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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/declining-trust-in-doctors-is-widening-the-health-gap-between-conservative-and-liberal-americans/" 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;">Declining trust in doctors is widening the health gap between conservative and liberal Americans</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 24th 2026, 10:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02474-9" target="_blank">Nature Human Behaviour</a></em> suggests that conservative Americans have experienced worse health outcomes and higher mortality rates than their liberal counterparts over the past decade. The research provides evidence that this widening health gap stems from demographic shifts within political coalitions and a growing distrust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals. These changing attitudes toward seeking and following medical advice tend to leave conservative individuals more vulnerable to preventable health risks.</p>
<p>Scientists Elizabeth Elder and <a href="https://neilobrian.com/" target="_blank">Neil A. O’Brian</a> conducted the study to better understand how political beliefs might act as a social determinant of health. Past studies on this topic often relied on county-level geographic data or self-reported health surveys. These older methods often produced mixed findings because self-reported health can be subjective and county-level averages do not always reflect individual behaviors. </p>
<p>To resolve these contradictory findings, Elder and O’Brian sought to link individual political orientations directly to verified medical data and death records. The researchers also wanted to understand how the relationship between political ideology and physical health has changed since the early 2010s. Medical issues have become highly politicized in recent years, prompting the scientists to investigate whether this polarization affects real-world health outcomes.</p>
<p>“During COVID, I watched how people’s political identity became a powerful predictor of how they engaged with the public health officials and its impact on health outcomes related to COVID,” said O’Brian, an assistant professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I started wondering, though, if polarization around trust in public health officials (like Anthony Fauci) or distrust in vaccines, spread beyond COVID-related matters to trust one’s personal doctor and whether they thought medicines to treat chronic disease were safe and effective.”</p>
<p>To answer these questions, the scientists analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. This long-term research project tracked a nationally representative group of individuals who were adolescents in the 1990s. The researchers focused on data collected during three specific time periods: 2001, 2008 to 2009, and 2016 to 2018. </p>
<p>This unique dataset includes both the participants’ self-reported political ideology and in-home medical measurements taken by trained professionals. The medical data included body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol, inflammation, and blood glucose levels. The authors combined these five measurements to create a comorbidity index, which is a single score that indicates how many different medical conditions or health risks a person has at the same time. </p>
<p>The sample sizes for these survey periods were very large, with over 11,000 to 13,000 respondents providing political ideology data in each of the three examined waves. The researchers also checked the participants’ vital status against the National Death Index, a database administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This database allowed them to see not only who had passed away by the year 2022 but also the underlying cause of death.</p>
<p>During the 2008 to 2009 period, the scientists found no significant differences in the physical health of liberal and conservative participants. By the 2016 to 2018 survey, the medical data showed a noticeable shift. The respondents who identified as the most conservative recorded the highest comorbidity scores, indicating they were the least healthy group. </p>
<p>The researchers tracked individuals who changed their political beliefs over time to see what might be driving this shift. They found that people who were less healthy in 2008 tended to adopt more conservative political views by 2016. At the same time, the liberal coalition gained an advantage in socioeconomic factors like income and education, which tend to be associated with better overall health.</p>
<p>The mortality data provided evidence of a similar timeline. In the early 2000s, liberals died at rates similar to or slightly higher than conservatives. By the period between 2020 and 2022, this pattern had reversed entirely. The most conservative respondents were significantly more likely to die than the most liberal respondents. </p>
<p>This elevated death rate was primarily driven by internal causes, such as heart disease and cancer, rather than external causes like car accidents. The authors noted that this difference in mortality was not entirely due to coronavirus infections. Even when the scientists removed deaths directly caused by the virus from their calculations, conservative participants still experienced higher mortality rates.</p>
