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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/what-brain-waves-reveal-about-people-who-can-solve-a-rubiks-cube-in-seconds/" 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;">What brain waves reveal about people who can solve a Rubik’s Cube in seconds</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 24th 2026, 10:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-025-07104-w" target="_blank">Experimental Brain Research</a></em> provides evidence that elite Rubik’s Cube solvers use the exact same brain patterns to mentally plan their moves as they do to physically execute them. This research suggests that highly trained experts mentally solve the entire puzzle before even touching it. These findings help explain how the human brain adapts to handle complex tasks that require intense thinking and fast physical movement at the same time.</p>
<p>Humans generally struggle to perform difficult mental calculations while executing precise physical movements. For example, a person texting on a smartphone tends to walk much slower because the brain cannot easily dedicate its full capacity to both thinking and moving at the exact same time.</p>
<p>Solving a Rubik’s Cube is an incredibly demanding activity. It requires a person to analyze color patterns, memorize those patterns, and predict how the puzzle will look multiple steps into the future. But professional speed-cubers can complete this puzzle in a matter of seconds.</p>
<p>“We humans can use our brains to perform difficult actions. We control refined movements and we can also make complex calculations or associations in our brains,” said study author <a href="https://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/oliveira/" target="_blank">Anderson Souza Oliveira</a>, an associate professor in biomechanics at Aalborg University.</p>
<p>“However, when we need to think <em>and</em> move at the same time, we usually cannot be so good at both things. You for sure have seen a person texting on a smartphone while walking, and usually the person walks slower than usual, or if the person walks close to normal speed, the texting speed is reduced. This happens because our brains cannot dedicate full capacity to both moving and thinking simultaneously.”</p>
<p>“Solving a Rubik’s is a very difficult task, since we need to analyze color patterns, memorize these patterns and predict how the patterns will look in the future in one or several moves. When a Rubik’s cube player is stuck and doesn’t move the pieces, the person is thinking really hard about what to do. Rubik’s cube athletes can finish the puzzle in less than one minute, so their brains must work differently as they can evaluate <em>and</em> move the pieces simultaneously – and really fast.”</p>
<p>This extreme speed suggests that expert brains adapt to evaluate information and physically move puzzle pieces simultaneously. Understanding the brain activity behind this expertise might reveal broad principles about how humans acquire new skills.</p>
<p>To study this process, the researchers recruited 13 healthy young male adults who were experienced speed-cubers. These participants had an average age of 23 and could solve a Rubik’s Cube in an average of 17 seconds. </p>
<p>The scientists attached special caps with sensors to the participants’ heads to record their brain waves. This recording technique is called electroencephalography. It allows scientists to measure the electrical activity in different areas of the brain as a person performs a task. The equipment picks up different types of brain waves, ranging from slow delta waves to faster beta waves, depending on how hard the brain is working.</p>
<p>The researchers recorded this electrical activity while the participants completed four isolated computer tasks. They also recorded the participants’ brain waves while they solved an actual Rubik’s Cube. The four isolated tasks were designed to test specific mental skills required for puzzle solving.</p>
<p>The first task involved rearranging colored rings on a screen to match a target image, which tested planning abilities. The second task required participants to judge the angles and positions of different lines on a screen. This specific assessment measured their ability to visually identify and mentally manipulate objects.</p>
<p>The third task was a memory matching game that tested spatial working memory. It required participants to flip over hidden tiles on a screen to find matching color patterns. The fourth task required participants to perform a specific sequence of repetitive moves on a physical Rubik’s Cube for 60 seconds to measure their fine motor skills.</p>
<p>After the isolated tasks, the participants completed the main event. They were given 15 seconds to look at a scrambled Rubik’s Cube and plan their strategy. Immediately after this planning phase, they physically solved the puzzle as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>When looking at the data, the scientists found that the brain regions controlling memory, action planning, spatial manipulation, and fine motor skills were highly synchronized. The brain waves from these distinct areas worked together seamlessly to facilitate rapid decision-making. The electrical activity across all frequency bands was remarkably similar during both the 15-second planning phase and the physical execution phase.</p>
<p>“Solving the Rubik’s cube demands high engagement of brain areas controlling memory, action planning, visuospatial manipulation of objects and fine motor skills,” Oliveira told PsyPost. “Our study showed that the waves from brain areas controlling such abilities are more synchronized, facilitating the decision-making process.”</p>
<p>“The main surprise was that the brain regions work very similarly when the athletes are mentally memorizing the cube or physically solving the puzzle. It seems that these athletes are so adapted to solving the cube that they don’t need the ‘physical’ cube anymore. They can solve it in their minds and just repeat the moves in the physical object.”</p>
<p>The researchers also found specific connections between the isolated cognitive tasks and the actual puzzle solving. For instance, slow delta brain waves in the back of the brain correlated strongly with the physical execution of the puzzle. This back area is known as the occipital lobe, and it primarily handles visual processing. This connection highlights the heavy need for visual and physical integration during the task. </p>
<p>Similarly, performance on the line angle task correlated with slow brain waves in both the front and back of the brain. This association points to the heavy reliance on visual and spatial abilities.</p>
<p>Performance on the ring-sorting planning task correlated with delta and theta brain waves in the temporal lobe, which sits on the side of the brain. This specific link demonstrates that general planning abilities are deeply engaged when figuring out a Rubik’s Cube. The scientists noted that the planning stage of the puzzle was also strongly tied to an individual’s proficiency in fine motor skills.</p>
<p>While this research provides a clear look into expert cognition, there are a few caveats to keep in mind. The study only included experienced speed-cubers. Without a control group of beginners, researchers cannot definitively say which specific brain adaptations occur only after someone reaches a professional level. The study also had a small sample size of only 13 participants, and all of them were young men. </p>
<p>“An important limitation in the study is that we did not measure the performance and brain activity in regular practitioners of Rubik’s cube,” Oliveira said. “Having the comparison between regular people and athletes could show which brain areas are more adapted to solve the cube once you reach a professional level.”</p>
<p>Looking ahead, the scientists note the importance of studying how the brain changes over time as a person learns to solve these puzzles. Tracking beginners as they become experts could provide better insight into how the brain acquires complex visual and physical skills.</p>
<p>“Our research opened an important venue to investigate how the brain adapts to complex cognitive-motor tasks,” Oliveira said. “In the long-term, our research can help defining relevant cognitive tasks for children with underdeveloped brains and/or neurological disorders to improve their cognitive capacity. This is highly relevant since low cognitive capacity directly impacts learning and future prospects for social interactions and professional development.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-025-07104-w" target="_blank">The electrocortical activity of elite Rubik’s cube athletes while solving the cube</a>,” was authored by Ali Asghar Zarei, Casper Ravn Frederiksen, Mathias Bundgaard Jensen, and Anderson Souza Oliveira.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/menstruation-may-worsen-adhd-symptoms-in-medicated-adult-women-2026-03-20/" 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;">Menstrual hormones may worsen ADHD symptoms in medicated women</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 24th 2026, 08:00</div>
