#psychotherapist — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: October 16, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Hiring bias against transgender women depends on both identity and appearance, field experiment suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/hiring-bias-against-transgender-women-depends-on-both-identity-and-appearance-field-experiment-suggests/

A recent field experiment provides evidence that transgender women face steep penalties in the labor market when applying for jobs, particularly when they do not look like a typical cisgender woman. The research indicates that disclosing a transgender identity and possessing physical features typically associated with males both independently reduce a person’s chances of receiving a positive response from employers, and the combination of the two results in a compounded penalty. The findings were posted as a working paper on SSRN and have not yet been peer reviewed.

Transgender women are individuals who were assigned male at birth but identify as women. They often face elevated barriers in the workforce, experiencing lower employment rates and higher rates of poverty compared with cisgender people. A study covered by PsyPost in 2026 suggests that transgender individuals experience higher rates of daily mistreatment and violence than cisgender sexual minorities. A central concept in understanding these experiences is “passing,” which refers to whether a transgender person is perceived by others as cisgender, meaning someone whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Previous economic studies have documented hiring bias against transgender individuals, but they have generally focused on identity alone. Researchers typically sent resumes that indirectly disclosed a transgender identity without showing the applicant’s face, leaving it uncertain whether employers were reacting to the identity itself or to an assumption about what the applicant might look like.

Both labels and looks can shape how transgender people are perceived. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2018 found that potential dating partners labeled as transgender or nonbinary were rated as less attractive than those labeled cisgender, regardless of what they actually looked like. Appearance may matter as well: the paper notes that in a large U.S. survey, about 43 percent of trans women who had socially transitioned reported passing, compared with 71 percent of trans men.

The new study, conducted by Taryn Eames, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Toronto, sought to untangle these factors. “People with marginalized identities can face pressure to conceal their identity or conform to dominant-group social expectations, sometimes at considerable personal or financial cost,” Eames told PsyPost. “I want to understand whether discrimination reflects someone’s identity, whether they fit those expectations, or how the two interact.” She focused specifically on trans women, whose labor market disadvantages “are well documented but whose causes remain poorly understood.”

To investigate this question, Eames conducted a correspondence study in Germany, a method in which researchers send matched fictitious applications to real employers and track who gets a response. German job applications standardly include a professional headshot and reference letters from past employers, making it possible to realistically test both appearance and identity signals. The study submitted 10,022 fictitious applications in pairs to real job postings across 27 German cities and nine occupations.

The experiment independently varied two signals, starting with the applicant’s headshot. Eames used artificial intelligence to generate 30 matched pairs of “twin” headshots. The passing version depicted a woman who looked typically cisgender, while the non-passing version kept the exact same hair, makeup, clothing, jewelry, and background but altered the facial structure to include more male-coded features. No employer ever received both versions of the same face.

“This study varies physical facial features while keeping gender presentation fixed, including hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and jewelry,” Eames noted. “These features reflect genetics, pubertal development, and access to gender-affirming care—factors often beyond an individual’s control. They are not styling choices an applicant can simply change when applying for a job.”

Second, the experiment varied whether the applicant disclosed a transgender identity. In Germany, a legal name change can leave older professional documents under a previous name. Some fictitious applicants included a years-old employer reference letter under a male name, along with a note explaining that they now use a female first name, giving employers a realistic administrative reason to learn about the transition.

Control applicants all had passing headshots. Some disclosed no name change, while others disclosed a female-to-female change, such as going from Theodora to Thea. These two control groups received positive responses at nearly identical rates, suggesting that employers were reacting to the transgender identity signaled by a male-to-female change rather than to name changes in general.

The results indicated a penalty for both a transgender identity and a non-passing appearance. Among control applicants, 47.6 percent received a positive response from employers, such as an interview request. Applicants who disclosed a transgender identity but had a passing headshot received positive responses at a rate that was 4.1 percentage points lower, a 9 percent reduction compared to controls, while those with a non-passing headshot but no disclosure saw a 4.6 percentage point drop, or a 10 percent reduction.

The penalty was largest when applicants combined both signals. Applicants who both disclosed a name change and had a non-passing appearance received positive responses at a rate 15.2 percentage points lower than controls, representing a 32 percent reduction. This combined penalty was 6.5 percentage points larger than the sum of the two individual penalties, indicating that identity and appearance compound one another.

“To illustrate, suppose an otherwise comparable, presumably cisgender woman submits 100 applications,” Eames explained. “An applicant with either signal alone would need approximately 110–111 applications to receive the same expected number of positive employer responses. With both signals, she would need about 147 applications.”

“I was surprised by how strongly the two signals compounded each other,” she told PsyPost. “Employers may already infer that an applicant is transgender from masculinized facial features, so the two signals may partly convey the same identity information.”

“I therefore expected the combined penalty to be smaller than the sum of the individual penalties—instead, it was substantially larger,” she continued. “One possibility is that masculinized facial features make a disclosed transgender identity more salient. Another is that employers hold different beliefs or attitudes toward transgender women depending on their appearance.”

The strength of the non-passing appearance also influenced outcomes. Moderately non-passing headshots without disclosure produced a small penalty of about 4 percent that was not statistically significant. Strongly non-passing headshots without disclosure led to a 15 percent drop in callbacks, while pairing a strongly non-passing headshot with identity disclosure resulted in a 36 percent penalty.

The context of the job posting shaped employer behavior as well. Postings listing a male contact person showed higher appearance penalties, whereas postings listing a female contact person showed little penalty for non-passing appearance unless it was paired with a transgender identity disclosure. In exploratory analyses, the penalty for non-passing applicants was larger for jobs involving more customer interaction, and discrimination overall was smaller in tight labor markets, consistent with the idea that heightened competition for workers constrains employers from acting on biased preferences.

To explore the perceptions behind these hiring patterns, Eames conducted a follow-up survey experiment with 1,400 members of the general public from Germany and the United States. Participants evaluated brief professional profiles depicting the same conditions used in the field experiment. They rated the applicants on eight subjective traits, including competence, attractiveness, and emotional stability, alongside their willingness to offer an interview.

Respondents rated non-passing applicants about 1.4 points less attractive on a 7-point scale, regardless of whether a transgender identity was disclosed. Anticipated coworker and customer comfort was lower in every condition: about 0.3 points lower when applicants disclosed a name change but passed, about 0.5 points lower when they did not pass and made no disclosure, and up to about 1 point lower when both signals were present.

Respondents also rated all three groups of transgender applicants as less emotionally stable, with the largest drop when both signals were present. Disclosing a name change led respondents to expect that an applicant would be more likely to raise concerns about workplace comments or behavior she viewed as insensitive or exclusionary, and this expectation was more than twice as strong when disclosure was paired with a non-passing appearance.

Respondents were less willing to interview applicants with either signal, but unlike in the field experiment, the two signals did not compound. Eames suggests that survey respondents may tone down especially large rating differences that could appear overtly discriminatory, particularly when the study’s purpose becomes more obvious.

The survey also provided evidence of different types of bias among different groups of people. Older respondents tended to penalize the transgender identity disclosure more heavily, while socially conservative respondents tended to penalize the non-passing appearance more heavily.

“The main takeaway is that transgender identity and masculinized facial features each carry a hiring penalty, but the combined penalty is greater than the sum of the two separate penalties,” Eames said. “In other words, employers penalize the same facial features more heavily when an applicant is known to be transgender. More broadly, these findings suggest that deviating from dominant-group expectations can be especially costly when someone is known to belong to a marginalized group.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Because the working paper was posted on a preprint server, it has not yet been peer reviewed. The compounding effect was also somewhat sensitive to analytic choices: while statistically significant in the author’s preferred analysis, it was smaller and less consistently significant in alternative analyses that did not adjust for baseline response rates across experimental groups. In addition, the experiment covered lower- to middle-skill jobs that do not require a university degree, measuring initial employer responses rather than final job offers.

Another consideration is that the field experiment relied on static headshots to manipulate appearance. In real life, whether a transgender woman passes depends on a wider array of traits, such as voice, height, and body proportions, meaning the study may underestimate overall in-person penalties. The direct penalty associated with non-passing headshots might also partially reflect broader biases against perceived unattractiveness, which often intertwines with traditional gender norms. And the survey respondents were members of the general public evaluating brief profiles, not hiring managers making real decisions.

Facial feminization surgery, which reshapes facial bones and soft tissue to create more typically female features, is one form of gender-affirming care that can affect whether a trans woman passes. “Understanding these sources of discrimination also yields policy implications: barriers to gender-affirming care—particularly a lack of insurance coverage for facial feminization surgery—may have consequences in terms of exposure to discrimination,” Eames said.

However, she emphasized that addressing bias should not rely on changing individuals. “These findings should not be taken to mean that the onus is on transgender women to change their appearance to avoid discrimination,” Eames added. “The goal should be to reduce discrimination while ensuring access to gender-affirming care for those who want it.”

The study, “The Cost of Being Seen: Identity, Non-Passing Appearance, and Hiring Discrimination Against Transgender Women,” was authored by Taryn Eames.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/hiring-bias-against-transgender-women-depends-on-both-identity-and-appearance-field-experiment-suggests/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HiringBias #TransWomenInTheWorkplace #DiscriminationInHiring #TransVisibility #GenderIdentity #NonPassingAppearance #LaborMarketBias #GenderAffirmingCare #WorkplaceInclusion #BiasInRecruitment

DATE: October 16, 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: Many people judge candidates and policies by a single deciding feature, new research suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/many-people-judge-candidates-and-policies-by-a-single-deciding-feature-new-research-suggests/

When people make complex political decisions, they tend to rely on simple mental shortcuts rather than exhaustively weighing every piece of information, according to a study published in PNAS. The research indicates that people frequently switch between different decision strategies depending on the issue at hand and the complexity of the choice environment. These findings suggest that standard survey methods in political science, which often assume people act as fully thorough evaluators, may obscure how individuals actually reach conclusions.

Social scientists frequently rely on choice-based conjoint experiments to measure public opinion on complex topics. In this type of survey, participants view side-by-side profiles of two options, such as hypothetical political candidates or policy proposals, with features that vary randomly, such as age, profession, or cost. Participants are then asked to pick the option they prefer, allowing researchers to infer how much specific features sway voter preferences on average across the entire population.

A key open question is whether people answering these multi-feature surveys actually weigh every detail, as many standard analysis methods implicitly assume, or rely on simplifying mental shortcuts known as heuristics. Some evidence points toward shortcuts. A 2020 eye-tracking study found that when survey tables included more features and options, people looked at a smaller fraction of the information on screen. In the consumer realm, a 2009 study found that although standard models assume people balance every feature against the others, a sizable minority of participants were better described by rules that rank features and decide based on the most important one.

Similar rankings appear in politics: a 2024 study of candidate choice found that voters tend to focus on party affiliation first, weighing traits like gender or race mainly when two candidates share the same party. Separately, research covered by PsyPost in 2026 found that voters often use left and right political labels as shortcuts to guess where candidates stand.

To understand the cognitive rules guiding these choices, study authors Nidhi V. Banavar, a postdoctoral scholar in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kirk Bansak, also of the University of California, Berkeley, created a mathematical framework to classify individual decision strategies. Their model analyzes a person’s survey selections to infer what attributes matter to them, which values they favor, and which cognitive rule best accounts for their behavior.

“We were interested in the question of how people go about making political choices,” Banavar told PsyPost. “When we estimate complex constructs like political attitudes, a lot of analysis methods implicitly assume that people weigh everything in front of them. We wanted to test whether that was true, and if not, to find how they were deciding instead.”

“This connects to a broader issue, which is that most political attitude research is done at the aggregate level,” Banavar explained. “The aggregate is perfect for giving us the high level snapshot and, for better or for worse, collapses a lot of the variation we see in people: both in terms of their actual preferences and in terms of how they make choices based on those preferences. We were interested in uncollapsing the aggregate and so built a model and designed experiments to do so.”

The model examines four distinct decision strategies that differ in cognitive demand. The most thorough strategy, known as Weighted Additive, involves a rational calculation where an individual weighs every single attribute and sums them up to pick the highest-scoring option. A simpler shortcut strategy, known as Tally, involves counting how many preferred traits each option possesses and choosing the profile with the higher count, without worrying about which traits matter more.

The simplest shortcut rule, called Take The Best, directs a person to choose based solely on whichever single feature matters most to them; they only examine a second feature if the options are tied on their favorite trait. The fourth classification, Contaminant, captures random guessing equivalent to a coin flip.

The scientists evaluated this model across two experiments involving 3,762 American adults recruited through Prolific, with quotas matching national demographics for age, sex, and political affiliation. Participants completed 90 choices divided into three blocks of 30 decisions across three common political topics: selecting between two hypothetical immigrants seeking admission to the United States, choosing between two Senate primary candidates, and choosing between two national climate policy packages. Each option varied across six attributes that each had two possible values.

In the first experiment, which included 1,964 participants, the researchers altered the complexity of the profiles by testing whether allowing ties changed how people decided. Half of the participants saw profiles where traits were never identical between the two options, while the other half saw profiles that contained one to three matching features, such as both candidates being in their 50s. This design was intended to test whether forcing people to look beyond their top attribute would push them toward more thorough evaluation strategies.

The results showed that the simplest shortcut rule, Take The Best, was the most common strategy across all three political domains. In the condition without ties, about 54% of participants were classified as using this single-attribute rule, while roughly 30% were classified as using the rational Weighted Additive strategy, and about 14% used the Tally strategy. When ties were introduced, forcing people to scan deeper into the profiles, use of the Take The Best rule dropped to roughly 45%, while rational strategy use increased to about 40%. Across both conditions, shortcut strategies accounted for the majority of participant behavior.

The authors also discovered that an individual’s strategy was not fixed. Depending on the condition, 67% to 76% of participants were classified as using different strategies for different issues, with about 10% using a completely different strategy across all three domains. The presentation order of the topics was randomized, and participants did not display signs of survey fatigue or increased guessing in later rounds. Instead, people appeared to adapt their decision rules to the specific context of each topic.

“On one hand, the big takeaway is the prevalence of heuristic use and how the majority of individuals use informational shortcuts,” Banavar noted. “This is an important finding people are not exhaustively weighting and evaluating all the information presented to them.”

“However, I think a bigger takeaway is that people tend to use different strategies depending on the political domain,” Banavar added. “How someone processes information is not a trait: just because I may choose a candidate based on one factor doesn’t mean that I’ll choose a climate policy based on one factor. This means we shouldn’t put people into buckets based on how they make political choices.”

In the second experiment, which included 1,798 participants, the researchers tested another common variation in survey design: asking participants to rate each profile individually on a 1-to-7 scale in addition to making their comparative choice. Among those asked to give ratings, fewer participants were classified as using Take The Best in all three policy domains, though it remained the most common strategy. That group also had more people classified as using the more thorough strategies, along with a small increase in people classified as random guessers, which the authors suggest may reflect some respondents losing interest. The authors caution that these shifts were not consistently statistically reliable across domains.

To check whether these classifications reflected something about how people were actually thinking, rather than just statistical patterns in their choices, the researchers analyzed response times. Participants classified as using the rational Weighted Additive strategy took the longest to answer, followed by those classified as using Tally, while those classified as using Take The Best responded much faster.

When ties were present, only the Take The Best group answered more slowly; response times for the other groups were essentially unchanged. Because this shortcut requires checking additional traits only when top traits tie, the authors interpret this selective slowdown as evidence that the classifications capture real differences in mental processing, though they stop short of claiming the model directly observes thought.

“While we note that our findings were obtained (necessarily) in the context of a limited set of experiments, we do believe their theoretical and practical value has generalizability,” Banavar pointed out. “For instance, while the precise pervasiveness of heuristic usage is certainly context dependent, we still found that the simplest heuristic strategy was our most commonly classified strategy across all of our experiments, regardless of complexity manipulations. Our finding that strategy classifications are not fixed for individual people was also robust, and we have no reason to believe there would be within-person strategy variation only for our experiments and not for others.”

The researchers also investigated whether demographic characteristics predicted which strategy a person chose. Across variables such as race, gender, education, and political affiliation, associations were generally weak, and most were not statistically distinguishable from chance after adjusting for multiple tests. Older participants showed a slight tendency toward Take The Best, but the effect was small and held up after statistical correction in only 2 of 12 tests. Participants who rated a topic as less complex, or who said they knew less about it, also showed slight tendencies toward the shortcut, but these patterns appeared in only some analyses and largely did not survive correction.

“I was surprised by how difficult it was to relate strategy classification to respondent characteristics,” Banavar observed. “There’s a lot of evidence in cognitive science research showing that this is a difficult problem. There is also, however, substantial work in political science that would generate some predictions about relating strategy classification and respondent characteristics.”

“In the end we found very little, even though we considered demographics and various other measures of how meaningful a given political topic was to each person,” she said. “I think there’s a lot more to explore on this front.”

When the authors broke aggregate preferences down into individual weightings, they found that population-level averages concealed large differences. For every feature, many participants appeared to give it little or no weight, and for several of the most heavily weighted features, the pattern split into two sharp groups: people who effectively ignored the feature and a distinct group who weighted it very heavily. For example, conjoint studies commonly find that female candidates are slightly preferred over male candidates on average; the new results suggest this average blends people who prefer women, people who prefer men, and many who put little weight on gender at all.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study used simplified experimental profiles where each feature only had two possible choices, such as a candidate being either in their 50s or 70s. In real-world political decisions, options often have many more layers and continuous values, which might prompt respondents to rely even more heavily on mental shortcuts than observed here.

