Research articles

Three studies of EU, UK, and US elections show that self-serving bias moderates the relationship between future thinking and remembering. Event memories and memories for pre-election expectations are shaped by having won or lost the election.

Support for moderate climate activists’ benefits from the rise of radicals as moderates are perceived reasonable in comparison — but only when they clearly distance themselves. These ‘radical flank effects’ are attenuated if moderates endorse radicals.

A 3-wave study of 1427 climate-action supporters tests predictors of conventional versus radical climate activism. Radical intentions were rare and linked most strongly to youth, personality and collective victimhood rather than ideology or efficacy.

This study shows that past experiences alter the basic processing of visual input, demonstrating that learning alters attentional processing in a similar way to what has previously been shown with endogenous and exogenous attention.

Using repeated autobiographical recall, this study shows that internal thoughts and feelings are less stable over time than externally oriented details, yet their retention and stability contribute to the perceived importance of personal memories.

Using eye-gaze methods, this research investigated infants’ ability to make moral character inferences. For a wide range of moral roles, infants could use an agent’s past moral behavior to revise their expectations for future moral behavior.

Higher cognitive ability is often linked to lower risk aversion and greater patience. Using polygenic scores and experimental data, this study shows that associations between cognitive related genetic variation and economic preferences vary by childhood environment.

A preregistered systematic review, meta-analysis, and multiverse meta-analysis of 32 RCTs (5704 patients) shows that psychosocial interventions consistently prolong cancer survival and clarifies sources of prior inconsistent findings.

Anxiety is associated with increased generalisation of threat to similar stimuli. This paper used computational modelling to dissociate perceptual mistakes from value generalisation and links stronger value-transfer to trait anxiety.

A Youth Peacebuilding Beliefs Scale (YPBS) is a novel tool to assess youth peacebuilding across different levels of the social ecology. It was developed through mixed-methods research with 2,970 youth across four countries

Democratic backsliding is exacerbated by elite norm violations. In four experimental studies we find that asking people to favour sincerity, rather than accuracy, as a marker of honesty makes them more tolerant of norm violations.

Using ecological momentary assessment and multilevel time-series models, we quantify loneliness inertia and its links to perceived social threat and social behavior, identifying dynamic patterns that help explain the persistence of chronic loneliness.

Bayesian psychophysical modelling of cardiac and respiratory interoception (N=241) showed no cross-domain associations in sensitivity, precision, or metacognition, indicating that interoceptive performance is organ-specific.

Across three studies, the ability of language-based assessments to capture subjective and psychological well-being was assessed. They performed well for life satisfaction but were less accurate for autonomy

Aging is not just a matter of cognitive decline but of mental health decline. This study reveals that in healthy older adults, anxiety is scaled with impaired slow-wave activity during sleep, accompanied by atrophy in emotion-processing brain regions.

This work explored whether people would rather choose to receive empathy from human or AI empathizers. When given the choice, participants sought human empathy, despite rating AI responses as more empathetic and making them feel more heard.

Skill transfer depends on how tasks are structured, who is trained, and how they experience stress. This study demonstrates that individual differences in emotion-cognition traits and physiological responses shape divergent transfer trajectories.

Six experiments examined addition bias in humans and in outputs of large language models (GPT-4, GPT-4o). Both human and model-generated solutions showed a preference for additive over subtractive strategies, with a stronger bias in the model output.

Synchronised rhythmic multisensory entrainment enhances episodic memory performance only when the trials’ actual theta phases follow the stimulation faithfully. Pre-stimulus alpha plays a role in modulating the upcoming trials’ entrainment strength.

Repeated visual exposure to bodies of varying sizes alters cognitive representations of weight and may influence anti-fat attitudes over time.