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<p><p>Women managing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder with stimulant medications might experience worse symptoms during certain phases of their menstrual cycle. A recent study published in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/10870547251400038">Journal of Attention Disorders</a> tracked daily symptom severity in adult females taking amphetamines. Tracking data revealed that ADHD symptoms and negative mood peak during the menstruation phase, pointing toward a need for personalized treatment plans that account for hormonal fluctuations.</p>
<p>Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder affects approximately six percent of the adult population. The condition is characterized by chronic difficulties with focus, elevated impulsivity, and physical hyperactivity. Patients often struggle to manage their time, organize daily tasks, or regulate their emotional responses in demanding environments.</p>
<p>Males historically received the diagnosis at much higher rates than females, often at a ratio of three boys for every one girl. That diagnostic gap is steadily narrowing as clinicians better recognize how the condition presents in adult women. Females often express higher levels of inattentiveness and internalizing behaviors rather than outward physical hyperactivity. </p>
<p>This difference in symptom presentation often causes teachers and parents to miss the warning signs in young girls. Many women go undiagnosed throughout their childhood, only discovering the source of their lifelong struggles during adulthood after experiencing career or family burnout. </p>
<p>Despite this growing diagnostic parity, female patients remain substantially underrepresented in the scientific literature. Researchers are just beginning to investigate how female-specific biological factors interact with the disorder. One universal aspect of female biology is the natural fluctuation of ovarian hormones like estrogen and progesterone over the course of the menstrual cycle. </p>
<p>Case reports and anecdotal accounts have occasionally hinted that these hormonal shifts might influence both the severity of a patient’s symptoms and the effectiveness of their medication. Some women report that their medication feels entirely useless during the days immediately preceding their period, leading to days of severe impairment in their professional and social lives.</p>
<p>During the follicular phase, which starts after menstruation finishes, estrogen levels gradually rise and peak during ovulation. In the subsequent luteal phase occurring just after ovulation, both estrogen and progesterone are highly elevated. Both hormones then drop rapidly just prior to the onset of bleeding. Some preceding research on healthy females without neurodevelopmental conditions suggests that stimulant drugs may be less effective during this late luteal phase.</p>
<p>Rebecca Zaritsky, a medical and doctoral student at Rutgers University, led a research team to investigate whether these hormonal shifts affect female patients actively treated for the disorder. Her academic focus centers on how biological factors influence neurodevelopment. Zaritsky collaborated with Stephanie C. Reed and Suzette M. Evans, both researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Their combined expertise centers on women’s health issues related to substance use and the menstrual cycle.</p>
<p>The team designed their study to fill a specific knowledge gap regarding females prescribed amphetamine salts. This category of medication operates by altering brain chemistry to improve focus and includes widely recognized brand names such as Adderall and Mydais. Over sixty percent of reproductive-age females medicated for the disorder in the United States rely on amphetamine salts. The researchers wanted to see if the therapeutic benefits of these daily medications fluctuated in tandem with the menstrual cycle.</p>
<p>The researchers recruited adult females with regular menstrual cycles between the ages of eighteen and forty. All thirty final participants had a formal diagnosis of the disorder and took amphetamine salts for symptom management on most days of the week. Most participants reported receiving their initial diagnosis during their mid-twenties, reflecting the common delays in identifying the condition in females. The participants also indicated that they took their medication nearly every single day, reinforcing how heavily they relied on the treatment.</p>
<p>To isolate the potential effects of natural hormonal cycles, the study excluded individuals taking hormonal birth control pills or other psychiatric medications. The participants agreed to complete daily online surveys for thirty-five consecutive days. This extended timeline was deliberately chosen to consistently capture data across one complete menstrual cycle for all participants.</p>
<p>Each evening, the participants answered standardized questions evaluating their current mood and the severity of their symptoms. They rated the frequency of eighteen different inattentive and hyperactive behaviors on a four-point sliding scale ranging from rarely to very often. They also reported their total daily medication dosage in milligrams and noted whether they were actively menstruating or spotting.</p>
<p>Analyzing the daily survey responses revealed clear patterns in symptom severity across the month. Participants reported higher levels of symptom severity during the menstruation phase. Conversely, they experienced milder symptoms during the mid-follicular phase. The difference in symptom expression between the late luteal phase and the mid-follicular phase was not statistically significant.</p>
<p>The team also evaluated general psychological well-being alongside the primary symptoms of the disorder. Participants reported elevated negative mood during both the menstruation phase and the late luteal phase compared to the mid-follicular phase. Changes in negative mood closely tracked with the severity of the primary condition.</p>
<p>Participants who reported greater increases in negative mood during their period also logged greater increases in their attention and hyperactivity symptoms. The magnitude of this mood change served as a reliable predictor for subjective experiences of inattention. Patients who struggled the most with sadness or irritability were the same individuals who struggled worst with focus.</p>
<p>The exact reasons for this alignment between mood and symptom severity remain unconfirmed. Worsening attention could naturally lead to feelings of low mood and emotional frustration. Alternatively, feelings of depression and physical fatigue could make it harder for patients to manage the executive function required for focus. It is also possible that dropping estrogen levels trigger a unified biological cascade that simultaneously drives both depression and distraction.</p>
<p>The researchers initially hypothesized that patients might try to counteract these difficult menstrual phases by taking higher doses of their prescribed stimulants. The survey data did not support this idea. Daily amphetamine dosage remained entirely consistent across all phases of the cycle.</p>
<p>This lack of dosage adjustment might reflect standard medical practices. Most prescribing physicians do not encourage flexible, symptom-based dosing regimens for these types of heavily regulated medications. Patients might also be entirely unaware that their medication metabolism and efficacy could wane alongside their physical hormonal shifts.</p>
<p>The authors noted several limitations to their interpretation of the data. The study relied entirely on self-reported surveys from a relatively small group of thirty individuals. This reliance on remote self-reporting means the objective accuracy of the data cannot be independently verified.</p>
<p>The self-reported questionnaires also limit the ability to tell if symptoms objectively worsened or if they were only perceived to be worse by the distressed participants. The study protocol also did not involve direct blood tests to verify exact hormone levels in the participants. </p>
<p>Without tracking precise estrogen and progesterone markers, the researchers could only approximate the internal hormonal environment based on the normal timing of human menstruation. The researchers were unable to study other unique phases of interest, such as the exact moments of highest fertility right after ovulation.</p>
<p>Additionally, excluding participants who navigate simultaneous mood disorders or who take hormonal birth control limits how broadly these results apply to the general public. Future research featuring larger participant pools and direct medical observation could help clarify how hormones interact with brain chemistry and prescription drugs. Expanding the scope to include women navigating puberty, pregnancy, or menopause could also yield a more thorough understanding of the female experience.</p>
<p>Pending varied and expanded data, the new findings point toward alternative types of clinical interventions that might eventually improve daily life for female patients. Educational initiatives could empower women to schedule demanding tasks around the days they feel most capable. Clinicians might also explore alternative prescribing strategies, temporarily increasing stimulant dosages during specific menstrual phases to combat dropping medication efficacy.</p>