There are also important nuances in how mental shortcuts should be understood, especially regarding whether they reflect poorly on respondents. “First, the fact that we classify the majority of individuals as using heuristics or not using the rational strategy does not mean that they are lazy,” Banavar stressed. “We have finite resources and it is a good thing to selectively deploy them.”

The classification approach has its own limits. Because strategies were inferred from choices, someone who weighs every feature but cares overwhelmingly about one would make the same choices as a Take The Best user, and the model would classify them the same way; the response time data suggest such mix-ups were not widespread. Simulations also showed that the model tends to classify random guessers as Tally users, so guessing may be somewhat more common, and Tally somewhat less common, than the estimates suggest.

“Secondly, while we have built a cognitive model, the model doesn’t actually tell us what’s happening inside someone’s head,” Banavar stated. “It’s a model that classifies, based on the choices that people make, what decision strategies best describe their choices. It is a technical clarification but an important one.”

Future research could expand on this framework by testing features with more than two values, exploring why people pick the strategies they do, and modeling response times alongside choices.

The study, “Classifying strategy use in multiattribute subjective choice: Application to conjoint experiments in political science,” was authored by Nidhi V. Banavar and Kirk Bansak.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/many-people-judge-candidates-and-policies-by-a-single-deciding-feature-new-research-suggests/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PoliticalDecisionMaking #HeuristicsInPolitics #ConjointAnalysis #TakeTheBest #WeightedAdditive #TallyStrategy #PolicyDecisionCognition #SurveyDesign #VoterBehavior #CognitiveStrategies

DATE: October 16, 2026 at 07:55AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHIATIRY FEED

TITLE: Yale scientists discover how stress changes the brain to make memories stronger

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015517.htm

Yale scientists have uncovered how the stress hormone cortisol helps the brain turn emotional experiences into stronger, longer-lasting memories. The discovery reveals that stress can reshape communication between brain networks involved in emotion and memory, potentially explaining why certain moments are so difficult to forget.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015517.htm

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DATE: October 16, 2026 at 07:55AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: Yale scientists discover how stress changes the brain to make memories stronger

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015517.htm

Yale scientists have uncovered how the stress hormone cortisol helps the brain turn emotional experiences into stronger, longer-lasting memories. The discovery reveals that stress can reshape communication between brain networks involved in emotion and memory, potentially explaining why certain moments are so difficult to forget.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015517.htm

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DATE: October 16, 2026 at 07:55AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Yale scientists discover how stress changes the brain to make memories stronger

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015517.htm

Yale scientists have uncovered how the stress hormone cortisol helps the brain turn emotional experiences into stronger, longer-lasting memories. The discovery reveals that stress can reshape communication between brain networks involved in emotion and memory, potentially explaining why certain moments are so difficult to forget.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015517.htm

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DATE: October 16, 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: Oxytocin amplifies negative childhood memories for anxiously attached adults

URL: https://www.psypost.org/oxytocin-amplifies-negative-childhood-memories-for-anxiously-attached-adults/

Oxytocin is often called the “love hormone,” but it can actually make childhood memories seem more negative for people who struggle with relationship anxiety. A new experiment demonstrates that oxytocin amplifies the emotional intensity of social cues rather than simply promoting warm feelings. The findings were published in the journal Emotion.

Human infants rely entirely on caregivers for survival, leading to an innate drive to form close bonds. These early childhood experiences shape a person’s attachment style, which acts as a mental blueprint for future relationships. Psychologists refer to these blueprints as internal working models. They represent a person’s core beliefs about whether other people will be available and responsive when needed.

Securely attached people generally expect others to be reliable and supportive. Anxiously attached people crave closeness but constantly fear abandonment, often hyper-focusing on relationship threats. Avoidantly attached people distance themselves from intimacy to prevent disappointment, shutting down their emotional needs when they feel vulnerable.

Researchers have long studied the biological systems that drive these social bonds. Oxytocin is a hormone and chemical messenger heavily involved in childbirth, nursing, and pair bonding. In studies of mice and sheep, oxytocin proved necessary for mothers to recognize their offspring and for adults to remember other members of their species.

Early human experiments suggested the hormone universally enhanced trust, cooperation, and empathy. This research helped popularize the idea that oxytocin is a simple prosocial booster.

More recent evidence suggests a nuanced view called the social salience hypothesis. This concept proposes that oxytocin acts as an emotional amplifier, highlighting social information regardless of whether that information is positive or negative. For instance, in animal models, oxytocin has been shown to enhance the fear response in mice after they experience a social defeat by a more aggressive cage-mate.

Researchers at McGill University, led by Melissa Shemirani and Jennifer A. Bartz, wanted to test this hypothesis by examining how oxytocin influences the emotional quality of attachment memories in humans. They sought to replicate and expand upon a previous experiment that only tested men. The research team recruited 77 male and female participants for a two-part study.

During one visit, participants received a dose of oxytocin via a nasal spray. On their other visit, they received a placebo spray. Neither the participants nor the experimenters knew which spray was administered on a given day. This crossover design allowed the researchers to compare how the same individual responded under both conditions.

After waiting for the hormone to take effect, participants were prompted with attachment-related words, such as “protect” or “upset.” They were asked to retrieve specific childhood memories involving their mothers based on these cues. The experimenters then selected one positive and one negative memory and asked the participants to elaborate on them verbally for a few minutes.

Independent human evaluators read transcripts of the recorded narratives and rated them for positive and negative emotional content. For participants with high attachment anxiety, oxytocin caused them to describe their mothers with more negative and less positive emotion compared to when they received the placebo. This suggests that the hormone amplified their underlying insecurities about relationships.

The researchers also analyzed the memory transcripts using two different computer programs designed to detect emotional tone in written text. One program counted the frequency of emotional words based on a vast dictionary, while the other evaluated grammatical context, such as whether a negative word was modified by another word. These automated tools matched the human evaluators in finding that attachment anxiety shaped how oxytocin affected negative emotional language. In the software analyses, however, the significant effect appeared among participants with low anxiety, for whom oxytocin reduced the negative emotional tone of their memories. The computer programs did not find any measurable differences in positive emotional language.

The research team also looked at participants with avoidant attachment styles, who typically suppress their desire for closeness. Oxytocin did not alter the emotional content of their maternal memories. Following the memory task, participants filled out a questionnaire about how much information they shared with the experimenter and how comfortable they felt doing so.

The results showed that avoidant individuals were generally less willing to reveal personal information. When given oxytocin, these participants became even more reluctant to open up emotionally. The hormone appeared to heighten their natural defensive tendency to distance themselves from intimate disclosures.

Readers should note that these results center entirely on recollections of mothers, who were historically viewed as primary caregivers in early psychology research. The study does not address whether oxytocin would alter memories of fathers or other childhood guardians in the same way. The participant group was also relatively young and predominantly White and Asian, meaning the patterns might look different in older adults or other racial groups.

The discrepancy between human evaluators and computer programs highlights the current limitations of automated text analysis. Software tools often struggle to interpret the mixed emotions typical of personal family histories. A memory about being comforted after a scary event contains negative words, but a human listener can easily recognize the overall positive meaning of the caregiver’s response. Spoken language is also full of tangents and structural quirks that confuse software designed for short written texts.

Finally, the findings indicate that oxytocin is not a universal treatment for relationship struggles or social difficulties. Because the hormone acts as a magnifier for pre-existing social fears, using it in therapeutic settings might require customized supervision. Administering oxytocin without proper guidance could inadvertently increase distress for those who already experience high anxiety in their personal connections.

The study, “Attachment, Oxytocin, and Maternal Recollections: Further Evidence for the Salience Hypothesis,” was authored by Melissa Shemirani, Willis Klein, Jonas P. Nitschke, Sonia A. Krol, Signy Sheldon, and Jennifer A. Bartz.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/oxytocin-amplifies-negative-childhood-memories-for-anxiously-attached-adults/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Oxytocin # attachment #negative memories #anxiousattachment #socialsalience #childhoodmemories #maternalrecollection #emotionalintensity #psychologyresearch #RelationshipAnxiety

DATE: October 16, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Some adults’ brains look older than their age, and gut biology may be part of the picture

URL: https://www.psypost.org/some-adults-brains-look-older-than-their-age-and-gut-biology-may-be-part-of-the-picture/

Some young and middle-aged adults have brain activity patterns that look “older” than their actual age, and new research suggests these differences are linked to thinking skills, mood, and the gut. Adults with older-looking brain patterns tended to score somewhat lower on tests of working memory and executive function, report more depressive symptoms, and have modestly different gut bacteria and stool chemicals. The findings were published in eBioMedicine.

A central concept in this research is the brain aging index. Researchers train a computer model to estimate a person’s age from brain scans alone, and the index is the gap between that estimate and the person’s actual age. A positive score means the brain looks older than expected, while a negative score means it looks younger. The authors of a 2017 review argued that such estimates could serve as a marker of brain health, pointing to evidence that an older-appearing brain is linked to poorer cognitive and physical aging and a higher risk of death.

Most of this research has focused on older adults who are already at risk for cognitive decline. However, the authors of a 2024 review argued that middle age may mark a turning point, with biological changes during this period shaping a person’s later brain health.

At the same time, evidence has grown linking the digestive system to brain health. A 2025 study comparing people with Alzheimer’s disease, people with mild cognitive impairment, and healthy adults found that gut bacteria and stool chemicals shifted step by step across these groups, and these shifts were tied to brain shrinkage and poorer thinking skills. A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 similarly found that depressed adults tend to have an imbalance of gut bacteria that relates to altered brain connectivity.

This progression of research led Kanhao Zhao, who conducted the study during his postdoctoral training under Arpana Church at the Church Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to test whether gut biology relates to early brain aging in young and middle-aged adults. The work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants awarded to Church.

“Most brain-age research has focused on older adults or people who already have neurological disease,” Zhao, who is now a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “We therefore wanted to ask whether meaningful differences in brain aging could already be detected in young and mid-life adults, and whether these differences were linked not only to cognition and mental health, but also to gut microbial and metabolic features.”

To investigate this, the research team analyzed brain imaging and biological data from healthy adults aged 18 to 65. They divided the data into three separate groups to ensure their results were consistent across different samples: a discovery group of 674 people, a replication group of 444 people, and an independent group of 344 people.

The participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. This technique measures changes in blood oxygen levels, which rise and fall with brain activity, while a person lies still and rests. By tracking which regions rise and fall together, a pattern known as functional connectivity, scientists can see how different brain regions communicate.

Participants also completed various tests to measure their cognitive and emotional health. These included assessments of intelligence, working memory, executive function, and self-reported questionnaires for depressive symptoms.

In the independent group of participants, the researchers collected stool samples. They analyzed these samples using metagenomics, which sequences the genetic material of the bacteria living in the gut, and metabolomics, which identifies specific metabolites. Metabolites are the small chemical molecules left over from cellular processes, digestion, and bacterial activity.

Across all three groups, the model’s age estimates tracked participants’ actual ages reasonably well, though imperfectly: its predictions were off by about 6 to 9 years on average. People whose brains looked older than expected showed a consistent pattern. A higher index score was associated with stronger connections involving the default mode network, a set of regions most active during inward-focused thought such as daydreaming and recalling memories, and the frontoparietal network, which helps control goal-directed thinking. The strongest links involved the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex, regions along the brain’s midline that are involved in internal thought and memory retrieval.

At the same time, people with older-appearing brains showed weaker connections in the ventral attention network, a brain system that helps humans orient themselves to sudden changes in their environment. This network imbalance was linked to worse performance on cognitive tests. Individuals with a higher brain aging index scored lower on performance IQ, working memory, and executive function tasks, while also reporting more symptoms of depression.

These associations were modest. Correlations between brain-age scores and individual test results ranged from about 0.12 to 0.38, meaning brain-age scores accounted for at most about 14 percent of the variation in any single measure, and usually much less. Not every measure lined up: verbal IQ showed no reliable link in either group where it was tested, and several test scores were linked in one group but not another. In the first group, the links held after accounting for participants’ actual ages.

“The effects should be viewed as meaningful population-level associations rather than as a diagnostic test for an individual person,” Zhao noted. “An important strength of the study is that the brain-age pattern was examined across multiple independent cohorts, but the associations with cognition, mood, and gut biology were generally modest. At this stage, the brain aging index is better understood as a research marker of individual variability in brain health than as something that could tell a person how quickly their brain is aging in a clinical setting.”

The gut findings were similarly small. In the 182 participants with complete data, a combined profile of gut bacteria and stool chemicals accounted for only about 2 percent of the differences in brain-age scores, though this was more than would be expected by chance. The bacteria most strongly tied to older-looking brains in this profile included species of Clostridium and Collinsella, and the stool chemicals included ceramides and 24-hydroxycholesterol, fat-related molecules involved in inflammation, cellular stress, and cholesterol processing.

Some of these bacteria have been tied to inflammation in other research, but the authors note that in these healthy adults they appeared alongside bacteria typically associated with a healthy gut. People with younger-looking brains, by contrast, had higher levels of stool chemicals related to neurotransmitter function and amino acid processing. One of the molecules most strongly tied to a younger-looking brain was estetrol, a form of estrogen, which the authors suggest could hint at a protective role for reproductive hormone pathways.

“What I found particularly interesting was that the signal was not confined to the brain,” Zhao said. “We observed coordinated associations involving functional brain networks, cognition and mood, and gut-derived biological features, including microbial and metabolic signatures related to lipid metabolism, immune and vascular processes, synaptic function, and mitochondrial pathways. This convergence across very different biological levels suggests that understanding brain aging may ultimately require looking beyond the brain alone.”

Notably, the cognitive and mood measures were tied to the brain network patterns rather than directly to any specific gut bacteria or stool chemicals.

“One important message is that people of the same chronological age can show meaningful differences in how their brain networks resemble patterns associated with aging,” Zhao explained. “We also found that these brain-age differences were linked to patterns in gut microbes and metabolites, suggesting that brain aging may be related to broader biological processes across the brain-gut system rather than occurring in isolation.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. “The most important caveat is that this was a cross-sectional observational study, so our findings do not establish causality,” Zhao emphasized. “We cannot conclude that particular gut microbes or metabolites cause the brain to age faster, nor that changing the microbiome would necessarily make the brain ‘younger.'”

Because everything was measured at a single point in time, it is also possible that brain changes influence the gut, or that other factors, such as diet, shape both. Zhao also noted that the brain-age measure is a “statistical index derived from functional connectivity, rather than a literal measurement of the biological age of a person’s brain.”

Additionally, the gut microbiome analysis was conducted on 182 participants, mostly women, and the cohorts drew on datasets from the U.S. and Japan. The researchers note that larger, more balanced studies will be necessary to verify the exact bacterial and metabolic signatures identified in this group. The genetic sequencing used in the study also identifies broad bacterial species but cannot pinpoint specific bacterial strains, which might have differing effects on human health.

“The next step is to move from cross-sectional associations toward longitudinal and prospective studies,” Zhao said. “We would like to determine whether these brain-body signatures can predict future cognitive trajectories and whether they change in response to modifiable factors or interventions. More broadly, we are interested in expanding beyond the brain-gut axis toward a more integrated view of brain-body aging. Emerging research suggests that brain function is also closely related to cardiovascular physiology and other organ systems.”

“In future studies, we hope to combine brain imaging with cardiac imaging, physiological signals such as ECG and PPG, and molecular measurements to better understand how aging processes across different organ systems interact,” he added. “Ultimately, our goal is to identify multimodal biomarkers that explain why individuals age differently and may eventually help guide personalized strategies for maintaining brain health.”

An ECG records the heart’s electrical activity, while PPG uses light sensors, like those in many smartwatches, to track pulse and blood flow.

Studying these processes over time could help scientists develop interventions to maintain brain health during middle age. “I think an important broader message is that brain aging is unlikely to be a process that begins suddenly in old age,” Zhao concluded. “Individual differences in brain network organization and their relationships with cognition and peripheral biology can already be observed much earlier in adulthood. Understanding these earlier differences may eventually help us shift the focus from treating late-stage decline toward identifying trajectories of brain health before substantial impairment develops.”

The study, “Brain-gut crosstalk associated with brain ageing in young and mid-life adults: a multicohort cross-sectional study,” was authored by Kanhao Zhao, Gabriel A. Vignolle, Jennifer S. Labus, Emeran A. Mayer, Allison Vaughan, Marika Dy, Priten Vora, Ming W. Hung, Keith Vossel, Chris Gill, Daniele Del Rio, Catherine Stanton, R. Paul Ross, John F. Cryan, Rima Kaddurah-Daouk, Yu Zhang, and Arpana Church.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/some-adults-brains-look-older-than-their-age-and-gut-biology-may-be-part-of-the-picture/

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DATE: October 16, 2026 at 04:30AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTH

TITLE: Opinion: I thought I knew why patients stopped taking their medicine. I was wrong

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/16/nonadherence-medication-stopped-identity-pharmacist-side-effects-prevent/?utm_campaign=rss

During my years as a clinical pharmacist, I thought I understood why patients stopped taking long-term medications — one of the biggest challenges in medicine. They forgot to take them, became frustrated with side effects, or didn’t fully understand their conditions. But over time, my clinical experience showed me that these explanations only told part of the story.

