons transmit to downstream targets and the factors that stabilize or destabilize their activity.”
“Difficulty maintaining motivation can have substantial social and medical consequences,” he added. “Although the present study did not examine specific disorders or treatments, we hope that our findings will ultimately contribute to a better understanding of conditions involving reduced motivation and provide a foundation for future therapeutic research.”
The study, “Reward prediction is encoded by orexin neuron activity during motivated behavior,” was authored by Yutao Dong, Sheikh Mizanur Rahaman, Wenjun Zhu, Ayumu Inutsuka, Daisuke Ono, Rinako Tanaka, Tetsuo Matsuzaki, Eiji Shibata, Madoka Isobe, Shuntaro Izawa, Akihiro Yamanaka, Kiyofumi Yamada, and Hiroyuki Mizoguchi.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #orexin #motivation #rewardprediction #neuroscience #brainresearch #itevations #optogenetics #chemogenetics #hypothalamus # motivatedbehavior
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system in the brain
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
A new study found that specialized brain cells called orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system that spikes in activity when an animal expects a reward. The research suggests that turning these cells on or off can directly adjust how hard an animal is willing to work for a goal. The findings were published in PNAS.
Orexin neurons are a small but highly influential group of cells located deep in the hypothalamus. This region at the base of the brain manages basic survival functions like body temperature, thirst, and fatigue. Originally discovered for their role in regulating sleep, wakefulness, and appetite, these neurons also play a massive role in motivated behavior.
Motivation is the internal psychological drive that initiates and sustains our actions toward a goal. To successfully reach a goal, an animal must evaluate a situation, predict the outcome, and apply the right amount of effort.
A 2014 review established the foundational idea that orexin does not just regulate sleep and hunger, but acts as a central engine for motivating animals to pursue goals. Building on this concept, a 2024 study in mice indicated that orexin neurons are essential for choosing to expend physical effort instead of settling for easy temptations.
“Orexin has traditionally been studied for its role in wakefulness, with much of the evidence coming from studies,” study author Hiroyuki Mizoguchi, an associate professor in the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Hospital Pharmacy at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “Although previous work has also implicated orexin neurons in motivated behavior in mice, exactly how their activity relates to reward prediction and effort has remained unclear.”
To bridge this gap, the research team, which also included Yutao Dong, developed a genetically modified rat model that allowed them to monitor and manipulate orexin neurons as the animals worked for food. Rats are particularly useful for this type of research because their advanced learning abilities make them well-suited for complex behavioral tests.
First, the researchers used a chemical technique called chemogenetics to selectively activate orexin neurons. They trained hungry rats to interact with a touchscreen to receive a small food pellet. To measure motivation, they used a progressive ratio test, where the amount of effort required to get a single food pellet steadily increased. For example, a rat might need to touch the screen five times for the first reward, but eventually have to touch it dozens of times for the next.
This escalating test continued until the rats gave up, providing a “breakpoint” that reflects their maximum willingness to work. When the researchers artificially activated the orexin neurons, the rats’ motivation increased. They displayed a higher breakpoint, meaning they were willing to tap the screen many more times to secure a single reward compared to their baseline performance.
Next, the team used a technique called fiber photometry to observe the natural activity of these cells in real time. When a neuron fires, calcium floods into the cell. By tracking these calcium signals, the scientists could monitor exactly when the orexin neurons were active while the rats performed tasks requiring varying levels of effort.
The researchers noticed a distinct pattern. As the rats tapped the screen and expected a food pellet, orexin neuron activity sharply increased. Once the rats received and ate the food, the cell activity dropped back down to normal levels.
The intensity of this brain signal also scaled with the amount of effort required. The neurons fired more strongly during the difficult progressive ratio test than during an easy task that required only one or two screen taps.
Additionally, the researchers tested what would happen if they tricked the rats by withholding the expected food pellet after a completed task. In these frustrating scenarios, the orexin activity stayed high. This suggests the cells maintain a state of prolonged expectation or stress when a predicted goal is not met.
“We were surprised that orexin neuronal activity changed across several distinct situations,” Mizoguchi said, noting that the neurons became active during reward prediction “rather than only when the reward was received.”
To test whether this burst of activity is directly tied to goal-directed action, the scientists used optogenetics. This method uses targeted flashes of light to turn specific brain cells on or off. The researchers trained the rats to tap the screen five times for a reward.
Right after the rats made their final tap, the researchers flashed a blue light into the brain to temporarily silence the orexin neurons during the brief window of reward anticipation. Suppressing the cells at this exact moment caused the rats to perform poorly. They took noticeably longer to complete the trials compared to when their brain activity was left alone, indicating that their drive to seek the reward had been interrupted.
“Our findings suggest that orexin neurons are part of a broader brain system that helps translate reward expectations into motivated action,” Mizoguchi explained. “Motivation does not depend on orexin alone, but these neurons may help the brain determine whether a reward is worth the effort.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2016, which found that blocking orexin signaling reduced compulsive drug-seeking behavior. A study covered by PsyPost in 2017 similarly observed that turning down these receptors lowered drug intake. It is worth noting that those earlier experiments examined extreme cocaine addiction models rather than general reward prediction, but they still point to orexin’s fundamental role in driving animals toward a desired outcome.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding the current study. The researchers only used food as a reward, so it is still unknown if orexin neurons act the same way for other types of goals. Future research will need to explore whether similar brain activity occurs during social interactions, mating behaviors, or avoiding danger.
Additionally, the light manipulation targeted the entire population of orexin neurons at once. The hypothalamus contains different sub-groups of these cells, and future studies might need to separate them to see if they handle motivation differently. The team also noted that while turning the neurons off reduced effort, artificially stimulating them with light did not reliably increase motivation. This might be because the hungry rats were already operating at near-maximum motivation, making it hard to push their effort levels even higher through artificial means.
“A key caveat is that the relationship between orexin neuronal activity and motivated behavior is not straightforward; its effects may vary with the experimental conditions and with how neuronal activity is manipulated,” Mizoguchi pointed out. “Moreover, because this was a basic study in rats, not all of the findings can necessarily be applied to humans.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to map the broader neural circuits involved in these processes. “Our long-term goal is to understand how orexin neuronal activity is regulated and how these neurons influence motivated behavior,” Mizoguchi said. “We aim to identify the signals that orexin neurons transmit to downstream targets and the factors that stabilize or destabilize their activity.”
“Difficulty maintaining motivation can have substantial social and medical consequences,” he added. “Although the present study did not examine specific disorders or treatments, we hope that our findings will ultimately contribute to a better understanding of conditions involving reduced motivation and provide a foundation for future therapeutic research.”
The study, “Reward prediction is encoded by orexin neuron activity during motivated behavior,” was authored by Yutao Dong, Sheikh Mizanur Rahaman, Wenjun Zhu, Ayumu Inutsuka, Daisuke Ono, Rinako Tanaka, Tetsuo Matsuzaki, Eiji Shibata, Madoka Isobe, Shuntaro Izawa, Akihiro Yamanaka, Kiyofumi Yamada, and Hiroyuki Mizoguchi.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #orexin #motivation #rewardprediction #neuroscience #brainresearch #itevations #optogenetics #chemogenetics #hypothalamus # motivatedbehavior
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system in the brain
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
A new study found that specialized brain cells called orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system that spikes in activity when an animal expects a reward. The research suggests that turning these cells on or off can directly adjust how hard an animal is willing to work for a goal. The findings were published in PNAS.
Orexin neurons are a small but highly influential group of cells located deep in the hypothalamus. This region at the base of the brain manages basic survival functions like body temperature, thirst, and fatigue. Originally discovered for their role in regulating sleep, wakefulness, and appetite, these neurons also play a massive role in motivated behavior.
Motivation is the internal psychological drive that initiates and sustains our actions toward a goal. To successfully reach a goal, an animal must evaluate a situation, predict the outcome, and apply the right amount of effort.
A 2014 review established the foundational idea that orexin does not just regulate sleep and hunger, but acts as a central engine for motivating animals to pursue goals. Building on this concept, a 2024 study in mice indicated that orexin neurons are essential for choosing to expend physical effort instead of settling for easy temptations.
“Orexin has traditionally been studied for its role in wakefulness, with much of the evidence coming from studies,” study author Hiroyuki Mizoguchi, an associate professor in the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Hospital Pharmacy at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “Although previous work has also implicated orexin neurons in motivated behavior in mice, exactly how their activity relates to reward prediction and effort has remained unclear.”
To bridge this gap, the research team, which also included Yutao Dong, developed a genetically modified rat model that allowed them to monitor and manipulate orexin neurons as the animals worked for food. Rats are particularly useful for this type of research because their advanced learning abilities make them well-suited for complex behavioral tests.
First, the researchers used a chemical technique called chemogenetics to selectively activate orexin neurons. They trained hungry rats to interact with a touchscreen to receive a small food pellet. To measure motivation, they used a progressive ratio test, where the amount of effort required to get a single food pellet steadily increased. For example, a rat might need to touch the screen five times for the first reward, but eventually have to touch it dozens of times for the next.
This escalating test continued until the rats gave up, providing a “breakpoint” that reflects their maximum willingness to work. When the researchers artificially activated the orexin neurons, the rats’ motivation increased. They displayed a higher breakpoint, meaning they were willing to tap the screen many more times to secure a single reward compared to their baseline performance.
Next, the team used a technique called fiber photometry to observe the natural activity of these cells in real time. When a neuron fires, calcium floods into the cell. By tracking these calcium signals, the scientists could monitor exactly when the orexin neurons were active while the rats performed tasks requiring varying levels of effort.
The researchers noticed a distinct pattern. As the rats tapped the screen and expected a food pellet, orexin neuron activity sharply increased. Once the rats received and ate the food, the cell activity dropped back down to normal levels.
The intensity of this brain signal also scaled with the amount of effort required. The neurons fired more strongly during the difficult progressive ratio test than during an easy task that required only one or two screen taps.
Additionally, the researchers tested what would happen if they tricked the rats by withholding the expected food pellet after a completed task. In these frustrating scenarios, the orexin activity stayed high. This suggests the cells maintain a state of prolonged expectation or stress when a predicted goal is not met.
