Whether infants at five months of age look mostly at faces or non-social objects such as cars or mobile phones is largely determined by genes. The findings suggest that there is a biological basis for how infants create their unique visual experiences and which things they learn most about ..read more

Psychologists are using EEG to research what games reveal about our ability to cooperate ..read more

Researchers have used an AI-based approach to uncover underlying patterns among the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, termed social determinants of health (SDoH), and then linked each pattern to children's health outcomes. Compared with traditional approaches, the strategy, in principle, provides a more objective and comprehensive picture of potential social factors that affect child health, which in turn, can enable better targeted interventions ..read more

As possibilities have changed and technology has advanced, memories and nostalgia are now a significant part of our use of social media ..read more

Researchers incorporate language ideologies, along with the impact of interaction between individuals with opposing preferences, on the language shift process. The team chose a quantitative approach based on a society in which only one language with two varieties, the standard and the vernacular, existed. The resulting mathematical model can predict the conditions that allow for the coexistence of different languages, presenting a comprehensive view of how language varieties are distributed within societies ..read more

A surprising thing happened when researchers began exploring whether early-life stress compounds the effects of a childhood head injury on health and behavior later in life: In an animal study, stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head ..read more

Invoking a sense of guilt -- a common tool used by advertisers, fundraisers and overbearing parents everywhere -- can backfire if it explicitly holds a person responsible for another's suffering, a meta-analysis of studies revealed. While guilt is widely used to try and persuade people to act, research has been mixed on its effectiveness in spurring behavior change. This analysis found that overall guilt had only a small persuasive effect, which is in line with previous research ..read more

Researchers discovered the cerebellum coordinates the brain network essential for social recognition memory.  ..read more

Roughly two decades ago, a community-wide reckoning emerged concerning the credibility of published literature in the social-behavioral sciences, especially psychology. Several large scale studies attempted to reproduce previously published findings to no avail or to a much lesser magnitude, sending the credibility of the findings -- and future studies in social-behavioral sciences -- into question.  ..read more

In a mouse study designed to explore the impact of marijuana's major psychoactive compound, THC, on teenage brains, researchers say they found changes to the structure of microglia, which are specialized brain immune cells, that may worsen a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia ..read more