Communications Psychology

This Comment advocates promoting children’s psychological agency to building climate resilience. This approach includes physical and digital climate learning, engaging families, educators, and communities to empower children and provide emotional support. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Self-report questionnaires are vital in psychology, yet how the brain generates these responses is unknown. We found that items assessing the same trait produced similar activation patterns specifically in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). nature.com/articles/s4427…

Rather than restructuring native sound category mappings, this EEG study shows that listeners recalibrate the functional relevance of sounds that violate long-term expectations, achieving rapid adaptation while preserving long-term stability. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Reviewing the psychology of poverty, this Perspective argues that variability in conformism, present orientation, personal agency and social vigilance alters responses to default options, self-regulation devices, information campaigns and social norms. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Our final call for papers this year! A collaboration with @NatureComms & the newest Comms journal Communications AI & C

This study provides evidence that bottom-up rhythmic features interact with top-down metric structures in a way that shapes the pleasurable urge to move to music. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Large language models automate event segmentation & recall scoring with human-level accuracy. LLMs identify event boundaries more consistently than humans, while semantic embeddings enable scalable memory assessments. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Using a within-subjects design, children’s early STEM behaviours during solitary play with loose parts (e.g., acorn, cardboard) were examined with findings indicating that play with loose parts offers strong potential for STEM exploration and learning. nature.com/articles/s4427…

A multilevel meta-analysis (N = 6,570) showed that boredom is generally linked to lower arousal. However, heterogeneity in effect sizes rather characterized boredom as a variable arousal state & could be explained by a range of moderators. @lisa_stempfer nature.com/articles/s4427…

Does mode of contact influence older adults’ verbal expression of emotion? Both in-person and phone contact were associated with communicating positive emotions, but only in-person contact was associated with communicating negative emotions. nature.com/articles/s4427…

This study finds that acute stress alone has a surprisingly limited effect on decision-making, irrespective of the decision’s complexity. However, on decisions with experienced time pressure, acute stress significantly reduced decision quality. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Using facial EMG and humor ratings, this study shows how suppression, reappraisal, and distraction differentially affect laughter-related expressions of amusement in solitary versus social settings. nature.com/articles/s4427…

This lab-in-the-field study embedded a classic economic task, the Ultimatum Game, in a museum, capturing <18,672 decisions about fairness from volunteer members of the public, revealing that information sampling shapes responses to unfairness. @SarahVahed nature.com/articles/s4427…

In a high-psychopathy community sample, steeper social discounting partly accounted for antisocial behavior. This study shows that psychopathy involves a systematic devaluation of others’ outcomes. @Naomi_M_Nero @prncssamygdala @PaigeAmormino @aa_marsh nature.com/articles/s4427…

Using EMG to measure dyads, this study shows that facial mimicry predicts preference better than expressions alone. Facial mimicry plays a role in everyday preferences during social interactions. @LironAmihai @YeshurunYaara @HilaMann1 nature.com/articles/s4427…

Decision biases previously attributed to value normalization are better explained by action repetition. Repeating an action biases choice preference even when options are encountered in new contexts. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Cognitive performance is a common concern among cancer survivors. Comparing survivors to controls on objective tasks in daily life, survivors had better average scores but showed greater fluctuations. nature.com/articles/s4427…

Process models of personality development propose that personality states precede trait change, yet evidence across the lifespan is limited. This multimethod study shows similar changes in personality states and traits in younger and older adults. nature.com/articles/s4427…

People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative signal against the potential social costs they incur. nature.com/articles/s4427…

This study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these strategies to interaction dynamics, payoffs, and cost of cooperation. @ViolaPriesemann nature.com/articles/s4427…