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DATE: October 8, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Brain replays motor skills during sleep without help from the memory center

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-replays-motor-skills-during-sleep-without-help-from-the-memory-center/

When we sleep, our brains replay the events of the day to solidify new skills, a process scientists previously thought was always controlled by a region called the hippocampus. A new study in mice reveals that the brain network responsible for habits and motor skills can generate these sleep replays entirely on its own. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that different memory systems in the brain can function and reinforce themselves independently.

Memory is not a single phenomenon. The brain handles facts and events, known as declarative memory, differently than it handles procedural memory, which covers motor skills and habits like riding a bicycle. For decades, researchers debated how the brain cements these different types of memories during sleep.

A prevailing theory suggested that the hippocampus acts as a central conductor for the sleeping brain. Under this model, the hippocampus replays the spatial and temporal context of the day’s events, sending signals that trigger the rest of the brain to lock in all types of memories. However, some past research hinted that motor skills might not need the hippocampus to become permanent.

To resolve this tension, a research team led by Emmett Thompson and Lars Rollik at University College London looked at exactly how the brain processes procedural memories offline. Marcus Stephenson-Jones supervised the work. The researchers wanted to know if the brain circuits that store motor skills possess an autonomous ability to replay memories, or if they rely entirely on the hippocampus.

The researchers first designed a physical task for a small study of mice. The animals learned to poke their noses into a specific sequence of five ports to receive a water reward. As the mice practiced, their movements became highly stereotyped, resembling the acquisition of a physical habit.

To confirm which brain area drove this learning, the researchers disabled a region called the dorsolateral striatum, part of the dorsal striatum. This structure sits deep in the brain and is heavily involved in coordinating movement and processing rewards. Mice with a disabled dorsolateral striatum failed to learn the sequence from memory, and they showed highly variable, uncoordinated movements during the physical task.

Next, the team blocked chemical receptors required for neural plasticity in the dorsal striatum while the mice slept. The researchers waited until the animals had finished a day of training before delivering the blocking agent. The following day, the animals performed worse on the sequence task, dropping back to earlier levels of training.

The researchers then implanted high-density electrodes to monitor individual brain cells in the dorsal striatum. They recorded the mice both while they performed the task and while they slept afterward. To analyze the data, they used a machine learning tool that identifies hidden patterns in neural firing without relying on human assumptions.

During the awake physical task, the algorithm identified distinct sequences of brain cell activity that aligned with specific phases of the behavioral sequence. Different groups of neurons fired in precise orders depending on whether the mouse was moving between ports, consuming a reward, or performing other behaviors such as grooming.

When the researchers applied the same algorithm to the animals’ sleeping brain activity, they found that these exact neural sequences reactivated. The brain cells fired in the same order they did during the physical task, a phenomenon known as replay. This offline replay occurred at normal speeds, but it also often progressed much faster, compressing the time it took to complete the neural sequence into a fraction of a second.

The content of the sleep replay was highly structured. The sleeping brain prioritized sequences related to the physical task over random behaviors. It also heavily favored sequences associated with rewards. When the brain replayed sequences in a forward direction, and when it used neurons that fired consistently during the daytime task, the mice showed better physical performance the next day.

Finally, the team tested whether the hippocampus was orchestrating this striatal replay. They used a viral injection to perform large bilateral lesions, completely disabling the hippocampus in a group of mice. They then monitored the animals’ learning and their brain activity during sleep.

The mice without a hippocampus learned the five-step physical sequence just as well as control animals. They completed the task with the exact same speed and accuracy. This confirmed that the hippocampus was not required to learn or perform this specific motor skill.

When the researchers looked at the sleep data, they found that the dorsal striatum still generated neural replay. Every characteristic of the replay remained intact despite the missing hippocampus. The sequences played in forward and reverse orders, sped up and slowed down, and occurred across multiple stages of sleep. The brain also continued to prioritize task-related sequences just as it did in healthy mice.

While these results show that procedural memory replay can happen without the hippocampus, the findings do not mean the hippocampus is universally uninvolved in all forms of motor learning. In physical tasks that heavily rely on spatial navigation or learning an environment, the hippocampus might still play a role in shaping memory.

Because this research was conducted in mice, the exact mechanisms of memory replay will need to be confirmed in humans. Additionally, the researchers point out that future studies will need to identify the exact trigger for this independent replay in the striatum. They plan to investigate how other chemicals, like dopamine, might coordinate with replay to cement habits and skills during rest.

The study, “Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus,” was authored by Emmett J. Thompson, Lars B. Rollik, Benjamin Waked, Georgina Mills, Sthitapranjya Pati, Jasvin Kaur, Ben Geva, Haoyu Li, Rodrigo Carrasco-Davis, Tom George, Clementine Domine, William Dorrell, and Marcus Stephenson-Jones.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-replays-motor-skills-during-sleep-without-help-from-the-memory-center/

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DATE: October 8, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: People who favor group-based inequality tend to have less gray matter in an empathy-linked brain region

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-favor-group-based-inequality-tend-to-have-less-gray-matter-in-an-empathy-linked-brain-region/

A person’s preference for group-based inequality and social hierarchies may be linked to both brain structure and a personality trait tied to reward seeking. According to a new study published in Current Psychology, young adults who score higher in social dominance orientation tend to have less gray matter in a brain region involved in empathy and emotional processing. The findings hint that social and political worldviews may be tied partly to basic motivational and emotional differences.

Social dominance orientation is a personality trait that captures how much an individual prefers inequality between social groups over equality. People who score high on this trait view society as naturally divided into superior and inferior groups, often supporting social systems and policies that maintain these hierarchies. In contrast, those with lower scores favor egalitarian relationships between groups and oppose group-based dominance.

To explore how this mindset relates to the physical brain, researchers focused on specific areas, including the anterior insula. The insula is an island of brain tissue tucked deep within the lateral groove on each side of the brain, positioned beneath the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. Its front portion, the anterior insula, plays a central role in detecting bodily sensations and processing the emotional experiences of others.

The study was led by Jesús Adrián-Ventura, a professor at the University of Zaragoza in Spain and a researcher with the Pseudo-Lab research group.

“Despite Social Dominance Orientation—the ideological belief that some groups should dominate others—being a central construct in social psychology, its neural underpinnings have received very little attention,” Adrián-Ventura told PsyPost. “We aimed to contribute to filling this gap, while also exploring predictors related to personality and motivation. Ultimately, we sought to investigate how stable brain traits (e.g., brain anatomy) and motivational drives jointly predispose individuals to endorse social hierarchies and inequality.”

Earlier psychological work helped establish this line of inquiry. For instance, a 2013 study indicated that people who strongly favor social dominance tend to report lower empathy in general.

Other research suggested that the desire for social hierarchy may be driven less by negative feelings toward other groups than by an appetite for rewards. In particular, a 2013 paper linked social dominance orientation to positive approach motivation, which is the psychological drive to actively pursue rewards. This finding pointed to the possibility that people who endorse hierarchies might find the prospect of higher social rank and power personally rewarding.

Scientists later began asking whether these persistent psychological tendencies correspond to measurable differences in brain anatomy. In a 2023 brain imaging study of adults in Singapore, researchers observed that higher social dominance scores were tied to less gray matter, the brain tissue made up mainly of nerve cell bodies, in the anterior insula and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area just above the eye sockets involved in weighing values and regulating emotions.

Higher scores were also tied to more gray matter in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that helps process emotions such as fear. Some of those results did not hold up under stricter analysis methods, so Adrián-Ventura and his colleagues set out to test them again with refined techniques in a Spanish sample.

The researchers recruited 99 healthy young adults between the ages of 18 and 30, including 62 women and 37 men, from a university campus in Spain. All participants completed cognitive screening and filled out psychological surveys before undergoing brain scans. Two participants showed brain volume values that were potential statistical outliers and were excluded from the neuroimaging analyses, leaving a sample of 97 participants. The researchers had calculated in advance that about 84 participants would be needed to reliably detect a moderate correlation.

Participants completed an eight-item survey measuring social dominance orientation, rating statements about group equality and dominance on a scale from 1 to 7. They also completed a 24-item survey assessing sensitivity to reward, which measures how readily someone acts in response to potential incentives in daily life without worrying about negative outcomes. Brain scans were gathered using high-resolution 3-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that produces detailed images of soft tissue without X-rays.

The team analyzed the scans using voxel-based morphometry, a computational approach that measures the volume of gray matter in specific parts of the brain. The authors analyzed predefined regions of interest based on a standardized anatomical brain atlas, adjusting their calculations for participant age and head size. They did not include sex as a separate factor, reasoning that adjusting for head size already captures much of the sex-related variation in brain volume.

The analyses indicated that higher scores on social dominance orientation were linked to less gray matter volume in both the left and right anterior insula. For the left anterior insula, the correlation with social dominance scores was r = -0.30, and for the right anterior insula, it was r = -0.29, representing moderate negative correlations after accounting for age and head size. Because testing several regions raises the odds of a chance finding, the researchers used a stricter threshold for statistical significance, and both insula results passed it.

An exploratory scan of the entire brain found no significant associations with social dominance anywhere, including the insula. The insula link appeared only in the targeted analysis of the three predefined regions.

Unlike the previous study in Singapore, the researchers did not find evidence linking social dominance to the amygdala or the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The associations between dominance scores and gray matter volume in the amygdala were small and were not statistically significant. Similarly, the correlation with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was not statistically significant.

“We were somewhat surprised by the absence of significant associations in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which contradicted the only previous neuroanatomical study on this topic,” Adrián-Ventura noted. “Because that prior study involved Singaporean Chinese adults while ours involved a Spanish sample, we suspect this discrepancy might reflect cultural differences. It suggests that while the anterior insula’s involvement might be a universally preserved pathway, other neural mechanisms of social dominance could be highly sensitive to distinct cultural landscapes.”

In their paper, the authors note that methodological differences, such as how the brain regions were outlined, could also explain the discrepancy, and they describe the cultural explanation as speculative.

At the behavioral level, social dominance orientation was positively related to sensitivity to reward, with a moderate correlation of r = 0.33. The researchers then built statistical models that predicted social dominance scores from anterior insula volume, age, and head size before adding reward sensitivity. Among the 95 participants with complete data, the full model accounted for up to 29 percent of the individual differences in social dominance scores, with reward sensitivity adding about 10 to 11 percentage points beyond what the other factors explained.

“The effects we observed are quite substantial,” Adrián-Ventura pointed out. “Importantly, structural brain features and personality traits are highly heritable and exhibit strong stability across the lifespan. This highlights that preferences for social hierarchies are not merely transient attitudes but may be rooted in early developmental and genetic factors.”

“In this sample, people who more strongly endorsed group-based hierarchies tended to have lower gray matter volume in the anterior insula and to report greater sensitivity to rewards,” said David V. Smith, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University, director of the Temple University Brain Research and Imaging Center, and director of the Neuroeconomics Laboratory, who was not involved in the study.

“These findings offer interesting leads for investigating how motivational processes relate to these attitudes.” “The authors’ comparison with earlier work suggests partial support: they found a similar insula association in a different population, but no significant associations in the other two brain regions tested,” he added. “This is a useful follow-up, although I’d want larger studies before treating the pattern as well established.”

The insula findings sit in tension with earlier work by the same team. In a study covered by PsyPost in 2025, Adrián-Ventura and his colleagues reported that, in nearly the same group of Spanish young adults, higher scores on anti-hierarchical aggression, a facet of left-wing authoritarianism that captures hostility toward established authorities, were linked to a thinner cortex in the right anterior insula. That study measured cortical thickness rather than gray matter volume, and its attitude measure targeted hostility toward those in power rather than a general preference for group hierarchy, suggesting that quite different ideological stances may relate to the structure of the same brain region.

The authors suggest that the anterior insula findings might reflect differences in socio-emotional processing. Because the anterior insula helps people tune into the emotional distress and feelings of others, having less gray matter in this region could relate to reduced empathy. If that is the case, reduced sensitivity to others’ feelings, combined with a heightened drive toward incentives, could make individuals more comfortable endorsing social arrangements where some groups dominate others.

“We found that individuals who strongly endorse social hierarchies tend to have less gray matter volume in the anterior insula, a brain region typically involved in empathy and socio-emotional processing,” Adrián-Ventura said. “Furthermore, these individuals showed a heightened sensitivity to reward, suggesting a strong drive to pursue status that may override the negative social consequences of inequality. Together, our results reveal an underlying neurobiological and motivational predisposition associated with a higher social dominance orientation.”

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study was cross-sectional, meaning it captured a snapshot of brain structure and personality traits at a single moment. These observations cannot establish that smaller insula volume causes someone to favor social hierarchies, nor can they determine whether adopting certain social beliefs alters brain tissue over time.

“A crucial caveat is that our study relies strictly on brain and personality measures, meaning we cannot definitively confirm that mechanisms like empathy directly mediate this relationship, although it is highly plausible,” Adrián-Ventura emphasized. “Furthermore, as this is an observational study, we cannot presume a causal direction between brain anatomy and behavioral outcomes. Finally, because our sample consisted of young Spanish adults (mostly university students), further cross-cultural research is needed to determine how well these neurobehavioral correlates generalize to other populations.”

“Lower gray matter volume does not automatically mean less empathy, and greater general reward sensitivity does not demonstrate that someone finds inequality rewarding,” Smith told PsyPost.

Smith also viewed the structural results with caution. “I would treat the anatomical findings as preliminary,” he said. “The targeted analyses and correction for multiple comparisons are strengths, but 97 participants is a relatively small sample for linking individual differences in brain anatomy to psychological traits, where estimated associations can be unstable in smaller samples. I’d also want to see whether the association holds when sex is included in the models, since adjusting for head size is not the same as adjusting for sex.”

The study was also not pre-registered, meaning the researchers did not publicly record their hypotheses and analysis plan in advance, unlike the Singapore study they sought to replicate. Future research will need to examine how sociodemographic variables such as sex and broader age distributions interact with these brain structures over time.

“More broadly, our research group investigates the neurocognitive factors associated with different belief systems—such as authoritarianism, pseudoscientific doctrines, and conspiracy theories—alongside interventions like empathetic refutation,” Adrián-Ventura said. “To advance this mission, our next steps involve examining new functional brain metrics (e.g., resting-state) and the potential mediating roles of behavioral variables such as empathy or perspective-taking. Finally, we aim to conduct longitudinal studies across more generalizable samples from adolescence to early adulthood, allowing us to track the development of these ideologies and establish causal predictors.”

Empathetic refutation is an approach to correcting false beliefs that first acknowledges the concerns behind them, while resting-state measures track brain activity when a person is not performing any task.

Smith also pointed toward experimental steps that could build upon the current findings. “I’d like to see a substantially larger, preregistered replication that directly measures empathy and tests whether people value their group being ahead of another group, even when their own group’s payoff stays the same,” he explained. “That would help distinguish a preference for relative advantage from a more general tendency to pursue rewards.”

The study, “Neuroanatomical correlates of social dominance orientation and the contributing role of reward sensitivity,” was authored by Jesús Adrián-Ventura, Angelo Fasce, Anna Miró-Padilla, Anastasia Cherednichenko, César Ávila, and Diego Avendaño.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-favor-group-based-inequality-tend-to-have-less-gray-matter-in-an-empathy-linked-brain-region/

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DATE: October 8, 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. **
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TITLE: Medication helps adults with ADHD weigh the negative consequences of their decisions

URL: https://www.psypost.org/medication-helps-adults-with-adhd-weigh-the-negative-consequences-of-their-decis/

Adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder often struggle with choices that require weighing potential rewards against negative consequences. A new experiment reveals that a common stimulant medication improves these choices specifically by helping individuals pay more attention to the potential costs of their actions. The research was published in Psychological Medicine.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior. People with this diagnosis frequently experience difficulties with real-life decisions, which can manifest as reckless driving, substance abuse, and risky sexual behavior. Every day, humans navigate choices that require balancing the positive aspects of an action against its negative aspects. Buying a new phone brings the benefit of better technology but carries the cost of having less money for groceries.

Neurobiological theories suggest that the disorder involves atypical functioning of dopamine and norepinephrine, which are chemical messengers in the brain that help regulate attention, reward processing, and cognitive effort. Stimulant medications like methylphenidate, often sold under the brand name Ritalin, increase the availability of these chemicals in the brain. While researchers know that stimulants generally improve decision-making, the exact psychological mechanisms driving this improvement have remained elusive.

Mads Lund Pedersen, a psychologist at the University of Oslo, and a team of colleagues conducted a study to break down the specific components of decision-making. They wanted to know if medication helps people by increasing their sensitivity to rewards, heightening their awareness of costs, or simply altering the amount of time they spend thinking before they act.

To answer these questions, the research team recruited 61 adults diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and 63 healthy control participants. The study utilized a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design. The participants with the diagnosis completed the testing twice, once after taking their standard dose of methylphenidate and once after taking an inactive placebo pill. Neither the participants nor the researchers knew which pill was administered on which day. The healthy control participants also completed the testing twice but did not receive any medication.

During the experiment, participants engaged in a computer-based task designed to test how they integrate costs and benefits. First, they completed a training phase where they learned to associate six different shapes with specific numerical rewards and six different colors with specific numerical costs. After learning these associations, they moved on to the main testing phase.

In the testing phase, the computer presented participants with a colored shape for a few seconds. The participants had to mentally combine the benefit value of the shape and the cost value of the color to determine the net value. If the net value was positive, the correct choice was to accept the offer. If the net value was negative, the correct choice was to reject it.

The researchers analyzed the behavioral data using a mathematical framework called the drift diffusion model. This model separates the fast, split-second process of making a choice into distinct cognitive components. One component is the drift rate, which measures how quickly and efficiently the brain accumulates evidence about the choice. Another component is the decision threshold, which represents the amount of information a person requires before they commit to an action, often referred to as the speed-accuracy tradeoff. A third component is non-decision time, which accounts for the physical time it takes to see the image on the screen and press the button.

The results showed that when participants with the diagnosis were given the placebo, they were less accurate than the healthy control group. The mathematical model revealed that the unmedicated participants had a lower drift rate, meaning they processed information about both the costs and the benefits less efficiently. They also exhibited a narrower decision threshold, meaning they acted on less information and responded prematurely.

