Austin van Loon, Amir Goldberg, Sameer B Srivastava
{"title":"Publisher Correction: Imagined otherness fuels blatant dehumanization of outgroups.","authors":"Austin van Loon, Amir Goldberg, Sameer B Srivastava","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00195-9","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00195-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11775275/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143061671","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":"Cultural and personal values interact to predict divorce.","authors":"Sari Mentser, Lilach Sagiv","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00185-x","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00185-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We investigate the role of values in motivating the dissolution of marriage. Drawing on comprehensive value frameworks, we study how cultural values explain cross-national variation in divorce, how personal values explain further variation within nations, and how the two value systems interact together. In three archival studies, including more than 100,000 participants from over 55 countries, we study attitudes toward divorce as well as actual divorce. We found that divorce was more justifiable and likely in nations emphasizing autonomy values, and among individuals ascribing importance to self-direction, stimulation, and hedonism values. Divorce was less justifiable and likely in nations emphasizing embeddedness values, and among individuals ascribing importance to tradition and conformity values. Overall, the impact of personal values was stronger the more the culture emphasizes autonomy (vs. embeddedness) values. Understanding the role of values in divorce may inform individuals as to the values they desire in their future spouses.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11772675/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143054743","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}
Fintan Smith, Almog Simchon, Dawn Holford, Stephan Lewandowsky
{"title":"Inoculation reduces social media engagement with affectively polarized content in the UK and US.","authors":"Fintan Smith, Almog Simchon, Dawn Holford, Stephan Lewandowsky","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00189-7","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00189-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The generation and distribution of hyper-partisan content on social media has gained millions of exposure across platforms, often allowing malevolent actors to influence and disrupt democracies. The spread of this content is facilitated by real users' engaging with it on platforms. The current study tests the efficacy of an 'inoculation' intervention via six online survey-based experiments in the UK and US. Experiments 1-3 (total N = 3276) found that the inoculation significantly reduced self-reported engagement with polarising stimuli. However, Experiments 4-6 (total N = 1878) found no effects on participants' self-produced written text discussing the topic. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of the literature on polarisation and previous interventions to reduce engagement with disinformation.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11769841/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049439","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}
Jörg Gross, Martin Götz, Katharina Reher, Filippo Toscano
{"title":"Free mobility across group boundaries promotes intergroup cooperation.","authors":"Jörg Gross, Martin Götz, Katharina Reher, Filippo Toscano","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00192-y","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00192-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Group cooperation is a cornerstone of human society, enabling achievements that surpass individual capabilities. However, groups also define and restrict who benefits from cooperative actions and who does not, raising the question of how to foster cooperation across group boundaries. This study investigates the impact of voluntary mobility across group boundaries on intergroup cooperation. Participants, organized into two groups, decided whether to create benefits for themselves, group members, or everyone. In each round, they were paired with another participant and could reward the other's actions during an 'enforcement stage', allowing for indirect reciprocity. In line with our preregistered hypothesis, when participants interacted only with in-group members, indirect reciprocity enforced group cooperation, while intergroup cooperation declined. Conversely, higher intergroup cooperation emerged when participants were forced to interact solely with out-group members. Crucially, in the free-mobility treatment - where participants could choose whether to meet an in-group or an out-group member in the enforcement stage - intergroup cooperation was significantly higher than when participants were forced to interact only with in-group members, even though most participants endogenously chose to interact with in-group members. A few 'mobile individuals' were sufficient to enforce intergroup cooperation by selectively choosing out-group members, enabling indirect reciprocity to transcend group boundaries. These findings highlight the importance of free intergroup mobility for overcoming the limitations of group cooperation.