<p>If these symptom fluctuations continue to cause distress, clinicians might eventually consider a wider range of pharmacological interventions. Some patients might benefit from utilizing oral contraceptives to reduce the natural hormonal fluctuations that trigger symptom spikes. Other individuals might find relief through the targeted use of antidepressant medications to ameliorate negative mood disruptions during specific cycle phases. Each of these potential interventions requires substantial future investigation to confirm their effectiveness and safety.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/10870547251400038" target="_blank">Changes in ADHD Symptoms and Mood Across the Menstrual Cycle in Females Treated With Stimulants: A Pilot Study</a>,” was authored by Rebecca Zaritsky, Stephanie C. Reed, and Suzette M. Evans.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/chronic-medical-conditions-predict-childhood-depression-more-strongly-than-social-or-family-hardships/" 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;">Chronic medical conditions predict childhood depression more strongly than social or family hardships</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 24th 2026, 06:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.121418" target="_blank">Journal of Affective Disorders</a></em> suggests that children and adolescents with chronic medical conditions face a higher risk of depression. The research provides evidence that physical health problems tend to be stronger predictors of youth depression than social disadvantages or relationship challenges. These findings point to a need for integrating mental health screening into standard medical care for young people.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.usf.edu/education/faculty-staff/faculty-directory/tan-tony.aspx" target="_blank">Tony Xing Tan</a>, a professor of educational psychology at the University of South Florida, conducted the new study to better understand the various life circumstances that contribute to depression in youth. He wanted to figure out which specific challenges play the biggest role in the development and continuation of the condition.</p>
<p>“I have a strong interest in the etiology of depression in children and adolescents. I know that, besides genetic disposition, negative life experiences (sometimes called risk factors) also contribute to the onset and maintenance of depression, so I wanted to find out among life circumstances, which ones were more potent,” Tan told PsyPost.</p>
<p>Thanks to a newly organized national dataset, the researcher was able to compare different types of risks to see which ones had the strongest impact. Depression in young people is a rapidly growing public health issue, prompting a need to identify its earliest warning signs.</p>
<p>To explore this topic, the scientist analyzed data from the 2022 to 2023 National Survey of Children’s Health. The final sample included exactly 65,652 children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 17. Through statistical weighting, this sample was adjusted to accurately reflect the demographic makeup of 48,352,311 young people across the United States.</p>
<p>Caregivers provided information on whether a healthcare provider had currently diagnosed their child with depression. They also indicated if the child had a current diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly known as ADHD.</p>
<p>The survey used a detailed measurement system to evaluate three distinct categories of childhood hardship. Each child received a score from zero to four in each category, based on the specific number of challenges they faced in their daily lives.</p>
<p>The first category was medical health risk, which measured the presence of chronic physical health conditions. This included severe functional impairments, lifelong medical diagnoses, or a generally poor state of overall health.</p>
<p>The second category was social health risk, which evaluated environmental and economic disadvantages. This captured hardships like a family’s inability to afford basic food or housing, exposure to neighborhood violence, or experiences of discrimination based on race or disability.</p>
<p>The third category was relational health risk, which assessed a child’s exposure to adverse childhood experiences. This included parental divorce, domestic violence, or having a caregiver who struggled with severe stress, anger, or mental illness.</p>
<p>The data showed that about 5.4 percent of the children and adolescents in the sample had a current depression diagnosis. Meanwhile, 12.4 percent had an ADHD diagnosis, 28 percent faced medical health risks, 27 percent experienced social health risks, and 40 percent dealt with relational health risks.</p>
<p>The researcher found that all four of these factors independently increased the likelihood of a depression diagnosis. Children who experienced multiple hardships across the different categories had an even higher probability of being diagnosed with depression.</p>
<p>Having a chronic medical problem was more strongly linked to depression than living in poverty or experiencing a parental divorce. Every additional medical health risk a child faced was associated with a nearly twofold increase in the likelihood of a depression diagnosis.</p>
<p>“I was surprised that social risk (e.g., living in poverty) and relational risk (e.g., relationship problems with parents, parental divorce) were not as potent as medical health risk in predicting depression status,” Tan said.</p>
<p>The study also tested a concept known as the diathesis stress model. This psychological theory suggests that an underlying personal vulnerability, known as a diathesis, interacts with external life stress to trigger mental health disorders. This concept helps explain why two people who experience the exact same stressful event might have different mental health outcomes.</p>
<p>In this study, ADHD and medical conditions were treated as internal vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, social disadvantages and relational hardships were treated as the external stressors.</p>
<p>The analysis confirmed that children with ADHD or medical issues were indeed more sensitive to the negative effects of social and relational stress. As the number of external stressors increased, depression rates climbed more sharply for children who also had physical health issues or ADHD.</p>
<p>For example, among children without any relational health risks, the predicted rate of depression was quite low. However, for children facing four relational health risks, the depression rate jumped to 18 percent for those without ADHD and 33 percent for those with ADHD.</p>
<p>Yet, the statistical modeling revealed that these complex interactions between vulnerabilities and stressors did not practically improve the ability to predict depression. Simply adding up the independent risks, especially the medical ones, was enough to accurately forecast the likelihood of a diagnosis.</p>
<p>While the findings are informative, readers should keep a few limitations in mind. The study relied entirely on parent reported diagnoses, which can sometimes be subject to reporting bias or memory errors. Parents might not always be fully aware of a child’s internal emotional state or official diagnostic history.</p>
<p>Additionally, the data was gathered at a single point in time. This type of snapshot observation, known as a cross sectional design, means the study cannot definitively prove that medical problems cause depression. It only suggests that the two conditions frequently occur together in young people.</p>
<p>Another limitation is that the survey grouped many different health issues into a single medical risk score. As a result, the researcher could not specify which exact medical problems carry the highest risk for depression.</p>
<p>Moving forward, Tan plans to investigate interventions designed to help children and adolescents build resilience against these risks. He also intends to examine other large datasets to further explore mental health trends among the American population.</p>
<p>These future steps aim to uncover better ways to support the emotional well being of young people facing chronic physical health challenges. By recognizing that physical illness takes a toll on the mind, healthcare providers can offer more comprehensive support to families in need.</p>
<p>“I appreciate the Data Resource Center for Child & Adolescent Health for making the data and codes available for public use.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.121418" target="_blank">The role of ADHD, medical, social, and relational health risk in depression: Evidence from a nationally representative sample of U.S. children and adolescents</a>,” was authored by Tony Xing Tan.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/global-experiment-supports-darwins-century-old-hunch-about-auditory-aesthetics/" 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;">Global experiment supports Darwin’s century-old hunch about auditory aesthetics</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 23rd 2026, 20:00</div>
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<p><p>People tend to favor the exact same mating calls that female frogs, birds, and insects find most attractive in their own species. This overlap in auditory taste suggests that humans and other animals process sounds using similar sensory traits shaped by millions of years of evolution. The findings were recently published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202" target="_blank">Science</a></em>.</p>
