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(https://www.psypost.org/stimulating-the-vagus-nerve-reduces-susceptibility-to-body-illusions-study-finds/) Stimulating the vagus nerve reduces susceptibility to body illusions, study finds
Mar 25th 2025, 10:00

New research published in the journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.70040?af=R) Psychophysiology suggests that stimulating a nerve in the ear can make people less likely to feel that a fake hand is part of their body. This process, known as the rubber hand illusion, relies on the brain’s ability to integrate different types of sensory information. The study found that people who received gentle electrical stimulation to the vagus nerve were less susceptible to this illusion, indicating they were more in touch with signals from their real body. This discovery could eventually help improve treatments for mental health conditions where bodily awareness is disrupted.
The vagus nerve plays a key role in how the body communicates with the brain. It carries signals from the heart, lungs, and other organs, helping the brain keep track of the body’s internal state. Scientists have long been interested in this nerve because of its wide-reaching effects on emotion, attention, and self-awareness. In recent years, researchers have explored how stimulating this nerve might improve mental health or enhance certain brain functions.
A non-invasive method known as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation, or taVNS, delivers mild electrical pulses to a part of the ear that connects to the vagus nerve. Past studies have shown that taVNS can improve a person’s ability to notice signals from inside the body, like their heartbeat. But researchers have not yet fully understood whether this stimulation can change how people experience their bodies more broadly—especially their sense of body ownership.
To explore this, a team of researchers asked whether taVNS could influence how people experience body ownership, using a high-tech version of the rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, a person sees a fake hand being touched in the same way and at the same time as their own hidden hand. Over time, many people begin to feel as though the fake hand is actually part of their body. This is a powerful demonstration of how the brain combines touch, sight, and body position to form a sense of physical self.
In this study, the researchers used virtual reality to recreate this illusion and included both visual-tactile feedback (a virtual brush stroking the hand) and visual-cardiac feedback (the hand flashing in time with the person’s heartbeat).
“I’ve always been fascinated by how our sense of self emerges from the interaction between our brain and body. Body ownership—our feeling that our body belongs to us—is an essential part of self-awareness, yet it can be surprisingly malleable,” explained study author (https://agliotilab.org/lab-staff/senior-fellows/alisha-vabba) Alisha Vabba, a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in the Neuroscience and Society Lab.
“Previous research suggested that interoception, or the ability to sense internal bodily signals like heartbeats, plays a role in body ownership. Since taVNS has been shown to enhance interoceptive awareness, I wanted to explore whether it could influence body ownership as well. Understanding this relationship has implications not only for neuroscience but also for clinical conditions where body awareness is disrupted.”
The study included 27 healthy young adults. Each participant visited the lab twice, once receiving real vagus nerve stimulation and once receiving sham stimulation. The sessions were at least a week apart and the order was randomized. During the stimulation, electrodes were placed on the ear—either on a region connected to the vagus nerve (for real stimulation) or on the earlobe, which is not connected to the nerve (for sham).
The researchers made sure the level of stimulation was noticeable but not uncomfortable. During both sessions, participants completed a series of tasks in virtual reality designed to trigger the rubber hand illusion. In some trials, the feedback was synchronous—meaning the visual cues matched the person’s heartbeat or the timing of the touch. In other trials, the feedback was asynchronous.
To measure how strongly participants experienced the illusion, the researchers used both objective and subjective measures. One was proprioceptive drift—the extent to which participants misjudged the location of their real hand, shifting toward the virtual hand. The other was a set of questions asking how strongly they felt the virtual hand belonged to them. The researchers also collected physiological data, including heart rate, heart rate variability, and skin-based nerve activity, to see how the body responded to the stimulation.