The researchers also compared how the different groups weighed the positive and negative information. The healthy control participants naturally allowed the cost of the stimuli to influence their decisions more heavily than the benefits. The unmedicated participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder showed the reverse pattern, demonstrating a stronger sensitivity to the benefits than to the costs.

Administration of methylphenidate changed how the participants processed the information. The medication caused an increase in the drift rate, but this improvement was highly selective. The drug improved how efficiently the participants accumulated evidence about the costs, while leaving their sensitivity to the benefits entirely unchanged. By boosting cost sensitivity, the medication shifted the overall balance of their decision-making closer to the pattern seen in the healthy control group.

The medication also produced some unexpected effects. Instead of increasing the decision threshold to make participants wait for more information, the drug narrowed the threshold slightly further. However, the medication also increased the participants’ non-decision time. The researchers suggest that the participants might have spent this extra fraction of a second visually encoding the images, which could have improved the accuracy of their stimulus representations and contributed to the higher drift rate observed under medication.

The researchers analyzed individual differences among the participants who had the diagnosis. They found that individuals who reported more severe symptoms in their daily lives had the lowest sensitivity to costs when they were unmedicated. Among those taking medication, higher prescribed doses of methylphenidate were associated with both a stronger sensitivity to costs and a wider decision threshold.

The study includes several limitations regarding how the medication might be acting on the brain. The drug could be improving basic learning and memory rather than the actual moment of decision-making. Because participants had to memorize the values of the shapes and colors during the training phase, the stimulant might simply help them remember those specific values more reliably during the test.

Alternatively, participants might have used simple mental arithmetic to subtract the cost from the benefit. Stimulant medication could enhance this working memory skill independently of how the brain naturally weighs risks and rewards. The study also excluded individuals with severe comorbid psychiatric conditions, meaning the results might not apply to people who have additional severe mental health disorders. Finally, because the medication can cause noticeable physical sensations, some participants might have guessed when they received the active drug, which can influence behavioral performance through expectations.

Future research could separate these potential mechanisms by providing the values directly on the screen, removing the need for participants to memorize the shapes and colors beforehand.

The study, “Selective enhancement of cost sensitivity by methylphenidate in adult ADHD: a randomized placebo-controlled trial,” was authored by Mads Lund Pedersen, Athanasia M. Mowinckel, Sigurd Ziegler, Mats Fredriksen, Atle Bjørnerud, Tor Endestad, and Guido Biele.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/medication-helps-adults-with-adhd-weigh-the-negative-consequences-of-their-decis/

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DATE: October 8, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Does nail length shape how attractive you are? New research suggests it might

URL: https://www.psypost.org/does-nail-length-shape-how-attractive-you-are-new-research-suggests-it-might/

A new study suggests that small grooming choices, such as the length and color of a person’s fingernails, can shape how others judge their physical appeal and romantic desirability. Observers tended to view medium-length nails and white nail polish as the most attractive options, while long nails and darker shades received less favorable marks. The findings were published in EvoS Journal: Evolutionary Studies and Higher Education.

Nail adornment involves altering the length, shape, or color of the hard protective plates on the tips of human fingers using cosmetic tools, lacquers, and polishes. While people in the United States alone spend billions of dollars each year on manicures and professional salon treatments, scientists know relatively little about how these cosmetic changes influence everyday social impressions. Evolutionary perspectives suggest that personal grooming acts as a nonverbal cue, communicating clues about a person’s health, hygiene, and investment in their appearance.

Past research has examined how different physical traits influence attraction. For instance, a 2011 study on hand attractiveness indicated that overall grooming and the condition of the skin around the nails influence how appealing people find someone’s hands. In addition, a 2008 study found that the color red can make women appear more sexually appealing to men, suggesting that color choices carry social meaning.

Although nail styling often serves personal emotional purposes, such as boosting mood and relaxation as suggested by a study covered by PsyPost in 2023, its impact on external observers remains less explored. Sara DeMichele, who began the project as an undergraduate at Bucknell University and is now pursuing a doctorate in psychology at Liberty University, conducted the research with T. Joel Wade, a presidential professor of psychology and director of the neuroscience program at Bucknell.

“My interest in the social psychology of nail adornments began with campus observations of how ‘getting your nails done’ functioned as a ritual far greater than just grooming,” DeMichele, the study’s lead author, told PsyPost. “Specifically, the practice appeared to serve as a practice for self-expression and social presentation.”

“Despite mainstream recognition of the nail care industry, there was surprisingly limited psychological research examining how specific nail characteristics influence social perception, or why individuals select particular colors and designs. This gap motivated me to investigate whether nail length and color systematically affect perceptions of physical attractiveness and seek to understand how subtle dimensions of appearance shape interpersonal judgments.”

“There is a dearth of research examining hand attractiveness,” Wade explained. “This research adds to the literature on hand attractiveness, and adds to the literature on ornamentation and attractiveness showing that hand ornamentation can also affect perceptions of attractiveness.”

To examine these impressions, the researchers collected responses from 342 adults through an online survey shared across social media and email platforms. The participant group included 214 women, 98 men, and 4 nonbinary individuals, with an average age of 30 years. Most participants identified as White (262 individuals), with smaller numbers identifying as Asian (26), Hispanic (13), Black (9), or other racial backgrounds (8). A majority of 275 participants identified as heterosexual, while the rest identified with various non-heterosexual sexual orientations.

Each participant viewed digital illustrations depicting hands with identical skin tone and shape, ensuring that only the nails varied between pictures. In the first phase, participants evaluated three different nail lengths: short, medium, and long. In the second phase, they looked at four different polish colors applied to the nails: red, white, black, and blue.

Participants rated each image using an eight-point scale ranging from zero, meaning not at all, to seven, meaning very much. The questions measured physical attractiveness, cuteness, sexual appeal, and how desirable the person seemed as a casual date, a romantic partner, or a marriage partner. The researchers then analyzed the scores to see how changes in length and color influenced these ratings.

The results indicated that nail length affected social impressions, with medium-length nails consistently scoring highest. On a scale from 0 to 7, participants gave medium nails an average physical attractiveness score of 5.10, compared to 3.20 for short nails and 2.50 for long nails. Medium nails also led the ratings for cuteness at 4.80, sexual appeal at 4.30, and partner desirability at 4.20, while long nails received the lowest scores across every measured category.

Nail color also swayed evaluations, though the pattern differed from traditional expectations regarding the allure of red. White nails earned the highest average marks across the board, scoring 4.60 for physical attractiveness and 4.70 for sexual appeal. Red polish followed with an average attractiveness score of 3.80, whereas darker shades scored lower, with blue receiving an average of 2.50 and black receiving 2.30. The paper reports an overall effect of color but does not report statistical comparisons between individual colors, so the ranking reflects average scores.

The lower standing of red polish came as an unexpected outcome for the team. “One finding that surprised our team was the relatively lower attractiveness ratings associated with red nails,” DeMichele said. “Red is frequently discussed in color theory literature as leading to initial attraction and sex signaling, which made me expect it to receive strong ratings.”

The researchers also looked at whether preferences varied by participant background. Medium-length nails received the highest ratings in every racial group, though some groups were very small, such as the 9 Black and 13 Hispanic participants. When it came to color, heterosexual participants rated white nails highest, whereas non-heterosexual participants, who were combined into a single group because each orientation had few members, gave higher ratings to black polish.

The preference for intermediate nail lengths aligns with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which examined eyelash length rather than fingernails and similarly observed that moderate feature lengths were judged as most attractive compared to short or long extremes.

The authors suggested that medium-length nails may strike an appealing balance between routine grooming and functional practicality. Extremely long nails may be viewed as impractical or exaggerated for daily life, while very short nails might be perceived as lacking grooming effort. Similarly, the high ratings for white polish may stem from cultural associations between lighter colors, cleanliness, and simplicity. The authors describe the overall effects as modest.

“The primary ‘takeaway’ was that nail presentation may influence how people perceive others, although the effects should not be interpreted as universal rules about what is or is not attractive,” DeMichele told PsyPost. “Importantly, these findings suggest that seemingly minor aspects of appearance can contribute to broader social judgments. They do not mean that one particular nail length or color is objectively more attractive, instead highlighting that aesthetic tweaks can influence perceptions within certain social contexts.”

Regarding how strongly these features guide human perception, DeMichele cautioned against overstating the findings. “I would characterize this as an introductory investigation of an understudied form of appearance-based social perception,” she explained. “The findings are useful for identifying patterns and generating hypotheses, but they should not be interpreted as evidence that one nail length or color determines overall ‘attractiveness’. Replication with larger and more diverse samples would be important for determining the robustness and practical magnitude of these effects in larger populations.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study used digitally edited drawings of hands rather than actual photographs of human hands in real-world settings. This controlled design allowed the researchers to isolate specific traits, but it may not fully capture how people respond to real hands during everyday social interactions.

DeMichele also pointed to the sample itself. “I would emphasize that this was an introductory study and that the sample was predominantly WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) which limits how broadly the findings can be applied,” she noted. “Preferences surrounding appearance and adornment are likely shaped by cultural norms, gender, sexuality, age, and other nuanced experiences.”

In addition, the researchers focused strictly on length and a small selection of four solid colors. Other common styling elements, such as intricate nail art, artificial textures, or varying nail shapes like almond or stiletto, were not assessed and could influence attractiveness differently.

Looking ahead, DeMichele has already begun investigating how these cosmetic choices affect the individuals wearing them. “My master’s thesis at Florida Southern College extended this line of study by examining whether nail length and color influence confidence and self-efficacy,” she stated. “The preliminary findings suggested that short- and medium-length nails, along with particular nail colors, were associated with higher levels of confidence and self-efficacy. Longer term, I will continue to expand on how and why nail adornments influence self-perception, interpersonal communication, and even professional judgment.”

Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their ability to succeed at tasks. Those thesis findings have not yet been published.

“I think one of the most interesting aspects of this research is that it examines something people encounter every day but rarely consider from a psychological perspective,” DeMichele reflected. “Nail presentation is a relatively small component of appearance, yet it may communicate meaningful information about individual identity. I hope this research encourages further examination of the subtle ways appearance-related behaviors influence both how we see ourselves and how others perceive us.”

The study, “The Power of Polish: Effects of Nail Length and Color on Perceptions of Attractiveness,” was authored by Sara DeMichele and T. Joel Wade.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/does-nail-length-shape-how-attractive-you-are-new-research-suggests-it-might/

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DATE: October 8, 2026 at 05:00AM
SOURCE:
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TITLE: Should I Marry a Man Who Won’t Touch Me?

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/well/mind/platonic-engagement-sex-emotion-touch-starved.html

Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a 65-year-old reader who loves her partner but is physically and emotionally unsatisfied.

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/well/mind/platonic-engagement-sex-emotion-touch-starved.html

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 08:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Food insecurity in later life is linked to higher odds of probable dementia

URL: https://www.psypost.org/food-insecurity-in-later-life-is-linked-to-higher-odds-of-probable-dementia/

An analysis of more than two decades of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that older adults who experienced food insecurity in later life had roughly twice the odds of screening positive for probable dementia, compared with those who had reliable access to food. People who experienced food insecurity only in middle age did not show a statistically significant increase in odds. The paper was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

People who do not have reliable access to enough nutritious food are considered to be experiencing food insecurity. In the United States, food insecurity among households with older adults has nearly doubled over the past two decades.

Food insecurity is linked to a range of health problems, including poor diet quality, cardiometabolic disease, psychological distress, and worse mental health. Growing evidence also suggests that it may affect the brain, with food-insecure older adults showing poorer cognitive functioning and a higher risk of dementia. These associations tend to remain even after differences in education, income, and wealth are taken into account.

Researchers are increasingly interested in whether the timing of food insecurity matters. Studies in Burkina Faso, Malaysia, and China have found that older adults who recalled experiencing hunger or food insecurity in childhood were more likely to show cognitive impairment or dementia decades later. Food insecurity during middle adulthood may also be important, as the share of people experiencing food insecurity tends to be particularly high in this period of life.

Study author Cindy W. Leung of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Michigan and her colleagues examined whether food insecurity in mid-life and in later life was associated with probable dementia among U.S. adults. They also wanted to see whether prolonged food insecurity, meaning food insecurity in both mid-life and later life, or repeated episodes of it, was linked to even higher risk.

The researchers analyzed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which they describe as the world’s longest-running nationally representative household panel survey. The study began in 1968 and has followed its original participants since then, with an oversample of low-income families that allows researchers to study poverty. Data were collected every year until 1997 and every two years since.

The analysis began with 2,685 respondents who completed the core survey in 1999, when they were between 43 and 59 years old. After excluding people with missing information on food security, dementia, or other key variables, the final sample included 2,051 participants. Fifty-six percent were women, and about three-quarters were non-Hispanic White.

Food security was measured every two years using a standard 18-item questionnaire from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which asks about experiences such as being unable to afford enough food over the past year. It was assessed in 1999, 2001, and 2003, which the researchers treated as mid-life, and again in 2015, 2017, and 2019, which they treated as later life. The researchers defined food insecurity as low or very low food security and noted whether each participant experienced it in neither period, only one, or both. Participants averaged about 51 years old during the mid-life window and about 67 during the later-life window.

Dementia was assessed in 2019 and 2021 using the Eight Item Interview to Differentiate Aging and Dementia, a screening questionnaire that asks about changes over the past year in memory, judgment, orientation to time, and the ability to handle daily activities. The questions are designed to pick up early cognitive changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and other forms of dementia. A score of 2 or more out of 8 was classified as probable dementia, and the questionnaire could be answered by the participant or by another member of the household.

Most participants (86%) were food secure in both periods. About 3% experienced food insecurity in mid-life only, 5% in later life only, and 5% in both periods. Those who experienced food insecurity at either point tended to have lower incomes and less education and were more likely to be women or Black or Hispanic. About 20% of the sample screened positive for probable dementia.

After accounting for factors such as age, sex, race and ethnicity, education, income, marital status, employment, home ownership, and prior diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, participants who experienced food insecurity in both mid-life and later life had 2.18 times the odds of probable dementia compared with those who were food secure in both periods. Those who experienced food insecurity in later life only had 1.85 times the odds. In models that did not account for changes in these factors over time, the estimates were higher, at 2.96 and 2.52, respectively.

In terms of predicted probabilities, the typical estimated chance of probable dementia was about 11% for adults who were food secure in both periods and about 40% for those who were food insecure in both. People who were food insecure only in mid-life did not have significantly higher odds of probable dementia, although this group was small, at 88 people, so the estimate was imprecise.

The number of food-insecure years in later life also appeared to matter. Participants who were food insecure in two or three of the later-life surveys had about 2.6 to 3.2 times the odds of probable dementia, while repeated episodes in mid-life were not significantly associated with it. The results were similar for men and women and held when the researchers broadened the definition of food insecurity to include marginal food security.

“Food insecurity is an important social determinant of health that can impact cognitive impairment and probable dementia. Future research should investigate the roles of income and nutrition policies to alleviate food insecurity and to reduce the burden of cognitive impairment and dementias before older adulthood,” the study authors concluded.

The authors note that food insecurity is reversible and is the focus of programs such as food pantries, “Food is Medicine” initiatives that provide produce prescriptions or medically tailored meals, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). They raised concern that SNAP work requirements extended to adults aged 55 to 64 under a 2025 law could discourage participation among older adults and lead to more food insecurity.

There are some caveats to consider. The study was observational, so it cannot show that food insecurity causes dementia. Later-life food insecurity was measured close in time to the dementia screening, and because no cognitive data were collected in mid-life, the researchers could not rule out that early cognitive decline made it harder for some people to secure enough food, rather than the other way around. Unmeasured factors such as neighborhood conditions could also contribute to both.

The dementia measure was a screening tool rather than a clinical diagnosis, and food security was not measured between 2005 and 2013, leaving a gap in the middle of the study period. People excluded because of missing data tended to be poorer and less healthy, which the authors suggest may have made the associations appear weaker than they are. The study also included only people who lived long enough to be screened at age 65 or older, and it did not adjust for mental health, which is linked to both food insecurity and cognitive decline.

The paper, “Associations between mid-life and later-life food insecurity on probable dementia in a national sample of United States adults,” was authored by Cindy W. Leung, Noura E. Insolera, Heejin Lee, Julia A. Wolfson, Claire T. McEvoy, Esther M. Friedman, Steven G. Heeringa, and Wei Hao.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/food-insecurity-in-later-life-is-linked-to-higher-odds-of-probable-dementia/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 05:05PM
SOURCE: HEALTHCARE INFO SECURITY

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 05:00PM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: STAT+: In small trial, optogenetics restores some vision lost to retinitis pigmentosa

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/07/optogenetics-restores-some-vision-retinitis-pigmentosa/?utm_campaign=rss

Retinitis pigmentosa is a genetic disorder that causes degeneration of the light-sensing cells in the retina. Generally diagnosed in childhood or early adolescence, patients gradually lose peripheral and night vision, often becoming legally blind by young adulthood. 

With the exception of a subset of patients who present a specific genetic mutation and can be treated with gene therapy, there is no cure for the condition. Cases are addressed by measures to slow degeneration and preserve what is left of the vision.

Optogenetics  — the technology just recognized with a Nobel Prize — could offer hope, according to a new paper published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/07/optogenetics-restores-some-vision-retinitis-pigmentosa/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 04:14AM
SOURCE: MILIARY PSYCHOLOGY JOURNAL: APA DIVISION 19

TITLE: Operationalizing deployment history: Three approaches to examining associations with military couples’ marital satisfaction

URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08995605.2026.2743422?af=R

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: October 7, 2026 at 04:05PM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Drinking problems remained a risk factor for reoffending even among men with stronger social skills

URL: https://www.psypost.org/drinking-problems-remained-a-risk-factor-for-reoffending-even-among-men-with-stronger-social-skills/

Alcohol-related problems and difficulties with social and cognitive skills were each associated with reoffending among men who had perpetrated intimate partner violence, but the two did not appear to combine in a way that further increased risk, according to a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Some skills that would normally be expected to protect against reoffending were unexpectedly linked to higher odds of a new violent offense.