<p>Across the natural world, male animals use a variety of signals to attract a mate. These signals range from the bright colors of butterfly wings to the elaborate songs of birds. Female animals receive these signals and show a distinct preference for certain traits over others. A female might choose a mate based on the depth of his call or the addition of extra acoustic flair.</p>
<p>These choices often stem from the way an animal’s nervous system is wired. Certain sounds provide greater stimulation to the auditory system, making them naturally more appealing to the listener. Because many species share similar nervous system structures, a sound that stimulates a frog might also stimulate a person. Charles Darwin originally suspected this shared appreciation, proposing that humans and animals possess similar aesthetic tastes.</p>
<p>A team of biologists and psychologists wanted to test Darwin’s century-old hypothesis using modern data. Logan S. James, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, led the investigation. James and his colleagues sought to determine if human listeners share the same subjective preferences as female animals listening to male courtship calls.</p>
<p>“After witnessing those female preferences Stan and Mike discovered when I got to measure them myself, I became fascinated with the question of where these preferences come from,” James said. “Plus, since that team released their initial findings, we’ve found that other animals, including eavesdroppers such as blood-sucking flies and frog-eating bats, also prefer complex calls. This got us wondering how common acoustic preferences may be.”</p>
<p>The researchers designed an online game to test human preferences for a wide variety of animal calls. They recruited more than 4,000 volunteer participants from around the world to play this game on their computers and mobile devices. During the activity, participants listened to pairs of sounds produced by male animals from sixteen different species. These species included various frogs, birds, mammals, and insects.</p>
<p>Prior field studies had already established which sound in each pair the female animals preferred. The researchers only used audio recordings from these past studies to ensure the animal’s choice was well documented. As the participants listened to the pairs of natural recordings, they were prompted to select which sound they liked more. The participants did not know which sound the female animals actually preferred.</p>
<p>The research team used recordings that had been manipulated in past experiments to isolate specific audio traits. For example, some frog calls had been digitally altered to change their frequency or pitch. Other recordings captured natural variation in the wild, such as the difference between an ancestral cricket chirp and a newer cricket purr. This variety allowed the researchers to test a wide range of acoustic features.</p>
<p>Samuel A. Mehr, a psychology researcher at Yale University and senior author of the study, noted the benefits of this online approach. “In gamified citizen science, people volunteer for experiments simply because they’re fun and interesting,” Mehr said. “The method is perfect for answering questions from evolutionary biology where we aim to study phenomena across many species as opposed to just a few. Our game enabled us to test lots of humans’ preferences for lots of different sounds.”</p>
<p>The research team discovered a broad overlap between the sounds humans liked and the sounds animals liked. When an animal showed a very strong preference for a specific mating call, human listeners were highly likely to pick that exact same call. This agreement occurred across all the major animal groups tested, including birds, mammals, frogs, and insects.</p>
<p>When participants agreed with the animal’s choice, they also made their decisions about 50 milliseconds faster. This quicker reaction time suggests the appealing nature of the sound was processed rapidly by the human brain. The human participants also showed high internal consistency in their choices. When the game played the same pair of sounds a second time, the participants generally picked the same sound they had chosen before.</p>
<p>The team looked closely at the specific acoustic traits that humans and animals found appealing. Humans and animals both favored calls that included acoustic adornments. An acoustic adornment is an extra sound added to the end of a basic call, like a trill, click, or a low-pitched chuckling noise. Humans and animals also both favored ancestral sounds, which are basic calls that have existed for a very long time in a species’ evolutionary history.</p>
<p>There were a few instances where human and animal preferences did not align. Humans showed a distinct preference for lower-pitched sounds across the board, while the non-human animals did not share this specific preference for lower pitches. Humans also preferred the songs of birds that had grown up in isolation. In contrast, the female birds preferred the songs of males that had learned their tunes from older tutors.</p>
<p>The team also checked if a participant’s background influenced their choices. They assumed that birdwatchers or expert musicians might align more closely with animal tastes due to their trained ears. The data showed no such connection for musicians or animal experts. The results for these groups were not statistically significant when compared to the general public.</p>
<p>The only trait that predicted a higher agreement with animal choices was the amount of time a person spent listening to music each day. The researchers suspect that frequent music listening might lead to better auditory discrimination skills. These enhanced listening skills could translate into a higher agreement with the aesthetic choices of animals.</p>
<p>Michael J. Ryan, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study, explained the broader meaning of these shared tastes. “Darwin noted that animals seem to have a ‘taste for the beautiful’ that sometimes parallels our own preferences,” Ryan said. “We show that Darwin’s observation seems to be true in a general sense, probably due to the many sensory system properties we share with other animals.”</p>
<p>The researchers noted a few limitations regarding the study’s scope and the nature of animal preferences. Animal preferences in the wild are highly dependent on context and can vary widely among individuals in a single population. This natural variation makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly which call is universally preferred by a species. The researchers had to rely on average preference rates from past studies, which inherently includes some uncertainty.</p>
<p>Additionally, the researchers struggled to find a single acoustic feature that perfectly predicted attractiveness across all species. Biological preferences likely arise from multiple audio cues blending together rather than one specific trait. A sound might need a specific combination of pitch, length, and volume to appeal to a particular species. This makes it challenging to draw sweeping conclusions about the exact nature of an attractive sound.</p>
<p>Future research will need to explore how these different sound features interact within the auditory systems of various species. Scientists hope to investigate whether this shared appreciation for sound extends to other sensory experiences. They want to know if humans also share animal preferences for visual patterns or physical courtship dances. Until then, these findings provide strong support for the idea that a basic sense of aesthetics is deeply rooted in our shared evolutionary past.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202" target="_blank">Humans share acoustic preferences with other animals</a>,” was authored by Logan S. James, Sarah C. Woolley, Jon T. Sakata, Courtney B. Hilton, Michael J. Ryan, and Samuel A. Mehr.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/occasional-use-of-classic-psychedelics-linked-to-enhanced-cognitive-flexibility-in-young-adults/" 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;">Occasional use of classic psychedelics linked to enhanced cognitive flexibility in young adults</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 23rd 2026, 18:00</div>
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<p><p>Occasional use of classic psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin is not associated with cognitive decline and might actually be linked to better mental adaptability. A recent evaluation of young adults found that sporadic users performed as well as non-users on a variety of brain function tests, while exhibiting a distinct advantage in shifting problem-solving strategies. The research was published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2025.111353">Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry</a>.</em></p>
<p>Classic psychedelics alter perception and mood by interacting with specific brain receptors. Examples include psilocybin, which is the active compound in magic mushrooms, and LSD. Clinical trials are testing these substances as treatments for mental health conditions, prompting increased public interest. At the same time, recreational use of these compounds is rising across the globe.</p>
