Reviews & Analysis

There is extensive debate about whether and how social media use affects well-being. In this Perspective, Vanden Abeele et al. outline key methodological issues in experimental intervention studies on social media use and how they could be addressed.

Striving for positive emotions and avoiding negative emotions are often associated with well-being benefits, but can come with costs for the self, others and the broader community. In this Review, Ford describes these costs in terms of the emotions people value (or devalue) and the emotions they seek to achieve (or avoid) via emotion regulation.

Despite the impact of functional neurological disorder on people’s lives, effective treatments remain elusive. In this Perspective, Putica et al. identify features shared between this condition and posttraumatic stress disorder to propose mechanistic targets for improved treatment outcomes.

Psychotherapy is liable to negative effects, but the lack of a shared conceptualization of these effects has hindered research and practice. In this Review, Rosendahl et al. provide working definitions of negative psychotherapy outcomes and outline solutions to clinical, methodological and training gaps.

Choice architecture interventions (or ‘nudges’) aim to guide behaviour by changing the proximal physical, social or psychological environment. In this Review, Szaszi and colleagues show that the average effectiveness of these interventions is small and variable and outline how researchers can gather evidence defining this generalizability more efficiently.

There are complex interactions between physical changes during the menopause transition and mental health and wellbeing. In this Review, Thurston et al. integrate these interactions and outline behavioural approaches to managing menopausal symptoms and related mental health concerns.

Dual-process models propose that reasoning involves intuition and deliberation, but the conceptualization of deliberation remains unclear. In this Perspective, De Neys presents four key functions of deliberation and proposes guiding principles for defining dual-process thinking.

Facial expressions are ubiquitous among primates and investigation of non-human primate facial behaviour is vital to an understanding of human facial behaviour. In this Review, Waller and colleagues discuss facial expression production and perception in non-human primates, focusing on methodological approaches and challenges.

The term ‘social connection’ is operationalized differently across disparate strands of research. In this Review, Baek et al. highlight four distinct uses of the term ‘social connection’ — as subjective perceptions, social networks, synchrony and interpersonal behaviours — and describe how research based in each conceptualization has contributed to understanding of the concept.

Memory cannot retain verbatim information about all experiences; some loss and compression is needed to meet resource constraints. In this Perspective, Nagy and colleagues describe a framework in which semantic memory encodes broad regularities and episodic memory retains specific information for key experiences.

Older adults have the highest suicide rates of any age group, but the mechanisms leading to this behaviour remain understudied. In this Review, Connors et al. integrate epidemiological research with psychological theories and interventions to better understand and prevent suicide and self-harm in older adults.

The capability to use abstract concepts such as ‘justice’ is a key part of human cognition. In this Perspective, Borghi et al. highlight distinct levels of social interaction and conceptual flexibility in the acquisition and use of abstract concepts.

Social norms are the formal and informal rules that define acceptable and desirable group member behaviour. In this Review, Gonzalez et al. explain how tensions between societal and group norms, between individual and group norms, and between norms of different groups mobilize collective action and promote social change.

Mental health risk and resilience in children who have been forcibly displaced are linked to individual, social and structural factors. In this Review, Pluess et al. synthesize differences across children and communities impacted by war and other conflicts, and discuss the effectiveness of mental health interventions.

Impression formation occurs when a perceiver infers another person’s traits, goals and preferences and forms an attitude towards that person. In this Perspective, Amodio describes the unique and interactive contributions of episodic, semantic, instrumental and Pavlovian memory systems to impression formation and updating.

Perception of emotional stimuli involves a mix of bottom-up stimulus information and top-down information. In this Review, Mohanty and colleague explore how top-down processes, including attention, expectations and context, shape the perception of emotional stimuli.

Human navigation involves encoding spatial relationships among places. In this Review, Mou examines the use of cognitive maps for navigation and the circumstances in which both place and orientation information are encoded.

Dehumanization is typically considered as an intergroup phenomenon, but failures to infer another person’s mental state also occur in everyday interpersonal contexts. In this Review, Harris and Delgado describe the functions of interpersonal dehumanization at three temporal scales and discuss their supporting brain networks.

Researchers have identified several environmental and personal characteristics that might accelerate cognitive decline in older adults but that are not yet listed as established risk factors for dementia. In this Review, Rodriguez et. al. explore the potential of these less well-established factors to prevent dementia and foster healthy cognitive ageing.

People use cognitive offloading (the use of physical action to reduce internal memory demand, such as writing a shopping list) in everyday life. In this Review, Richmond and Taylor describe cognitive offloading for retrospective memory-based tasks and consider factors that might lead to variability in the use and benefits of cognitive offloading.