Problematic alcohol use is common among men who perpetrate intimate partner violence, and alcohol can impair judgment, weaken behavioral control and make people more prone to impulsive reactions. However, alcohol is not the sole cause of violence. Other factors, including hostility, impulsivity, poor problem-solving, difficulty understanding another person’s perspective and trouble controlling behavior, are also linked to violence against partners and to reoffending.

Researchers have suggested that alcohol might be especially dangerous for people who already have these difficulties. For example, alcohol could make it harder for someone with poor impulse control to pause before acting or could intensify hostile interpretations of a partner’s behavior, while stronger skills might help buffer against alcohol’s effects. Few studies had tested whether these factors actually interact to predict reoffending, and most had looked at only a handful of skills.

The study was led by Crystal J. Giesbrecht and Kaila C. Bruer of the University of Regina in Canada. The team analyzed existing assessment and follow-up data from 7,781 men in Alberta who had perpetrated intimate partner violence and had started community supervision between 2009 and 2012. The men ranged in age from 18 to 84, with an average age of about 35, and about 27% were Indigenous.

The data came from the Service Planning Instrument, a risk assessment that correctional staff complete when a person begins serving a sentence under supervision in the community. Staff score it using interviews, criminal records, previous assessments and information from people such as family members, partners and employers. The researchers then examined whether the men had any recidivism within three years, which included new charges as well as violations such as breaching release conditions or failing to appear in court, and whether they had a new violent offense, such as assault or uttering threats.

Alcohol use was measured in three ways: how often the men drank, whether drinking had disrupted their work, family life, friendships or health, and whether alcohol use contributed to their criminal behavior. Staff also rated eight social and cognitive skills: impulsivity, hostile attributions (the tendency to read neutral actions as hostile), consequential thinking (thinking ahead about the results of one’s actions), perspective-taking, problem-solving, behavioral control, interpersonal skills, and goal-setting and planning. The researchers classified each skill as either a risk area or not.

Alcohol use was widespread: 93% of the men used alcohol, and about a third drank at least three days a week. For about half the men, alcohol contributed to their criminal behavior, and for 27% it had disrupted their functioning. Within three years, 38% of the men had some form of recidivism and 20% had a new violent offense.

After accounting for the other factors in the analysis, men whose drinking had disrupted their functioning had about 27% higher odds of any recidivism and 28% higher odds of violent recidivism. Alcohol-related criminal behavior was linked to similar increases for both outcomes. Frequent drinking was associated with higher odds of any recidivism compared with not drinking, but not with violent recidivism.

Among the skill measures, men rated as having problems with impulsivity were more likely to have both types of recidivism, and those with weaker goal-setting and planning were more likely to have any recidivism. Hostile attributions were linked to higher odds of violent reoffending. Problem-solving, behavioral control and interpersonal skills were not reliably linked to either outcome once the other factors were taken into account.

Two results ran in the opposite direction from what the researchers expected. Men rated as having no problems with perspective-taking had higher odds of any and violent recidivism, and those with no problems in consequential thinking had higher odds of violent recidivism. The authors suggested that such skills, without adequate self-control or prosocial goals, might help some people manipulate others or navigate the justice system in self-serving ways, though the pattern could also reflect factors the data did not capture.

Alcohol problems and skill deficits tended to go together: men whose drinking disrupted their lives or contributed to their offending were more likely to be rated as having deficits in every skill area. But the researchers found little evidence that the two interacted to predict reoffending. In other words, alcohol problems and skill deficits each mattered, but having both did not produce an extra increase in risk beyond what each contributed on its own. The models explained only about 3% of the variation in any recidivism and about 2% for violent recidivism, which the authors note is typical of research predicting a behavior as complex as reoffending.

“This indicates that problematic alcohol use may represent a stand-alone criminogenic need that remains salient even among individuals with relatively strong cognitive or social skills,” the authors wrote. Criminogenic needs are risk factors for reoffending that can change over time, which makes them targets for treatment.

The researchers recommend screening for both alcohol problems and social and cognitive skills when people enter supervision, and building alcohol treatment into intimate partner violence programs. Such programs often exclude people who are actively using substances, and access to them in Canada is limited and inconsistent.

There are a few things to keep in mind. Because the dataset contained no victim information, the researchers could not tell whether new offenses were committed against an intimate partner, so the findings concern general and violent reoffending rather than repeat partner violence specifically. Canada’s Criminal Code also has no specific offense for intimate partner violence, which makes such cases hard to identify in official records.

The study relied on existing assessment data, so the researchers could not add measures or check for errors, and recidivism was based on official records, which miss offenses that never come to the attention of authorities. Because the data are observational, the findings show associations rather than evidence that alcohol or skill deficits cause reoffending. The authors also suggest that future research account for differences among men who perpetrate partner violence, since alcohol may be more closely tied to violence for some types of perpetrators than for others.

The study, “The Connection Between Alcohol Use and Social and Cognitive Skills for Men Who Have Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence,” was authored by Crystal J. Giesbrecht and Kaila C. Bruer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/drinking-problems-remained-a-risk-factor-for-reoffending-even-among-men-with-stronger-social-skills/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Brain scans reveal opposite reward responses in ADHD and autism

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-opposite-reward-responses-in-adhd-and-autism/

Individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and those with autism spectrum disorder both experience atypical responses to rewards, but their brain activity patterns differ in opposite ways. A new analysis reveals that while the two conditions involve the same deeper brain structures, they feature distinct patterns of heightened or reduced activity that could help explain their differing symptoms. The findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Processing rewards is a basic function that drives learning and survival. When a person receives a reward, specific brain networks evaluate its value and influence future motivation. Atypical responses within these systems are common in several neurodevelopmental conditions.

People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, often show a high sensitivity to immediate rewards. This sensitivity is associated with impulsive behavior. When an individual with ADHD receives a reward, their brain may over-register the immediate gratification, making it difficult to wait for delayed outcomes.

In contrast, individuals with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, frequently exhibit a reduced drive for specific rewards. This includes a lower sensitivity to social rewards, which can affect social engagement and interaction. They may not experience the same internal reinforcement from a smile or verbal praise that a neurotypical person does.

Because ADHD and ASD often occur together and share overlapping symptoms, researchers wanted to know if their reward-processing differences stem from the same underlying brain mechanisms. A research team led by Chunhong Zhu, Ting Xu, and Tingyong Feng at Southwest University in China conducted a systematic review to map these patterns. They sought to identify exactly how brain activity diverges when individuals with either condition experience a reward.

The researchers first performed a meta-analysis of 29 existing brain imaging studies. This combined dataset included 468 patients with ADHD, 424 patients with ASD, and 1,027 control participants. Each original study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan participants’ brains while they received either a monetary or social reward.

The team used specialized software to map areas of the brain that consistently showed abnormal activity across the studies. They found that both conditions involve altered activity in the amygdala and the putamen. These are deep subcortical brain regions that help process emotions and motivation.

The amygdala is generally responsible for recognizing motivationally important stimuli. The putamen helps the brain gauge sensitivity to a received reward. However, the nature of the alterations went in entirely opposite directions for each diagnosis.

In individuals with ADHD, these subcortical areas showed abnormally high activity during reward delivery. In individuals with ASD, the same regions exhibited unusually low activity compared to healthy controls. The two conditions also featured entirely distinct changes in the outer layers of the brain, known as the cortex.

Participants with ADHD displayed reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex and other areas responsible for impulse control and decision making. Participants with ASD showed heightened activity in medial prefrontal regions that assign subjective value to specific interests. To better understand these biological differences, the researchers conducted a second level of analysis using an independent database of healthy brain scans.

They looked at how the altered amygdala and putamen regions functionally connect with the rest of the brain. The brain regions that are hyperactive in ADHD were heavily linked to circuits that drive motivation and emotional responses. The regions that are hypoactive in ASD were more strongly wired to social and cognitive networks.

The team also used a large database called Neurosynth to match the abnormal brain maps with specific cognitive functions. Neurosynth contains data from thousands of published studies, allowing the researchers to see which psychological terms frequently overlap with certain brain areas. The hyperactive regions in ADHD matched with terms related to intense emotions.

The hypoactive regions in ADHD aligned with attention and executive control. For ASD, hyperactive regions were linked to social and value-related terms. The hypoactive regions in ASD matched with novelty and basic affective processing.

These patterns suggest that reward responses in ADHD are tied to emotional regulation challenges. In ASD, the responses point toward difficulties in integrating social and affective signals. Finally, the researchers compared their brain activity maps with known distributions of chemical messengers in the human brain.

They examined positron emission tomography scans showing where receptors for dopamine and serotonin are most densely located. Dopamine helps drive immediate reward-seeking behavior. Serotonin helps manage long-term goals and impulse inhibition.

The team found that the hyperactive regions in ADHD overlap with areas heavily populated by both dopamine and serotonin receptors. This chemical overlap in hyperactive emotion centers, combined with underactive impulse control centers, provides a physical map for impulsive behavior. The imbalance between a highly sensitive reward center and a weakened prefrontal control system makes delayed gratification difficult.

In ASD, the overactive value-processing regions sat in areas with very low serotonin transporter density. This might reflect a compensatory mechanism where the brain over-processes certain social or restricted reward signals. The underactive subcortical regions in ASD mapped onto areas rich in both dopamine and serotonin receptors, pointing to a general biological desensitization to rewards.

These findings provide a biological framework for understanding divergent behaviors in ADHD and ASD. However, the research does face a few limitations. The initial meta-analysis included a moderate number of studies, and it grouped different types of rewards together.

Social and monetary rewards may trigger slightly different biological pathways. Because of a limited amount of available data, there were not enough original studies on ASD to separate the reward types mathematically. Additionally, the brain connectivity analysis relied on scans from healthy individuals rather than patients with the conditions.

Mapping these exact networks directly in patient populations will be an important next step. Future research could also explore whether separating distinct reward types yields even more specific brain signatures.

The study, “Distinct neurobiological alterations during hedonic experience of rewards in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder: Multimodal evidence from neuroimaging meta-analyses,” was authored by Chunhong Zhu, Mercy Chepngetich Bore, Xueke Wang, Ting Xu, and Tingyong Feng.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-opposite-reward-responses-in-adhd-and-autism/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Conservatives’ more rigid thinking styles don’t seem to make them likelier than liberals to toe the party line

URL: https://www.psypost.org/conservatives-more-rigid-thinking-styles-dont-seem-to-make-them-likelier-than-liberals-to-toe-the-party-line/

People who identify as liberal or conservative often appear worlds apart in how they think, but new research suggests they respond to political endorsements in much the same way. Although conservatives in the study tended to report more rigid thinking styles, liberals and conservatives were largely equally likely to shift their policy views to match the stated positions of their own party. The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, indicate that at least one key psychological process behind partisan opinion operates similarly across the ideological spectrum.

The research was conducted at Michigan State University by Aymin Triki, then an undergraduate research assistant; Abigail L. Cassario, then a PhD candidate; and Mark J. Brandt, then an associate professor who ran the lab where Triki worked. Triki, the study’s lead author, is now a lab manager at the We-Search Lab at Harvard University, Cassario is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Brandt is a professor of political psychology at Tilburg University.

“I’m proud of Aymin for leading this project and writing an excellent paper describing our work together,” Brandt told PsyPost.

The team aimed to explore the psychological mechanisms behind “party cues.” A party cue is a piece of information indicating whether a political party or its leaders support or oppose a specific policy. Learning that your own party supports a proposal generally makes you more likely to support it, while learning that the opposing party supports it makes you less likely to agree.

Psychologists have offered two main explanations for why party cues work. The first is that they act as a mental shortcut, allowing voters to skip the hard work of analyzing complex policies by simply trusting a group that generally shares their interests. The second explanation is that people are motivated to be good group members, and following a party endorsement is a way to express loyalty and protect their social identity.

“There is a long-running argument in political psychology about whether liberals and conservatives are characterized by different psychological processes,” Brandt explained. “That is, rather than just being different in terms of their values and policy positions, also being different in the psychological processes that drive their decisions and attitudes.”

The “asymmetry perspective” proposes that liberals and conservatives differ in deep-seated psychological ways, not just in their values. According to this view, conservative ideology tends to attract people with more rigid thinking styles, such as a stronger desire for firm, definite answers and less inclination to second-guess their first instincts. Some psychologists have argued that this profile, along with a greater emphasis on group loyalty and authority, should make conservatives more likely to rely on party cues.

Whether that rigidity shows up in how people actually handle political information is less settled. A study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that more conservative people updated their beliefs slightly less in response to new factual evidence, though the difference was very small.

An opposing “symmetry perspective” argues that liberals and conservatives process political information using the same basic psychological tools, even if they apply them toward different goals. A 2018 meta-analysis, which pooled the results of 51 experiments, concluded that liberals and conservatives were equally likely to judge identical information more favorably when it supported their side. But the authors of a 2019 commentary argued that the experiments in that analysis often relied on a narrow, unrepresentative set of policy issues, which may have hidden real differences between the two groups.

Triki, Cassario, and Brandt set out to address that criticism by testing party cue effects across a wide range of contemporary issues while also measuring participants’ thinking styles. “Prior work has examined ideological differences in party cues, but we wanted to do a more comprehensive study,” Brandt said. “In particular, we wanted to test these effects across a wide range of issues currently important in American politics. This way we can be sure that our results are not due to the specifics of a given policy and instead we can be confident in understanding how ideology and party cues intersect across a wide range of policies.”

The researchers first re-analyzed data from two earlier experiments, conducted in 2018 and 2020, that together included more than 4,300 participants and more than 80 policy issues. Both samples were recruited with the aim of resembling the U.S. population demographically. Participants rated their support for policies such as raising the minimum wage or privatizing veterans’ health care on a 1-to-7 scale. For randomly selected issues, they first learned where the two parties, or Barack Obama and Donald Trump, stood.

These analyses pointed toward symmetry. Democrats and Republicans shifted toward their own party’s position and away from the opposing party’s to essentially the same degree. On individual issues, conservatives sometimes responded more strongly and liberals sometimes did, in roughly equal numbers. A measure of liberal-conservative self-identification in one dataset also showed no difference between the groups, though that result was less conclusive.

“The overall party cue effect was reliable, but small,” Brandt noted. “It was the equivalent to .3 scale points on a 1-7 scale. However, this is just the average.”

“For some policies, the effect is much smaller (nearer to zero) and for others the effect is much larger (an effect larger than 1 scale point on a 1-7 scale),” he continued. “These larger effects would represent very large effects in the experimental literature on attitude change.”

To test whether particular thinking styles might still make a difference, the researchers ran a third experiment in August 2024 with 1,659 participants recruited through Prolific, an online research platform. This was a convenience sample, meaning participants were not selected to mirror the national population, though the researchers recruited roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. The experiment used 37 real policy issues on which Joe Biden and Donald Trump took opposing positions. For some issues, participants were told where “Democratic leaders” and “Republican leaders” stood.

The researchers measured ideology in four ways: party identification, self-placement on a liberal-to-conservative scale, right-wing authoritarianism, and progressive values. Right-wing authoritarianism reflects a tendency to defer to established authorities, value tradition, and favor harsh treatment of people who break social norms, while the progressive values scale captures an identity-focused form of left-wing ideology.

To assess thinking styles, participants completed a short reasoning test built around questions where the intuitive answer is wrong. They also completed questionnaires measuring need for closure, which is a desire for firm answers and a dislike of ambiguity, and dogmatism, which is the tendency to treat one’s own beliefs as unquestionably true.

In this sample, conservatives showed the profile that the asymmetry perspective predicts. Compared with liberals, they did worse on the reasoning test and reported a higher need for closure and more dogmatism. Conservatives, whether identified by party or self-placement, were also more responsive to party cues than liberals, as were people high in right-wing authoritarianism, while the progressive values measure showed no difference. Participants with a higher need for closure or more dogmatism also followed cues more closely, though results for the reasoning test were inconclusive.

This result conflicted with the first two analyses. When the researchers limited the analysis to nine issues that also appeared in the 2020 experiment, the difference persisted, suggesting the choice of issues did not explain it. Instead, they suspected the online convenience sample might not reflect the broader population, or that conservatives had become more responsive to party cues since the earlier data were collected.

To find out, the team ran a fourth experiment with 1,389 participants recruited using quotas to match the U.S. population on age, gender, race and ethnicity, and region. It used the same 37 issues and the same psychological measures as the third experiment, with additional attention checks.

Once again, conservatives did worse on the reasoning test and reported a higher need for closure and more dogmatism than liberals. However, the difference in how the two groups responded to party cues disappeared: whether ideology was measured by party or by liberal-conservative self-placement, liberals and conservatives were equally swayed by party endorsements. Reasoning test scores showed no link to how strongly people followed cues, and there was no evidence that need for closure or dogmatism made a difference, although those estimates were less precise. The progressive values measure gave inconclusive results.

“Notably, our core finding is that liberals and conservatives do not differ substantially,” Brandt emphasized. “In other words, the strength of party cue effects does not differ between liberals and conservatives. We do not think there is a practical difference in the size of the effect of party cues between liberals and conservatives.”

The finding that conservatives reported more rigid thinking styles is in line with a study covered by PsyPost in 2022, which found greater cognitive rigidity among Trump supporters than among supporters of liberal candidates, though that study looked at support for specific 2020 presidential candidates rather than general ideology. The overall symmetry in responses to party cues is also in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, in which liberals and conservatives alike rated political opponents as less moral than members of their own party, even after being treated fairly by them in an economic game. That study examined moral judgments rather than responses to party endorsements.

“We found ideological similarities in a specific psychological process. This is not an argument that all ideologies are the same,” Brandt cautioned.

“The liberals and conservatives in our samples differ from each other in other ways,” he said. “They support different policies. They follow different political leaders. And they cared more about different types of policies.”

The exception was right-wing authoritarianism. In both the third and fourth experiments, people scoring high on this measure followed party cues more strongly than those scoring low. The researchers considered whether this reflects a tendency to obey authority figures, but the part of the scale measuring submission to authority did not stand out from the others.

“This measure captures a type of conservatism that is particularly obedient to conservative authorities and aggressive in response to people who violate conservative norms,” Brandt observed. “Although we do not have an explanation for why this measure differed from the other measures of conservative ideology, it may be the case that there are particular types of conservatism that are more susceptible to party cues than others.”

