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

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#OracleHealth's #Cerner #EHR Breach Figure Soars to 20 Million https://t.co/chwmQS11Fh

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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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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 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
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

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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

** 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: 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

** 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: 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...

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

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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...

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

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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

Source: DW- top stories

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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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 03:41AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Trump Approves Firing Squad for Mass Shooter Nidal Hasan

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191792&url=https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/fort-hood-mass-shooter-nidal-010114676.html

Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines

Nidal Malik Hasan, a former Army officer and psychiatrist who killed 13 people and injured 32 others during a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, will be executed by a U.S. Army firing squad, the Pentagon announced Monday. "Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended—and President Donald J. Trump has approved—death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan," announced chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell.

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191792&url=https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/fort-hood-mass-shooter-nidal-010114676.html

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DATE: October 6, 2026 at 03:41AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: AI Giants "Not Being Nearly Careful Enough," Warns Safety Engineer

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191741&url=https://www.dw.com/en/ai-giants-not-being-nearly-careful-enough-warns-outgoing-openai-safety-engineer/a-79533080?maca=en-rss-en-top-1022-rdf

Source: DW- top stories

A safety engineer who recently quit OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, warned Saturday that artificial intelligence firms were "not being nearly careful enough." David Robinson's comments came amid growing concerns about AI becoming too powerful—a threat that President Donald Trump has labeled a "hoax." In an op-ed for The Atlantic, Robinson said AI needs guardrails similar to those for nuclear power and aviation, adding, "The time for trial and...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191741&url=https://www.dw.com/en/ai-giants-not-being-nearly-careful-enough-warns-outgoing-openai-safety-engineer/a-79533080?maca=en-rss-en-top-1022-rdf

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Talking to yourself on psilocybin may be a good sign in alcohol treatment, small study hints

URL: https://www.psypost.org/talking-to-yourself-on-psilocybin-may-be-a-good-sign-in-alcohol-treatment-small-study-hints/

People with alcohol use disorder who were still abstinent three months after psilocybin-assisted therapy tended to describe their first psychedelic session differently than those who had returned to drinking, according to a study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders. In interviews the day after their first dose, much of the talk about an inner dialogue, rethinking habitual patterns, and committing to change came from people who stayed abstinent, while talk focused on sensations, visions, and emotions came mostly from those who later drank. The exploratory findings suggest that how people engage with a psychedelic experience may be related to treatment response.

Psilocybin is a psychedelic substance that can temporarily alter perception, emotions, and patterns of thinking. In psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, the drug experience is combined with preparation and follow-up sessions. The follow-up, or integration, sessions are intended to help participants make sense of what they experienced and connect it with their goals for recovery.

Previous studies have suggested that psychedelic therapy may help some people with alcohol use disorder, but it remains unclear why some participants improve more than others. Researchers have proposed that personal insights, emotional processing, changes in self-perception, and new approaches to coping may all contribute, but earlier interview-based studies of psilocybin for alcohol use disorder included only a handful of participants.

Led by Maria Garcia Garcia of Nîmes University Hospital and the University of Montpellier in France, the team analyzed recordings from the first integration session in the Psilocybin Alcohol Depression trial. In that randomized trial, recently detoxified patients received two psilocybin sessions three weeks apart, at either a high dose or a very low dose, alongside an intensive relapse prevention program.

The analysis included the 20 participants who received the high, 25-milligram dose. All had alcohol use disorder and continuing depressive symptoms, and they had a median age of 49 years; 11 were male and nine were female. Before dosing, participants took part in preparation sessions that included mindfulness exercises and setting personal intentions related to alcohol, which were read aloud at the start of the psilocybin session.

The integration sessions took place the day after the first dose. Eleven participants were abstinent from alcohol three months later, meaning they had not had a drink in the previous four weeks, while nine were not.

The sessions were transcribed and analyzed with software that uses an automated method to sort passages into groups based on the words they share, without the researchers specifying the groups in advance. The transcripts contained 127,760 words and were divided into 3,700 short segments. The software sorted 88.27% of these segments into two main language patterns.

The first pattern, which represented 44% of the classified segments, focused on sensory and emotional features of the psychedelic experience. Participants discussed physical sensations, visual experiences, emotions, and the setting of the session. This pattern came mostly from people who were not abstinent three months later.

The second pattern represented nearly 56% of the classified segments. It focused on inner dialogue, rethinking familiar ways of behaving, making commitments, working with the intentions set during preparation, and revisiting the role of alcohol in participants’ lives. This pattern came mostly from participants who remained abstinent, as well as from those with more trauma symptoms or greater sensitivity to social rejection.

The authors described the second pattern as involving “active cognitive processes, characterized by an inner dialogue.” They emphasize that this dialogue was something participants described having during the psilocybin session itself, often while freely recounting the experience, rather than something generated during the interview. One participant who remained abstinent recalled: “I told myself I don’t need alcohol to feel okay. I have people I love, and I have people who love me.”

A follow-up analysis comparing the words used by abstinent and non-abstinent participants painted a similar picture. People who stayed abstinent more often mentioned family members, pleasant emotions, and new ways of handling situations that used to trigger drinking. Those who returned to drinking more often mentioned negative emotions, physical pain, disappointment, and attempts to push unpleasant feelings away.

Difficult experiences were not necessarily a bad sign. Fear was the one negative emotion linked to abstinence, and it tended to appear when participants described facing old fears using coping strategies taught during preparation, such as holding a meaningful object. The authors suggest that what mattered was how people handled difficult content, not whether it appeared.

Notably, none of the participants directly described a mystical experience, and talk about the intensity of the experience was not more common among those who stayed abstinent. The authors suggest that preparation, including work on personal intentions, may help encourage the kind of inner dialogue that was linked to abstinence.

The study has some limitations. With only 20 participants, the findings are preliminary, and each language pattern was driven heavily by a handful of people. The analysis was exploratory and examined text segments rather than treating each participant as a separate statistical observation. Therapist questions were also included in the transcripts, so the conversations reflected an interaction rather than participants’ words alone.

The study also cannot show that inner dialogue caused abstinence. Participants received a second psilocybin session and continued an intensive relapse prevention program after these interviews, so the early differences might not have held up without the full course of treatment. The authors describe inner dialogue as a possible therapeutic mechanism to be tested in future studies rather than a proven one.

The study, “Insights from the psychedelic experience integration session: Verbatims differentiate 3-month abstinence in alcohol use disorder with depressive symptoms,” was authored by Maria Garcia Garcia, Dahbia Belahda, Carine Graux, Chris Serrand, Noé Igounenc, Felix Sergent, Thibault Mura, and Amandine Luquiens.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/talking-to-yourself-on-psilocybin-may-be-a-good-sign-in-alcohol-treatment-small-study-hints/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 04:08PM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: STAT+: Nobel-winning optogenetics research has led to experimental treatments for blindness and Alzheimer’s

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/2026-nobel-prize-winning-optogenetics-research-explained/?utm_campaign=rss

It is probably impossible to overstate how complex a brain is: A network of billions of intertwined neurons forming an intricate anatomy, capable of working on the millisecond scale to perceive reality, detect sensations, create plans, and take actions. 