<p>This mortality difference is quite large when compared to other known health risks. “The mortality rate for internally caused deaths between very liberal and very conservative in the pandemic era (in our paper defined as 2020-22) is about two-thirds the gap between people making over $100,000 and those making less than $30,000 a year,” O’Brian explained. He noted that income is often thought of as a powerful social determinant of health. “That’s a pretty substantive gap,” he said.</p>
<p>Since demographic changes and the recent pandemic could not fully explain the widening health gap, Elder and O’Brian conducted a second study. They wanted to test whether right-leaning individuals were simply engaging less with the healthcare system today. In the spring of 2024, the scientists surveyed 21,751 adults living in the United States using an online panel platform. </p>
<p>This large survey asked participants about their recent visits to primary care providers and emergency room doctors. The questionnaire asked how much they trusted these medical professionals and whether they followed their clinical advice. The scientists measured political beliefs using self-reported ideology, political party identification, and the participant’s choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in recent elections.</p>
<p>The survey results indicated that conservative Americans, particularly those who identify as Republicans or Trump voters, express significantly less trust in their primary care doctors. These right-leaning respondents reported that they were less likely to follow the medical advice given by their primary care providers. They also reported lower levels of trust in emergency room doctors compared to left-leaning respondents.</p>
<p>The researchers also presented participants with a hypothetical scenario involving sudden chest pain. The right-leaning respondents indicated they would be less likely to schedule a doctor’s appointment if they experienced this alarming symptom. This suggests a broader hesitation to seek medical care for issues completely unrelated to the recent pandemic. </p>
<p>Additionally, the scientists looked at a subgroup of respondents who reported having chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, heart disease, or diabetes. This subgroup made up about 38 percent of the total survey sample. The researchers asked these individuals if they believed their prescribed daily medications were safe and effective using a specialized questionnaire. </p>
<p>The questionnaire asked participants to agree or disagree with statements like whether their lives would be impossible without their medications or if they worried about long-term side effects. Right-leaning respondents with chronic illnesses were more skeptical of their prescription medications than left-leaning individuals with similar health conditions. This political divide in the consumption of medical care may sustain or deepen the health divide that has emerged in recent decades.</p>
<p>“People’s political affiliation has become a strong predictor of whether people visit, trust and adhere to their doctor’s advice,” O’Brian said. “This persists even after accounting for factors that correlate with political identity and health, like rurality, income or education.”</p>
<p>O’Brian pointed out that this polarization in trust and engagement with the medical system came at an unfortunate time, as a health gap was already emerging between the left and right on the eve of the pandemic. “This means that those on the right, who entered the pandemic era with some of the worst health outcomes, are now reporting they are less likely to see their primary care provider, trust them, or believe medicines to treat chronic disease are safe and effective,” he added. “This has the potential to make those health outcomes worse.”</p>
<p>While these findings are detailed, the authors note several limitations and potential misinterpretations. The data describes observed associations rather than direct cause and effect. It is not entirely certain that a person’s political beliefs directly cause them to distrust doctors or experience worse physical health. Other unmeasured social or cultural factors could be influencing both a person’s political ideology and their healthcare behaviors at the exact same time.</p>
<p>The long-term medical data also focused on a specific cohort of Americans born between 1976 and 1982. “The health data are from one cohort in one period, so it’s still an open question of whether this generalizes to other cohorts or whether it will persist,” O’Brian said. “That said, ecological studies over the 2010s have found similar gaps emerging between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ areas of the country.”</p>
<p>Future research should aim to determine whether this partisan gap in medical trust is indeed a causal factor in declining physical health. Scientists might also look into exactly when this political divide in medical trust began to emerge. Understanding these mechanisms will be highly important for public health officials who are trying to reach populations that have grown skeptical of modern medical institutions.</p>