I first noticed this pattern across very different medical specialties. In psychiatry, I saw patients with schizophrenia experience psychotic episodes after stopping their antipsychotics. Patients who abruptly discontinued their antidepressants often suffered withdrawal symptoms. Later, when I worked in a kidney transplant center, I encountered a surprisingly similar situation when patients stopped taking one or more of their immunosuppressants and developed acute rejection of their new kidneys. Colleagues in cardiology, primary care, and other specialties described similar experiences.

Read the rest…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/16/nonadherence-medication-stopped-identity-pharmacist-side-effects-prevent/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 11:35AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: 93% of Australia's Indigenous People Lost Within 73 Years of Colonization

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191945&url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261013015807.htm

Source: Science Daily - Top Society

New research suggests that Australia's Indigenous population before European colonization was far larger than historical estimates have indicated. Scientists now estimate that approximately 2.2 million Indigenous people lived across the continent before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788—up to seven times the number suggested by some earlier calculations—and a staggering 93% of the Indigenous population was lost within 73 years of...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191945&url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261013015807.htm

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Family genetics study questions the role of genetic nurture in ADHD

URL: https://www.psypost.org/child-s-own-genetics-drive-adhd-traits-more-than-family-environment-large-study/

A large study of families suggests that a child’s overall attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder traits are primarily driven by their own genetics by mid-childhood, rather than by the indirect environmental influence of their parents’ genes. Researchers found a lack of evidence for parental genetic nurture effects at both age five and age eight, though they note that statistical limitations might obscure more subtle influences. The research was published in Behavior Genetics.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a neurodevelopmental condition involving patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Decades of twin studies indicate that ADHD is highly heritable. This means a child’s own DNA plays a major role in whether they develop these behavioral traits.

However, genetic and environmental factors do not operate in isolation. In recent years, scientists have focused on how an individual’s traits might be shaped by the genes of the people around them. Because biological parents provide both their children’s DNA and their rearing environment, it is notoriously difficult to separate nature from nurture.

When parents’ genes influence their child’s environment, this process is known as an indirect genetic effect, or genetic nurture. For instance, a parent’s genetic makeup might influence their patience, parenting style, or the general household environment they create. This environment then affects the child’s development, meaning the parent’s genes have shaped the child’s traits from the outside in.

When indirect genetic effects are not accounted for, researchers risk overestimating the direct impact of a child’s own DNA. To better understand the origins of ADHD traits, researchers set out to untangle these direct and indirect genetic influences. Daniel L. Wechsler, a researcher at King’s College London, led a team to investigate whether parents’ genetic profiles exert indirect effects on a child’s ADHD traits over and above the child’s own direct genetic risks.

The researchers also wanted to see how these influences might shift as children grow. Previous research has explored these dynamics for specific traits like hyperactivity at single time points. The current project instead focused on overall ADHD scores across two distinct developmental stages, early and mid-childhood.

Wechsler and his colleagues utilized data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a population-based registry. They analyzed genetic data from mother, father, and child trios alongside survey data. The questionnaires asked parents to rate the frequency of specific behaviors, such as difficulty paying attention to tasks or acting without thinking.

A method called trio genome-wide complex trait analysis was used to examine around a million genetic variations across all three family members. These genetic variations, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, are tiny changes in the genetic code that can influence various physical and behavioral traits. Humans share the vast majority of their DNA, but these small variations make each person unique.

Unlike some genetic approaches that only look at specific genes tied to a known condition, this method captures the cumulative influence of all measured genetic variations. By modeling the genetic data from the whole family at once, the researchers could estimate the child’s direct genetic effects alongside the cumulative indirect environmental effects of both parents’ genes.

The first analysis focused on a large study sample of 12,374 family trios when the children were five years old. The initial statistical models at this age suggested that maternal indirect genetic effects accounted for nearly five percent of the variation in children’s ADHD traits. At the same time, the child’s direct genetic effects appeared to account for less than two percent.

However, when the researchers tested these findings against more stringent statistical models, the results failed to hold up. The model comparisons ultimately favored a scenario in which neither direct nor indirect genetic effects were present at age five. Large margins of error in the data prevented the team from confirming specific genetic effects at this age.

This lack of measurable direct genetic influence at early childhood was unexpected. ADHD is widely recognized as highly heritable, even in young children. The researchers suggested that ADHD traits might not fully manifest in a measurable way for many children by age five.

Alternatively, it is possible that children’s individual genetic propensities simply account for more variation in their behavior as they grow older. This pattern has been observed in other developmental traits, where the influence of a child’s own genetics becomes more apparent over time. In previous research utilizing an even larger sample of the same cohort, scientists found evidence for direct genetic effects on specific traits like hyperactivity and inattention as early as age three.

Next, the team conducted a similar analysis on an overlapping large study sample of 12,714 family trios when the children were eight years old. The preliminary models for this mid-childhood stage showed increased genetic influence overall. These early estimates pointed to roughly equal contributions, with the child’s own genes and the mother’s indirect genetic effects each accounting for about eight percent of the variation.

Once again, the researchers applied rigorous model comparisons to see which scenario best fit the data. At age eight, the most accurate model indicated that the child’s direct genetics played a role in their ADHD traits. This model, however, showed no evidence of indirect genetic effects from either parent.

Across both age groups, the team found no robust evidence that a mother or father’s genetic profile indirectly influences a child’s overall ADHD traits through the environment. The results at age eight suggest that a child’s own DNA is the primary biological driver of their overall ADHD traits by mid-childhood.

While the results appear to rule out genetic nurture for total ADHD traits, the researchers caution against drawing absolute conclusions. The statistical models were hampered by large margins of error, meaning the results were not statistically significant enough to firmly distinguish direct from indirect effects in the more complicated models. The study might simply have lacked the mathematical power to detect subtle indirect influences.

The decision to analyze total ADHD scores rather than breaking them down into specific categories might have also obscured important details. Past studies have successfully detected indirect genetic effects on specific behaviors like hyperactivity and inattention. This suggests that genetic nurture might operate on certain specific behaviors rather than the overarching condition.

Another limitation is that the survey data relied solely on the mothers’ assessments of their children. Mothers’ ratings could be influenced by their own perceptions or biases based on their specific interactions with the children. Utilizing teacher reports or formal clinical diagnoses could provide a more rounded perspective in future investigations.

Additionally, the genetic data came exclusively from families of European ancestry. This demographic focus limits how well the findings might apply to more diverse populations worldwide. Future research could benefit from even more massive study samples across diverse demographics to better separate these intertwined genetic signals.

The study, “Direct and Indirect Genetic Effects on Child ADHD Traits in Early and Mid-Childhood: Trio Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analyses in a Large Norwegian Birth Registry Cohort,” was authored by Daniel L. Wechsler, Espen M. Eilertsen, Yasmin I. Ahmadzadeh, Rosa Cheesman, Nicoletta Adamo, Laurie J. Hannigan, Eivind Ystrom, and Tom A. McAdams. Their work adds new context to the ongoing scientific effort to untangle the developmental roots of behavioral traits.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/child-s-own-genetics-drive-adhd-traits-more-than-family-environment-large-study/

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DATE: October 15, 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: Your job says little about what you want in a partner, study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/your-job-says-little-about-what-you-want-in-a-partner-study-suggests/

The kind of industry a person works in appears to say very little about what they look for in a romantic partner, according to new research published in Personality and Individual Differences. Across seven countries, a person’s sex and whether they were imagining a short-term or long-term relationship were far more strongly linked to partner preferences than whether they worked in a people-focused, things-focused, or ideas-focused sector.

Vocational interests refer to the broad preferences that guide people toward certain types of work. Psychologists often map these interests along a spectrum that contrasts working with people, like nursing or teaching, with working with objects or systems, like engineering or logistics. A second dimension contrasts working with data and working with ideas, as in technology or finance; the researchers combined these into an “abstract” category. Interest theory treats these career interests as expressions of personality rather than just a taste for specific daily tasks.

If career interests reflect deep parts of personality, they might shape other major life choices, such as picking a partner. Men and women also differ markedly along the people-versus-things dimension: a 2009 meta-analysis found that men generally lean toward working with things and women toward working with people. This divide appears across cultures, as noted in a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 showing a global trend of women preferring people-oriented jobs and men preferring things-oriented occupations.

At the same time, relationship research has established that partner preferences differ by biological sex and relationship goals. The authors of a 1993 paper proposing sexual strategies theory argued, with supporting evidence, that what people prioritize in a partner changes dramatically depending on whether they are looking for a short-term fling or a long-term commitment. The new research brings these two lines of work together to test whether the dispositions that draw people to certain kinds of work also shape their romantic preferences.

The research was led by Peter K. Jonason of Vizja University and Dritjon Gruda, an invited associate professor of organizational behavior at Católica Porto Business School, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, and lecturer at Maynooth University School of Business.

“Vocational psychologists treat whether you are drawn to people or to things as a deep part of personality, more stable over time than the Big Five and very different between men and women,” Gruda told PsyPost. “If that holds, a pediatric nurse and a structural engineer should want different things in a partner, and nobody had checked whether they do.”

The Big Five refers to the five broad traits psychologists commonly use to describe personality, such as extraversion and conscientiousness.

To answer this question, the researchers recruited 1,974 adults (968 men and 982 women) through Prolific from seven countries, including the United States, Germany, and South Africa. The participants completed an online survey about their current employment and their romantic preferences. The researchers grouped participants into three occupational orientations based on their current industry: people-oriented (746 workers), things-oriented (289 workers), and abstract-oriented (710 workers).

To measure mate preferences, the team used a forced-choice task. In each of ten pairings, participants picked which of two traits mattered more from a set of five qualities: physicality (attractiveness and fitness), compassion (warmth and kindness), competence (intelligence and capability), compatibility (shared values and lifestyle), and character (honesty and moral values).

Participants completed this task twice, once imagining a short-term relationship and once imagining a long-term partnership, with the order varied across participants. Because each person made 10 choices per scenario, a trait chosen at an average rate would score 2. Choosing one trait meant passing on another, allowing the researchers to measure the relative priority of each quality on a scale from zero to four.

The results showed that occupational orientation had almost no association with partner preferences. The researchers used equivalence tests, which check whether a difference is small enough to count as negligible rather than simply failing to find one. By this standard, people-oriented and things-oriented workers made practically identical choices for competence and compatibility in both scenarios, and for character in the long-term scenario. Abstract-oriented workers, whom the researchers expected to favor character and compatibility, also chose these traits at rates equivalent to everyone else.

“Your job says very little about what you want in a partner,” Gruda explained. “Among 1,974 adults in seven countries, the sector people worked in had almost no bearing on how often they picked looks, compassion, competence, compatibility, or character. Their sex, and whether they were imagining a fling or a long-term relationship, mattered far more.”

Because things-oriented jobs were held mostly by men (68 percent) and people-oriented jobs mostly by women (63 percent), the researchers analyzed occupation and sex together. Things-oriented workers did choose physical attractiveness somewhat more often than people-oriented workers, but accounting for sex removed about two-thirds of that gap, leaving only a small difference.

The association the authors highlight involved compassion. In the long-term scenario, men in people-oriented jobs chose compassion more often than men in things-oriented jobs (an average of 2.21 versus 1.76 choices out of four), while women chose it at nearly identical rates regardless of sector. Because the researchers tested many outcomes, they applied a stricter threshold to guard against chance findings, and this link did not meet it; it also vanished when things-oriented workers were left out, so the authors treat it as exploratory.

The persistence of the sex difference within the same kinds of jobs stood out to the researchers. “Men in people-focused work like teaching and care, where most colleagues are women, still picked compassion less often than the women next to them,” Gruda noted. “The one occupational link we found, with people-oriented men valuing compassion more in a long-term partner, was small and did not survive correction for multiple tests.”

Sex and relationship context, by contrast, were consistently linked to partner preferences. In both long-term and short-term scenarios, men chose physical attractiveness more often than women did, while women chose compassion and competence more often than men did. For example, in long-term relationships, men chose physicality at an average rate of 1.13 choices compared to 0.60 choices for women, while women chose compassion 2.51 times versus 2.08 times for men. Men and women did not differ in how often they chose compatibility, and differed only slightly on character.

Relationship context reorganized priorities far more heavily than occupation did. When considering a short-term relationship rather than a long-term one, participants selected physicality nearly three times as often, jumping from an average of 0.85 choices to 2.33 choices. To accommodate this focus on looks, choices for compatibility, compassion, and character each fell by roughly half a choice, while competence dipped only slightly.

“Occupation explained extremely little in how often people picked any one trait,” Gruda pointed out. “Relationship context mattered far more.”

The pattern of choices was broadly similar across the seven countries, though some differences emerged, such as fewer compassion choices in Germany and Poland. Country accounted for about five times as much of the variation in compassion choices as occupation did, which the authors take as evidence that the task could detect group differences where they existed.

The authors interpret the weak role of occupation as support for the view that partner preferences are shaped by psychological mechanisms specialized for mating, rather than by the broad dispositions that steer people toward particular kinds of work. Because sex differences in career interests emerge early in life, they suggest sex may shape both the jobs people hold and what they want in a partner, though the study’s single-snapshot design cannot confirm this.

“For me, the main finding is that knowing the industry where somebody works tells us rather little about their partner preferences, once sex is taken into account,” said Toivo Aavik, an associate professor of individual and social psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, who has expertise in sexology and mate preferences and was not involved in the research. “Whether the person is thinking about a short-term or a long-term relationship makes a much larger difference. The results concerning sex and relationship context are broadly in line with previous research. The more novel part is the weak association with industry.”

“But here I see the main limitation: the study measured current industry, not vocational interests themselves,” Aavik continued. “These are related, but they are not the same thing. A nurse and a data analyst may both work in healthcare, while having quite different interests and daily tasks. Therefore, I would not yet conclude that vocational interests have little relevance for partner preferences.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study used the participants’ current employment industry as a stand-in for their actual vocational interests. People work where they do for practical reasons such as income, availability, or location, meaning a person’s current field may not reflect their underlying interests.

Gruda acknowledged the limitation while also cautioning against oversimplifying the findings. “We measured the industry people work in, not their vocational interests, and people take jobs for all sorts of reasons,” he said. “That noise would hide a real effect rather than create a false one, yet the same task picked up country differences several times larger than anything occupational. The results also do not mean men want only looks and women only kindness, because for a long-term partner both sexes picked character and compatibility most often.”

Measuring vocational interests directly with specialized assessments, rather than relying on current industry, could provide a more direct test in future investigations. The noise introduced by using industry as a proxy might make subtle associations harder to detect.

“I have reasonable confidence in the narrower result,” Aavik said. “The sample is relatively large, includes seven countries, and the authors used equivalence tests. This is a strength, because finding no statistically significant difference is not sufficient evidence that a difference is small. But still, a large sample cannot fully compensate for an indirect measure of the central concept.”

The forced-choice task also asked participants to choose between broad, abstract traits. While this approach reveals which general qualities people prioritize, real-world dating involves weighing complex combinations of these traits in actual people.

“Participants chose between desirable qualities in hypothetical relationship contexts,” Aavik observed. “Choosing attractiveness more often necessarily leaves fewer choices for other qualities. It does not mean that kindness or honesty is no longer valued. Also, these are average differences between groups; they tell us much less about a particular man or woman.”

The researchers also excluded participants who identified as non-binary or reported a sexual orientation other than heterosexual because those groups were too small to analyze separately. In addition, all seven countries in the sample were Western, industrialized nations, which leaves open the question of whether similar patterns would appear in other cultural settings.

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to build on this line of inquiry. “We would like to measure vocational interests directly instead of inferring them from industry, and to test samples beyond our seven Western countries,” Gruda stated.

Aavik similarly outlined key priorities for future investigations. “What I would most like to see next is a study measuring vocational interests directly and following actual romantic choices,” he told PsyPost. “From a sexology perspective, I would also want sexual compatibility to be assessed explicitly and sufficient representation of people (maybe) with different sexual orientations and/or gender identities.”

The study, “Sex, love, and work: What you do is not whom you want,” was authored by Peter K. Jonason and Dritjon Gruda.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/your-job-says-little-about-what-you-want-in-a-partner-study-suggests/

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 03:48PM
SOURCE: HEALTHCARE INFO SECURITY

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Machine learning uncovers early warning signs of depression in brain scans

URL: https://www.psypost.org/deep-learning-model-links-visual-distortions-to-future-depression-risk/

A new computational model combined with brain imaging data reveals that relying too heavily on prior expectations when perceiving facial expressions can predict a person’s risk for developing depression. By analyzing how the human brain processes angry faces, researchers identified a mathematical pattern of visual distortion that appears up to four years before clinical symptoms emerge. The study was published in Science Advances.

Major depressive disorder affects millions of people worldwide and is often difficult to treat once established. Early detection remains a high priority for public health experts, but predicting who will develop the condition relies mostly on self-reported symptoms and environmental risk factors. Identifying biological markers that indicate an individual’s vulnerability before they feel ill could improve prevention efforts.