Because the study covered so many issues, the researchers could also explore why differences between liberals and conservatives showed up on some topics but not others. “An advantage to looking at many different issues is that we can see if there are some issues with ideological differences and others without such differences,” Brandt said.

In these exploratory analyses, differences tended to emerge on issues where one group already held stronger views before seeing any cue. On those issues, the group with stronger initial views shifted less, either because they were more committed to their position or because they had little room left to move. In one dataset that also measured how aware people were of each policy, the group that was more aware of a given policy tended to shift less. The authors note that these analyses were not planned in advance and need to be replicated.

“One thing we found is that when an ideological group has a strong opinion on the issue, then they are less likely to be affected by party cues,” Brandt added. “This gives us insight into where we might expect people to be more or less likely to be affected by party cues.”

There are a few other things to keep in mind. The experiments measured how people’s stated attitudes shifted in response to party cues, but not whether those shifts translate into behaviors such as voting or protesting, where liberals and conservatives could still differ. The researchers also used accurate, real-world party positions, so the cues may often have matched what participants already believed. Future studies might examine how people respond to cues that run against their prior views, or to false information about where their party stands.

The conclusions also rest most heavily on three of the four experiments. The authors gave less weight to the third experiment because further analyses suggested that conservatives recruited through Prolific responded unusually strongly to party cues compared with liberals in that sample and with both groups in the other samples. The study also did not include every possible measure of ideology, such as left-wing authoritarianism, and all of the samples were from the United States.

“The goal of my lab is to understand how belief systems work,” said Brandt, who directs The Belief System Lab. “Major ongoing projects in the lab aim to map the structure of belief systems and to use that information to predict and understand the dynamics of political attitudes.”

The study, “American liberals and conservatives have different cognitive styles, but (mostly) respond the same to party cues,” was authored by Aymin Triki, Abigail L. Cassario, and Mark J. Brandt.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/conservatives-more-rigid-thinking-styles-dont-seem-to-make-them-likelier-than-liberals-to-toe-the-party-line/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 11:18AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMES

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The FDA has cleared Motivista, a prescription digital therapeutic indicated for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, as an adjunct to outpatient care. This is the first authorized treatment for negative symptoms of schizophrenia in the United States. https://t.co/JqKYf8JfD2

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 11:06AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMES

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A recent study found that vortioxetine was consistently associated with improvements in depressive symptoms, though improvements in cognitive symptoms were inconsistent, with neutral-to-positive, predominantly domain-specific effects. https://t.co/Q0xIF1BuM4

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 10:35AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMES

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Physical attractiveness offers no protection for perpetrators of online misogyny

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physical-attractiveness-offers-no-protection-for-perpetrators-of-online-misogyny/

People evaluating online misogyny judge the severity of the hateful content itself rather than giving attractive perpetrators a free pass. The findings suggest that when online harassment crosses an unambiguous moral line, users rely on message-based reasoning over heuristic shortcuts like physical appearance. The research was published in Computers in Human Behavior.

Social media users constantly encounter rapid streams of information and often rely on mental shortcuts to make quick judgments about what they see. This behavior is partly explained by the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a psychological framework describing how people process information through two distinct pathways. When individuals evaluate a message deeply, they use a central route of processing. When they lack the motivation or time, they tend to rely on a peripheral route, depending on accessible cues like a speaker’s visual appearance.

One well-documented mental shortcut is the attractiveness-leniency effect. This is a psychological bias where physically attractive people receive softer moral judgments after committing an offense. Because online environments are visually driven, a user’s profile picture can heavily influence how others interpret their intent and credibility. Yet research on online harassment has rarely examined whether this physical bias extends to perpetrators of digital misogyny.

Automated moderation systems often fail to capture the nuanced expressions of online hostility, shifting the responsibility of defining moral boundaries onto regular users. Rinat Meerson, Kevin Koban, and Jörg Matthes, researchers at the University of Vienna, sought to test whether an internet troll’s appearance alters how bystanders react to their posts. They also wanted to understand if the specific phrasing of the hostility changes those reactions.

Communication experts generally divide digital hostility into three categories: incivility, intolerance, and threats. Incivility involves rude or vulgar language that breaks social etiquette without necessarily targeting a demographic group. Intolerance communicates ideological exclusion or discrimination against a specific group, undermining democratic principles of equality. Threats involve explicit insinuations of physical or psychological harm, introducing an element of coercion and fear.

To test how these factors influence user reactions, the researchers designed an online experiment involving 884 adult participants in Austria. The participants first viewed three mock social media profiles featuring male faces. These faces had been scientifically validated in a prior database as having high, medium, or low physical attractiveness.

Next, the participants read three misogynistic comments that were ostensibly written by the men in the profiles. These comments were pre-selected by independent experts to represent either incivility, intolerance, or a direct threat. After viewing the material, the participants rated the comments on their acceptability and their level of sexism. They also reported their negative emotional reactions, their support for platform moderation, and their likelihood of intervening.

The researchers measured two types of behavioral responses: indirect and direct intervention. Indirect interventions involve low-risk actions like reporting a post or flagging it for community moderation. Direct interventions involve engaging in a social interaction, such as replying to the perpetrator or expressing public support for the victim.

The results showed that users categorized the hostility on a progressive scale. Participants rated both intolerance and threats as less acceptable and more sexist than mere incivility. The cognitive evaluations leveled off between the two more severe categories, indicating a ceiling effect. Once a comment crossed a certain boundary of unacceptability, users did not judge the direct threat to be much worse than the intolerant remark.

In contrast, emotional reactions continued to intensify across all three categories. Participants reported higher levels of anger and disgust as the comments escalated from incivility to intolerance. These emotional responses reached their absolute highest point when participants read direct threats.

When it came to taking action, the study revealed a split between private reporting and public confrontation. Participants expressed a higher intention to indirectly intervene as the severity of the hate increased. They also showed stronger support for platform moderation when viewing threats compared to uncivil or intolerant comments.

Yet their willingness to directly intervene remained consistently low across all types of comments. The researchers noted an asymmetry between moral condemnation and visible action. Users recognized the harm and felt negative emotions, but they remained hesitant to involve themselves in a public conflict. The authors suggest this reluctance stems from the reputational and emotional risks associated with public confrontation, such as the fear of retaliation.

Regarding physical appearance, the researchers found that perpetrator attractiveness had no effect on any of the outcomes. Participants evaluated the misogynistic comments with the same level of condemnation regardless of whether the profile picture showed a highly attractive or highly unattractive man. The researchers noted that these findings were not statistically significant for the attractiveness variable, meaning the pretty privilege bias failed to materialize.

The unambiguous nature of the misogynistic statements appeared to override any superficial mental shortcuts. The researchers propose that when a moral violation is highly explicit, users may engage in more systematic, central-route processing. In that case, the moral content of the message may dominate their evaluations, overriding any leniency typically associated with physical attractiveness.

The experiment relied on static text and images rather than a fully interactive social media environment. This limits how perfectly the study mirrors everyday scrolling, as real platforms feature moving elements and ongoing comment threads. The study also exclusively utilized male faces and focused solely on hostility directed at women.

Reactions to digital hate might shift if the comments were directed at a less uniformly protected social group. Different biases might also emerge if the perpetrator were female. Because attractiveness can sometimes work against women when it is seen as a sign of manipulativeness or deceptiveness, an attractive female troll might face harsher judgments for similar comments. Future research could explore how perpetrator gender interacts with physical appearance to shape bystander intervention.

The study, “Pretty privilege? Effects of perpetrators’ attractiveness and hate type on user responses against misogynist digital hate,” was authored by Rinat Meerson, Kevin Koban, and Jörg Matthes.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physical-attractiveness-offers-no-protection-for-perpetrators-of-online-misogyny/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: A love of intense sweetness shows a surprising link to financial choices

URL: https://www.psypost.org/a-love-of-intense-sweetness-shows-a-surprising-link-to-financial-choices/

People who have a strong preference for intensely sweet tastes tend to grab a small reward available right now rather than wait for a larger one. New research published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that this impatience may be partly explained by a general aversion to risk, rather than a stronger pull toward bigger rewards. The findings may help clarify the psychological and biological mechanisms connecting reward sensitivity to decision-making.

Reward sensitivity describes how strongly a person is motivated by the prospect of a reward. Scientists usually measure it with questionnaires or behavioral tasks, but one more physiological method is testing a person’s preference for sweet tastes. The sweet-liking phenotype, an observable biological marker, sorts people into two groups based on whether they strongly prefer highly concentrated sugar solutions or milder sweetness. Being a sweet-liker, a characteristic that is about half heritable and stable across life, is considered a physiological indicator of heightened sensitivity to a basic sensory reward.

A 2014 study found that people who intensely enjoy sweet tastes are more prone to choosing smaller, immediate rewards over delayed ones, a behavior known as delay discounting. Delay discounting is an economic and psychological measure of impatience. It captures how much less a reward seems worth to a person as the wait to receive it grows longer.

Separate neuroscience work, such as a 2009 study, demonstrated that the human brain relies on partly overlapping neural circuits to calculate the value of both delayed rewards and uncertain gambles. This physical overlap suggests that time preferences and risk preferences share common roots. Building on that idea, a 2018 study showed that a person’s tolerance for risk systematically alters how impatient they appear on delay-discounting tests, highlighting risk sensitivity as a potential hidden driver of impulsive choices.

The new study connects these threads by investigating whether biological sweet preference is linked to impulsive choices specifically through a heightened sensitivity to risk. The research was conducted by Anna Davidovich, senior research fellow Ksenia Panidi, and their colleagues at the Centre for Cognition and Decision Making at HSE University in Moscow. The team aimed to determine whether the link between sweet-liking and impulsivity could be explained by an increased desire for larger rewards, a heightened urge for immediate gratification, or a general avoidance of the uncertainty that comes with waiting.

“The study was motivated by the observation that sweet-taste preferences were linked to various kinds of addictions, such as alcoholism and other substance use disorders,” Panidi told PsyPost. “This observation suggests that sweet-taste preferences might be more broadly linked to impulsive decision making, due to the possible involvement of the opioid system in the valuation of rewards.” The opioid system refers to the brain’s own opioid chemicals, such as endorphins, which help regulate pleasure and pain.

“If this is the case, these differences in sweet-taste preference should then show up in other contexts (not linked to food rewards) that also imply value-based choices,” she explained. “This was the hypothesis that we decided to test using economic choices.”

To explore this, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, 49 healthy adults completed a series of behavioral tasks. Participants took a standardized sweet-taste liking test, where they sampled five water solutions with varying concentrations of sucrose and rated their pleasantness. Those who rated the highest sucrose concentration as their favorite were classified as sweet-likers, while the rest were classified as sweet-dislikers.

It is important to distinguish this biological metric from everyday dietary habits. “The results of this study are very commonly misinterpreted as indicating that people who ‘like sweet food’ are more impulsive than those who don’t,” Panidi said. “In fact, sweet-taste preferences are very different from ‘sweet food preferences.’ Some studies even show that the correlation between the two is rather small.”

“The major difference is that the sweet-taste liking test only shows whether a person favors a sugar solution with the highest concentration of sucrose (i.e., 3 times higher than that of Coca-Cola),” she explained. “It does not necessarily mean that the same person would prefer sugary food, as food contains many more nutrients than just sugar (fats, proteins), which also affects food preferences.”

Participants also completed a lottery choice task to measure their risk preferences. In this task, they made 60 choices between a guaranteed payout of 100 monetary units and a risky lottery that offered up to 500 units at varying probabilities of winning (25, 50, or 75 percent).

After the lottery, they played a computerized balloon game, where they could earn real rubles by inflating a virtual balloon but would lose that balloon’s earnings if it popped. The taste test came first for 24 participants and last for the other 25, and the researchers controlled for this order, along with age and gender.

Twelve participants were classified as sweet-likers and 37 as sweet-dislikers. Sweet-likers did not rate the solutions as sweeter than sweet-dislikers did; they simply enjoyed the stronger ones more. The researchers found that sweet-likers were more risk-averse in the lottery choice task. They were less likely than sweet-dislikers to choose the lottery, and this gap held regardless of the prize size or the odds of winning.

However, the balloon task showed no differences between the two groups. The authors suggest this discrepancy might reflect that the lottery task involves explicit probabilities, while the balloon task requires people to learn about risk gradually through trial and error.

This aversion to risk ran counter to the researchers’ expectations. “Our initial hypothesis was that sweet-likers would be more prone to making impulsive choices which would also imply making risky choices, i.e., preferring an option where one can win bigger reward with some probability rather than taking a smaller amount of money for sure,” Panidi said. “However, we were surprised to see the opposite sweet-likers showed higher preference for sure options compared to sweet-dislikers.”

“This might suggest that our common understanding of ‘impulsivity’ in risky contexts might be wrong,” she added. “In fact, making impulsive choices does not necessarily mean making risky choices. It might mean preference for more ‘tangible’ reward. If getting a small amount of money for sure feels more ‘tangible’ than playing a lottery, an impulsive person might prefer that small amount.”

In the second experiment, the research team recruited a new sample of 100 healthy adults to see how sweet-taste preferences relate to both risk and time delays. Because the task order had affected lottery choices in the first experiment, this time the taste test was always given last.

Alongside the same lottery choice task, participants completed a delay discounting task, which required them to choose between a smaller monetary reward available sooner and a larger reward available later. The two tasks were mixed together in blocks. Some of the delay choices offered the smaller reward immediately, while others enforced a delay for both the smaller and larger options.

Out of 100 participants, 28 were classified as sweet-likers. “I think an interesting observation is how stable the proportion of sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers in the population seems to be,” Panidi noted. “In our experiments, 25-30% of participants were classified as sweet-likers, which is pretty close to the proportions found in other countries where a similar method was used, such as South Korea or the UK.”

Sweet-likers again leaned toward the safe option, though in this larger sample the difference appeared only when the odds of winning were 50 percent, the point of greatest uncertainty. In the delay discounting task, the sweet-likers exhibited a specific pattern of impulsivity. When one of the rewards was available immediately, sweet-likers were more likely than sweet-dislikers to choose the immediate option.

But when both options required a waiting period, sweet-likers were actually more likely to choose the delayed, larger reward. Sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers did not differ in how strongly the size of the rewards or the length of the wait swayed their choices. Together, these patterns suggest that sweet-likers’ impatience is tied specifically to the availability of an immediate, certain outcome.

When the researchers accounted for each participant’s general risk aversion, the link between sweet-liking and choosing the immediate reward weakened by about 40 percent and fell just short of statistical significance. The authors interpret this as a sign that sweet-likers’ impatience may stem at least partly from a wariness of uncertainty: for someone who dislikes risk, a reward that arrives later can feel less certain than one in hand.

The two groups also looked alike on questionnaires. In the first experiment, sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers scored similarly on measures of sensation seeking and novelty seeking, and in the second they also did not differ on a standard impulsivity questionnaire or in how risky they rated themselves. The authors suggest that physiological and questionnaire-based measures of reward sensitivity may capture different things.

Panidi sees implications that reach beyond taste. “I think the main takeaway from this study is that the neurobiology of economic choice might have a much deeper physiological grounding than we might commonly think,” she told PsyPost. “At first, the link between sweet-taste preference and monetary choices might seem very indirect (how these two things might even be related?), but as we look deeper, we find that economic choices might be guided by our physiology just as much as our taste preferences.”

The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which relied on long-running household surveys of about 14,000 people in the United Kingdom rather than laboratory choice tasks. That study found that people who felt more dread about possible financial losses tended to be both less willing to take risks and less willing to wait for rewards.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on laboratory tasks with small real-money stakes, which might not fully capture how people make high-stakes decisions in daily life. The effects were relatively small; in the first experiment, sweet-liking accounted for about 0.2 percent more of the variation in risky choices, and there were only 12 sweet-likers. The sample was limited as well: participants were young adults recruited in Moscow, and people with math, physics, economics, finance, or computer science backgrounds were excluded.

The delay discounting task offered only three sizes of sooner reward. This restricted range might have made it difficult to detect whether sweet-likers are more sensitive to the sheer size of a reward.

“I would not say practical significance is very important here,” Panidi said. “Rather, the results might be important for researchers as they suggest that we should further look into the mechanisms of opioid system involvement in economic or any other value-based choices. This might open the way to further investigation of addiction mechanisms.”

For instance, she suggested that “people who have preference for very sweet taste might be more prone to impulsive choices in various contexts, and knowing this might help them create the environment which discourages them from making unhealthy choices. But further studies are needed to make more solid conclusions.”

In addition, the lottery tasks in the study only involved positive gains, avoiding any scenarios where participants could lose money. Because the biological opioid systems linked to sweet-taste preferences may also be involved in evaluating threats, future studies could explore whether sweet-likers show a similar aversion to financial losses.

The research team also plans to observe these mechanisms more directly. “The next steps for this line of research would be in digging deeper into the neural differences between sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers, i.e., exploring what happens differently on the brain level when they make economic choices,” Panidi said.

The study, “Sweet-taste liking is associated with preference for less risky and immediate rewards in economic decision-making,” was authored by Anna Davidovich, Anna N. Shestakova, Nina Arzumanyan, and Ksenia Panidi.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/a-love-of-intense-sweetness-shows-a-surprising-link-to-financial-choices/

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: October 7, 2026 at 09:46AM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

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RT @CSTS_USU: 95% of suicide attempts occur among Service members who didn’t disclose risk during routine screenings.

This #NationalSuicidePreventionMonth, learn how SAFEGUARD uses machine learning to identify at-risk personnel before crisis strikes.