“We were surprised that orexin neuronal activity changed across several distinct situations,” Mizoguchi said, noting that the neurons became active during reward prediction “rather than only when the reward was received.”
To test whether this burst of activity is directly tied to goal-directed action, the scientists used optogenetics. This method uses targeted flashes of light to turn specific brain cells on or off. The researchers trained the rats to tap the screen five times for a reward.
Right after the rats made their final tap, the researchers flashed a blue light into the brain to temporarily silence the orexin neurons during the brief window of reward anticipation. Suppressing the cells at this exact moment caused the rats to perform poorly. They took noticeably longer to complete the trials compared to when their brain activity was left alone, indicating that their drive to seek the reward had been interrupted.
“Our findings suggest that orexin neurons are part of a broader brain system that helps translate reward expectations into motivated action,” Mizoguchi explained. “Motivation does not depend on orexin alone, but these neurons may help the brain determine whether a reward is worth the effort.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2016, which found that blocking orexin signaling reduced compulsive drug-seeking behavior. A study covered by PsyPost in 2017 similarly observed that turning down these receptors lowered drug intake. It is worth noting that those earlier experiments examined extreme cocaine addiction models rather than general reward prediction, but they still point to orexin’s fundamental role in driving animals toward a desired outcome.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding the current study. The researchers only used food as a reward, so it is still unknown if orexin neurons act the same way for other types of goals. Future research will need to explore whether similar brain activity occurs during social interactions, mating behaviors, or avoiding danger.
Additionally, the light manipulation targeted the entire population of orexin neurons at once. The hypothalamus contains different sub-groups of these cells, and future studies might need to separate them to see if they handle motivation differently. The team also noted that while turning the neurons off reduced effort, artificially stimulating them with light did not reliably increase motivation. This might be because the hungry rats were already operating at near-maximum motivation, making it hard to push their effort levels even higher through artificial means.
“A key caveat is that the relationship between orexin neuronal activity and motivated behavior is not straightforward; its effects may vary with the experimental conditions and with how neuronal activity is manipulated,” Mizoguchi pointed out. “Moreover, because this was a basic study in rats, not all of the findings can necessarily be applied to humans.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to map the broader neural circuits involved in these processes. “Our long-term goal is to understand how orexin neuronal activity is regulated and how these neurons influence motivated behavior,” Mizoguchi said. “We aim to identify the signals that orexin neurons transmit to downstream targets and the factors that stabilize or destabilize their activity.”
“Difficulty maintaining motivation can have substantial social and medical consequences,” he added. “Although the present study did not examine specific disorders or treatments, we hope that our findings will ultimately contribute to a better understanding of conditions involving reduced motivation and provide a foundation for future therapeutic research.”
The study, “Reward prediction is encoded by orexin neuron activity during motivated behavior,” was authored by Yutao Dong, Sheikh Mizanur Rahaman, Wenjun Zhu, Ayumu Inutsuka, Daisuke Ono, Rinako Tanaka, Tetsuo Matsuzaki, Eiji Shibata, Madoka Isobe, Shuntaro Izawa, Akihiro Yamanaka, Kiyofumi Yamada, and Hiroyuki Mizoguchi.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #orexin #motivation #rewardprediction #neuroscience #brainresearch #itevations #optogenetics #chemogenetics #hypothalamus # motivatedbehavior
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system in the brain
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
A new study found that specialized brain cells called orexin neurons act as an effort-tracking system that spikes in activity when an animal expects a reward. The research suggests that turning these cells on or off can directly adjust how hard an animal is willing to work for a goal. The findings were published in PNAS.
Orexin neurons are a small but highly influential group of cells located deep in the hypothalamus. This region at the base of the brain manages basic survival functions like body temperature, thirst, and fatigue. Originally discovered for their role in regulating sleep, wakefulness, and appetite, these neurons also play a massive role in motivated behavior.
Motivation is the internal psychological drive that initiates and sustains our actions toward a goal. To successfully reach a goal, an animal must evaluate a situation, predict the outcome, and apply the right amount of effort.
A 2014 review established the foundational idea that orexin does not just regulate sleep and hunger, but acts as a central engine for motivating animals to pursue goals. Building on this concept, a 2024 study in mice indicated that orexin neurons are essential for choosing to expend physical effort instead of settling for easy temptations.
“Orexin has traditionally been studied for its role in wakefulness, with much of the evidence coming from studies,” study author Hiroyuki Mizoguchi, an associate professor in the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Hospital Pharmacy at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “Although previous work has also implicated orexin neurons in motivated behavior in mice, exactly how their activity relates to reward prediction and effort has remained unclear.”
To bridge this gap, the research team, which also included Yutao Dong, developed a genetically modified rat model that allowed them to monitor and manipulate orexin neurons as the animals worked for food. Rats are particularly useful for this type of research because their advanced learning abilities make them well-suited for complex behavioral tests.
First, the researchers used a chemical technique called chemogenetics to selectively activate orexin neurons. They trained hungry rats to interact with a touchscreen to receive a small food pellet. To measure motivation, they used a progressive ratio test, where the amount of effort required to get a single food pellet steadily increased. For example, a rat might need to touch the screen five times for the first reward, but eventually have to touch it dozens of times for the next.
This escalating test continued until the rats gave up, providing a “breakpoint” that reflects their maximum willingness to work. When the researchers artificially activated the orexin neurons, the rats’ motivation increased. They displayed a higher breakpoint, meaning they were willing to tap the screen many more times to secure a single reward compared to their baseline performance.
Next, the team used a technique called fiber photometry to observe the natural activity of these cells in real time. When a neuron fires, calcium floods into the cell. By tracking these calcium signals, the scientists could monitor exactly when the orexin neurons were active while the rats performed tasks requiring varying levels of effort.
The researchers noticed a distinct pattern. As the rats tapped the screen and expected a food pellet, orexin neuron activity sharply increased. Once the rats received and ate the food, the cell activity dropped back down to normal levels.
The intensity of this brain signal also scaled with the amount of effort required. The neurons fired more strongly during the difficult progressive ratio test than during an easy task that required only one or two screen taps.
Additionally, the researchers tested what would happen if they tricked the rats by withholding the expected food pellet after a completed task. In these frustrating scenarios, the orexin activity stayed high. This suggests the cells maintain a state of prolonged expectation or stress when a predicted goal is not met.
“We were surprised that orexin neuronal activity changed across several distinct situations,” Mizoguchi said, noting that the neurons became active during reward prediction “rather than only when the reward was received.”
To test whether this burst of activity is directly tied to goal-directed action, the scientists used optogenetics. This method uses targeted flashes of light to turn specific brain cells on or off. The researchers trained the rats to tap the screen five times for a reward.
Right after the rats made their final tap, the researchers flashed a blue light into the brain to temporarily silence the orexin neurons during the brief window of reward anticipation. Suppressing the cells at this exact moment caused the rats to perform poorly. They took noticeably longer to complete the trials compared to when their brain activity was left alone, indicating that their drive to seek the reward had been interrupted.
“Our findings suggest that orexin neurons are part of a broader brain system that helps translate reward expectations into motivated action,” Mizoguchi explained. “Motivation does not depend on orexin alone, but these neurons may help the brain determine whether a reward is worth the effort.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2016, which found that blocking orexin signaling reduced compulsive drug-seeking behavior. A study covered by PsyPost in 2017 similarly observed that turning down these receptors lowered drug intake. It is worth noting that those earlier experiments examined extreme cocaine addiction models rather than general reward prediction, but they still point to orexin’s fundamental role in driving animals toward a desired outcome.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding the current study. The researchers only used food as a reward, so it is still unknown if orexin neurons act the same way for other types of goals. Future research will need to explore whether similar brain activity occurs during social interactions, mating behaviors, or avoiding danger.
Additionally, the light manipulation targeted the entire population of orexin neurons at once. The hypothalamus contains different sub-groups of these cells, and future studies might need to separate them to see if they handle motivation differently. The team also noted that while turning the neurons off reduced effort, artificially stimulating them with light did not reliably increase motivation. This might be because the hungry rats were already operating at near-maximum motivation, making it hard to push their effort levels even higher through artificial means.
“A key caveat is that the relationship between orexin neuronal activity and motivated behavior is not straightforward; its effects may vary with the experimental conditions and with how neuronal activity is manipulated,” Mizoguchi pointed out. “Moreover, because this was a basic study in rats, not all of the findings can necessarily be applied to humans.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to map the broader neural circuits involved in these processes. “Our long-term goal is to understand how orexin neuronal activity is regulated and how these neurons influence motivated behavior,” Mizoguchi said. “We aim to identify the signals that orexin neurons transmit to downstream targets and the factors that stabilize or destabilize their activity.”
“Difficulty maintaining motivation can have substantial social and medical consequences,” he added. “Although the present study did not examine specific disorders or treatments, we hope that our findings will ultimately contribute to a better understanding of conditions involving reduced motivation and provide a foundation for future therapeutic research.”
The study, “Reward prediction is encoded by orexin neuron activity during motivated behavior,” was authored by Yutao Dong, Sheikh Mizanur Rahaman, Wenjun Zhu, Ayumu Inutsuka, Daisuke Ono, Rinako Tanaka, Tetsuo Matsuzaki, Eiji Shibata, Madoka Isobe, Shuntaro Izawa, Akihiro Yamanaka, Kiyofumi Yamada, and Hiroyuki Mizoguchi.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/orexin-neurons-act-as-an-effort-tracking-system-in-the-brain/
-------------------------------------------------
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DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Men with less modest self-views are more likely to feel victimized and support men’s rights activism
Men with a less modest view of themselves tend to feel that men as a group are unfairly disadvantaged compared to women. This sense of victimhood predicts a greater willingness to support and participate in men’s rights activism, according to new research. The findings were published in Personality and Individual Differences.
To understand this connection, it helps to look at two psychological concepts at the center of the research: trait modesty and group-based relative deprivation. Trait modesty refers to how people evaluate themselves in relation to others. People with high trait modesty generally view themselves as being no better than anyone else. On the other hand, people with low trait modesty tend to feel superior and entitled to special privileges, viewing themselves as better than those around them. This shapes how they interpret situations involving social comparisons.
