An assistant professor conducted a study in which he lived among one of the poorest, most marginalized communities in Seoul, South Korea. In the ethnographic study, he asked residents how they dealt with extreme heat. He found they tended to accept the conditions, stating there was not much that could be done. That shows people accepted extreme climate events, despite evidence showing this should not be normal, which bodes the argument social work as a field has much to do to help address climate emergencies ..read more

Social interactions synchronize brain activity within individuals and between individuals. In a new study, researchers compared brain synchronization between pairs of people with relatively strong social ties (acquaintance pairs) and pairs with almost no social ties (stranger pairs). The study found that during a cooperative task, the stranger pairs exhibited more closely connected brain networks compared to the acquaintance pairs. These findings challenge the conventional understanding that stronger social bonds lead to greater brain synchronization ..read more

Though life goals change over time, a study of teen goals indicates that goals of education and high prestige can drive success ..read more

New research has found that perceptions of globally shared life experiences and globally shared biology can strengthen psychological bonding with humanity at large, which can motivate prosocial action on a global scale and help to tackle global problems ..read more

A country's economic prosperity is linked with improved well-being in its residents, according to a new study ..read more

Researchers found that when the adult talked and played socially with a 5-month-old baby, the baby's brain activity particularly increased in regions responsible for attention -- and the level of this type of activity predicted enhanced language development at later ages ..read more

Researchers make the case that prairie voles, small rodents that are found throughout the central United States and Canada, can be effectively used as animal models to further the study of clinical depression ..read more

A new study reveals how large language models (LLMs) respond to different motivational states. In their evaluation of three LLM-based generative conversational agents (GAs)--ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Llama 2, scientists found that while GAs are able to identify users' motivation states and provide relevant information when individuals have established goals, they are less likely to provide guidance when the users are hesitant or ambivalent about changing their behavior ..read more

Individuals underestimate the social connection they can make with a stranger who disagrees with them on contentious issues, a new research paper suggests ..read more

Researchers investigate the influence of social relationships on our bodily responses to the presence of other persons in the interpersonal space ..read more