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<td><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;">PsyPost – Psychology News</span></td>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/parents-responses-during-conflict-may-predict-suicidal-thoughts-in-adolescent-girls-study-suggests/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Parents’ responses during conflict may predict suicidal thoughts in adolescent girls, study suggests</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 14th 2025, 10:00</div>
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<p><p>New research published in <em><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/girls-with-higher-levels-of-suicidal-ideation-experienced-less-parental-reciprocity-of-eyecontact-and-positive-facial-affect-during-conflictual-interactions-a-pilot-study/A04B33B156E28076D391B5CFFDC046C1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Development and Psychopathology</a></em> suggests that how parents respond to their daughters during emotionally charged conversations may help identify who is at risk of developing suicidal thoughts. The study found that girls whose parents were less likely to reciprocate eye contact and happy facial expressions during conflict discussions were more likely to report suicidal ideation one year later.</p>
<p>Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among adolescents, and rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors have been rising, especially among girls. While much is known about how feelings of social isolation, rejection, and family conflict contribute to suicide risk, the moment-to-moment dynamics of how people interact have received less attention. This study aimed to fill that gap by focusing on subtle, second-by-second behaviors during real interactions between parents and early adolescent girls.</p>
<p>The research was guided by a framework from the National Institute of Mental Health that encourages looking at basic behavioral processes, like how people communicate with one another. In particular, the team was interested in whether eye contact and facial expressions—key signals in social communication—could offer clues about future suicidal thinking. Prior studies have relied heavily on self-reports, which may miss nonverbal and unconscious behaviors. By analyzing actual interactions, the researchers hoped to capture more nuanced indicators of risk.</p>
<p>“Suicide is a leading cause of death for teens in the United States and rates of suicidality have dramatically increased in recent decades. Research shows that family and peer relationship factors can play a role in risk for suicidality,” said study author Kiera M. James, a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>“However, most prior studies have looked at relationship factors broadly, using, for example, questionnaires that assess aspects of youths’ relationships globally. For this reason, we know less about the small, moment-to-moment (or second-to-second) ways that social interactions might contribute to youths’ risk for suicidality.”</p>
<p>“These fine-grained social interaction processes, like eye-gaze and facial expressions, play an important role in how close or connected youth feel to the person with whom they are interacting, which is important because social connectedness is a key protective factor for suicidality. Our goal was to examine how the exchange of eye-contact and facial expressions of happiness may differ during parent-child interactions in families in which the youth later experienced suicidal thoughts.”</p>
<p>The study involved 129 girls between the ages of 11 and 13 and their parents, who were participating in a larger longitudinal project on mental health. Most of the girls had temperamental traits that are known to increase the risk of depression, such as shyness and fearfulness. At the start of the study, each girl and her parent took part in a standardized task called the “Hot Topics” discussion, where they were asked to talk through a conflict they had recently experienced.</p>
<p>During the interaction, the researchers measured two key behaviors: how much time each person spent looking at the other’s eyes and how often they displayed happy facial expressions. Eye contact was measured using mobile eye-tracking glasses, and facial expressions were analyzed with facial recognition software. These data were collected and analyzed in one-second intervals, allowing the team to look at how one person’s behavior influenced the other’s in real time.</p>
<p>The girls’ suicidal ideation was assessed at the start of the study and again 12 months later using a questionnaire that asked how often they had certain thoughts, such as “life is not worth living” or “thought about killing myself.” While none of the participants reported active suicidal intent or planning at the time of the study, a small portion reported suicidal thoughts during the follow-up.</p>
<p>Using statistical models that account for how behaviors influence each other within dyads, the researchers found that in pairs where parents were less likely to return their daughter’s eye contact or reciprocate her expressions of happiness, the girls were more likely to report suicidal thoughts one year later. This pattern held even after accounting for symptoms of depression and anxiety. Importantly, these effects were specific to future suicidal ideation—there was no link between the parent-child communication patterns and whether a girl had suicidal thoughts at the start of the study.</p>
<p>The findings suggest that social communication during emotionally stressful interactions might serve as an early behavioral signal of suicide risk. Reciprocal behaviors—such as returning eye contact or mirroring a smile—are thought to foster feelings of connection and trust. When these responses are absent during conflict, adolescents may feel emotionally disconnected from their parents. This sense of disconnection could, over time, contribute to a greater risk of suicidal thoughts.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the researchers also found that among girls who went on to experience suicidal ideation, their parents tended to sustain their own happy expressions more during the conflict. While at first this might seem like a positive sign, it may actually indicate a mismatch in emotional tone—where a parent’s smiling expression is not responsive to the emotional needs of the child, potentially reinforcing feelings of misunderstanding or rejection.</p>
