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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/new-research-suggests-truth-has-a-natural-competitive-edge-over-misinformation/" 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;">New research suggests truth has a natural competitive edge over misinformation</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 25th 2026, 10:00</div>
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<p><p>Truthful messages are more persuasive and more likely to be shared than false ones, according to new research published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000467" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</a></em>. The findings, drawn from four large experiments, challenge the widespread belief that misinformation naturally spreads more effectively than accurate information.</p>
<p>Concerns about the influence of false information have intensified in recent years, particularly as misleading claims have been linked to delayed climate action, public health issues, and a loss of trust in institutions. Earlier studies have shown that falsehoods can travel rapidly on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), leading many to conclude that lies possess an inherent advantage in the digital environment. However, the new research suggests that this pattern may be shaped more by the design of social media platforms than by human preference.</p>
<p>Led by Nicolas Fay from the University of Western Australia, the researchers sought to examine how people respond to true and false information when the influence of algorithms, bots, and platform incentives is removed.</p>
<p>The team conducted four experiments involving a combined total of 4,607 participants (ranging from 18 to 99 years of age). Two experiments focused on a “persuasion game,” where the goal was to create short messages to convince others of a claim. The other two experiments focused on an “attention game,” where the goal was to write messages designed to capture as much attention as possible.</p>
<p>In the first and third experiments, human participants wrote the messages. They were randomly assigned to base their messages on information they believed to be true, information they believed to be false, or given no constraints at all. In the second and fourth experiments, the messages were generated by the artificial intelligence model GPT-3.5 using the same constraints. A separate, large group of human participants then rated all the messages on truthfulness, persuasiveness, emotional tone, and likelihood of sharing.</p>
<p>Across all four experiments, the results were consistent. Messages written with the intention of being truthful were rated as more persuasive and more interesting, and they produced stronger belief change in the direction of the claim. False messages, in contrast, often caused participants to believe the claim less. True messages were also more likely to be shared, both online and offline.</p>
<p>However, the researchers found that truth itself was not the primary reason people chose to share information. Instead, sharing was driven mainly by the positive emotions a message evoked and the degree to which it encouraged social interaction.</p>
<p>The experiments also revealed that messages produced by GPT‑3.5 were consistently rated as more persuasive and more shareable than those written by humans, particularly when the AI was instructed to generate truthful content.</p>
<p>Another notable finding was that when participants were free to write persuasive messages without constraints, they tended to default to truthfulness. Their unconstrained messages were rated as nearly as truthful as those written under explicit instructions to be accurate.</p>
<p>This tendency weakened slightly when participants were asked to write attention‑grabbing messages, but even then, their messages remained far more truthful than those written under falsehood instructions. Crucially, the researchers noted that relaxing the truth to make a message more attention-grabbing did not actually increase user engagement or intent to share.</p>
<p>Fay and colleagues concluded: “Our findings suggest that people are predisposed to the truth – both as information producers and consumers. This is consistent with the finding that the majority of online misinformation is spread by a small group of supersharers.”</p>
<p>The study acknowledges several limitations. For example, the experiments were conducted in a controlled environment, which may not reflect the complexity of real-world information ecosystems. Participants were primarily from Western, educated backgrounds, and the role of repetition, social networks, and source credibility was not examined.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000467" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Truth Over Falsehood: Experimental Evidence on What Persuades and Spreads</a>,” was authored by Nicolas Fay, Keith J. Ransom, Bradley Walker, Piers D. L. Howe, Andrew Perfors, and Yoshihisa Kashima.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/how-mindreading-ai-detects-hidden-suicidal-thoughts-in-the-brains-of-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;">How “mindreading” AI detects hidden suicidal thoughts in the brains of 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 25th 2026, 08:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70489" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Human Brain Mapping</a></em> provides evidence that young adults experiencing suicidal thoughts process concepts related to death differently in their brains compared to healthy individuals. The findings indicate that these individuals reflexively associate death-related ideas with their own sense of self. This research suggests that brain imaging combined with artificial intelligence could eventually help identify people at risk for suicide based on how their brains represent specific words.</p>
<p><em>If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a mental health crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 to reach the free and confidential Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or chat live at <a href="http://988lifeline.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">988lifeline.org</a>.</em></p>
<p>While mental health professionals typically rely on patients to report their feelings, people at risk for suicide do not always disclose their struggles. Finding an objective physical measurement in the brain could help identify those in need of support.</p>
<p>Previous behavioral tests have indicated that individuals with suicidal thoughts tend to implicitly link themselves with the idea of death. For example, word association games often show that these individuals connect words like “funeral” or “suicide” with words related to themselves. The scientists wanted to see if this psychological link leaves a detectable footprint in the brain.</p>
<p>“Our laboratory’s goal is to understand how thought is underpinned by brain activity. We explored whether certain concepts in people who were thinking about suicide were systematically altered by examining the underlying brain activity,” said study author <a href="http://ccbi.cmu.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Marcel Just</a>, D.O. Hebb University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.</p>
<p>The research team relied on the idea that the human brain functions like a universal concept dictionary. When people think of a common object, like a banana, their brains show very similar patterns of activity. The scientists aimed to determine if the neural blueprint for death-related concepts is uniquely altered in people experiencing suicidal thoughts.</p>
<p>The study included a final sample of 154 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. Of these participants, 89 were currently experiencing suicidal ideation, and 65 were healthy individuals with no history of mental health conditions. The researchers ensured that the two groups were evenly matched in terms of age, gender ratio, and general intelligence.</p>
<p>To measure brain activity, the scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging. This is a common brain scanning technique that tracks blood flow to different areas of the brain, revealing which regions are active during a specific task. While inside the scanner, participants were shown a series of 28 words on a screen.</p>
<p>These words were divided into four categories, which included suicide-related concepts, positive concepts, negative concepts, and attitude-related concepts. The suicide-related words included terms like death, funeral, lifeless, and hopeless. Each word appeared on the screen for three seconds, and participants were instructed to actively think about the main properties and meaning of the word.</p>
<p>The words were presented multiple times in different random orders. This repetition allowed the scientists to identify brain voxels, which are tiny three-dimensional units of brain tissue, that consistently responded to the specific concepts. The scientists then analyzed this brain scan data using machine learning, which is a type of computer algorithm designed to recognize complex patterns.</p>
<p>They specifically trained the algorithm to look at areas of the brain that previous studies have linked to thinking about oneself. These self-representation regions include structures like the precuneus and the middle temporal gyrus, which are typically active when people reflect on their own lives or identities.</p>
<p>The machine learning program successfully distinguished the individuals with suicidal thoughts from the healthy participants with a moderate but reliable accuracy of about 57 to 61 percent. This distinction was based entirely on the brain activity observed when participants thought about the suicide-related concepts.</p>
<p>When thinking about words like “death” or “funeral,” the individuals with suicidal thoughts showed distinct activation in the brain regions responsible for self-reflection. This pattern provides evidence that these individuals reflexively think about themselves when processing concepts related to dying.</p>
<p>“Individuals experiencing suicidal ideation associate the ‘self’ with concepts related to death,” Just told PsyPost. “We can now detect these neural signatures using fMRI.”</p>
<p>The researchers also tested the other categories of words, including the positive and negative terms. The brain activity associated with these non-suicide-related words did not distinguish the two groups above random chance. This specificity suggests that the altered brain patterns are strictly tied to how the individuals perceive death, rather than a general difference in how they process all emotional words.</p>
