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Category: Psychology

Huge genetic study finds strong links between DNA and personality traits

Huge genetic study finds strong links between DNA and personality traits

John M Lund / Getty Images By Briar Wormington, QIMR Berghofer and Michelle K Lupton, QIMR Berghofer Personality is something we all share, but the different ways we think and feel also make us unique. Personality is relatively stable and influences nearly every aspect of human life, from academic performance and career choices to health behaviours and longevity. For example, someone who is responsible might avoid taking risks or alcohol and drug use. Our new study, published in Nature, has…

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Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score

Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score

Justin Neuman writes: Our kids were playing Settlers of Catan over the holidays. Or rather, they weren’t. They’d rearranged the strategy game’s hexagonal tiles into an archipelago of islands that no rulebook recognises, imagined ‘bridges’ built from wood, brick and stone, and invented a purpose for the game about network connectivity that had nothing to do with earning points. They were not playing Catan. They were playing in Catan, using its materials as components to make a world the designers…

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Biophilia: Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans

Biophilia: Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans

Popular Science reports: We humans love our pets, but we aren’t the only great apes who buddy up with other species. Researchers have documented multiple instances of primates forming bonds with different animals, but a recent study indicates these relationships may be even more common than expected. In a first-of-its-kind comprehensive review published in the journal Primates, anthropologists at the University of Oxford explored various instances of monkeys and apes carrying, grooming, playing, and sometimes actually adopting other creatures. The…

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Great apes were using touch to reassure and keep the peace six million years before humans evolved – new research

Great apes were using touch to reassure and keep the peace six million years before humans evolved – new research

Physical touch may be an important evolutionary tool to help manage social tension and keep the peace. Left: Jake Brooker/Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust; Right: Zanna Clay/Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary, CC BY-NC-ND By Jake Brooker, Utrecht University and Zanna Clay, Durham University During an eight-month-long research trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia, we studied consolation: the way bonobos and chimpanzees comfort each other after conflicts and distress. But early on, we kept noticing something that didn’t quite…

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For both consciousness and AI, attention is all you need

For both consciousness and AI, attention is all you need

Michael Graziano writes: The most energy-expensive organ in the body is the brain. The human brain, for example, coming in at about 2% of the body’s mass, uses 20% of the body’s energy. Neural tissue is so costly that evolution does not generally favor large brains. Otherwise, the entire animal kingdom would have evolved giant ones, instead of just a few species that have found a way to exploit that trait. To pack as much capacity in as small a…

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Experiments reveal the psychological cost of insulting political rhetoric

Experiments reveal the psychological cost of insulting political rhetoric

PsyPost reports: Politicians frequently use aggressive, blaming language to mobilize voters and attack opponents. Recent psychological experiments reveal that exposure to this specific style of communication causes people to feel their core values are under attack, regardless of their own political affiliation. The findings, published in Current Psychology, show that polarizing rhetoric can directly degrade a person’s willingness to grant freedom of speech to political rivals. Political communication has increasingly fractured into hostile territory over the last several years. Across…

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Advanced AI models suffer a near-total collapse on classic psychology test as cognitive demands increase

Advanced AI models suffer a near-total collapse on classic psychology test as cognitive demands increase

PsyPost reports: New research provides evidence that while advanced artificial intelligence models process language with remarkable skill, they struggle significantly with tasks requiring the kind of sustained focus and conflict resolution seen in human attention. The study, published in PNAS Nexus, indicates that as cognitive demands increase, these programs experience a complete collapse in their ability to override automatic responses. The findings suggest that artificial intelligence systems currently lack the fundamental executive control necessary for developing true artificial general intelligence….

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Trump’s anti-free speech rhetoric increases support for censorship among his voters

Trump’s anti-free speech rhetoric increases support for censorship among his voters

PsyPost reports: A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that when political leaders suddenly express support for censorship, their supporters tend to adopt those same views. The findings provide evidence that the statements of prominent politicians can easily sway public opinion on foundational democratic rights like freedom of speech. This highlights how political language can influence voters to abandon long-held values in favor of restricting the rights of opposing groups. President Donald Trump…

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Political anger fuels support for violence mainly when voters feel ignored by the system

Political anger fuels support for violence mainly when voters feel ignored by the system

PsyPost reports: A recent study published in Political Psychology suggests that how political anger influences a person’s support for violence depends heavily on whether they believe the political system actually listens to them. Researchers found that intense anger tends to fuel support for undemocratic practices only when people feel their voices do not matter to politicians. When people believe the government is responsive, this sense of political power acts as a buffer against endorsing political violence. Political discussions in the…

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New finding refines how scientists study animal happiness

New finding refines how scientists study animal happiness

Science News reports: For nearly a decade, Vincent Bombail has been tickling rats. It’s been a standard technique used in the study of animal happiness. But not all rats particularly enjoy the experience, data show. Female rats prefer gentler, more playful tickling than males, Bombail and his colleagues report April 15 in Biology Letters. The findings suggest that the same physical experience evokes a different emotional response in different individuals, potentially influencing the results of studies on animal happiness. “This…

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Using AI for just ten minutes might make you lazy and dumb, study shows

Using AI for just ten minutes might make you lazy and dumb, study shows

Wired reports: Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA. Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid them for their work. They conducted three experiments, each involving several hundred people. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable…

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How much of our personalities are determined at birth?

How much of our personalities are determined at birth?

Laurie Clarke writes: In 2009, Abdelmalek Bayout faced a nine-year prison sentence in Trieste, Italy, for stabbing and killing a man who had mocked him in the street. Aiming to reduce the sentence, his lawyer made an unusual legal argument. His client’s DNA, he said, indicated the presence of the “warrior gene”, a mutation that decades of scientific research had tied to aggressive behaviour. Because of this, the argument went, he couldn’t be held fully accountable for his actions. The…

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Shared music listening synchronizes brain activity

Shared music listening synchronizes brain activity

PsyPost reports: While sharing a musical experience with a friend might not drastically alter your overall enjoyment of a song, it tends to synchronize your brain activity and emotional responses. A recent study published in the journal Cortex has found that listening to music with another person increases the moment-to-moment similarity of subjective pleasure and enhances neural alignment. These findings help explain how music acts as a powerful tool for social bonding and collective emotional experiences. Human beings naturally use…

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What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat

What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat

Noah Hawley writes: Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of…

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We’re speaking less every day

We’re speaking less every day

BBC Science Focus reports: The spoken word is in decline, according to new research from the universities of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and Arizona. Psychologists discovered that, since 2005, the average person has spoken less each year than the year before, by approximately 338 fewer words per day. That’s equivalent to a yearly loss of around 120,000 words per person, representing thousands of lost human interactions. “Small changes in daily behaviour accumulate over time,” said first author Dr Valeria Pfeifer, assistant…

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Why your brain already understands complex music theory

Why your brain already understands complex music theory

ZME Science reports: The human brain operates as a tireless prediction machine. It watches a dropped glass and anticipates the shatter. It listens to a conversation and guesses the final word of a sentence. And, as it turns out, it listens to a melody and inherently knows exactly what chord should fall next. If there’s something in the world most people tend to agree is that they love music. But to feel the music, our minds must decode a hidden…

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