<p>“Our findings suggest that parental effort to match their child’s body language (like eye-contact and positive facial expressions) really matters during parent-child interactions,” James told PsyPost. “Youth whose parents were less likely to reciprocate their efforts to make eye-contact – or exchange a smile – were more likely to report higher levels of suicidality a year later.”</p>
<p>The study’s strengths include its use of real, naturalistic interactions rather than simulated tasks or hypothetical scenarios. The fine-grained analysis of second-by-second behaviors allowed the researchers to detect subtle patterns that would be missed by broader measures. The researchers also controlled for other factors like symptoms of anxiety and depression to isolate the effects of eye-gaze and facial affect.</p>
<p>But as with all research, the study has limitations. The number of girls who reported suicidal ideation at follow-up was small, which means that the findings should be interpreted cautiously until replicated in larger samples. The measure of suicidal ideation did not assess plans or intent, so the results may not extend to more severe forms of suicidality. Additionally, the study included only girls, so it remains unknown whether similar patterns would be found in boys.</p>
<p>“The youth in this study were not recruited to be at high risk for suicidality,” James noted. “Consequently, the number of participants who reported suicidal thoughts over the course of the study was small. Our findings should, therefore, be considered preliminary. However, with support from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, I am currently conducting another study aimed at replicating and extending these findings in a larger and higher risk sample of teens.”</p>
<p>“The long-term goal for my research in this area is to determine how to improve and sustain beneficial social connection processes, which may be crucial to reducing suicidality during adolescence and into adulthood. Ultimately, beneficial social connection processes, like eye-contact or the exchange of smiles, may prove to be promising treatment targets to reduce risk for future suicidality in youth. These efforts may also enhance the ability to savor moments of connectedness.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579425000070" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Girls with higher levels of suicidal ideation experienced less parental reciprocity of eye-contact and positive facial affect during conflictual interactions: A pilot study</a>,” was authored by Kiera M. James, Aleksandra Kaurin, Amelia Lint, Samantha Wert, Kirsten M. McKone, Emily A. Hutchinson, Rebecca B. Price, Cecile D. Ladouceur, and Jennifer S. Silk.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/lucid-dreaming-sparks-complex-brain-connectivity-rarely-seen-in-sleep/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Lucid dreaming sparks complex brain connectivity rarely seen in sleep</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 14th 2025, 08:00</div>
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<p><p>Lucid dreaming—a rare state where the dreamer knows they are dreaming—activates the brain in ways that are distinct from both normal dreaming and wakefulness. A new study published in <em><a href="https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2025/03/27/JNEUROSCI.2237-24.2025" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Journal of Neuroscience</a></em> has mapped the neural activity underlying lucid dreams with unprecedented precision. The researchers found that lucid dreaming produces a unique pattern of brain activity that includes altered communication between brain regions, increased gamma activity, and signatures linked to self-awareness and cognitive control.</p>
<p>Lucid dreaming occurs when a person becomes aware that they are dreaming, sometimes even gaining control over the dream’s content. Though vivid and immersive, this state is neurologically complex and still poorly understood. Previous studies had proposed possible brain markers of lucid dreaming, but results were often inconsistent. Many used small samples and lacked standardized methods to clean up confounding signals such as those produced by eye movements during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The team led by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/%C3%A7a%C4%9Fatay-demirel-93bb50b6/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Çağatay Demirel</a> at Radboud University Medical Center sought to overcome these limitations.</p>
<p>“I am a PhD candidate nearing completion, and this project represents the largest chapter of my dissertation,” Demirel explained. “Lucid dreaming felt like a strange crack in reality—a moment where you could witness your mind from within and perhaps even take control, even when nothing else felt truly graspable. That paradox—being awake inside a dream—captivated me.”</p>
<p>“Over time, that existential curiosity evolved into a scientific pursuit. Moreover, the inconclusive results regarding electrophysiological correlates in several studies using distinct, small-sample EEG datasets highlighted the need for refinement in the field—specifically, through an EEG mega-analysis by combining various datasets.”</p>