Mental health conditions are often characterized by altered emotional processing, such as a tendency to interpret ambiguous social cues as negative or threatening. Leading psychological theories propose that our brains construct emotional experiences by using abstract concepts stored in our memory to interpret raw sensory information, like the visual details of a face. In recent years, researchers have mapped out various brain regions associated with depression, but these descriptive patterns do not explain the exact mechanisms driving the illness.

Han Lu and Qiang Luo, researchers at Shenzhen University and Fudan University, respectively, sought to understand how this integration of sensory input and abstract memory might go wrong in people prone to depression. They hypothesized that the visual cortex, the brain region responsible for processing sight, might act as an early bottleneck where social threat signals become distorted. To test this idea, the researchers developed a mathematical simulation to replicate how the human brain learns to recognize emotional expressions.

The researchers first analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans from 1,332 nineteen-year-old participants in a population-based European study known as the IMAGEN cohort. This imaging technique measures blood flow in the brain to detect areas of neural activity. The scans tracked the adolescents’ brain activity while they viewed short video clips of faces transitioning from neutral expressions to angry ones.

Using a machine learning algorithm, the research team extracted a mathematical representation of how each participant’s visual cortex encoded the angry faces. They refer to this specific pattern of neural activity as a visual code. The team then grouped the participants based on the efficiency of these visual codes, separating them into one group with typical, highly efficient visual encoding and another with inefficient, noisy visual processing.

Adolescents in the less efficient group reported higher levels of emotional symptoms, such as anxiety and low mood, on clinical questionnaires. This relationship indicated that a degraded visual representation of angry faces was tied to emotional distress. The researchers determined that poor visual coding in the brain was directly related to the presence of emotional symptoms.

To understand the computational mechanism behind this degraded visual processing, the team built a deep neural network, which is an artificial intelligence model composed of interconnected algorithms modeled after the human brain. This specific model featured two distinct processing pathways. One pathway processed raw visual information from images, while the other pathway held abstract conceptual knowledge about different emotions.

In standard human perception, the brain uses abstract knowledge to guide and speed up the processing of visual information, allowing a person to recognize a facial expression quickly. The researchers programmed their artificial network to mimic this process, allowing the conceptual pathway to regulate the visual pathway as the model learned to identify facial expressions. When the researchers compared the artificial network’s internal mathematical code to the human brain scans, they found a strong alignment.

This similarity suggested the model successfully replicated the visual perception of angry faces. The team then conducted an experiment on the model by altering the strength of the conceptual pathway’s influence over the visual pathway. They systematically turned the regulation strength up and down to observe how the network would respond.

When the regulation was set to an intermediate level, the model achieved optimal emotion recognition. However, when the researchers forced the model to apply excessive conceptual regulation, it began to misclassify neutral faces as angry or sad. This overreliance on abstract concepts overrode the actual visual details, producing a computational negative bias.

The internal code of this overly regulated artificial model closely matched the inefficient, noisy brain patterns found in the adolescents with higher emotional symptoms. This suggests that overregularization, which is the act of letting preexisting beliefs overpower sensory reality, acts as a mechanism that drives negative emotional biases.

Building on this simulation, the researchers created a computational marker that quantified each human participant’s degree of visual overregularization based on their brain scans at age nineteen. They then followed up with 725 of these participants four years later. The goal was to see if the marker could forecast the onset of mental health issues.

Among the young adults who had no clinical symptoms at age nineteen, the mathematical marker successfully predicted which individuals would develop high levels of emotional symptoms by age twenty-three. This prediction model outperformed traditional baseline measures that rely only on demographics and basic brain activation levels. The finding suggests that the overregulation mechanism may precede the onset of emotional symptoms.

To determine if this computational mechanism was specific to depression, the team examined genetic data from the IMAGEN participants. They checked for associations between the overregulation marker and genetic variants tied to various psychiatric conditions. The analysis showed a link between the overregulated visual marker and a specific genetic variant associated with major depressive disorder, located on a gene involved in brain development.

The marker was also linked to the participants’ polygenic risk score for depression, which is a number that summarizes the estimated effect of many different genetic variants on a person’s risk for a disease. The visual marker did not show any links to the genetic risks for alcohol use disorder or eating disorders. This specificity supported the idea that the visual distortion mechanism is uniquely tied to depression.

Finally, the researchers tested their marker in a separate clinical dataset of young adults to see if it persisted in established illnesses. They analyzed brain scans from 134 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder and 62 healthy control subjects. The patients with depression exhibited higher levels of the overregulation marker compared to the healthy controls.

The marker accurately classified whether a participant had depression or not. When applied to patients with alcohol use disorder, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa, the marker showed no group differences. The traditional brain activation measures were not statistically significant in distinguishing the depressed patients from the healthy controls.

The study participants from both the population-based and clinical cohorts were predominantly white individuals from middle-to-high socioeconomic backgrounds. Future research will need to examine whether these specific computational patterns apply equally to populations with different ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic demographics. The differences in emotional symptoms between the high-efficiency and low-efficiency visual processing groups in the general adolescent sample were also relatively small.

While expected in general population studies capturing subclinical distress, this small effect size means the visual clustering approach alone has limited diagnostic power for individual patients at this stage. Researchers must validate the broader clinical utility of this marker in independent patient groups. Tracking these computational markers in younger adolescents could reveal if the visual distortions appear even earlier in development.

Tracking patients over time will also help determine if the marker can predict long-term recovery versus chronic illness. Identifying whether the visual distortion is a permanent trait or a temporary state would assist in designing targeted therapies. Interventions that aim to retrain visual processing might one day help mitigate this depression risk.

The study, “Deep learning reveals a neurocomputational mechanism predicting depression risk in adolescents,” was authored by Han Lu, Xiaoqian Yan, Benjamin Becker, Andreas Heinz, Barbara J. Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Zhaoyu Zuo, Luolong Cao, Zuo Zhang, Lauren Robinson, Nilakshi Vaidya, Jeanne Winterer, Sinead King, Charlotte Walton, Tobias Banaschewski, Gareth J. Barker, Arun L.W. Bokde, Rüdiger Brühl, Herta Flor, Hugh Garavan, Penny Gowland, Antoine Grigis, Herve Lemaitre, Jean-Luc Martinot, Marie-Laure Paillère Martinot, Eric Artiges, Frauke Nees, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Luise Poustka, Hedi Kebir, Ulrike Schmidt, Julia Sinclair, Michael N. Smolka, Sarah Hohmann, Nathalie Holz, Henrik Walter, Robert Whelan, Sylvane Desrivières, Gunter Schumann, Qiang Luo, STRATIFY/ESTRA Consortium, and IMAGEN Consortium.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/deep-learning-model-links-visual-distortions-to-future-depression-risk/

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Social freedom shapes whose version of reality you adopt, new research suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/social-freedom-shapes-whose-version-of-reality-you-adopt-new-research-suggests/

New research provides evidence that the culture or social environment we live in influences whose version of the world we adopt as our own. People in settings where relationships are easily formed and broken tend to align their worldviews more selectively with people who help them achieve their goals, partly by feeling less in sync with those who don’t. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Human beings have an inherent need to make sense of the world, a process often shaped by the people around them. Psychologists refer to this merging of inner states, beliefs, and judgments as shared reality. As noted in a study covered by PsyPost in 2021, this psychological factor acts as an important bonding mechanism. It allows two people to experience the world through a common lens, deepening their connection.

People do not attempt to establish this deep mental connection with just anyone. They are often motivated to build shared reality with instrumental others, which refers to friends, family members, or colleagues who help them achieve specific personal or professional goals. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2023 indicated that experiencing a shared reality with these helpful individuals is associated with greater academic and personal success. Sharing reality with helpful people has been linked to greater confidence in one’s own abilities and may help keep those relationships intact.

The research, led by Abdo Elnakouri, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and director of the Worldviews in Motion Lab, alongside Eli J. Finkel of Northwestern University and Abigail A. Scholer of the University of Virginia, explored how the broader cultural context might alter this dynamic. Specifically, the authors focused on a concept called relational mobility. This refers to the degree of freedom people have in a given society to form new relationships and end existing ones.

“Honestly this came as an idea to previous work our team had done on shared reality and goal success,” Elnakouri told PsyPost. “I came across the relational mobility variable through reading and going to conferences. Seemed like a possible cool extension.”

“Research finds those in high relational mobility contexts invest more in their relationships: they express more love, give grander gifts, and reveal deeper secrets,” Elnakouri said. “In these contexts, people don’t take their relationships for granted (the person can leave!), working harder to invest in them. So it made sense that this might extend out to shared reality as well.”

In low relational mobility contexts, social networks are more rigid, and people are largely tied to their existing connections. In high relational mobility settings, by contrast, people can easily choose new ties or walk away from current ones. Elnakouri and his team suspected that when people live in highly mobile environments where partners could leave, they might feel a stronger need to secure their most beneficial relationships.

“Specifically, I wondered whether relational mobility might push people to not only invest their hearts , but also their minds in those they care about,” Elnakouri continued. “Might people be motivated to share reality, or ‘merge minds,’ with others when in a high relationally mobile context?”

To test this idea, the researchers first analyzed an archival dataset containing responses from nearly 17,000 participants across 39 countries. Participants completed questionnaires assessing the relational mobility of their local environment. They also reported on their relationship with a close friend or romantic partner, rating how much emotional support that person provided and whether they could count on the person in times of need. In addition, they rated how much they felt the person truly understood them, which served as a basic measure for shared reality.

People who lived in more relationally mobile settings tended to report more shared reality with their close partner. This association depended on how supportive the partner was. Comparing countries, the gap arose because people in high-mobility countries reported less shared reality with less supportive partners; when the researchers instead used participants’ own perceptions of mobility, the gap arose because people reported more shared reality with supportive partners.

To build on these initial patterns, the researchers conducted two social network studies with undergraduate students at a Canadian university, 353 in the first and 277 in the second. Both samples were composed mostly of women. Instead of focusing on just one close relationship, participants nominated people they had been in contact with during the past month (up to 30 in the first study and up to five in the second), rating each person’s helpfulness for their goals and their degree of shared reality.

When looking at these broader social networks, the researchers did not find that high relational mobility predicted an overall increase in shared reality. Instead, the effects centered on the relative difference between helpful and unhelpful members of their network. In both the 39-country dataset and the network studies, the scientists also measured other types of similarity, including shared personality traits, upbringing, and geographical background, but these did not follow the same pattern, suggesting the dynamic was specific to shared reality.

In three of four analyses, students who saw their social world as highly mobile showed a bigger gap between helpful and unhelpful people in their networks. In one analysis, this gap stemmed from lower shared reality with less helpful people; in the others, the shifts with helpful and unhelpful people were not statistically significant on their own. A measure of how free participants themselves felt to leave relationships showed no such pattern, which the authors interpret as a sign that concerns about others leaving drive the effect.

“I think the fact that people seem to primarily distance themselves from those who do not support their goal in high relationally mobile contexts was interesting,” Elnakouri explained. “So when people have choices, they look to more exclusively invest in those who are invested in them. It could have been the case that people only drew closer to those who helped them with their goal instead of distancing themselves from those that didn’t.”

Because the first three datasets relied on correlational data, the authors conducted an experiment to test whether shifting perceptions of relational mobility would directly alter shared reality. They recruited 590 adults and asked them to nominate three specific people in their lives: one who was helpful for their career goals, one who was not helpful for their career, and a third newer acquaintance unrelated to their career. In a separate pilot study of 102 people, the researchers confirmed that their experimental writing task shifted how freely people felt others around them could come and go.

In the main experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the high relational mobility condition, they wrote about whether the third acquaintance might eventually drift away and leave their life. In the low relational mobility condition, they wrote about how that person might stay close and remain in their life.

Participants in the high relational mobility condition reported less shared reality with their less helpful career contacts (an average of 3.69 on a 7-point scale, compared with 4.04 in the low mobility condition). Shared reality with helpful contacts did not differ between conditions, suggesting that a sense of social fragility leads people to mentally distance themselves from less helpful ties.

“To answer that question, we find that the answer is ‘yes,’ but with one crucial caveat,” Elnakouri said, looking across the research program as a whole. “It looks like relational mobility pushes people to invest more in some relationships, yes, but also less in others.”

“The takeaway: cultures seem to shape how we see the world, but also who we look to in order to form our perceptions of the world/reality,” Elnakouri noted. “I think this is a cool connection between work on culture, shared reality, relationships, and self-regulation.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding these findings. In the first study, participants were recruited through Facebook and 86 percent were women, which may limit generalizability. In addition, the social network studies relied on student samples at a single university, and the experiment manipulated perceptions by focusing on thoughts about a single acquaintance. Study 1 also measured shared reality with a single survey question, which captures only a narrow slice of the concept; the later studies used a more complete, validated questionnaire.

Social fluidity is also just one piece of the puzzle. “Effect sizes were what you’d expect from typical social psychology studies, so there is sure to be plenty of other factors shaping our worldviews!” Elnakouri pointed out.

There is also the question of how these selective alignments impact society at large. The authors suggest that if people in fluid social environments build shared reality more selectively with those who benefit their goals, they might form insular bubbles, leading to diverging views from those outside their immediate circles. Future research could test whether more relationally mobile cultures are more prone to defensiveness, polarization, and divided worldviews.

The research team plans to continue investigating how environmental contexts and personal goals interact. “I want to continue to explore how people’s worldviews are shaped by complex dynamics across multiple levels of analysis (e.g., self-regulatory needs, cultural context) that too rarely come into conversation with one another,” Elnakouri said.

The study, “Choosing Our Reality: Relational Mobility Shapes When and With Whom People Share Reality,” was authored by Abdo Elnakouri, Eli J. Finkel, and Abigail A. Scholer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/social-freedom-shapes-whose-version-of-reality-you-adopt-new-research-suggests/

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 11:44AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMES

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Puberty may mark a turning point for sex differences in the brain’s emotion and memory centers

URL: https://www.psypost.org/puberty-may-mark-a-turning-point-for-sex-differences-in-the-brains-emotion-and-memory-centers/

Differences between males and females in the fine-grained tissue structure of deep brain regions are minimal at ages 9 to 12 but emerge and widen during adolescence, according to a new brain imaging study. The timing coincides with puberty and with the period when sex differences in conditions like anxiety and depression begin to appear, though the study could not determine what drives the brain changes. The findings were published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Deep gray matter refers to a collection of structures located beneath the outer layer of the brain. These areas include the amygdala, which processes emotions, the hippocampus, which is central to memory, and the nucleus accumbens, which plays a role in reward and motivation. The study also examined the thalamus, a relay hub for sensory signals, and the caudate and putamen, which help control movement and habits. In human populations, many mental health conditions tied to these brain functions show different rates of diagnosis between men and women, but the biological reasons behind these differences remain poorly understood.

Animal research points to puberty as a key period for these changes: a 2008 study in rats found that sex hormones during puberty drive the addition of new cells to brain regions that differ between the sexes. In humans, a 2014 study that followed young people over time found that pubertal development was linked to the size of these deep brain regions in both boys and girls, independent of age.

While overall volume provides part of the picture, scientists have sought to understand the microscopic layout of brain tissue. Earlier work by the same research team, covered by PsyPost in 2024, found large differences between young adult men and women in measures of tissue microstructure, with men showing signs of more densely packed cells in regions like the hippocampus. The new research, led by Christopher G. Filippi of The Hospital for Sick Children and Richard Watts of the University of Canterbury, aimed to pinpoint when those microscopic differences first develop.

The research team examined brain scan data from 1,643 individuals aged 9 to 35. The participants were drawn from two large public databases: the Human Connectome Project Development dataset for children and teens, and the Young Adult dataset for older participants. In their analyses, the scientists statistically controlled for age and body mass index, and they accounted for family relationships among the many twins included in the adult sample.

To evaluate tissue microstructure, the researchers used an advanced magnetic resonance imaging technique called Restriction Spectrum Imaging. This method measures how water molecules diffuse through brain tissue. Water trapped inside a cell encounters barriers, producing a restricted diffusion signal that reflects cell packing. Water in the spaces between cells encounters fewer obstacles, producing a hindered diffusion signal that reflects the extracellular environment.

For the youngest participants, aged 9 to 12, the researchers observed no statistically significant differences between boys and girls in these diffusion measures. Across the deep gray matter structures, the tissue composition in childhood appeared similar between the sexes.

However, differences began to emerge between ages 13 and 16, first in the hippocampus, amygdala, and thalamus. Restricted diffusion rose with age in both sexes, but from puberty onward it was consistently higher in males, a pattern the researchers suggest may reflect more densely packed cells or larger cell bodies. By ages 17 to 21, sex accounted for roughly 13 to 33 percent of the variation in restricted diffusion across all six regions, and in adults it explained 32 to 37 percent in the hippocampus and amygdala.

Females, in turn, showed a larger hindered component, meaning a greater share of the water signal came from the spaces between cells. Because both measures are expressed as shares of the total signal, the two patterns largely mirror each other.

In regions such as the nucleus accumbens, caudate, and putamen, females showed a slowing in development in their late teens before accelerating again in their early 20s, while males followed a more steady progression. By the mid-20s, the size of the sex difference in the hippocampus and amygdala had leveled off, though the measures themselves were still changing in both sexes. In the thalamus, the divergence between the sexes continued to widen up to age 35.