“All of this is incredibly complicated, and so of course the challenge that we face as neuroscientists and as physicians treating brain disorders is how can we hope to make headway without tools that match the complexity and the precision of the brain?” said Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher who on Monday won the 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine, alongside German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for work developing such tools. 

“Our perception of reality and all our inner subjective states come from cells, and so the appropriate tool that would be matched to how the brain works would be something that was fast and could be targeted to individual cells or individual types of cells,” he said in an interview after the announcement. 

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/2026-nobel-prize-winning-optogenetics-research-explained/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: October 5, 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: How the TikTok algorithm changed political campaigning in 2024

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-tiktok-s-design-shaped-the-2024-presidential-campaign/

A recent study shows that political candidates on TikTok garner more views and interactions when they use short, highly emotional, and performance-based videos rather than detailed policy discussions. The research reveals how the structural design of the app encourages political messaging that prioritizes quick entertainment and visual spectacle over traditional campaigning. The findings were published in the Journal of Political Marketing.

Social media has completely changed how politicians reach voters, allowing them to bypass traditional news outlets. On platforms like TikTok, the audience tends to be younger, and the content moves rapidly. Researchers wanted to understand how candidates adapt their communication styles to survive in this specific digital environment.

To explore this, the researchers relied on a concept called Media Ecology Theory. This theory suggests that communication platforms are not just neutral delivery pipes for information. Instead, the specific design tools and rules of a platform shape the actual messages people create.

The investigators also looked at the idea of “affective publics.” This term describes how digital communities often form around shared emotions rather than logical debates. On an app powered by an algorithm that rewards rapid engagement, a shared joke or a burst of outrage might travel much further than a policy white paper. The study was authored by Jenny Bronstein and Tal Eitan, researchers at the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

The researchers analyzed every TikTok video posted by the official accounts of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. The data covered the period from when each candidate launched their account in the summer of 2024 until the day after the November election. The final dataset included 276 videos, consisting of 57 posts from Trump and 219 posts from Harris.

The research team watched and coded each video based on its structural style and its content. They looked for stylistic choices like speaking directly to the camera, sharing casual moments, or showing footage of large crowds. They also tracked emotional themes, noting whenever a candidate used humor, criticized their opponent, or featured a celebrity. Finally, the researchers compared these categories against public engagement numbers, such as views, likes, comments, and shares, to see which formats were most visible.

The overall posting habits of the two candidates differed greatly. Trump posted less frequently, but his videos were shorter, averaging 18 seconds. These shorter clips were associated with higher average engagement per post. Harris uploaded videos much more often, and her videos were longer, averaging 37 seconds. Her longer, issue-focused videos were associated with steadier but lower average interaction levels.

Both campaigns relied heavily on visual spectacle to project momentum. Over 80 percent of the videos from both candidates featured campaign stops, motorcades, or rallies. Showing energetic crowd scenes and candidates stepping off airplanes served as symbolic displays of power and territorial reach. For Trump, videos featuring these campaign spectacles were associated with higher share counts.

The candidates took different approaches when speaking directly to the camera. Trump favored an assertive, broadcast-style delivery. He focused on economic themes, border control, and confidence in victory, using forceful language. These direct-to-camera appeals made up about two-thirds of his posts and correlated with higher numbers of plays and likes for his account.

Harris used direct-to-camera appeals less often, featuring them in about a third of her posts. When she did speak directly to the viewer, she adopted a more instructional tone. She prioritized topics like human rights, disaster recovery, and reproductive rights, often encouraging civic participation. Her direct appeals were generally longer and more explanatory than Trump’s punchy statements.

Both candidates dedicated roughly half of their videos to informal, relatable moments. Trump cultivated a populist image by visiting a McDonald’s and riding in a garbage truck. Harris shared personal stories about cooking or caring for family members, trying to project warmth and accessibility. The researchers found no statistically significant differences in engagement for these relatable videos, suggesting that casual moments alone did not guarantee higher algorithmic visibility.

Humor and entertainment proved to be highly effective for capturing attention, even though the candidates used them sparingly. Less than 10 percent of the videos from each candidate relied primarily on jokes, memes, or parody. For Trump, these comedic posts were linked to significantly higher engagement across all metrics.

The candidates also used the platform to attack each other, but they utilized different formats. Harris referenced Trump in about a fifth of her videos. She frequently used split-screen formats to play a clip of her opponent and then offer a detailed rebuttal. In one video, she stated, “As president, I will take on corporate price gouging to lower the cost of groceries. Donald Trump can’t figure out what groceries are.”

Trump referenced Harris in about a third of his videos, but he rarely engaged directly with her specific claims. Instead, he relied on sarcasm, visual exaggeration, and direct mockery. In one video blaming his opponent for job losses, he stated, “In the last month, Kamala Harris has destroyed 24,000 jobs, manufacturing jobs, beautiful jobs.” Ultimately, the researchers found no statistically significant differences in engagement for videos that focused on attacking opponents.

Associating with celebrities and online influencers was another major strategy. Trump featured male figures from competitive sports and podcasting to reinforce a populist, masculine image. Harris collaborated with diverse musicians, actors, and media personalities to emphasize inclusivity and broader cultural relevance. For Trump, videos featuring these cultural figures were correlated with higher share counts, functioning as an effective shortcut for signaling identity.

The researchers noted a few limitations to their work. The study focused entirely on TikTok, meaning these communication patterns might not apply to platforms with different designs, such as Instagram or X. The analysis was also limited to two candidates in a single U.S. election cycle.

Additionally, the study relied on public engagement metrics, which only reflect how widely a video circulated. These numbers do not reveal how audiences actually felt about the videos or whether the content influenced their voting behavior. The coding system also only noted whether a specific feature was present in a video, without measuring the intensity of the emotional appeal.

The study, “Campaigning on TikTok: Platform Affordances, Affective Messaging, and Candidate Communication Styles in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election,” was authored by Jenny Bronstein and Tal Eitan.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-tiktok-s-design-shaped-the-2024-presidential-campaign/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Sexual satisfaction is more closely tied to orgasm for women than for men, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/sexual-satisfaction-is-more-closely-tied-to-orgasm-for-women-than-for-men-study-finds/

A study of Italian adults in heterosexual relationships found that men report reaching orgasm more often than women. For both genders, more frequent orgasms went along with greater sexual arousal, a greater variety of sexual activities, and wanting sex more often. Other links differed by gender: women’s orgasm frequency was more closely tied than men’s to their sexual satisfaction and to oral sex, while men’s was linked to a different set of practices, including the use of sex toys and erotic media. The paper was published in Sexuality & Culture.

