Volume 1 Issue 11, November 2017

Supporting the Safe Schools Declaration is one way that governments can help protect education and keep students safe during war, argues Susan Raqib.

Moral outrage is an ancient emotion that is now widespread on digital media and online social networks. How might these new technologies change the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences?

Introduction of genetic evidence of a predisposition to violent or impulsive behaviour is on the rise in criminal trials. However, a panoply of data suggests that such evidence is ineffective at reducing judgements of culpability and punishment, and therefore its use in the legal process is likely to diminish.

Advances in technology and the advent of social media have led to the emergence of a new phenomenon — cyberbullying. Although there are some similarities, approaches to tackling traditional bullying are largely ineffective in combating cyberbullying, which has been linked to adverse mental health and, in extreme cases, suicide.

In the United States, direct-to-consumer advertisements for medications must disclose each specific side-effect risk. A new study demonstrates a counterintuitive dilution effect: people perceive drug descriptions that include both serious and trivial side effects as less risky than descriptions that only list serious side effects.

Consistent failure over the past few decades to reduce the high prevalence of stress-related disorders has motivated a search for alternative research strategies. Resilience refers to the phenomenon of many people maintaining mental health despite exposure to psychological or physical adversity. Instead of aiming to understand the pathophysiology of stress-related disorders, resilience research focuses on protective mechanisms that shield people against the development of such disorders and tries to exploit its insights to improve treatment and, in particular, disease prevention. To fully harness the potential of resilience research, a critical appraisal of the current state of the art — in terms of basic concepts and key methods — is needed. We highlight challenges to resilience research and make concrete conceptual and methodological proposals to improve resilience research. Most importantly, we propose to focus research on the dynamic processes of successful adaptation to stressors in prospective longitudinal studies.

Nielsen and colleagues’ analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.

Direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceutical drugs requires mention of severe side effects, along with the most frequent. Sivanathan and Kakkar show that this practice dilutes consumers’ judgements of the overall severity of side effects

Pedroni et al. show that risk preferences vary across behavioural elicitation methods, challenging the view that risk preferences can be consistently captured by a single method.

Using behavioural experiments and computational modelling, Navajas and colleagues provide a systematic characterization of individual differences in human confidence.

Women often behave more prosocially than men. Soutschek et al. use pharmacology and neuroimaging to show that the neural reward system appears to be more sensitive to prosocial rewards in women than men, providing a neurobiological account for this gender difference.

Im et al. examine how people process crowd facial expressions as opposed to individual ones, finding significant behavioural and neural differences.