<p>The scientists noted that the algorithm could distinguish the groups even when the analysis was restricted to just two words, which were death and funeral. They also mathematically controlled for differences in age, intelligence, and data quality to ensure the algorithm was truly detecting the mental link to death. By identifying this specific conceptual alteration, the study establishes a measurable neurobiological basis for suicidal ideation.</p>
<p>“It is technically possible to use neuroimaging to determine if a person’s representation of death-related concepts is unusually linked to their ‘self-representation,'” Just explained. “This determination can potentially be made even if the person does not verbally disclose those thoughts.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps the most profound implication is that, to a first order, everyone with a healthy brain represents concepts similarly. Whether it is a ‘cup’ or a ‘banana,’ the neural machinery is consistent across the species. This ‘universal concept dictionary’ of the brain is what allows us to analyze activity and determine what a person is thinking—a process the media often calls ‘mindreading.'”</p>
<p>While these findings are promising, there are some limitations and potential misinterpretations to keep in mind. The current accuracy rate of the algorithm is too low for this test to be used as a standalone clinical diagnostic tool right now. The test correctly identified many individuals with suicidal thoughts, but it also produced a notable number of false positives and false negatives.</p>
<p>Additionally, the scanning process requires intense focus, and the researchers had to exclude data from 77 other initial participants who let their minds wander during the lengthy twenty-five-minute task. “Performing a scan of brain activity in an MRI scanner is cumbersome and requires the use of a very expensive instrument,” Just noted. “So using this method to detect suicidal ideation is not currently practical for routine clinical screening.”</p>
<p>In the future, the research team hopes to refine this procedure to make it shorter and easier for participants to complete. A shorter task focusing only on a few highly informative words might improve the quality of the data and the accuracy of the algorithm. The scientists also plan to adapt this method for use with less expensive and more accessible technologies.</p>
<p>For instance, translating this approach to electroencephalography, a method that measures electrical brain waves using a cap of sensors, could make the test widely available in standard clinics. Ultimately, developing therapies that help break the mental link between the self and death could provide a new pathway to support those at risk for suicide.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70489" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Neural Representations of Death-Related Concepts Identify Conceptual Alteration of Self in Suicidal Youth</a>,” was authored by Marcel Adam Just, Robert Mason, Lisa Pan, Dana McMakin, Christine Cha, Matthew K. Nock, and David Brent.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/demon-face-syndrome-the-science-behind-prosopometamorphopsia/" 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;">Demon face syndrome: The science behind prosopometamorphopsia</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 25th 2026, 07:00</div>
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<p><p>Imagine looking at a loved one and seeing their face twist into a demonic, unnatural shape. Their eyes might stretch to the sides of their head, their nose might swell, and deep, unnatural grooves might appear across their cheeks and forehead. This terrifying visual experience belongs to a rare neurological condition known medically as prosopometamorphopsia.</p>
<p>In popular media and online discussions, it is sometimes referred to as “demon face syndrome.” People with this condition see human faces as severely distorted, even though their vision for everyday objects remains completely normal.</p>
<p>Prosopometamorphopsia is fundamentally different from a hallucination. A hallucination involves seeing something that is not actually present in the physical world. People experiencing these facial distortions are looking at a real person standing in front of them. Their brain simply alters the shape, size, color, or position of the facial features before the image reaches their conscious awareness.</p>
<p>The condition is also distinct from face blindness, which scientists call prosopagnosia. People with face blindness cannot recognize who a person is, but the face itself looks physically normal to them. They often have to rely on a person’s hairstyle, voice, or walking style to figure out who they are talking to. People with demon face syndrome often know exactly who they are looking at, but the face appears physically warped and unsettling.</p>
<p>Jan Dirk Blom and his colleagues reviewed over a century of research on the condition in a 2021 report published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.03.001">Cortex</a></em>. They analyzed 81 different medical cases to understand how the brain maintains our normal perception of human faces. Their review provides evidence that the brain uses a highly distributed and interconnected network to process facial features. When part of this delicate network experiences a disruption, the visual output becomes disorganized and distorted.</p>
<h2>How Distortions Map Across the Face</h2>
<p>The visual distortions take many different forms depending on the individual patient. Sarah B. Herald and her colleagues outlined these variations in a 2023 review published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108517"><em>Neuropsychologia</em></a>. Some patients report that faces look like they are melting, comparing the experience to looking at a surrealist painting by Salvador Dalí. Others see facial features drooping, swelling, or shifting entirely out of place.</p>
<p>Around two-thirds of the patients evaluated by Herald and her team experienced distortions on only one half of the face. This specific presentation indicates that the human brain processes the left and right sides of a face separately before stitching them together into a single, cohesive image. Brain injuries on the left side of the brain consistently caused patients to see distortions on the right side of the faces they looked at. Injuries on the right side of the brain could cause distortions on either the left side, the right side, or across the entire face.</p>
<p>This separation of facial halves requires constant, lightning-fast communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. Blom and his team found that many cases of half-face distortions involved damage to a structure called the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is a thick band of nerve fibers that acts as an information highway between the left and right sides of the brain. When this neurological highway is damaged, the brain struggles to fuse the two halves of the face properly.</p>
<h2>A Rare Window Into Visual Processing</h2>
<p>The condition provides strong evidence that the human brain has dedicated circuits designed exclusively for processing faces. Antônio Mello and Brad Duchaine explored this concept in a 2025 report published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2025.2590662">Cognitive Neuroscience</a></em>. They tested two patients using over a thousand images of everyday objects alongside images of human faces. The patients reported severe visual distortions when looking at the faces, but the everyday objects appeared perfectly normal.</p>
<p>To understand why this selective distortion happens, we have to look at how the brain handles visual information. In a 2025 book chapter for <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/61420/chapter-abstract/533987873">Oxford University Press</a>, Mello and Duchaine explained that the brain relies on very specific regions to analyze faces. One primary region is located near the bottom of the brain and is dedicated to recognizing identities and processing the overall structure of a face. After light hits the back of the eye, the signal travels to the back of the brain and then moves forward into these specialized face-processing regions.</p>
<p>The brain does not just look at individual parts like a nose or an eye in isolation. It also evaluates the distances and relationships between these features, which scientists refer to as configural processing. When the delicate balance of configural processing is disrupted, the brain miscalculates the physical space on a face. The eyes might appear too far apart, or the mouth might seem to slide down toward the chin.</p>
<h2>The Teenager Who Sees Shifting Faces</h2>
<p>Most documented cases of these facial distortions occur later in life after a stroke, brain tumor, or head injury. Sydney Fortner and her colleagues detailed a rare early-emerging case in a 2025 preprint posted to <a href="https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.15.690312">bioRxiv</a>. The patient, a teenager referred to by the pseudonym Zed, has experienced dynamic facial distortions for as long as he can remember. He frequently sees facial features move, droop, shrink, and expand while he is looking directly at them.</p>
<p>Zed underwent extensive behavioral and neurological testing to map his exact visual abilities. Despite seeing faces as constantly shifting and warping, he was perfectly capable of judging a person’s age and sex. This suggests that the brain might use entirely different pathways to judge basic demographic information than it uses to construct our conscious visual experience of a face.</p>
<p>Fortner and her team used advanced brain scanning techniques to look closely inside Zed’s brain. They found that the specialized face-processing regions in the right side of his brain were much less active than those in people without the condition. They also found reduced health and integrity in specific white matter tracts, which are the insulated biological wires that connect different brain regions together.</p>
<p>Zed also frequently misidentifies people, sometimes seeing familiar faces on complete strangers. He once approached an older man in public because the man’s face looked exactly like his mother’s face to him. This blending of incorrect identity and physical distortion points to a deep irregularity in how his brain retrieves and applies facial memories to the people he sees.</p>
<h2>Visualizing the Unimaginable</h2>