Orgasm is an intense psychophysiological experience of sexual pleasure that usually represents the height of a sexual act. It is accompanied by characteristic bodily responses such as rhythmic muscular contractions, changes in blood flow, and hormonal activity. Although its basic physiological mechanisms are broadly similar in men and women, in heterosexual relationships women report experiencing orgasm less often than men. This is known as the orgasm gap.

Researchers have proposed several explanations for the orgasm gap, including anatomy, patterns of sexual stimulation, stress, body image, and sexual self-confidence. Relationship factors such as emotional closeness, communication, responsiveness, and satisfaction also seem to play an important role, particularly for women.

Specific sexual practices matter as well, because intercourse alone may not provide the stimulation most likely to produce orgasm for many women. Sexual experiences are also shaped by cultural “scripts” that influence how men and women are expected to behave, respond, and experience pleasure during sex. These expectations can affect both sexual behavior and the meaning people attach to orgasm within intimate relationships.

Most research on the orgasm gap has drawn on samples from the United States and other English-speaking countries. The authors chose Italy in part because traditional cultural and religious influences there coexist with growing sexual openness and changing gender roles.

Study author Cristina Civilotti of the University of Turin and her colleagues examined how often people experience orgasm and which factors are associated with it in a large group of Italian heterosexual adults. More specifically, they examined how orgasm frequency related to the quality of people’s romantic relationships, aspects of sexual satisfaction, non-coital practices (sexual activities other than intercourse), and sexual habits.

Study participants were 579 heterosexual adults in Italy who reported being in a stable relationship. They were between 18 and 60 years of age, and most were middle-aged, highly educated, steadily employed, and had been with their partners for more than 10 years. They were recruited through centers of the Italian Federation of Scientific Sexology in northern, central, and southern Italy and through an online survey link.

Participants completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and assessments of relationship quality (a short version of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale) and of sexual attitudes and behaviors (the Sexual Activity Questionnaire). They also answered questions about their sexual history and functioning (e.g., “How often do you orgasm during sexual activity with your partner?”, “How often do you and your partner have sexual intercourse?”, “How often would you like to have sexual intercourse with your partner?”). Orgasm frequency was rated on a five-point scale ranging from “almost always” to “never.”

As expected, men reported reaching orgasm more often than women. Men’s average rating fell between “almost always” and “usually,” closer to “almost always,” while women’s average was close to “usually.” Additional analyses showed that this difference was not explained by participants’ age, education, employment status, parenthood, or relationship status.

For both genders, those reporting more frequent orgasms also tended to report greater ease of sexual arousal, a greater variety of sexual activity, and wanting sex more often. More frequent orgasms were also linked to better relationship quality in both men and women, including agreement with the partner on important matters, time spent together in conversation and shared activities (which the authors describe as emotional closeness), and overall happiness with the relationship. These links were somewhat larger among women, but the difference between genders was not statistically significant.

The clearest gender difference involved sexual satisfaction. Among women, more frequent orgasms were moderately linked to greater satisfaction with the sexual relationship, enjoyment of the partner’s behavior, ease of arousal, and affectionate touch, while among men these links were weak or absent. Women who reported more oral sex and more sharing of sexual fantasies also tended to report more frequent orgasms, a pattern not seen in men.

For men, orgasm frequency was linked to anal sex, sex toys, and erotic films, books, and websites, practices that were unrelated to orgasm frequency among women. The authors interpret these links as a sign that men’s orgasms are tied to sexual novelty and stimulation. However, the direction of these correlations as reported in the paper does not match that interpretation, so this finding should be treated with caution.

“These findings point to persistent gender differences in orgasmic experience and suggest that men’s orgasm is more strongly influenced by sexual novelty and stimulation, while women’s orgasm is more strongly associated with emotional and relational factors. A better understanding of these differences is essential for promoting more satisfying and equitable sexual experiences in couples,” the study authors concluded.

That summary goes somewhat beyond the data on relationships, since the paper’s own tests found no statistically significant gender difference in how relationship quality was linked to orgasm. The clearer differences involved sexual satisfaction and specific sexual practices.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of sexual experiences and of the “orgasm gap.” However, its design does not allow causal inferences, so it cannot show whether better relationships or particular practices lead to more frequent orgasms, or the reverse. All data were collected using self-report measures, leaving room for reporting bias, and orgasm frequency was measured with a single question.

Recruitment through sexology centers may have attracted people who are unusually comfortable discussing sex, and the sample was mostly middle-aged, highly educated, and in long-term relationships. The results may also not apply to LGBTQ+ adults, who were excluded from the analysis.

The paper, “Revisiting the Gender Orgasm Gap: Relational, Sexual, and Behavioral Correlates of Orgasm Attainment Among Cisgender Heterosexual Adults,” was authored by Cristina Civilotti, Giulia Di Fini, Vieri Boncinelli, Ivan De Marco, Camilla Branda, Gabriella Gandino, and Fabio Veglia.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/sexual-satisfaction-is-more-closely-tied-to-orgasm-for-women-than-for-men-study-finds/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Male managers start hiring more women after their first daughter is born, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/male-managers-start-hiring-more-women-after-their-first-daughter-is-born-study-finds/

Male managers who become fathers to their first daughter tend to start hiring more women, raising women’s share of jobs and earnings at the businesses they run, according to research accepted for publication in The Review of Economic Studies. The shift appeared almost immediately after the birth and had no detectable effect on the firm’s overall performance.

The research revolves around the daughter effect, a sociological concept describing how fathering a daughter makes men more sensitive to issues of gender equality. The research, led by Maddalena Ronchi, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Nina Smith of Aarhus University, sought to understand if this shift in personal attitudes translates into concrete professional actions.

“Economists increasingly see gender attitudes as one reason why gender gaps persist in the labor market,” Ronchi told PsyPost. “Most of that research, however, has focused on how attitudes shape women’s own choices—whether and how much to work, for example, or whom to marry.”

“But managers’ attitudes could matter just as much, because managers decide whom to hire, retain, and promote,” she continued.

The authors note that managers hold a lot of power over hiring, firing, and promotions. Because of this, their personal biases or beliefs could be a driving force behind why women continue to face unequal pay and fewer opportunities in the corporate world. It is difficult to study how a manager’s personal views affect their employees because attitudes are hard to measure.

“The challenge is that it is very hard to isolate the effect of a manager’s attitudes,” Ronchi explained. “We rarely observe what managers actually think about women’s role at work.”

