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Accounting for the genetic effects of education and socioeconomic status, psychopathology and psychosocial factors revealed trait-specific genetic architecture, associated biological inference and correlative and putatively causal relationships.
Dietze and Craig find that framing economic inequality as group disadvantages (versus advantages) increases Americans’ engagement with the issue and support for mitigating action. This is partly driven by perceptions of disadvantages as more unjust.
Kelly, Corbett and O’Connell use neurally informed modelling to establish that humans account for time constraints and prior probability in their perceptual decisions by adjusting multiple distinct components of a build-to-threshold process.
The authors investigated over 100 human complex traits in 80,889 couples from UK Biobank, finding evidence that the genotype of one person explains trait variation in another person. The genotypes of those around us are an important part of our environment.
Studies of transfers of surplus military equipment to police have argued that they reduce crime. Gunderson et al. reanalysed US federal data and replicated key studies. They find no credible evidence that crime drops when local police get more SME.
Lowande shows that existing estimates of the effect of police militarization in the United States are based on incomplete data. When military surplus was recalled from local police, there were negligible or undetectable impacts on violent crime and officer safety.
Thoret and colleagues present a re-analysis of past research to identify the multiple acoustical facets of musical instrument timbre perception, capitalizing on spectrotemporal modulations models and metric learning.
Lydon-Staley and colleagues examine intrinsic information seeking and find that individuals who tend to seek information that eliminates knowledge gaps move between similar concepts and tend to return to previously visited concepts.
Individuals are willing to punish antisocial others even at a personal cost. Marshall et al. examine the motivational basis of this behaviour from a developmental standpoint, showing that children—like adults—punish others for both retributive and consequentialist reasons.
Druckman et al. use a two-wave survey fielded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to study the relationship between affective polarization and issue positions. They find an association between previous out-party animus and COVID-19 policy beliefs, and local context moderates this relationship.
How does the ventral striatum encode value and effort? Here Suzuki et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging with a naturalistic maze-navigation paradigm to reveal functionally segregated regions of the ventral striatum encoding effort activation, movement initiation and effort discounting.
In their analysis of two datasets, Djonlagic et al. identify 23 objective sleep metrics that predict cognitive performance and processing speed in older adults.
How long does the average person sleep? Here, Kocevska et al. conducted a meta-analysis including over 1.1 million people to produce age- and sex-specific population reference charts for sleep duration and efficiency.
Analysing over 50,000 government interventions in more than 200 countries, Haug et al. find that combinations of softer measures, such as risk communication or those increasing healthcare capacity, can be almost as effective as disruptive lockdowns.
The COVID-19 Real-Time Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool allows individuals to assess risk associated with attending events of different sizes via a real-time, interactive website and helps individuals assess whether this risk is worth taking.
The genetic variance that predicts educational attainment or intelligence test performance predicts individual-level voter turnout in a nationally representative sample and among people with psychiatric conditions, such as depression.
Findling et al. present the Weber-imprecision model of decision-making, which operates on imprecise representations of uncertainty. It produces efficient adaptive behaviour regardless of environmental volatility and fits human behaviour better than optimal adaptive models.
Physical distancing during COVID-19 was more difficult for residents of low-income US neighbourhoods. Using smartphone mobility data, Jay et al. find that days at work, not visits to other locations, explain these disparities and that state policies did not correct them.
Vosberg et al. have developed a continuous measure of biological sex in an adolescent cohort, based on quantitative traits of the brain and body. Within each sex, these ‘sex scores’ are associated with sex hormones and personality traits.