<p>Because the distortions happen entirely inside the patient’s mind, scientists have traditionally struggled to see exactly what the patients see. If a patient tries to draw the distorted face, they are looking at their own drawing, which might also appear distorted to them. Antônio Mello and his team found a unique workaround for this problem, which they published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00136-3">The Lancet</a></em> in 2024.</p>
<p>The researchers worked with a 58-year-old man who had been seeing demonic faces for over two years. The man saw severe distortions when looking at real people in the same room. He described their faces as having stretched features, widened mouths, and deep grooves carved into their foreheads and cheeks.</p>
<p>The man experienced a very specific version of the condition that made a visual experiment possible. He only saw the demonic distortions when looking at real people in the physical world. When he looked at a photograph of a face on a computer screen, the face looked completely normal to him. This unusual exception gave the researchers a rare opportunity to recreate his exact visual experience.</p>
<p>The scientists took a photograph of a person in the room and displayed it on a computer screen next to the actual person. The patient looked back and forth between the normal photograph and the distorted real face. Using photo-editing software, the researchers tweaked the photograph based on his real-time feedback until the digital image perfectly matched the demonic face he saw in person. This resulted in the first photorealistic images of demon face syndrome ever created.</p>
<h2>The Surprising Impact of Color</h2>
<p>The same 58-year-old patient participated in another study that revealed an unexpected element of the condition. Mello and his colleagues published these new findings in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.9.5715">Journal of Vision</a></em> in 2023. They discovered that the intensity of the man’s facial distortions changed dramatically depending on the color of light hitting his eyes.</p>
<p>The researchers had the patient look at human faces through different colored plastic filters. When he looked through a green filter, the demonic distortions decreased significantly, and faces looked much more normal. When he looked through a red filter, the distortions became much more severe and intense.</p>
<p>This strong reaction to color was entirely unexpected by the research team. It suggests that the brain’s pathways for processing color are deeply intertwined with the pathways that determine the physical shape and structure of a face. Using colored glasses could potentially serve as a non-invasive treatment to help manage the visual symptoms for some patients experiencing these specific distortions.</p>
<h2>Infections and Autoimmune Triggers</h2>
<p>The underlying causes of the condition vary widely among patients and can sometimes involve the immune system. In a 2025 report published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2025.10788">BJPsych Open</a>, Isuri Wimalasiri and colleagues described a man in his thirties who saw his own reflection as a demon. The man had a medical history of N-methyl-D-aspartate encephalitis, which is a rare disease where the immune system attacks the brain.</p>
<p>This specific variation of the condition is called autoprosopometamorphopsia, meaning the patient sees distortions primarily in their own face rather than in others. The man became highly socially withdrawn because of the distress caused by looking at his own reflection. The researchers noted that his symptoms improved after he received specialized psychiatric treatments, showing that the condition can sometimes respond to medical intervention.</p>
<p>Seizures and epilepsy are also known triggers for severe visual distortions. In another 2025 <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2025.10787">BJPsych Open</a></em> report, Thilini Wickramarathna and a team of researchers detailed how frontal lobe seizures can present as highly unusual psychiatric symptoms. Abnormal electrical activity in the brain can easily spill over into the visual processing centers. When a seizure disrupts the visual centers at the back or side of the brain, it can temporarily warp a person’s entire visual reality.</p>
<h2>Childhood Cases and Bacterial Links</h2>
<p>The condition is incredibly rare in children, but it can occur under specific medical circumstances. Watanabe Yusuke and his colleagues documented the first known early childhood case in a 2026 report published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.102888">Cureus</a></em>. A four-year-old boy began seeing human faces as vertically and horizontally stretched. His parents noticed the issue when he started drawing portraits of his family with highly elongated ears, faces, and hair.</p>
<p>The young boy developed these visual symptoms shortly after recovering from a routine respiratory tract infection. Blood tests revealed high levels of antibodies for a specific bacteria called Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The scientists proposed that the boy’s immune system mounted a defense against the lung infection but mistakenly caused inflammation in his brain’s visual networks.</p>
<p>The researchers emphasized that doctors and parents need to take children seriously when they report bizarre visual changes. It is easy to dismiss a child’s claim of seeing stretched or warped faces as an active imagination or a playful joke. Recognizing these symptoms as a legitimate medical condition allows for proper evaluation and reduces the fear and anxiety the child might be experiencing.</p>
<h2>How the Brain Maps the Visual World</h2>
<p>To fully understand how these distortions map onto human vision, scientists study the concept of reference frames. In the review by Herald and her team, they explained that a reference frame is the spatial coordinate system the brain uses to encode an image. By testing how the distortions behave when a face is turned upside down or moved to the side of a patient’s vision, researchers can pinpoint exactly where the brain’s processing breaks down.</p>
<p>If the distortion stays on the anatomical right side of a face even when the face is turned upside down, the brain is using a face-centric reference frame. This means the brain has locked the distortion onto the structural concept of the face itself, regardless of how it is positioned in space. It shows that the glitch is happening at a very high level of cognitive processing.</p>
<p>If the distortion stays in the right side of the person’s field of vision regardless of how the face moves, the brain is using a retino-centric reference frame. This indicates that the problem is tied to a specific area of the retina or early visual processing pathways. By mapping these reference frames, doctors can better understand which specific neural circuits are damaged or misfiring.</p>
<h2>The Fatigue of the Brain</h2>
<p>The timing of the visual distortions can also provide clues about how the brain tries to fix itself. Blom and his colleagues found that some patients only see distortions after staring at a face for several seconds or minutes. The face looks perfectly normal at first glance, but the warping and drooping slowly build up over time.</p>
<p>This delayed effect is known in older medical literature as cerebral asthenopia, which translates directly to brain fatigue. It provides evidence that the brain’s face-processing network is highly adaptable and resilient. The brain initially manages to route visual information around damaged areas to present a normal face, but the biological system eventually gets tired. Once the neural pathways fatigue, the compensatory mechanisms fail, and the distortions break through into the patient’s conscious awareness.</p>
<p>Demon face syndrome is a jarring and often frightening condition that radically alters how a person experiences the social world. It strips away the familiar comfort of a human face and replaces it with something surreal or deeply unsettling. At the same time, it offers neuroscientists a brilliant, albeit accidental, lens into the sheer complexity of human vision.</p>
<p>Every time we effortlessly recognize a friend or smile at a family member, millions of neurons are performing a highly orchestrated routine. Conditions like prosopometamorphopsia remind us of how fragile that biological routine can be. By continuing to study these rare visual glitches, scientists hope to unravel the final mysteries of how the human brain constructs the visual world we navigate every day.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-pinpoints-a-key-factor-separating-liberal-and-conservative-morality/" 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;">New psychology research pinpoints a key factor separating liberal and conservative morality</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 25th 2026, 06:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672261422957"><em>Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</em></a> suggests that liberals and conservatives actually share a common foundation for morality based on preventing harm. The research indicates that political disagreements arise because people on the left and right hold different “assumptions of vulnerability.” In other words, they make different assumptions about which groups or entities are most susceptible to being harmed.</p>
<p>While both sides actually agree that marginalized groups and the environment face the highest risk of harm, they disagree on the size of the gap between different groups. Liberals see a massive divide in vulnerability between the marginalized and those in power. Conservatives, on the other hand, view vulnerability as a more universal human trait, rating the powerful and the divine as significantly more susceptible to harm than liberals do.</p>
<p>These findings challenge a popular idea known as Moral Foundations Theory. This older framework proposes that conservatives and liberals rely on entirely different mental mechanisms to make moral judgments, suggesting liberals care mostly about harm and fairness, while conservatives uniquely value loyalty, authority, and purity.</p>
<p>However, recent scientific advances point to harm as the universal core of all moral judgments. This shift in understanding presented a puzzle for scientists. The researchers wanted to better understand how “moral disagreements about politics arise when everyone makes moral judgements based on whether someone was perceived to harm someone else,” explained <a href="https://jakewomick.com/">Jake Womick</a>, an assistant professor at California State University, Bakersfield, and co-first author of the study.</p>
<p>“People tend to think that liberals and conservatives are fundamentally morally different, that they hold different foundational moral values about what is fundamentally right and wrong and that this explains why the left and right disagree on things like abortion, immigration and guns,” explained Emily Kubin, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford and co-first author.</p>