<p>“Looking at trust in doctors and health outcomes along political lines is just one way to think about engagement with healthcare, and an increasingly important one,” O’Brian noted. “But health and creating access and trust in the health system is a multi-dimensional problem and other work can and does look at other social cleavages in health and engagement.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02474-9" target="_blank">The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA</a>,” was authored by Elizabeth Elder and Neil A. O’Brian.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/decades-of-data-reveal-the-reality-of-happiness-and-single-parenthood/" 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 50 years of data say about the happiness of single parents</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 24th 2026, 08:00</div>
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<p><p>A comprehensive review of decades of data reveals that single parents report lower levels of life satisfaction on average compared to parents living with a partner. However, under certain conditions, these solo caregivers report higher levels of happiness than adults living without a partner or children. The findings, which synthesize research from nearly half a century, were published in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-026-01030-6"><i>Journal of Happiness Studies</i></a>.</p>
<p>The modern landscape of household structures is diversifying rapidly across the globe. Alongside this shift, the reasons people enter single parenthood have evolved from predominantly widowhood to separation, divorce, and intentional solo parenting.</p>
<p>As the prevalence of single-parent households has grown, so has the academic focus on their economic and social realities. Much of the existing literature looks at physical and monetary hardships. Single parents often shoulder the dual burdens of providing income and managing childcare without another adult in the home. </p>
<p>They face higher risks of poverty and often report intense conflicts between their work obligations and family responsibilities. Scholars want to understand how these combined challenges translate into an individual’s subjective sense of well-being. Evaluating a person’s self-reported happiness provides a broad measure of how they perceive their overall quality of life. </p>
<p>Susanne Elsas, a researcher at the State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg in Germany, led the recent inquiry. She worked alongside Teresa Möhrle of the German Federal Statistical Office and Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University Rotterdam. </p>
<p>Elsas and her team conducted the research to consolidate scattered data on single parents. Prior investigations into this topic were often fragmented, with single parenthood acting as a side note in broader demographic surveys. The team aimed to gather these isolated data points to build a comprehensive picture of how single parenthood relates to general life satisfaction.</p>
<p>The researchers drew their material from the World Database of Happiness. This is a public archive that collects and standardizes findings from scientific publications evaluating subjective life satisfaction. To ensure consistency, the team only included studies that measured happiness as an individual’s stable appreciation of their life as a whole. </p>
<p>They excluded studies measuring short-term emotional states, such as fleeting joy. They also ignored surveys that focused on specific domain satisfactions, such as being happy only with a job or a neighborhood. </p>
<p>Their review analyzed data from 54 distinct publications. These papers encompass roughly 2.5 million people polled between 1972 and 2020. The bulk of the survey data originates from countries in the Global North, particularly within Europe, the United States, and Australia. </p>
<p>Elsas and her colleagues found a highly consistent pattern across time periods and geographical borders. Compared to those raising children alongside a partner, single parents report lower average levels of happiness. This outcome emerged regardless of whether the researchers looked at single mothers, single fathers, or grouped both together. </p>
<p>The picture becomes far more nuanced when comparing single parents to single adults who do not have children. In a majority of these comparisons, the non-parents reported higher levels of happiness. Yet in several instances across different countries, single parents reported greater life satisfaction than unpartnered people without children. </p>
<p>The study highlighted several factors that associate strongly with the well-being of single moms and dads. Not surprisingly, access to money and career opportunities played a major role. Parents working part-time or full-time were generally happier than those without employment. </p>
<p>Higher income was positively associated with life satisfaction. Conversely, financial stress and unresolved tension between professional demands and family duties were linked to lower happiness. Providing for a family alone takes a heavy toll, but gainful employment appears to offer psychological benefits that rival the loss of free time. </p>
<p>Social support systems also emerged as an impactful factor for single parents. Those with strong informal networks, such as reliable friendships and extended family help, reported higher levels of happiness. Elements of personal fulfillment, including romantic involvement and an active sex life, were similarly linked to greater life satisfaction. </p>