<p>Past research regarding the long-term cognitive effects of psychedelics has yielded conflicting results. Early studies exploring LSD and mescaline in the middle of the twentieth century raised alarms about potential brain damage. However, these older investigations often suffered from small sample sizes or failed to account for outside factors that can warp test results.</p>
<p>More recent research looking at the frequent, ritualistic consumption of peyote or the Amazonian brew ayahuasca pointed to neutral outcomes. Some studies even hinted at slight benefits in memory and problem-solving. Ritualistic use typically happens within well-defined cultural frameworks that tightly regulate the dosage and context of the psychedelic experience.</p>
<p>Lead author Simon Reiche, a researcher at Charité in Berlin, Germany, and his colleagues identified a gap in the literature. Most people around the world who consume psychedelics do so sporadically in unstructured, naturalistic settings. The research team wanted to investigate whether these mild to moderate use patterns left any lasting marks on cognitive health.</p>
<p>To find out, the researchers recruited 136 participants between the ages of 18 and 50. The study group included 84 individuals who had used psychedelics at least once in their lives and 52 control subjects who had never tried them. The participants underwent structured psychiatric evaluations and screening to ensure they had abstained from all psychoactive substances for two weeks prior to testing.</p>
<p>The researchers administered a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests. These assessments measured multiple domains of brain function. The specific areas included attention, memory, visuospatial abilities, and executive functioning.</p>
<p>Executive functioning is a broad term for the advanced mental skills that help people plan, focus their attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Working memory and impulse control fall under this operational umbrella. These skills are required for navigating daily challenges and achieving long-term goals.</p>
<p>Recognizing that people who take psychedelics routinely consume other substances, the researchers allowed participants with mild use of other recreational drugs into the study. To make the groups as comparable as possible, they required the control subjects to have a history of cannabis use. This rule was established because cannabis consumption was common among the psychedelic users.</p>
<p>The research team also conducted a more refined comparison using a statistical technique called matched-pair analysis. They isolated 30 participants from the psychedelic group who had used the drugs more than ten times in their lives. They then paired these individuals with 30 control subjects who shared similar age, sex, education levels, and cannabis habits.</p>
<p>When looking at the entire study population, the researchers observed that overall cognitive performance was broadly equivalent between the two groups. The individuals who used psychedelics showed no signs of overall cognitive deterioration. Across basic tests for memory, processing speed, and attention, the scores lined up closely with those of the non-users.</p>
<p>The matched-pair analysis revealed a pronounced difference in one specific area of executive functioning. The psychedelic users demonstrated a clear advantage on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. This particular assessment measures cognitive flexibility, which is the brain’s ability to adapt its behavior and thoughts in response to changing situations.</p>
<p>During the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, participants are asked to sort cards based on hidden rules that change without warning as the test progresses. The subject must figure out the new rule through trial and error. The psychedelic users made fewer repetitive mistakes than the control subjects. They were less likely to stick to an old sorting strategy after it stopped working.</p>
<p>The researchers also looked for a dose-response relationship within the overall group of psychedelic users. They analyzed whether the amount of lifetime psychedelic use correlated with test performance. They found an association between a higher number of past psychedelic experiences and fewer errors on the card sorting test.</p>
<p>Other analyses within the study supported these observations. When adjusting for variables like education and alcohol use, the researchers noticed that lifetime psychedelic use was tied to quicker visual reaction times during a divided attention task. In this task, participants had to monitor visual and auditory signals simultaneously. This suggests an overlap between problem-solving adaptability and the ability to allocate attention effectively in a dynamic setting.</p>
<p>Cognitive flexibility plays a central role in complex decision-making and the capacity to devise fresh strategies when confronted with unfamiliar scenarios. Mental rigidity, the opposing trait, is a hallmark of several psychiatric conditions. These inflexible thought patterns play heavily into substance abuse, eating disorders, and severe depression.</p>
<p>The observed association with mental flexibility aligns with emerging theories about how psychedelics affect the physical brain. Recent biological studies suggest these compounds promote structural changes in neurons. They are chemically thought to induce a temporary window of elevated neuroplasticity.</p>
<p>Neuroplasticity refers to the central nervous system’s ability to reorganize its structure, functions, or connections in response to internal or external stimuli. Psychedelics exert their influence by activating specific serotonin receptors distributed throughout the cerebral cortex. This activation triggers chemical cascades inside the cells that can lead to subtle structural alterations.</p>
<p>Scientists have observed that these chemical compounds encourage the branching of dendrites in animal models. Dendrites act as the communication antennas on nerve cells. By encouraging the growth of new connections between brain cells, psychedelics might facilitate an unconstrained state of cognition.</p>
<p>The study has several limitations that prevent the researchers from declaring that psychedelics directly cause increases in cognitive flexibility. Because the research relied on a cross-sectional design, it only captured a snapshot in time. It is possible that individuals who possess naturally high levels of mental flexibility are more drawn to experimenting with psychedelics in the first place.</p>
<p>The study also relied on self-reported data regarding past substance use. Asking participants to recall specific drug events from years past introduces the possibility of memory biases or inaccurate reporting. Additionally, the psychedelic users in the matched group had higher rates of lifetime use of other illicit substances, which could have influenced the test scores.</p>
<p>Despite the statistical matching process, the study population largely consisted of highly educated, urban young adults. This demographic profile reflects broader trends in non-clinical psychedelic use, but it limits how well the findings apply to differing populations. The researchers noted that the chemical purity and dosage of the street drugs consumed by the participants could not be independently verified.</p>
<p>The researchers also evaluated multiple variables without making targeted statistical adjustments that penalize for multiple comparisons. This mathematical approach increases the risk that some of the favorable test results occurred by chance alone. To confirm these initial observations, future research will need to employ focused, long-term cognitive evaluations.</p>
<p>Advancing the scientific understanding of these substances will require extensive studies that track individuals before and after they start using psychedelics. The researchers hope their work will inform realistic risk profiles for evolving public health initiatives. By investigating non-medical drug use in realistic settings, scientists can better grasp the true biological effects of these potent compounds.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2025.111353">Sporadic use of classic psychedelics and neuropsychological performance: A cross-sectional analysis</a>,” was authored by Simon Reiche, Tim Hirschfeld, Anna Lena Gröticke, Marie Traub, Nicklas Jakob Hafiz, Rico Haas, Lara Sedlaczek, Linda Ortlieb, Georg Leistenschneider, Lukas A. Basedow, Andrea Lohse, Felix Bermpohl, Thomas Günther Riemer, and Tomislav Majić.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-democrats-and-republicans-use-different-neural-pathways-to-buy-groceries/" 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;">Brain scans reveal Democrats and Republicans use different neural pathways to buy groceries</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 23rd 2026, 16:00</div>