<p>The researchers assembled a large dataset from multiple laboratories in the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and the United States, bringing together a final sample of 26 lucid dreamers who contributed a total of 43 usable sleep recordings. These included both low-density and high-density EEG recordings, with up to 128 electrodes monitoring electrical activity across the scalp. Participants were instructed to perform a distinct sequence of eye movements (left-right-left-right) once they realized they were dreaming. This standard signal allowed the researchers to pinpoint the moment lucidity began.</p>
<p>A major innovation in the study was the development of a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline to clean the EEG data. This was essential because both spontaneous and voluntary eye movements during REM sleep can introduce artifacts that mimic brain activity, especially in the gamma frequency band (30–45 Hz). The team implemented techniques to identify and remove these saccadic artifacts using signal processing methods that worked even on low-density EEG setups. This preprocessing ensured that the signals analyzed truly reflected neural activity and not muscle movements or other noise.</p>
<p>The researchers then compared brain activity during lucid REM sleep to that during regular REM sleep and relaxed wakefulness. These comparisons used both broad frequency band analyses and more advanced techniques that measured brain signal complexity and functional connectivity. They found that lucid dreaming had a distinctive neural profile. While some features overlapped with normal REM sleep, such as lower alpha power and higher delta activity compared to waking, other features set lucid dreams apart.</p>
<p>One key finding was a reduction in theta and beta power in certain brain regions during lucid dreams, particularly in the posterior and right temporoparietal regions of the brain. These areas are involved in attention and self-awareness, suggesting that lucid dreaming might engage neural circuits similar to those used during reflective or metacognitive thinking. At the same time, the researchers observed increased gamma activity—especially in the 30–36 Hz range—around the moment the lucid dreamer became aware. This activity was most pronounced in the precuneus and prefrontal cortex, areas linked to consciousness and internal monitoring.</p>
<p>Functional connectivity analyses revealed that lucid dreaming was associated with greater long-range communication between brain regions, particularly in the alpha and gamma bands. These patterns involved areas of the brain known to support sensory integration, internal attention, and memory—functions likely involved in recognizing and maintaining lucidity within the dream. Notably, alpha connectivity during lucid dreams formed a network that included the superior temporal and superior frontal gyri, suggesting coordination between auditory, sensory, and executive systems.</p>
<p>Signal complexity analyses also distinguished lucid dreams from other sleep states. Measures like Lempel-Ziv complexity and entropy, which quantify the unpredictability or richness of brain signals, were higher in lucid dreaming than in regular REM sleep. However, these values were still lower than in the waking state. This suggests that lucid dreaming represents an intermediate state of consciousness—one that is more organized and self-aware than typical dreaming, but still distinct from being awake.</p>
<p>“We didn’t approach with any specific expectations (there is no null hypothesis in this project), as this is an almost entirely exploratory study due to the merging of large datasets from different labs,” Demirel told PsyPost. “However, the findings that captivated us most were in the source-level analyses (cortical estimation), which differ from the more traditional sensor-level EEG analyses we also applied. Sensor-level EEG patterns during lucid dreaming regarding power spectral density (PSD) analyses resemble REM sleep in statistical sense. However, source-level findings revealed heightened alpha connectivity during lucid dreaming that lies between REM sleep and wakefulness (there are evidences in the literature regarding alpha connectivity changes related to psychedelics).”</p>
<p>The researchers also studied how brain activity changed in the moments before and after lucid dreamers signaled their awareness with eye movements. In the seconds surrounding this signal, gamma activity spiked, and large-scale increases in connectivity were seen across the cortex. These changes began just before the eye movement signal, suggesting that the brain prepares for lucidity even before the dreamer communicates it. These moments may capture the emergence of self-awareness from a non-conscious dream state.</p>
<p>“The gamma activation in the precuneus around the onset of lucidity eye signaling was quite a surprising finding,” Demirel said. “Considering that this activation occurs in comparison to a baseline temporally close to the onset itself, it provides potentially conclusive patterns suggesting that the brain may simulate its own reality, reflecting self-referential awareness and possibly motor awareness. This could be interpreted as a potential sensory awakening into a simulated reality.”</p>
<p>This study sheds light on the neural mechanisms behind lucid dreaming by addressing previous methodological challenges and using both sensor-level and source-level analyses. The findings show that lucid dreaming is not simply a hybrid of dreaming and waking, but a distinct state of consciousness with its own brain dynamics. By tracking both spectral activity and functional connectivity, the researchers provide a more complete picture of how the brain supports self-awareness within a dream.</p>
<p>There are still several open questions. Lucid dreaming remains difficult to induce in experimental settings, which means that researchers often rely on naturally occurring instances. Dream content also varies widely between participants and sessions, making it harder to isolate what aspects of the experience are most responsible for the observed brain patterns. The study also relied on EEG, which has limited spatial resolution and cannot definitively rule out the influence of residual artifacts—especially in high-frequency bands where eye movements are most disruptive. Future studies using methods like fMRI or intracranial recordings could help resolve these issues.</p>