“And even if we did, managers with different attitudes are likely to differ in many other ways,” she noted. “A manager with more progressive views may be younger or more educated, for example. He may also choose, or be chosen by, a firm that already treats women differently. So simply comparing managers or firms cannot tell us whether managers’ attitudes themselves affect women’s careers.”

In addition, managers are not randomly assigned to companies, making it tough to separate a single person’s influence from the company’s existing culture. By looking at what happens to female employees when a male manager becomes a father to a daughter rather than a son, the researchers hoped to capture a natural experiment, a situation where chance, rather than researchers, sorts people into comparison groups.

“Ideally, we would change a manager’s attitudes at random, keep him in the same firm, and see whether his treatment of female employees changes,” Ronchi said. “Of course, we cannot run that experiment. Instead, we use the birth of a manager’s first daughter. Whether a newborn is a boy or a girl is essentially random, and previous research suggests that having a daughter can make fathers more attentive to gender inequality.”

This approach allowed them to see how an external shock to a manager’s worldview might shift their workplace behavior. To investigate this, the researchers used Danish administrative registry data spanning from 1992 to 2017. These records linked employer and employee information with longitudinal data on family composition. The authors focused on single-manager establishments, which are workplaces with only one person in a management role. These businesses averaged 12 to 13 workers, but made up more than 90 percent of Danish establishments and accounted for about a third of total employment.

This setup increased the likelihood that the manager being studied was directly responsible for personnel decisions like hiring and supervising employees on a daily basis. Because previous research indicates that the daughter effect is mostly observed in fathers, the study restricted its focus to male managers. The final sample included 6,701 periods of employment where a male manager experienced the birth of a child while working at the same company.

The researchers tracked two outcomes within the same company before and after the birth: the share of employees who were women, and a measure comparing women’s average earnings with men’s, scored so that 0.5 means women and men earned the same on average. At the companies studied, women made up 34 percent of employees on average, and the earnings measure averaged 0.39. They controlled for the total number of children a manager had, comparing fathers who had a daughter with those who had a son while also adjusting for workforce characteristics like average education and company size.

After the birth of a manager’s first daughter, the earnings measure rose by about 0.017, a 4.4 percent increase over its average of 0.39, and women’s share of employees rose by about 1 percentage point, a 2.9 percent increase. “To put those numbers in perspective, these effects amount to roughly 20 to 50% of the difference in women’s outcomes between firms run by male and female managers,” Ronchi pointed out.

This positive effect on female employment and earnings was concentrated among managers having their first daughter. Experiencing the birth of additional daughters produced a positive but smaller effect that was not statistically reliable. Furthermore, among managers having their first child, a son did not reduce women’s outcomes, suggesting the effect reflects daughters raising them rather than sons lowering them.

When breaking down how these changes happened, the data showed that managers shifted their hiring practices. Instead of completely restructuring the workforce to be more family-friendly by offering more part-time roles, managers simply substituted male hires with female hires who had similar qualifications. Following the birth of a first daughter, managers hired more women who were highly educated, worked full-time, and commanded higher salaries. The researchers also found that women already working at the firm who were good candidates for promotion were more likely to see earnings increases, while male employees did not experience a similar change.

“The main takeaway is that managers’ attitudes toward women can shape women’s opportunities at work—and that those attitudes may change quite quickly,” Ronchi observed.

These results fit with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that among managers, having a daughter weakened the link between a rivalrous form of narcissism and traditional gender role attitudes, though that study measured self-reported attitudes rather than hiring and pay. The findings also align with a study of Japanese fathers covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that men whose firstborn child was a daughter were more likely to reject traditional gender roles and support gender-equality policies, again based on self-reported attitudes rather than workplace decisions.

The study also assessed whether these shifts in hiring and promotion affected the financial health of the companies. Looking at sales, total employment, and value added per employee, which is the value a business creates per worker, the researchers found no detectable effect on firm performance.

“Importantly, we find no evidence that these gains for women came at a cost to the firm,” Ronchi noted. “So the results suggest that at least some of the men these managers would previously have hired could instead be replaced by similarly qualified women without a detectable cost to the firm.”

This indicates that managers were able to hire observably similar women without sacrificing productivity. It also suggests that any previous bias favoring men did not provide an economic benefit to the firm.

Additionally, the researchers looked at the timing of these changes. The shift in hiring and in women’s earnings happened almost immediately after the daughter’s birth, and the effect persisted for years afterward. This rapid change suggests that managers did not need years of seeing their daughters grow up to learn about gender barriers in the labor market.

“That timing is important,” Ronchi said. “A newborn daughter is decades away from entering the labor market herself, so the manager cannot be improving opportunities for women in order to directly benefit his own child.”

“Instead, the evidence is consistent with having a daughter changing how managers think about women more broadly—and those changes showing up almost immediately in their decisions at work,” she added.

A separate comparison of managers whose oldest daughters were different ages found that the effect grew stronger as daughters reached adolescence and adulthood, suggesting that continued exposure may reinforce the initial shift. The effect was also larger among managers born in 1965 or later and for births after 2001.

The authors interpret the lack of a performance effect as a sign that the bias they detected mostly affected close calls between a man and a woman with similar education, hours, and pay. Theoretical work they cite suggests that even subtle bias of this kind can carry long-run costs, for example by discouraging women from investing in skills if they expect to lose such close calls.

“The gender bias we uncover seems to operate ‘at the margin’—affecting whether a man or an equally qualified woman gets the job, rather than leading managers to choose substantially less qualified workers,” Ronchi explained. “That helps explain why changing these decisions can improve women’s opportunities without producing a detectable change in the firm’s output. The absence of a productivity effect does not mean the bias is harmless. A manager choosing a man over an equally qualified woman may make little difference to that firm’s output, while repeated decisions like this can make a large difference to women’s careers.”

As with all research, there are a few caveats to consider. “One important misinterpretation is that fathers of daughters are somehow better managers, or that firms should care about whether a manager has sons or daughters,” Ronchi emphasized. “That is not the point of the study. The birth of a daughter gives us a research tool: an essentially random event that previous research links to men’s attitudes toward gender, allowing us to study whether workplace decisions change after that event.”

The study focuses entirely on single-manager businesses in Denmark. It is unknown if managers in larger corporations would have the same level of freedom to change hiring practices based on their personal attitudes. Formal human resources policies in larger firms might constrain an individual manager’s ability to act on their updated worldview.

Another limitation is that the researchers cannot directly read the managers’ minds or measure their exact beliefs. Because the research relies on administrative data, it only tracks the outcomes of the managers’ decisions rather than their internal psychological states. Future research could explore whether diversity training or other interventions might produce a similar shift in perspective for managers who do not have daughters.