“Sex differences in the brain have so far been primarily investigated at the macro-structural level (i.e., differences in overall brain size or differences in the size of specific regions),” said Yumnah Khan, a doctoral scientist at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the research. “What is interesting about this work is it provides evidence for differences in brain microstructure (i.e., what is happening at a finer level within brain tissue), which gives us a more detailed picture of sex differences in the brain.”

Marco Balducci, a senior researcher at the University of Turku who was not involved in the study, said the findings build on earlier work. “Earlier studies had identified sex differences in subcortical brain structure and, more recently, in diffusion-derived microstructure in young adults,” Balducci told PsyPost. “This study extends that work by showing that the differences emerge during adolescence rather than simply being present in adulthood.”

The timing of these changes aligns with the pubertal transition, leading the study authors to speculate about biological drivers. Earlier animal work indicates that sex hormones can influence synapses and dendrites, the connection points and branching extensions of nerve cells. Because these adolescent brain shifts occur alongside the emergence of sex-biased mental health conditions, identifying typical developmental paths could help clarify underlying vulnerabilities.

Khan told PsyPost that considering human imaging alongside animal research helps connect biology to observation. “Animal studies can provide much stronger evidence about causality and specific mechanisms, while human studies are generally observational and correlational,” she said. “However, when both of these lines of research are considered and interpreted together, we get a better picture of the mechanisms underlying sex differences in brain development.”

Balducci noted that the broad descriptive findings appear well-supported. “The main descriptive finding appears robust because the study uses a large combined sample, finds a consistent developmental pattern across several brain regions, and applies correction for multiple comparisons,” he said. “However, the reasons for these differences remain uncertain because the data are cross-sectional, and in this setting it is difficult to distinguish age-related changes from pubertal development or establish a hormonal cause.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on cross-sectional data from different individuals at each age, rather than following the same individuals across their development. Additionally, puberty was measured using ratings of physical development, which rose so closely with age that the researchers could not separate the effects of puberty from those of getting older, and hormone levels were not measured. The researchers did find an association between a girl’s first menstrual period and a specific measure in the thalamus, but they describe any role of sex hormones as speculative.

The researchers also had to combine two projects that used different scanners and imaging settings. Because one covered ages 9 to 21 and the other ages 22 to 36, the statistical adjustments for those differences fall at the same point as the transition into adulthood, so features of the age trajectories near that point, such as the slowdown seen in females, should be read with some caution. Comparisons between males and females within each age group are less affected.

“I think the biggest risk is interpreting these findings as showing that male and female brains are fundamentally different,” Khan said. “In reality, sex differences in the brain tend to be relatively small, with a lot of overlap between the sexes.”

She added that the timing of differences depends on which ages a study covers. “It is also important not to assume that adolescence is when these differences necessarily begin,” Khan noted. “Although the study found minimal differences early in childhood, sex-by-age effects can be highly sensitive to the particular age range that is being studied. As such, the findings do not necessarily mean that differences are entirely absent earlier in development.”

Balducci also cautioned against reading too much into what the scans can show.

“The findings do not show that differences in water diffusion directly cause differences in behavior or mental health,” Balducci pointed out. “Diffusion MRI provides an indirect measure of tissue microstructure.”

“Also, as with many sex differences, males and females vary on average,” Balducci added. “However, when multiple small differences are considered together, the overall profiles of males and females can become considerably more distinct.”

To address these remaining questions, both outside researchers point toward the need for investigations that capture earlier and more detailed developmental data.

“The most important next step would be a longitudinal study that repeatedly scans the same individuals before, during, and after puberty, while also measuring pubertal hormones and developmental phases,” Balducci told PsyPost. “That would help determine whether the observed diffusion changes track individual pubertal development and whether they are related to later mental-health outcomes.”

“It would be very interesting to see this approach being used in earlier stages of development, such as the prenatal period,” Khan said. “The prenatal period is another critical window for the emergence of sex differences in the brain. Moreover, male and female fetuses are exposed to different levels of sex hormones, which may contribute to differences in early brain development.”

The researchers say the sex-specific trajectories they describe could serve as a reference point for future studies exploring how departures from typical development might relate to mental health conditions.

The study, “Sex Differences in Human Deep Grey Matter Microstructure Emerge During Adolescence,” was authored by Christopher G. Filippi, Jay N. Giedd, Aziz M. Uluğ, and Richard Watts.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/puberty-may-mark-a-turning-point-for-sex-differences-in-the-brains-emotion-and-memory-centers/

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 08:52AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: Mysterious brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousness

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015003440.htm

Even under general anesthesia, the human brain can analyze language, recognize different types of words, and predict what comes next in a story, according to a surprising discovery by Baylor researchers. The findings challenge our understanding of consciousness and suggest that the unconscious brain is far more capable than scientists previously realized.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015003440.htm

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 08:52AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Mysterious brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousness

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015003440.htm

Even under general anesthesia, the human brain can analyze language, recognize different types of words, and predict what comes next in a story, according to a surprising discovery by Baylor researchers. The findings challenge our understanding of consciousness and suggest that the unconscious brain is far more capable than scientists previously realized.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015003440.htm

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 01:28AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Strokes have nearly doubled among younger adults, and scientists aren't sure why

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015459.htm

Strokes are becoming alarmingly common among younger adults, with rates nearly doubling among people ages 20 to 54 over nearly three decades. Researchers found that blocked blood vessels in the brain accounted for much of the increase, while high blood pressure, diabetes, and substance use also became more common among younger stroke patients. Although survival rates have improved, more young adults may now face the lasting consequences of stroke.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261014015459.htm

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 06:05AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Rare study reveals a striking divide inside an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261013015814.htm

A rare examination of an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain revealed that regions cleared of amyloid plaques had remarkably little of the harmful tau buildup associated with memory loss, while neighboring areas showed extensive damage. The discovery suggests that removing amyloid may have lasting protective effects and could help slow Alzheimer’s progression, especially when treatment begins early.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261013015814.htm

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: October 15, 2026 at 08:33AM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

Direct article link at end of text block below.

Dr. William Brim along with Drs. Elizabeth Parins, Kelly Chrestman, & Kristyn Heins & Ms. Cat Rizzuto, hosted 20 Ukrainian civilian + military mental health professionals last week in Warsaw, Poland, for the first of 2 training and education research programs funded by the CCCRP. https://t.co/8n4sTUtyBt

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Articles can be found at https://deploymentpsych.org/.

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DATE: October 15, 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: Psychologists identify three distinct profiles of support for free speech

URL: https://www.psypost.org/support-for-free-speech-is-linked-to-conspiracy-beliefs-and-low-trust-in-institu/

People who express the most permissive attitudes toward free speech often harbor stronger beliefs in conspiracy theories and lower trust in societal institutions. These patterns suggest that advocating for unrestricted expression is not always driven by a commitment to democratic values, but might also stem from a deep skepticism toward official narratives. The research was published in Personality and Individual Differences.

Psychologists have traditionally measured support for freedom of speech as a single, overarching attitude. This approach assumes that a person who defends the right to speak freely will do so evenly across all situations. In recent years, researchers have proposed that this support is actually broken down into different categories, depending on the type of speech involved. A person might tolerate everyday disagreements but draw the line at speech that is deeply offensive or threatens social order.

To capture these nuances, researchers have recently defined free speech support across four specific dimensions. The first is tolerance for offensive speech, which involves accepting language that challenges deeply held moral frameworks or sacred values. The second is tolerance for disagreement, or allowing others to express contradictory beliefs that might cause interpersonal tension.

The third dimension is tolerance for heterodox speech. This involves an openness to non-mainstream or unconventional ideas, even those that seem irrational. The final dimension is tolerance for socially divisive speech, which reflects support for public advocacy or protests that could be seen as threatening societal cohesion.

Researchers also suspected that attitudes about free speech might relate to how people view information and authority. People who distrust dominant institutions, such as the government or the news media, might favor completely unrestricted expression as a way to bypass what they perceive as informational control. Nejc Plohl, a psychologist at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, led a research team to investigate how these different dimensions of free speech support combine within individuals. Plohl and his colleagues, Dean Korošak and Boris Podobnik, wanted to see if specific types of people share distinct patterns of tolerance for controversial speech.

The researchers surveyed 563 European adults online. The participants completed a 24-item questionnaire designed to measure their tolerance for the four specific types of speech mentioned above. Participants rated how much they agreed with statements assessing their willingness to allow offensive, disagreeing, heterodox, and socially divisive speech.

Alongside the free speech questionnaire, the participants answered questions about their political ideology, their level of education, and their gender. They also completed measures to gauge their belief in conspiracy theories and their trust in three major societal institutions. To assess institutional trust, participants estimated the percentage of journalists, politicians, and scientists who prioritize truth and public well-being over other interests. To measure conspiracy ideation, participants rated how strongly they believed that official accounts of events are frequently designed to hide the truth.

The researchers first used a statistical technique called confirmatory factor analysis to see if the participants’ answers naturally grouped into the four proposed categories of speech. This method tests whether a set of survey items accurately measures the distinct concepts they were designed to evaluate. The analysis showed that people do indeed view offensive, disagreeing, heterodox, and socially divisive speech as distinct concepts. The researchers found no statistical support for a single, general attitude covering all forms of free expression.

Next, the team used a method called latent profile analysis to sort the participants into groups based on their shared response patterns. This technique identifies hidden subgroups within a larger population by finding people who answer questions in very similar ways. The analysis revealed three distinct profiles of free speech support.

The majority of the participants, making up about 57 percent of the group, fell into a “conditional tolerance” profile. These individuals showed average tolerance for offensive speech and disagreement, but were slightly less tolerant of heterodox and socially divisive speech. This suggests they hold a moderate, context-sensitive view of free expression.

About 20 percent of the participants formed a “low tolerance” profile. These individuals consistently reported the lowest acceptance of controversial or norm-challenging speech across all four categories. They were especially intolerant of offensive speech and basic disagreement.

The remaining 23 percent of the sample fell into a “broad tolerance” profile. These participants expressed highly permissive attitudes toward all forms of speech, including ideas that most people would find offensive or socially destructive.

When the researchers looked at how these profiles aligned with other personal characteristics, several patterns emerged. Men and highly educated individuals were heavily overrepresented in the broad tolerance group. Women were more prevalent in the low tolerance group. Age differences between the profiles were not statistically significant.

In terms of politics, the low tolerance profile leaned slightly more conservative than the other groups. The broad tolerance profile leaned more liberal, with the conditional tolerance profile falling in the middle. The most pronounced differences, however, appeared in how the groups viewed institutions and information.

Participants in the broad tolerance group reported the highest levels of belief in conspiracy theories and the lowest levels of trust in science, politics, and journalism. Conversely, the conditional tolerance group exhibited the highest trust in these institutions and the lowest endorsement of conspiracy theories. The researchers concluded that a blanket endorsement of free speech often co-occurs with an underlying distrust of official authorities.

The study relied on an abstract questionnaire that asked participants how they felt about hypothetical types of speech. People often respond differently when confronted with specific, real-world examples of controversial statements. Because the survey did not present concrete scenarios, the findings represent how people think about free speech in theory rather than how they might react in practice. The researchers noted that individuals might support free speech in principle but oppose it when faced with specific topics or targets.

The research relied on data collected at a single point in time, meaning it cannot determine the direction of the relationship between free speech attitudes and institutional trust. It is unknown whether a deep skepticism of institutions causes people to support unrestricted speech, or if holding permissive views on speech naturally leads to greater distrust of authority. It is also possible that an unmeasured factor drives both of these attitudes simultaneously.

The researchers measured political ideology and conspiracy beliefs using very brief questionnaires to reduce the time burden on participants. While these shorter surveys are common in psychological research, they cannot capture the full depth of a person’s political worldview or their specific conspiratorial beliefs. Future studies will need to use more comprehensive assessments to fully understand how these complex traits relate to free speech attitudes.

The study, “Distinct profiles of free speech support and their demographic, ideological, and epistemic characteristics,” was authored by Nejc Plohl, Dean Korošak, and Boris Podobnik.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/support-for-free-speech-is-linked-to-conspiracy-beliefs-and-low-trust-in-institu/

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DATE: October 15, 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: Psilocybin appears to strengthen this optical illusion, but LSD microdoses do not

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-appears-to-strengthen-this-optical-illusion-but-lsd-microdoses-do-not/

New research indicates that very low doses of LSD can make the world look blurrier, more colorful, and more dynamic to participants, even without causing full hallucinogenic trips. However, the drug did not appear to change how strongly people experienced a visual illusion that depends on the surrounding scene. The findings were published in Neuroscience of Consciousness.

To make sense of what we see, the visual cortex, the brain region at the back of the head that processes sight, takes the surrounding scene into account. One result is an illusion called contrast surround suppression: a striped pattern looks fainter, or lower in contrast, when it is surrounded by a bold, high-contrast pattern. Scientists think this happens partly because activity in brain cells responding to the surround dampens the response of cells responding to the center.

Classic psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin produce their effects mainly by activating a type of serotonin receptor, a chemical docking site on brain cells. A study covered by PsyPost in 2022, which analyzed more than 6,000 written accounts of psychedelic trips, linked descriptions of altered sensory perception to areas of the visual cortex rich in serotonin receptors.

Previous experiments suggest that psychedelics can change how strongly the brain relies on visual context. For example, a 2019 study of mice showed that a psychedelic drug reduced surround suppression in the visual cortex.

In humans, however, the effect might go the other direction. A small 2024 pilot study of six volunteers found that a high dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, made a similar contrast illusion stronger, and that people with more intense visual effects showed bigger changes.

Adding to this evidence, a 2025 study found that low to moderate doses of psilocybin made people more susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion, in which a circle looks larger or smaller depending on the size of the circles around it. Together, these findings suggest that psilocybin can change how the human brain uses surrounding visual context.

Some people take very small amounts of psychedelics, known as microdoses, in hopes of boosting their mood or creativity. However, a second study covered by PsyPost in 2022 found that repeated LSD microdoses did not reliably improve mood or cognitive performance compared with a placebo, though the higher dose produced small increases in feelings of vigor. The new study tests whether these very low doses might still objectively alter basic visual perception.

The research, led by Lucca Jaeckel, a doctoral student at the Translational Psychiatry Lab at the University of Basel’s Department of Psychiatry, aimed to test whether a low dose of a different psychedelic, LSD, would produce changes like those seen with psilocybin. “There are different theories about how psychedelic drugs cause altered visual perception,” Jaeckel told PsyPost.

“A few studies, two of which investigated psilocybin in humans, have shown alterations in a neural phenomenon called surround suppression, where brain responses to a stimulus at some location in the visual field are suppressed by stimulation in the surrounding area,” he explained. “One way to study surround suppression is through studying visual illusions. The previous studies showed that psilocybin could enhance the illusory amplification of perceived stimulus size and the illusory suppression of stimulus contrast, which are both linked with these surround suppression mechanisms.”

“We wanted to see if LSD microdoses (10 and 20 μg) affect these processes in the same way as psilocybin, using a contrast discrimination task in healthy human participants,” Jaeckel said.

The researchers conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study, analyzing data from 31 healthy adults who completed at least two sessions. Each participant was scheduled for three testing sessions at least a week apart, receiving a placebo in one, 10 micrograms of LSD in another, and 20 micrograms in the third. Neither the participants nor the researchers knew which substance was given on which day until the study concluded. The participants averaged 28 years old, and about half had used psychedelics before.

Four hours after taking the dose, the participants completed a visual contrast task on a computer. On each of 100 trials, they saw two circular patches of drifting light and dark stripes for one second. One patch sat in the center of the screen inside a ring of high-contrast stripes, while the other appeared off to the side with no ring.

The participants pressed a key to indicate which patch looked higher in contrast. Because the surrounding ring creates a suppressing illusion, people typically underestimate the contrast of the center patch.

Throughout the testing days, participants also filled out detailed questionnaires about their subjective experiences. They rated how they felt on sliding scales, answering questions about whether their vision seemed sharper or blurrier, brighter or darker, more or less saturated with color, and static or dynamic. They also rated broader psychological feelings, such as whether they felt a sense of boundary dissolution or visionary changes.

These subjective measures were examined in exploratory analyses, meaning they were not part of the plan the researchers registered in advance. On a 100-point scale, ratings of “any drug effect” rose by about 17 points at 20 micrograms and about 5 points at 10 micrograms. The 20-microgram dose also produced a mildly altered state of consciousness, with higher scores for visionary changes, oceanic boundlessness (pleasant feelings such as bliss and insightfulness), and reduced alertness. These increases were small, amounting to roughly 2 to 5 percent of each scale’s maximum.

Visually, participants reported that 20 micrograms made colors look more saturated, made the world seem more dynamic, as if things were in motion, and made their vision blurrier. Even the 10-microgram dose made vision slightly blurrier than placebo, while brightness ratings did not change. These shifts were modest, between about 3 and 7 points on a scale running 50 points in either direction from “normal.”

At the end of each session, participants guessed which treatment they had received. They identified the placebo and the 20-microgram dose at better-than-chance rates, but not the 10-microgram dose.

“There is considerable disagreement as to what dose of a psychedelic constitutes a microdose,” Jaeckel noted. “We used doses of 10 and 20 μg which are often considered microdoses.”