<p>On the other end of the spectrum, individuals who expressed feelings of loneliness or perceived resentment from their community reported lower happiness. The data essentially paints a picture of social beings who thrive on connection, especially when navigating the heavy demands of solo parenting. </p>
<p>Childcare infrastructure proved to be a highly relevant topic, though its impact varied by regional attitudes. In West Germany, single mothers relying on any form of formal or informal childcare were happier on average. In East Germany, however, half-day childcare use was associated with lower life satisfaction. </p>
<p>Broader national policies and gender norms play a quiet but structural role in shaping life satisfaction. Higher scores in national gender equality were associated with greater happiness among single mothers. Expansions in full-day childcare options also correlated positively with parental well-being at the macro level. </p>
<p>Time itself functions as a balancing mechanism. The review found that single parents often experience immediate dips in happiness following a separation or divorce. As the years pass, life satisfaction tends to rebound and increase, suggesting that people adapt and develop effective coping strategies over time.</p>
<p>While the review covers an enormous sample size, the authors note some inherent limitations in the underlying surveys. Chief among them is the inability to determine if single parenthood directly causes a drop in happiness. Most people self-select into their relationship statuses, and the life events leading to single parenthood are deeply intertwined with other elements that influence mental health. </p>
<p>The researchers also warn of survivor bias in the data. Survivor bias occurs when a sample is disproportionately shaped by those who remain in a certain condition for a long stretch of time. People who remain single parents for many years are more likely to be captured in these surveys than those who quickly remarry or cohabitate. </p>
<p>Another gap in the literature is a severe lack of focus on single fathers. Because single dads make up a smaller demographic group, population surveys often lack enough participants to draw definitive conclusions about them. The few available findings show no statistically significant differences between the happiness patterns of single mothers and fathers, but researchers emphasize that more targeted study is needed. </p>
<p>The ages of the children involved also varied substantially throughout the literature. Some researchers defined single parents as those caring for children under the age of 15, while others included dependents up to age 25. This lack of a standardized definition complicates the comparison of single parents across different national contexts.</p>
<p>Definitions of single parenthood varied widely among the 54 studies. Some included widowed parents, others focused on divorcees, and some surveyed individuals who never married. Future investigations should account for these different pathways into single parenthood, as the experience of an intentional solo parent may differ drastically from a grieving widow. </p>
<p>Finally, the authors suggest that future analyses should look more closely at national policies. Examining how specific divorce laws, family benefits, and reproductive rights relate to single parents’ well-being could offer practical guidance for policymakers. Easing the practical burdens of solo parents goes a long way toward improving their quality of life.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-026-01030-6" target="_blank">Happiness and Single Parenthood: A Literature Review Using an Online Findings Archive</a>,” was authored by Susanne Elsas, Teresa Möhrle, and Ruut Veenhoven.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/a-new-study-mapped-350000-relationship-stories-and-found-a-communication-style-ai-struggles-to-copy/" 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 new study mapped 350,000 relationship stories and found a communication style AI struggles to copy</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 24th 2026, 06:00</div>
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<p><p>When people share emotional stories, the intensity of their feelings does not always match the length or detail of their words. A recent study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0348715" target="_blank">PLOS One</a></em> suggests that the gap between what people express and how much they say is a deliberate communication strategy rather than an error. These findings provide evidence that humans use a wide range of expressive styles that artificial intelligence currently struggles to replicate.</p>
<p>Ryan SangBaek Kim, the founding director and principal investigator of the Ryan Research Institute in Paris, conducted this study to challenge common assumptions in psychology and computer science. Many experts assume that healthy communication requires people to perfectly match their internal feelings with their spoken or written words. Kim noticed that this mismatch is usually dismissed as an error. </p>
<p>“Affective science has long treated the gap between what people feel and what they say as measurement noise,” Kim told PsyPost. “Working across psychology, affective science, and AI ethics, I came to suspect that this gap was not noise but structure.” People often regulate how much of an emotion becomes language, especially in relationship narratives. “I wanted to test whether that regulation leaves a measurable shape in the data,” he noted.</p>
