Articles

Earle and Hodson find that discrimination perceptions differ from reported discrimination experiences, and that declines in anti-black discrimination have not coincided with increases in anti-white discrimination.

Subtle economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces even when perceivers are warned that such cues are non-informative or are instructed and incentivized to ignore them. This bias puts low-income individuals at a disadvantage.

Scholars have long disagreed about how best to achieve stable national democracy. Ruck et al. show that democratization follows from an intergenerational build-up of democratic cultural values, without which democracy is liable to fail.

Efferson et al. use models to examine the reversal of traditions such as female genital cutting. They find that interventions should avoid targeting agents amenable to change and should disrupt any link between cultural identity and traditional practice.

Bellmund et al. use immersive virtual reality combined with successor representation modelling to show that environmental geometry distorts human spatial memory consistent with deformations of grid-cell firing patterns in navigating rodents.

Lees and Cikara show a negativity bias in group meta-perceptions—how we believe ‘they’ see ‘our’ behaviour—demonstrate how such inaccurate, pessimistic beliefs exacerbate intergroup conflict; and they provide an avenue for reducing the negative effects of inaccuracy.

Schad et al. find that, during Pavlovian conditioning, model-free striatal reward prediction errors are present in a group of sign-tracking humans, while goal-tracking humans show learning signals from a model-based system instead.

All anxiety disorders are characterized by sleep disruption. Ben Simon et al. develop a neural framework of sleep-loss-induced anxiety, one that emphasizes NREM sleep as a therapeutic target for anxiety amelioration.

Recent accounts of overconfidence suggest it helps individuals reach higher status in groups by making them seem more competent. Lyons et al. show that lobbyists with higher social status (for example, higher income) are more likely to overrate their own success.

When an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hear about it? Over five studies, Awad et al. find that drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes.

Using physician stress as a model stressor, Fang et al. demonstrate that the polygenic risk score for major depressive disorder is a stronger predictor of depression under stress than under baseline conditions and may be particularly useful for identifying resilience.

Abdellaoui et al. examine the geographic distribution of human DNA differences in Great Britain, finding that the geographic distribution of polygenic scores for educational attainment and other complex traits resembles the geographic distribution of economic differences.

Here we demonstrate that patients’ pain experiences are directly modulated by providers’ expectations of treatment outcomes in a simulated clinical interaction, providing evidence of a socially transmitted placebo effect.

Using billions of words of digitized historical text, Hills et al. develop and validate a measure of national subjective wellbeing, the National Valence Index, going back 200 years.

Bridgers et al. combine computational modelling and developmental experiments to show that even young children reason about others’ costs and rewards to make utility-maximizing decisions about what to teach and what to let learners discover on their own.

An intervention highlighting the hypocrisy involved in blaming Muslims but not ingroup members reduces collective blame of Muslims. This reduction was maintained for a year, despite an attack by Muslim extremists that was carried out during this time.

Ing et al. develop a method of establishing direct relationships between psychiatric symptoms and neuroimaging measures of brain structure and function and use it to stratify adolescent psychopathology on the basis of underlying biology. They replicate their results in independent clinical samples.

Zhou et al. use multimodal brain imaging measures to describe the neural dynamics of same-race and other-race facial categorization. The resulting dynamic neural activity predicts racial biases in facial recognition and altruistic intention.

In a cross-cultural study of eight diverse societies, House et al. provide evidence that links societal variation in prosociality to the development of a universal psychology for responding to social norms.

Fonzo et al. found that brain activity during a form of emotional regulation predicted how well individuals with depression would respond to a common antidepressant. Brain function assays may herald a new era of precision medicine in psychiatry.