Psychology, Biological

Article Psychology, Biological

The heart rate discrimination task: A psychophysical method to estimate the accuracy and precision of interoceptive beliefs

Nicolas Legrand, Niia Nikolova, Camile Correa, Malthe Braendholt, Anna Stuckert, Nanna Kildahl, Melina Vejlo, Francesca Fardo, Micah Allen

Summary: Interoception, the physiological sense of our inner bodies, has become a prominent research area in psychology and psychiatry. However, measuring accuracy in detecting cardiac signals has been challenging due to various limitations. In this study, researchers redefined subjective beliefs about heart rate as a crucial component of interoception and proposed a new psychophysical method to estimate their accuracy. The results showed that cardiac interoceptive beliefs were biased, less precise, and associated with poorer metacognitive insight. The open-source python package provided in this study offers a robust approach for quantifying cardiac beliefs.

BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY (2022)

Review Psychology, Biological

Oscillatory brain activity and maintenance of verbal and visual working memory: A systematic review

Yuri G. Pavlov, Boris Kotchoubey

Summary: Brain oscillations are important in working memory, especially in the verbal domain. Theta oscillations have been found to be important in verbal working memory, while the effects of alpha activity are inconsistent. The studies on beta and gamma activity have not provided a conclusive conclusion.

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY (2022)

Review Psychology, Biological

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of cash transfers on subjective well-being and mental health in low- and middle-income countries

Joel McGuire, Caspar Kaiser, Anders M. Bach-Mortensen

Summary: In a systematic review and meta-analysis of 45 studies, it was found that cash transfers have a statistically significant positive effect on subjective well-being and mental health of recipients in low- and middle-income countries. The impact is small but noticeable even after an average follow-up time of two years.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Review Psychology, Biological

A systematic literature review to clarify the concept of vaccine hesitancy

Daphne Bussink-Voorend, Jeannine L. A. Hautvast, Lisa Vandeberg, Olga Visser, Marlies E. J. L. Hulscher

Summary: This systematic review examines the concept of vaccine hesitancy and finds that the term is used inconsistently. It suggests defining vaccine hesitancy as a psychological state of indecisiveness that people may experience when making a vaccination decision.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

Courtney B. Hilton, Cody J. Moser, Mila Bertolo, Harry Lee-Rubin, Dorsa Amir, Constance M. Bainbridge, Jan Simson, Dean Knox, Luke Glowacki, Elias Alemu, Andrzej Galbarczyk, Grazyna Jasienska, Cody T. Ross, Mary Beth Neff, Alia Martin, Laura K. Cirelli, Sandra E. Trehub, Jinqi Song, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner, Tom A. Vardy, Quentin D. Atkinson, Amanda Salenius, Jannik Andelin, Jan Antfolk, Purnima Madhivanan, Anand Siddaiah, Caitlyn D. Placek, Gul Deniz Salali, Sarai Keestra, Manvir Singh, Scott A. Collins, John Q. Patton, Camila Scaff, Jonathan Stieglitz, Silvia Ccari Cutipa, Cristina Moya, Rohan R. Sagar, Mariamu Anyawire, Audax Mabulla, Brian M. Wood, Max M. Krasnow, Samuel A. Mehr

Summary: When interacting with infants, humans alter their speech and song to support communication, and this phenomenon is observed globally. Our study found that the acoustic features of infant-directed vocalizations differ across different cultures but in consistent patterns. Furthermore, listeners are able to accurately recognize these infant-directed vocalizations.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Evidence that ageing yields improvements as well as declines across attention and executive functions

John Verssimo, Paul Verhaeghen, Noreen Goldman, Maxine Weinstein, Michael T. Ullman

Summary: The study found that efficiency of attentional orienting and executive inhibition increased into the 70s, while attentional alerting declined. Age has varied effects on attention and executive functions, with some aspects declining while others improving.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on COVID-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada

John M. Carey, Andrew M. Guess, Peter J. Loewen, Eric Merkley, Brendan Nyhan, Joseph B. Phillips, Jason Reifler

Summary: Fact-checks can reduce belief in misperceptions about COVID-19, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims. However, these effects do not persist over time.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

The integrated information theory of consciousness: A case of mistaken identity

Bjorn Merker, Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf

Summary: Integrated information theory attempts to equate consciousness with integrated information, but its method of equating consciousness with the causal efficacy of global information transfer is shown to be mistaken, leading to the attribution of consciousness to a wide range of natural systems and the exploration of panpsychism.

BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2022)

Editorial Material Psychology, Biological

The distributional effects of nudges

Cass R. Sunstein

Summary: Nudges are tools for achieving behavioral change, and the evaluation of nudges should consider both their overall and distributional effects. More targeted, personalized nudging may be necessary to maximize social welfare and promote distributive justice.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Connecting and considering: Electrophysiology provides insights into comprehension

Kara D. Federmeier

Summary: This article discusses the core mechanism of human cognition, which is the ability to access information stored in long-term memory to respond to incoming sensory inputs. Through research findings, it is revealed that connecting and further understanding are the key steps in acquiring meaning, resulting in stable bindings in the brain to help humans perceive and understand the world.

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY (2022)

Review Psychology, Biological

What do measures of self-report interoception measure? Insights from a systematic review, latent factor analysis, and network approach

Olivier Desmedt, Alexandre Heeren, Olivier Corneille, Olivier Luminet

Summary: Recent research on interoception has identified different facets of this concept, including interoceptive sensibility and self-report interoceptive scales. However, it is uncertain whether current measures converge on a common construct. This study examined the most cited questionnaires of interoceptive sensibility and found that they tap onto distinct constructs with low overall convergence and interrelationships between questionnaire items. These findings challenge the interpretation and replicability of self-report interoception research, emphasizing the need for better matching between constructs and measures.

BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Episodic Future Thinking as a Brief Alcohol Intervention for Heavy Drinking College Students: A Pilot Feasibility Study

Andrew T. Voss, Margaret K. Jorgensen, James G. Murphy

Summary: The current study supports the feasibility and acceptability of an academic goal-relevant episodic future thinking intervention, indicating potential for further research to establish treatment efficacy.

EXPERIMENTAL AND CLINICAL PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Leading countries in global science increasingly receive more citations than other countries doing similar research

Charles J. Gomez, Andrew C. Herman, Paolo Parigi

Summary: Gomez et al. studied international citation and text similarity networks and found that some countries receive more citations despite researching similar topics as others. They argue that this growing inequality in scientific knowledge production highlights the differences in citation flows, and propose a framework called "citational lensing" to explain this phenomenon.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Evolution of prosocial behaviours in multilayer populations

Qi Su, Alex McAvoy, Yoichiro Mori, Joshua B. Plotkin

Summary: This study uses multilayer networks to investigate the influence of multiple domains of social interactions on individual behavior. The findings suggest that coupling between layers promotes prosocial behavior simultaneously in all layers.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

A Multisample Demonstration of Using the Prolific Platform for Repeated Assessment and Psychometric Substance Use Research

Kasey Stanton, Ryan W. Carpenter, Melissa Nance, Taylor Sturgeon, Mara Villalongo Andino

Summary: The study demonstrates that the Prolific platform can efficiently collect repeated measures data for substance use research and psychometric research. The findings indicate high participant adherence, good internal consistency, and adherence to theoretical expectations in terms of factor structures.

EXPERIMENTAL AND CLINICAL PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Semantic projection recovers rich human knowledge of multiple object features from word embeddings

Gabriel Grand, Idan Asher Blank, Francisco Pereira, Evelina Fedorenko

Summary: Current computational models infer word meanings from lexical co-occurrence patterns, but human judgements are highly context dependent. This study shows that context-dependent knowledge about objects can be recovered from word embeddings via a simple, interpretable geometrical operation.

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Relational frame theory 20 years on: The Odysseus voyage and beyond

Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Colin Harte

Summary: This article provides an overview of the recent developments in relational frame theory (RFT) beyond the seminal 2001 volume and aims to inform future research and critiques of the theory.

JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Cultural evolution of genetic heritability

Ryutaro Uchiyama, Rachel Spicer, Michael Muthukrishna

Summary: Research in behavioral genetics and cultural evolution has transformed our understanding of human behavior, but the relationship between these two fields is often viewed as independent. Through a dual inheritance framework, we have gained a more in-depth understanding of the interaction between genes and culture, as well as explored how cultural dynamics influence this interaction and predictions of heritability.

BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2022)

Article Psychology, Biological

Recommendations and publication guidelines for studies using frequency domain and time-frequency domain analyses of neural time series

Andreas Keil, Edward M. Bernat, Michael X. Cohen, Mingzhou Ding, Monica Fabiani, Gabriele Gratton, Emily S. Kappenman, Eric Maris, Kyle E. Mathewson, Richard T. Ward, Nathan Weisz

Summary: This report provides recommendations for the use of neural time series analysis methods, with a focus on frequency domain and time-frequency analyses. It also offers publication guidelines to promote scientific rigor and facilitate communication.

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY (2022)

Editorial Material Psychology, Biological

A community-sourced glossary of open scholarship terms

Sam Parsons, Flavio Azevedo, Mahmoud M. Elsherif, Samuel Guay, Owen N. Shahim, Gisela H. Govaart, Emma Norris, Aoife O'Mahony, Adam J. Parker, Ana Todorovic, Charlotte R. Pennington, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, Aleksandra Lazic, Olly Robertson, Sara L. Middleton, Beatrice Valentini, Joanne McCuaig, Bradley J. Baker, Elizabeth Collins, Adrien A. Fillon, Tina B. Lonsdorf, Michele C. Lim, Norbert Vanek, Marton Kovacs, Timo B. Roettger, Sonia Rishi, Jacob F. Miranda, Matt Jaquiery, Suzanne L. K. Stewart, Valeria Agostini, Andrew J. Stewart, Kamil Izydorczak, Sarah Ashcroft-Jones, Helena Hartmann, Madeleine Ingham, Yuki Yamada, Martin R. Vasilev, Filip Dechterenko, Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir, Yu-Fang Yang, Annalise A. LaPlume, Julia K. Wolska, Emma L. Henderson, Mirela Zaneva, Benjamin G. Farrar, Ross Mounce, Tamara Kalandadze, Wanyin Li, Qinyu Xiao, Robert M. Ross, Siu Kit Yeung, Meng Liu, Micah L. Vandegrift, Zoltan Kekecs, Marta K. Topor, Myriam A. Baum, Emily A. Williams, Asma A. Assaneea, Amelie Bret, Aidan G. Cashin, Nick Ballou, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, Bettina M. J. Kern, Claire R. Melia, Beatrix Arendt, Gerald H. Vineyard, Jade S. Pickering, Thomas R. Evans, Catherine Laverty, Eliza A. Woodward, David Moreau, Dominique G. Roche, Eike M. Rinke, Graham Reid, Eduardo Garcia-Garzon, Steven Verheyen, Halil E. Kocalar, Ashley R. Blake, Jamie P. Cockcroft, Leticia Micheli, Brice Beffara Bret, Zoe M. Flack, Barnabas Szaszi, Markus Weinmann, Oscar Lecuona, Birgit Schmidt, William X. Ngiam, Ana Barbosa Mendes, Shannon Francis, Brett J. Gall, Mariella Paul, Connor T. Keating, Magdalena Grose-Hodge, James E. Bartlett, Bethan J. Iley, Lisa Spitzer, Madeleine Pownall, Christopher J. Graham, Tobias Wingen, Jenny Terry, Catia Margarida F. Oliveira, Ryan A. Millager, Kerry J. Fox, Alaa AlDoh, Alexander Hart, Olmo R. van den Akker, Gilad Feldman, Dominik A. Kiersz, Christina Pomareda, Kai Krautter, Ali H. Al-Hoorie, Balazs Aczel

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR (2022)