<p>“However, recent advancements in morality research point to people across the ideological spectrum caring about the same moral concern — harm,” Kubin continued. “But how can everyone care about harm but still disagree on so many issues? This work attempted to address that tension by showing how liberals and conservatives care about harm (or vulnerability), but just see it in different places.”</p>
<p>To solve this puzzle, the researchers proposed that everyone bases their morality on protecting victims, but individuals simply disagree on who exactly qualifies as a victim. By measuring these underlying assumptions of vulnerability, they hoped to explain why the left and right diverge on issues ranging from climate change to policing.</p>
<p>In preliminary work, the scientists conducted a pilot study and two supplemental studies to establish that assumptions of vulnerability predict general moral judgments. They confirmed that people who perceived entities like children or the American flag as highly vulnerable also granted them higher moral status. These early tests revealed systematic differences across the political spectrum, with conservatives seeing fetuses as especially vulnerable to harm.</p>
<p>In the first primary study, the researchers recruited 400 participants to examine how vulnerability assumptions explain moral judgments on divisive topics. Participants read six moral scenarios, such as college students burning an American flag or illegal immigrants being detained at the border. The participants then rated the immorality of each scenario on a scale from one to five. The participants also rated the perceived vulnerability of the targets at the center of each scenario, such as the American flag or illegal immigrants.</p>
<p>The researchers found that political orientation predicted moral judgments, with liberals condemning left-leaning issues and conservatives condemning right-leaning issues. More importantly, individual perceptions of vulnerability predicted these moral judgments better than political orientation alone.</p>
<p>The scientists then focused on four specific themes of vulnerability to better understand contemporary political debates. These four themes included the environment, marginalized groups known as the “othered,” powerful people like police officers, and the divine. In the second study, 932 participants rated the vulnerability of three targets within each of the four themes. They also evaluated the immorality of real-world scenarios in which these targets were victimized.</p>
<p>The data revealed that liberals rated the environment and marginalized groups as more vulnerable than conservatives did. On the other hand, conservatives rated the powerful and the divine as more vulnerable than liberals did. The scientists also noted that liberals tended to view vulnerability as group-based, while conservatives viewed vulnerability as more evenly distributed across all individuals.</p>
<p>To ensure these findings were robust, the scientists replicated the experiment with a quasi-representative national sample of 1,832 religious Americans. These participants completed the same vulnerability ratings and reported their political orientations. The researchers observed the same ideological patterns in this highly religious sample.</p>
<p>Liberals again amplified the differences in vulnerability between groups, while conservatives minimized those differences. Because the sample was highly religious, the overall ratings for the vulnerability of the divine were significantly higher than in the previous study.</p>
<p>“Perhaps the most interesting and important finding comes from looking at the rank order of these four categories on the extreme political left and right,” Womick told PsyPost. “Two big takeaways here.”</p>
<p>“First, Across the political spectrum, people tend to agree on the relative vulnerability of groups (i.e., the rank order of each category of vulnerability). Both extreme liberals and conservatives viewed transgender people and immigrants as more vulnerable than police officers and CEOs. I think the unifying framework of perceived harm and these similar rankings across the political spectrum offer some common ground that might be useful for bridging political divides.”</p>
<p>“Second, where they differed here was in the degree of these distinctions. On the extreme left, people really split vulnerability into extremes (e.g., transgender people are highly vulnerable, while CEOs are almost completely invulnerable), whereas those on the extreme right the capacity for harm, victimization, and mistreatment as more evenly distributed across groups.”</p>
<p><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-231408" src="https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-1024x743.png" alt="" width="1024" height="743" srcset="https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-1024x743.png 1024w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-300x218.png 300w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-768x557.png 768w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-120x86.png 120w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-750x544.png 750w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505-1140x827.png 1140w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-24-124505.png 1492w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"></p>
<p>The researchers conducted a third study to see how these vulnerability perceptions related to other personal values and whether they remained stable over time. They recruited 920 participants who completed the vulnerability surveys twice, with a one-week gap between the sessions. During the first session, the participants also completed surveys measuring their moral foundations, basic values, authoritarian beliefs, and supernatural beliefs.</p>
<p>The scientists found that the participants’ vulnerability ratings were highly stable over the one-week period. The vulnerability perceptions also aligned with other psychological traits in expected ways. For instance, believing the environment is vulnerable predicted a strong moral concern for plants and animals, while perceiving the powerful as vulnerable predicted higher levels of right-wing authoritarianism.</p>
<p>In the fourth study, the scientists directly compared their vulnerability framework against Moral Foundations Theory. They recruited 484 participants to rate their stances on eight hot-button issues, such as transgender rights and health insurance regulations. Participants also completed assessments of their political ideology, their assumptions of vulnerability, and their moral foundations.</p>
<p>The data showed that assumptions of vulnerability explained unique variances in the participants’ political stances beyond what moral foundations could explain. For issues related to the environment and marginalized groups, vulnerability assumptions were much stronger predictors of political stances than moral foundations. This provides evidence that beliefs about who can be harmed are uniquely powerful in explaining social and economic debates.</p>
<p>The scientists wanted to ensure these ideological patterns were not just reactions to specific, highly politicized words like immigrants or police. In a fifth study involving 403 participants, they measured vulnerability perceptions using only abstract definitions of the four themes. Participants read definitions for the environment, marginalized groups, the powerful, and the divine, without seeing any specific examples.</p>
<p>They then rated how vulnerable these broad categories were to harm and mistreatment. Even without specific examples, the ideological divides persisted exactly as before. Liberals rated the abstract concepts of the environment and marginalized groups as highly vulnerable, while conservatives extended more vulnerability to the powerful and the divine.</p>
<p>The researchers then investigated whether these perceptions of vulnerability operate on an unconscious level. They recruited 278 participants to complete a reaction-time task designed to measure implicit associations. Participants quickly viewed words related to the four vulnerability themes followed by ambiguous visual symbols, and they had to guess if the symbol represented something vulnerable.</p>
<p>Because the initial words appear so quickly, people tend to unconsciously project their feelings about the word onto the ambiguous symbol. The scientists found that these unconscious measures of vulnerability highly correlated with the participants’ explicit, self-reported survey answers. Political orientation also predicted these implicit scores, suggesting that our assumptions about victimhood are deeply ingrained in our unconscious minds.</p>
<p>In the seventh study, the scientists tested whether these vulnerability beliefs actually influence real-world behavior. They asked 186 participants to make forced-choice decisions between pairs of real charities. Each charity represented one of the four vulnerability themes, such as a climate action fund for the environment or a police survivor fund for the powerful.</p>
<p>The researchers promised to donate real money to the charities based on the participants’ choices. The scientists found that participants’ vulnerability ratings predicted their donation choices. People who perceived a specific group as highly vulnerable were significantly more likely to direct financial resources to a charity supporting that group.</p>
<p>To test whether vulnerability perceptions actively cause changes in moral judgments, the researchers conducted an experimental manipulation. They recruited 506 participants to read a story about a wealthy corporate executive who refused to give money to a homeless person. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups.</p>
<p>One group wrote about how the executive might be vulnerable to harm, another group wrote about how the homeless person might be vulnerable, and a control group simply read the story. The researchers found that focusing on a specific person’s vulnerability changed how participants judged the situation. When participants focused on the executive’s vulnerability, they judged the executive’s refusal to donate as less immoral. Focusing on the homeless person’s vulnerability made the executive’s actions seem significantly more wrong.</p>
<p>“Everyone views morality as a matter of harm, but those on the political left and right disagree about what groups are particularly vulnerable to harm,” Womick said. “Those on the left view the marginalized and the environment as more vulnerable to harm, victimization, and mistreatment. Those on the right view the powerful and the divine as more vulnerable.”</p>