Group-based relative deprivation is the perception that a person’s own group is being unfairly treated or disadvantaged compared to other groups in society. This feeling often triggers anger and resentment. To experience it, an individual has to compare their group to another, appraise their group as disadvantaged, and view that disadvantage as unjust. In the context of gender, it captures a sense that men are losing power or status they are rightfully entitled to.
Researchers have increasingly documented how men adopt a sense of victimhood and how entitlement fuels backlash against gender equality. For example, a 2021 study indicated that many people now believe sexism primarily targets men rather than women, capturing a core grievance of the men’s rights movement. Building on this idea, a 2022 study showed how men in the men’s rights movement construct a sense of victimhood to build a collective identity that justifies their protests and organizing.
Adding to this picture, a 2024 study provided evidence that male entitlement predicts a willingness to engage in both peaceful and aggressive actions to defend men’s societal status. Similarly, research covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that traits like narcissism and psychopathy were associated with lower support for feminist attitudes.
The new research, led by Joanna Lindström, a psychology researcher at Uppsala University, and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, a lecturer in social, political, and feminist psychology at the University of Exeter, sought to pinpoint whether low modesty is a specific personality trait linked to these feelings of unfair deprivation and a willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.
“I was initially interested in understanding why some (but not all) members of structurally advantaged groups perceive that their group is unjustly disadvantaged, despite statistics and history suggesting otherwise,” Lindström told PsyPost. “This led me to show that low modesty was linked to feeling deprived among men (but not women), and among White Americans (but not Black Americans),” she explained, referring to a previous study she conducted. “We then wanted to examine whether modesty and feeling deprived as a man could also explain men’s willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.”
The researchers tested this idea in two separate stages. In the first study, the team recruited 195 White American men through an online platform. The participants completed a standardized personality questionnaire designed to measure trait modesty. They also answered a series of questions measuring group-based relative deprivation, indicating how frustrated they felt about men being supposedly disadvantaged in modern society.
Next, the researchers measured the participants’ support for and intention to engage in men’s rights activism. They separated these potential actions into two distinct categories. Conventional political actions included activities accepted within a social system, like advocating for law reform or joining a men’s rights organization. Extreme or non-traditional actions included behaviors that deviate from societal norms, like participating in a protest that might turn violent or supporting those who use physical aggression for the cause.
The team found that men with lower trait modesty were more likely to report feeling that men are an oppressed group. This feeling of deprivation, in turn, predicted higher support for both peaceful and extreme activism. Deprivation was a stronger predictor of conventional activism, while having low modesty itself was a stronger predictor of a willingness to engage in extreme, non-traditional activism. The results suggest an indirect pathway: low modesty leads to a heightened sense of relative deprivation, which then fuels a desire to engage in activism.
“Aspects of men’s personality and perceptions of social context both have a role to play in shaping men’s support for men’s rights activism,” Lindström said. “That is, trait modesty predicts how men appraise their treatment as a group in society more generally, which, in turn influences whether they support and want to personally engage in actions that further men’s ‘rights and opportunities.'” “Put another way, the findings highlight that high modesty may protect men from perceptions of deprivation and men’s rights activism in turn,” she added.
In the second study, the researchers expanded the project to include 492 men, split almost evenly between White and Black Americans. The authors wanted to see if the connection between modesty and activism existed across different racial groups. While the men’s rights movement is often stereotyped as being exclusively White, emerging scholarship has highlighted the presence of a Black manosphere, where Black men engage in online conversations about men’s issues and articulate similar narratives of gender-based disadvantage.
The researchers also tested whether making the idea of male disadvantage highly visible would alter the results. Participants first completed the same measure of trait modesty used in the first study. Half of the men were then asked to take a minute to reflect on the ways men are disadvantaged relative to women, and write four sentences about it. The other half acted as a comparison group and wrote four sentences about their morning routines. After this writing task, all participants completed the measures of deprivation and activism.
The experimental writing task did not change the underlying personality effects. Across both White and Black participants, low modesty consistently predicted a stronger sense that men are unfairly deprived. Just as in the first study, this sense of group deprivation predicted a greater willingness to support and engage in men’s rights activism.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that personal feelings of disadvantage drive hostile sexism toward women. However, the new study specifically measures how group-based deprivation predicts support for collective men’s rights activism rather than individual sexist attitudes.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting the results. The experimental writing task in the second study did not actually increase feelings of relative deprivation compared to writing about a morning routine. This suggests the specific writing exercise might not have been strong enough to affect participants’ views, or that trait modesty exerts a stable influence regardless of the immediate situation.
Also, the researchers note that low modesty shares some overlap with narcissism. Future research is needed to untangle exactly how much of this effect is driven by low modesty alone versus related narcissistic traits, like a desire for authority or a tendency to exploit others. The study also focused exclusively on White and Black men. The authors point out that other minority groups, such as Asian American and Latino men, face unique racial and cultural pressures that could alter how modesty and feelings of deprivation interact.
Finally, the studies were conducted entirely in the United States. Cultural norms around modesty and gender vary widely across the world, meaning these patterns might look different in other countries. More research is needed to see if these psychological pathways hold true in different cultural contexts.
“Given the correlational nature of the data, we also cannot determine a causal link between personality, perceptions of relative deprivation, and men’s rights activism,” the researchers noted. “We know that these things are linked and have explanatory power, but we need to conduct a further experimental study to determine if one variable causes the other, and in which order.” For instance, they explained, “does heightened relative deprivation causally increase men’s rights activism, or does engaging in men’s rights activism/collective action color men’s perceptions of their group’s status in society.”
“We don’t want to convey that the manosphere and men’s rights activism can be explained purely by personality,” the researchers emphasized. “It’s also important to remember that personality is malleable – just because men lower in trait modesty are more likely to perceive men as deprived in society and support/engage in men’s rights activism doesn’t mean that their modesty perceptions can’t change. Cultivating higher modesty may be a key avenue for protecting men from the manosphere’s influence.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are continuing this line of inquiry, including work with the EMMELO project an EU-funded initiative examining the role of masculinity in extremist movements. “We are currently conducting research where we show that modesty and feeling deprived (individually and as a man) predict men’s support for manosphere figures in the U.S. context,” they said. “We aim to design interventions that may decrease men’s support for—and engagement in—the manosphere, which are informed by our ongoing work on the role of modesty and relative deprivation in underpinning endorsement of the manosphere.”
The study, “Low modesty and feeling deprived as a man: A psychological explanation of men’s rights activism,” was authored by Joanna Lindström and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MenRightsActivism #ModestyTraits #GroupDeprivation #MasculinityStudies #MenVsSociety #PsychologyResearch #Manosphere #RelativeDeprivation #GenderEqualityDebate #InfluenceOfPersonality
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DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Men with less modest self-views are more likely to feel victimized and support men’s rights activism
Men with a less modest view of themselves tend to feel that men as a group are unfairly disadvantaged compared to women. This sense of victimhood predicts a greater willingness to support and participate in men’s rights activism, according to new research. The findings were published in Personality and Individual Differences.
To understand this connection, it helps to look at two psychological concepts at the center of the research: trait modesty and group-based relative deprivation. Trait modesty refers to how people evaluate themselves in relation to others. People with high trait modesty generally view themselves as being no better than anyone else. On the other hand, people with low trait modesty tend to feel superior and entitled to special privileges, viewing themselves as better than those around them. This shapes how they interpret situations involving social comparisons.
Group-based relative deprivation is the perception that a person’s own group is being unfairly treated or disadvantaged compared to other groups in society. This feeling often triggers anger and resentment. To experience it, an individual has to compare their group to another, appraise their group as disadvantaged, and view that disadvantage as unjust. In the context of gender, it captures a sense that men are losing power or status they are rightfully entitled to.
Researchers have increasingly documented how men adopt a sense of victimhood and how entitlement fuels backlash against gender equality. For example, a 2021 study indicated that many people now believe sexism primarily targets men rather than women, capturing a core grievance of the men’s rights movement. Building on this idea, a 2022 study showed how men in the men’s rights movement construct a sense of victimhood to build a collective identity that justifies their protests and organizing.
Adding to this picture, a 2024 study provided evidence that male entitlement predicts a willingness to engage in both peaceful and aggressive actions to defend men’s societal status. Similarly, research covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that traits like narcissism and psychopathy were associated with lower support for feminist attitudes.
The new research, led by Joanna Lindström, a psychology researcher at Uppsala University, and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, a lecturer in social, political, and feminist psychology at the University of Exeter, sought to pinpoint whether low modesty is a specific personality trait linked to these feelings of unfair deprivation and a willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.
“I was initially interested in understanding why some (but not all) members of structurally advantaged groups perceive that their group is unjustly disadvantaged, despite statistics and history suggesting otherwise,” Lindström told PsyPost. “This led me to show that low modesty was linked to feeling deprived among men (but not women), and among White Americans (but not Black Americans),” she explained, referring to a previous study she conducted. “We then wanted to examine whether modesty and feeling deprived as a man could also explain men’s willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.”
The researchers tested this idea in two separate stages. In the first study, the team recruited 195 White American men through an online platform. The participants completed a standardized personality questionnaire designed to measure trait modesty. They also answered a series of questions measuring group-based relative deprivation, indicating how frustrated they felt about men being supposedly disadvantaged in modern society.
Next, the researchers measured the participants’ support for and intention to engage in men’s rights activism. They separated these potential actions into two distinct categories. Conventional political actions included activities accepted within a social system, like advocating for law reform or joining a men’s rights organization. Extreme or non-traditional actions included behaviors that deviate from societal norms, like participating in a protest that might turn violent or supporting those who use physical aggression for the cause.
The team found that men with lower trait modesty were more likely to report feeling that men are an oppressed group. This feeling of deprivation, in turn, predicted higher support for both peaceful and extreme activism. Deprivation was a stronger predictor of conventional activism, while having low modesty itself was a stronger predictor of a willingness to engage in extreme, non-traditional activism. The results suggest an indirect pathway: low modesty leads to a heightened sense of relative deprivation, which then fuels a desire to engage in activism.