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 08:13AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHIATIRY FEED

TITLE: Drug target could block brain inflammation linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261005071515.htm

Blocking a receptor called P2X7 significantly reduced inflammation in human brain tissue, revealing a potential new treatment strategy for neurological and psychiatric disorders. The discovery could help researchers repurpose existing drugs for conditions including traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and schizophrenia.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261005071515.htm

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 08:13AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: Drug target could block brain inflammation linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261005071515.htm

Blocking a receptor called P2X7 significantly reduced inflammation in human brain tissue, revealing a potential new treatment strategy for neurological and psychiatric disorders. The discovery could help researchers repurpose existing drugs for conditions including traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and schizophrenia.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261005071515.htm

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 08:13AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Drug target could block brain inflammation linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261005071515.htm

Blocking a receptor called P2X7 significantly reduced inflammation in human brain tissue, revealing a potential new treatment strategy for neurological and psychiatric disorders. The discovery could help researchers repurpose existing drugs for conditions including traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and schizophrenia.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261005071515.htm

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Philadelphia therapists navigate ‘Uberized’ field

Constant text-messaging and tiered pay Despite the disadvantages, some therapists find themselves remaining with a platform for years.…
#NewsBeep #News #Mentalhealth #CA #Canada #Health #MentalHealth #psychiatry #therapist #therapy
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/923976/

Compulsive sexual behavior disorder is a psychological condition characterized by persistent, recurring difficulties in controlling sexual impulses and behaviors. Recent clinical trials demonstrate that the medications fluoxetine and naltrexone yield comparable reductions in these symptoms over an eight-week period.
#Psychiatry #Psychopharmacology #BehavioralScience #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/10/psyc10072601.html

DATE: October 7, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Researchers probe the oxytocin system for clues to functional neurological disorder

URL: https://www.psypost.org/epigenetics-and-oxytocin-levels-show-links-to-childhood-trauma-in-functional-neu/

A recent study investigated whether the body’s oxytocin system acts as a biological risk factor for Functional Neurological Disorder. The findings indicate that while genetic variations do not appear to directly cause the condition, interactions between genetics, epigenetics, and circulating hormones might explain how patients process physical sensations and childhood trauma. The research was published in Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Natascha Stoffel, a researcher at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, led the investigation. She and her colleagues wanted to understand the biological mechanisms behind Functional Neurological Disorder. This condition sits at the boundary between psychiatry and neurology.

Patients with the disorder experience physical symptoms like tremors, weakness, or non-epileptic seizures. These symptoms are genuine and debilitating, but they are not caused by traditional structural brain diseases. People with the condition frequently report a history of adverse life events, such as childhood trauma or emotional neglect.

Patients also often struggle with interoception, which is the brain’s ability to sense and process internal bodily signals. Interoception allows a person to feel when they are hungry, when their heart is racing, or when their breathing changes. In many stress-related conditions, this internal sensory system becomes disrupted.

To explore potential biological mechanisms, Stoffel and her team focused on the oxytocin system. Oxytocin is a hormone and chemical messenger that regulates stress, emotional responses, and social behavior. The researchers suspected that changes in how the body processes oxytocin might alter a person’s stress response and their internal bodily awareness.

The team looked at three distinct components of the oxytocin system. First, they looked at genetics, specifically examining variations in the oxytocin receptor gene. Second, they examined epigenetics, which are chemical tags added to DNA that change how a gene functions without altering the genetic code itself. Epigenetic changes are influenced by a person’s environment and life experiences.

For the epigenetic component, the team specifically measured methylation, a type of chemical tag that typically reduces a gene’s activity. Finally, the researchers measured the actual levels of oxytocin circulating in the participants’ bodies.

To conduct the first part of their research, the scientists analyzed data from 89 adults, after three of the 92 originally enrolled participants were excluded because of missing genetic data. The group included 41 patients diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder and 48 healthy control participants. The research team collected blood samples to extract and analyze the participants’ DNA.

From the blood samples, the team identified each participant’s genetic variants for the oxytocin receptor gene. They also measured the degree of epigenetic methylation at two specific regions of this gene. To measure circulating hormones, the researchers collected saliva samples at four different times during the day.

The scientists compared the genetic and epigenetic data between the two groups. When looking at the genetic variants alone, the models showed no difference in how the gene variations were distributed between the patients and the healthy controls. They also found no statistically significant differences in the average epigenetic methylation rates between the two groups.

While the baseline genetic and epigenetic markers did not differ, the researchers found an interaction when they included the salivary oxytocin levels. Patients with the disorder who carried a specific variant of the oxytocin receptor gene (the GG genotype) had elevated levels of oxytocin in their saliva compared to healthy controls with the same genetic variant.

In healthy individuals, oxytocin levels typically rise in response to specific contexts, like social bonding, parenting, or physical exercise. For the patients in this study, the elevated oxytocin levels appeared independently of these specific triggers. The researchers suggest that a specific genetic variant might act as a vulnerability factor, causing an abnormal release of oxytocin in response to daily stress.

In the second part of the investigation, the researchers tested whether combining the genetic and epigenetic data could help explain the participants’ interoceptive abilities. Participants completed a breathing task that measured their physical sensitivity to respiratory resistance. They also filled out a questionnaire that assessed how accurately they felt they could detect their own bodily sensations.

The researchers used statistical models to see if combining the oxytocin receptor genetics, methylation data, and salivary oxytocin levels would predict the interoceptive test scores. The addition of these biological markers did not improve the models. The genetic and epigenetic variables did not explain the interoceptive dysfunction observed in the patient group.

The team then applied the same statistical approach to look at childhood trauma. Participants completed a standard questionnaire to self-report their history of childhood trauma and emotional neglect. The researchers built a model to see if the biological markers aligned with the variation in these trauma scores.

In this case, the addition of the biological markers improved the statistical model. Including the epigenetic methylation data and the salivary oxytocin levels helped explain the variance in the self-reported childhood trauma scores. Higher levels of methylation at a specific region of the oxytocin receptor gene were associated with lower reported trauma scores.

The researchers noted a few caveats regarding their findings. Because the investigation relied on a modest sample size of 89 adults, it lacked the statistical power needed to make definitive claims about genetic associations. A simulation conducted by the researchers indicated that a study would need about 400 participants to confidently detect the genetic effects they observed.

The study measured epigenetic markers using blood samples, which might not accurately reflect the methylation levels present in brain tissue. The levels of oxytocin measured in saliva also might not perfectly mirror the concentrations of the hormone functioning directly within the central nervous system.

The statistical models linking the oxytocin system to childhood trauma do not establish a directional mechanism. The researchers cannot say whether experiencing trauma causes changes to the oxytocin system, or if an altered oxytocin system changes how a person processes and reports traumatic memories. Future research will need to track larger groups of people over time to understand how stress, genetics, and hormones interact to trigger the condition.

The study, “The Oxytocinergic System in Functional Neurological Disorder: Preliminary Testing of Associations with Interoception and Childhood Trauma,” was authored by Natascha Stoffel, Juan Ansede-Bermejo, Cristina Concetti, Ángel Carracedo, and Selma Aybek.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/epigenetics-and-oxytocin-levels-show-links-to-childhood-trauma-in-functional-neu/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 08:56AM
SOURCE: HEALTHCARE INFO SECURITY

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#MedicalDevices Face a #PostQuantum #Security Gap: #Forescout Research Finds #IoMT, #OT Systems Lag Far Behind IT in #PQC Readiness https://t.co/dxQnMnRe9Q

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 08:51AM
SOURCE: HEALTHCARE INFO SECURITY

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#AI Gets a Bigger Role in #Healthcare - Not the Final Say https://t.co/nFpMvJx2H8

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DATE: October 7, 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: People who think the world lacks meaning are more prone to political violence

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-think-the-world-lacks-meaning-are-more-prone-to-political-violence/

People who believe that few things in the world truly matter tend to report greater willingness to engage in violent extremism, according to research published in Psychology of Violence. A 10-day exercise in photographing and journaling about meaningful things was also followed by lower violent extremism intentions, though the evidence on why the exercise worked was mixed.

The research was led by Daniel W. Snook, an assistant professor of experimental psychology at Florida Gulf Coast University. The study explored how specific “primal world beliefs” relate to political and ideological violence.

Primal world beliefs refer to the broad, largely unconscious assumptions people make about the overall character of reality. These are basic lenses through which humans view their environment. For example, some people assume the world is a generally safe place, while others view it as a highly dangerous one.

“When I learned about primal world beliefs—people’s basic assumptions about the nature of reality—I immediately began to wonder which ones might be related to violent extremism, which is violence for a religious, political, or social cause,” Snook told PsyPost.

“Researchers have long studied how specific ideological beliefs relate to violent extremism (like the White supremacist belief that White people are the superior race or the jihadist belief that strict, literal sharia must be upheld), but none had studied how general worldviews, that is, what people believe is true of the world across contexts, relate to violent extremism,” the researcher explained. “So, in 2021, I started exploring the connections between these newly described worldviews and intentions to do violence for a variety of sociopolitical causes.”

The concept builds on a 2019 study that identified about two dozen primal world beliefs by analyzing sources ranging from historical texts to tweets. It also builds on a theory outlined in a 2019 book that argues that radicalization is often initially driven by a universal desire to feel significant, and a 2023 study covered by PsyPost found that people with an obsessive passion for their ideology tended to report more support for political violence.

The authors reasoned that people who believe few things in the world matter might find it easier to justify harming people and property for one of the rare causes they do care about, since the collateral damage would seem smaller to them.

To investigate this, the scientists conducted a series of four surveys examining adults from various ideological groups in the United States. The sample included 354 Democrats, 212 Republicans, 262 environmental activists, and 579 Black Lives Matter activists. The first three surveys measured 22 different primal world beliefs; the fourth measured only the three strongest predictors from those surveys. To assess violent intentions, participants rated their agreement with statements about using any means, including physical violence, to advance their group’s objectives.

Across all four groups, the Meaningful world belief was the strongest predictor of violent intentions, though the strength of the association varied widely, from modest among the Black Lives Matter activists to strong among the Republicans. The Meaningful world belief is not about whether a person feels their own life has meaning, nor is it the idea that the universe has a grand, intentional design. Rather, it is the simple belief that most things, including other people, tend to matter. People with lower scores on this measure, meaning those who feel that things and people generally do not matter, were much more open to engaging in violence for their ideology.

“The fact that the belief that the world is a place where meaning is rare was the best predictor of violent extremism, rather than primal world beliefs we might have expected based on previous theory, such as the belief the world is a dangerous or competitive place, was a surprise,” Snook said.

To see if this pattern held among actual offenders, the researchers assessed 125 men incarcerated in Kazakhstan. The researchers worked with prison administrators to identify two distinct groups. Sixty-four of these men were convicted of jihadist terrorism, while the other 61 were convicted of non-ideological violent crimes like murder, rape, or assault. The surveys were conducted anonymously to protect the inmates.

The imprisoned terrorists scored lower on the Meaningful world belief scale than the non-terrorist violent offenders. This provides evidence that a lack of perceived meaning in the world is tied to ideological violence in real-world settings. By isolating terrorists from other types of violent criminals, the researchers found a difference between people convicted of violence for a cause and those convicted of violence for other reasons. The terrorists scored an average of 4.10 on the Meaningful world belief scale, compared to 4.73 for the non-terrorist violent offenders, on a 1-to-6 scale.

Snook noted that the relationships found in these initial surveys were robust. “The effects were consistent across the correlational studies (Studies 1-5), including some large effect sizes,” he pointed out.

The authors then designed an experiment to see if changing these beliefs could reduce violent intentions. They recruited Republicans who endorsed the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Of the 395 people assigned to the intervention, 179 started it (216 declined to participate due to the time commitment) and 71 completed all 10 days. Each day, they used their cellphones to take three photos of things they found meaningful, such as elements of the natural world or things that often go overlooked in daily life.

After taking the photos, they uploaded them to a study portal, picked the most meaningful one, and wrote a short journal entry about why it mattered. On the final day, the participants reflected on how their photos represented only a tiny fraction of the people and things in the world that hold true value. Compared to a passive control group of 359 participants who did not complete the photo exercises, the intervention group reported a higher Meaningful world belief at the end of the study.

The intervention group also reported lower intentions for violent extremism, averaging 1.74 on a 1-to-7 scale compared to 2.26 in the control group. One month later, the 57 intervention participants who responded still reported lower violent intentions than before the program, although their Meaningful world belief scores had drifted back toward where they started, and the control group was not surveyed again.

“This suggests that helping people see meaning in more places than they did before makes them less supportive of political violence, possibly by helping them see meaning in more places than only in their political cause,” Snook said. “This is also the first time any experimental intervention was able to change the levels of a primal world belief, which were previously found to be largely unchangeable.”

A final experiment tested this same 10-day photography intervention on a broader sample of 297 Americans, including 129 people in the intervention group and 168 people in an active control group that completed a course of online safety modules instead of the photo journaling.

Because the general public rarely endorses violent extremism, most participants started this final study with the lowest possible score for violent intentions. The preregistered analysis found a small overall difference between the groups in how violent intentions changed. In an exploratory analysis of the 87 people who did not start at the minimum, the photo intervention was linked to lower violent intentions a month later.

These findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that on days when employees felt more burned out, they reported more sympathy for violent extremist ideas, a link partly explained by a weakened sense of meaning. That study focused on workplace burnout rather than general world beliefs.

Comparing the two experiments, Snook clarified the magnitude of the results. “In the experiment with Republicans who endorsed the January 6th Capitol insurrection (Study 6), effect sizes were medium, meaning the intervention noticeably mattered for reducing violent extremism, but in the experiment with general U.S. political partisans (Study 7), effect sizes were small, though significant,” he explained.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. “An important caveat to these results is that in the final experiment with general U.S. political partisans (Study 7), participating in the intervention group compared to the control group resulted in reduced violent extremism, but not increased Meaningful world belief, which calls into question exactly how the intervention caused the reduction in violent extremism,” Snook noted. The authors note that the photo exercise might have simply made meaningful things more noticeable, rather than changing the underlying belief itself.

Additionally, the exercise asked people what matters, and the survey asked how much things matter, meaning participants might have guessed the study’s aim and altered their responses. Most of the participants in these studies were also self-reporting their intentions to use violence, which is a behavioral intention rather than an actual action.

Only the prison study looked at past violent acts. The two groups compared in the prison study might also have differed in unmeasured ways, such as education levels or time served, which could influence their worldviews. The control group in the experiment with January 6 supporters was also passive, meaning they did not complete an alternative 10-day task, and they were surveyed only once, after the program, so there is no baseline to compare.

Future studies will need to test the photography intervention against active control exercises among extremist populations to see how consistently these results hold. “This project is exciting because it opens the door to test other positive psychology interventions for reducing violent extremism,” Snook concluded.

The study, “Is a Meaningless World Easier to Destroy? Low Meaningful World Belief Predicts Violent Extremism Intentions,” was authored by Daniel W. Snook, Nicholas Kerry, Baglan Aidarov, Kairat Abuov, Jeremy D. W. Clifton, and Jocelyn J. Bélanger.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-think-the-world-lacks-meaning-are-more-prone-to-political-violence/

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DATE: October 7, 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. **
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TITLE: Scientists decode imagined melodies from human brain waves

URL: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-decode-imagined-melodies-from-human-brain-waves/

Researchers have successfully decoded the basic structure of imagined melodies from human brain waves by focusing on how notes relate to one another rather than their exact pitch. Published in the journal eNeuro, the small study demonstrates that computer models can reconstruct the general rising and falling contours of a silent song directly from neural recordings. These results show that the brain’s internal auditory experiences can be accessed and translated into recognizable musical sequences.

When we recognize a familiar song, we do not usually rely on the exact acoustic frequencies of the notes. We rely on relative pitch, which is the interval or distance between successive tones. This is why a song like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” sounds identical whether it is played on a high-pitched flute or a low-pitched tuba. The human brain naturally encodes these relational patterns, allowing people to carry tunes across different keys and instruments.

Imagining music engages many of the same neural networks as actually listening to it. When a person hears a song in their head, their brain generates an internal auditory experience. Extracting this hidden musical content from brain activity is highly difficult. Past attempts have mostly detected the presence of musical thought or basic rhythmic beats.

Predicting the actual melody a person is imagining requires capturing rapid, fine-grained changes in brain activity. Absolute pitch is tied to specific sound wave frequencies. Because most human brains process melodies relatively, attempting to decode exact absolute pitches often fails.

To address this challenge, researchers Jii Kwon and Chun Kee Chung from Seoul National University led a team to investigate whether neural decoding models could identify imagined melodies using a relative pitch framework. They wanted to see if they could predict individual imagined notes by their scale degree, like “Do” or “Re,” regardless of the starting key.

The researchers conducted a small study involving 10 patients with medically intractable epilepsy. These patients already had arrays of electrodes surgically implanted directly on the surface of their brains for clinical evaluation. This recording technique, called electrocorticography, provides a highly detailed look at electrical activity across the cerebral cortex. The direct contact with the brain tissue allows sensors to pick up high-frequency signals that external scalp monitors often miss.

During the experiment, the patients listened to short segments of familiar children’s songs, such as “Yankee Doodle.” The songs were played in three different musical keys. The researchers instructed the patients to listen to the first two measures of a song and then silently imagine the next two measures. To ensure they were actually following the tune, the patients hummed the melody aloud after the silent imagination period ended.

As the patients imagined the music, the scientists recorded their brain activity. They focused on specific electrical patterns known as high-gamma activity. These rapid brain waves oscillate between 60 and 150 times per second and are a reliable indicator of active sensory processing. The team isolated the signals coming from regions like the superior temporal gyrus, an area on the side of the brain heavily involved in processing sounds.

The researchers took this neural data and trained a machine learning program to recognize patterns associated with specific relative pitches. They broke the imagination period into half-second segments, matching each segment to a specific note in the song. The model learned to categorize the brain waves into six relative pitch classes. These classes correspond to the solfège syllables Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, and La.

The research team then tested the computer models on a fresh set of brain recordings that the models had not seen before. The computer tried to guess which relative note the patient was imagining during each half-second window. The accuracy for these single-note predictions was modest, sitting around 26 percent on average. While this number might seem low, a random guess would only be correct about 16 percent of the time, meaning the models were successfully extracting real musical information.

The team also tried to decode the exact acoustic frequencies, or absolute pitches, from the same brain data. In this test, the models failed to perform better than a random guess. The results were not statistically significant for absolute pitch, supporting the view that the brain primarily represents the imagined melody through relative pitch relationships.

Although predicting individual notes was difficult, the researchers found success when they linked the individual predictions together over time. By arranging the decoded relative pitches in sequence, they reconstructed the overall melodic contour of the imagined songs. These reconstructed sequences generally matched the ascending and descending patterns of the original melodies. Even when a specific note prediction was slightly off, the overall shape of the song remained intact.