<p>But the study, like all research, includes some limitations. The United States has a unique political landscape, and it remains unclear how these trends might apply to political dynamics in other countries. Future research will need to test these vulnerability frameworks across different cultures to see if the same patterns emerge globally.</p>
<p>Additionally, the demographic makeup of the study samples was predominantly White and not fully representative of the general population. Because political ideology and racial identity are closely connected, the researchers recommend testing these ideas in more diverse groups. The four themes explored in these studies also represent just a starting point, as there are many other groups people might view as vulnerable.</p>
<p>Looking ahead, the researchers plan to expand their focus beyond the victims of harm to study the people who cause harm. They want to investigate whether there are dispositional differences in how liberals and conservatives perceive moral agents.</p>
<p>“This research was inspired by Dyadic Morality Theory, which tells us acts are viewed immoral when one person (an agent) intentionally harms another person (a patient),” Womick explained. “Assumptions of vulnerability focus on dispositional differences in the person being harmed (how much a target has patiency). We’re now working on looking at dispositional differences in what kinds of groups are especially likely to do harm (dispositional differences in perceptions of moral agents).”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672261422957">Liberals and Conservatives See Different Victims: Moral Disagreement Is Explained by Different Assumptions of Vulnerability</a>,” was authored by Jake Womick, Emily Kubin, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa, Carlos Rebollar, Kyra Kapsaskis, Samuel Pratt, Helen Devine, B. Keith Payne, Stephen Vaisey, and Kurt Gray.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/new-study-challenges-the-idea-that-sexual-consent-is-widely-misinterpreted-in-romantic-relationships/" 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;">New study challenges the idea that sexual consent is widely misinterpreted in romantic relationships</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, 20:00</div>
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<p><p>Romantic partners are generally accurate in perceiving each other’s sexual consent, challenging the assumption that sexual consent is frequently misunderstood. This research was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-026-01641-6"><em>Sex Roles</em></a>.</p>
<p>Sexual consent encompasses a person’s internal willingness to engage in sexual activity, the ways that willingness is expressed through verbal and nonverbal cues, and how those signals are interpreted by others. Internal consent reflects feelings such as comfort, readiness, and desire, whereas external consent involves the communication of willingness or boundaries through words and behavior.</p>
<p>Accurately interpreting these signals is central to healthy sexual decision-making and relationship satisfaction, but how well do people actually understand a partner’s consent?</p>
<p>Xin Shi and Emily A. Impett investigated this question by examining the “sexual miscommunication theory,” which suggests that sexual consent is often ambiguous and therefore prone to misinterpretation, especially by men.</p>
<p>According to this perspective, traditional gender roles portray men as sexual initiators and women as gatekeepers, potentially leading men to overestimate women’s interest. Yet emerging research suggests that romantic partners may be more accurate at interpreting each other’s sexual signals than this theory predicts.</p>
<p>The researchers conducted two studies with mixed-gender romantic couples in China. In the first study, 235 couples (470 individuals) were recruited through online advertisements and social media platforms. Participants were required to be at least 18 years old, in an exclusive relationship, and to have had sexual activity with their partner within the previous three months. Each partner independently completed surveys recalling their most recent sexual encounter.</p>
<p>Participants completed several measures. Internal feelings of sexual consent were assessed using a short form of the Internal Consent Scale, which measured feelings such as comfort and willingness during the encounter. They also rated how strongly they believed their partner experienced these same feelings.</p>
<p>External consent communication was measured using items assessing how participants expressed willingness through verbal or nonverbal cues. Sexual satisfaction with the encounter was measured using the New Sexual Satisfaction Scale, and relationship satisfaction was assessed using items from the Perceived Relationship Quality Components scale.</p>
<p>The researchers used the Truth and Bias model to compare partners’ perceptions with each other’s self-reported experiences in order to determine accuracy and systematic biases in consent perception.</p>
<p>A second study extended these findings using a more ecologically valid design. In this study, 103 couples (206 participants) completed a 21-day daily diary study. Participants received nightly survey links through WeChat and reported on sexual activity and consent experiences each day.</p>
<p>On days when couples reported having sex, participants rated their own internal consent, their perceptions of their partner’s consent, how consent was communicated externally, and their sexual and relationship satisfaction. Across the diary period, over 4,200 daily surveys were completed, with analyses focusing on the approximately 1,650 days when sexual activity occurred.</p>
<p>Across studies, romantic partners were generally quite accurate in perceiving each other’s sexual consent. Men and women were both able to closely track their partner’s internal consent feelings; that is, when one partner reported stronger feelings of willingness or comfort during sex, the other partner’s perception of that willingness tended to increase as well. Participants also tended to project their own feelings of consent onto their partner, meaning that individuals who felt more willing themselves were more likely to assume that their partner felt similarly.</p>
<p>While overall perceptions were accurate, some gender differences appeared: women slightly overestimated their partner’s internal consent, whereas men showed no consistent bias in this regard.</p>
<p>The daily diary study largely replicated these findings in a more naturalistic context. Over the course of the 21-day period, both men and women continued to show strong accuracy in perceiving their partner’s consent from one sexual encounter to the next. However, the direction of some biases differed from the first study.</p>
<p>Men tended to slightly underestimate their partner’s internal consent on a given day, whereas women tended to overestimate it. Participants also showed similar patterns when judging how their partner communicated consent externally. Both men and women were able to track day-to-day changes in how their partner expressed consent through words or behaviors, but women again tended to slightly overestimate the extent to which their partners expressed willingness.</p>
<p>Across both studies, when partners accurately perceived higher levels of their partner’s consent, both individuals tended to report greater sexual satisfaction. Interestingly, some forms of misperception were also associated with relationship outcomes. Overestimating a partner’s willingness was linked to greater sexual satisfaction for the perceiver, while underestimating it was sometimes linked to greater satisfaction reported by the partner.</p>
<p>This research focused on mixed-gender romantic couples in China, which may limit how well the findings generalize to other cultural contexts or to different relationship structures.</p>
<p>Overall, the findings suggest that sexual consent communication in established relationships may be more accurate and mutually understood than traditional miscommunication theories assume.</p>
<p>The research “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-026-01641-6">Reading the Signals: Accuracy and Bias in Men’s and Women’s Perceptions of Sexual Consent in Romantic Relationships</a>” was authored by Xin Shi and Emily A. Impett.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/brain-volume-in-bipolar-disorder-increases-during-depression-and-shrinks-during-remission/" 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 volume in bipolar disorder increases during depression and shrinks during remission</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, 18:00</div>
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<p><p>A longitudinal neuroimaging study comparing individuals with bipolar disorder and healthy participants found that bipolar disorder patients with a higher number of depressive episodes tended to show increases in gray matter volume of the right exterior cerebellum. The paper was published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-025-02197-x"><em>Neuropsychopharmacology</em></a>.</p>
<p>Bipolar disorder is a mental health condition characterized by extreme shifts in mood, energy, and activity levels. People with bipolar disorder experience episodes of mania or hypomania, which involve elevated or irritable mood, increased energy, and reduced need for sleep. These episodes alternate with depressive episodes, marked by sadness, loss of interest, fatigue, and feelings of hopelessness.</p>
<p>Research suggests that differences in brain structure, neurotransmitter systems, and emotional regulation networks may play a role in the development of bipolar disorder. This disorder typically begins in late adolescence or early adulthood, although it can appear earlier or later in life.</p>
<p>Study author Florian Thomas-Odenthal and his colleagues wanted to explore changes in gray matter volume of the brain in individuals suffering from bipolar disorder with and without recurring depressive or manic episodes during a 2-year follow-up and compare them to healthy participants.</p>
<p>The authors hypothesized that patients with bipolar disorder who experience a new depressive or manic episode during the follow-up period would show decreases in gray matter volume associated with manic episodes and increases in gray matter volume associated with depressive episodes. Gray matter is the part of the central nervous system that consists mainly of neuronal cell bodies, dendrites, and synapses.</p>