During sham stimulation, the researchers found that participants were more likely to experience the illusion when the visual and touch or heartbeat feedback was synchronized. This is consistent with earlier studies.
But during real vagus nerve stimulation, this effect disappeared. There was no difference between synchronous and asynchronous trials, suggesting that taVNS disrupted the illusion. People became less likely to feel that the fake hand was their own, regardless of whether the feedback was matched or not. This pattern was found in both the tactile and cardiac trials.
“I wasn’t hugely surprised but it was interesting to note the effect we expected was observed similarly for cardiac and tactile trials,” Vabba told PsyPost. “I expected to see a strong effect in the cardiac trials, as taVNS has been shown to improve interoception, making individuals more attuned to their internal bodily signals. However we saw an effect in both cardiac and tactile trials, suggesting that taVNS doesn’t just enhance cardiac awareness but plays a more general role in altering multisensory integration—affecting not only interoception but also how the brain processes and combines visual, tactile, and proprioceptive signals.”
The researchers also found that heart rate dropped slightly during active stimulation but not during sham, suggesting that the vagus nerve stimulation influenced the body’s arousal levels. However, other physiological measures, such as variability in heart rate and skin-based nerve activity, did not show strong or consistent changes. In fact, both real and sham stimulation appeared to raise skin nerve activity, possibly because any electrical stimulation—even if not targeting the vagus nerve—can cause a mild arousal response.
Importantly, the study did not find that a person’s baseline ability to sense their own heartbeat predicted how strongly they experienced the illusion. This is worth noting because previous studies had suggested that people who are more in tune with their internal signals may be less susceptible to body illusions. Here, that link did not hold up.
“Our study shows that the vagus nerve plays a crucial role in how we integrate different sensory signals from our body,” Vabba explained. “Normally, we combine visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information to create a sense of body ownership. When we applied taVNS, it altered this process—reducing susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion. This suggests that vagus nerve stimulation can shift the balance between external sensory input and internal bodily signals, making people rely more on their real body rather than external cues. This finding could have implications for understanding disorders where body perception is disrupted, such as depersonalization, certain anxiety disorders, and even chronic pain conditions.”
But as with all research, there are caveats to consider. “While our study provides interesting evidence for the role of vagus nerve stimulation in body ownership, it was conducted in a relatively small sample of healthy participants,” Vabba noted. “The effects of taVNS may vary between individuals, and it’s unclear how long-lasting these changes are. Additionally, while we used a well-established sham control, some physiological responses (like changes in skin sympathetic nervous activity) were observed in both real and sham stimulation, suggesting that non-specific effects of electrical stimulation might also play a role.”
Future studies should include a larger and more diverse group of participants and could add a no-stimulation control group to further separate the effects of the stimulation itself from the context of the experiment. In the long run, the researchers hope this work will lead to better understanding and potential therapies for disorders where the sense of bodily self is disturbed.
“A long-term goal for this line of research should be to explore how vagus nerve stimulation could be used to enhance body awareness and improve mental health conditions where interoception and self-perception are disrupted,” Vabba explained. “Disorders such as anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, and depersonalization involve altered interoception, and if taVNS can strengthen body ownership and interoceptive accuracy, it may have therapeutic potential.”
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70040) The Vagus Nerve as a Gateway to Body Ownership: taVNS Reduces Susceptibility to a Virtual Version of the Cardiac and Tactile Rubber Hand Illusion,” was authored by Alisha Vabba, Keisuke Suzuki, Milica Doric, Tim J. Möller, Sarah Garfinkel, and Hugo Critchley.

