Research on art, media, religion, language, and history. Coverage follows how ideas, beliefs, and identities move through societies.
Word counts across 38,467 songs by 230 popular artists show positive emotion and social words mostly sliding within careers and across generations, though anxiety words crept up. The pattern is an association, not a cause.
Across three online experiments with 1,563 people, reading a careless repairman’s private thoughts rather than his spoken apology raised forgiveness only when he was clearly at fault, and the gains were small.
Bedsharing did not measurably reduce sleep duration or efficiency in this small Ontario sample, while multiple-dog owners rated their sleep worse and paired motion traces often moved together.
College students who prepare and drink from a jug of mixed liquor, sold online as a party staple, log alcohol totals far beyond an ordinary night out, and most say the risks will not stop them.
A Stanford trial found teens and young adults rated social media health warnings, already mandated in four states, more discouraging than platforms’ own screen-time nudges, though perceived persuasiveness doesn’t guarantee anyone actually logs off.
The makers of Digit Party had a score ceiling that no player could exceed, but it was sometimes higher than any real arrangement could achieve. A new mathematical solution finally lets the browser calculate the true maximum.
A study of 10 blockbuster album releases finds that US traffic fatalities rose on release days, alongside a sharp increase in music streaming. The pattern is concerning, but it cannot show that streaming, or a smartphone, directly caused any individual crash.
A Norwegian study of 747 children found that greater primary-parent smartphone use was associated with slower growth in receptive vocabulary from ages 5 to 7. Most other measures of child and parent screen use were not consistently linked to language growth.
Adults who pictured a socially connected old age went on to see more of family and friends a decade later, a Vienna-led study of 459 people found, with the expectation preceding the behaviour rather than following it.
Thirty years after a landmark study found Barbie and Ken’s proportions were almost impossible in real people, Australian researchers measured today’s dolls with the same tape and the same math. Barbie has moved a long way toward average. Ken’s waist has barely budged.
A survey of over five thousand Brazilian adults finds that deja vu, visions and out-of-body sensations follow oddly similar patterns of interpretation, and most people count the experience as a net positive within their own lives.
A survey of more than 500 Japanese gamers found no measurable genre gap by social-withdrawal risk, yet higher-risk players described favouring cooperation, absorbing stories and strategy in their own words.