<p>Study participants were 124 individuals participating in the ongoing Marburg–Münster Affective Disorder Cohort Study (MACS), investigating the neurobiology of major psychiatric disorders. Sixty-two of the participants suffered from bipolar disorder, while the other 62 were healthy individuals, included as control participants.</p>
<p>All participants completed magnetic resonance imaging at two time points approximately two years apart (2.18 years, on average). Aside from this, study participants completed semi-structured clinical interviews at those two time points in which they reported on the course of their illness, whether they were currently experiencing symptoms of the disorder (remission status), and current medication use.</p>
<p>They also completed assessments of psychopathology, global psycho-social functioning, and familial risk. Their body mass index was calculated. Study authors further divided participants with bipolar disorder into those who experienced a new manic or depressive episode during the follow-up period and those who did not.</p>
<p>Results indicated that patients with bipolar disorder who did not experience a new manic or depressive episode during the follow-up period tended to show significant decreases in the gray matter volume of the right exterior cerebellum. Patients with bipolar disorder who experienced a depressive or manic episode during the follow-up period showed a non-significant increase in gray matter volume. Gray matter volume in this region did not change in healthy participants.</p>
<p>A higher number of depressive, but not manic, episodes during the follow-up period was moderately associated with higher increases in gray matter volume of the mentioned brain area. In bipolar disorder patients who did not experience a new manic or depressive episode during the follow-up, longer durations of manic episodes prior to the baseline assessment were associated with decreases in gray matter volume in the right exterior cerebellum during the follow-up period.</p>
<p>“Our findings underscore the dynamic nature of brain changes in BD [bipolar disorder]. GMV [gray matter volume] increases in BD patients with recurrence may be due to acute neuroinflammatory mechanisms including glial cell proliferation, whereas GMV reductions in BD patients without recurrence may result from abnormal synaptic refinement or pruning, as a consequence of past neuroinflammation during BD episodes,” the study authors concluded.</p>
<p>The study sheds light on the structural brain changes associated with bipolar disorder. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any definitive causal inferences to be derived from the results.</p>
<p>The paper “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-025-02197-x">Differential impact of manic versus depressive episode recurrence on longitudinal gray matter volume changes in bipolar disorder</a>” was authored by Florian Thomas-Odenthal, Lea Teutenberg, Frederike Stein, Nina Alexander, Linda M. Bonnekoh, Katharina Brosch, Kira Flinkenflügel, Janik Goltermann, Dominik Grotegerd, Tim Hahn, Andreas Jansen, Elisabeth J. Leehr, Susanne Meinert, Julia-Katharina Pfarr, Harald Renz, Kai Ringwald, Navid Schürmeyer, Thomas Stief, Benjamin Straube, Katharina Thiel, Paula Usemann, Axel Krug, Igor Nenadić, Udo Dannlowski, and Tilo Kircher.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/viewing-parenthood-as-sacred-boosts-happiness-depending-on-how-parents-imagine-g-2026-03-19/" 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;">Viewing parenthood as sacred might boost happiness, depending on how parents imagine God</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, 16:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12945">Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion</a> </em>suggests that viewing parenthood as a sacred duty is linked to higher levels of happiness and satisfaction among adults in the United States. This relationship depends heavily on how a person visualizes God as a relational figure.</p>
<p>Raising children routinely involves psychological, physical, and financial costs that can drain adults. Sociologists and psychologists regularly document that the stresses of child-rearing can associate with higher rates of depression and lower physical health. At the same time, the experience of raising children can impart a profound sense of meaning and purpose to daily life. Researchers have noted that how people interpret their responsibilities as parents plays a major part in whether they experience joy or distress.</p>
<p>One specific psychological concept that influences this subjective experience is called sanctification. In the social sciences, sanctification is the process of assigning divine character and significance to an ordinary aspect of life. This can be theistic, where a person views their circumstances as a direct manifestation of God. It can also be non-theistic, where someone perceives a basic human role, such as parenting, as possessing sacred or holy qualities without explicitly attributing them to a specific deity. By treating an everyday task as sacred, individuals often invest more energy into it and report higher levels of satisfaction.</p>
<p>Sociologists Laura Upenieks and Christopher G. Ellison wanted to explore how viewing the parenting role as sacred interacts with personal beliefs about the divine entity itself. Upenieks, a researcher at Baylor University, and Ellison, a researcher at the University of Texas at San Antonio, focused their attention on what sociologists call images of God. These images represent how people internally visualize a divine figure and serve as an internal working model for how they relate to the world.</p>
<p>Scholars generally categorize American views of God into four main types. These types are based on whether the deity is perceived as actively engaged in earthly affairs and whether the deity is seen as judgmental. The first type is the authoritative God, who is seen as both highly active in the world and highly judgmental of human behavior. The second is the benevolent God, who is engaged but forgiving and non-judgmental.</p>
<p>The third type consists of the critical God, visualized as disengaged from daily human life but quick to judge human failings. Finally, the distant God is viewed as neither engaged in the world nor concerned with judging it. The researchers suspected that the supposed mental health benefits of seeing parenthood as a sacred calling might change depending on which of these four God images a parent holds.</p>
<p>To test this idea, Upenieks and Ellison analyzed information from the 2014 Baylor Religion Survey. This national poll collected responses from adults across the United States regarding their behaviors, attitudes, and religious convictions. The researchers focused their analysis on a specific sample of 1,078 individuals who were parents and had provided answers about their overall well-being.</p>
<p>The survey respondents were asked to rate their general happiness on a basic scale, as well as their agreement with the statement that they are satisfied with their role as a parent. To measure non-theistic sanctification, the survey included a question asking participants to rate their agreement with the simple statement that their role as a parent is holy and sacred.</p>
<p>To capture internal images of God, the survey asked respondents a series of descriptive questions. Participants indicated if they thought God was personally involved in their lives, actively concerned with their well-being, or angered by human sins. Through these answers, the researchers categorized each parent into one of the four primary God images.</p>
<p>The statistical models were built to account for a variety of potentially influencing features, including age, education, race, marital status, and frequency of typical religious attendance. The analysis revealed a clear overall pattern linking parental sanctification to higher personal well-being. Parents who strongly agreed that their parental role was sacred tended to report higher general happiness. They also reported feeling far more satisfied with their responsibilities as parents.</p>
<p>Imbuing an exhausting life role with spiritual weight appears to help adults weather the negative aspects of child-rearing. This positive association shifted greatly when combined with specific views of the divine. The link between viewing parenting as sacred and experiencing high levels of happiness was most pronounced among parents who held an authoritative God image.</p>
<p>A similar boost in well-being appeared among parents who imagined a benevolent God instead. For these groups, feelings of sacredness combined with an active God yielded the best mental and emotional outcomes. The researchers propose a few psychological reasons for these patterns.</p>
<p>A benevolent God image serves as a constant source of comfort, offering parents a sense of unconditional support when facing the severe demands of raising children. An authoritative God image, while carrying elements of strict judgment, still provides a sense of divine structure and engagement. This worldview aligns well with the daily tasks of disciplining and guiding a child, allowing parents to feel they are acting in harmony with divine expectations.</p>
<p>Conversely, the distant God image seemed to hinder the positive feelings historically associated with sacred parenting. For parents who primarily viewed God as an uninvolved observer, the association between sanctification and parental satisfaction was noticeably weaker. Believing that one’s parental role has ultimate cosmic significance while simultaneously believing that the cosmos is governed by an absent deity appears to create cognitive friction.</p>
<p>If a parent feels their duties are fundamentally holy but cannot turn to an active God for help, they might struggle to find comfort in their faith during difficult periods. The data did not reveal a statistically significant interaction between viewing parenting as sacred and holding a critical God image. The researchers had speculated that a judgmental, absent God would increase distress for parents feeling overwhelmed by a sacred duty, but this specific risk did not materialize in the survey.</p>
<p>The study has a few limitations that influence how the conclusions should be interpreted. The analysis relies on cross-sectional data, meaning all the information was collected at a single moment in time. Because of this design, the researchers cannot state that viewing parenting as sacred directly causes an increase in happiness. It is entirely possible that parents who are already happy are simply more prone to describing their roles in glowing, sacred terms.</p>