“Aspects of men’s personality and perceptions of social context both have a role to play in shaping men’s support for men’s rights activism,” Lindström said. “That is, trait modesty predicts how men appraise their treatment as a group in society more generally, which, in turn influences whether they support and want to personally engage in actions that further men’s ‘rights and opportunities.'” “Put another way, the findings highlight that high modesty may protect men from perceptions of deprivation and men’s rights activism in turn,” she added.
In the second study, the researchers expanded the project to include 492 men, split almost evenly between White and Black Americans. The authors wanted to see if the connection between modesty and activism existed across different racial groups. While the men’s rights movement is often stereotyped as being exclusively White, emerging scholarship has highlighted the presence of a Black manosphere, where Black men engage in online conversations about men’s issues and articulate similar narratives of gender-based disadvantage.
The researchers also tested whether making the idea of male disadvantage highly visible would alter the results. Participants first completed the same measure of trait modesty used in the first study. Half of the men were then asked to take a minute to reflect on the ways men are disadvantaged relative to women, and write four sentences about it. The other half acted as a comparison group and wrote four sentences about their morning routines. After this writing task, all participants completed the measures of deprivation and activism.
The experimental writing task did not change the underlying personality effects. Across both White and Black participants, low modesty consistently predicted a stronger sense that men are unfairly deprived. Just as in the first study, this sense of group deprivation predicted a greater willingness to support and engage in men’s rights activism.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that personal feelings of disadvantage drive hostile sexism toward women. However, the new study specifically measures how group-based deprivation predicts support for collective men’s rights activism rather than individual sexist attitudes.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting the results. The experimental writing task in the second study did not actually increase feelings of relative deprivation compared to writing about a morning routine. This suggests the specific writing exercise might not have been strong enough to affect participants’ views, or that trait modesty exerts a stable influence regardless of the immediate situation.
Also, the researchers note that low modesty shares some overlap with narcissism. Future research is needed to untangle exactly how much of this effect is driven by low modesty alone versus related narcissistic traits, like a desire for authority or a tendency to exploit others. The study also focused exclusively on White and Black men. The authors point out that other minority groups, such as Asian American and Latino men, face unique racial and cultural pressures that could alter how modesty and feelings of deprivation interact.
Finally, the studies were conducted entirely in the United States. Cultural norms around modesty and gender vary widely across the world, meaning these patterns might look different in other countries. More research is needed to see if these psychological pathways hold true in different cultural contexts.
“Given the correlational nature of the data, we also cannot determine a causal link between personality, perceptions of relative deprivation, and men’s rights activism,” the researchers noted. “We know that these things are linked and have explanatory power, but we need to conduct a further experimental study to determine if one variable causes the other, and in which order.” For instance, they explained, “does heightened relative deprivation causally increase men’s rights activism, or does engaging in men’s rights activism/collective action color men’s perceptions of their group’s status in society.”
“We don’t want to convey that the manosphere and men’s rights activism can be explained purely by personality,” the researchers emphasized. “It’s also important to remember that personality is malleable – just because men lower in trait modesty are more likely to perceive men as deprived in society and support/engage in men’s rights activism doesn’t mean that their modesty perceptions can’t change. Cultivating higher modesty may be a key avenue for protecting men from the manosphere’s influence.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are continuing this line of inquiry, including work with the EMMELO project an EU-funded initiative examining the role of masculinity in extremist movements. “We are currently conducting research where we show that modesty and feeling deprived (individually and as a man) predict men’s support for manosphere figures in the U.S. context,” they said. “We aim to design interventions that may decrease men’s support for—and engagement in—the manosphere, which are informed by our ongoing work on the role of modesty and relative deprivation in underpinning endorsement of the manosphere.”
The study, “Low modesty and feeling deprived as a man: A psychological explanation of men’s rights activism,” was authored by Joanna Lindström and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MenRightsActivism #ModestyTraits #GroupDeprivation #MasculinityStudies #MenVsSociety #PsychologyResearch #Manosphere #RelativeDeprivation #GenderEqualityDebate #InfluenceOfPersonality
-
DATE: September 23, 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. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Men with less modest self-views are more likely to feel victimized and support men’s rights activism
Men with a less modest view of themselves tend to feel that men as a group are unfairly disadvantaged compared to women. This sense of victimhood predicts a greater willingness to support and participate in men’s rights activism, according to new research. The findings were published in Personality and Individual Differences.
To understand this connection, it helps to look at two psychological concepts at the center of the research: trait modesty and group-based relative deprivation. Trait modesty refers to how people evaluate themselves in relation to others. People with high trait modesty generally view themselves as being no better than anyone else. On the other hand, people with low trait modesty tend to feel superior and entitled to special privileges, viewing themselves as better than those around them. This shapes how they interpret situations involving social comparisons.
Group-based relative deprivation is the perception that a person’s own group is being unfairly treated or disadvantaged compared to other groups in society. This feeling often triggers anger and resentment. To experience it, an individual has to compare their group to another, appraise their group as disadvantaged, and view that disadvantage as unjust. In the context of gender, it captures a sense that men are losing power or status they are rightfully entitled to.
Researchers have increasingly documented how men adopt a sense of victimhood and how entitlement fuels backlash against gender equality. For example, a 2021 study indicated that many people now believe sexism primarily targets men rather than women, capturing a core grievance of the men’s rights movement. Building on this idea, a 2022 study showed how men in the men’s rights movement construct a sense of victimhood to build a collective identity that justifies their protests and organizing.
Adding to this picture, a 2024 study provided evidence that male entitlement predicts a willingness to engage in both peaceful and aggressive actions to defend men’s societal status. Similarly, research covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that traits like narcissism and psychopathy were associated with lower support for feminist attitudes.
The new research, led by Joanna Lindström, a psychology researcher at Uppsala University, and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, a lecturer in social, political, and feminist psychology at the University of Exeter, sought to pinpoint whether low modesty is a specific personality trait linked to these feelings of unfair deprivation and a willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.
“I was initially interested in understanding why some (but not all) members of structurally advantaged groups perceive that their group is unjustly disadvantaged, despite statistics and history suggesting otherwise,” Lindström told PsyPost. “This led me to show that low modesty was linked to feeling deprived among men (but not women), and among White Americans (but not Black Americans),” she explained, referring to a previous study she conducted. “We then wanted to examine whether modesty and feeling deprived as a man could also explain men’s willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.”
The researchers tested this idea in two separate stages. In the first study, the team recruited 195 White American men through an online platform. The participants completed a standardized personality questionnaire designed to measure trait modesty. They also answered a series of questions measuring group-based relative deprivation, indicating how frustrated they felt about men being supposedly disadvantaged in modern society.
Next, the researchers measured the participants’ support for and intention to engage in men’s rights activism. They separated these potential actions into two distinct categories. Conventional political actions included activities accepted within a social system, like advocating for law reform or joining a men’s rights organization. Extreme or non-traditional actions included behaviors that deviate from societal norms, like participating in a protest that might turn violent or supporting those who use physical aggression for the cause.
The team found that men with lower trait modesty were more likely to report feeling that men are an oppressed group. This feeling of deprivation, in turn, predicted higher support for both peaceful and extreme activism. Deprivation was a stronger predictor of conventional activism, while having low modesty itself was a stronger predictor of a willingness to engage in extreme, non-traditional activism. The results suggest an indirect pathway: low modesty leads to a heightened sense of relative deprivation, which then fuels a desire to engage in activism.
“Aspects of men’s personality and perceptions of social context both have a role to play in shaping men’s support for men’s rights activism,” Lindström said. “That is, trait modesty predicts how men appraise their treatment as a group in society more generally, which, in turn influences whether they support and want to personally engage in actions that further men’s ‘rights and opportunities.'” “Put another way, the findings highlight that high modesty may protect men from perceptions of deprivation and men’s rights activism in turn,” she added.
In the second study, the researchers expanded the project to include 492 men, split almost evenly between White and Black Americans. The authors wanted to see if the connection between modesty and activism existed across different racial groups. While the men’s rights movement is often stereotyped as being exclusively White, emerging scholarship has highlighted the presence of a Black manosphere, where Black men engage in online conversations about men’s issues and articulate similar narratives of gender-based disadvantage.
The researchers also tested whether making the idea of male disadvantage highly visible would alter the results. Participants first completed the same measure of trait modesty used in the first study. Half of the men were then asked to take a minute to reflect on the ways men are disadvantaged relative to women, and write four sentences about it. The other half acted as a comparison group and wrote four sentences about their morning routines. After this writing task, all participants completed the measures of deprivation and activism.
The experimental writing task did not change the underlying personality effects. Across both White and Black participants, low modesty consistently predicted a stronger sense that men are unfairly deprived. Just as in the first study, this sense of group deprivation predicted a greater willingness to support and engage in men’s rights activism.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that personal feelings of disadvantage drive hostile sexism toward women. However, the new study specifically measures how group-based deprivation predicts support for collective men’s rights activism rather than individual sexist attitudes.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting the results. The experimental writing task in the second study did not actually increase feelings of relative deprivation compared to writing about a morning routine. This suggests the specific writing exercise might not have been strong enough to affect participants’ views, or that trait modesty exerts a stable influence regardless of the immediate situation.
Also, the researchers note that low modesty shares some overlap with narcissism. Future research is needed to untangle exactly how much of this effect is driven by low modesty alone versus related narcissistic traits, like a desire for authority or a tendency to exploit others. The study also focused exclusively on White and Black men. The authors point out that other minority groups, such as Asian American and Latino men, face unique racial and cultural pressures that could alter how modesty and feelings of deprivation interact.
Finally, the studies were conducted entirely in the United States. Cultural norms around modesty and gender vary widely across the world, meaning these patterns might look different in other countries. More research is needed to see if these psychological pathways hold true in different cultural contexts.