By looking closer at the data, the researchers identified which brain areas provided the most useful information for the computer models. Activity in the superior temporal gyrus on both sides of the brain was a major contributor. They also found helpful signals in the left precentral gyrus, a brain region often linked to motor planning. This suggests that internally imagining a melody might involve a mental rehearsal of the physical actions required to sing it.

While these findings present a novel way to access internal musical thoughts, the approach has several practical limitations. The accuracy of predicting individual notes remains relatively low. Reconstructing a perfectly accurate melody note-for-note is not yet possible with current methods. The reconstructed melodies rely on the general shape of the song rather than flawless individual predictions.

The study also relied exclusively on highly familiar children’s songs. Familiar melodies are deeply ingrained in memory, which likely helps patients produce stable and consistent internal imagery. Because of this, it is unknown if the models could decode novel or spontaneously composed melodies. Spontaneous imagination might not generate the same robust neural patterns as recalling a well-learned tune.

The need for surgically implanted electrodes restricts this technology to clinical settings. The invasive nature of electrocorticography means this specific method cannot be adapted into a wearable device for the general public. Future studies will likely explore whether non-invasive techniques can capture similar relative pitch information. Expanding the computer models to decode a wider range of notes across multiple octaves will also be a priority for subsequent research.

The study, “Reconstruction of Imagined Melody with Relative Pitch Decoding in Electrocorticography,” was authored by Jii Kwon, Youmin Shin, June sic Kim, Eunju Jeong, Sung-Phil Kim, Eun Jung Lee, and Chun Kee Chung.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-decode-imagined-melodies-from-human-brain-waves/

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DATE: October 7, 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. **
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TITLE: Winning the lottery helps men marry, but briefly raises divorce risk for women

URL: https://www.psypost.org/winning-the-lottery-helps-men-marry-but-briefly-raises-divorce-risk-for-women/

A sudden financial windfall appears to increase the likelihood that men marry and have children, while temporarily raising the risk of divorce for women. These findings, based on nearly 77,000 Swedish lottery players, provide evidence that money can shape family life, possibly in different ways for men and women. The research was published in the Journal of Human Resources.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker argued that individuals make family decisions by weighing how much satisfaction they expect from being married, single, or a parent. “Economists have long argued that money shapes decisions about marriage, divorce and having children,” study co-author Anastasia Terskaya, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Barcelona and a research affiliate at the Institute of Economics of Barcelona, told PsyPost. “Gary Becker’s work in the 1960s-70s is the classic example.”

Money may also shape what people look for in a partner. A study covered by PsyPost in 2026 found that women’s preference for wealthier partners decreased when they had more economic power, though that research measured stated preferences in a simulated society rather than real-world behavior.

Testing these theories in the real world is notoriously difficult because people who earn higher incomes usually differ from those who earn less in many other ways, such as their education levels or career ambitions. “The fact that richer men are more likely to be married doesn’t tell us whether money causes marriage,” Terskaya said.

To isolate the pure effect of money, scientists look for sudden, unexpected influxes of cash that are unrelated to a person’s background or behavior. “Lotteries get around this problem because the size of the prize is random,” Terskaya explained. By comparing people who played the exact same lotteries but won different amounts by random chance, researchers can estimate how wealth itself alters life trajectories.

The research, authored by Terskaya alongside David Cesarini of New York University and colleagues, aimed to document the long-term effects of such unearned wealth on family formation. “This question has important policy implications,” she added. “Fertility has been falling across much of the world, and many countries now have birth rates below the replacement rate of roughly 2.1 children per woman, the level needed to keep a population stable over the long run.”

“Many governments worry about the consequences, such as aging populations and pressure on pension and welfare systems,” she continued. “This raises a key question: can money actually persuade people to have more children, and if so, how much would it take?”

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed data from three major Swedish lotteries: a monthly subscription lottery, a scratch-ticket lottery, and savings accounts that paid lower interest in exchange for automatic entry into lottery draws. They matched the records of 76,859 unique lottery players to government administrative registries that track marriage, divorce, and childbirth over time. The lottery players closely resembled other Swedes of similar age and sex: 33 percent were married, compared with 35 percent of the comparison group, and their incomes were similar, though players were somewhat less likely to have attended college (24 percent versus 30 percent).

The players were grouped tightly based on their exact lottery participation, such as buying the same number of subscription tickets in a given month. “Because we compare players who faced the same odds but won different amounts, our setup is close to a randomized experiment,” Terskaya observed. “That let us ask cleanly: what happens to people’s family lives when they suddenly get richer?”

The study focused on adults aged 18 to 44 at the time of their lottery win, tracking family outcomes at two-year, five-year, and ten-year horizons. Winnings varied widely, with the researchers expressing the effects per 1 million Swedish kronor (SEK), after taxes. This baseline amount, equivalent to about $140,000 in 2010, was more than five times a typical Swede’s annual disposable income.

The findings indicate that wealth boosts marriage prospects, but primarily for men. For unmarried male winners, a 1 million SEK windfall increased the probability of getting married within five years by 4.7 percentage points. Given a baseline marriage rate of about 16 percent for this group, the jump represented a roughly 30 percent increase. This boost appeared to be concentrated among men who had below-median incomes before winning.

For unmarried female winners, the effect on marriage was small and not statistically significant. However, the difference between men’s and women’s responses was not large enough to rule out chance, so the gender gap in marriage is suggestive rather than firmly established.

“Even in Sweden, one of the world’s most gender-equal societies, men’s and women’s responses differ,” Terskaya remarked. “The absence of an effect on marriage for women, combined with the positive effect for men, likely indicates that men and women have different preferences regarding marriage.”

When it came to divorce, the results diverged by gender. Married women who won the lottery experienced a sudden spike in their likelihood of divorce. A 1 million SEK prize nearly doubled their short-term divorce risk, raising it by almost 4 percentage points over a baseline of 4 percent within two years.

“The divorce effect for women is sharp and short-lived,” Terskaya pointed out. “This suggests that women still face financial barriers to leaving a marriage.”

Because this effect faded at the ten-year horizon, the researchers suggest the wealth likely accelerated divorces that were already under consideration. The short-term spike was also concentrated among women who had below-median incomes before winning. The researchers interpret this as a sign that the lottery provided a sudden rush of financial independence, giving women who were previously financially vulnerable the resources needed to leave their marriages.

Terskaya warned against a common misreading. “‘Money makes women leave their husbands.’ Not quite,” she said. “The effect fades over time, so wealth mostly changes when already-troubled marriages end, not whether they end.”

For married men, the lottery winnings had the opposite effect: wealth appeared to reduce their risk of divorce. However, this was the least reliable result in the study, as discussed below.

The divorce findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that among opposite-sex couples in Finland, higher income for the secondary earner, usually the wife, was linked to greater divorce risk, while higher income for the primary earner was linked to more stable marriages. That study relied on observational income data rather than sudden windfalls.

The researchers also found that children function as what economists call a normal good, meaning people tend to have more of them when their financial resources increase. Ten years after a lottery win, male winners had an average of 0.056 more children per 1 million SEK won, amounting to a 14 percent increase in fertility. The researchers roughly estimate that 20 to 40 percent of men’s fertility increase traces to higher marriage rates and fewer divorces. “Part of this happens because wealth helps them marry and stay married,” Terskaya added.

Women’s fertility saw a slight positive bump, but the results were not statistically significant. As with marriage, the researchers could not statistically confirm that men and women responded differently. The researchers noted that the gender gap in fertility was strongest among winners over 35. The authors suggest this may reflect women’s age-related decline in fertility, which would point to differing constraints rather than differing preferences.

“In absolute terms, the effects are modest, even though some look large in percentage terms,” Terskaya said. “One way to see it: in the full sample, each 1 million SEK raises the number of children born over ten years by about 0.033. That works out to roughly 30 million SEK (around $4 million) in windfall wealth per additional child.”

When the researchers combined their data with earlier lottery studies, they estimated that every $100,000 in windfall wealth increases the odds that a single person marries in the next five years by roughly 1.2 percentage points. “So money clearly matters, but large cash transfers would be an expensive way to change marriage or birth rates,” Terskaya said.

“Large, unexpected wealth shocks affected family outcomes differently by gender,” said Jeong Jin Yu, a professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China who was not involved in the study. “They increased men’s marriage and fertility, while women experienced a short-term increase in divorce risk.”

“The findings confirm that men’s economic resources are associated with marriage and family formation,” he added. “They also extend previous research by using lottery winnings as a plausibly random wealth shock rather than relying only on correlations.”

To explain the gender differences in divorce, the authors point out that wealth increases bargaining power, or how much say each spouse has in household decisions. In Sweden, the legal default is an equal split in a divorce, but registry data suggests the wealthier spouse often walks away with a much larger share in practice. The authors suggest that if women carry a heavier domestic workload or have less autonomy in a marriage, sudden financial independence might make single life more appealing, while men might find that wealth enhances their married life.

“Confidence is relatively high in the main findings because the study uses a large administrative dataset and a lottery-based research design,” Yu told PsyPost. “However, confidence is relatively lower regarding the explanations for the gender differences, since the data do not directly measure marital satisfaction, relationship quality, or decision-making power within relationships.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study is based entirely in Sweden, a country with a strong social welfare system, low legal barriers to divorce, and relatively high social acceptance of non-traditional family structures.

“Context matters,” Terskaya emphasized. “We expect the results to carry over best to other high-income welfare states, especially the Nordic countries, and much less to developing countries.” The way wealth influences marriage and fertility might look different in nations with more traditional gender norms or weaker social safety nets.

Yu cautioned against reading too much into the results. “Readers should not conclude that money automatically causes marriage, children, or divorce,” he said. “The study reports average effects, not outcomes that apply to every individual. The findings may also reflect Sweden’s particular legal, economic, and cultural context.”

There is also some uncertainty regarding the exact mechanisms behind the male marriage boost. The researchers note that it is difficult to determine if men are marrying more because they have reached a basic threshold of absolute financial security, or if their relative rank among other men has simply improved. If relative rank dictates marriage prospects, a general increase in wealth across an entire society would not necessarily boost overall marriage rates.

“Making one man richer is not the same as making everyone richer,” Terskaya highlighted. “If wealthier men marry more partly because they become more attractive relative to other men, a rise in everyone’s income would raise marriage and fertility less than our estimates suggest. Our numbers may therefore be an upper bound for such general increases. This is important to keep in mind if a government wants to use our estimates to justify a universal basic income, which raises everyone’s income.”

Finally, the finding that wealth reduces divorce risk for men was sensitive to how the researchers defined their sample. When they expanded the analysis to include older adults up to age 64, the stabilizing effect on male marriages became much smaller and less reliable, suggesting the original result may be fragile.

“The finding that men’s marriages become more stable is the least robust result,” Terskaya acknowledged. “It weakens or disappears under other age ranges, definitions and statistical tests, so we put less weight on it.”

“The paper leaves several open questions,” Terskaya told PsyPost. She would like to learn how couples’ property is split in practice when marriages end, and whether the same patterns would emerge in nations with different marriage laws and cultural expectations about family.

“Future research should examine relationship quality, relationship duration, partner characteristics, financial decision-making, and how wealth affects each partner’s independence and decision-making power,” Yu added. “It would also be useful to test whether similar patterns appear with other types of wealth and in different countries.”

The study, “Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility,” was authored by David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, and Anastasia Terskaya.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/winning-the-lottery-helps-men-marry-but-briefly-raises-divorce-risk-for-women/

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 02:45AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Trump Allies Push to Sideline AI Safety Advocates As Oversight Fight Grows

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191810&url=https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/told-world-ai-dangerous-now-092510605.html

Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines

After artificial intelligence safety advocates captured Washington's attention with dire warnings about the technology's power, the Trump administration and its allies embraced some of their suggestions, while moving to sideline the advocates themselves. AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have for years worked with AI safety nonprofits, but President Trump's allies say the work of auditing AI should be done by large business consulting...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191810&url=https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/told-world-ai-dangerous-now-092510605.html

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 02:45AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: "Complete Devastation": How NSF Gutted Its Social Sciences Research

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191817&url=https://www.science.org/content/article/complete-devastation-how-nsf-gutted-its-social-sciences-research

Source: Science

Social scientists in the U.S. have known for months that their National Science Foundation funding was threatened but were unsure how dire the situation was. With the end of the 2026 fiscal year on September 30, the extent of the damage is now becoming clear. "For entire disciplines, this is existential," says Wendy Naus, head of the nonprofit Consortium of Social Science Associations. Among those disciplines defunded at NSF: social psychology.

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191817&url=https://www.science.org/content/article/complete-devastation-how-nsf-gutted-its-social-sciences-research

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DATE: October 7, 2026 at 02:45AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: The Clock on AI Regulation Is Ticking, Warns U.N. Rights Chief

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191802&url=https://news.un.org/feed/view/en/story/2026/10/1168529

Source: United Nations News

The world is running out of time to put guardrails on artificial intelligence, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned Monday, as a "ruthless race" between companies and countries raises concerns about human safety and even humanity's survival. Speaking at an AI and Human Rights Summit in Oxford, Mr. Türk said the technology was being built and controlled by a select few, without public oversight, and already proving...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191802&url=https://news.un.org/feed/view/en/story/2026/10/1168529

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 09:26PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHIATIRY FEED

TITLE: What happens in the brain when cannabis makes you anxious?

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261003234021.htm

Cannabinoids may intensify anxiety by removing a natural brake on specific neurons in the brain’s fear center, particularly during stressful situations. In mice, shutting down those neurons sharply reduced cannabinoid-related anxious behavior.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261003234021.htm

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 09:26PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: What happens in the brain when cannabis makes you anxious?

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261003234021.htm

Cannabinoids may intensify anxiety by removing a natural brake on specific neurons in the brain’s fear center, particularly during stressful situations. In mice, shutting down those neurons sharply reduced cannabinoid-related anxious behavior.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261003234021.htm

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 09:26PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: What happens in the brain when cannabis makes you anxious?

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261003234021.htm

Cannabinoids may intensify anxiety by removing a natural brake on specific neurons in the brain’s fear center, particularly during stressful situations. In mice, shutting down those neurons sharply reduced cannabinoid-related anxious behavior.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261003234021.htm

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DATE: October 6, 2026
SOURCE: SOCIALWORKER.COM

TITLE: Review: The Airport Chaplain—A Master Class in “Good Trouble” and Vicarous Trauma

URL: https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/reviews-commentary/airport-chaplain-master-class-good-trouble/

The captivating, authentic series, The Airport Chaplain, offers a longed-for community, multi-layered principals, and a master class in vicarious and secondary trauma.

URL: https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/reviews-commentary/airport-chaplain-master-class-good-trouble/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Newborn circumcision is not linked to autism, large U.S. study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/newborn-circumcision-is-not-linked-to-autism-large-u-s-study-finds/

A recent study found no evidence that circumcising newborn boys increases their risk of developing autism spectrum disorder. The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, may offer reassurance to parents considering the procedure or whose sons have already had it. The researchers also found that acetaminophen was rarely given to the infants, making it unlikely that the pain reliever explains any connection between the procedure and autism.

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that involves differences in how a person interacts socially and communicates with others. It also typically involves repetitive body movements and atypical responses to sensory input. The diagnosis relies on clinical assessments of a child’s behavior and development.

Over the past few decades, the rate of autism diagnoses has grown considerably. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about one in 150 8-year-olds had an autism diagnosis in 2000, compared with one in 31 in 2022. Experts are still working to figure out how much of this increase reflects a true rise in the condition, as opposed to better awareness and changes in how doctors screen for it. Regardless, this trend has prompted scientists to look for environmental factors that might interact with complex genetic predispositions.

One consistent feature of autism is that it is diagnosed much more frequently in boys than in girls. As noted in a 2022 review of sex differences, this disparity may partly reflect differences in how symptoms present and are recognized by doctors. However, the higher prevalence in boys has also motivated experts to investigate early-life exposures that only apply to males. This includes neonatal medical circumcision, a common surgical procedure involving the removal of the foreskin covering the tip of the penis shortly after birth, which is performed on about half of newborn boys in U.S. hospitals, a share that has been declining in recent years.

The research, led by Monica McGrath, a research professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes Data Analysis Center, examined whether newborn circumcision is linked to autism. In recent years, public speculation has circulated suggesting that the physical stress of the procedure, or the acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) provided for pain relief, might contribute to autism.

In October 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Cabinet meeting that two studies showed boys circumcised early had double the rate of autism, and he suggested Tylenol given for pain was the reason. Media coverage of the remarks resurfaced two older observational studies: a 2013 analysis that compared circumcision and autism rates across countries and U.S. states, and a 2015 study of Danish health records that found a 46 percent higher risk of autism among circumcised boys.

“We knew we had the data to help investigate this question,” McGrath said in a news release from Johns Hopkins.

The authors of the new study pointed out that those prior reports suffered from potential biases. For example, in places like Denmark where circumcision is relatively rare, the procedure is mostly performed for religious or cultural reasons. This means that unmeasured factors, such as differences in when and how certain communities seek health care, might have skewed the older data. Because circumcision is routinely performed in hospitals across the United States for a broad range of families, the research team wanted to evaluate the question in a large, diverse American population.

To do this, the research team examined data from the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes project, a national research initiative that tracks children’s health. The analysis included 2,771 male children from 14 different research sites across the United States. All of the children were singleton births, meaning they were not twins or triplets. If a family had multiple children participating in the broader project, the researchers randomly selected one child to ensure that shared family environments did not skew the statistics.

The scientists checked medical records to determine whether each child had been circumcised at a medical facility within 28 days of birth. They then tracked whether the children were later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. A diagnosis was recorded if a parent reported that a medical professional had identified the condition, or if there was documentation from standard clinical autism assessments. The average age at which the children received an autism diagnosis was just under four years old.

In addition to formal diagnoses, the team evaluated broader behavioral traits using two standardized questionnaires filled out by parents: the Social Responsiveness Scale, completed for 1,886 children, and the Child Behavior Checklist, completed for 1,880 children. The Social Responsiveness Scale measures the presence and severity of social impairments and traits associated with autism. The Child Behavior Checklist screens for emotional and behavioral problems, including a specific subset of behaviors that align with autism. Because these questionnaires produce scores along a range rather than a yes-or-no diagnosis, they could pick up milder autism-like traits in children who had not been diagnosed.