<p>The study also relied on single-item survey questions to measure complex ideas like sanctification and happiness, rather than using full diagnostic scales. Additionally, the survey sample was uniquely American, predominantly white, and largely Christian. The concept of God and the nature of religious coping can differ greatly across different cultures and faith traditions. The authors suggest that future studies should track families over many years to observe how these beliefs shift as children mature and household dynamics alter.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12945">Parental Sanctification, God Images, and Parental Happiness and Satisfaction in the United States</a>,” was authored by Laura Upenieks and Christopher G. Ellison.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/ai-can-generate-images-that-are-just-as-effective-at-triggering-human-emotions-as-traditional-photographs/" 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;">AI can generate images that are just as effective at triggering human emotions as traditional photographs</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, 14:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study provides evidence that artificial intelligence can successfully generate customized images designed to trigger specific human emotions. The findings suggest that these computer-generated pictures work just as well as traditional photographs, while offering the added benefit of being adaptable to different cultures, ages, and genders. The research was published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251415336" target="_blank">Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science</a></em>.</p>
<p>Generative AI refers to computer systems that can create new content, such as text or pictures, based on simple written instructions. Scientists often use collections of photographs to study human emotions, a process known as affect induction.</p>
<p>By showing participants specific images, researchers can reliably trigger feelings like fear, joy, or disgust in a laboratory setting. This allows scientists to study how emotions influence human behavior and decision making.</p>
<p>However, older image collections have started to show their age. Many traditional photographs suffer from low resolution or feature outdated fashion styles that might distract participants from the intended emotion. Existing image databases also tend to lack cultural diversity. Most traditional photos feature Western settings and people, which can limit how well they work for individuals from other parts of the world.</p>
<p>To solve these problems, a massive international team of forty six scientists joined forces. They wanted to see if generative AI could create a more flexible and up to date collection of emotional images.</p>
<p>“What led me to explore this topic was really two things. First, in affective science we have long worked with image sets that are valuable, but also come with clear limitations — for example in diversity, flexibility, cultural fit, and the ability to update or expand them for new research questions,” said corresponding author Maciej Behnke, an associate professor of psychology at Adam Mickiewicz University.</p>
<p>“Second, this project also grew out of a personal step in my academic career. After securing tenure in Poland, I decided to take a step back intellectually and begin a bachelor’s degree in computer science, because I wanted to understand AI more deeply rather than only follow it from a distance. Over time, it became natural to combine these two paths: my background in affective science and my growing interest in artificial intelligence.”</p>
<p>The scientists ChatGPT-4o to write detailed descriptions of existing emotional photographs, and then fed those descriptions into image-generating tools, such as Midjourney and Freepik, to produce the new pictures. They produced eight hundred forty seven distinct images designed to trigger twelve specific emotional states, including amusement, awe, anger, attachment love, craving, disgust, excitement, fear, joy, neutral, nurturant love, and sadness.</p>
<p>The research team did not rely on the computer programs alone. They used a collaborative process where local cultural experts reviewed the images and asked the AI to make specific adjustments.</p>
<p>This allowed the team to adapt the base images for different demographic groups. They created specific versions of the pictures to reflect six broad cultural regions, including Asian, African, Arabic, Indian, Latin American, and Western contexts.</p>
<p>They also made sure the images could feature different types of people. The scientists generated matching variations that changed the sex and age of the people in the photos without altering the overall emotional scene.</p>
<p>To test how well the pictures worked, the researchers recruited 2,470 participants from 58 different countries. The participants were divided across six separate experiments. During the experiments, participants looked at both traditional photographs and the newly generated pictures. Each image appeared on a screen for four seconds.</p>
<p>After seeing a picture, participants rated how strongly they felt different emotions on a scale from one to seven. They also rated whether the image made them feel positive or negative, and whether it made them feel calm or energized.</p>
<p>The scientists found that the computer-generated images were just as effective at bringing about emotional responses as the traditional photographs. For positive emotions like amusement and awe, the AI pictures often produced even stronger reactions.</p>
<p>When participants viewed images tailored to their specific cultural background, they reported slightly stronger emotional responses compared to viewing mismatched images. This suggests that customizing visual materials to fit a person’s culture can improve how well those materials work.</p>
<p>“Our findings showed that culturally adjusted images produced slightly stronger emotional responses, which reinforces the idea that people respond more strongly to stimuli that better reflect their own context,” Behnke told PsyPost. “That also carries a broader message: in psychological research, we should move beyond the habit of showing the same White, Western-centered imagery everywhere.”</p>
<p>The researchers also found that changing the sex or age of the people in the images did not reduce the emotional impact. This provides evidence that scientists can safely change demographic details to fit their specific research needs.</p>
<p>The scientists also calculated the smallest difference in emotional intensity that a person can actually notice. They found that even when participants rated two images as causing similar emotional reactions, minor shifts in their feelings could still be measured mathematically.</p>
<p>The computer-generated images were slightly less effective at triggering negative emotions like sadness or anger. The researchers noted that safety filters built into the AI programs often prevented the creation of mildly graphic or upsetting content.</p>
<p>“I think the key message is that AI can help us do better science,” Behnke said. “We found that AI-generated images were good enough to evoke emotional responses at a level comparable to traditional research image sets, and that they can also be adapted to different cultural contexts without losing their impact. That matters not only for researchers, but also for the public, because it shows that AI-generated images are already powerful enough to influence how people feel.”</p>
<p>One potential misinterpretation of this study is that creating emotional images is now a fully automated process. The researchers point out that human oversight remains strictly necessary to ensure the pictures are psychologically useful and ethically acceptable.</p>
<p>“AI can help generate and refine stimuli, but it still takes human creativity to come up with meaningful ideas and human expertise to judge whether an image is psychologically useful, culturally appropriate, and ethically acceptable,” Behnke said. “Our study really supports a human-in-the-loop model, not a replacement-of-humans model.”</p>
<p>The study also has some limitations. All the experiments were conducted in English, and the broad cultural categories used by the researchers do not capture the full diversity within specific global regions. The AI programs also struggled with certain visual details. Some generated faces appeared unrealistically attractive, and the software sometimes produced anatomical errors like poorly rendered hands.</p>
<p>Because AI technology advances very quickly, specific computer programs change from month to month. This rapid evolution means that scientists will need to constantly update their image collections to keep up with changing standards.</p>
<p>In the future, the research team hopes to explore how AI might generate dynamic videos rather than just still photographs. They also plan to investigate ways to personalize emotional images for individual participants to make scientific studies even more accurate.</p>
<p>“One of our long-term goals is to understand more broadly what AI can contribute to affective science,” Behnke explained. “In <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00123" target="_blank">related work</a>, we are already examining whether AI models can predict viewers’ emotional reactions to images, which opens up a new set of questions about how AI might support emotion research beyond stimulus creation.”</p>
<p>“More broadly, I think AI could help move the field toward personalization. At the moment, affective science largely relies on one-size-fits-all stimuli, even though people differ a lot in what actually makes them feel happy, sad, afraid, or angry. In the future, AI may allow us to tailor stimuli to the individual, so that emotion induction becomes more reliable and more meaningful for each participant.”</p>
<p>“I would also like to emphasize that this study was only possible because so many people were willing to contribute their time, expertise, and energy,” Behnke added. “For me, that is part of a bigger lesson: I believe large-scale team science is the future of affective science. If we want to understand emotions across people and cultures, we need to stop thinking so locally and start building more global, collaborative research efforts.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251415336" target="_blank">Using Artificial Intelligence to Generate Affective Images: Methodology and Initial Library</a>,” was authored by Maciej Behnke, Maciej Kłoskowski, Michał Klichowski, Wadim Krzyżaniak, Kacper Szymański, Patryk Maciejewski, Patrycja Chwiłkowska, Marta Kowal, Rafał Jończyk, Jan Nowak, Szymon Kupiński, Dominika Kunc, Stanisław Saganowski, Aakash A. Chowkase, Farida Guemaz, Kevin S. Kertechian, Ameer I. M. T. Maadal, Leonardo A. Aguilar, Barnabas T. Alayande, Vimala Balakrishnan, Dana M. Basnight-Brown, Jordane Boudesseul, Tomás A. D’Amelio, Jovi C. Dacanay, Abhishek Dedhe, Shan Gao, Joao F. G. B. Takayanagi, Md. Rohmotul Islam, Alvaro Mailhos, Christine M. Mpyangu, Moises Mebarak, Arooj Najmussaqib, Ju Hee Park, Ekaterine Pirtskhalava, Eli Rice, Sohrab Sami, Yuki Yamada, Jan Baczyński, Lilianna Dera, Szymon Jęśko-Białek, Jakub Łączkowski, Hubert Marciniak, Filip Nowicki, Bartosz Wilczek, James J. Gross, and Nicholas A. Coles.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/playing-an-action-video-game-before-bed-may-reduce-stress-without-harming-sleep-2026-03-19/" 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;">Playing Call of Duty before bed doesn’t ruin sleep, and it might even boost your memory</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, 12:00</div>