<p>To map out these communication patterns, Kim analyzed exactly 351,734 English language relationship narratives. These stories were collected from public online advice forums and support communities between 2012 and 2023. The data was completely stripped of all personal identifying information to protect the privacy of the original writers. This massive collection provided a window into how real people discuss their relationships in natural, unscripted environments.</p>
<p>Kim measured two main features for every single narrative in the dataset. The first was narrative complexity, which is a structural measure of the writing itself. This concept looks at the total length of the post, the variety of the vocabulary used, and how densely the sentences are constructed. Writing a highly complex narrative requires significant mental effort.</p>
<p>The second feature was linguistically inferred affective intensity. Affect is a term psychologists use to describe the underlying experience of feeling or emotion. The researcher used specialized software to analyze the text and estimate the magnitude of the emotion present in the words. This tool measured how strong the emotional language was, regardless of whether the overall feelings were positive or negative.</p>
<p>By comparing these two measurements, Kim calculated the narrative affect discrepancy. This concept describes the exact mathematical gap between the complexity of the story and the emotional intensity it contains. He did not try to guess the writers’ hidden inner feelings. Instead, he simply measured how much linguistic effort people spent relative to the emotion they put on the page.</p>
<p>“The near-zero correlation surprised me most,” Kim said. “I expected narrative complexity and affective intensity to move together at least weakly, but they were almost orthogonal,” he explained. In statistical terms, variables that are orthogonal are completely independent of one another. “In the data, a story could be psychologically complex without sounding emotionally intense,” Kim added. </p>
<p>“The main takeaway is that emotionally complex experiences do not always sound emotional on the surface,” Kim said. “This challenges a common assumption in both emotion research and affective AI: that stronger or more difficult emotional states should appear as stronger emotional language,” he noted. “In the data, people often described painful or psychologically difficult experiences in calm, restrained, or indirect language rather than highly emotional language.”</p>
<p>“In other words, someone saying ‘I’m fine’ is not always hiding emotion poorly,” Kim explained. “Sometimes restraint is itself part of how humans communicate distress.” These findings provide evidence that humans use a wide range of expressive styles rather than automatically matching complexity to feeling. </p>
<p>Kim identified four distinct patterns of emotional expression in the data. The vast majority of the narratives, about 91.3 percent, fell into a category called coupled expression. In this group, the story complexity and emotional intensity were relatively balanced without extreme gaps. The writing did not show severe signs of overstating or understating emotions.</p>
<p>The remaining narratives fell into three specific mismatch categories. About 20,223 stories showed strategic understatement, where writers expressed intense emotions but used very little narrative structure. Another 2,223 stories demonstrated strategic overstatement, meaning authors used highly complex language to express relatively low emotional intensity. This strategy indicates people are using extensive words to create a protective cognitive distance from a topic. </p>
<p>The final group of 8,040 narratives fell into a pattern Kim called collapse. These writers showed very high emotional intensity but lacked the structural wording to support it. This pattern tends to occur when feelings are so overwhelming that a person cannot organize their thoughts into a cohesive story. The narrative structure effectively breaks down under the weight of the emotion.</p>
<p>After mapping out these human patterns, Kim tested an artificial intelligence system using a safety aligned language model. “For AI, the important finding was that one RLHF-aligned language model occupied a roughly 1.70 times narrower expressive region than humans under the same measurement framework,” Kim said. This type of program is trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback, making it polite and helpful. “The model was especially less present in the parts of emotional language where humans speak indirectly, hold back, or emotionally shut down,” he noted. </p>
<p>“The clearest human signals are not always the loudest ones,” Kim added. “I was also surprised that the model’s contraction was not uniform. It was especially pronounced in regions where humans communicate through strategic understatement or expressive collapse.”</p>
<p>“The 1.70-fold contraction is statistically clear, but its practical importance lies in where the contraction occurs,” Kim said. “If aligned models occupy a narrower expressive space, they may be less sensitive to people who communicate distress through understatement, confusion, silence, or fragmented language rather than direct emotional intensity. This matters for mental health tools, AI companions, and other systems that try to interpret emotional language. A system that only hears intensity will miss the people who speak in restraint.”</p>
