Research articles

A survey across 90 societies reveals that variation and change in everyday norms are explained by a single value dimension: the priority societies place on individualizing versus binding moral concerns.

People often receive rewards for good performance, but what happens when rewards do not reflect ability? Two behavioral studies suggest that rewards can impact how we evaluate our own ability, above and beyond the impact of actual performance.

Decisions and confidence ratings are crucial to metacognition research. A concern is whether the order in which first and second order ratings are collected may affect results. This Registered Report finds order has little effect on metacognitive efficiency.

People and LLMs evaluate deliberative reasoning more favorably than intuitive thinking—even when both yield accurate results. This preference appears to be intuitive itself and has implications for how we assess others’ and AI advise.

This Registered Report finds that an implicit measure of subjective agency – intentional binding, where the perceived time of an action is biased toward that of its consequence – is altered when the consequence is masked from conscious awareness.

Using machine learning, this study revealed that predictors from 51 theoretical models of delusions explain only 31% of the variance in persecutory beliefs, raising questions about current theories and pointing to gaps in understanding the specific aetiology of delusions.

Using virtual reality to simulate physical risk, we show that over time, risk-taking escalates while emotional responses to risk habituate. The greater the emotional habituation, the steeper the risk escalation.

Adolescents’ choices are influenced by others. A social risky choice experiment and Bayesian modelling reveal that age differences in internal uncertainty, being unsure how to choose, relate to differences in susceptibility to social influence.

This study shows that, following social isolation, adolescents show increased sensitivity to rewards during effort-based decision making and reward learning. Access to virtual social interactions during isolation partially remediates these effects.

Across a four-week ecological momentary assessment with university students, between-subject and reciprocal within-subject associations between self-esteem and burnout symptoms occurred, which were partly mediated by repetitive negative thinking.

A mini meta-analysis finds loneliness is linked to distorted expectations of emotion transitions, including atypical models, reduced accuracy, perceived volatility in others, and an anti-positivity bias in expectations for the self.

Using longitudinal data from the National Study of Daily Experiences, results indicate perceived control is a psychosocial correlate of stressor resolution and an important appraisal resource for daily stress processes across the adult lifespan.

Attentional prioritization and testing in working memory not only effect immediate memory recall but can also enhance long-term memory and its underlying neural representation.

Eight experimental and naturalistic studies show that people (and chatbots) tend to give advice to improve mental health that involve us doing more (e.g., take up yoga) and they neglect solutions that involve doing less (e.g., quit junk food).

Neural dynamics reveal separate stages of spontaneous face perception: EEG shows illusory faces in objects initially resemble real faces then shift to object-like representations, with task demands determining which identity guides behavior.

Speech auditory-motor adaptation to a formant-shift perturbation and de-adaptation after the perturbation is removed both depend more on total amount of time spent in the corresponding environment than on the number of practice trials.

People learn from rewards differently when outcomes are shared with others. Learning slows when receiving smaller reward shares, and social stereotypes about partners further impair learning when cognitive demands are low, showing social context shapes basic learning.

Identity fusion has traditionally been associated with intergroup violence. However, across two studies we show that fusion can predict increased willingness to trust and cooperate with outgroups, if contextual perceptions are positive.

Using VR, EEG, and contrastive learning, this study found that subjective awe is better predicted by behavioral and neural representations of mixed feelings than by those of purely positive or negative ones, challenging a univalent viewpoint of awe.

Anticipatory eye movements during repeated movie viewing reveal when and what is remembered. Gaze patterns correlate with explicit reports, offering a method to detect memory for events without verbal reports.