“Some people would argue a microdose is a dose that does not noticeably affect conscious state,” he explained. “Interestingly, our 10 μg dose was not identified as an active dose beyond chance level, yet we could show a small effect of that low dose on subjective visual perception.”

Despite these subjective changes in how the world looked, the objective task results told a different story. Of the 93 completed sessions, 68 sessions from 24 participants met the researchers’ quality criteria; most of the rest were excluded because the responses suggested participants had misunderstood or could not perform the task. In the remaining data, the task reliably produced the illusion, but LSD did not measurably change its strength. A statistical analysis designed to weigh evidence for and against an effect strongly favored no effect of the drug.

The researchers also checked whether participants who reported the biggest changes in their visual perception at 20 micrograms showed bigger changes on the task. They found no correlation, unlike the 2024 psilocybin pilot study, which had linked more intense visual effects to stronger suppression. This suggests that, at these doses, the conscious feeling of altered vision can occur without changes in the brain’s early, automatic filtering of visual contrast.

“Unlike psilocybin, LSD did not affect spatial context-related contrast perception as would be expected from altered surround suppression. At the same time, we did find subjective alterations to visual perception,” Jaeckel said. “This indicates that alterations in surround suppression are not necessary for the perceptual alterations induced by LSD. Nevertheless, it may be that psychedelics affect surround suppression at higher doses where this may affect visual perception.”

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Because participants could often tell when they had received the 20-microgram dose or the placebo, expectations may have inflated their subjective ratings. The authors argue that expectations alone are unlikely to explain the visual effects, noting that some sources describe low-dose psychedelics as making vision sharper, the opposite of the blurriness participants reported.

The authors suggest the most likely reason for the lack of an objective effect is the low dose. Based on a direct comparison study, 20 micrograms of LSD is roughly equivalent to 4 milligrams of psilocybin, far below the 25-milligram dose used in the 2024 contrast study and slightly below the 5-milligram dose that affected the size illusion in the 2025 study.

Low doses of LSD may change conscious perception without being strong enough to shift early visual processing. LSD also acts on dopamine receptors in ways psilocybin does not, and the authors speculate that these effects, which may emerge later in the drug’s time course, could have counteracted any change in surround suppression.

There are a few other things to keep in mind regarding the study design. The contrast task was administered four hours after the participants took the drug, past the absolute peak of the drug’s effects. Additionally, participants were asked to avoid caffeine before and during sessions, because caffeine can itself influence brain activity measures and surround suppression. For regular caffeine users, withdrawal or fatigue four hours into the session may have made it harder to maintain focus.

Future studies could build on these findings by testing higher doses of LSD to see if the contrast illusion eventually shifts, or by testing participants earlier in the drug’s timeline. For now, the evidence indicates that while low doses of LSD can make the world seem more colorful, blurry, and dynamic, they did not measurably change how the brain handles this contrast illusion.

“This is the first publication from a larger study investigating how LSD affects how different kinds of context are used toward making choices about perceptual stimuli,” Jaeckel told PsyPost. “So there’ll be more data coming out soon.”

One of the study’s co-authors, Matthias Liechti, serves as a consultant for Mind Medicine, a company developing LSD-based treatments, and Lykos Therapeutics.

The study, “Low-dose lysergic acid diethylamide alters subjective visual perception but not visual contrast surround suppression,” was authored by Lucca F. Jaeckel, Deborah Logvinski, Mika Kanana, Felix Müller, Nicolai Rohner, Anna M. Becker, Matthias E. Liechti, and Philipp Sterzer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-appears-to-strengthen-this-optical-illusion-but-lsd-microdoses-do-not/

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 05:00AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEED

TITLE: Do You Have ‘Purpose Anxiety’?

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/well/purpose-anxiety-psychology.html

This is for everyone who has ever laid awake at night wondering what it’s all for.

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/well/purpose-anxiety-psychology.html

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DATE: October 15, 2026 at 05:00AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEED

TITLE: Do You Have ‘Purpose Anxiety’?

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/well/do-you-have-purpose-anxiety.html

This is for everyone who has ever laid awake at night wondering what it’s all for.

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/well/do-you-have-purpose-anxiety.html

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:22PM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: NIH Banned-Word List Kills Research Over Climate Change, DEI, Gender

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191937&url=https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/10/14/nih-banned-keyword-list-censorship-first-amendment-lawsuit/7321791983669/

Source: United Press International - Health News

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has implemented a list of 235 banned keywords used to reject grant funding for research, drawing science into a First Amendment case. The ACLU, Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Protect Democracy have filed a class action lawsuit against the agency, alleging that it is censoring researchers and violating the Administrative Procedures Act. The most commonly occurring flagged term on the list is...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191937&url=https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/10/14/nih-banned-keyword-list-censorship-first-amendment-lawsuit/7321791983669/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:21PM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Drone Swarms Are Problem the Secret Service Has Yet to Solve

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191905&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-service-faces-rising-threats-drones-60-minutes/

Source: Yahoo News - Top Headlines

The U.S. Secret Service is working out how to handle threats that have evolved beyond a lone gunman to swarms of attack drones. "Swarms are a huge problem and a big threat," said Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn. "I'd love to tell you the swarm problem is solved. It's not." The concern is that a small, rudimentary drone could be weaponized with explosives and do serious damage to a large concert, sporting event, or political campaign...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191905&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-service-faces-rising-threats-drones-60-minutes/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:20PM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: AI Can Act Just Like a Human, But We Still Don't Think It's Conscious

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191933&url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261012185017.htm

Source: Science Daily - Top Health

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, reports of it misleading users, working together, or pursuing its own goals are becoming common. Yet a new study finds that people draw a sharp line between human consciousness and AI, even when both behave identically. On the whole, people regard even the most responsive AI as less conscious than the least responsive human, but when asked about "awareness" instead, people judge humans and AI...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191933&url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261012185017.htm

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:20PM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Earth's "Vital Signs" Pushed to Record Extremes in 2026, Report Says

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191942&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-earth-limits-2026-research/

Source: CBS News - World News

Climate change pushed the Earth's environment to—and perhaps beyond—its limits in 2026, as several of its "vital signs" reached record extremes, researchers said Wednesday in a new report on the state of the global climate. Of the 16 climate markers considered key measures of how the Earth is doing, 7 are at record extremes and others show evidence of accelerating or abruptly shifting, said the report, which was published in the journal...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191942&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-earth-limits-2026-research/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 05:41PM
SOURCE: HEALTHCARE INFO SECURITY

Direct article link at end of text block below.

#Pathology Lab Confirms Hack, But Disputes #DataTheft Claims: #SouthAfrican #AmpathLaboratories Doubts #Hackers Stole 80 Million Patient Records https://t.co/9YLgNfUFmN

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DATE: October 14, 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: Neighborhood air pollution linked to slower brain development in early adolescence

URL: https://www.psypost.org/neighborhood-air-pollution-linked-to-slower-brain-development-in-early-adolescence/

An analysis of data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study found that preteens living in neighborhoods with high levels of fine particulate matter or ozone showed less neurocognitive maturation over two years than demographically similar peers in low-pollution areas. Compared with their peers, they showed smaller gains in cognitive task performance, less maturation of brain network organization, and less of the cortical thinning that normally occurs with development. The paper was published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Adolescence is a period of rapid brain development during which the ability to maintain attention, process relevant information, and exercise cognitive control continues to improve. At the same time, the cerebral cortex undergoes major structural and functional changes, including cortical thinning and increasing specialization of communication between brain networks.

Air pollution has attracted growing concern as a possible environmental influence on these developmental processes. Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, is especially concerning because its particles are smaller than red blood cells and can travel through the bloodstream, while some toxic components may reach the brain through the nasal cavity and the olfactory system. Ozone, a gas found in smog, may harm nerve cells through chronic oxidative stress, and inflammation in the brain has been proposed as another pathway by which pollutants could affect development.

Neuroimaging studies have linked exposure to PM2.5, ozone, and nitrogen oxides with differences in cortical thickness, brain volume, surface area, and functional connectivity in children and adolescents. However, the direction and meaning of these associations have been inconsistent, with some findings suggesting delayed maturation and others appearing to suggest more advanced developmental patterns. Few studies have also examined whether these brain differences are reflected in children’s thinking abilities.

One difficulty is that pollution exposure is closely intertwined with socioeconomic and neighborhood factors, making it challenging to determine whether observed brain differences are caused by pollutants themselves or by other characteristics of the environments in which children live.

Study author Omid Kardan of the University of Michigan and his colleagues set out to isolate the effects of exposure to high levels of PM2.5 and ozone in pre- and early adolescence on brain development and cognitive performance. They hypothesized that high exposure to either pollutant would be associated with slower neurocognitive maturation.

The researchers analyzed data from the ABCD Study, an ongoing longitudinal study of 11,868 children across 21 sites in the U.S. who were enrolled between the ages of 9 and 10.9. The analysis used data from the start of the study and from a follow-up two years later.

The data included resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which show how brain regions communicate, structural brain scans, and cognitive tasks measuring attention, working memory, inhibitory control, processing speed, memory, vocabulary, and reading. A total of 3,645 participants had usable data at both time points.

The researchers estimated each child’s exposure from modeled air pollution levels in the 1 km2 area around their primary residence at the start of the study. They used U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards to define high exposure: an annual average above 9 µg/m³ for PM2.5 and a peak ozone level above 70 parts per billion. Low-exposure comparison groups were drawn from children living with less than 7 µg/m³ of PM2.5 or less than 60 parts per billion of ozone.

No participants met the threshold for high exposure to nitrogen dioxide, so that pollutant was not analyzed. The researchers also excluded 40 children who were exposed to high levels of both PM2.5 and ozone, to separate the effects of the two pollutants.

Because pollution exposure is tied to family income and neighborhood, the researchers compared each high-pollution group with a control group matched on household income, parental education, race and ethnicity, sex, and age. The final samples included 348 children with high PM2.5 exposure and 279 matched controls, and 355 children with high ozone exposure and 324 matched controls. The analyses also adjusted for factors including puberty, mental health symptoms, and neighborhood disadvantage.

The researchers combined three measures into a single index of neurocognitive maturation: cognitive task performance, average cortical thickness, and a measure of how closely the organization of a child’s brain networks resembled that of adults rather than infants. Cortical thinning is a normal part of brain maturation in this age range, so greater thinning indicates more maturation.

Children in the low-pollution control groups showed a statistically reliable increase on this maturation index over the two years, but children in the high-PM2.5 and high-ozone groups did not. In other words, the controls showed greater gains in cognitive performance, more maturation of brain network organization, and more cortical thinning than their peers in high-pollution areas. The differences were small, and they held up when the researchers accounted for exposure to the other pollutant.

“As healthy cognitive development is central to multiple domains of resilience and academic achievement, more effort should be directed toward reduction of these pollutants in residential and school areas,” study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about environmental factors affecting cognitive development. However, the study was observational, and the air pollution data were based on ambient air pollution in the 1 km2 area around each participant’s home, which may not fully reflect their actual exposure. Pollution was also measured only at the start of the study, so the data may not capture moves during the study or exposure earlier in life, including before birth.

In addition, the ozone measure was based on the highest level recorded in a year rather than the EPA’s standard calculation, which may have overstated how many children had high exposure. To create well-matched groups, the researchers also had to exclude 35 children with high PM2.5 exposure who had no demographically similar peers in low-pollution areas, which limits how representative the findings are.

The paper, “Neighborhood air pollution is associated with attenuated neurocognitive maturation over early adolescence,” was authored by Omid Kardan, Chacriya Sereeyothin, Kathryn E. Schertz, Mike Angstadt, Alexander S. Weigard, Marc G. Berman, Mary M. Heitzeg, and Monica D. Rosenberg.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/neighborhood-air-pollution-linked-to-slower-brain-development-in-early-adolescence/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Psilocybin, LSD, and 2C-B leave different fingerprints on the brain, new study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-lsd-and-2c-b-leave-different-fingerprints-on-the-brain-new-study-suggests/

A new study in rats suggests that three classic psychedelics, psilocybin, LSD, and 2C-B, produce distinct patterns of brain energy use, both immediately and a week after a single dose. The findings, published in Nature Communications, challenge the common practice of treating these drugs as interchangeable, though the authors stress that any implications for treating specific mental health conditions remain speculative.

Scientists classify psilocybin, LSD, and 2C-B as serotonergic psychedelics because they all bind to the serotonin 2A receptor, a specific protein on the surface of brain cells whose activation is linked to the altered states psychedelics produce. Because they share this primary target, these drugs are often grouped together as potential treatments for mental health conditions like depression and anxiety.

But their chemical structures differ, and they interact with other brain receptors in distinct ways. A 2023 review argued that while these drugs all stimulate the serotonin 2A receptor, their varying interactions with other biological targets could allow them to affect the brain quite differently.

To map these effects, researchers often track how the brain consumes energy. Brain cells use glucose, a simple sugar, for fuel, so measuring where glucose goes can reveal which brain areas are highly active and which are quiet. A 1997 study in humans used this technique, called positron emission tomography or PET, to show that psilocybin increased activity in the frontal cortex.

The research team was led by Mikael Palner, an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark and head of the Palner Lab, alongside first author Frederik Gudmundsen, now a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University Hospital. “This was the idea of Frederik Gudmundsen, who was a PhD student in my lab at the time,” Palner told PsyPost. “After discussing it back and forth a lot and seeing that many papers and researchers were combining these psychedelic drugs into one bucket we knew we had to test the hypothesis, that serotonergic psychedelics are not just one drug class, but quite distinct drugs.”

The researchers wanted to see if psilocybin, LSD, and 2C-B produce similar or different metabolic patterns over time. They focused specifically on two interconnected webs of brain regions. The first is a network linking the outer layer of the brain to deep structures that regulate movement, habits, and compulsive behaviors. The second is a system spanning memory and emotion centers that is involved in fear and anxiety.

Understanding how different drugs alter these networks could provide a biological map for matching specific psychedelics to specific psychiatric disorders. In related work, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 found that a single dose of psilocybin reduced depression-like behavior in rats for up to 12 weeks, alongside lasting increases in the excitability of prefrontal brain cells.

To test the effects of the three drugs, the researchers divided 48 rats into four groups of 12. Three groups received a single injection of either psilocybin, LSD, or 2C-B, while the fourth group received a saline injection as a control. The researchers gave the rats doses of psilocybin (1 milligram per kilogram), LSD (0.3), and 2C-B (3). In a separate group of nine rats, they confirmed that these doses occupied 51 to 70 percent of serotonin 2A receptors, a level associated with intense psychedelic effects in humans.

Finding the right dose to mimic the human experience yielded an unexpected result. “We compared three different drugs that are often used in humans: LSD, 2C-B and psilocybin,” Palner explained. “One thing was a big surprise and that is how much LSD we need to give a rat per body weight compared to a human.”

Scaled up by body weight, the rat dose would equal about 200 times a typical human dose. “The dose of LSD is 0.3 mg/kg in the rat; in a 70 kg human that’s 21 mg LSD (a regular dose is 0.1 mg),” he continued. “We don’t know why, but the rat has several protective mechanisms towards neurotoxins that may play a role.”

“The dose issue above is a common flaw in animal research with psychedelics and other neuropharmacological drugs for that matter,” Palner added. “One can’t just extrapolate the dose per kg and give the same to a rodent. We need to measure target effects and estimate the correct dose to translate between rodents and humans.”

Each rat underwent three PET scans: a baseline scan before receiving any drugs, an acute scan shortly after the injection, and a long-term scan one week later. During each scan, the rats were injected with the radioactive glucose tracer and allowed to remain awake in their cages for 45 minutes while their brains absorbed the fuel.

Afterward, they were temporarily anesthetized and placed in a PET scanner for 35 minutes to image the tracer’s distribution. The researchers also examined how strongly activity levels in pairs of brain regions tended to rise and fall together across the rats in each group, a rough indicator of how those regions work together.

Because all three psychedelics reduced overall glucose tracer uptake across the brain, which the authors suspect may partly reflect reduced blood flow, the researchers mathematically adjusted the data to look at relative changes. They calculated how much glucose each specific brain region absorbed compared to the rest of the brain. This adjustment allowed them to spot localized spikes or drops in activity relative to the animal’s global brain metabolism.

The acute scans showed that each drug produced a distinct metabolic signature. Psilocybin led to a relative increase in energy use in the dorsal striatum, a deep brain structure involved in habit formation, as well as in the insula, an area linked to emotional processing and bodily awareness. Unlike the 1997 human study, the researchers found no psilocybin-related changes in frontal regions in rats, and a possible strengthening of the link between two frontal areas did not hold up after statistical correction.

In contrast, LSD was associated with widespread decreases in metabolism across the outer layer of the brain, alongside increased activity in the midbrain and emotional centers like the amygdala and hypothalamus. 2C-B shared some features with LSD, including decreased frontal cortex activity and increased activity in midbrain areas that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger linked to reward and motivation, but its midbrain increase was larger and formed a distinct hotspot in a whole-brain analysis. 2C-B and psilocybin both increased activity in the insula.

A week after the single injection, the immediate spikes and drops had mostly faded, but some distinct network changes remained. Psilocybin left a lasting trace of increased metabolism in the insula and strengthened the link between activity in the insula and the prefrontal cortex, the only such network change in the study that held up after statistical correction. Psilocybin and LSD, but not 2C-B, also showed modest lasting decreases across several cortical, limbic, and midbrain areas.