(https://www.psypost.org/genetic-influence-on-political-interest-is-stronger-in-high-income-families-highlighting-a-gene-environment-interaction/) Genetic influence on political interest is stronger in high-income families, highlighting a gene-environment interaction
Mar 25th 2025, 08:00

A study published in (https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2025.1) Politics and the Life Sciences reveals that genetic predispositions to political interest manifest more strongly in adolescents from wealthier families.
Political engagement follows socioeconomic lines, with wealthier individuals generally displaying greater political interest. While previous research attributed these disparities primarily to childhood socialization, we now know that political interest and participation also have significant genetic components. This raises an intriguing question: Does family income create conditions that either amplify or suppress the expression of genetic predispositions toward political engagement?
Researchers Sebastian Jungkunz and Paul Marx analyzed data from the German TwinLife study, a comprehensive longitudinal project tracking genetic and environmental influences on various life outcomes. By comparing identical twins (who share 100% of their genetic material) with fraternal twins (who share approximately 50%), the researchers could isolate genetic effects from environmental factors.
The study included 6,174 individuals aged 10 to 29, with particular focus on adolescents between 10 and 18 years old—a critical period for the development of political identity.
Participants from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds rated their political interest on a 4-point scale. To ensure fair comparisons across different household compositions, the researchers used equivalized household income, which adjusts for family size. This methodological approach allowed them to estimate the relative contributions of genetic predispositions, shared family environment, and unique individual experiences to political interest.
A separate analysis focusing on early adults (aged 23 and older) controlled for genetic and family background factors to determine whether personal income during early adulthood independently affected political interest beyond these inherited traits.
The results revealed that genetic factors account for approximately 30-40% of the variation in political interest among adolescents. However, this genetic effect was not uniform across socioeconomic strata. In wealthier households, genetic influences played a much more prominent role in shaping political interest, while in less affluent families, these genetic effects were reduced.
In low-income environments, political interest appeared to be shaped more by external circumstances, such as family dynamics or economic stress, rather than by inherent predispositions. This suggests that economic hardship may constrain the expression of genetic tendencies toward political engagement.
Notably, when examining early adults, the researchers found that personal income in adulthood had no significant effect on political interest once genetic and family background factors were controlled for. This indicates that the connection between income and political engagement is largely established during adolescence rather than being a direct product of financial circumstances in adulthood.
While the twin-based methodology provides valuable insights into the link between genetics and environment, it is worth noting that twin samples may not perfectly represent the general population.
Rather than viewing political engagement as solely determined by either nature or nurture, this research highlights their interaction—genetic tendencies toward political interest require supportive environments to flourish.
These findings have important implications for understanding and addressing political inequality. Policymakers might develop more effective approaches to fostering civic participation across socioeconomic divides.
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2025.1) Parental Income Moderates the Influence of Genetic Dispositions on Political Interest in Adolescents,” was authored by Sebastian Jungkunz and Paul Marx.

(https://www.psypost.org/in-fascinating-study-neuroscientists-reveal-the-unique-impact-of-nostalgic-music-on-the-brain/) In fascinating study, neuroscientists reveal the unique impact of nostalgic music on the brain
Mar 25th 2025, 06:00