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<p><p>The way Republicans and Democrats think about everyday food purchases looks distinctly different on a brain scan, even when they end up buying the exact same groceries. This insight comes from a neuroimaging study published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2025.2">Politics and the Life Sciences</a></em>, which revealed that people with different political affiliations rely on different neural pathways to make identical decisions. The researchers found they could accurately predict a person’s political party just by looking at their brain activity during a routine shopping task.</p>
<p>The study sits at the intersection of neuroscience and political behavior. Researchers in this field look at how political ideology corresponds to brain structure and internal processing. Past experiments have shown that liberals and conservatives exhibit different neural activity when faced with situations involving physical threats, risky financial bets, or disgusting images.</p>
<p>Those previous experiments generally used highly emotional or provocative triggers. The research team behind the new study wanted to see if political affiliation corresponds to different brain activity during ordinary decisions that lack obvious emotional weight. Choosing what to make for breakfast represents exactly this kind of mundane, everyday thinking.</p>
<p>Lead researchers Amanda S. Bruce, a pediatric behavioral scientist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and Darren M. Schreiber, a political scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, designed the project. They wanted to understand if the mental processes underlying a routine food choice differ by political party. Biology provides a precedent for this idea, as animal studies show that completely different neural configurations can produce the exact same behavioral outcome.</p>
<p>The paper cites foundational neuroscience research on wild-caught crabs to explain this biological phenomenon. Scientists previously discovered that basic neural circuits in different crabs could look incredibly diverse but still produce identical stomach movements. In a laboratory setting with normal environments, the crabs behaved indistinguishably from one another. Only when the environment experienced extreme temperature changes did the behavioral outcomes begin to diverge.</p>
<p>The political researchers view the grocery task as the human equivalent of a stable laboratory temperature. A routine trip to the dairy aisle is not a high-stress political event, allowing Democrats and Republicans to reach the same behavioral conclusions. Yet the distinct neural wiring they use to get there might reveal hidden differences that only dictate behavior under the heat of severe partisan conflict.</p>
<p>To test this in humans, the researchers recruited healthy adults from the Kansas City metropolitan area. They identified the political affiliations of the participants through standard questionnaires. After excluding independent and unaffiliated voters to ensure a focus on clear partisans, the final sample included forty Democrats and twenty-five Republicans.</p>
<p>The participants were placed into a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This machine uses strong magnetic fields to track blood flow in the brain as it happens. When a specific area of the brain works harder, it requires more oxygen, and the scanner detects these subtle changes in blood oxygenation to map neural activity.</p>
<p>While inside the scanner, the participants made real economic choices about buying groceries. The researchers provided each person with fifty dollars to spend. The participants knew they would actually purchase one of their chosen items to take home, with the cost directly deducted from their payment.</p>
<p>The team ran two separate experiments within the scanner. The first focused on buying a gallon of milk, while the second focused on buying a dozen eggs. The researchers chose these items because they are incredibly common staples, meaning most adult consumers already have established habits regarding them.</p>
<p>During the task, participants looked at a screen showing two different product images and had to pick one. The choices were divided into three specific conditions. In the price condition, the alternative food items were made using the exact same methods but offered at different price points.</p>
<p>In the production method condition, the prices were identical but the labels described different farming practices. For milk, the labels indicated whether the product came from a cloned cow, a cow treated with artificial growth hormones, or a cow raised without those technologies. For eggs, the labels indicated whether the hens were caged, confined, cage-free, or free-range.</p>
<p>In the combination condition, both the price and the production method varied at the same time. The researchers noted that this combination scenario most closely mimics a real trip to the grocery store. Participants had to weigh the trade-offs between cheaper prices and specialized farming practices.</p>
<p>When looking at the final choices the participants made, the researchers found no behavioral gap between the political parties. Democrats and Republicans bought the cloned milk, the growth-hormone milk, and the cage-free eggs at remarkably similar rates. Any differences in the actual food items selected were not statistically significant.</p>
<p>The brain scans presented a completely different picture. The thought processes driving these identical food choices relied on distinct areas of the brain depending on the shopper’s political identification. The researchers conducted a whole-brain analysis to pinpoint exactly where these differences occurred.</p>
<p>Among the Republican participants, the brain scans showed elevated activity in the left insula during the combination milk choices. The insula is a region often involved in interpreting internal body sensations and assigning subjective value to an item. The Republicans also showed heightened activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region linked to self-reflection and evaluating economic choices, when looking at milk production methods.</p>
<p>Among the Democratic participants, the brain scans showed elevated activity in the right precuneus and the right superior frontal gyrus during the combination egg choices. The precuneus is frequently associated with recalling personal memories and processing social information. The superior frontal gyrus acts as a gateway for directing attention and managing cognitive resources.</p>
<p>The researchers took these brain activation patterns and fed them into statistical models. They wanted to see if the neural data alone could accurately classify a participant as a Republican or a Democrat. The models performed exceptionally well, guessing a person’s political party correctly between seventy-six and ninety-four percent of the time.</p>
<p>In one specific model based entirely on brain activity during the egg combination choices, the system correctly identified the Democratic participants one hundred percent of the time. These classification rates are highly accurate compared to a random guess. They also outperform traditional predictive methods based simply on how conservative a person’s parents happen to be.</p>
<p>The researchers pointed out a few unexpected absences in the brain data. They did not see any differences in the amygdala, an emotion-processing center of the brain that has featured prominently in older studies of political ideology. The team suggested this is likely because choosing eggs or milk provides cognitive information but does not trigger the intense emotional reactions seen in experiments involving political faces or physical threats.</p>
<p>The study comes with a few caveats. By excluding independent and unaffiliated voters, the data only reflects the mental habits of firm partisans. Future studies will need to include unaligned voters to see if their brains respond to ordinary choices in a unique way or if they mirror one of the established parties.</p>
<p>The sample size of sixty-five participants is relatively small compared to national polling surveys. However, it is an acceptable number for neuroimaging research, which is notoriously expensive and time-consuming to conduct. The researchers also used strict statistical thresholds to ensure the brain activation differences were genuine.</p>
<p>The team hopes this research encourages a deeper look into the underlying mechanisms of political polarization. Focusing entirely on what people do might limit our understanding of why they do it. When different biological systems generate identical outcomes, identifying those unseen differences might explain why groups react so differently when political tensions eventually rise.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2025.2">Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases</a>,” was authored by Amanda S. Bruce, John M. Crespi, Dermot J Hayes, Angelos Lagoudakis, Jayson L. Lusk, Darren M. Schreiber, and Qianrong Wu.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/a-parents-mental-health-is-linked-to-their-teenagers-screen-time-and-exercise-habits/" 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;">A parent’s mental health is linked to their teenager’s screen time and exercise habits</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 23rd 2026, 14:00</div>
