Communications Psychology - Mapping the methodological landscape of social media detox intervention through a scoping review of evidence relevant to social media restriction policies

Communications Psychology - Infants’ facial input from 6 to 17 months rarely includes hypothesized expressive emotion prototypes

Communications Psychology - New mothers and fathers show distinct emotion dynamics across maternity and paternity leave

This study investigates the dynamic organization and temporal transitions of daily emotional states and examines their neural correlates using brain imaging data. It shows that reduced tendency to mai...

This study analyzes six intensive longitudinal studies with 1,088 participants to test whether fatigue and processing speed predict people’s ability to override fatigue in daily life. Greater-than-usu...

Job title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Communications (Human Behaviour team) Locations: Shanghai, Berlin or Pune (hybrid) Closing date: 11th Oct 2026 (candidates will be considered as they appl...

We train a recurrent neural network to synchronize its output with a metronome across a range of tempos using reinforcement learning. The most effective reinforcement scheme also reproduces key featur...

Communications Psychology - Characterizing the behavioral subtypes of phobic avoidance

Communications Psychology - Visual features explain dynamic aesthetic experiences across distinct movie content

Using generative AI in science necessitates that institutions and researchers practice epistemic reflexivity to protect intellectual diversity and resist the threat of scientific monoculture. We argue...

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly entering education, framed as a tool for efficiency and personalization. This Perspective argues that this framing of GenAI obscures a deeper tran...

In this study, pupil dilation is related to latent variables of belief updating (surprisal, information gain) from an auditory change-point task across the spatial and temporal domain. The results sug...

Combining eye-movement, body-kinematics, heart-rate, and individual-characteristic data with machine learning, this study shows that coordination during dynamic motor interaction reflects how similarl...

Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we show that, from just the mention of a role, people build rapid expectations about how other people will act, what they know, and whether they can be interchange...

The paper introduces a model for item- and person-specific affect dynamics that improves cross-study comparability when item sets only partly overlap, demonstrated in a reanalysis of five intensive lo...

This study examines how spontaneous drifts in listening relate to EEG responses to continuous speech, using encoding models of semantic and contextual representations. It finds that neural markers of ...

This preregistered RCT (N = 558 U.S. adults) tested perspective-taking on a divisive environmental education topic. Affirming either arguments or intentions of the opposing side built common ground an...

In a preregistered, doubleblind randomized pilot study in Brazil, a game-based social-cognitive intervention improved preschool children’s emotion labeling, recognition, and emotion situation knowledg...

Surveys are compromised not only by bots, but also by the use of AI by genuine human survey respondents. How can researchers ensure that surveys reflect public opinion rather than recycled or programm...

The valence of client and therapist language was associated with changes in clients’ depression and anxiety symptoms across messaging based psychotherapeutic exchanges, showing how affective and lingu...

Using LLMs, this study mapped contamination-related obsessive compulsive symptom triggers in 1’495 individuals. Distinct trigger categories across ecological domains and varying intensity were identif...

Using a large-scale dataset linking U.S. policy documents to cited social science papers, this study traces psychology’s policy uptake from 2000–2022 and identifies the paper features, topics, and pol...

Two studies show that laypeople uniquely rate personality traits as being more stable across the lifespan than 20+ other individual differences, despite the traits having similar and often even larger...

How do children build comprehensive models of the world? Across two experiments with 5- to 9-year-olds in the United States and France, marking items as special or useful shifted children’s curiosity ...

How individuals learn to assign value to cues and actions may help explain how eating behaviours emerge. This study investigated whether reinforcement learning biases are associated with food cravings...

Reward responsiveness plays an important role in promoting health in youth. We examined neural reward response from childhood through adolescence. Lower positive parenting and higher negative parentin...

We show that valid spatial cues directing internal attention during long-term memory retrieval boost recall, while invalid cues incur costs. Our work offers a flexible experimental framework to study ...

This Perspective proposes machine experientialism, positing that LLMs build their own form of understanding from training corpora.

Re-analysis of 31 published longitudinal datasets shows that intergroup contact improves outgroup attitudes only in traditional CLPM models. Recent alternatives (FF-CLPM, RI-CLPM) find no signifi...

People often make sequences of decisions to reach a goal. In such situations, when decisions can be undone, people act faster and undo to correct errors. Undoing is driven by both retrospective and pr...

This series of experiments shows that context in memory is reconstructed rather than encoded. When recognition pertained to background scenes in the context reinstatement paradigm, objects acted as co...

This study introduces MAPS, a framework for testing whether artificial neural network explanations capture the visual information used by humans and non-human primates during object recognition, linki...

thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Jennifer Bellingtier. A peer review file is available.

Using a Snake-inspired working memory task, this study shows that people dynamically reprioritize memorized goals after distraction, demonstrating how working memory supports flexible planning in dyna...

Density Map-Based Predictive Modeling (DMPM) quantifies spontaneous thought dynamics in valence–selfrelevance–time space to predict positive and negative affectivity across independent datasets, linki...

This study used latent growth models on UK cohort data to examine age-specific sensitivity between internalising symptoms and adverse social experiences. Sensitivity to bullying varied across ages 10 ...

This study asks whether cognition unfolds rhythmically. Across two dense-sampling datasets, autoregressive modelling reveals reliable theta-band rhythms in behavior, but no consistent difficulty-relat...

Comparing brain representations before and after drama viewing with functional MRI and representational similarity analysis, this study shows that antagonistic interpersonal relationships shape neural...

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 27 studies assessed mental health both overall and across specific psychological domains, showing that associations with swiping-based dating app use vary subs...

This study applies natural language processing to 25,000 pre-college essays to detect two beliefs about belonging: simple optimism predicts worse first-year outcomes, while a process-oriented view pre...

This study suggests that self-focused information may dampen emotional and neural responses to partner feedback, that emotion regulation may moderate this effect, and that neural responses during the ...

Collective mental time travel pathways link past and future representations following consequential events like the 2023 Turkish elections. These links can be sociopolitically sensitive and are relate...

Using a group decision-making task, this study shows that teams perform worse when newcomers hold critical information. Newcomers in this position showed weaker linguistic coordination and more task c...

With this cross-journal Collection, the editors at Nature Communications, Communications Psychology and Scientific Reports invite submissions from across ...

How individual perceptual maps shape behavior remains unclear. The current study compares task-naïve and task-based auditory maps in humans and mice, finding congruent perceptual structures across con...

Across England, Hong Kong and Mainland China (N = 849) parental distress is linked to child internalizing problems. Yet protective factors differ across contexts, as this link is attenuated by po...