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<p><p>Playing a fast-paced action video game for an hour before bed might actually lower stress levels and improve certain memory skills the next day. A recent experiment found that these brief gaming sessions did not negatively affect objective sleep quality in adults who do not typically play video games. The findings were published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2025.03.002">Sleep Medicine</a></em>.</p>
<p>The video game industry commands hundreds of billions of dollars globally every year. With the vast majority of young people and adults engaging in digital play, questions about the physiological and mental effects of gaming are highly relevant. Past research on how games affect health has yielded mixed results. Some reports link video games to increased aggression, elevated anxiety, and disrupted sleep.</p>
<p>Other studies point to clear psychological benefits, suggesting games can relieve stress and assist with emotional regulation. Video games are increasingly utilized in non-recreational settings to build community connections and provide quick mental stimulation. Part of the reason for these conflicting reports is that previous study designs often ignored context. Different types of games demand very different mental responses. A relaxing puzzle game will not stimulate the brain in the same way as a tense survival game.</p>
<p>The duration of the play session also matters immensely. Binge-gaming late into the night is distinct from playing for a single localized hour before a scheduled bedtime. A person’s familiarity with gaming also alters how their brain responds to the activity. Frequent players have developed a tolerance to the mental demands of navigating virtual worlds.</p>
<p>For someone who rarely picks up a controller, learning a new game requires immense concentration and intense mental adaptation. Research shows that human sleep architecture often shifts to accommodate learning and memory consolidation. Specifically, a high demand for learning new tasks can increase sleep continuity and stability as the brain processes new information overnight.</p>
<p>University of Campania researcher Oreste De Rosa led a team to investigate this phenomenon. The researchers designed an experiment to isolate the effects of a high-action, violently themed video game on adults who were unaccustomed to playing. By using short, controlled play sessions, the team hoped to define exactly how the sudden mental challenge of learning an action game would impact sleep patterns, cognitive performance, and general psychological well-being.</p>
<p>The researchers recruited eighteen healthy young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. To isolate the effects of novelty and learning, all participants were classified as non-gamers. These individuals played video games for no more than one hour per week, with mostly zero weekly playtime. The volunteers completed all parts of the experiment in their own homes to keep their physical resting environment familiar and natural.</p>
<p>The procedure began with a baseline week. Participants wore activity-tracking watches, filled out daily sleep logs, and maintained their normal routines. At the end of the week, the research team recorded their brain activity during sleep using home polysomnography. This type of monitoring uses sensors to track brain waves, eye movements, and muscle activity. The collected data created a highly accurate map of how long it took participants to fall asleep and how often they transitioned between light and deep sleep stages.</p>
<p>The participants also took a battery of cognitive tests to measure skills like memory and attention. They completed standardized mental health questionnaires to assess their current levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. Following the baseline week, the volunteers participated in two separate testing phases lasting four days each. The order of these phases was randomized to ensure fairness in the results.</p>
<p>One phase served as an active control condition. For three consecutive nights, participants watched an action-packed television series, “Money Heist,” for one hour before going to sleep. On the fourth day, the researchers re-administered the cognitive tests and mental health surveys. This reading allowed the team to measure the effects of engaging media that did not involve active physical learning or problem-solving.</p>
<p>In the other testing phase, the participants actively played an action video game for an hour each night instead of watching television. The researchers selected “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War,” a popular first-person shooter game. The team chose this specific title because it requires high levels of physical engagement, rapid visual learning, and fast navigation through stressful virtual environments.</p>
<p>Just like the television phase, this phase ended with polysomnography on the third night and cognitive testing on the fourth day. After the data was collected, the researchers compared the results from the baseline week, the television-watching phase, and the video game phase. The results challenged popular assumptions about screen time and physiological arousal before bed.</p>
<p>Playing the violent action game for an hour did not alter objective sleep quality compared to the baseline week. The time it took to fall asleep, the duration of deep sleep, and the number of nighttime awakenings remained totally stable. The sleep architecture components responsible for organizing restorative brain states remained completely intact despite the intense digital combat.</p>
<p>Sleep efficiency actually declined slightly after watching the television series compared to playing the video game. The participants reported feeling sleepier immediately after watching television than they did after playing the game. Yet, the higher alertness associated with gaming did not translate into sleep disturbances later in the physical night.</p>
<p>The researchers suspect that the heavy learning demands required to play the game may have triggered sleep-dependent memory processing. This neurological mechanism might have actively protected the physical structure of the participants’ sleep. The brain needed high-quality sleep to integrate the complex new controller inputs and virtual navigation strategies utilized during the session.</p>
<p>The cognitive tests administered on the mornings following the experiment phases revealed distinct mental benefits linked to the gaming sessions. Participants scored higher on tests of visuospatial working memory after the video game condition. To measure this, scientists used a computerized test where participants had to remember an evolving sequence of colored blocks on a screen while under moderate cognitive pressure.</p>
<p>Visuospatial working memory is the brain’s ability to hold and manipulate visual information in the short term. The mental effort of navigating three-dimensional game maps and tracking multiple moving targets safely provided a sharp cognitive boost the next day. Other areas of cognition like verbal memory and sustained attention did not change across the various testing phases.</p>
<p>Mental health assessments also reflected positive changes following the video game phase. Participants reported lower daily stress levels after the three nights of gaming compared to both the baseline week and the television phase. The specific drops in anxiety and depression scores noted on the digital surveys were not statistically significant.</p>
<p>The interactive, engaging nature of the game appeared to provide a helpful buffer against daily friction and stress. Interacting with a rich digital world gave the non-gamers a potent mental distraction. The results align with growing evidence that commercial video games can be utilized as effective tools for emotional regulation and relaxation routines.</p>
<p>While the study presents a positive view of casual gaming, the researchers outlined parameters limiting the broad application of the results. The experiment intentionally restricted playtime to an hour, and sessions always ended thirty minutes before bed. Prolonged sessions that cut into scheduled sleep time or run throughout the entire evening would likely yield different outcomes. Binge-gaming has consistently been linked to severe sleep disruptions in other studies.</p>
<p>The study examined a small sample of highly specific individuals, focusing purely on young adults who previously avoided video games. Habitual gamers who play daily might not experience the same sleep-protecting learning mechanisms. Their brains are already deeply accustomed to the mechanics of modern digital entertainment.</p>
<p>The cognitive boost observed here relied heavily on the novelty of the challenge. Future research might expand on these findings by varying the types of games used in the evening sessions. Action games rely heavily on quick reflexes and stressful scenarios, but puzzle or strategy games demand slow planning and logic.</p>
<p>Comparing how different digital mechanics alter nocturnal brain activity could help experts develop specific gaming routines designed to improve sleep hygiene. Researchers hope to eventually map precisely how different visual styles and gameplay loops affect the resting human brain. This latest evidence suggests that a short digital combat session might be exactly what an exhausted brain needs to unwind.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2025.03.002">The impact of an action commercial video game on adult non-gamers psychological well-being, cognitive functioning, and sleep</a>,” was authored by Oreste De Rosa, Paolo D’Onofrio, Francesca Conte, Paola De Luca, Claudia Schiavone, Alessio Lustro, Serena Malloggi, Fiorenza Giganti, Torbjörn Åkerstedt, and Gianluca Ficca.</p></p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
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