<p>“The rarity of very high-density EEG combined with fMRI data—or the lack of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data—on lucid dreaming poses a major limitation for performing volumetric estimations of deep brain structures,” Demirel said. “While interesting patterns can be captured at the source level, we had to restrict our analyses to cortical estimations. Although we can detect the onset of lucid dreaming through eye signaling via electrooculogram (EOG), the actual experience likely begins earlier, and we still don’t know exactly when lucidity truly emerges.”</p>
<p>“The limitations are shaping the goals. I am working on the development of more in-depth mathematical models to decode EEG patterns and improve sensitivity to phase shifts in non-stationary state decoding. Considering that lucid dreaming is seemingly a transient brain state, methodological reconsideration is essential to distinguish it from stationary signals. This could enable a more precise segmentation of the lucid state. I also view lucid dreaming as a tool for developing methods that could ultimately help redefine the dynamics of sleep and wakefulness, which will also indirectly support research into disorders of consciousness.”</p>
<p>“I’m just happy that the study has finally been published after years of very draining work that, at times, felt like it would never end,” Demirel added. “I’m really excited to finally share these findings with the community.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2237-24.2025" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Electrophysiological correlates of lucid dreaming: sensor and source level signatures</a>,” was authored by Çağatay Demirel, Jarrod Gott, Kristoffer Appel, Katharina Lüth, Christian Fischer, Cecilia Raffaelli, Britta Westner, Xinlin Wang, Zsófia Zavecz, Axel Steiger, Daniel Erlacher, Stephen LaBerge, Sérgio Mota-Rolim, Sidarta Ribeiro, Marcel Zeising, Nico Adelhöfer, and Martin Dresler.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/scientists-reveal-how-dmt-alters-brain-activity-and-consciousness-by-lowering-control-energy/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Scientists reveal how DMT alters brain activity and consciousness by lowering control energy</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 14th 2025, 06:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in <em><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08078-9" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Communications Biology</a></em> sheds light on how the psychedelic compound DMT changes the brain’s dynamic behavior. Researchers found that DMT reduces the amount of energy the brain needs to switch between different activity states. This reduction in control energy was linked to increased complexity in brain signals and to how intense the psychedelic experience felt to participants. The effects were strongest in brain regions rich in serotonin 2a receptors, which are known to play a key role in the effects of psychedelics.</p>
<p>DMT, or N,N-dimethyltryptamine, is a powerful psychedelic substance that produces vivid hallucinations and immersive altered states of consciousness. It is found in some plants and is the main psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca, a ceremonial brew used in some South American spiritual traditions. Unlike other psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, DMT has a very short duration of action—when injected, its effects come on rapidly and subside within about 20 minutes. This brief but intense experience makes DMT uniquely suited for studies using brain imaging tools like fMRI, which can capture the entire altered state in a single session.</p>
<p>In the current study, researchers sought to understand how DMT changes the way the brain shifts between different states of activity. They were particularly interested in how these changes relate to the serotonin 2a receptor. Previous work has shown that psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin increase the brain’s signal diversity—a measure of how complex and varied brain activity is over time. But this study went further, using a mathematical framework known as network control theory to examine how much effort, or “control energy,” the brain needs to transition from one state to another during the DMT experience.</p>
<p>“I’ve always been interested in studying the brain during non-ordinary states of consciousness and DMT’s rapid onset and metabolism provides a powerful approach to do so,” said study author <a href="https://singlesp.github.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">S. Parker Singleton</a>, a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Lifespan Informatics & Neuroimaging Center (PennLINC) at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>The study involved 20 participants, 14 of whom were included in the final analysis after removing those with excessive head movement. Each participant underwent two sessions, spaced two weeks apart. In one session, they were given an intravenous injection of DMT; in the other, they received a saline placebo. Functional MRI and EEG recordings were taken during each 28-minute scan. DMT or placebo was injected eight minutes into the scan. In a separate session, participants also rated how intense the drug experience felt every minute on a scale from 0 to 10.</p>
<p>The researchers used network control theory to analyze how much energy was needed for the brain to move from one activity pattern to the next at each time point. They found that DMT consistently lowered this control energy compared to placebo. This suggests that under DMT, the brain more easily transitions between different activity states. This flexibility was not random—it followed a pattern tied to the structure and chemistry of the brain.</p>
<p>“Do you ever wonder what’s going on in the brain when someone is on DMT? Well, so do we,” Singleton told PsyPost. “There’s a lot happening and we’re still working to understand what it all means.”</p>