“Given the correlational nature of the data, we also cannot determine a causal link between personality, perceptions of relative deprivation, and men’s rights activism,” the researchers noted. “We know that these things are linked and have explanatory power, but we need to conduct a further experimental study to determine if one variable causes the other, and in which order.” For instance, they explained, “does heightened relative deprivation causally increase men’s rights activism, or does engaging in men’s rights activism/collective action color men’s perceptions of their group’s status in society.”
“We don’t want to convey that the manosphere and men’s rights activism can be explained purely by personality,” the researchers emphasized. “It’s also important to remember that personality is malleable – just because men lower in trait modesty are more likely to perceive men as deprived in society and support/engage in men’s rights activism doesn’t mean that their modesty perceptions can’t change. Cultivating higher modesty may be a key avenue for protecting men from the manosphere’s influence.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are continuing this line of inquiry, including work with the EMMELO project an EU-funded initiative examining the role of masculinity in extremist movements. “We are currently conducting research where we show that modesty and feeling deprived (individually and as a man) predict men’s support for manosphere figures in the U.S. context,” they said. “We aim to design interventions that may decrease men’s support for—and engagement in—the manosphere, which are informed by our ongoing work on the role of modesty and relative deprivation in underpinning endorsement of the manosphere.”
The study, “Low modesty and feeling deprived as a man: A psychological explanation of men’s rights activism,” was authored by Joanna Lindström and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MenRightsActivism #ModestyTraits #GroupDeprivation #MasculinityStudies #MenVsSociety #PsychologyResearch #Manosphere #RelativeDeprivation #GenderEqualityDebate #InfluenceOfPersonality
-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Consciousness may have evolved to solve a problem that pure intelligence couldn’t handle, fascinating new theory suggests
Consciousness may have evolved to help living things resolve competing needs when their survival is at stake, rather than simply emerging from greater intelligence. This theoretical account was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
How did conscious experience emerge from the chemistry of life? Existing theories examine how brains broadcast information, integrate signals, and generate predictions. But explaining these mechanisms leaves an evolutionary question: what problem did consciousness help organisms solve?
Jeff Stibel, a cognitive scientist and author who serves as a trustee of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Tufts University, proposes that cognition and consciousness arose from different evolutionary pressures. Cognition helped organisms navigate uncertainty, while the regulatory processes underlying consciousness helped them preserve themselves and manage competing demands.
“This paper was deeply personal. It grew out of years of conversations with my late mentor, Dan Dennett, who pushed me to formalize some of my thoughts on the evolutionary differences between cognition and consciousness,” explained Stibel. “When Dan passed, I felt an obligation to revisit our discussions, and it became even more pressing given the advances we have seen across AI. What pulled me in was a growing suspicion that we have been asking the wrong question: treating consciousness as the top rung of intelligence, when it looks more like a separate adaptation with its own evolutionary job. The timing felt urgent as AI grows more capable, alongside a widespread assumption that a clever enough machine will simply ‘wake up’ or has already awoken. That narrative is everywhere, and I think it rests on the same confusion.”
Stibel draws together existing research in cell biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He traces a possible progression from cells protecting their boundaries to organisms coordinating multiple needs under conditions of uncertainty, limited resources, and potentially irreversible consequences.
The author outlines six predictions to make the framework testable. These concern whether conscious engagement increases with competing demands; whether different needs must become comparable; whether attention, bodily state, memory, and readiness to act change together; whether consciousness diminishes when this coordination is disrupted or less necessary; how these capacities differ across species; and whether artificial systems require genuine self-maintenance pressures.
Suggested experiments would vary conflict or risk while holding sensory input constant, disrupt coordination while preserving simpler processing, or compare artificial systems with different self-maintenance requirements. The paper also identifies potentially disconfirming findings, including consciousness persisting despite disrupted settlement capacity.
The central argument describes three levels of regulation. “Proto-control” protects an organism’s integrity, such as by preserving a cell’s membrane and limiting destructive processes; the paper explicitly does not describe this as conscious. “Meta-control” manages conflicts among separate regulatory processes. “Settlement control” makes competing needs comparable and coordinates them into a shared course of action. For example, a hungry animal encountering food near a possible predator must weigh feeding against danger. A decision to retreat would involve coordinated changes in attention, bodily readiness, movement, and learning. Stibel identifies consciousness with this coordinated state in a system whose continued existence depends on its own regulation.
“Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing, and they did not evolve for the same reason. Intelligence is outward facing: it is for modeling the world, predicting, planning, solving problems. Consciousness evolved for something more internal: holding a fragile organism together when survival is on the line. The analogy I use in the paper is cannibalism. Intelligence helped early life forage efficiently, but without a self to protect, the most efficient meal was often the nearest neighbor, or the organism itself. The earliest precursors of consciousness helped define biological boundaries, which likely protected early cellular life from eating itself.”
Applied to artificial intelligence, the argument is that greater capability alone would not produce consciousness: a system would also need to maintain itself and resolve competing demands with genuine consequences for its continued existence.
“The upshot for AI is blunt. Scaling today’s models makes them better predictors, not systems with anything of their own at stake. LLMs have no boundaries and no self to protect, and humans provide everything they need,” Stibel told PsyPost. “In that respect, the problem isn’t that they are too simple or fall short of AGI. They are too coddled. Without real skin in the game, no amount of capability will magically cross over into consciousness.”
The paper does not restrict consciousness to biological organisms. However, an artificial system would need more than programmed self-preservation, such that its continued operation would have to depend on conditions that it maintains itself.
Stibel emphasized the implications: “The most important takeaway is that biology and evolution reframe the AI debate. The fear that we will accidentally scale our way into a suffering machine, and the engineering hype that digital minds are just around the corner, both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness. If those are genuinely separate things, then consciousness is not something that sneaks up on us through sheer capability. It is a specific kind of organization we would have to deliberately build, and I would argue, one we have good reason not to. Getting that distinction right is how we choose our ethics rather than stumble into them.”
Testing this account presents a fundamental challenge: researchers may be able to examine whether a system has the proposed capacities for self-maintenance and coordination, but they cannot directly observe whether it has subjective experience.
“The biggest unanswered question is measurement,” Stibel said. “It is impossible to observe consciousness in anyone other than yourself, so the paper proposes testing the necessary precursors instead. At the heart of the test is whether a system genuinely works to maintain its own existence under constraint, rather than just reacting to threats it was built to detect. Turning that into a real experiment, in both biological and artificial systems, is the hard road ahead.”
Stibel also identified an unresolved ethical question: “There is also a deeper question the paper raises but doesn’t settle. If we ever did build a system with genuine stakes in its own survival, we would have created something that can be harmed, a moral patient whose interests may not align with ours. That is a line worth understanding well before we approach it, not after.”
The paper, “From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint,” was authored by Jeff Stibel.
-------------------------------------------------
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DATE: September 23, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Consciousness may have evolved to solve a problem that pure intelligence couldn’t handle, fascinating new theory suggests
Consciousness may have evolved to help living things resolve competing needs when their survival is at stake, rather than simply emerging from greater intelligence. This theoretical account was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
How did conscious experience emerge from the chemistry of life? Existing theories examine how brains broadcast information, integrate signals, and generate predictions. But explaining these mechanisms leaves an evolutionary question: what problem did consciousness help organisms solve?
Jeff Stibel, a cognitive scientist and author who serves as a trustee of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Tufts University, proposes that cognition and consciousness arose from different evolutionary pressures. Cognition helped organisms navigate uncertainty, while the regulatory processes underlying consciousness helped them preserve themselves and manage competing demands.
“This paper was deeply personal. It grew out of years of conversations with my late mentor, Dan Dennett, who pushed me to formalize some of my thoughts on the evolutionary differences between cognition and consciousness,” explained Stibel. “When Dan passed, I felt an obligation to revisit our discussions, and it became even more pressing given the advances we have seen across AI. What pulled me in was a growing suspicion that we have been asking the wrong question: treating consciousness as the top rung of intelligence, when it looks more like a separate adaptation with its own evolutionary job. The timing felt urgent as AI grows more capable, alongside a widespread assumption that a clever enough machine will simply ‘wake up’ or has already awoken. That narrative is everywhere, and I think it rests on the same confusion.”
Stibel draws together existing research in cell biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He traces a possible progression from cells protecting their boundaries to organisms coordinating multiple needs under conditions of uncertainty, limited resources, and potentially irreversible consequences.
The author outlines six predictions to make the framework testable. These concern whether conscious engagement increases with competing demands; whether different needs must become comparable; whether attention, bodily state, memory, and readiness to act change together; whether consciousness diminishes when this coordination is disrupted or less necessary; how these capacities differ across species; and whether artificial systems require genuine self-maintenance pressures.
Suggested experiments would vary conflict or risk while holding sensory input constant, disrupt coordination while preserving simpler processing, or compare artificial systems with different self-maintenance requirements. The paper also identifies potentially disconfirming findings, including consciousness persisting despite disrupted settlement capacity.
The central argument describes three levels of regulation. “Proto-control” protects an organism’s integrity, such as by preserving a cell’s membrane and limiting destructive processes; the paper explicitly does not describe this as conscious. “Meta-control” manages conflicts among separate regulatory processes. “Settlement control” makes competing needs comparable and coordinates them into a shared course of action. For example, a hungry animal encountering food near a possible predator must weigh feeding against danger. A decision to retreat would involve coordinated changes in attention, bodily readiness, movement, and learning. Stibel identifies consciousness with this coordinated state in a system whose continued existence depends on its own regulation.
“Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing, and they did not evolve for the same reason. Intelligence is outward facing: it is for modeling the world, predicting, planning, solving problems. Consciousness evolved for something more internal: holding a fragile organism together when survival is on the line. The analogy I use in the paper is cannibalism. Intelligence helped early life forage efficiently, but without a self to protect, the most efficient meal was often the nearest neighbor, or the organism itself. The earliest precursors of consciousness helped define biological boundaries, which likely protected early cellular life from eating itself.”
Applied to artificial intelligence, the argument is that greater capability alone would not produce consciousness: a system would also need to maintain itself and resolve competing demands with genuine consequences for its continued existence.