The study, “Daddy’s Girl: Daughters, Managerial Decisions, and Gender Inequality,” was authored by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/male-managers-start-hiring-more-women-after-their-first-daughter-is-born-study-finds/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Brain receptors for dopamine and insulin coordinate to control compulsive eating

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-receptors-for-dopamine-and-insulin-coordinate-to-control-compulsive-eating/

A new study in mice reveals how receptors for dopamine and insulin act together in a specific brain region to regulate compulsive eating habits. The research, published in Molecular Psychiatry, highlights a cellular mechanism that stops animals from overconsuming sugary and fatty foods. These findings offer a biological explanation for why certain eating disorders and metabolic conditions frequently occur together.

Compulsive eating involves an intense drive to consume highly palatable foods regardless of negative health consequences. This behavior shares behavioral traits with substance addiction. Repeated overconsumption of foods high in fat and sugar can lead to obesity and metabolic diseases like diabetes.

Previous research linked both food cravings and metabolic disturbances to the reward pathways in the brain. Dopamine is a chemical messenger that helps the brain evaluate rewards and motivation. One specific docking station for this chemical, the dopamine D2 receptor, influences impulsivity and food addiction.

Another key component of metabolic health is insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar. The brain also contains insulin receptors, which help manage feeding behaviors. The precise relationship between these two receptor types during food consumption has remained largely unexplored.

The current research was led by Bokyeong Kim and Ja-Hyun Baik at Korea University, alongside a team of scientists from several South Korean institutions. The researchers focused on the central amygdala, a deep brain structure that processes emotions, motivation, and environmental cues. They noticed that dopamine D2 receptors and insulin receptors were often located on the exact same cells within this region.

The researchers first observed how a total lack of D2 receptors affects eating behavior. They used a small study of mice genetically engineered to lack these receptors entirely, comparing them to unaltered mice. Both groups were trained to press a lever to receive a sugary food pellet.

Once the animals learned this task, the researchers introduced a mild electric foot shock alongside the food reward. The unaltered mice stopped pressing the lever to avoid the punishment. The mice lacking D2 receptors kept pressing the active lever despite the shocks, exhibiting a compulsive drive for the sweet food.

To see if this effect was specific to the central amygdala, the team conducted a second experiment. They used targeted viral injections to remove D2 receptors only in the central amygdala of normal mice. When these mice faced the foot shock test, they also demonstrated heightened lever pressing for the sugary pellets.

Next, the team examined the relationship between dopamine and insulin receptors on these specific cells. They found that roughly 60 percent of the central amygdala neurons containing D2 receptors also carried insulin receptors. When the researchers removed the D2 receptors, the expression of insulin receptors in that brain region dropped by more than half.

The scientists then infused insulin or a dopamine-mimicking drug into the central amygdala of the mice. In unaltered mice, both chemicals triggered a process called phosphorylation, a chemical modification that activates the insulin receptors. In mice lacking D2 receptors, neither chemical activated the insulin receptors.

This demonstrated that dopamine receptors actively control insulin receptor function. The researchers traced this connection to a specific protein that normally inhibits insulin signaling. Activating the D2 receptors suppressed this inhibitory protein, which allowed the insulin receptors to function more freely.

To test if the insulin receptors themselves influence feeding, the researchers engineered a group of mice to lack insulin receptors exclusively on the neurons containing D2 receptors in the central amygdala. These mice were subjected to the lever-pressing task with foot shocks. Similar to the dopamine receptor mutants, these mice ignored the punishment and continued seeking the sweet food.

The researchers also examined the electrical properties of these brain cells using isolated brain tissue. They recorded the electrical activity of the central amygdala neurons in a controlled laboratory setting. Applying the dopamine-mimicking drug alone did not change the baseline electrical excitability of the cells.

However, when the researchers bathed the cells in a mixture of both insulin and the dopamine-mimicking drug, the neurons became highly electrically active. This indicated that the two types of receptors work together synergistically. The combined chemical signals drastically increased the electrical firing capacity of the specific brain cells.

The team then monitored the real-time activity of these specific brain cells in live animals. They used fiber photometry, a technique that employs tiny optic fibers to measure the calcium signals of active neurons. The researchers recorded the brain activity of mice while they consumed standard chow and while they ate a high-fat, high-sugar diet.

The activity of the central amygdala neurons containing D2 receptors decreased substantially when the mice ate the highly palatable food, while normal chow produced no change. Mice with lower neuron activity ate higher quantities of the rich food. When the researchers injected drugs to activate these receptors, the neuron activity stabilized, and the mice reduced their consumption of the sweet and fatty food.

To manipulate this circuit directly, the researchers utilized optogenetics. This method allows scientists to turn specific brain cells on or off using targeted flashes of light. In a small study of mice, they used light to silence the neurons containing D2 receptors in the central amygdala.

Silencing these cells caused the mice to eat vastly larger amounts of the sugary and fatty food. Conversely, using light to artificially activate these cells reduced the animals’ food intake.

However, there was a biological catch to this suppression. When the researchers blocked the insulin receptors with a chemical inhibitor, the light-induced activation of the D2 receptor-expressing neurons no longer stopped the mice from overeating. These neurons required functional insulin receptors to put the brakes on compulsive food consumption.

Finally, the scientists measured dopamine release in the central amygdala during extended access to the rich diet. Mice with reduced dopamine receptors in this region exhibited blunted dopamine release when they had constant access to the food. In a separate group given access to the rich food for only one hour a day, mice with reduced D2 receptors consumed roughly 64 percent of their daily calories during that hour, a binge-like eating pattern.

These experiments were conducted in mice, and animal models of feeding do not perfectly replicate human eating disorders or food addiction. The researchers used a lever-pressing task with foot shocks to model compulsivity, which measures the persistence of a habit despite physical punishment. This represents only one facet of human compulsive behavior, which involves complex emotional and psychological triggers.

Future studies will need to investigate exactly how this cellular machinery adapts over a longer lifespan. Researchers also hope to explore how these cells change after prolonged exposure to obesity-inducing diets. Understanding this receptor partnership might eventually guide new medical treatments that target both dopamine and insulin pathways to treat metabolic diseases and eating disorders simultaneously.

