Communications Psychology最新文献

{"title":"Cognitive distortions are associated with increasing political polarization.","authors":"Andy Edinger, Johan Bollen, Hernán A Makse, Matteo Serafino","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00289-4","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00289-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Political polarization has increased over the past decade to the point of endangering our self-governance and democratic institutions. The thought patterns that characterize political polarization bear a striking similarity to cognitive distortions, a pattern of thought associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety. Individuals with such disorders tend to think about themselves and others in exaggerated, absolutist, and black-and-white terms, matching the psychosocial features of political polarization. Here, we compare the prevalence of language patterns that have shown to be indicative of cognitive distortions among a cohort of Twitter users discussing the 2016 and 2020 elections. The full dataset comprises 37292720 tweets by 1558934 users in 2016 and 47532985 tweets by 3005657 users in 2020. We find a sharp increase of such markers between these two elections, indicating a profound change in political thinking aligned with cognitive distortions. We further investigate differences in the relationship between political thinking and cognitive distortions according to users' ideological leaning. We find that users on the political left exhibit a stronger relationship between the level of extremism and distortion prevalence, while users on the right exhibit a higher baseline prevalence of cognitive distortion use. Our findings suggest a psychosocial connection between the cognitive mechanisms involved in cognitive distortions and the rise of political polarization, offering avenues for addressing its adverse societal impacts.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12263434/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144644590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social aloofness is associated with non-social explore-exploit decisions.","authors":"Evan Knep, Xinyuan Yan, Cathy S Chen, Suma Jacob, David P Darrow, R Becket Ebitz, Nicola Grissom, Alexander B Herman","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00278-7","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00278-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How humans resolve the explore-exploit dilemma in decision making is central to how we flexibly interact with both social and non-social aspects of dynamic environments. However, how individual differences in the cognitive computations underlying exploration relate to social and non-social psychological flexibility traits remains unclear. To test this, we probed decision-making strategies in a cognitive flexibility task, a restless three-armed bandit task, and examined how individual differences in cognitive strategy related to social and non-social traits measured by the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ), a well-validated, clinically-relevant, community instrument, in a large (N = 1001) online sample. In contrast to prior links found between exploratory behavior and cognitive rigidity, we found that differences in choice behavior and exploration were primarily associated with social phenotypes as captured by the BAPQ aloof subscale. Higher scores on the BAPQ aloof subscale, indicative of reduced social interest and engagement, were associated with decreased shift rates, increased win-stay/lose-shift behavior, heightened sensitivity to negative outcomes, and reduced exploration. Reinforcement learning (RL) modeling further revealed that reduced exploration in high aloof individuals was driven by lower decision noise rather than increased cognitive rigidity, suggesting that decreased exploratory behavior may reflect a reduced tendency for stochastic exploration rather than an inflexible learning process. Sparse canonical correlation analysis reveals that the strongest loading for these non-social reward-related measures are in fact socially coded items. These results suggest that differences in motivation to seek information, especially in social contexts, may manifest as decreased exploratory behavior in a non-social decision-making task. Our findings additionally highlight the potential for using computational approaches to reveal general cognitive mechanisms underlying social functioning.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12263421/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144644591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Range nudges enhance behavioural adherence to safety and health guidelines.","authors":"Yutaro Onuki, Kazuhiro Ueda","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00276-9","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00276-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Behavioural guidelines sometimes specify only an upper or lower limit, such as speed limits (e.g., '60') or minimum handwashing durations (e.g., '20 s'). Limits can produce anchoring effects, biasing judgments toward the values. The distinction between anchoring arising from limits that semantically imply a range (e.g., speed limit '60' implying '0-60 km/h') and those arising from an explicitly stated range (e.g., '0-60') provides insights into how presentation formats affect anchoring. Here, we show that explicitly stating both limits acts as an additional anchor; the Range Nudge-reframing a single limit as a range-reduces non-adherence behaviour compared to presenting only one limit. In online (Study 1: n = 112) and simulated driving tasks (Study 2: n = 31), while the speed limits '60' and '0-60' are logically equivalent, the range led to lower incidences of speeding. Similarly, in handwashing tasks conducted in online (Study 3a: n = 163; Study 3b: n = 484), field (Study 4: n = 38), lab (Study 5a: n = 19), and individual home settings (Study 5b: n = 442), although the limit ('more than 20 s') covered a broader time span than the range ('20-60 s'), the latter prompted a longer handwashing duration. The results suggest that individuals consider limits as recommendations, but the Range Nudge reduces this tendency. Although the findings (seven experiments, total n = 1199) stem from controlled experiments rather than large-scale real-world applications, they offer theoretical insights and practical guidance for using the Range Nudge to enhance adherence to safety and health guidelines.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12259934/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144639254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fake news, real war.","authors":"Jais Adam-Troian","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00267-w","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00267-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12254414/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144621673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Causal inference and cognitive-behavioral integration deficits drive stable variation in human punishment sensitivity.","authors":"Lilith Zeng, Haeme R P Park, Gavan P McNally, Philip Jean-Richard-Dit-Bressel","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00284-9","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00284-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Some individuals persist in behaviors that incur harm to themselves or others. While adaptive decision-making requires integrating such punishment feedback to update action selection, the mechanisms driving individual differences in this capacity remain unclear. Here, in a sample spanning 24 countries (N = 267), we used a conditioned punishment task to identify how individuals learn from and adapt to punishment. We identified three, behaviorally robust phenotypes: (1) Sensitive, who correctly inferred punishment causality and adaptively updated decisions through direct experience of punishment; (2) Unaware, who failed to correctly infer punishment causality from direct experience but corrected their decisions following an informational intervention clarifying consequences; and (3) Compulsive, who persisted in harmful decisions despite both punishment and informational intervention. These phenotypes were driven by distinct cognitive mechanisms: (1) causal inference deficits, where individuals misinterpreted punishment causality, impairing correct knowledge acquisition (remediable via targeted informational intervention); and (2) integration failure, a deficit in synthesizing causal knowledge, action valuation, and action selection that rendered decision-making inert to punishment feedback, even after targeted informational intervention. Remarkably, these phenotypes predicted longitudinal outcomes (learning trajectories, choice behavior) six months later. By identifying the cognitive mechanisms driving variation in human punishment learning, this work provides a framework to understand why individuals persist in harmful behavior and highlights the need for approaches to address these distinct cognitive barriers to adaptive decision-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12241639/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144602752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neuroscience: Domestication shaped dogs' brains and behaviour.","authors":"Marike Schiffer","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00283-w","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00283-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12241485/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144602753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Profiles of social isolation and loneliness as moderators of the longitudinal association between uncorrected hearing impairment and cognitive aging.","authors":"Charikleia Lampraki, Sascha Zuber, Nora Turoman, Emilie Joly-Burra, Melanie Mack, Gianvito Laera, Chiara Scarampi, Adriana Rostekova, Matthias Kliegel, Andreas Ihle","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00277-8","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00277-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Hearing impairment affects a growing number of older adults and is linked to cognitive decline. This study investigated whether profiles of social isolation and loneliness (e.g., non-isolated but lonely) moderate the association between hearing impairment and cognition over time across domains. Using longitudinal data from waves 1-9 of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we analysed 33,741 individuals (Mage = 61.4, SD = 8.6) using multilevel models accounting for both inter-and intra-individual variability. Results showed that both higher levels and worsening self-reported hearing impairment were associated with lower cognitive performance and steeper decline in episodic memory (immediate and delayed recall) and executive functioning (verbal fluency). Notably, profiles combining social isolation and/or loneliness were linked to lower cognitive performance across domains. Furthermore, for the \"non-isolated but lonely\" profile hearing impairment was more strongly and negatively associated with episodic memory decline compared to the non-isolated and not lonely profiles. A separate multivariate model confirmed that the moderating role of social isolation and loneliness profiles differed across cognitive domains. Specifically, among individuals in the non-isolated but lonely group, the negative association between hearing impairment and cognition was strongest for episodic memory compared to executive functions. These findings underscore the importance of considering both sensory and psychosocial factors in cognitive aging. Addressing hearing impairment alongside loneliness-even in socially integrated individuals-may be crucial for promoting cognitive health in later life.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12240851/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144602654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A multimodal transformer-based tool for automatic generation of concreteness ratings across languages.","authors":"Viktor Kewenig, Jeremy I Skipper, Gabriella Vigliocco","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00280-z","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00280-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We present an automated method for generating concreteness ratings that achieves beyond human-level reliability across multiple languages and expression types. Our approach combines multimodal transformers with emotion-finetuned language models and achieves correlations of 0.93 for single British words and 0.85 for multiword expressions with existing corpora of human raters. We demonstrate general applicability through successful cross-lingual generalization to an entirely unseen corpus of Estonian single- and multi-word expressions (N = 35,979), achieved via automated language detection and translation. By leveraging both visual and emotional information in context-aware language embeddings, our method effectively captures the full spectrum from concrete to abstract concepts. Our automated system offers a context sensitive, reliable alternative to traditional human ratings, eliminating the need for time-consuming and costly human rating collection. We provide an easy to access web-based interface for research to use our tool under concreteness.eu .</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12238627/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144593309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The construction of emotional meaning in language.","authors":"Katie Hoemann, Yeasle Lee, Èvelyne Dussault, Simon Devylder, Lyle H Ungar, Dirk Geeraerts, Batja Mesquita","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00255-0","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00255-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making: it reveals one's relationship to the circumstances. Often, the emphasis is on the emotions explicitly named or subjective feelings conveyed. In this perspective, we argue that psychology should use a broader set of tools to study emotional meaning in language. We put forward three sets of language features that capture: the contextual features or aspects of experience salient at each moment (attention); the conceptual vantage point which from events are viewed (construal); the evaluation of events along relevant dimensions (appraisal). We explain how each of these language features can be used to answer specific questions about emotional meaning-making and how it varies based on situation, person, and culture. Our interdisciplinary approach-grounded in socio-, cognitive, and computational linguistics as well as discursive, cognitive, and emotion psychology-seeks to move the field to a higher-dimensional, dynamical account of emotional meaning.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12234366/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144586070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Network models reveal high-dimensional social inferences in naturalistic settings beyond latent construct models.","authors":"Junsong Lu, Chujun Lin","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00275-w","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00275-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Long-standing research suggests that social inferences are captured by a few latent dimensions (e.g., warmth and competence). Others argue that social inferences are more complex but lack sufficient empirical support. Here, we conducted two pre-registered studies to test the high-dimensional properties of social inferences. To maximize generalizability, we computationally sampled diverse naturalistic videos and recruited U.S. representative participants (Study 1, N = 1598). Participants freely described people in videos using their own words. Cross-validation identified 25 latent dimensions which explained only 15% of the variance in the data. Alternatively, a sparse network model representing the unique correlations between inferences better represented the data. The network models informed the dynamics of naturalistic inferences, revealing how different inferences co-occurred and how they unfolded over time from concrete to abstract (Study 1). The network models also indicated cultural differences in how one inference was related to another between samples (Study 2, Asian N = 651, European N = 792). Together, these findings show that the high-dimensional network approach provides an alternative model for understanding the mental representation of social inferences in naturalistic contexts, which provides new insights into the dynamics and diversities of social inferences beyond the static, universal structure found with traditional low-dimensional latent-construct approaches.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12234753/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144586069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}