<p>Readers might misinterpret the study by assuming the software perfectly captured the writers’ true inner feelings. “The most important caveat is that the study does not claim to measure subjective feeling directly,” Kim cautioned. “It measures the geometry of emotional expression, meaning what people put into language, not the full inner experience underneath it.” </p>
<p>The study also has several limitations regarding its scope and sample. “The data also come from English-language public relationship narratives, so the pattern may differ across languages, cultures, or settings,” Kim said. “Finally, the AI comparison involves one model under a fixed configuration, so it should be read as a baseline result rather than a verdict on all aligned models.” Across these three limits, Kim suggests the safest reading is that the study measures one stable asymmetry between human and aligned-model expressive geometry, not a verdict on emotional AI as a whole.</p>
<p>For future research, Kim plans to look at how these communication styles change over time. “This study is part of a broader research program on narrative-affect geometry and affective sovereignty,” Kim said. “The empirical question is how people structure emotional meaning in language.” The governance question, he noted, is what happens when artificial intelligence systems begin to interpret those meanings for humans. </p>
<p>He aims to study how prolonged interaction with artificial intelligence impacts human behavior. “My next step is longitudinal: whether repeated exposure to aligned models changes how people express, regulate, or interpret their own emotions over time,” Kim said. “The deeper question is whether AI only responds to our emotional language, or whether, over time, it also reshapes how we learn to speak about ourselves.”</p>
<p>To encourage more research, the study resources are completely public. “The dataset and analysis code are openly available on Zenodo,” Kim stated. “Claims about AI and emotion can easily become speculative, so open data and reproducible analysis are especially important here. My hope is that other researchers will test, challenge, and extend the framework.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0348715" target="_blank">Narrative-affect discrepancy as a regulated degree of freedom in 351,734 relationship narratives</a>,” was authored by Ryan SangBaek Kim.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/a-picture-of-a-picture-makes-people-appear-less-human-2026-03-26/" 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;">The strange psychology of the Medusa effect</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 23rd 2026, 20:00</div>
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<p><p>When we look at a photograph of a person holding another photograph, we implicitly judge the individual in the nested picture as having a lesser capacity to think and feel. A new study published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106419">Cognition</a> reveals that this visual bias remains consistent regardless of whether the faces are upside down, covered by masks, or entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The research demonstrates that the structural presentation of a nested image heavily overrides the actual physical details of the human face itself.</p>
<p>Psychologists evaluate how we view the inner lives of others through a concept called mind perception. This theory proposes that people intuitively judge the mental capacities of various entities along two primary dimensions. The way we attribute these mental states dictates our moral judgments, our empathy, and our behavioral expectations in social environments. </p>
<p>The first dimension represents agency, which is the ability to think, plan, and act on one’s own volition. The second dimension represents experience, which describes the capacity to sense the surrounding environment and feel emotions. We naturally attribute high levels of agency and experience to living humans, placing them firmly at the top of the social hierarchy. We attribute significantly lower qualities of mind to animals, robots, and two-dimensional representations like photographs.</p>
<p>Previous research established a hierarchical decline in mind perception based on visual abstraction, a phenomenon dubbed the Medusa effect. Observers consistently attribute reduced mental capacity and realness to a person depicted in a picture of a picture compared to a person shown directly in a photograph. A single photograph represents a primary level of abstraction. A photo within a photo acts as a nested representation, separating the viewer by a secondary level of abstraction.</p>
<p>Kyushu University researcher Jing Han and a team of colleagues conducted the new study to investigate the underlying cognitive mechanics of this psychological phenomenon. The researchers wanted to know if manipulating how we process facial information would disrupt or erase the Medusa effect. They set out to test the bias using culturally adapted photographs, synthetic media, and physical obstructions that interrupt standard visual processing.</p>