The study, “Dopamine D2 receptor modulation of insulin receptor signaling in the central amygdala: implications for compulsive-like eating behavior,” was authored by Bokyeong Kim, Minji Kim, Hyun-Yong Lee, Jung Hyun Pyo, Jihee Seo, Yoon Jeon, Ho Lee, Joung-Hun Kim, Seung Hyun Ahn, Sung Wook Chi, Je Kyung Seong, and Ja-Hyun Baik.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-receptors-for-dopamine-and-insulin-coordinate-to-control-compulsive-eating/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:13AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: Vagus Nerve Stimulation Could Help New Skills Stick

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261002080034.htm

Stimulating the vagus nerve after practice helped mice develop stronger long-term motor learning, revealing a potentially important window when the brain is still locking in a new skill. The effect was linked to rhythmic changes in brain blood vessels, hinting that body-to-brain signals may help prepare the brain for lasting change.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261002080034.htm

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:28AM
SOURCE: HEALTHCARE INFO SECURITY

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:13AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Vagus Nerve Stimulation Could Help New Skills Stick

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261002080034.htm

Stimulating the vagus nerve after practice helped mice develop stronger long-term motor learning, revealing a potentially important window when the brain is still locking in a new skill. The effect was linked to rhythmic changes in brain blood vessels, hinting that body-to-brain signals may help prepare the brain for lasting change.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261002080034.htm

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: Could we one day vaccinate against every cancer?

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/health-news-could-we-one-day-vaccinate-against-every-cancer/?utm_campaign=rss

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

The winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine was announced early this morning. Did you win your office pool? Do you think another research team was robbed? Send me all your hot takes at [email protected].

Read the rest…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/health-news-could-we-one-day-vaccinate-against-every-cancer/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Two decades of U.S. data challenge an evolutionary explanation for the gender-equality paradox

URL: https://www.psypost.org/two-decades-of-u-s-data-challenge-an-evolutionary-explanation-for-the-gender-equality-paradox/

Two studies that tracked Americans for two decades or more found that as the United States grew wealthier and more gender-equal, psychological differences between men and women did not grow, and in a few cases they shrank. The findings, published in Social Psychology and Psychological Reports, provide evidence against a popular evolutionary explanation for why such differences appear larger in richer, more egalitarian countries.

The research addresses a phenomenon known as the gender-equality paradox. This concept refers to the observation that differences between men and women in personality, academic strengths, and mental health often appear larger in countries with higher levels of gender equality and economic prosperity.

A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that higher living conditions were associated with larger sex differences in personality and depression across different countries, though differences in math, sexual behavior, and partner preferences were smaller. Similar patterns have been observed in education, with another 2024 study showing that differences in girls’ and boys’ relative academic strengths, with girls relatively stronger in reading and boys in math and science, are consistently larger in wealthier, more gender-equal nations.

To explain this paradox, many evolutionary psychologists point to the resource hypothesis, sometimes called the free expression hypothesis. This framework proposes that humans possess innate, sex-specific tendencies rooted in early human evolution, when, according to this view, men and women faced different pressures that shaped different psychological traits.

On this account, when a society meets its citizens’ basic material needs and relaxes strict social rules, individuals are finally free to express their true, biologically driven gender differences. Under this theory, a highly developed country removes the struggle for basic survival, allowing men and women to naturally drift toward distinct, gendered interests and emotional patterns.

“The study was motivated by a long-standing debate about the so-called gender-equality paradox,” Gabriele Prati, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna and the author of both studies, told PsyPost.

“The problem is that most of the evidence supporting this explanation comes from comparisons between different countries at a single point in time,” he explained. “Countries differ in many other respects—history, culture, institutions, religion, economic structure, and social norms—so a correlation between gender equality and sex differences does not necessarily tell us what happens when equality or economic resources actually increase.”

A more direct test is to follow what happens within a single society as it changes. Prati did this in two longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over many years, tracking Americans across a period of rising wealth and gender equality.

The first study, published in Social Psychology, analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States project, which included a nationally representative sample of 7,108 adults. At the start of the study, participants averaged 46 years old, and 52 percent were women. Prati examined three waves of data collected between the mid-1990s and 2014. During this nearly twenty-year span, the United States experienced documented increases in its gross domestic product, a standard measure of economic prosperity, as well as an overall increase in gender equality.

Participants completed surveys assessing their personality traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. The surveys also measured altruism, trust, negative emotions, and clinical depression. At the start, women scored higher than men on most of these measures, including negative emotions, agreeableness, and neuroticism, while men scored slightly higher on openness. The research aimed to determine whether the psychological gaps between men and women widened as the societal conditions improved, exactly as the resource hypothesis would predict.

The findings did not support the evolutionary resource hypothesis. The gap between men and women in altruism, trust, negative emotions, and all major personality traits remained unchanged over the nearly twenty-year span. For depression, the gender gap actually shrank. Women were still more likely than men to meet the criteria for depression in 2014, but the gap narrowed because women’s odds of depression fell by about 38 percent while men’s did not change.

Prati also tested the hypothesis at the individual level by looking at changes in household income adjusted for household size. Rising income was not followed by growing differences between men and women. The two associations that did emerge ran opposite to the theory’s predictions: higher income was followed by slightly lower conscientiousness among women and, at the edge of statistical significance, a higher likelihood of depression among men.

“The main takeaway is that greater prosperity and gender equality did not make men and women progressively more psychologically different in the way predicted by the resource hypothesis,” Prati said.

“An important broader lesson is that a pattern observed when comparing countries is not necessarily evidence of the mechanism producing that pattern,” he noted. “Following people and societies over time provides a more direct test, and in this study that test did not support the resource hypothesis in its current form.”

To test the hypothesis in a different developmental stage, Prati conducted a second study, published in Psychological Reports, focusing on adolescents and young adults. This research used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which tracked a nationally representative sample of 6,504 Americans from 1994 to 2018. Over five survey waves, participants grew from middle and high school students into adults in their late thirties. This dataset allowed Prati to examine different outcomes in younger people: math and science grades, scores on a picture vocabulary test, self-reported willingness to take risks, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms.

Once again, the results did not support the predictions of the evolutionary framework. Gender differences in math and science grades did not change between the mid-1990s and the end of high school, differences in vocabulary scores did not change between 1994–95 and 2001–02, and differences in willingness to take risks did not change between 1996 and 2018.

Just as in the adult study, the gender differences in depressive symptoms decreased over time. The gap in depressive symptoms, on a scale from 0 to 3, shrank from 0.14 points in 1994–95 to 0.10 points in 2008–09, and the self-esteem gap, in which boys typically score higher, shrank from 0.16 to 0.05 points on a five-point scale by 2001–02. Prati describes these changes as very small to small, but they ran opposite to the theory’s prediction.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Both studies rely on data from a single country, and tracking these changes in countries with different cultural histories or economic structures might yield different patterns.

In addition, because the same people were aging while society changed, the studies cannot fully separate the effects of societal change from ordinary development. The self-esteem gap, for example, tends to narrow as teenagers become adults.

Another detail to keep in mind is the way certain traits were measured. Some, such as risk-taking and trust, were assessed using a single survey question, which might not capture their full complexity. The datasets also lacked some of the measures most central to the theory, such as interest in working with things versus people, so future studies could test whether those show different patterns.