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11762412/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143044029","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":"Bayesian p-curve mixture models as a tool to dissociate effect size and effect prevalence.","authors":"John P Veillette, Howard C Nusbaum","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00190-0","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00190-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Much research in the behavioral sciences aims to characterize the \"typical\" person. A statistically significant group-averaged effect size is often interpreted as evidence that the typical person shows an effect, but that is only true under certain distributional assumptions for which explicit evidence is rarely presented. Mean effect size varies with both within-participant effect size and population prevalence (proportion of population showing effect). Few studies consider how prevalence affects mean effect size estimates and existing estimators of prevalence are, conversely, confounded by uncertainty about effect size. We introduce a widely applicable Bayesian method, the p-curve mixture model, that jointly estimates prevalence and effect size by probabilistically clustering participant-level data based on their likelihood under a null distribution. Our approach, for which we provide a software tool, outperforms existing prevalence estimation methods when effect size is uncertain and is sensitive to differences in prevalence or effect size across groups or conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11754609/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143026286","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}
Brontë Mckeown, Ian Goodall-Halliwell, Raven Wallace, Louis Chitiz, Bridget Mulholland, Theodoros Karapanagiotidis, Samyogita Hardikar, Will Strawson, Adam Turnbull, Tamara Vanderwal, Nerissa Ho, Hao-Ting Wang, Ting Xu, Michael Milham, Xiuyi Wang, Meichao Zhang, Tirso Rj Gonzalez Alam, Reinder Vos de Wael, Boris Bernhardt, Daniel Margulies, Jeffrey Wammes, Elizabeth Jefferies, Robert Leech, Jonathan Smallwood
{"title":"Self-reports map the landscape of task states derived from brain imaging.","authors":"Brontë Mckeown, Ian Goodall-Halliwell, Raven Wallace, Louis Chitiz, Bridget Mulholland, Theodoros Karapanagiotidis, Samyogita Hardikar, Will Strawson, Adam Turnbull, Tamara Vanderwal, Nerissa Ho, Hao-Ting Wang, Ting Xu, Michael Milham, Xiuyi Wang, Meichao Zhang, Tirso Rj Gonzalez Alam, Reinder Vos de Wael, Boris Bernhardt, Daniel Margulies, Jeffrey Wammes, Elizabeth Jefferies, Robert Leech, Jonathan Smallwood","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00184-y","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00184-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Psychological states influence our happiness and productivity; however, estimates of their impact have historically been assumed to be limited by the accuracy with which introspection can quantify them. Over the last two decades, studies have shown that introspective descriptions of psychological states correlate with objective indicators of cognition, including task performance and metrics of brain function, using techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Such evidence suggests it may be possible to quantify the mapping between self-reports of experience and objective representations of those states (e.g., those inferred from measures of brain activity). Here, we used machine learning to show that self-reported descriptions of experiences across tasks can reliably map the objective landscape of task states derived from brain activity. In our study, 194 participants provided descriptions of their psychological states while performing tasks for which the contribution of different brain systems was available from prior fMRI studies. We used machine learning to combine these reports with descriptions of brain function to form a 'state-space' that reliably predicted patterns of brain activity based solely on unseen descriptions of experience (N = 101). Our study demonstrates that introspective reports can share information with the objective task landscape inferred from brain activity.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11754446/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143026287","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 network analysis of postpartum depression and mother-to-infant bonding shows common and unique symptom-level connections across three postpartum periods.","authors":"Norihiro Harasawa, Chong Chen, Sumiyo Okawa, Ryo Okubo, Toshio Matsubara, Shin Nakagawa, Takahiro Tabuchi","doi":"10.1038/s44271-024-00171-9","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-024-00171-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Postpartum depression and mother-to-infant bonding difficulties (MIBD), two issues crucial to maternal and infant mental health, often coexist and affect each other. Our study aims to dissect their complex relationship through a graphical LASSO network analysis of individual symptoms in 5594 Japanese postpartum women, whose geographical distribution was nationally representative. We identified 'fear', 'enjoyment', 'overwhelm', and 'insomnia' as common bridge symptoms linking postpartum depression and MIBD across three distinct postpartum periods. Moreover, 'self-harm' emerged as a bridge symptom in the first 6 months and the 7-12 month period, while 'laugh' was a bridge symptom in the first 6 months and the 13-24 month period. Notably, 'self-blame' was identified as a unique bridge symptom specific to the 13-24 month period. Our analysis highlights the complexities of symptom connectivity across postpartum stages and underscores the critical need for interventions that address both common and stage-specific bridge symptoms to effectively support maternal mental health and strengthen mother-to-infant bonding.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11754899/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143026285","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}