<p>Importantly, the drop in control energy was linked to two key aspects of the psychedelic experience. First, EEG recordings showed that brain signals became more complex under DMT, an effect known as increased signal diversity. This complexity has been proposed as a marker of expanded conscious experience. Second, the participants’ own reports of how intense the DMT experience felt were inversely related to control energy—lower energy requirements were associated with stronger subjective effects.</p>
<p>These relationships varied across different parts of the brain. When the researchers looked at specific brain networks, they found that control energy dropped most significantly in the visual system, the frontoparietal network, and the default mode network. These networks are often implicated in visual processing, attention, and self-referential thought, and they have been shown in previous studies to be particularly affected by psychedelics. Interestingly, the timing of these effects differed: the frontoparietal and default mode networks showed the greatest changes early in the experience, while the visual network’s changes were more sustained and appeared later.</p>
<p>“We found what I believe to be a pretty convincing arousal (vigilance) effect in the visual cortex during the later stages of the scan,” Singleton said. “We likely would not have caught this without our time-resolved approach.”</p>
<p>At an even finer level, the researchers looked at individual brain regions to see how changes in control energy corresponded to the local density of serotonin 2a receptors. They used brain maps from previous PET imaging studies to estimate how many of these receptors were present in each region. They found that areas with higher serotonin 2a receptor density tended to show larger drops in control energy during the DMT session. These same regions also showed stronger associations between control energy and both EEG signal diversity and subjective intensity.</p>
<p>To ensure that this connection wasn’t just a coincidence, the researchers ran a dominance analysis comparing several types of serotonin receptors. The serotonin 2a receptor consistently emerged as the most important predictor of how DMT affected brain control energy. This reinforces the idea that DMT’s effects are specifically tied to its action on this particular receptor.</p>
<p>Taking the analysis a step further, the team asked whether they could simulate DMT’s effects on brain control energy using only placebo data, receptor maps, and pharmacological modeling. They built a simulation that estimated DMT’s concentration in the brain over time and scaled this by serotonin 2a receptor density across brain regions. Using this model as a guide for where and when DMT would act, they were able to recreate the observed changes in control energy with high accuracy. This approach could open new avenues for predicting how other compounds might affect brain dynamics based on their pharmacological profiles.</p>
<p>The study offers a detailed picture of how DMT temporarily shifts the brain into a more fluid and flexible mode of functioning. By requiring less control energy to move between different activity patterns, the brain may be able to explore a broader range of mental states, contributing to the intense and sometimes transformative nature of the psychedelic experience. The close alignment of these changes with serotonin 2a receptor distribution also strengthens the case that this receptor is a key gateway for the altered states produced by psychedelics.</p>
<p>Despite its insights, the study has limitations. The sample size was relatively small, and individual differences in brain structure were not accounted for, since the researchers used a group-average structural connectome. The design was single-blind rather than double-blind, which might introduce some bias. Also, while the researchers found strong associations at the group level, future studies could explore whether these patterns hold true at the individual level—an important step for personalizing psychedelic therapy.</p>
<p>“We still have a lot to learn about psychedelic action in the brain,” Singleton said. “On-going work seeks to address many potential confounds including influences of arousal, head motion, and these drugs’ ability to impact the tone of blood vessels.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08078-9" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Network control energy reductions under DMT relate to serotonin receptors, signal diversity, and subjective experience</a>,” was authored by S. Parker Singleton, Christopher Timmermann, Andrea I. Luppi, Emma Eckernäs, Leor Roseman, Robin L. Carhart-Harris, and Amy Kuceyeski.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/study-links-anomalous-experiences-to-subconscious-connectedness-and-other-psychological-traits/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Study links anomalous experiences to subconscious connectedness and other psychological traits</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 13th 2025, 17:00</div>
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<p><p>A new series of studies suggests that unusual experiences like premonitions, déjà vu, and out-of-body sensations are not rare, but instead quite common—and that people who report them often share distinct psychological traits. The research, published in the journal <em><a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-07062-001?doi=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice</a></em>, found that individuals high in a trait called subconscious connectedness were significantly more likely to report frequent anomalous experiences. These experiences were also associated with traits such as dissociation, magical thinking, absorption, and intuitive thinking.</p>