It is also possible that two decades is not long enough to observe deep cultural shifts in how gender differences are expressed. However, Prati notes that the hypothesis does not specify how long these effects should take to emerge, and that there is no clear reason to expect individual income gains to take decades to have an effect.

“We should be cautious about concluding that giving people more economic resources and greater gender equality naturally reveals or amplifies innate psychological differences between women and men,” Prati added. “Differences between women and men are likely shaped by a much more complex combination of social, cultural, environmental, and possibly biological influences.”

The study, “No Evidence for the Evolutionary Resource Hypothesis as an Explanation of the Gender-Equality Paradox: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of Sex Differences in the United States,” was authored by Gabriele Prati. The study, “The Gender-Equality Paradox: A Longitudinal Test of the Free Expression or Resource Hypothesis Among Adolescents,” was also authored by Gabriele Prati.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/two-decades-of-u-s-data-challenge-an-evolutionary-explanation-for-the-gender-equality-paradox/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Crime videos push liberal voters toward stricter laws but not the political right

URL: https://www.psypost.org/crime-videos-push-liberal-voters-toward-stricter-laws-but-not-the-political-righ/

When exposed to videos of retail crime, voters in a highly liberal city adopted tougher, more conservative stances on local criminal justice policies. The participants did not, however, alter their broader political identities or overall ideological leanings. These findings were published in the The Journal of Social Psychology.

In psychology, a concept called terror management theory explores how people manage their deep-seated awareness of their own mortality. The theory suggests that reminders of death or existential threats create intense anxiety. To cope with this discomfort, individuals often seek comfort in structured, predictable, and historically conservative worldviews.

Decades of research on this topic have yielded mixed results regarding how people vote under stress. Some experiments show that threats push people toward the political right. Other studies suggest that threats cause polarization, driving both liberals and conservatives further toward their respective extremes.

Recent political shifts in the United States provided a real-world testing ground for these ideas. In California, voters recently considered revising a state law known as Proposition 47. Originally designed to reduce prison populations by classifying minor thefts as misdemeanors, the law has faced intense debate in recent years. Critics have argued that the $950 threshold for a felony charge encouraged organized retail theft, as offenders faced minimal legal consequences.

University of San Francisco psychologist Violet Cheung-Blunden and her colleagues wanted to see if fear-inducing media could sway voters in a deeply liberal area. They designed two experiments to test whether videos about local crime could alter decisions on Proposition 47. The researchers also wanted to know if this exposure would change the participants’ general political identities.

In the first experiment, the research team recruited 206 adults from the San Francisco area during the week leading up to the election. The researchers asked the participants about their preexisting political beliefs, including their views on authority, immigration, and economics. The participants were then randomly assigned to watch one of two short videos.

Half of the group watched a video showing local tourist attractions, like the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, to serve as a baseline comparison. The other half watched a compilation of news clips and online videos depicting organized looting and retail theft in the city. After watching the videos, the participants completed a mock exercise to revise Proposition 47.

The participants were asked to propose the ideal dollar amount for classifying retail theft as a felony. They also had to provide the minimum and maximum amounts they would be willing to accept on a ballot. Finally, the participants rated their current overall political orientation on a scale ranging from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative.

The participants who watched the crime video proposed a markedly lower minimum and ideal dollar threshold for felony charges compared to the group that watched the tourist video. In practical terms, exposure to the crime footage prompted these voters to adopt a stricter, more punitive stance on retail theft. They became more conservative on the specific issue of criminal justice.

This shift toward a conservative policy position did not translate to a broader ideological change. The participants’ self-reported political orientation remained anchored to their initial beliefs, and they did not shift toward the political right overall. A single exposure to threatening media was not enough to uproot their overarching political identities.

The researchers also looked for evidence of political polarization. They checked whether the crime video caused initially liberal participants to become more liberal and initially conservative participants to become more conservative. The data did not support this idea, as the participants largely maintained their general ideological footing.

To ensure the reliability of these initial patterns, Cheung-Blunden and her team conducted a second experiment with 98 college students in San Francisco. This study followed a nearly identical procedure to the first one, but it took place in a controlled laboratory setting. The researchers also had all participants watch a five-minute breathing and relaxation video before viewing their assigned footage.

This relaxation step was intended to reduce baseline mood variations among the students. By calming the participants first, the researchers hoped to make any emotional reactions to the subsequent tourist or crime videos easier to measure. The results of the second experiment ended up mirroring the first.

The students exposed to the crime video proposed substantially lower dollar thresholds for felony theft across all three categories. Just like the community adults, the student participants embraced a tougher stance on crime after viewing the threatening footage. Once again, this shift toward a stricter crime policy did not alter the students’ broader political identities.

The crime video failed to move the student participants’ overall political orientation toward the right. The researchers also found no indication that the threatening footage caused the students’ general political views to become more polarized. The students’ overarching political ideologies remained stable, even as their position on a specific local policy shifted.

While the experiments show how media exposure can alter specific policy preferences, the results come with a few boundaries. The studies took place in a highly liberal city, meaning the participants likely sat further to the political left than the average American voter. The second experiment also included a high proportion of female participants, who generally reported more liberal leanings than male participants in the study.

These demographic skews mean the findings might not neatly apply to voters in more conservative or politically divided regions. Additionally, the researchers point out that their experiments measured political shifts using a mock policy threshold and a general ideology scale. Future research could incorporate a wider range of political choices, such as preferences for specific political figures in an actual election.

It is also difficult to know if the crime videos specifically triggered a deep fear of mortality, as terror management theory suggests. The footage might have simply provoked general anxiety about safety and social order. Future studies will need to directly measure the specific types of emotional discomfort that drive voters to change their minds on public policy.

The study, “Threat-Induced Conservatism in a Liberal Electorate: Issue-Based Shifts without Ideological Transformation,” was authored by Violet Cheung-Blunden, Serena Rajkumar, Yuka Hirata, Caelyn A. McDonough, and Chonhei Liao.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/crime-videos-push-liberal-voters-toward-stricter-laws-but-not-the-political-righ/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Celebrity admiration is linked to submission to authority, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/celebrity-admiration-is-linked-to-submission-to-authority-study-finds/

People who strongly admire celebrities tend to be more deferential to authority and more attached to traditional norms, according to new research published in Psychological Reports. The findings suggest that strong emotional attachments to famous figures relate to a preference for established social order and conventional norms, even after accounting for a person’s general political orientation.

People often form one-sided emotional connections with famous actors, musicians, and social media influencers. While these parasocial relationships are common and can sometimes provide a sense of community, intense celebrity admiration involves spending excessive time and effort focusing on a favorite public figure. This level of absorption is sometimes linked to negative outcomes. For instance, a 2021 study covered by PsyPost indicated that higher obsession with celebrities was associated with lower performance on tests of vocabulary and fluid intelligence.

