News by Subject Social & Behavior

According to new research, when people are explicitly told that they are free to accept or reject propagandistic claims, the likelihood of choosing a moderate view increases. This was a result of a survey of attitudes that tested counter-propaganda strategies, which stressed a person's autonomy, and then measured sentiments after exposure.

Older adults are more willing to make an effort to help others than younger adults, according to new research from the University of Birmingham.

Researchers from the Child Mind Institute in collaboration with the National Institutes of mental health have developed and deployed the CoRonavIruS health and Impact Survey (CRISIS), covering key topics related to mental distress during the pandemic. Their findings are now published in the peer reviewed journal Scientific Reports. They describe how pre-pandemic mental health, perceptions of COVID-19 risk, and lifestyle change stressors are associated with negative mental health outcomes during the pandemic.

Now that federal funding is flowing again for research on firearm injury prevention, some of the few already-funded researchers doing work in this area share new results and look ahead.

Decades after their days on the gridiron, middle-aged men who played football in high school are not experiencing greater problems with concentration, memory, or depression compared to men who did not play football, reports a study in Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Research led by the University of Kent's Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) has found that the personification of animals in recent wildlife documentaries leads to significant misinformation and creates problems for public understanding of wider conservation.

Is it the difficulty of a task that determines whether or not students are stressed when working on it? Dr. Nina Minkley, a biologist working in biology didactics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), set out to find out the answers in an interdisciplinary research team together with Dr. Moritz Krell (Freie Universität Berlin) and Dr. Kate Xu (Open Universiteit, Netherlands); to this end, the team used questionnaires and measured the heart rate in 209 test participants.

Researchers at the University of Zurich show that increased sensitivity in a specific region of the brain contributes to the development of anxiety and depression in response to real-life stress. Their study establishes an objective neurobiological measure for stress resilience in humans.

Young-onset dementia challenges couples to face a rapidly progressive terminal illness with an uncertain future. By understanding the lived experiences of couples coping with the condition, researchers identified building blocks for a novel couples-based approach to illness management.

While people may expect suicide rates to rise during a worldwide crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a University of Michigan study suggests the onset of the pandemic and state of emergency executive orders likely did not increase suicide-related behavior in the early months of the outbreak.