A new study published in Human Brain Mapping has found that music which evokes nostalgia activates a unique network of brain regions tied to memory, self-reflection, and emotion. Researchers discovered that self-selected nostalgic songs triggered more brain activity than familiar or unfamiliar non-nostalgic music in both younger and older adults. Notably, older adults showed even stronger activation in key nostalgia-related areas, suggesting nostalgic music may play a special role in memory and emotional processing later in life.
This research was driven by growing interest in how music can help people with memory loss, especially those with Alzheimer’s disease or related conditions. While it’s well known that music can stir strong emotions and bring back personal memories, scientists have only recently started to explore the brain’s response to nostalgic music in detail. 
The goal of the new study was to understand how nostalgia-evoking music differs from other types of music in the brain, and how these effects might vary across the lifespan. This foundational knowledge could eventually inform new therapies using music to help preserve memory and emotional well-being in aging populations.
“I grew up as an avid musician and music listener. As a teenager, I began to notice how certain songs could transport me back to moment in time, where I could truly feel how I
felt in that moment or era of my life and return to that headspace,” said study author (https://www.sarahlouisehennessy.com/) Sarah Hennessy, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Arizona, who conducted the study while a PhD student at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
“I’d be listening to the Beatles White Album and I’d be back in the car with my dad, driving to school for fourth grade through the snow and sipping a hot chocolate. I began collecting these types of songs and ‘saving them for a rainy day,’ in a way, where I listened to them when I felt lonely, or simply needed to reminisce.” 
“Later, various anecdotal reports began to emerge that individuals with Alzheimer’s and other dementias could still emotionally respond to personalized music, even with profound memory degradation, which I was very interested in. Unsurprisingly, this fascination continued into my research career! So my primary motivation for this project was to understand why and how we feel nostalgia associated with music, and how this manifests in the brain across adulthood, which will help us understand these processes in individuals with cognitive decline.”
For their study, the researchers recruited 57 healthy participants—29 younger adults aged 18 to 35, and 28 older adults aged 60 and above. Each participant identified six songs that personally evoked nostalgia. 
“Nostalgic music is not universal,” Hennessy noted. “Every individual has a different personalized set of nostalgic songs that have meaning and memories attached to them. These songs span across every genre.”
The researchers then used a machine-learning tool to find other songs that were musically similar in tempo, key, and energy, but did not evoke nostalgia. These were used as “familiar control” songs. Additionally, the team selected unfamiliar songs that were also musically matched, ensuring that differences in brain activity could be attributed to nostalgia rather than musical features or familiarity alone.
During the main experiment, participants listened to their nostalgia-evoking songs, as well as the matched familiar and unfamiliar control songs, while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan. Each song was played for 40 seconds, and participants kept their eyes closed to focus on the music and any thoughts or feelings it evoked. Afterward, they completed tasks assessing memory and rated how nostalgic, positive, or emotionally intense the songs felt.
The brain scans revealed that nostalgic songs, more than the control songs, activated a wide array of brain regions. These included areas involved in self-reflection and memory (such as the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and hippocampus), emotional salience (like the insula and anterior cingulate cortex), and reward processing (including the ventral tegmental area and orbitofrontal cortex). These regions together form a network associated with processing autobiographical memories, regulating emotions, and feeling pleasure—all key elements of the nostalgic experience.
Interestingly, the nostalgic songs also triggered increased functional connectivity between brain regions involved in self-related processing and emotional awareness. Specifically, the posterior medial cortex showed stronger communication with the anterior insula when participants listened to nostalgic music, suggesting that nostalgia may integrate personal memories with emotional significance in a particularly powerful way.
“Despite all of the differences present in musical choice, nostalgia as evoked by music is associated with a very clear pattern in the brain across individuals and across the lifespan,” Hennessy told PsyPost. “This pattern involves parts of the brain called the default mode network and the reward network. These networks of the brain help us process information about our own life stories, and respond to things that bring us pleasure.”
Older adults not only reported feeling more positive emotions while listening to music in general, but they also showed stronger brain responses to nostalgic songs than younger adults. In particular, older participants showed greater activation in brain areas related to sound, memory, and emotional meaning, such as the temporal pole, angular gyrus, and sensory processing regions. The findings suggest that older adults may engage more deeply with nostalgic music, possibly reflecting a shift in emotional priorities with age.
“We observed that older adults actually had slightly stronger activation in these nostalgia-related regions than younger adults,” Hennessy explained. “We expected older and younger adults to have similar patterns of activation, but this finding was a bit unexpected. There are a few different explanations for this finding, but future work is needed to really parse them apart. But for now, it’s an interesting piece of information to explore in the future.”
But the study, like all research, includes some caveats.
“Our sample was from the greater Los Angeles area, so of course is not representative of all younger and older adults,” Hennessy noted. “I think there is a lot of cool work to be done exploring the role of culture in music-evoked nostalgia and autobiographical memory. Participants only listed to 40 second clips in the scanner (we hope to explore these research questions with full-length pieces in the future). However, the fact that we saw such robust effects with only 40 seconds is pretty amazing.”
Still, this research represents a significant step toward understanding the neuroscience of nostalgia and how music taps into deep emotional and autobiographical experiences. The study’s authors hope to apply these insights to future work with clinical populations, including individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
“The goal is to use this research to create, improve, and understand music-based interventions for neurodegenerative diseases,” Hennessy explained. “If we can understand how music-evoked memories and emotions can remain in individuals with dementia, we can learn how to harness music to improve quality of life for these individuals and their caregivers.”
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70181) Music-Evoked Nostalgia Activates Default Mode and Reward Networks Across the Lifespan,” was authored by Sarah Hennessy, Petr Janata, Talia Ginsberg, Jonas Kaplan, and Assal Habibi.