“The upshot for AI is blunt. Scaling today’s models makes them better predictors, not systems with anything of their own at stake. LLMs have no boundaries and no self to protect, and humans provide everything they need,” Stibel told PsyPost. “In that respect, the problem isn’t that they are too simple or fall short of AGI. They are too coddled. Without real skin in the game, no amount of capability will magically cross over into consciousness.”
The paper does not restrict consciousness to biological organisms. However, an artificial system would need more than programmed self-preservation, such that its continued operation would have to depend on conditions that it maintains itself.
Stibel emphasized the implications: “The most important takeaway is that biology and evolution reframe the AI debate. The fear that we will accidentally scale our way into a suffering machine, and the engineering hype that digital minds are just around the corner, both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness. If those are genuinely separate things, then consciousness is not something that sneaks up on us through sheer capability. It is a specific kind of organization we would have to deliberately build, and I would argue, one we have good reason not to. Getting that distinction right is how we choose our ethics rather than stumble into them.”
Testing this account presents a fundamental challenge: researchers may be able to examine whether a system has the proposed capacities for self-maintenance and coordination, but they cannot directly observe whether it has subjective experience.
“The biggest unanswered question is measurement,” Stibel said. “It is impossible to observe consciousness in anyone other than yourself, so the paper proposes testing the necessary precursors instead. At the heart of the test is whether a system genuinely works to maintain its own existence under constraint, rather than just reacting to threats it was built to detect. Turning that into a real experiment, in both biological and artificial systems, is the hard road ahead.”
Stibel also identified an unresolved ethical question: “There is also a deeper question the paper raises but doesn’t settle. If we ever did build a system with genuine stakes in its own survival, we would have created something that can be harmed, a moral patient whose interests may not align with ours. That is a line worth understanding well before we approach it, not after.”
The paper, “From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint,” was authored by Jeff Stibel.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ConsciousnessEvolution #CognitionVsConsciousness #SelfMaintenance #AdaptiveOrigins #BioInspiredAI #EvolutionaryNeuroscience #AIethics #ConsciousnessResearch #RegulationLevels #SelfPreservation
-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Consciousness may have evolved to solve a problem that pure intelligence couldn’t handle, fascinating new theory suggests
Consciousness may have evolved to help living things resolve competing needs when their survival is at stake, rather than simply emerging from greater intelligence. This theoretical account was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
How did conscious experience emerge from the chemistry of life? Existing theories examine how brains broadcast information, integrate signals, and generate predictions. But explaining these mechanisms leaves an evolutionary question: what problem did consciousness help organisms solve?
Jeff Stibel, a cognitive scientist and author who serves as a trustee of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Tufts University, proposes that cognition and consciousness arose from different evolutionary pressures. Cognition helped organisms navigate uncertainty, while the regulatory processes underlying consciousness helped them preserve themselves and manage competing demands.
“This paper was deeply personal. It grew out of years of conversations with my late mentor, Dan Dennett, who pushed me to formalize some of my thoughts on the evolutionary differences between cognition and consciousness,” explained Stibel. “When Dan passed, I felt an obligation to revisit our discussions, and it became even more pressing given the advances we have seen across AI. What pulled me in was a growing suspicion that we have been asking the wrong question: treating consciousness as the top rung of intelligence, when it looks more like a separate adaptation with its own evolutionary job. The timing felt urgent as AI grows more capable, alongside a widespread assumption that a clever enough machine will simply ‘wake up’ or has already awoken. That narrative is everywhere, and I think it rests on the same confusion.”
Stibel draws together existing research in cell biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He traces a possible progression from cells protecting their boundaries to organisms coordinating multiple needs under conditions of uncertainty, limited resources, and potentially irreversible consequences.
The author outlines six predictions to make the framework testable. These concern whether conscious engagement increases with competing demands; whether different needs must become comparable; whether attention, bodily state, memory, and readiness to act change together; whether consciousness diminishes when this coordination is disrupted or less necessary; how these capacities differ across species; and whether artificial systems require genuine self-maintenance pressures.
Suggested experiments would vary conflict or risk while holding sensory input constant, disrupt coordination while preserving simpler processing, or compare artificial systems with different self-maintenance requirements. The paper also identifies potentially disconfirming findings, including consciousness persisting despite disrupted settlement capacity.
The central argument describes three levels of regulation. “Proto-control” protects an organism’s integrity, such as by preserving a cell’s membrane and limiting destructive processes; the paper explicitly does not describe this as conscious. “Meta-control” manages conflicts among separate regulatory processes. “Settlement control” makes competing needs comparable and coordinates them into a shared course of action. For example, a hungry animal encountering food near a possible predator must weigh feeding against danger. A decision to retreat would involve coordinated changes in attention, bodily readiness, movement, and learning. Stibel identifies consciousness with this coordinated state in a system whose continued existence depends on its own regulation.
“Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing, and they did not evolve for the same reason. Intelligence is outward facing: it is for modeling the world, predicting, planning, solving problems. Consciousness evolved for something more internal: holding a fragile organism together when survival is on the line. The analogy I use in the paper is cannibalism. Intelligence helped early life forage efficiently, but without a self to protect, the most efficient meal was often the nearest neighbor, or the organism itself. The earliest precursors of consciousness helped define biological boundaries, which likely protected early cellular life from eating itself.”
Applied to artificial intelligence, the argument is that greater capability alone would not produce consciousness: a system would also need to maintain itself and resolve competing demands with genuine consequences for its continued existence.
“The upshot for AI is blunt. Scaling today’s models makes them better predictors, not systems with anything of their own at stake. LLMs have no boundaries and no self to protect, and humans provide everything they need,” Stibel told PsyPost. “In that respect, the problem isn’t that they are too simple or fall short of AGI. They are too coddled. Without real skin in the game, no amount of capability will magically cross over into consciousness.”
The paper does not restrict consciousness to biological organisms. However, an artificial system would need more than programmed self-preservation, such that its continued operation would have to depend on conditions that it maintains itself.
Stibel emphasized the implications: “The most important takeaway is that biology and evolution reframe the AI debate. The fear that we will accidentally scale our way into a suffering machine, and the engineering hype that digital minds are just around the corner, both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness. If those are genuinely separate things, then consciousness is not something that sneaks up on us through sheer capability. It is a specific kind of organization we would have to deliberately build, and I would argue, one we have good reason not to. Getting that distinction right is how we choose our ethics rather than stumble into them.”
Testing this account presents a fundamental challenge: researchers may be able to examine whether a system has the proposed capacities for self-maintenance and coordination, but they cannot directly observe whether it has subjective experience.
“The biggest unanswered question is measurement,” Stibel said. “It is impossible to observe consciousness in anyone other than yourself, so the paper proposes testing the necessary precursors instead. At the heart of the test is whether a system genuinely works to maintain its own existence under constraint, rather than just reacting to threats it was built to detect. Turning that into a real experiment, in both biological and artificial systems, is the hard road ahead.”
Stibel also identified an unresolved ethical question: “There is also a deeper question the paper raises but doesn’t settle. If we ever did build a system with genuine stakes in its own survival, we would have created something that can be harmed, a moral patient whose interests may not align with ours. That is a line worth understanding well before we approach it, not after.”
The paper, “From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint,” was authored by Jeff Stibel.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ConsciousnessEvolution #CognitionVsConsciousness #SelfMaintenance #AdaptiveOrigins #BioInspiredAI #EvolutionaryNeuroscience #AIethics #ConsciousnessResearch #RegulationLevels #SelfPreservation
-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 02:41AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Trump Tells U.N. He Could "Annihilate" Iran's Regime But Predicts a Deal
Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines
President Trump defended his handling of conflicts around the world in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, saying he could "annihilate" Iran while predicting that its leaders would make a deal to end the war after the U.S. midterm elections. He framed his approach to foreign policy as deploying American power to solve "decades of intractable challenges" that previous U.S. leaders have failed to address.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #TrumpUN #IranDeal #USForeignPolicy #AnnihilateIran #UNGA #MiddleEastNews #TrumpSpeech #InternationalRelations #ForeignPolicy #Geopolitics
-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 02:41AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Trump Tells U.N. He Could "Annihilate" Iran's Regime But Predicts a Deal
Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines
President Trump defended his handling of conflicts around the world in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, saying he could "annihilate" Iran while predicting that its leaders would make a deal to end the war after the U.S. midterm elections. He framed his approach to foreign policy as deploying American power to solve "decades of intractable challenges" that previous U.S. leaders have failed to address.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #TrumpUN #IranDeal #USForeignPolicy #AnnihilateIran #UNGA #MiddleEastNews #TrumpSpeech #InternationalRelations #ForeignPolicy #Geopolitics
-
DATE: September 23, 2026 at 02:41AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Trump Tells U.N. He Could "Annihilate" Iran's Regime But Predicts a Deal
Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines
President Trump defended his handling of conflicts around the world in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, saying he could "annihilate" Iran while predicting that its leaders would make a deal to end the war after the U.S. midterm elections. He framed his approach to foreign policy as deploying American power to solve "decades of intractable challenges" that previous U.S. leaders have failed to address.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
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-
DATE: September 22, 2026 at 02:30PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brain scans reveal how artificial sweeteners affect our reward circuits differently than sugar
An experimental study compared changes in brain activity after ingestion of water and different types of flavored waters. Results showed that cerebral blood flow in the hypothalamus (a brain region that controls homeostatic processes like hunger and thirst) was not differentially affected by any of the drinks. However, the ventral tegmental area (a midbrain region involved in reward and motivation) showed lower changes in cerebral blood flow after sucrose than after water, sucralose, or monk fruit drink ingestion. The paper was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
As obesity rates have risen worldwide, reducing excessive energy intake has become an important goal for both individuals and public health. One widely used strategy is to replace sugar with low- or no-calorie sweeteners, particularly in beverages, where added sugars can contribute substantially to daily calorie intake. Although concerns are often raised that exposure to sweetness might increase cravings for sweet foods, current evidence does not consistently support this idea.