The idea that celebrity admiration might be tied to authoritarianism is not new. Researchers proposed in 2001 that people inclined to defer to authority might gravitate toward celebrities, who are often treated as authorities on a range of topics, but their study of British participants found no association between the two.

Since then, the understanding of authoritarianism has shifted. The authors of a 2010 paper argued that right-wing authoritarianism is better understood as three related but distinct sets of attitudes: authoritarianism (which involves aggression and strict control), conservatism (which focuses on submission to authority and preserving the status quo), and traditionalism (which centers on adhering to old-fashioned lifestyles and morality).

Nearly 25 years after that first study, and amid shifts in celebrity culture and politics, the researchers sought to test which specific dimensions of authoritarianism are actually associated with celebrity admiration, especially once general political ideology and demographic factors are taken into account. The team was led by Ho Huynh, a senior lecturer in the School of Medicine and Psychology at the Australian National University.

“We know that celebrities have undue influence over people and that celebrities typically endorse liberal-leaning causes (e.g., climate change, immigration, abortion),” Huynh told PsyPost. “We were surprised to learn through our previous work that people who admire celebrities tend to self-identify as more politically conservative.”

“In the current work, we wanted to see if celebrity admiration would extend to right-wing authoritarianism,” Huynh continued. “This work might help to explain the contradiction of why politically conservative people in the United States might be more attracted to celebrities despite the stereotype that celebrities tend to hold liberal views.”

To investigate this, the researchers recruited 331 adults living in the United States through the online crowdsourcing platform Prolific. The sample was deliberately balanced during recruitment to contain an equal mix of self-identified liberals, moderates, and conservatives, meaning it is not nationally representative. About 54 percent of the participants were women, and all were 18 or older, with an average age of about 40.

Participants completed the brief seven-item version of the Celebrity Attitude Scale, a questionnaire that asks people to indicate their agreement with statements about their favorite famous person. This scale measures two levels of admiration. The first is a lighter, entertainment-social level, which includes enjoying keeping up with news about the celebrity or discussing them with friends. The second is a more intense, pathological level, characterized by feelings that the celebrity is a soulmate or that the fan shares a special, indescribable bond with them.

The participants also completed a survey assessing the three dimensions of right-wing authoritarianism. For example, participants rated their agreement with statements like “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.” Finally, they provided demographic information, including their education level, socioeconomic status, and their overall political orientation on an 11-point scale ranging from completely liberal to completely conservative.

The initial results showed that both forms of celebrity admiration were linked to higher scores on all three dimensions of authoritarianism. The links were strongest for conservatism (correlations of 0.32 for the lighter form and 0.45 for the intense form, on a scale where 0 means no relationship), moderate for traditionalism (0.19 and 0.32), and weak for authoritarian aggression (0.15 and 0.13). Only the intense form was linked to political conservatism, and modestly so (a correlation of 0.19).

To see if these links held up under closer statistical scrutiny, the researchers ran a series of models that controlled for the participants’ age, gender, education, socioeconomic status, and general political orientation. This step helped rule out the possibility that the connection simply reflected factors like political conservatism, which was linked to authoritarian attitudes and to intense admiration.

After accounting for these factors, celebrity admiration consistently predicted right-wing conservatism and right-wing traditionalism. Demographics and political orientation explained about 24 percent of the variation in conservatism scores; celebrity admiration added 9 percent (lighter form) or 13 percent (intense form) on top of that. For traditionalism, it added only about 2 to 4 percent.

“The association between celebrity admiration and authoritarian submission seems to be robust and reliable, indicating that people who worship their favorite celebrity tend to prefer more dominant authorities,” Huynh explained. Asked what the average person should take away, he said: “People who report admiring their favorite celebrity are more likely to submit to authority and prefer traditional norms. These trends might help explain why people who admire celebrities may self-identify as more politically conservative.”

However, the relationship between celebrity admiration and the third dimension, authoritarianism (the demand for strict punishment of rule-breakers), did not remain robust. Once demographics and political orientation were factored in, intense admiration no longer predicted authoritarian aggression. The lighter form remained a statistically detectable predictor, but it accounted for only about 1 percent of the variation, and the authors do not consider this strong evidence of a link. The authors suggest this may be because people who heavily admire celebrities tend to see the world as fair, with people getting what they deserve, and so may feel less need to support harsh punishment for rule-breakers.

Huynh sees this boundary as an encouraging sign. “Celebrity admiration was not related to authoritarian aggression, which involves strictness and social control,” he noted. “This finding showed the limits of celebrity admiration, which is positive and worthy of optimism.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study measured these traits at a single point in time, so the direction of the relationship is unknown. Intense absorption in celebrity culture might lead someone to adopt more authority-respecting and traditional views, or people who already hold such views might be more drawn to celebrity culture. When the researchers flipped their statistical model, higher authority-submission scores also predicted more celebrity admiration, a pattern consistent with either direction.

The list of control variables was also limited, missing related traits like narcissism and a preference for social hierarchies. Additionally, the survey asked participants to focus on their favorite celebrity but did not distinguish between typical entertainers and political figures. Because modern politics has become heavily focused on personalities, admiring a politician might function differently than admiring a musician or actor.

“This research was not about political celebrities, but celebrities generally,” Huynh said. “Some people may want to view these findings through the Trump presidencies, but only 5 out of 331 people in the study listed Donald Trump as their favorite celebrity. As such, these findings represent the associations between celebrity admiration and endorsement of different aspects of right-wing authoritarianism more broadly.”

Finally, the study only included participants from the United States. Cultural values, political structures, and the nature of fame vary widely around the world, so these connections might operate differently in other countries.

Huynh suggested another direction for future work. “An interesting next step would be to examine the associations between celebrity admiration and left-wing authoritarianism (e.g., hostility toward people in power, support for censoring opposing views, and rejection of traditional values and norms),” he said.

The study, “Idols and Ideologies: Examining Associations Between Celebrity Admiration and Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” was authored by Ho Phi Huynh, Joshua L. Williams, Marla F. Jorgensen, Amy Dicke-Bohmann, and Lynn McCutcheon.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/celebrity-admiration-is-linked-to-submission-to-authority-study-finds/

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for brain research tool called optogenetics

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/nobel-prize-medicine-2026-winner-deisseroth-hegemann-nagel/?utm_campaign=rss

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel are the joint recipients of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden announced on Monday. 

Deisseroth, a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, Hegemann, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and Nagel, a professor at the University of Würzburg, Germany, developed a method that uses light, combined with genetic modifications of neurons, to switch on or off individual cells in a living brain. This makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behavior in the brain, and is being studied as a treatment for disease. 

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URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/nobel-prize-medicine-2026-winner-deisseroth-hegemann-nagel/?utm_campaign=rss

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