(https://www.psypost.org/scientists-identify-distinct-brain-patterns-linked-to-mental-health-symptoms/) Scientists identify distinct brain patterns linked to mental health symptoms
Mar 24th 2025, 14:00

A new study published in (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-025-00388-5) Nature Mental Health has found that patterns of brain activity can help predict different types of mental health symptoms, and that these brain-based predictors are more similar within symptom categories than between them. In other words, the brain features linked to behaviors like anxiety or depression are more alike with each other than they are to behaviors like aggression or rule-breaking—and vice versa. This pattern held true in children, adolescents, and adults, suggesting that brain connectivity plays a consistent but distinct role in different types of mental health issues across development.
Researchers conducted this study to address a long-standing question in mental health: whether internalizing behaviors and externalizing behaviors are supported by shared or unique patterns in the brain. These categories are often used in psychiatry to help understand a wide range of psychological problems, but little is known about how the brain’s network architecture relates to each one.
“Mental health symptoms can be classified into two broad categories: internalizing and externalizing problems,” explained study authors Yueyue Lydia Qu and Avram J. Holmes, a PhD candidate at Yale University and an associate professor at Rutgers University, respectively.
“Internalizing problems, such as anxiety, withdrawal, and somatic complaints, are directed “internally” towards the individual. Externalizing problems, such as disruptive and aggressive behaviors, are directed “externally” towards the environment or other people. In this study, we explored whether brain-based predictors differ between these two categories of mental health symptoms across development.”
The researchers analyzed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data , which captures brain activity while participants are not performing any specific task. The main goal was to examine whether certain brain connectivity patterns—how different regions of the brain interact at rest—could reliably predict internalizing or externalizing symptoms.
The study included three large and independent samples spanning children, adolescents, and adults. The primary sample came from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and included 5,260 children around age 10. Two smaller samples were used to test whether the findings from the children would generalize: one of 229 adolescents aged 12 to 18 from the Healthy Brain Network, and another of 423 young adults with an average age of 29 from the Human Connectome Project. All participants completed mental health questionnaires designed to assess levels of internalizing and externalizing problems, and all underwent high-quality resting-state brain scans.
The researchers analyzed functional connectivity across 419 regions of interest in each person’s brain. They then applied a machine learning model known as kernel ridge regression to try to predict each participant’s symptom levels based on their brain connectivity. While prediction accuracy in children was modest, it was statistically better than chance. However, the predictions did not generalize as well to the adolescent and adult samples, likely due to the smaller size of those groups.
Even so, across all three age groups, one consistent finding stood out: brain-based predictors of internalizing behaviors were more similar to each other than to those predicting externalizing behaviors, and the same held true in reverse. For instance, the patterns in the brain that helped predict a child’s anxiety also looked more like those that predicted withdrawal than they did the patterns predicting aggression. This supports the idea that internalizing and externalizing symptoms are biologically distinct in the brain, even if they sometimes co-occur or share risk factors.
The researchers also examined which specific brain networks were involved in these predictions and whether they changed across age. In children and adolescents, externalizing behaviors were more strongly associated with connectivity between the brain’s visual network and other areas, while internalizing symptoms were more associated with connections to the subcortical regions—deep brain structures involved in emotion and motivation. In adults, however, internalizing and externalizing symptoms were better predicted by connections within large-scale networks such as the limbic and temporal-parietal systems.
One particularly interesting finding was that the same brain networks can play different roles depending on age. For example, connectivity between the subcortical regions and the temporal-parietal network was linked to externalizing behavior in children and adolescents but linked to internalizing behavior in adults. This suggests that the way different parts of the brain communicate may shift in meaning across development, reflecting how the brain reorganizes itself from childhood to adulthood.
The researchers also found some shared brain patterns across symptom categories. This reinforces earlier work showing that many mental health symptoms share overlapping features, but the new findings go a step further by showing that more fine-grained distinctions—such as the difference between anxiety and aggression—can still be detected in brain connectivity patterns.
“We discovered that brain-based predictors of mental health symptoms are more similar within the internalizing and externalizing categories than between them, across independent samples of children, adolescents, and adults,” Qu and Holmes told PsyPost. “Overall, there are both shared and unique brain-based predictors for internalizing and externalizing categories of mental health symptoms across these samples.”
Despite the strengths of this study—including large sample sizes, rigorous data processing, and replication across age groups—there are some limitations to keep in mind. “The three independent samples used in our study were cross-sectional and did not follow participants over time,” the researchers noted. “Therefore, it remains unclear whether our findings hold true within the same individuals as they grow and develop from children to adults. Additionally, the strength of the brain-behavior relationship observed is modest, suggesting that non-brain factors also play a significant role in predicting mental health symptoms.”
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to build on this work by studying how brain-based predictors evolve within the same individuals over time. Longitudinal research could help clarify whether early differences in brain connectivity predict later mental health outcomes, and whether interventions can alter these patterns.
“The long-term goal of this line of research is to identify distinct brain signatures that predict distinct classes of mental health symptoms,” Qu and Holmes said. “This would enable early identification of at-risk individuals and allow for the personalization of prevention strategies.”
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00388-5) Distinct brain network features predict internalizing and externalizing traits in children, adolescents and adults,” was authored by Yueyue Lydia Qu, Jianzhong Chen, Angela Tam, Leon Qi Rong Ooi, Elvisha Dhamala, Carrisa V. Cocuzza, Shaoshi Zhang, Tianchu Zeng, Connor Lawhead, B. T. Thomas Yeo, and Avram J. Holmes.