At the same time, low- and no-calorie sweeteners should not necessarily be viewed as a single, uniform group. Different sweeteners can vary in taste, metabolic effects, effects on the gut microbiome, and the physiological responses they produce after consumption. Sugars themselves also differ in how they are processed by the body and in their effects on blood glucose and other metabolic processes.
Because the brain plays a central role in hunger, satiety, reward, and energy regulation, researchers are increasingly interested in how different sweeteners influence brain activity after consumption. Brain-imaging research suggests that caloric sugars and non-caloric sweeteners may sometimes produce different responses in regions involved in appetite regulation, including the hypothalamus, although findings remain inconsistent.
Study author Paul AM Smeets, an associate professor at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University Research, and his colleagues conducted a study in which they examined changes in brain activity and physiological markers after the ingestion of flavored waters sweetened with the sugar sucrose or various low-no-calorie sweeteners.
“I have done previous work on low-/no-calorie sweeteners (LNCS), also with the use of brain imaging (fMRI),” Smeets explained. “There has been quite some negative press about potential adverse effects of sweet compounds on metabolism and energy intake. The evidence in favor of no adverse effects such as subsequent increased food intake is substantial. That said, there is research emerging that shows differential effects of different LNCS because they are metabolized differently by the body. Therefore, when I was approached by an ingredient company to do a study on a range of LNCS I was eager to pursue such a study.”
The researchers hypothesized that sugar sucrose would elicit decreased cerebral blood flow (indicating decreased neural activity) in brain areas related to food intake regulation and reward 30 minutes after ingestion. They expected that low- or no-calorie sweeteners and water would not produce such effects due to their low or absent energy content.
Study participants were 30 healthy individuals. Fifteen of them were men. Their average age was 23 years. They completed six treatment sessions between February 2023 and March 2024.
The treatment consisted of ingestion of 500 milliliters of either water or one of five equally sweet, lemon-lime flavored waters sweetened with sucrose (25 grams, 97 kcal) or sucralose, stevia extract, monk fruit extract, or allulose + stevia extract.
Sucralose is a high-intensity artificial sweetener made from modified sucrose that provides sweetness with virtually no calories. Stevia extract is a plant-derived sweetener obtained from Stevia rebaudiana and contains sweet compounds called steviol glycosides. Monk fruit extract is a natural high-intensity sweetener derived from Siraitia grosvenorii fruit. Allulose is a rare low-calorie sugar with properties similar to ordinary sugar. Stevia is mixed with allulose to increase sweetness while keeping calorie content low. These sweeteners add little or no calories to a drink.
At the start of the treatment procedure, participants completed magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains and of their stomachs. They also answered questions about appetite and well-being verbally. After this, they drank the drink assigned to them on the occasion. This was followed by two more scans of their brains and of their stomachs at different times up to 45 minutes after drinking.
Participants gave blood samples at the start and five more times up to an hour after drinking their assigned beverage (except on the day they received water). After the first sip, participants rated the tastiness and sweetness of the drink they consumed. All participants consumed their drinks within five minutes. Sixty minutes after drinking, after all the procedures were completed, participants were offered a takeaway breakfast.
“It was a huge study, with approximately 180 intense test sessions that combined brain imaging, blood sampling and stomach imaging,” Smeets noted. “I’m really proud of the research team that did the data collection.”
Results showed that all sweet drinks were liked equally, except monk fruit, which was liked modestly less than the sucrose-sweetened drink. All sweetened drinks except the one with monk fruit were liked more than water. All sweetened drinks were perceived as sweeter than water. The monk fruit-sweetened drink and the drink sweetened with allulose+stevia were rated modestly less sweet than the sucrose-sweetened drink.
Cerebral blood flow in the hypothalamus was similarly affected by all sweet drinks. Cerebral blood flow is an indirect indicator of activity in a particular region of the brain, with higher cerebral blood flow generally suggesting higher neural activity.
In the ventral tegmental area, the change in the cerebral blood flow was lower after sucrose than after water, sucralose, and monk fruit drink 30 minutes after ingestion. This suggests that neural activity in that region of the brain was lower after ingesting the sucrose-sweetened drink than after water, and drinks sweetened with sucralose and monk fruit extract.
Exploratory analyses showed increased cerebral blood flow (and thus increased neural activity) after consumption of the allulose+stevia-sweetened drink in the amygdala region of the brain and after the stevia-sweetened drink in the putamen region of the brain compared to the sucrose-sweetened drink. Despite its low energy content, the allulose+stevia-sweetened drink delayed gastric emptying (the speed at which food leaves the stomach) similar to the sucrose-sweetened drink, whereas only the sucrose-sweetened drink increased glucose and insulin concentrations.
This particular finding stood out to the research team. The fact that the “LNCS allulose slowed down stomach emptying of the drink similar to table sugar despite its low energy content” was a surprising result, Smeets said. Looking ahead, he added, “I would like to further explore allulose, e.g. by measuring its effect on gut hormones that affect gastric emptying and appetite, like GLP-1.”
“Although flavored waters with LNCS mostly elicit similar neural and gastrointestinal responses as water, they have some distinct effects on the brain compared with 25 g of sucrose, particularly in reward-related brain areas,” the study authors wrote.
Smeets emphasized that the overarching takeaway for consumers is quite straightforward: “Sweet drinks (flavored waters) with LNCS mostly elicit similar neural and gastrointestinal responses as water, i.e., they are largely equivalent to water except for their sweet taste.”
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about brain reactions to sweetened beverages. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a very small group of participants, which may have made some differences in brain reactions undetectable using usual statistical procedures. Smeets also pointed out that the research involved a “young healthy adults (specifically selected),” cautioning that “responses in individuals with overweight/obesity or type 2 diabetes might be different.”
The paper, “Brain and physiological responses to flavored waters with different sweeteners: a randomized crossover study in healthy young adults,” was authored by Paul AM Smeets, Ralf Veit, Els Oosterink, Saskia Meijboom, Davide Risso, Hubert Preissl, and Stephanie Kullmann.
(Note: This article was updated post-publication with comments from Smeets.)
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BrainImaging #Sweeteners #SucroseVsLNCS #RewardCircuit #VentralTegmentalArea #Hypothalamus #FlavorBevResearch #NeuroscienceNutrition #AlluloseStevia #GutBrainConnection
-
DATE: September 22, 2026 at 02:30PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brain scans reveal how artificial sweeteners affect our reward circuits differently than sugar
An experimental study compared changes in brain activity after ingestion of water and different types of flavored waters. Results showed that cerebral blood flow in the hypothalamus (a brain region that controls homeostatic processes like hunger and thirst) was not differentially affected by any of the drinks. However, the ventral tegmental area (a midbrain region involved in reward and motivation) showed lower changes in cerebral blood flow after sucrose than after water, sucralose, or monk fruit drink ingestion. The paper was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
As obesity rates have risen worldwide, reducing excessive energy intake has become an important goal for both individuals and public health. One widely used strategy is to replace sugar with low- or no-calorie sweeteners, particularly in beverages, where added sugars can contribute substantially to daily calorie intake. Although concerns are often raised that exposure to sweetness might increase cravings for sweet foods, current evidence does not consistently support this idea.
At the same time, low- and no-calorie sweeteners should not necessarily be viewed as a single, uniform group. Different sweeteners can vary in taste, metabolic effects, effects on the gut microbiome, and the physiological responses they produce after consumption. Sugars themselves also differ in how they are processed by the body and in their effects on blood glucose and other metabolic processes.
Because the brain plays a central role in hunger, satiety, reward, and energy regulation, researchers are increasingly interested in how different sweeteners influence brain activity after consumption. Brain-imaging research suggests that caloric sugars and non-caloric sweeteners may sometimes produce different responses in regions involved in appetite regulation, including the hypothalamus, although findings remain inconsistent.
Study author Paul AM Smeets, an associate professor at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University Research, and his colleagues conducted a study in which they examined changes in brain activity and physiological markers after the ingestion of flavored waters sweetened with the sugar sucrose or various low-no-calorie sweeteners.
“I have done previous work on low-/no-calorie sweeteners (LNCS), also with the use of brain imaging (fMRI),” Smeets explained. “There has been quite some negative press about potential adverse effects of sweet compounds on metabolism and energy intake. The evidence in favor of no adverse effects such as subsequent increased food intake is substantial. That said, there is research emerging that shows differential effects of different LNCS because they are metabolized differently by the body. Therefore, when I was approached by an ingredient company to do a study on a range of LNCS I was eager to pursue such a study.”
The researchers hypothesized that sugar sucrose would elicit decreased cerebral blood flow (indicating decreased neural activity) in brain areas related to food intake regulation and reward 30 minutes after ingestion. They expected that low- or no-calorie sweeteners and water would not produce such effects due to their low or absent energy content.
Study participants were 30 healthy individuals. Fifteen of them were men. Their average age was 23 years. They completed six treatment sessions between February 2023 and March 2024.
The treatment consisted of ingestion of 500 milliliters of either water or one of five equally sweet, lemon-lime flavored waters sweetened with sucrose (25 grams, 97 kcal) or sucralose, stevia extract, monk fruit extract, or allulose + stevia extract.
Sucralose is a high-intensity artificial sweetener made from modified sucrose that provides sweetness with virtually no calories. Stevia extract is a plant-derived sweetener obtained from Stevia rebaudiana and contains sweet compounds called steviol glycosides. Monk fruit extract is a natural high-intensity sweetener derived from Siraitia grosvenorii fruit. Allulose is a rare low-calorie sugar with properties similar to ordinary sugar. Stevia is mixed with allulose to increase sweetness while keeping calorie content low. These sweeteners add little or no calories to a drink.
At the start of the treatment procedure, participants completed magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains and of their stomachs. They also answered questions about appetite and well-being verbally. After this, they drank the drink assigned to them on the occasion. This was followed by two more scans of their brains and of their stomachs at different times up to 45 minutes after drinking.
Participants gave blood samples at the start and five more times up to an hour after drinking their assigned beverage (except on the day they received water). After the first sip, participants rated the tastiness and sweetness of the drink they consumed. All participants consumed their drinks within five minutes. Sixty minutes after drinking, after all the procedures were completed, participants were offered a takeaway breakfast.