<p>Recognizing human faces relies on two parallel visual evaluation pathways. Holistic processing involves recognizing the overall configuration of a face, intuitively taking in the arrangement of the parts as a unified whole. Feature processing relies on identifying specific individual components, such as the shape of the eyes or the curve of a mouth. The researchers designed a series of eight psychological experiments to systematically interfere with these visual pathways.</p>
<p>In the first experiment, the team recruited Japanese participants online and presented them with a new set of culturally adapted images featuring Asian models. The participants viewed images of a primary person holding a portrait of a secondary, nested person. The participants assigned numerical scores between zero and ten evaluating the subjects on agency, experience, and realness. The team found that the Medusa effect held true for the Asian models just as it had for Western populations in previous literature. </p>
<p>The subsequent test targeted holistic visual processing. The researchers took the images from the first experiment and flipped them vertically. Face recognition is disproportionately impaired when faces are presented upside down compared to other objects like houses or vehicles. While the inversion successfully lowered the broad mind attribution scores for all the individuals pictured, the participants still rated the people in the nested photographs lower than the primary subjects holding them.</p>
<p>Next, the team targeted feature processing by occluding specific parts of the face. In three successive experiments, they photographed their models wearing surgical face masks, dark sunglasses, or both accessories at the same time. Covering the lower face or the eyes prevents observers from utilizing necessary visual cues that typically signal emotion and inner mental states. </p>
<p>The physical accessories drastically reduced the general perception of mentality across the entire trial. Observers found it much harder to recognize agency and experience in subjects hiding behind masks and sunglasses. Yet the relative difference in mind perception remained intact. The nested subjects were always judged as possessing tangibly less of a mind than the directly photographed subjects.</p>
<p>The researchers also examined the impact of authenticity and artificial intelligence. The steady proliferation of synthetic media makes it incredibly easy to generate faces that are indistinguishable from authentic human photographs. The researchers used image generation software to create completely artificial scenes featuring synthetic people holding pictures of other synthetic people. The participants evaluated these images without being told they were generated by artificial intelligence. </p>
<p>The observers intuitively attributed less of a mind to the synthetic subjects than they did to real humans in previous trials. Even within these artificial generations, the psychological gap persisted. The artificial mind in the primary photo was rated higher than the artificial mind in the nested photo. </p>
<p>The final manipulation involved spatial scrambling. The team rearranged the internal facial features of their models, unnaturally scattering the eyes, noses, brows, and mouths. Scrambling removes the ability to interpret the stimulus as a coherent social agent entirely. Rating scores plummeted, establishing the lowest mind perception marks of the entire study. Despite evaluating violently distorted faces, observers still demonstrated the Medusa effect by rating the nested scrambled face lower than the primary scrambled face.</p>
<p>The results indicate that the Medusa effect ranks as an incredibly robust phenomenon that defies basic perceptual disruptions. It appears to operate largely independently of the physical or structural information present on a recognizable face. The researchers suggest that the effect might stem from a psychological concept known as Construal Level Theory. This theory posits that creating spatial, temporal, or hypothetical distance prompts more abstract mental associations in the human brain. </p>
<p>A nested photo signals psychological distance, making the individual seem existentially remote to the person evaluating the image. The Medusa effect could also reflect a deeper categorical sorting process. Observers might unconsciously treat an image embedded within another image more like a decorative object rather than a human agent.</p>
<p>The researchers noted a few specific limitations that require broader evaluation in future testing. The current photographs largely restricted the view to neutral faces and upper torsos, eliminating the influence of full body posture. Bodies contribute a vast amount of social information regarding emotion and identity that could skew visual evaluations. </p>
<p>Future research should test whether altering body language or introducing animated and robotic figures changes how nested abstraction impacts our social judgments. Evaluating individual differences in visual processing speed and accuracy might also help explain why some people are more susceptible to this visual bias than others. </p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106419" target="_blank">Robust Medusa effect across facial manipulations</a>,” was authored by Jing Han, Kyoshiro Sasaki, Fumiya Yonemitsu, Kaito Takashima, and Yuki Yamada.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/as-robots-threaten-our-jobs-and-identity-people-seek-comfort-in-unequal-social-structures/" 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;">As robots threaten our jobs and identity, people seek comfort in unequal social structures</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 23rd 2026, 18:00</div>