(https://www.psypost.org/study-finds-intelligence-and-education-predict-disbelief-in-astrology/) Study finds intelligence and education predict disbelief in astrology
Mar 24th 2025, 12:00

A recent study published in the (https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000434) Journal of Individual Differences finds that cognitive ability and educational background are the strongest predictors of whether someone considers astrology scientific.
Analyzing data from over 8,500 Americans, researchers discovered that previously suggested explanations—such as spirituality, religious beliefs, or political orientation—played surprisingly minor roles in astrological belief.
Despite clear scientific consensus that astrology lacks predictive validity, it maintains remarkable popularity in modern society. Nearly 30% of Americans believe astrology is scientific, and horoscope apps continue to attract millions of users. This widespread acceptance of astrological principles prompted researchers Tobias Edwards and colleagues to investigate an interesting question: What factors determine who believes in astrology?
The research team tested four competing hypotheses. The “superficial knowledge” hypothesis proposes that limited education and cognitive ability increase susceptibility to pseudoscientific beliefs. Alternative explanations suggested that astrological belief might stem from science skepticism, spiritual tendencies, or authoritarian personality traits. With inconsistent findings from previous smaller studies, the researchers sought definitive answers through large-scale analysis.
The investigators analyzed data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults conducted regularly since 1972. The final dataset included 8,553 participants who answered the question “Do you believe astrology is scientific?” with one of three responses: “not at all scientific,” “sort of scientific,” or “very scientific.”
To assess potential predictors, the researchers measured intelligence using Wordsum, a 10-item vocabulary test that is strongly associated with general cognitive ability. Education was recorded as years of formal schooling completed. Trust in science was measured by participants’ self-reported confidence in the scientific community. Religiosity and spirituality were self-rated on separate four-point scales. Political orientation was rated on a seven-point scale from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative.”
The study controlled for demographic variables including sex, age, and race, and employed statistical weighting techniques to ensure the sample accurately represented the broader population.
The results provided evidence that intelligence and education significantly influence belief in astrology. Participants scoring lower on the Wordsum test were considerably more likely to consider astrology scientific. Similarly, those with fewer years of formal education showed stronger tendencies to endorse astrology’s scientific legitimacy. These findings strongly support the “superficial knowledge” hypothesis.
Contrary to expectations, other proposed explanations received little empirical support. Trust in science showed only a minimal relationship with astrological belief. Religiosity and spirituality had no significant association with astrological beliefs, challenging the notion that astrology serves as a substitute for religious faith. Political orientation demonstrated no meaningful correlation with belief in astrology, contradicting earlier European studies that linked right-wing authoritarianism to greater acceptance of astrological concepts.
These findings challenge common assumptions about why people believe in astrology, highlighting cognitive ability and educational background as the predominant factors.
A notable limitation involves the study’s measurement approach. By specifically asking whether participants believed astrology was “scientific,” the research may have missed individuals who believe in astrology without considering it scientific.
Despite decades of scientific evidence refuting astrological claims, belief in astrology persists among significant portions of the population. This research suggests that educational initiatives enhancing critical thinking skills and scientific literacy may be the most effective approach for addressing pseudoscientific beliefs.
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000434) Intelligence and Individual Differences in Astrological Belief,” was authored by Tobias Edwards, Magdalena J. March, Emily A. Willoughby, and Alexandros Giannelis.

Forwarded by:
Michael Reeder LCPC
Baltimore, MD

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