For LSD, most acute metabolic changes had faded by one week, and a possible change in coordination between the cortex and the striatum did not hold up after statistical correction. The drug 2C-B left lasting effects primarily in dopamine-producing midbrain regions, without the sustained cortical effects seen with the other two drugs.

The authors offer what they describe as purely speculative ideas about therapeutic matching. Given their effects on the insula, psilocybin and 2C-B might suit disorders involving anxiety or disturbed bodily awareness; psilocybin’s tentative effects on links involving the orbitofrontal cortex, a frontal region, might make it suited to impulse-control conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder; and LSD’s effects on circuits linking the midbrain and striatum might suit substance use disorders. Overall, the results point to drug-specific brain responses rather than a single, universal psychedelic effect.

“Understand that just because one psychedelic drug is reported to do something to your mental health, it’s not necessary that others do the same,” Palner emphasized. “I think with the increased focus and ease of legislation this will be really important to understand.”

“I hope this is taken further and we will see that the right drug is given to the right patients,” he continued. “Whether it’s LSD or psilocybin for depression or anxiety. We need to do the comparison at some point.”

In earlier work, Palner’s lab found that repeated low doses of psilocybin made rats more resilient to stress and reduced compulsive behavior. “We are especially interested in dose reduction and finding the right drug, as our prior experiments with psilocybin microdosing were also interesting,” Palner noted.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Because the measurements were relative to each brain’s overall average, an apparent increase in one region could partly reflect decreases elsewhere. Each drug’s effects were also measured against the same rats’ own baseline scans; the paper does not report statistical tests comparing the drugs directly with one another. And the drugs occupied somewhat different shares of serotonin 2A receptors (51 to 70 percent), so some differences could reflect intensity rather than drug identity.

The study was also small, with 11 or 12 rats per group, and most of the network changes did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. “This is a small study, yet still significant, meaning that the distinct effects are quite robust, otherwise they would drown in noise,” Palner noted. “With rodent work we must balance ethics and significance and justify how many subjects we included.”

Finally, the study was conducted in healthy rats, and no behavior was measured, meaning the links to specific mental health conditions cannot be directly tested here. The emotional and psychological experiences of a psychedelic trip cannot be measured in animals, so the behavioral impact of these metabolic changes remains a topic for future study.

“This was a huge team effort and so many talented young researchers were involved,” Palner said. “I really want to thank them for their time in my lab and wish them all the best in their next adventure.”

Palner disclosed owning shares in Compass Pathways and ATAI, companies developing psychedelic treatments.

The study, “Serotonergic psychedelics induce distinct patterns of metabolic activity and covariance within biologically informed rat brain networks,” was authored by Frederik Gudmundsen, Julia Czurylo, Daniel R. Rijsketic, Camilla Trang Vo, Janika Fortunato, Naja S. Jessen, Sophie Woodruff, Christina Baun, Matthias M. Herth, Vladimir Shalgunov, Boris D. Heifets, Patrick M. Fisher, and Mikael Palner.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-lsd-and-2c-b-leave-different-fingerprints-on-the-brain-new-study-suggests/

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: October 14, 2026 at 01:32PM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:24PM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMES

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A psychiatric nurse practitioner shares mentorship lessons, training fixes, and practical tips to close prescriber gaps and improve team-based care in this week's episode of "Psyched Perspectives."
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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Listening to digital jazz might help people manage stress and regulate emotions

URL: https://www.psypost.org/listening-to-digital-jazz-might-help-people-manage-stress-and-regulate-emotions/

New research indicates that listening to digital jazz music through streaming platforms can help people manage their emotions and safely detach from daily stressors. The findings suggest that this specific genre promotes measurable changes in brainwaves and heart rates that support psychological relaxation. The study was published in Acta Psychologica.

Modern life often brings intense academic and professional pressures, especially in highly urbanized environments. To cope with this continuous stress, many adults turn to digital music streaming platforms to alter their moods. Using media to manage how you feel is known in psychology as emotional regulation. People can regulate their emotions in healthy ways, such as reframing a stressful situation, or unhealthy ways, such as suppressing their feelings entirely.

Researchers are particularly interested in a related concept called psychological escapism. This happens when someone temporarily unplugs from their worries by immersing themselves in a digital experience. While escapism is sometimes viewed as a negative habit of avoiding reality, it can also act as a protective mental break that prevents emotional overload. Jazz music, which often features fluid rhythms, improvisation, and a lack of lyrics, is uniquely suited to foster this kind of immersive mental state.

With the rise of automated streaming playlists, genres like lo-fi and ambient jazz have experienced a cultural resurgence. Listeners often rely on algorithms to feed them an emotional ecosystem tailored to their exact state of mind. Researchers wanted to understand how this modern habit of digital jazz consumption affects both the brain and the body.

Yuhao Tian of Shenyang Normal University and Xiaochen Zhang of the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts focused their investigation on young and middle-aged adults in Guangdong Province, China. This region features a fast-paced economy and a high rate of digital media consumption. The researchers aimed to bridge a gap between the psychological habits of music streamers and the biological reality of how their nervous systems react to audio stimuli.

The researchers recruited 300 adults who regularly used music streaming apps to manage their moods. The participants provided data on their weekly listening habits, including how often they listened to jazz, their average listening duration, and their use of mood-based playlists. They also completed questionnaires designed to measure their emotional regulation skills and their tendencies toward psychological escapism.

The survey results revealed that adults who engaged heavily with digital jazz were better at stabilizing their moods. These frequent listeners favored adaptive emotional regulation techniques, such as rethinking their perspective on a problem, over simply burying negative feelings. Overall, engaging with digital jazz was highly associated with a healthy, restorative form of psychological escapism.

To see exactly what happens inside the body during this escapism, Tian and Zhang brought 50 of the participants into a laboratory setting. The researchers played standardized clips of digital jazz and control tracks, such as ambient or classical instrumental music. The songs had no lyrics and a controlled tempo to ensure the beat did not artificially skew the physical data. While the participants listened, the researchers recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography, or EEG.

The research team also monitored the participants’ heart rate variability and skin conductance. Heart rate variability measures the variation in time between heartbeats, which indicates how well the nervous system is managing stress. Skin conductance measures subtle changes in sweat gland activity, providing a metric for physical arousal. The lab tests showed that listening to digital jazz produced a distinct biological profile compared to the control music.

When participants listened to jazz, their brains showed increased electrical activity in the alpha and theta frequency bands. These specific brain waves are typically associated with a state of relaxed alertness and deep cognitive absorption. At the same time, the participants’ heart rate variability increased, and their skin conductance dropped. This combination of physical reactions points to a calmer autonomic nervous system and lower overall physical tension.

The researchers used statistical techniques to map the relationships between the survey responses and the laboratory metrics. This modeling suggested that the physical responses inside the nervous system partially mediated, in a statistical sense, the link between jazz engagement and emotional regulation. In other words, greater engagement with jazz was associated with calmer physical responses, which were in turn associated with better emotional regulation and greater escapism, though the cross-sectional design means these links cannot be interpreted as cause and effect.

Finally, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 22 participants to explore their personal experiences with jazz streaming. The researchers recorded and analyzed these conversations to identify common themes. They wanted to see how the biological data matched up with the subjective feelings of the everyday listeners.

The interviewees reported that digital jazz helped them distance themselves from their stressors without feeling entirely disconnected from the real world. One participant explained, “I never use jazz to get away with reality. It only puts a bit of distance between me and whatever is causing my stresses.” Many participants noted that jazz let their emotions come naturally without being forced into a specific mood.

Some individuals also mentioned that they felt emotionally safe relying on streaming algorithms. They trusted automated playlists to curate the right mood for them during moments of fatigue, reducing the mental effort required to select songs. Another participant noted, “When I feel overwhelmed, I find it work to select music. The algorithm has already been informed about the type of jazz that would pacify me.”

A few limitations should be kept in mind when interpreting the results. The study relies on cross-sectional data, meaning it captures a single snapshot in time. Because of this design, the researchers cannot prove that listening to jazz directly caused the improvements in emotional regulation. It remains possible that people who are already good at managing their stress are simply more drawn to jazz music.

The researchers intentionally recruited participants who already used music to relax, which might inflate the statistical associations found in the data. The study also did not account for baseline personality traits, starting stress levels, or broader musical preferences. Future research would need to track listeners over a longer period and test a wider variety of music genres to see if these benefits hold true across different populations.

The study, “Digital jazz and emotional regulation: A neuroaffective and streaming behavior analysis of psychological escapism,” was authored by Yuhao Tian and Xiaochen Zhang.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/listening-to-digital-jazz-might-help-people-manage-stress-and-regulate-emotions/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 10:12AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTH

TITLE: STAT+: FDA adcomm members’ ties to industry under scrutiny

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/14/biotech-news-fda-adcomm-member-ties-to-industry-under-scrutiny/?utm_campaign=rss

Good morning. Yesterday, we got the devastating news that STAT’s infectious disease correspondent, Helen Branswell, passed away. She was a reporter I always looked up to and was also an incredibly generous colleague. Please take the time to read this tribute to her.

The need-to-know this morning

•Liquidia and United Therapeutics reached a settlement agreement that resolves their ongoing patent litigation over Liquidia’s treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension. 

•

New trial to test effect of GLP-1s on social outcomes

Researchers in Pittsburgh are launching a novel type of GLP-1 trial — testing not only if the drug will help people with addiction, but also if it will help reduce recidivism while improving other employment, health, and housing outcomes.

The Center for Addiction Science, Policy and Research (CASPR), a non-profit organizing the effort, and the Allegheny County Department of Human Services are planning to launch the trial in early 2027. They will enroll up to 1,200 adults with alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, or both, who are also at high risk of criminal-justice involvement. Half will be randomly assigned to take Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, according to a press release issued yesterday.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/14/biotech-news-fda-adcomm-member-ties-to-industry-under-scrutiny/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Happiness, not awe, may be the better emotional lever for openness to diversity

URL: https://www.psypost.org/happiness-not-awe-may-be-the-better-emotional-lever-for-openness-to-diversity/

Feeling happy might do more to open people’s minds to social diversity than experiencing a sense of awe. New research published in the International Journal of Psychology indicates that a brief burst of joy leads to more positive attitudes toward inclusion, while awe has little effect. The findings challenge the expectation that awe would outperform other positive emotions in fostering acceptance of others.

Awe is an emotional response typically triggered by perceiving something vast and extraordinary that challenges a person’s usual understanding of the world, like a starry night sky or a towering mountain range. This feeling tends to diminish attention to oneself and make people view their surroundings as interconnected and meaningful.

Because awe encourages people to feel part of something larger than themselves, researchers have wondered whether it could help foster more positive attitudes toward diversity. The research, led by Jens Agerström, a professor of psychology at Linnaeus University, set out to test whether experiencing awe could encourage greater openness toward different social groups.

“Previous research has shown that people who are exposed to awe-inducing stimuli (e.g., vast and beautiful landscapes, moon landings) are more likely to act more prosocially (e.g., help another person),” Agerström told PsyPost. “We wanted to extend the research literature by examining whether awe can also make people more diversity oriented by, for instance, expressing more positive attitudes toward ethnic minority groups.”

Prior work provided reason to think awe might bridge social divides. For instance, a 2015 study found that awe shifts attention away from the self and promotes generosity: in one experiment, adults who watched an awe-inducing nature clip gave away more raffle tickets than those who watched a happiness-inducing one. Building on this, an experiment covered by PsyPost in 2023 found that experiencing awe, rather than joy, made children more likely to donate to members of an outgroup.

Happiness served as the comparison. Like awe, it is a positive emotion that tends to broaden people’s outlook and encourage helping and cooperation, which made it a solid benchmark. But the researchers expected awe to come out ahead, because awe is more strongly tied to a sense of a smaller self and a connection to others. Happiness also has a more mixed record: a 1994 study found that happy moods can lead people to rely more heavily on social stereotypes.

To test this, the researchers recruited 3,196 adults through the online research platform Prolific. The participants, who averaged about 40 years old, were randomly assigned to one of three groups, and each group watched a 28-second video designed to evoke a specific emotional response.

The awe group viewed majestic images of the universe, vast landscapes, and the Apollo 11 moon landing accompanied by sweeping music. The happiness group watched cheerful scenes of children playing and birthday parties paired with joyful music. A third, neutral control group saw everyday images of people studying or taking a coffee break with ambient background noise.

Immediately after watching the clips, the participants completed three questionnaires assessing their orientation toward diversity. The first survey measured general attitudes toward diversity, asking respondents if they value getting to know people from different racial or cultural backgrounds. The second survey measured diversity fatigue, which captures feelings of weariness or annoyance toward societal inclusion efforts. The third survey assessed social dominance orientation, which captures how much a person believes some social groups are simply inferior to others and that inequality between groups is acceptable.

The researchers found that the awe video did not measurably change how participants answered the surveys. On all three measures, the awe group’s responses did not differ statistically from those of the neutral control group.

Happiness, on the other hand, consistently shifted responses in a more inclusive direction. The neutral group’s average diversity attitude score was about 4.6 on a 6-point scale, and the happiness group scored about 0.08 points higher. The happiness group also scored 0.10 points lower on diversity fatigue (neutral group average: about 2.1 on a 5-point scale) and 0.15 points lower on preference for group hierarchy (neutral group average: about 2.4 on a 6-point scale).

When the two emotions were compared directly, the happiness group reported more positive attitudes toward diversity than the awe group and showed a slightly lower preference for social hierarchy, a difference that fell just short of statistical significance. The two groups did not differ reliably in diversity fatigue. The results held when the researchers excluded participants who finished unusually quickly or slowly and when they accounted for age and gender.

These shifts are small, but the authors note they emerged after a 28-second video and on measures thought to be fairly stable. The researchers suggest that happiness may promote social bonding, cooperation, and concern for others, which could carry over into more welcoming attitudes, though the study did not test this explanation.

“Brief inductions of awe do not seem to make people more diversity oriented,” Agerström noted. “Somewhat unexpectedly we found that happiness, which we used as a contrasting emotion, resulted in more positive diversity-related attitudes. Perhaps most interestingly, happiness seems to reduce social dominance, an individual difference characteristic capturing preferences for inequality and discrimination.”

The team’s biggest surprise, Agerström said, was “that happiness seems to triumph over awe when it comes to diversity.”

The lack of an effect for awe is in tension with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that evoking awe through science fiction increased people’s identification with all of humanity. However, that earlier study measured a broad sense of global connection rather than specific attitudes toward demographic diversity and social equality.

“The main takeaway is that even a brief experience of happiness can make people more positive toward diversity and reduce diversity fatigue and social dominance orientation. Interestingly, the researchers did not find similar effects for awe,” said Ewa Palikot of the Institute of Psychology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study. “Like the authors, I expected awe to have a positive effect on attitudes toward diversity, especially since previous research suggests that awe can make people feel more connected to others and encourage prosocial behavior.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on a very short video clip to spark emotion. A 28-second video can easily lift a person’s mood, but it might not be intense enough to trigger the profound, transformative sense of awe that comes from standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It is possible that a stronger, real-world experience of awe would yield different results.

The researchers note, however, that in a pretest with 125 people, the awe video produced about as much awe as the happiness video produced happiness, so a weaker emotional jolt does not obviously explain the difference. The main study itself did not check how participants felt after watching.

The researchers offer a few possible explanations for why awe fell short. Awe is a complex emotion, and although their awe video produced very little fear, it did produce some surprise, which the authors suggest could prompt a disorienting search for order rather than curiosity and openness. It is also possible the video did not create the “small self” feeling thought to drive awe’s social benefits, something the study did not measure.

“The size of the observed effects of happiness was small and it is important to examine whether happiness has the potential to shape diversity-oriented behavior in real-world settings,” Agerström said. “For example, can a more joyful workplace reduce prejudice?”

Palikot cautioned against generalizing the experimental findings to everyday life. “It is important to remember that these findings do not mean that happier people are necessarily more open to diversity in everyday life,” she told PsyPost. “The researchers looked at how a brief feeling of happiness affected people’s reported attitudes right after watching a video. We still don’t know how long these effects last or whether they influence people’s actual behavior.”

The participants in this study also started out with relatively low preferences for social hierarchy, which left less room for their scores to drop, although the happiness effect still emerged.

“As is always the case, findings need to be replicated before strong conclusions are drawn,” Agerström emphasized. “Also, other awe-inducing methods (than those we tested) may have the potential to increase diversity. Future research needs to look into this.”

Looking ahead, Agerström said the team’s long-term plan is “to unobtrusively study effects of awe and happiness on diversity behavior.” Unobtrusive studies observe what people actually do without making the measured behavior obvious, which can reduce the pull to give socially desirable answers.

“From a cross-cultural perspective, I would be curious to see whether happiness and awe have similar effects across cultures,” Palikot said. “Previous research shows that happiness and positive emotions are not viewed in the same way in different cultural contexts. For example, in some East Asian cultures, emotional balance is more valued, and strong positive emotions like happiness can also be associated with negative consequences. This does not necessarily mean that these emotions have different effects on social attitudes, but I think it would be interesting to explore.”