“It was a huge study, with approximately 180 intense test sessions that combined brain imaging, blood sampling and stomach imaging,” Smeets noted. “I’m really proud of the research team that did the data collection.”
Results showed that all sweet drinks were liked equally, except monk fruit, which was liked modestly less than the sucrose-sweetened drink. All sweetened drinks except the one with monk fruit were liked more than water. All sweetened drinks were perceived as sweeter than water. The monk fruit-sweetened drink and the drink sweetened with allulose+stevia were rated modestly less sweet than the sucrose-sweetened drink.
Cerebral blood flow in the hypothalamus was similarly affected by all sweet drinks. Cerebral blood flow is an indirect indicator of activity in a particular region of the brain, with higher cerebral blood flow generally suggesting higher neural activity.
In the ventral tegmental area, the change in the cerebral blood flow was lower after sucrose than after water, sucralose, and monk fruit drink 30 minutes after ingestion. This suggests that neural activity in that region of the brain was lower after ingesting the sucrose-sweetened drink than after water, and drinks sweetened with sucralose and monk fruit extract.
Exploratory analyses showed increased cerebral blood flow (and thus increased neural activity) after consumption of the allulose+stevia-sweetened drink in the amygdala region of the brain and after the stevia-sweetened drink in the putamen region of the brain compared to the sucrose-sweetened drink. Despite its low energy content, the allulose+stevia-sweetened drink delayed gastric emptying (the speed at which food leaves the stomach) similar to the sucrose-sweetened drink, whereas only the sucrose-sweetened drink increased glucose and insulin concentrations.
This particular finding stood out to the research team. The fact that the “LNCS allulose slowed down stomach emptying of the drink similar to table sugar despite its low energy content” was a surprising result, Smeets said. Looking ahead, he added, “I would like to further explore allulose, e.g. by measuring its effect on gut hormones that affect gastric emptying and appetite, like GLP-1.”
“Although flavored waters with LNCS mostly elicit similar neural and gastrointestinal responses as water, they have some distinct effects on the brain compared with 25 g of sucrose, particularly in reward-related brain areas,” the study authors wrote.
Smeets emphasized that the overarching takeaway for consumers is quite straightforward: “Sweet drinks (flavored waters) with LNCS mostly elicit similar neural and gastrointestinal responses as water, i.e., they are largely equivalent to water except for their sweet taste.”
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about brain reactions to sweetened beverages. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a very small group of participants, which may have made some differences in brain reactions undetectable using usual statistical procedures. Smeets also pointed out that the research involved a “young healthy adults (specifically selected),” cautioning that “responses in individuals with overweight/obesity or type 2 diabetes might be different.”
The paper, “Brain and physiological responses to flavored waters with different sweeteners: a randomized crossover study in healthy young adults,” was authored by Paul AM Smeets, Ralf Veit, Els Oosterink, Saskia Meijboom, Davide Risso, Hubert Preissl, and Stephanie Kullmann.
(Note: This article was updated post-publication with comments from Smeets.)
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BrainImaging #Sweeteners #SucroseVsLNCS #RewardCircuit #VentralTegmentalArea #Hypothalamus #FlavorBevResearch #NeuroscienceNutrition #AlluloseStevia #GutBrainConnection
-
DATE: September 22, 2026 at 02:30PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brain scans reveal how artificial sweeteners affect our reward circuits differently than sugar
An experimental study compared changes in brain activity after ingestion of water and different types of flavored waters. Results showed that cerebral blood flow in the hypothalamus (a brain region that controls homeostatic processes like hunger and thirst) was not differentially affected by any of the drinks. However, the ventral tegmental area (a midbrain region involved in reward and motivation) showed lower changes in cerebral blood flow after sucrose than after water, sucralose, or monk fruit drink ingestion. The paper was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
As obesity rates have risen worldwide, reducing excessive energy intake has become an important goal for both individuals and public health. One widely used strategy is to replace sugar with low- or no-calorie sweeteners, particularly in beverages, where added sugars can contribute substantially to daily calorie intake. Although concerns are often raised that exposure to sweetness might increase cravings for sweet foods, current evidence does not consistently support this idea.
At the same time, low- and no-calorie sweeteners should not necessarily be viewed as a single, uniform group. Different sweeteners can vary in taste, metabolic effects, effects on the gut microbiome, and the physiological responses they produce after consumption. Sugars themselves also differ in how they are processed by the body and in their effects on blood glucose and other metabolic processes.
Because the brain plays a central role in hunger, satiety, reward, and energy regulation, researchers are increasingly interested in how different sweeteners influence brain activity after consumption. Brain-imaging research suggests that caloric sugars and non-caloric sweeteners may sometimes produce different responses in regions involved in appetite regulation, including the hypothalamus, although findings remain inconsistent.
Study author Paul AM Smeets, an associate professor at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University Research, and his colleagues conducted a study in which they examined changes in brain activity and physiological markers after the ingestion of flavored waters sweetened with the sugar sucrose or various low-no-calorie sweeteners.
“I have done previous work on low-/no-calorie sweeteners (LNCS), also with the use of brain imaging (fMRI),” Smeets explained. “There has been quite some negative press about potential adverse effects of sweet compounds on metabolism and energy intake. The evidence in favor of no adverse effects such as subsequent increased food intake is substantial. That said, there is research emerging that shows differential effects of different LNCS because they are metabolized differently by the body. Therefore, when I was approached by an ingredient company to do a study on a range of LNCS I was eager to pursue such a study.”
The researchers hypothesized that sugar sucrose would elicit decreased cerebral blood flow (indicating decreased neural activity) in brain areas related to food intake regulation and reward 30 minutes after ingestion. They expected that low- or no-calorie sweeteners and water would not produce such effects due to their low or absent energy content.
Study participants were 30 healthy individuals. Fifteen of them were men. Their average age was 23 years. They completed six treatment sessions between February 2023 and March 2024.
The treatment consisted of ingestion of 500 milliliters of either water or one of five equally sweet, lemon-lime flavored waters sweetened with sucrose (25 grams, 97 kcal) or sucralose, stevia extract, monk fruit extract, or allulose + stevia extract.
Sucralose is a high-intensity artificial sweetener made from modified sucrose that provides sweetness with virtually no calories. Stevia extract is a plant-derived sweetener obtained from Stevia rebaudiana and contains sweet compounds called steviol glycosides. Monk fruit extract is a natural high-intensity sweetener derived from Siraitia grosvenorii fruit. Allulose is a rare low-calorie sugar with properties similar to ordinary sugar. Stevia is mixed with allulose to increase sweetness while keeping calorie content low. These sweeteners add little or no calories to a drink.
At the start of the treatment procedure, participants completed magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains and of their stomachs. They also answered questions about appetite and well-being verbally. After this, they drank the drink assigned to them on the occasion. This was followed by two more scans of their brains and of their stomachs at different times up to 45 minutes after drinking.
Participants gave blood samples at the start and five more times up to an hour after drinking their assigned beverage (except on the day they received water). After the first sip, participants rated the tastiness and sweetness of the drink they consumed. All participants consumed their drinks within five minutes. Sixty minutes after drinking, after all the procedures were completed, participants were offered a takeaway breakfast.
“It was a huge study, with approximately 180 intense test sessions that combined brain imaging, blood sampling and stomach imaging,” Smeets noted. “I’m really proud of the research team that did the data collection.”
Results showed that all sweet drinks were liked equally, except monk fruit, which was liked modestly less than the sucrose-sweetened drink. All sweetened drinks except the one with monk fruit were liked more than water. All sweetened drinks were perceived as sweeter than water. The monk fruit-sweetened drink and the drink sweetened with allulose+stevia were rated modestly less sweet than the sucrose-sweetened drink.
Cerebral blood flow in the hypothalamus was similarly affected by all sweet drinks. Cerebral blood flow is an indirect indicator of activity in a particular region of the brain, with higher cerebral blood flow generally suggesting higher neural activity.
In the ventral tegmental area, the change in the cerebral blood flow was lower after sucrose than after water, sucralose, and monk fruit drink 30 minutes after ingestion. This suggests that neural activity in that region of the brain was lower after ingesting the sucrose-sweetened drink than after water, and drinks sweetened with sucralose and monk fruit extract.
Exploratory analyses showed increased cerebral blood flow (and thus increased neural activity) after consumption of the allulose+stevia-sweetened drink in the amygdala region of the brain and after the stevia-sweetened drink in the putamen region of the brain compared to the sucrose-sweetened drink. Despite its low energy content, the allulose+stevia-sweetened drink delayed gastric emptying (the speed at which food leaves the stomach) similar to the sucrose-sweetened drink, whereas only the sucrose-sweetened drink increased glucose and insulin concentrations.
This particular finding stood out to the research team. The fact that the “LNCS allulose slowed down stomach emptying of the drink similar to table sugar despite its low energy content” was a surprising result, Smeets said. Looking ahead, he added, “I would like to further explore allulose, e.g. by measuring its effect on gut hormones that affect gastric emptying and appetite, like GLP-1.”
“Although flavored waters with LNCS mostly elicit similar neural and gastrointestinal responses as water, they have some distinct effects on the brain compared with 25 g of sucrose, particularly in reward-related brain areas,” the study authors wrote.
Smeets emphasized that the overarching takeaway for consumers is quite straightforward: “Sweet drinks (flavored waters) with LNCS mostly elicit similar neural and gastrointestinal responses as water, i.e., they are largely equivalent to water except for their sweet taste.”
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about brain reactions to sweetened beverages. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a very small group of participants, which may have made some differences in brain reactions undetectable using usual statistical procedures. Smeets also pointed out that the research involved a “young healthy adults (specifically selected),” cautioning that “responses in individuals with overweight/obesity or type 2 diabetes might be different.”
The paper, “Brain and physiological responses to flavored waters with different sweeteners: a randomized crossover study in healthy young adults,” was authored by Paul AM Smeets, Ralf Veit, Els Oosterink, Saskia Meijboom, Davide Risso, Hubert Preissl, and Stephanie Kullmann.
(Note: This article was updated post-publication with comments from Smeets.)
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