<p>Anomalous experiences are events that seem to go beyond what conventional science can explain. These include extrasensory perceptions, vivid or unusual dreams, perceived telepathic events, or an unexplained sense of presence. While such experiences are often dismissed as illusions or signs of mental illness, some researchers argue that they are widespread in the general population and deserve more scientific attention. The new study was designed to better understand what kinds of people are more likely to report such experiences and how those experiences might be related to underlying psychological traits.</p>
<p>“I have been formally studying the personality trait of subconscious connectedness for several years. It is a line of research that indicates that some people have a much closer connection with the non-conscious or subconscious parts of their mind than other people; meaning that their consciousness and their subconscious mind influence each other to an unusually high degree in their everyday life,” said study author <a href="https://www.med.unc.edu/medicine/gi/people/olafur-s-palsson-psyd/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Olafur S. Palsson</a>, professor emeritus of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</p>
<p>“This can be measured with a questionnaire called the Thought Impact Scale, which I developed and validated. By using scores on that scale, people can be reliably divided into those with high, moderate, and low subconscious connectedness. It is a personality characteristic that is normally distributed in the general population.”</p>
<p>“Having high subconscious connectedness seems to be associated with a range of specific personal tendencies and behaviors, and I have been investigating those systematically in several studies,” Palsson explained. “These side effects, so to speak, of high subconscious connectedness include greater proneness to engage regularly in creative or artistic activities, higher hypnotizability and being more likely to seek hypnosis treatment, and greater probability of experiencing certain stress-related physical health problems such as irritable bowel syndrome and migraine headaches. A tendency to have a lot of unusual life experiences is another characteristic that I have long suspected to be associated with high subconscious connectedness.”</p>
<p>“Anomalous experiences are a broad and heterogenous class of phenomena that simply have in common that they are things that people sometimes experience that are outside the conventional framework of understanding of how the world operates. I noticed many years ago that clients in my practice as a clinical psychologist who showed indications of high subconscious connectedness seemed to spontaneously report various anomalous experiences more commonly than my other clients.”</p>
<p>“For example, they more often described being able to sense the thoughts of other people, having predictive dreams, experiencing highly improbable and very meaningful synchronicities, or having out-of-body experiences,” Palsson continued. “This observation led me to conduct a series of three studies to examine whether greater proneness to anomalous experiences is indeed a side effect of having high subconscious connectedness.”</p>
<p>Palsson conducted three separate studies involving over 2,200 adults in the United States. The first study was a pilot involving 216 participants from a university community. The second and third studies were large, demographically balanced online surveys conducted with nationwide samples—500 people in Study 2 and 1,500 people in Study 3.</p>
<p>All three studies used the newly developed Unusual Experiences Questionnaire, which asks people about 13 types of anomalous experiences and how often they occur. Examples include sensing someone is watching you before you turn around, having predictive dreams, or noticing meaningful coincidences that seem too unlikely to be chance. The team also used the Thought Impact Scale to assess the psychological trait of subconscious connectedness.</p>
<p>Palsson found that people with high subconscious connectedness reported more anomalous experiences than those with low scores on the Thought Impact Scale. In all three studies, the difference between high and low scorers was not just statistically significant—it was large. For example, in the nationally representative Study 3, people with high Thought Impact Scale scores reported, on average, more than three times as many repeated anomalous experiences as those with low scores. In fact, 86% of participants in that survey said they had experienced at least one of the anomalous events more than once.</p>
<p>The correlation between Thought Impact Scale scores and the amount of anomalous experiences was moderate to strong across all three studies (r = .53 to .69). Moreover, every single one of the 13 experiences listed in the Unusual Experiences Questionnaire was more common among people with high subconscious connectedness—ranging from déjà vu to feeling their thoughts had influenced other people’s behavior.</p>
<p>“What surprised me most was to see how many adults have certain anomalous experiences again and again,” Palsson told PsyPost. “The most common of these repeated experiences was déjà-vu — that is, the sense that what one is experiencing in the present moment has happened before, when that is not possible. About sixty percent of people in the U.S. national population samples reported having had déjà-vu at least a few times. And between forty and fifty percent of all the people surveyed reported that they had at least a few times sensed correctly being stared at before looking, having had premonition that came true, and objects oddly disappearing and showing up later in places where they had already looked for them.”</p>
<p>“A person having any such peculiar experience once can perhaps be dismissed as misperception or imagination. But to see that a large proportion of the general population experiences particular anomalies again and again over time is eye-opening to me, and suggests that these phenomena warrant far more research. Most surveys of anomalous experiences have unfortunately only asked whether people have ever experienced what is described, but not how often it occurs. That is a mistake, I think. For if some subjective experience happens repeatedly over time, it is a psychological tendency, and likely says something about the mind of the person who has that experience.”</p>