The study, “Happiness, Not Awe, Makes People More Diversity-Oriented,” was authored by Jens Agerström, Magnus Carlsson, and Towe Nilsson.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/happiness-not-awe-may-be-the-better-emotional-lever-for-openness-to-diversity/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 09:40AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMES

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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology

DATE: October 14, 2026 at 08:29AM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGY

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 07:06AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: Scientists may have overlooked a hidden Alzheimer's culprit for decades

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261013015838.htm

For decades, scientists have focused on amyloid beta as a major culprit behind Alzheimer’s disease, spending billions of dollars developing treatments that have often delivered disappointing results. Now, researchers at UC Santa Cruz are drawing attention to a largely overlooked peptide called P3 that could also play a role in the disease. Previously believed to be harmless, P3 can form harmful-looking protein clumps even faster than amyloid beta and may also damage brain cells.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261013015838.htm

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DATE: October 14, 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: High smartphone dependency linked to altered time allocation in teens

URL: https://www.psypost.org/teenage-smartphone-habits-displace-study-time-without-directly-raising-stress/

Adolescents who exhibit problematic smartphone use tend to reallocate their daily hours away from studying and toward screen-based entertainment, which ultimately hinders their ability to manage their own learning. While heavy smartphone use also goes hand in hand with heightened academic stress, this stress appears to be a pre-existing condition rather than a direct consequence of digital habits. The research was published in Behavioral Sciences.

As smartphones have become central to modern life, psychologists have debated how excessive use impacts adolescent development. Past research has consistently linked problematic smartphone use to depression, anxiety, and poorer school performance. Problematic use refers to a pattern of overdependence that interferes with daily life, rather than a clinical addiction diagnosis.

Despite these known associations, the specific ways in which screen habits alter teen development remain a subject of active debate. Joungmin Kim, a researcher at Soonchunhyang University in South Korea, designed the current study to test two complementary ideas regarding how digital habits influence growing teenagers.

The first idea is a stress-activation theory. This proposes that excessive smartphone use interferes with offline socializing and healthy sleep routines. When teenagers lose these coping resources, they may feel overwhelmed by schoolwork, which then erodes their general well-being.

The second idea focuses on time displacement. This theory suggests that passive screen activities simply consume the finite hours in a day. During adolescence, the brain’s reward-seeking systems mature faster than its cognitive control systems. High-reward digital entertainment captures an adolescent’s attention, leaving less time and mental energy for effortful tasks like studying.

To explore these two pathways, Kim analyzed data from the Panel Study on Korean Children. The research tracked 1,116 adolescents across three consecutive years, starting when the participants were 14 years old. The researchers controlled for background factors like sex, household income, and average sleep duration to isolate the role of digital habits.

The adolescents completed surveys measuring their smartphone dependency, daily schedules, and emotional states. The survey also tracked four distinct developmental outcomes to see if smartphones affect different areas of life in different ways. These outcomes included school adjustment, self-regulated learning, ego resilience, and subjective happiness.

School adjustment measures how well a student behaves and relates to others in a classroom environment. Self-regulated learning reflects an adolescent’s ability to independently plan, monitor, and complete their academic work. Ego resilience refers to a person’s capacity to adapt their emotions and behavior in response to environmental demands. Subjective happiness is a broad evaluation of one’s own life satisfaction.

Kim first looked at the adolescents at age 14 to establish baseline measurements for their smartphone habits, stress levels, and developmental outcomes. At age 15, the survey recorded the participants’ daily hours spent gaming, watching videos, and studying independently, alongside their perceived academic stress. Gaming and video watching were measured separately because gaming is highly interactive, while video watching is generally a passive experience. At age 16, the survey assessed the four final developmental outcomes.

The initial analysis revealed that problematic smartphone use at age 14 predicted lower scores in school adjustment, self-regulated learning, and ego resilience two years later. Smartphone use did not have a direct statistical association with subjective happiness, but the data initially hinted at an indirect link.

When Kim mapped out the intermediary steps at age 15, two distinct patterns emerged. For self-regulated learning, the relationship flowed largely through how the teens spent their time, although smartphone use also retained a direct association with this outcome. Higher smartphone dependency at age 14 predicted an increase in gaming and a decrease in independent studying at age 15. This reallocation of time then predicted poorer self-regulated learning at age 16.

For the other three outcomes, time displacement played a minimal role. Instead, the initial models suggested that school adjustment, ego resilience, and subjective happiness were linked to smartphone use through heightened academic stress. Adolescents who reported higher smartphone dependency at age 14 also reported greater academic stress at age 15. This elevated stress then predicted lower resilience and happiness at age 16.

The most prominent detail in the research emerged when Kim adjusted the statistical models to account for the adolescents’ initial stress levels at age 14. Once this baseline stress was factored in, the apparent pathway connecting smartphone use to subsequent academic stress completely vanished. The statistical results for this pathway were not statistically significant after the adjustment.

This adjustment indicates that problematic smartphone use does not prospectively increase a teenager’s academic stress over time. Rather, high stress and heavy smartphone use are concurrent vulnerabilities. The adolescents who exhibited high smartphone dependency were already experiencing elevated academic stress from the very beginning of the study.

In contrast, the time-displacement pathway remained robust even after baseline adjustments. The data supported the idea that smartphone overdependence actively shifts a teenager’s future schedule. It draws time away from studying and into gaming or video watching.

This shift in habits appears to be the primary mechanism hindering an adolescent’s ability to manage their own learning. Self-regulated learning depends on the sustained allocation of time and attention, which are exactly the resources that digital entertainment consumes.

Because the data relies entirely on self-reported surveys, the responses may be influenced by personal reporting styles or a lack of objective self-awareness. Unmeasured factors, such as family dynamics, prior mental health conditions, or parental monitoring, could also influence both smartphone habits and developmental outcomes.

The initial baseline data was collected in 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disruptions caused by the pandemic may have jointly elevated both screen time and academic stress for this specific group of adolescents. While the baseline adjustments help account for this, the unique historical context means the findings should be generalized cautiously.

These findings offer guidance for school-based interventions. Because high smartphone dependency and high academic stress often occur together, stress-reduction programs could serve as an important tool for vulnerable students. Meanwhile, time-management training and study-skill workshops might help protect students from the behavioral shifts caused by digital distractions.

Future research might benefit from incorporating objective measurements of digital behavior, such as screen-time tracking applications. Tracking actual app usage could help identify exactly how digital task-switching disrupts attention. Additional studies could also evaluate whether time-management training helps protect adolescents’ learning habits against the pull of digital entertainment.

The study, “Problematic Smartphone Use and Adolescent Developmental Outcomes: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of Prospective Associations Through Academic Stress and Time-Use Pathways,” was authored by Joungmin Kim.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/teenage-smartphone-habits-displace-study-time-without-directly-raising-stress/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: A drug-free trance can blur the line between self and surroundings

URL: https://www.psypost.org/a-drug-free-trance-can-blur-the-line-between-self-and-surroundings/

Practitioners of a drug-free trance technique describe it as profoundly changing how they experience their own minds and bodies, according to a small new study. When recalling a deep trance, participants reported fewer self-focused thoughts, blurred body boundaries, and a strong sense of oneness, along with more inner peace than during an ordinary meal. The findings were published in Neuroscience of Consciousness.

Psychologists generally divide our sense of self into two main components. The “narrative self” is the internal storyteller, consisting of the thoughts we have about our past, our future, and our personality traits. The “minimal self” is the immediate, wordless physical sensation of being anchored in a body and being the one who controls its movements.

Theorists have proposed that loosening our grip on a rigid, self-centered focus might open the door to lasting happiness. According to a 2011 theoretical paper co-authored by Michael Dambrun, one of the new study’s authors, moving beyond an everyday self-centered mindset paves the way for deeper emotional stability and peace of mind.

Later experiments provided evidence for this idea. For example, a 2016 study by Dambrun found that people who felt their physical boundaries dissolving during a body scan meditation reported greater happiness. A 2021 investigation mapped out how deep meditative states systematically break down specific parts of self-experience, such as where people feel physically located and whether they feel in control of their actions.

The new study extends this line of research to a practice called auto-induced cognitive trance. This is a learnable, drug-free state of awareness characterized by deep sensory immersion, spontaneous body movements, and vivid mental imagery. Practitioners use personal sounds and gestures to enter the trance without external aids. In a study covered by PsyPost in 2026, brain scans of a single practitioner showed her activity shifting toward an internal focus as she voluntarily entered a similar drug-free trance.

“For about a decade, our research has focused on the link between states of ‘self-transcendence’ (moments when the feeling of being a separate, self-centered individual fades) and the emergence of positive emotions and well-being,” said lead researcher Pierre De Oliveira of the Psy-DREPI laboratory at Université Bourgogne Europe in Dijon, France.

“So far, this link has mainly been studied in the context of meditation, a practice grounded in stillness and the attentive observation of one’s own thoughts,” De Oliveira told PsyPost. “We first wanted to know whether a very different route, a self-induced trance practice that is dynamic, bodily and expressive, would also alter the experience of self.”

To investigate this, the researchers interviewed 17 practitioners (13 women and four men, with an average age of 49) who had previously undergone specialized training in auto-induced cognitive trance. On average, they had trained about 15 months earlier and practiced several times a week in sessions lasting about 10 minutes.

The participants were asked to vividly recall and describe two distinct moments in a randomized order. One was an ordinary waking state, specifically the last time they had a meal. The other was one of their most intense and memorable episodes of deep cognitive trance.

During the interviews, the participants answered open-ended questions about what they were thinking and feeling, and they also completed quantitative ratings, scoring different aspects of their self-awareness and emotional states on scales from 0 to 100.

The results indicated a large shift in the participants’ narrative self during the trance. Mind wandering dropped dramatically, with thoughts about the future falling from 31.5 percent of the time in the ordinary state down to just 2.7 percent in the trance state. Present-focused thoughts also dropped, from 63.5 to 37.0 percent of the time, with one participant explaining they were fully present in the trance rather than in the room.

Participants also felt much less like the authors of their own thoughts and feelings, with ratings dropping from 67.4 to 12.1. However, the feeling of being an observer of those thoughts did not change significantly. Time perception was also sharply altered: the feeling that time was present in their mind dropped from 64.3 to 7.0, and 11 of the 17 participants could not even estimate how fast time passed during the trance.

The minimal self also underwent profound changes. In their ordinary state, participants generally felt located in their head or upper torso and reported a high sense of bodily control. During the trance, this feeling of motor agency plummeted from 83.8 to 10.4, as movements and vocalizations were described as spontaneous or irresistible.

Dissociation refers to feeling detached from one’s own body, actions, or surroundings, and in clinical settings it can signal psychological distress. “What we found particularly interesting were participants’ accounts of a nonpathological form of dissociation,” De Oliveira explained. “Several participants described a body that moved and made sounds on its own, without any sense of deciding to do so, while a part of themselves watched the scene unfold.”

“They felt both like spectators of the experience and carried along by it, in a kind of willing surrender,” De Oliveira said. “For several of them, however, this surrender remained partial. They described this observing part as a kind of brake on whatever might emerge, one that both limited how deep the trance could go and allowed them to keep some degree of control.”

“Unlike the dissociation seen in clinical settings, this experience is self-induced, and many participants spontaneously mentioned that they could come out of it whenever they wished,” he added.

Additionally, the physical boundaries separating the practitioners from their environment seemed to melt away. The perceived distinctness of their bodily boundaries dropped from 83.8 in the everyday state to 36.5 in the trance state. At the same time, their feelings of oneness with their surroundings rose from 28.4 to 75.9. In contrast, participants’ sense of being their body and of being at the center of the scene did not differ meaningfully between the two conditions, although their sense of self became less tied to one specific point, dropping from 85.7 to 50.4.

These shifts in self-awareness were accompanied by higher well-being ratings. Overall happiness scores rose from 50.5 during the meal to 74.2 during the trance. The difference came mainly from the “inner peace” dimension, which jumped from 44.3 to 74.7; contentment also rose, but that difference was not statistically significant.

The researchers then checked whether the self-related changes tracked happiness during the trance. Only two correlations were statistically significant: participants who felt less at the center of the scene, or whose sense of self was less tied to one specific point, tended to report greater happiness. Weaker, nonsignificant links appeared for softened body boundaries and oneness, and changes to the narrative self, such as reduced mind wandering, showed no reliable association.

The overall pattern, softened body boundaries alongside greater well-being, is in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that immersive virtual exposure to spacious natural environments reduced perceived body boundaries, and that this, in turn, was linked to greater selflessness and positive emotions. In the new study, however, the specific correlation between boundary changes and happiness was not statistically significant, and the 2023 study examined virtual reality nature exposure in students rather than trance states in trained practitioners.

Altered states do not always feel good. The new findings stand in some tension with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that while most people who had experienced non-drug altered states described positive effects, about 13 percent reported moderate or greater suffering afterward. That earlier study surveyed a broad population experiencing varied states, whereas the current study examined a small group of trained practitioners.

“The main misinterpretation to avoid would be to conclude that trance makes people happier or that it is a form of therapy,” De Oliveira cautioned. “Our participants were recalling a past experience, and our study can neither establish cause and effect nor tell us whether any such effects carry over into everyday life.”

“Second, these experiences are not always pleasant and may not suit everyone,” he continued. “Some participants described moments of fear or oppressive sensations, and research on meditation shows that alterations in the sense of self can also be experienced as destabilizing.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on a very small sample of 17 individuals, most of whom were highly educated women, many working in health professions.

“These results should nonetheless be read cautiously,” De Oliveira noted. “This was a pilot study with a small sample, which tends to overestimate the size of effects. In terms of practical significance, our data at this stage describe the intensity of a transient nonordinary state of consciousness, not a lasting benefit.”

Another limitation relates to the study’s reliance on retrospective recall. Asking participants to remember past events can sometimes introduce memory distortions, especially when describing emotionally intense or hard-to-explain experiences. Participants also chose one of their most intense and memorable trance experiences, which was compared against an ordinary meal, a contrast that could magnify the differences between conditions. Recalling a meal might also have drawn participants’ attention to their bodily sensations, making the everyday state seem more body-centered than usual.

The participants’ common training could also have shaped what they reported. All of them were trained by the TranceScience Research Institute, with which one of the study’s co-authors is affiliated.

“All our participants had been trained by the same institute and likely shared common expectations about what trance would feel like,” De Oliveira said. “These expectations may have shaped their accounts, and our study cannot separate them from the effects of the practice itself. This is why we believe it is important for research to examine more closely the psychological and social processes underlying these practices: practitioners’ expectations and dispositions, the setting in which the practice is taught, and how these experiences are later integrated into everyday life.”

The cross-sectional design of the study means the researchers cannot determine if practicing these trance states leads to permanent trait changes in a person’s baseline well-being. It remains to be seen whether regular engagement with these practices translates to lasting psychological flexibility in everyday life.

“Our long-term question concerns regular practice: can these self-transcendent experiences, repeated session after session, have lasting effects on the sense of self?” De Oliveira said. “Our hypothesis, drawn from research on meditation, is that these transient states could gradually loosen the way people perceive themselves. They would come to experience themselves a little less as a fixed, separate entity and a little more as connected to their surroundings.”

“According to our model, this less self-centered way of functioning would foster a form of inner peace, because people would be less driven by the need to protect the self,” he explained. “But this process is not automatic; it probably depends on how people integrate these experiences and on the story they build around them afterward. The same experience of dissolving boundaries can become a source of openness or, on the contrary, of destabilization, depending in part on the meaning given to it.”

“It is genuinely exciting to be able to study, within a scientific framework, practices that remain largely unexplored,” De Oliveira concluded. “We would also like to thank the participants, who agreed to put into words experiences that are often hard to describe.”

The study, “From the attenuation of self-boundaries to inner peace: how nonordinary states of consciousness modulates self-experience and subjective well-being,” was authored by Pierre De Oliveira, Hélène Meunier, Audrey Breton, and Michael Dambrun.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/a-drug-free-trance-can-blur-the-line-between-self-and-surroundings/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 05:01AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEED

TITLE: Is It Wrong to Love a Chatbot?

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sherry-turkle.html

Sherry Turkle, who has spent decades studying people’s relationships with machines, believes we have “a very small window” to correct our current course with A.I.

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sherry-turkle.html

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 04:30AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS NEUROSCIENCE

TITLE: Opinion: We think a baby’s gut microbiome could be key to lifelong brain health

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/14/gut-microbiome-baby-brain-health-research/?utm_campaign=rss

Picture a baby sleeping in a crib.  

Every second, her brain is forming more than a million new neural connections. The scaffolding for language, memory, attention, and thought is going up in real time, wire by wire. We don’t yet know who she will become; yet much of her future self depends on what reaches her now, in the earliest months of her life.

Read the rest…

URL: https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/14/gut-microbiome-baby-brain-health-research/?utm_campaign=rss

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DATE: October 13, 2026 at 09:41PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEED

TITLE: AI can act exactly like a human, but we still don't think it's conscious

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261012185017.htm

A new study reveals that people draw a surprisingly sharp line between human consciousness and artificial intelligence, even when both behave identically. Researchers found that participants considered even the most responsive AI less conscious than the least responsive human. Yet when asked about "awareness" instead, people judged humans and AI much more similarly.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261012185017.htm

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