News by Subject Social & Behavior

Research led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London has provided new insights into why people often make unrealistic plans that are doomed to fail.

This study captures the prevalence of image-based abuse victimisation and perpetration in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It's the first cross-national survey on the issue.

A new study from UCLA professor of anthropology Brooke Scelza invites geneticists and sociologists to think more broadly about human fidelity and paternity. Published in the journal Science Advances, the study found that Himba pastoralists in Namibia have the highest recorded rate of "extra-pair paternity" -- when a married couple's child has a different biological father. Himba men and women have a system of social norms that support the practice and it does not happen at the husband's expense.

Merely a brief introduction to mindfulness helps people deal with physical pain and negative emotions, a new study by researchers at Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth shows. The effect of mindfulness was so pronounced, they found, that even when participants were subjected to high heat on their forearm, their brain responded as if it was experiencing normal temperature.

Individuals who exhibit life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour - for example, stealing, aggression and violence, bullying, lying, or repeated failure to take care of work or school responsibilities - may have thinner cortex and smaller surface area in regions of the brain previously implicated in studies of antisocial behaviour more broadly, compared to individuals without antisocial behaviour, according to an observational study of 672 participants published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

Facial expressions might not be reliable indicators of emotion, research indicates. In fact, it might be more accurate to say we should never trust a person's face, new research suggests.

Patients with facial palsy completed questionnaires to help identify socioeconomic, personality and mental health factors associated with their health-related quality of life, information that may be beneficial in interpreting treatment outcomes.

In a study published today researchers propose that changing states of mind are holistic in that they exert all-encompassing and coordinated effects simultaneously on our perception, attention, thought, affect, and behavior. They provide evidence and a framework for the concept of SoM, proposing a unifying principle for the underlying cortical mechanism whereby SoM is determined. This novel global account gives rise to unique hypotheses and opens new horizons for understanding the human mind.

The regional gap in trust is not a result of the higher percentage of Black Americans -- who tend to have lower trust - living in the south, York University sociologist Prof. Cary Wu, who conducted the study said. Instead, the distrust is deeply rooted in the unique social and political culture shaped by the defeat in the Civil War, history of slavery, poverty, and prominence of religion in the southern United States.