Research on how people think, feel, remember, and decide. Coverage draws on psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral science.
Tracking nearly 3000 American boys from birth, researchers found circumcised children were no more likely to be diagnosed with autism, and a raw gap that first hinted otherwise dissolved once family and regional differences were taken into account.
Two economists reanalysed a public dataset of about 4,000 online test-takers and argue the famous confidence-competence pattern is a statistical artefact. Corrected, it flips: the ablest people looked the most overconfident, not the least.
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.
An unexpectedly free hour feels longer than an hour you planned to have, and across seven experiments that swollen sense of time nudged people into slower choices, longer tasks and, occasionally, a missed deadline.
Brain scans of people reading real disaster headlines revealed a stark split: response to money climbed with the stakes, while response to human lives sagged as the toll rose and flattened almost entirely for deaths in other countries.
Elementary schoolers who owned a personal phone scored lower on reading comprehension than those who didn’t, yet having the phone on the desk during a test changed nothing. Ownership, not moment-to-moment distraction, was what tracked with weaker reading.
UCLA researchers found the drug rescued hyperexcitability, sensory over-responsivity and repetitive behavior in adult mice exposed to mild inflammation in the womb — without reversing any of the structural brain changes. The effect was gone by 72 hours, and five weeks of daily treatment produced tolerance.
A model trained on 45,900 healthy scans ranked nine disorders by how much older the tissue looked than the birth certificate. Alzheimer’s led at d = 0.97, combined alcohol and tobacco use at 0.84 — and autism and ADHD came in at 0.06 and 0.01, statistically indistinguishable from controls.
In the first adequately powered ARFID trial, family-based treatment moved 98 children from 85.7 to 90.5 per cent of expected body weight while individual therapy left weight flat — but both cut symptoms by the same amount. Every child enrolled was underweight, and 42 per cent of applicants were excluded for not being.
An Oxford trial found eight weeks of salsa cut PHQ-9 depression scores 2.45 points below a waitlist group in 18-to-24-year-olds. But per-class enjoyment ratings predicted who improved, suggesting the active ingredient may be scheduled pleasure, not dance.
In 1,712 adults tracked more than 23 years by the ARIC study, frequent TV watching predicted shrunken frontal and Alzheimer’s-signature regions while frequent occupational sitting predicted the opposite. The difference held after adjusting for exercise.
Nearly 20 percent of veterans have used acid, a rate that survives every demographic control, in RAND’s first nationally representative survey — which also finds roughly half don’t know whether disclosing use could cost them their VA benefits.