Out of the 2,771 boys in the study, 1,840 were circumcised before they were discharged from the hospital, making up 66 percent of the group. The remaining 931 boys, or 34 percent, did not undergo the procedure. Overall, 192 children in the sample had an autism diagnosis, which is about 7 percent of the group.

When breaking the numbers down by circumcision status, 6 percent of the circumcised boys had an autism diagnosis, compared to 9 percent of the uncircumcised boys. In other words, circumcised boys were somewhat less likely to be diagnosed. But the two groups also differed in other ways: uncircumcised boys were more often Hispanic, more often born in the West or Puerto Rico, and more often born prematurely or admitted to intensive care. After the researchers accounted for factors that could influence both circumcision and autism diagnosis, such as maternal education, geographic region, family history of autism, and parental age, the gap shrank and was no longer statistically meaningful.

The parent-reported questionnaires told a similar story: after adjustment, circumcision was not linked to higher scores on either measure. The researchers also checked whether the pattern held within subgroups, such as children from different regions, those born prematurely, and those admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit. In most of these checks, circumcised boys had similar or lower autism-related scores. One exception emerged among children born in the West, where circumcised boys were more likely to score in the elevated range on one questionnaire; the researchers suggest this isolated result may be a statistical fluke given the number of comparisons, noting it was driven by a single site.

The team also reviewed pain management records, which were available for fewer than half of the circumcised infants. Among those, only 4 percent received acetaminophen during the procedure, and about 7 percent of all circumcised infants received it within 30 days of birth. Most documented pain care involved a nerve block, an injection that numbs the area (72 percent), or a sugar solution given by mouth (59 percent), and some infants received more than one. Because acetaminophen was so rarely used, the researchers could not test its role directly, but they concluded that a pathway running from the procedure through the medication to autism is unlikely.

“Parents have been concerned about this potential circumcision-autism connection, but hopefully these findings may help allay their fears,” McGrath said.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding this study. The team noted that they had limited information on the participants’ health insurance status. Because insurance coverage can influence both a family’s decision to have a hospital circumcision and their access to developmental evaluations for autism, missing this variable could leave some untracked influences in the data.

The researchers also pointed out that they specifically evaluated medical circumcisions performed in a hospital setting shortly after birth. The findings might not apply to circumcisions performed later in childhood or those conducted outside of a hospital environment. Additionally, the data on acetaminophen use was restricted to what was recorded by the hospital, meaning any doses given by parents at home after discharge were not captured.

Finally, the parent-reported behavioral questionnaires are validated screening tools that help identify children at risk for autism, but they are not formal diagnostic instruments themselves. And though the study included a large number of children from multiple sites across the United States, the sample does not perfectly represent the entire population of American male newborns.

“We observed no association between circumcision and autism in boys, but it remains important to evaluate the safety of common medical procedures,” McGrath said. She and her colleagues are now examining other possible explanations for the increase in autism diagnoses.

The study, “Neonatal Medical Male Circumcision and Child Autism Diagnosis,” was authored by Monica McGrath, Xiuhong Li, Lisa P. Jacobson, Bennett Leventhal, Judy L. Aschner, Brennan Baker, Karla Cardoso Garcia, Aisha S. Dickerson, Amy J. Elliott, Jody Ganiban, Amanda Goodrich, Daniel B. Horton, Melinda Jarnecke, Sarah Keim, Brian K. Lee, Courtney D. Lynch, Mark Klebanoff, Abdul-Manaf Mutaru, Ruby H. N. Nguyen, Rebecca J. Schmidt, Hyeong-Moo Shin, Lauren C. Shuffrey, Jonathan L. Slaughter, Annemarie Stroustrup, Zhaozhong Zhu, Aaron A. R. Tobian, and M. Kate Grabowski.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/newborn-circumcision-is-not-linked-to-autism-large-u-s-study-finds/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Tripping during a political convention was linked to more support for political violence in a recent psychedelic study

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tripping-during-a-political-convention-was-linked-to-more-support-for-political-violence-in-a-recent-psychedelic-study/

People whose most intense psychedelic experience fell on the Fourth of July showed a decrease in support for partisan violence over a two-month period, compared with people who used psychedelics on other dates, according to research published in Psychedelic Medicine. Exploratory analyses found the opposite pattern for psychedelic use during the 2024 party conventions and closer to Election Day. The findings suggest that the broader cultural and political moment may shape what follows a psychedelic experience.

Psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, are substances that alter perception, mood, and cognitive processes by interacting with serotonin receptors in the brain. Over the past several years, experts have expressed concern about support for partisan violence, which refers to the belief that physical harm or force is an acceptable way to advance political goals or defeat political opponents. While a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that Americans’ support for political violence declined between 2022 and 2023, it remains a heavily studied topic due to its potential impact on democratic stability.

The psychological effects of psychedelics are thought to depend heavily on context. The authors of a 2018 review argued that a user’s mindset and surroundings strongly shape what a psychedelic experience produces, so the same drug can lead to very different outcomes in different situations.

Extending this idea, the authors of a 2021 paper argued that psychedelics do not automatically make people more peaceful or politically liberal. Instead, they proposed that these substances act as magnifiers of a user’s broader cultural and social environment. This perspective suggests that national events and collective moods could influence a person’s psychedelic experience.

This idea raises the possibility that shared cultural moments might steer the psychological effects of psychedelics in different directions. For example, a 2018 study showed that reminding people of a shared American identity reduces hostility between rival political parties.

“There’s reasonably good evidence that psychedelic outcomes depend on context what researchers call set and setting,” lead study author Otto Simonsson told PsyPost. Set refers to a person’s mindset and expectations, and setting to the physical and social environment. Simonsson is an assistant professor at the Center for Social Sustainability within the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at the Karolinska Institutet. “Building on this idea, some scholars have suggested that the broader sociocultural context might matter as well, but that idea is difficult to test empirically,” he explained.

Simonsson and his colleagues aimed to test whether taking psychedelics during specific national events is associated with changes in a person’s willingness to endorse partisan violence. “One possible approach is to use dates that carry a shared cultural meaning, and the Fourth of July is a reasonable candidate, since it’s broadly associated with unity and collective celebration,” Simonsson noted. “If the wider cultural context does shape what follows from a psychedelic experience, then using on that date, with that as the backdrop, might be associated with different changes than using on an ordinary date. That was the basic logic.”

To investigate this, the research team used a longitudinal observational design to track changes over time. They recruited a large sample of U.S. adults aged 18 to 50 on Prolific, an age range chosen because earlier research suggested it would include more psychedelic users. The data came from two waves, collected in the summers of 2023 and 2024. The participants did not know the study was specifically about psychedelics when they signed up.

During the initial survey, 21,990 participants answered questions about their demographic background, including age, gender identity, and political affiliation. They also completed a questionnaire designed to measure their baseline support for partisan violence. About two months later, 12,345 of these initial participants returned to complete a follow-up survey.

In this second survey, participants reported whether they had used classic psychedelics during the two-month period. If they had, they provided the exact date and estimated the dose of their most intense psychedelic experience. They also answered the same questions about partisan violence to see if their attitudes had shifted.

The researchers statistically accounted for a range of other factors. They controlled for age, gender identity, political affiliation, prior psychedelic use, survey year, and the use of other substances, including alcohol, cannabis, and stimulants, as well as the participants’ educational attainment and religious beliefs.

Out of the thousands of people who completed the follow-up, 505 participants reported using psychedelics during the two-month window. Within this smaller group, 19 individuals noted that their most intense experience happened on the Fourth of July. The remaining 486 participants had their most intense experience on a different date.

The results indicated that people whose most intense psychedelic experience fell on the Fourth of July showed a larger decrease in support for partisan violence than people whose most intense experience fell on other dates, a difference of about 0.7 standard deviations, though it rests on only 19 people. Participants who did not use psychedelics at all also showed a greater decrease than the other-date psychedelic users.

The scientists also examined other dates with intense political focus using the 2024 data. Exploratory analyses showed that taking psychedelics on the date of the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump was associated with a decrease in support for partisan violence. This particular decrease was reported almost exclusively by Republican respondents. However, this finding rests on very few Republicans, as about four in five psychedelic users in the sample identified as Democrats.

In contrast, the context of an upcoming election was associated with a different pattern. Using psychedelics during the dates of the Democratic or Republican National Conventions was associated with an increase in support for partisan violence. This increase appeared to be stronger among people who were exposed that day to their own party’s leaders describing the other side as a threat. Similarly, having a most intense psychedelic experience on a date closer to Election Day was linked to increased support for violence.

The authors interpret this pattern as consistent with the idea that psychedelics may amplify the prevailing mood of the moment. A unifying holiday might soften partisan hostility, while a divisive political convention might heighten animosity. An earlier analysis from the same research team’s survey, covered by PsyPost in 2025, similarly found that outcomes varied with context: psychedelic use in illegal settings was linked to increases in psychotic and manic symptoms over two months, while use in legal or decriminalized settings was not.

Simonsson said the main takeaway is “possibly that psychedelics might not push people in any single direction.” “In our data, participants whose most intense psychedelic experience fell on the Fourth of July showed a decrease in support for partisan violence over the study period, while those whose experience fell during the party conventions or closer to Election Day showed an increase,” he added.

However, the researchers note the need for caution when interpreting the results. “That said, this is one study with a small number of relevant participants, so I’d hold the takeaway loosely,” Simonsson cautioned.

As with all research, there are other caveats to consider. The study observed behaviors as they naturally occurred rather than assigning participants to take psychedelics, so the findings cannot confirm that the dates themselves directly caused the changes in political attitudes. Only the Fourth of July test was preregistered. The analyses regarding the assassination attempt, political conventions, and Election Day were exploratory, with no statistical correction for running several tests.

The number of participants who used psychedelics on specific dates was quite small. The researchers also skipped one follow-up analysis for the assassination attempt date because the groups were too small. The high dropout rate between the first and second surveys also introduces the possibility of skewed data. Exposure to the events was not measured directly; participants were asked whether they celebrated the Fourth of July, but not whether they closely followed the conventions, the assassination attempt, or the election.

Because the researchers recruited online and deliberately targeted an age range likely to include psychedelic users, the results might not represent the general public. Participants also reported their own substance use and political views, which can sometimes result in inaccurate answers if people want to present themselves favorably.

The study, “Politically Salient Events May Modulate Effects of Naturalistic Psychedelic Use on Support for Partisan Violence,” was authored by Otto Simonsson, Peter S. Hendricks, Walter Osika, and Simon B. Goldberg.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/tripping-during-a-political-convention-was-linked-to-more-support-for-political-violence-in-a-recent-psychedelic-study/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: The brain may use a shared code for gender across faces, bodies, and objects

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brain-may-use-a-shared-code-for-gender-across-faces-bodies-and-objects/

A neuroimaging study suggests that the brain processes cues about gender from faces, bodies, and objects in many overlapping regions at the back and lower sides of the brain. One region, in the right middle temporal gyrus, appeared to represent gender in a similar way whether it was signaled by a face, a body, or an object. The paper, a reviewed preprint, was published in eLife.

Humans are remarkably good at inferring gender from visual information. They make such judgments quickly and with little conscious effort. Faces provide especially powerful cues, but gender can also be inferred from body shape, posture, clothing, and even objects that people associate with men or women.

For faces, this ability remains surprisingly intact even when an image is degraded, partly hidden, or reduced to a silhouette. Such flexibility suggests that the brain may represent gender at a level that goes beyond any single type of visual cue. In other words, the same general concept may be extracted from very different kinds of images.

Scientists have already identified several brain regions involved in judging gender from faces, particularly areas associated with visual and social processing. Much less is known about how the brain handles gender information conveyed by bodies, and gender cues from objects had not been studied in this way before. An important question is whether these different sources ultimately converge on a common neural representation.

Study author Wenjie Liu and colleagues at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks changes in blood flow as an indicator of brain activity, to record participants’ brain activity while they viewed images of faces, bodies, and objects associated with men or women. They aimed to establish whether any brain region encodes gender regardless of what type of image a person is viewing. Identifying such a region could help researchers understand how the brain turns diverse visual signals into abstract social categories, such as gender, that guide everyday perception and interaction.

Study participants were 22 healthy adults between 19 and 28 years of age, with an average age of 22. Eleven of them were men.

In the main experiment, participants viewed six types of images while their brain activity was recorded: male and female faces, male and female bodies, and objects associated with men or with women. Each type included 30 different images. Face images showed Chinese male and female movie actors, and body images showed a body in underwear from below the head to above the knees. The object images, which were strongly associated with one gender or the other, came from a previous study.

Images were shown in 12-second blocks, each containing images from a single condition, such as female faces. Each of the six conditions appeared three times per run in random order, and each run lasted 5 minutes and 30 seconds. Participants completed six runs, except for the first two participants, who completed seven. To make sure they paid attention, participants pressed a button whenever the same image appeared twice in a row, which they did with about 97% accuracy; they were not asked to judge gender.

To analyze the scans, the researchers used a machine-learning approach that tests whether patterns of activity in a given brain area can be used to tell male images from female images. The regions carrying this gender information differed somewhat depending on the type of image. For faces, gender information was found in several visual areas on both sides of the brain (the cuneus, calcarine cortex, lingual gyrus, superior and middle occipital gyri, and middle temporal gyrus), as well as in the right superior parietal lobule and the left fusiform gyrus.

For bodies, gender information was found in a large portion of the occipitotemporal cortex, along with clusters in the superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, and postcentral gyrus on both sides of the brain. For objects, it was found in the cuneus, calcarine cortex, lingual gyrus, fusiform gyrus, superior, middle, and inferior occipital gyri, and inferior temporal gyrus on both sides of the brain, as well as in the right middle temporal gyrus.

The researchers then tested whether gender information carried over from one type of image to another. For example, they trained the classifier on brain responses to male and female faces and tested whether it could tell the gender of bodies. The only region where this worked for all three pairings of faces, bodies, and objects was a small cluster in the right middle temporal gyrus, and a second type of analysis pointed to the same area.

This region was not dedicated to gender alone. Like most of the gender-related regions the researchers identified, it also carried information about whether a person was viewing a face, a body, or an object.

To probe what kind of visual information this region might be using, the researchers compared its activity with an artificial neural network trained to classify images by gender. Activity in the right middle temporal gyrus most closely resembled the network’s middle layers, suggesting that it relies on mid-level visual features. Mid-level visual features are intermediate representations such as contours, textures, shapes, and spatial arrangements that lie between basic features like color or orientation and the recognition of whole objects or categories.

The researchers also examined how gender-related brain regions communicated with one another. The pattern of these connections was modestly similar when people viewed faces and bodies, but not when they viewed objects.

“Together, these findings identify a category-general neural hub for gender perception and illuminate how mid-level visual features and distributed networks support the abstraction of gender across heterogeneous visual inputs,” the authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the neural basis of social perception. However, eLife’s reviewers rated the evidence as incomplete, citing conceptual concerns, weak statistical methods, and possible confounds from basic differences between the images, such as their size. They suggested the authors temper their claims that the region holds an abstract representation of gender, and the preprint has not yet been revised in response.

The study was also small, with 22 young adults, and participants did not need to attend to gender during the task. Because the faces were of Chinese actors and the gender associations of objects are shaped by culture, the results might differ in other populations.

The paper, “A shared neural code for gender across faces, bodies, and objects in the human brain,” was authored by Wenjie Liu, Xiqian Lu, Yuhui Cheng, Ruidi Wang, Xinquan Lu, Xiangyong Yuan, and Yi Jiang.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brain-may-use-a-shared-code-for-gender-across-faces-bodies-and-objects/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Narcissism and psychopathy are closely linked in women serving prison sentences

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-manipulative-strategies-connect-narcissism-and-psychopathy-behind-bars/

A recent study of incarcerated individuals reveals that grandiose, narcissistic personality traits are closely linked to psychopathic tendencies, partially because people with these traits use manipulative strategies to navigate prison environments. This direct relationship between narcissism and psychopathy is especially pronounced in incarcerated women. The research was published in Psychology, Crime & Law.

The Dark Triad is a psychological framework that groups together three aggressive and self-centered personality traits. These include narcissism, which involves an inflated sense of self-importance; Machiavellianism, characterized by a manipulative and cynical approach to others; and psychopathy, marked by emotional coldness, moral disengagement, and a lack of empathy. In everyday settings, psychologists often view these three traits as related but distinct behavioral patterns.

In a restrictive environment like a prison, these personality features can blend together into active survival tactics. Correctional facilities force constant competition for limited resources and informal privileges. Because overt aggression can attract swift formal or informal sanctions, inmates often rely on covert manipulation to maintain their social standing.

Health researcher Gizell Green of the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel, along with crisis management and security scholars Alena Lochmannová and Ondřej Kolář of the Police Academy of the Czech Republic, wanted to understand how these traits operate under the constraints of incarceration. The researchers proposed that an innate sense of narcissistic entitlement might not automatically lead to psychopathic behavior. Instead, they hypothesized that an intermediate step of calculated manipulation connects the two. They also wanted to investigate whether this behavioral pathway looked different between men and women in custody.

To test these ideas, the researchers surveyed 344 adults serving time in six different Czech prisons. The group included 205 women and 139 men. Participants filled out a demographic questionnaire and a brief psychological assessment known as the Dirty Dozen. This assessment uses a twelve-item rating scale to measure the presence of the three Dark Triad traits.

To encourage honest answers about antisocial behavior, the researchers used a locked collection box so that prison staff could not match responses to specific individuals. The team then used statistical modeling to map the relationships among the three personality traits. Their models accounted for background factors like age, marital status, and the number of children each participant had, as these demographic details can influence criminal trajectories and baseline personality expressions.

The results showed strong associations among all three dark personality traits in the prison sample. Narcissism was robustly linked to elevated levels of Machiavellian tendencies. Both narcissism and Machiavellianism also directly predicted higher levels of psychopathy.