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<p><p>A study of over 5000 parent-adolescent pairs in Finland found that better parental mental well-being was associated with higher physical activity and lower digital media use in their 11-year-old children. These associations were present at 14 years of age as well. The paper was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mhpa.2025.100749"><em>Mental Health and Physical Activity</em></a>.</p>
<p>Overweight and obesity among children and adolescents have been visibly increasing in recent decades. At the moment, they represent a major global health challenge. Moreover, being overweight during childhood tends to continue into adulthood and increases the risk of health problems such as cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders. Low physical activity and prolonged periods spent sitting while using digital media are considered important contributors to the obesity epidemic among young people.</p>
<p>Estimates state that, globally, about 80% of adolescents aged 11–17 do not meet recommended levels of physical activity. Digital media use has also risen substantially in recent decades. Studies indicate that, once developed, these habits tend to persist into adulthood.</p>
<p>One factor potentially affecting children’s health behaviors is parental mental health. Parents experiencing depression may struggle to establish healthy routines for physical activity and digital media use for themselves and their children. Previous research suggests that maternal stress or depression may be associated with lower physical activity, more sedentary behavior, an unhealthy diet, and a higher obesity risk in children, although existing evidence is limited and mixed.</p>
<p>Study author Lauri Hietajärvi and his colleagues wanted to investigate how parental mental well-being may influence adolescents’ behavioral and health outcomes. They sought to identify mental health profiles of parents of 11-year-olds and examine whether they are associated with their children’s physical activity levels, digital media use, and body mass index.</p>
<p>These authors analyzed data from the Finnish Health in Teens study. This is a study of school-aged adolescents in Finland including 10,785 9- to 12-year-old adolescents and 6046 parents. The analyses presented in this study involved 5839 parent-adolescent pairs. Parents’ mean age was 42 years at the start of the study. 89% of parents were mothers, and 51% of participating adolescents were girls.</p>
<p>Study authors used data on parents’ mental well-being (based on the Short Form of the Beck’s Depression Inventory, the Sense of Coherence Scale, and the RAND-36 Mental Component Summary for health-related quality of life), and on participating adolescents’ body mass index, leisure-time physical activity, and sedentary digital media use.</p>
<p>Results showed that, on average, participating adolescents had about 6.5 to 7.3 hours of physical activity per week, and reported spending around 1.6 to 1.8 hours per day using digital media on weekdays and about 2.4 to 2.9 hours per day on weekends. 14-15% of adolescents were overweight.</p>
<p>Further analyses revealed that better parental mental well-being was associated with higher physical activity levels and lower sedentary digital media use in their 11-year-old children. These associations were still present when the adolescents reached 14 years of age.</p>
<p>Looking into specific aspects of parental mental well-being, results showed that greater parental depressive symptoms were associated with lower physical activity in their children, while a greater parental sense of coherence was associated with less digital media use. Parental mental well-being was not associated with their children’s body mass index.</p>
<p>“Better parental mental wellbeing was associated with higher adolescent leisure-time physical activity and lower sedentary digital media use in both early and mid-adolescence, suggesting that parental wellbeing may influence adolescents’ health behaviors and warrants further investigation. These findings underscore the potential value of addressing parental mental wellbeing in strategies aimed at promoting healthier lifestyles among youth,” the study authors concluded.</p>
<p>The study sheds light on the links between the mental well-being of parents and the behavioral habits of their adolescent children. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any definitive causal inferences to be derived from the results. Additionally, the study was conducted in Finland and results in other countries and cultures might differ.</p>
<p>The paper, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mhpa.2025.100749">Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between parental mental wellbeing and adolescents’ physical activity, sedentary digital media use, and body mass index,</a>” was authored by Lauri Hietajärvi, Erika Maksniemi, Jari Lahti, Kirsti Lonka, Heli Viljakainen, and Elina Engberg.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/researchers-find-major-flaws-in-the-historical-clinical-trials-used-to-justify-spanking/" 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;">Researchers find major flaws in the historical clinical trials used to justify spanking</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 23rd 2026, 12:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study suggests that there is no experimental evidence proving physical punishment is an effective way to discipline children. The findings indicate that alternative, non-physical strategies are just as effective at encouraging child cooperation, without the potential risks associated with spanking. The research was published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2026.107945" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Child Abuse & Neglect</a>.</p>
<p>Spanking remains a widely practiced form of discipline, considered normative and socially acceptable in many cultures. Despite disapproval from some health organizations, it is estimated that globally, two out of every three children aged two to four years have been spanked.</p>
<p>Scientists conducted the new study in response to ongoing debates about the merits of physical punishment. Recently, some academics <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12442255/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published a commentary</a> arguing that strict experimental trials provide evidence that spanking is an effective way to enforce child compliance. These proponents claimed that laws banning physical discipline are misguided and that spanking should remain an available option for parents.</p>
<p>“We explored this topic because a recent invited commentary in a psychiatry journal advocated use of spanking as a means of enforcing child compliance. The authors argued that the ‘most rigorous’ clinical trials (specifically, [randomized controlled trials]) validate the effectiveness of spanking,” said Leslie Atkinson of Toronto Metropolitan University, the corresponding author of the new research.</p>
<p>“They argued further that studies showing a positive link between spanking and developmental difficulties (e.g., child behavioural and emotional problems) are not designed to assess causality (e.g., child behavioural difficulties could lead to more spanking, rather than vice versa). They conclude that spanking is an effective disciplinary strategy.”</p>
<p>“We were surprised at this perspective, given that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that children be protected from physical punishment. At present, only 70 countries are signatory to the Convention.”</p>
<p>The debate is highly relevant to current legal battles in North America. The United States is not a signatory to the Convention and does not legally ban corporal punishment at the state or national level. In Canada, the Supreme Court previously upheld the use of reasonable physical force for correction, but this ruling is currently being challenged in Parliament.</p>
<p>The scientists wanted to assess the scientific foundation of the claims supporting these laws. They focused their attention on four specific clinical trials published between 1981 and 1990. Proponents of physical discipline frequently cite these four trials as proof that spanking works.</p>
<p>The researchers sought to determine if these older studies actually hold up to modern scientific standards. They also wanted to evaluate several combined analyses of these studies, known as meta-analyses. A meta-analysis is a statistical technique that combines the results of multiple independent studies to find an overall trend.</p>
<p>Past meta-analyses have historically influenced court decisions and professional pediatric guidelines. However, the scientists identified statistical problems within some past meta-analyses that favored spanking. Many of those previous reviews only examined one or two narrow measures of child compliance, ignoring a wide variety of other behavioral outcomes recorded in the original trials.</p>
<p>Some earlier reviews also used mathematical techniques that tend to artificially inflate the apparent success of an intervention. For example, instead of comparing the final behavior of the spanked group directly against the non-spanked group, they measured behavior changes from before the discipline to after. This statistical choice breaks the rules of randomized experiments and exaggerates the reported benefits.</p>