<p>But subconscious connectedness wasn’t the only trait linked to these experiences. In the first and third studies, Palsson also measured several other personality traits previously associated with anomalous experiences. These included absorption (becoming fully immersed in thoughts or sensory experiences), dissociation (feeling detached from oneself), fantasy proneness, faith in intuition, magical ideation (the belief that one’s thoughts can influence the world), and belief in paranormal phenomena. All of these traits showed significant associations with the number of anomalous experiences participants reported.</p>
<p>Palsson also explored how these experiences relate to mental health and well-being. People who reported more anomalous experiences tended to report more stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. However, the correlations were modest. The number of anomalous experiences was only weakly related to lower happiness and had no clear relationship with perceived quality of life. These findings suggest that while unusual experiences may be more common in individuals with higher emotional distress, they are not necessarily impairing or distressing themselves.</p>
<p>Demographic patterns also emerged. Across the two national surveys, younger adults reported more anomalous experiences than older adults. The highest prevalence was found in participants under 50 years old, while people over 65 reported the fewest. Some racial and ethnic differences were also found: in the third study, Black participants reported more anomalous experiences than white participants, while Hispanic participants fell in between.</p>
<p>“I think there are two important points that emerge from this work for the general public,” Palsson explained. “The first is that anomalous experiences are actually very common. They tend to be dismissed as exceptions or rare events, but the findings indicate that they are a normal part of human life experience. The series of three studies that I describe in the paper that was just published is the most comprehensive investigation carried out so far on anomalous experiences in the U.S. general population.</p>
<p>“Two of the studies were nationwide surveys of nationally representative samples of adults. Both of those population studies showed that about four out of every five American adults have at least one kind of anomalous experience repeatedly, and in fact, most of them have multiple different kinds of such odd experiences again and again. In my view, this suggests that having anomalous experiences is something that should be considered to be a part of our natural psychological makeup as human beings.”</p>
<p>“The second important takeaway from this research, I think, is that people vary greatly in regard to the extent to which they have odd life experiences,” Palssons said. “Proneness to have anomalous experiences is most likely a stable personal characteristic over time, and is probably determined in large part by how much people’s conscious and subconscious minds communicate with each other in everyday life. What this means is that if you are a person who frequently has anomalous experiences, and you have a friend who rarely or never has such experiences, that particular difference between you will probably still be there years from now.”</p>
<p>Palsson cautions that while the findings are robust, they do not prove that subconscious connectedness causes anomalous experiences. It is possible that both are influenced by other underlying factors, or that people who are more open to experiences are simply more likely to notice or recall unusual events. Another limitation is that the Unusual Experiences Questionnaire does not cover all possible anomalous experiences—such as religious visions, communication with the dead, or UFO encounters—so the findings may not apply to those domains.</p>
<p>“The main limitation of this research is that I used a short questionnaire in the three survey studies to measure anomalous experiences,” Palsson noted. “It is therefore unclear whether the findings apply to all types of anomalous experiences. For example, we cannot know for sure whether seeing ghosts is related to being high on the psychological trait of subconscious connectedness, because my surveys did not ask people whether or how often they have seen ghosts. However, because all thirteen types of anomalous experiences that were measured in my surveys showed a robust association with high subconscious connectedness, it seems likely that other such experiences are also more common for people with high scores on that trait.”</p>
<p>The authors hope their findings will encourage more scientific attention to these experiences and promote a better understanding of their psychological roots. Whether or not anomalous experiences reflect hidden aspects of reality or just the quirks of the human mind, they appear to be deeply woven into how many people experience the world.</p>
<p>“I continue to actively pursue research to enhance understanding of the effects of having high, or low, subconscious connectedness,” Palsson said. “In regard to anomalous experiences, future studies will aim to examine what specific cognitive differences related to high subconscious connectedness result in proneness to have anomalous experiences.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cns0000428" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anomalous Experiences Are Associated With High Subconscious Connectedness</a>,” was published April 17, 2025.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/sharing-false-information-online-boosts-visibility-for-republican-legislators-study-finds/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Sharing false information online boosts visibility for Republican legislators, study finds</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 13th 2025, 14:00</div>