When analyzing the pathways between these traits, the researchers found that Machiavellianism acts as a psychological bridge. Narcissistic desires for dominance and admiration translate into psychopathic callousness partly through the use of calculating and manipulative strategies. In the context of a prison, where informal hierarchies dictate social standing, manipulation functions as a practical tool to secure resources without exposing personal vulnerability. This repeated strategic behavior can foster the emotional detachment characteristic of psychopathy.

The researchers also looked at whether gender changed these behavioral pathways. Their statistical model did not allow the indirect pathway linking narcissism to psychopathy through manipulation to vary by gender, so it was treated as the same for men and women rather than tested for differences. The direct link between narcissism and psychopathy, however, varied measurably depending on gender. For incarcerated women, the direct association between narcissistic traits and psychopathic traits was almost twice as strong as it was for incarcerated men.

In women’s prisons, a grandiose sense of entitlement is more likely to be paired with severe interpersonal hostility and emotional coldness. Female offenders who display pronounced narcissistic behavior represent a more extreme deviation from traditional gender expectations. The researchers suggest this deviation often reflects a more deeply rooted personality pathology that closely aligns with psychopathy.

These findings offer practical guidance for correctional staff managing risk and rehabilitation. Assessment protocols should avoid treating high scores on Dark Triad tests as a single, undifferentiated warning sign. Recognizing how a person’s pursuit of status translates into exploitative tactics can help staff identify inmates who might resort to coercive behavior. Rehabilitation programs can then focus on addressing these specific manipulative strategies rather than just enforcing general rule compliance.

Because the researchers collected all their data at a single point in time, the study cannot establish a definitive sequence of cause and effect. It remains possible that the prison environment first encourages manipulative behavior, which then brings out dormant narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies. The study also lacked a comparison group of people living outside the prison system. Without this baseline, it is impossible to know if this specific blending of personality traits is unique to the custodial environment.

The psychological survey used in the study is brief and might not capture the full range of behaviors associated with psychopathy. Participants in a prison setting might also adjust their answers to protect their reputations, even with anonymous collection methods. Expanding on these findings will require incorporating longer psychological evaluations and reviewing official behavioral records. Observing how these traits manifest in different international justice systems could help clarify how specific prison cultures shape antagonistic behavior.

The study, “The dark path to psychopathy, Machiavellianism as a mediator of the narcissism–psychopathy link among incarcerated men and women: a moderated mediation analysis,” was authored by Gizell Green, Alena Lochmannová, and Ondřej Kolář.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-manipulative-strategies-connect-narcissism-and-psychopathy-behind-bars/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 08:23AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Scientists say this simple habit could strengthen your marriage

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261004001843.htm

Couples who exercise together report better communication, healthier conflict resolution, and lower marital stress than those who work out alone. Even something as simple as taking a walk together may create valuable opportunities to talk, listen, and feel more connected.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261004001843.htm

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: October 6, 2026 at 08:06AM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Parents of transgender youth faced declining mental health after the 2025 inauguration

URL: https://www.psypost.org/parents-of-transgender-youth-faced-declining-mental-health-after-the-2025-inaugu/

A recent study found that parents of transgender youth experienced worsening mental health and well-being following the 2025 United States presidential inauguration compared to parents of cisgender youth. The research highlights the immediate emotional toll that shifting political climates and federal policy changes can take on the family members of marginalized groups. The study was published in Psychological Science.

Following the 2025 presidential inauguration, the new federal administration issued several executive orders aimed at transgender youth. These orders sought to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors, penalize schools that support transgender students, and restrict transgender girls from competing on gender-aligned sports teams.

Prior research has established that such macrolevel policies can act as institutional signals. These signals communicate how broader society views specific groups, which can influence the well-being of those targeted and their families. Policies limiting self-expression and resources contribute to minority stress, a framework explaining how marginalized groups experience worse well-being due to societal hostility.

Researchers wanted to understand how this specific political shift affected both transgender adolescents and their supportive parents. The research team was led by psychologist Rachel A. Leshin of Princeton University, along with Aditi Kodipady, Grey F. Raber, Natalie M. Gallagher, and Kristina R. Olson. They designed a study to compare the mental health trajectories of transgender youth and their parents against a similarly situated group of cisgender youth and their parents.

The researchers tracked 160 youth between the ages of 12 and 17, as well as 167 parents. Within this group, 73 of the youth identified as transgender or nonbinary, and 87 identified as cisgender. The participants were drawn from larger, ongoing longitudinal studies of gender development across the United States.

The families involved in the research were predominantly white, highly educated, and high-income. Because both groups of parents skewed politically liberal, the study offered a controlled comparison. It allowed researchers to differentiate between general frustration with the new administration and distress specifically tied to raising a transgender child in a hostile political environment.

In their primary analysis, the researchers compared mental health data collected annually between 2022 and 2024 to weekly data collected in the seven weeks following the January 2025 inauguration. Youth and parents completed separate self-report surveys measuring depression, anxiety, and positive emotional states. Participants rated how frequently they experienced specific symptoms, such as being unable to stop feeling sad or worrying at bedtime, over the previous seven days.

The researchers observed widening gaps in mental health between the two groups of parents. Before the election, parents of transgender youth and parents of cisgender youth reported similar levels of depression and positive emotions. After the inauguration, parents of transgender youth reported higher levels of depression and lower positive emotions than their counterparts.

Anxiety levels also diverged. While parents of transgender youth reported higher anxiety than parents of cisgender youth before the election, this gap more than doubled in size after the inauguration. To ensure these differences were not just reflecting voting behavior or a parent’s own gender identity, the researchers ran additional analyses. The patterns remained the same when excluding the small number of parents who voted for the current president or who identified as transgender or gender-diverse themselves.

The team also conducted a secondary analysis tracking participants continuously over an eight-week period surrounding the inauguration. They found that parents of transgender youth experienced steady linear increases in anxiety and depression throughout this window. In contrast, parents of cisgender youth showed no consistent changes in these measures.

To understand why parents experienced these outcomes, the researchers analyzed weekly measures of parental worry and perceived social support. Their exploratory analyses suggested that elevated worry for their children may help explain the differing mental health outcomes between the two parent groups, though the researchers noted the causal direction could not be definitively established. Perceived social support did not differ between the groups and did not explain the results. Both groups reported high levels of social support, indicating that community backing was not enough to offset the distress caused by the new political landscape.

The researchers also examined the mental health of the youth themselves. In the primary comparison between pre-election and post-inauguration periods, the differences in well-being between transgender and cisgender youth were subtle and not statistically significant in most models. Transgender youth showed a drop in positive emotions after the inauguration. However, the mental health trajectories of the two youth groups largely diverged only in anxiety. During the post-election period, cisgender youths’ anxiety lessened, while transgender youths’ anxiety remained stable.

To explore why the mental health declines were more prominent in parents than in the youth, the researchers analyzed open-ended survey responses. Two independent reviewers, blinded to the participants’ demographics, coded these responses. They found that parents of transgender youth were much more likely to explicitly mention transgender issues and express severe negative emotions than the transgender youth were. Some parents shared statements like, “I have cried almost every day this past week,” and “Every week is a new wave of fear, frustration, and utter disbelief.”

The authors suggest that parents often anticipate long-term threats more acutely than adolescents do. At the time of the surveys, the executive orders targeting transgender youth had largely been blocked by federal judges and had not yet altered daily life for most participants. The youth might not have felt the immediate impact, whereas their parents were already processing the institutional signals and preparing for potential future consequences.

The study focused on a specific demographic of liberal-leaning, supportive parents. Parents who hold different political beliefs or who do not support their child’s transgender identity might not experience the same mental health changes. Research involving more politically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse families is necessary to see if these patterns hold across the broader population.

The number of participants involved also limits how broadly the conclusions can be applied. The group differences observed among the youth were small and less consistent than those among the parents. Further research with larger groups of adolescents is required to track how federal policies affect the long-term mental health of transgender youth. Future studies could also track whether the deteriorating mental health of supportive parents eventually impacts the well-being of their children over time.

The study, “Reduced Mental Health and Well-Being in Parents of Transgender Youth Following the 2025 U.S. Presidential Inauguration,” was authored by Rachel A. Leshin, Aditi Kodipady, Grey F. Raber, Natalie M. Gallagher, and Kristina R. Olson.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/parents-of-transgender-youth-faced-declining-mental-health-after-the-2025-inaugu/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Salsa dancing can ease depressive symptoms in young adults, randomized trial finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/salsa-dancing-can-ease-depressive-symptoms-in-young-adults-randomized-trial-finds/

Young adults with depressive symptoms might benefit from learning how to salsa dance. A new trial published in Psychological Medicine indicates that an eight-week salsa dance program reduced depressive symptoms and social anxiety in young people compared to a waitlist control group. The research provides evidence that social movement activities could offer an accessible and engaging way to support youth mental health.

Depression in young adults, typically defined as those between the ages of 18 and 25, is a growing health concern. According to a 2021 meta-analysis, the onset of mental health conditions peaks during adolescence and early adulthood, with a large proportion of cases emerging before age 25.

Despite this early onset, young people are often less likely to seek treatment. When they do, they tend to drop out of therapy more frequently than older adults. Many existing therapies adopt generic approaches that some young adults feel do not align with their specific needs or daily realities.

The research team, led by Brennan Delattre, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, set out to see if social dance could help young adults with depression. “Depression most often begins between the ages of 15 and 25, yet young adults are under-represented in treatment research and are more likely to drop out of treatment once they start compared to older adults,” Delattre told PsyPost.

Young people also report high levels of social isolation and loneliness, which act as both triggers for depression and barriers to recovery. “Waiting times for mental healthcare can also be long, and longer waiting times can correspond to worse treatment outcomes,” Delattre added. “Especially for young people, we wanted to investigate something accessible and enjoyable that young people would see as ‘for them’ and that might target mood and social connection at the same time.”

Physical activity is known to improve mental well-being. For example, a meta-analysis covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that various forms of exercise, including yoga and strength training, help reduce depressive symptoms.

Social dance, which combines physical exertion with continuous social interaction, could offer unique benefits. Learning to dance in a group setting involves cooperation, nonverbal communication, and a shared sense of accomplishment.

Before launching the trial, the researchers consulted with an Oxford-based youth advisory group, which included young people with and without lived experience of depression and anxiety, through a Patient and Public Involvement process to determine which style of dance would be most appealing. “These young people watched videos of salsa dancing, cèilidh dancing, capoeira, and cooperative movement games and their feedback indicated that they thought salsa dance would be the most enjoyable and acceptable to their peers,” Delattre explained.

To test the effects of the intervention, the researchers recruited 121 individuals between the ages of 18 and 24. These participants all reported mild to moderately severe symptoms of depression based on a screening questionnaire.

The participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a waitlist control group. The experimental group was asked to attend at least six out of eight weekly salsa dance classes hosted by local university dance societies in Oxford.

These classes were taught by experienced instructors and included regular attendees who were not part of the research, allowing the participants to blend in naturally. The waitlist group completed the same assessments but had to wait 12 weeks before being offered the chance to take the dance classes.

Throughout the study, participants completed several questionnaires tracking their mental health. The primary measure was a standard assessment that asks individuals how often they have experienced depressive symptoms, such as low mood or loss of interest in activities, over the past two weeks.

The researchers also tracked changes in generalized anxiety, social anxiety, loneliness, and how much pleasure participants derived from social interactions. Finally, participants received daily text messages asking them to rate their happiness on a scale from one to ten.

After excluding individuals who dropped out or did not comply with the study requirements, the final analysis included 93 participants. Of these, 49 were in the salsa group and 44 were in the waitlist group.

The researchers found that the salsa dance program had a positive impact on the participants’ mental health. By the end of the 12-week tracking period, those in the salsa group reported lower levels of depressive symptoms compared to the waitlist group.

“On the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), a standard 0–27 depression questionnaire used in healthcare practices, the salsa group’s scores fell by about three points on average, while the waitlist group’s changed by less than one,” Delattre noted. This drop exceeded a common benchmark for clinically meaningful change in depressive symptoms.

“The roughly 2.5-point difference between the groups is larger than the change patients themselves typically notice as meaningful,” Delattre said.

The waitlist group, in contrast, experienced little to no change in their depression scores. The benefit did not differ significantly between participants who started with mild symptoms and those with moderately severe ones.

“Enjoyment of salsa seemed to matter: participants who had more positive experiences in class tended to have lower depressive symptoms,” Delattre pointed out. “The message isn’t that salsa is a cure, but that doing something active, social and genuinely enjoyable can make a real difference to mood, alongside (not instead of) professional care.”

Beyond depression, the salsa group showed a steady decline in social anxiety over the course of the study, while the waitlist group showed barely any change.

Interestingly, the waitlist group experienced a gradual decrease in their ability to enjoy social interactions as the weeks went by. The salsa group did not experience this decline, suggesting that participating in the dance classes may have helped preserve their capacity for interpersonal pleasure.

“I think the most surprising finding of this study was that over the 12 weeks, young people in the waitlist group showed a worsening in social anhedonia, meaning reduced ability to enjoy, or feelings of reward from, social interactions, whereas those in the salsa classes did not,” Delattre told PsyPost.

“This didn’t statistically explain the improvement in depressive symptoms, possibly because participants started out at very different levels of interpersonal pleasure to begin with,” she continued. “But it raises an interesting question for future research: could social dance help protect people’s capacity to enjoy social connection while they’re struggling with low mood?”

Both groups reported decreases in general anxiety and loneliness over time, meaning the salsa group did not improve more than the waitlist group in those areas. However, daily text message ratings showed that the happiness levels of the salsa group rose more steeply over the course of the study than those of the waitlist group.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study utilized a waitlist control group, which can sometimes make an intervention look more effective than it is in reality. Participants assigned to a waitlist might experience disappointment or a drop in motivation, which could worsen their symptoms.

“Statistically, it’s a large effect, but comparisons against a waitlist tend to produce bigger effects than comparisons against another activity, so the fairest summary is that there was a noticeable, clinically meaningful improvement in the salsa group compared to the waiting group that justifies conducting larger studies in the future,” Delattre cautioned. “Our comparison group was a waitlist, which tells us salsa is better than waiting, but not whether it’s better than another social or physical activity, or than therapy or medication. From these results, salsa looks like a promising option for young people while they wait for care, and potentially alongside other treatments, though that combination still needs to be tested directly.”

Another caveat is that the study focused solely on one type of dance. “This study does not measure or suggest that salsa dancing is more effective than other types of social dance; the same benefits may well apply to them, and that’s worth testing,” Delattre said.

More people dropped out of the salsa group than the waitlist group (17 of 66 who started, versus 2 of 47), and the analysis included only participants who completed the study. If those who left the salsa classes were benefiting less, the results could overstate the effect. Additionally, Delattre taught some of the salsa classes, without pay, and the researcher who collected the data knew which group each participant was in.

Because the study was statistically powered only to measure changes in depression and no corrections were made for testing multiple outcomes, the secondary findings regarding social anxiety, happiness, and social enjoyment should be considered preliminary. Another consideration is selection bias. People who volunteer for a dance study likely already believe that dance will be enjoyable and helpful, and this expectation of improvement can influence the results, though this expectation would apply equally to participants randomly assigned to either group.

The study also relied on self-reported symptoms rather than diagnoses from structured clinical interviews. While the symptom thresholds used are common in community health settings, testing the intervention in a formally diagnosed clinical population would help verify its medical utility.

“I’m presently finishing my doctorate and applying for funding to run larger randomized controlled trials testing social dance under the umbrella of social prescribing within the public healthcare systems like the NHS, compared against active control conditions,” Delattre said of her future plans. “In the long term, I’d like to evaluate social dance and other creative interventions for mental health across different populations internationally, and across different definitions of what it means for an intervention to ‘work.'”

Delattre also expressed her gratitude to those who made the research possible. “I’d just like to extend my thanks to the large group of people that generously enabled this study to take place, including local social dance organizations (the Oxford University Salsa Society, Linacre Latin Dance Society and Teddy Hall Latin Dance Society) and their instructors for donating classes, time, and resources, and the study participants who committed their time over the course of twelve weeks to trying something new and responding to personal mental health questions,” she said. “Thank you for your trust, enthusiasm, time, vulnerability, and feedback.”

The study, “The effects of a salsa dance intervention in young people with mild to moderately severe depressive symptoms,” was authored by Brennan Delattre, Joshua E.J. Buckman, Catherine J. Harmer, and Susannah E. Murphy.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/salsa-dancing-can-ease-depressive-symptoms-in-young-adults-randomized-trial-finds/

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 03:42AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Anti-Frat Protests Erupt at Cornell Over Handling of Rape Allegation

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191794&url=https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/student-protests-erupt-cornell-over-013011295.html

Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines

Protests erupted at Cornell University on Monday, with students criticizing officials' handling of gang-rape allegations, demanding the president's resign and painting "SMASH THE PATRIARCHY" on an administration building. Thousands of students and faculty rallied over the case of a former student known as Jane Doe, who alleged being plied with drugs and raped at a fraternity house. Some protest signs said, "At Cornell, rapists are safer than...

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 03:42AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Trump Uses Anti-Trans Slur Against Democratic Senate Candidate

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191797&url=https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/trump-anti-trans-slur-annie-andrews-south-carolina-democrat-senate-rcna601767

Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines

President Donald Trump used an anti-trans slur Monday to attack the Democratic nominee for the Senate in South Carolina as he urged voters to back Republican Senator Darline Graham. In a Truth Social post, Trump referred to Democratic candidate Annie Andrews three times as "trannie." He said Andrews, who is not transgender, is "not for South Carolina." Former South Carolina Governor David Beasley, a Republican, called President Trump's words...

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 03:42AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: ICC Charges More Taliban Leaders for Persecuting Women

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191787&url=https://www.dw.com/en/icc-unseals-taliban-leaders-warrants-over-persecuting-women/a-79556631?maca=en-rss-en-top-1022-rdf

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The International Criminal Court disclosed more details Monday about the arrest warrants against two Taliban leaders, while also issuing two more arrest warrants. The four Taliban leaders are accused of crimes against humanity through the persecution of women, girls, and the LGBTQ+ community in Afghanistan since taking power in 2021. The Taliban limit women's access to jobs and education beyond sixth grade, as well as barring them from most...

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