<p>Their goal was to objectively evaluate whether these four older trials genuinely support the claim that spanking is better than non-physical discipline. To evaluate the evidence, the researchers first conducted a detailed review of the four historical trials. These trials originally tested spanking as a backup method for enforcing timeouts among oppositional children aged two to six years old.</p>
<p>In these older experiments, a mother would place her child in a chair for a timeout. If the child tried to leave the chair, the mother would use different assigned strategies. These strategies included spanking the child, returning the child to the chair while holding them, or placing the child in a room blocked by a plywood barrier.</p>
<p>Other conditions allowed the child to leave the chair without penalty or involved no consequences at all. The sample sizes in these original experiments were very small. They included only four, eight, or nine mother and child pairs per experimental condition.</p>
<p>The researchers evaluated the design of these trials using a standardized tool designed to detect bias in scientific studies. They found that three of the four trials had a high risk of bias due to flawed procedures by modern standards. For example, the ways children were assigned to different disciplinary groups were not rigorously randomized.</p>
<p>When examining the oldest trial from 1981, the researchers noticed a major design flaw that past reviews had overlooked. The children in the spanking group ended up spending significantly more time in the timeout chair than the children in the non-physical group. This means that any increase in child cooperation might have been caused by the longer timeout duration, rather than the spanking itself.</p>
<p>The researchers also determined that the original trials lacked external validity. External validity refers to how well the results of a study apply to real-world situations and diverse populations outside of a laboratory setting. Because the original trials only involved mothers in highly controlled clinical settings over thirty years ago, their findings do not easily apply to modern families.</p>
<p>In addition to the outdated clinical settings, the original experiments only tested children on specific types of instructions, such as telling a child to pick up a toy. They never tested instructions that required a child to stop a bad behavior. Research provides evidence that a child’s willingness to follow a direct command does not always predict their willingness to stop a prohibited action.</p>
<p>Attitudes toward parenting have also shifted massively since the 1980s. Modern studies suggest that the psychological impact of physical discipline is heavily influenced by how common and accepted the practice is within a specific community. Because the original trials took place in a single narrow context decades ago, they cannot account for these broader cultural shifts.</p>
<p>After reviewing the individual trials, the scientists conducted their own updated meta-analysis. This new analysis combined data from the four trials, encompassing a total of sixty-eight mother and child pairs.</p>
<p>The scientists compared the effectiveness of spanking against all the other non-physical strategies combined. They calculated effect sizes, which are numbers that represent the strength of a relationship between two variables. To account for the extremely small sample sizes in the older studies, the scientists used a specialized statistical metric called Hedges’ g, which is designed to prevent exaggerated results.</p>
<p>They also calculated confidence intervals to estimate the range in which the true effect of spanking likely falls. The resulting ranges were extremely wide, which indicates a very high level of uncertainty about the actual effectiveness of physical discipline. Ultimately, the researchers found no significant difference in effectiveness between spanking and the combined alternative strategies.</p>
<p>When they specifically compared spanking to the strategy of allowing the child to leave the timeout early, the difference in compliance was not statistically significant. This finding was based on data from two of the trials involving thirty-four mother and child pairs. Similarly, spanking was not significantly more effective than using a physical barrier to enforce the timeout.</p>
<p>In fact, the data provided evidence that the barrier method tended to be slightly more effective, though not by a significant margin. This comparison relied on data from three trials involving thirty-four pairs. The scientists also compared spanking to physically holding the child in the timeout chair.</p>
<p>Based on data from one trial of eighteen pairs, spanking did not prove to be more effective than holding. Finally, they found that spanking actually resulted in more disruptive behavior during timeouts compared to simply placing the child in a room. Together, these statistics show that spanking does not reliably outperform non-physical discipline.</p>
<p>“We decided to assess the literature on which the claims regarding the effectiveness of spanking were based,” Atkinson told PsyPost. “The literature consists of four controlled trials published between 1981 and 1990, and a meta-analysis of these trials published in 2024. We reviewed the trials one by one, and found that 1) they are poorly designed by today’s standards, with high risk of bias, 2) they offer ambiguous support for spanking at best, and 3) such support as exists pertains to very constricted circumstances. In addition, 4) the results were not generalizable to today’s population.”</p>
<p>These new findings diverge from some recent publications that advocate for limited spanking. For instance, <a href="https://www.psypost.org/does-spanking-harm-child-development-major-study-challenges-common-beliefs/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a recent review of long-term observation studies</a> suggested that occasional, mild spanking had minimal negative effects on behavior. That particular study argued that spanking could be an effective backup tool for parents of young children when milder responses fail.</p>
<p>Another previous analysis by scientists at Purdue University also suggested that <a href="https://www.psypost.org/can-spanking-a-child-ever-have-beneficial-results/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">infrequent hand spanking might decrease defiant behaviors</a>. Those researchers looked at annual data from children aged six to eight in Tennessee and Indiana. They argued that previous studies exaggerated the harms of spanking by failing to separate individual personality differences from the effects of the discipline itself.</p>
<p>At the same time, the new findings align with a broad body of global research highlighting the potential risks of physical discipline. For example, <a href="https://www.psypost.org/longitudinal-study-provides-more-evidence-that-spanking-might-harm-kids-early-developmental-skills/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a recent major study</a> examining children in Bhutan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda found that spanking was negatively associated with cognitive and emotional development. That international study showed that children who were spanked had poorer outcomes in numeracy, literacy, and emotional regulation.</p>
<p>The debate over the effectiveness of spanking is hampered by the extremely small number of experimental findings. Because modern ethical guidelines prevent scientists from conducting new experiments that involve spanking children, the available experimental data will likely always remain sparse. This lack of data undermines the certainty of any broad statistical conclusions. The small sample sizes mean that mathematical estimates of effectiveness are relatively unstable.</p>
<p>Still, the researchers emphasize that this lack of evidence is exactly the point. People cannot claim that experimental evidence proves spanking works when the existing experiments are this limited and flawed.</p>
<p>“Our meta-analysis was based on the only four spanking trials available (and likely that ever will be available due to ethical considerations),” Atkinson said. “This paucity undermines the certainty of our meta-analytic results. However, it does show that there is currently no experimental evidence supporting the effectiveness of spanking, contradicting claims to the contrary.”</p>
<p>“Other literature shows that physical punishment is linked to negative developmental outcomes, although the causal nature of these findings is indeterminate. Together, these literatures suggest that the most prudent parenting strategies involve positive, relational parenting (e.g., positive reinforcement, praise in particular, and natural/logical consequences) that have been proven effective.”</p>
<p>“At this point, it would be fair to say that the use of physical punishment is a high-risk parenting strategy,” Atkinson concluded.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2026.107945" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Is there experimental evidence for the effectiveness of disciplinary spanking? A review and Meta-analysis of four controlled trials</a>,” was authored by Leslie Atkinson, Jennifer Khoury, Meghan Kenny, and Andrea Gonzalez.</p></p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
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