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<p><p>What happens when politicians post false or toxic messages online? My team and I found evidence that suggests U.S. state legislators can <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.16014">increase or decrease their public visibility</a> by sharing unverified claims or using uncivil language during times of high political tension. This raises questions about how social media platforms shape public opinion and, intentionally or not, reward certain behaviors.</p>
<p>I’m a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=9EeqDSEAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate">computational social scientist</a>, and my team builds tools to study political communication on social media. In our latest study we looked at what types of messages made U.S. state legislators stand out online during 2020 and 2021 – a time marked by the pandemic, the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. We focused on two types of harmful content: low-credibility information and uncivil language such as insults or extreme statements. We measured their impact based on how widely a post was liked, shared or commented on on Facebook and X, at the time Twitter.</p>
<p>Our study found that this harmful content is linked to <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.16014">increased visibility for posters</a>. However, the effects vary. For example, Republican legislators who posted low-credibility information were more likely to receive greater online attention, a pattern not observed among Democrats. In contrast, posting uncivil content generally reduced visibility, particularly for lawmakers at ideological extremes.</p>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>Social media platforms such as Facebook and X have become one of the <a href="https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/05/11/the-power-of-social-media-shaping-political-discourse-in-the-digital-age/">main stages for political debate and persuasion</a>. Politicians use them to reach voters, promote their agendas, rally supporters and attack rivals. But some of their posts get far more attention than others.</p>
<p>Earlier research showed that false information <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559">spreads faster and reaches wider audiences</a> than factual content. Platform algorithms often push content that makes people angry or emotional <a href="https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0009">higher in feeds</a>. At the same time, uncivil language can <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.966365">deepen divisions</a> and make people <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764220978470">lose trust in democratic processes</a>.</p>
<p>When platforms reward harmful content with increased visibility, politicians have an incentive to post such messages, because increased visibility can lead directly to greater media attention and potentially more voter support. Our findings raise concerns that platform algorithms may unintentionally reward divisive or misleading behavior.</p>
<p>When harmful content becomes a winning strategy for politicians to stand out, it can distort public debates, deepen polarization and make it harder for voters to find <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05912-8">trustworthy information</a>.</p>
<h2>How we did our work</h2>
<p>We gathered nearly 4 million tweets and half a million Facebook posts from over 6,500 U.S. state legislators during 2020 and 2021. We used machine learning techniques to determine causal relationships between content and visibility.</p>
<p>The techniques allowed us to compare posts that were similar in almost every aspect except that one had harmful content and the other didn’t. By measuring the difference in how widely those posts were seen or shared, we could estimate how much visibility was gained or lost due solely to that harmful content.</p>
<h2>What other research is being done</h2>
<p>Most research on harmful content has focused on national figures or social media influencers. Our study instead examined state legislators, who significantly shape state-level laws on issues such as education, health and public safety but typically receive less <a href="http://doi.org/10.4324/9781003004431-55">media coverage and fact-checking</a>.</p>
<p>State legislators often <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764220978470">escape broad scrutiny</a>, which creates opportunities for misinformation and toxic content to spread unchecked. This makes their online activities especially important to understand.</p>
<h2>What’s next</h2>
<p>We plan on conducting ongoing analyses to determine whether the patterns we found during the intense years of 2020 and 2021 persist over time. Do platforms and audiences continue rewarding low-credibility information, or is that effect temporary?</p>
<p>We also plan to examine how changes in moderation policies such as X’s <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-rolls-back-covid-misinformation-policy-2022-11-29/">shift to less oversight</a> or Facebook’s <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/meta-drops-fact-checking-and-loosens-its-content-moderation-rules/">end of human fact-checking</a> affect what gets seen and shared. Finally, we want to better understand how people react to harmful posts: Are they liking them, sharing them in outrage, or trying to correct them?</p>
<p>Building on our current findings, this line of research can help shape smarter platform design, more effective digital literacy efforts and stronger protections for healthy political conversation.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/some-politicians-who-share-harmful-information-are-rewarded-with-more-clicks-study-finds-252491">original article</a>.</em></p></p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
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