Margaret Welte, Tzipporah P Dang, Shaina Rosenblum, Jennifer T Kubota, Jasmin Cloutier
{"title":"Interracial contact shapes racial bias in the learning of person-knowledge.","authors":"Margaret Welte, Tzipporah P Dang, Shaina Rosenblum, Jennifer T Kubota, Jasmin Cloutier","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00187-9","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00187-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>During impression formation, perceptual cues facilitate social categorization while person-knowledge can promote individuation and enhance person memory. Although there is extensive literature on the cross-race recognition deficit, observed when racial ingroup faces are recognized more than outgroup faces, it is unclear whether a similar deficit exists when recalling individuating information about outgroup members. To better understand how perceived race can bias person memory, the present study examined how self-identified White perceivers' interracial contact impacts learning of perceptual cues and person-knowledge about perceived Black and White others over five sessions of training. While person-knowledge facilitated face recognition accuracy for low-contact perceivers, face recognition accuracy did not differ for high-contact perceivers based on person-knowledge availability. The results indicate a bias towards better recall of ingroup person knowledge, which decreased for high-contact perceivers across the five-day training but simultaneously increased for low-contact perceivers. Overall, the elimination of racial bias in recall of person-knowledge among high-contact perceivers amid a persistent cross-race deficit in face recognition suggests that contact may have a greater impact on the recall of person-knowledge than on face recognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11751151/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143019541","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":"Informational ecosystems partially explain differences in socioenvironmental conceptual associations between U.S. American racial groups.","authors":"Roberto Vargas, Timothy Verstynen","doi":"10.1038/s44271-025-00186-w","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-025-00186-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Social groups represent a collective identity defined by a distinct consensus of concepts (e.g., ideas, values, and goals) whose structural relationship varies between groups. Here we set out to measure how a set of inter-concept semantic associations, comprising what we refer to as a concept graph, covaries between established social groups, based on racial identity, and how this effect is mediated by information ecosystems, contextualized as news sources. Group differences among racial identity (278 Black and 294 white Americans) and informational ecosystems (Left- and Right- leaning news sources) are present in subjective judgments of how the meaning of concepts such as healthcare, police, and voting relate to each other. These racial group differences in concept graphs were partially mediated by the bias of news sources that individuals get their information from. This supports the idea of groups being defined by common conceptual semantic relationships that partially arise from shared information ecosystems.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11747393/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143019540","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}
Dariya Ovsyannikova, Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Michael Inzlicht
{"title":"Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans.","authors":"Dariya Ovsyannikova, Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Michael Inzlicht","doi":"10.1038/s44271-024-00182-6","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s44271-024-00182-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Empathy connects us but strains under demanding settings. This study explored how third parties evaluated AI-generated empathetic responses versus human responses in terms of compassion, responsiveness, and overall preference across four preregistered experiments. Participants (N = 556) read empathy prompts describing valenced personal experiences and compared the AI responses to select non-expert or expert humans. Results revealed that AI responses were preferred and rated as more compassionate compared to select human responders (Study 1). This pattern of results remained when author identity was made transparent (Study 2), when AI was compared to expert crisis responders (Study 3), and when author identity was disclosed to all participants (Study 4). Third parties perceived AI as being more responsive-conveying understanding, validation, and care-which partially explained AI's higher compassion ratings in Study 4. These findings suggest that AI has robust utility in contexts requiring empathetic interaction, with the potential to address the increasing need for empathy in supportive communication contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":501698,"journal":{"name":"Communications Psychology","volume":"3 1","pages":"4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11723910/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142967495","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}