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<p><p>As the rapid advancement of robotics changes the modern workplace, a new psychological phenomenon has emerged where people who feel threatened by machines tend to favor strict social hierarchies as a way to regain a sense of control. A recent paper published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.70079" target="_blank" rel="noopener">European Journal of Social Psychology</a></em> provides evidence that exposure to highly capable robots reduces an individual’s feeling of personal mastery, which in turn increases their desire for well-defined social rankings.</p>
<p>The integration of robots and artificial intelligence into daily life brings both technological benefits and psychological challenges. Scientists note that this transition poses a unique type of threat to human beings on multiple fronts.</p>
<p>“As robots become increasingly involved in human society, people are concerned about their jobs being replaced and begin to question the clarity of human identity,” said study author Feng Yu, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Wuhan University. “In other words, the rise of robots poses both realistic and identity-based threats, profoundly disrupting individuals’ need for control.”</p>
<p>To understand how people navigate this anxiety, the scientists drew upon the concept of compensatory control. This psychological framework suggests that when people feel they are losing control over their own lives, they look for external sources of structure to make the world feel predictable again.</p>
<p>“In response, we became interested in how people compensate for this unique form of loss of control when faced with robot threats,” Yu explained. “Drawing on compensatory control theory, we proposed that people tend to prefer hierarchical structures to restore the sense of control threatened by robot threats.”</p>
<p>Social hierarchies offer exactly this type of psychological structure. A hierarchy is a system where people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority. In a strict hierarchy, roles and power dynamics are explicitly defined, making human behavior highly predictable.</p>
<p>“Our perceptions of robot threats can, quietly and without our awareness, nudge us toward preferring more hierarchical and unequal arrangements,” Yu said. “This finding suggests that robotics may have an imperceptible power to reshape social structures. However, this effect is not inevitable. When the social system is perceived as capable of managing robots effectively, this negative compensatory effect is weakened.”</p>
<p>To test these ideas, the researchers conducted three separate experiments. The first experiment included 270 Chinese participants. The scientists wanted to see if reading about the threat of robots would lower the participants’ sense of personal control and subsequently increase their preference for hierarchy.</p>
<p>Participants were randomly divided into two groups. One group read a customized science news article titled “Robots: Replacing Human Labor?” which detailed how robots might take over human jobs. The second group read a different article titled “Robots: Just a Fad?” which minimized the likelihood of job displacement.</p>
<p>After reading the articles, participants answered a series of questionnaire items to measure their perception of the robotic threat. They also completed a 12-item survey designed to evaluate their sense of personal control. Finally, they filled out a six-item measure to assess their preference for strict social hierarchies.</p>
<p>The results from the first experiment matched the initial predictions. Participants who read the threatening article reported a significantly lower sense of personal control compared to those who read the dismissive article. This reduced sense of mastery was directly associated with a stronger preference for hierarchical structures.</p>
<p>The second experiment aimed to find stronger proof that a loss of personal control was the actual cause of this preference for hierarchy. The sample consisted of 400 Chinese participants. The researchers used a study design that manipulated both the perceived threat of robots and the participants’ feelings of personal control at the same time.</p>
<p>Participants again read one of the two news articles from the first study to induce either a high or low sense of robotic threat. Then, they completed a specific writing task. Half of the participants were asked to write about a personal memory where they felt a high degree of control over a situation, while the other half wrote about a neutral, everyday routine.</p>
<p>After the writing exercise, the participants reported their preferences for social hierarchies. The researchers factored in various personality traits, such as openness and agreeableness, to ensure their measurements were precise. They found that when participants were guided to feel a strong sense of personal control through the writing task, the threat of robots no longer increased their desire for strict rankings.</p>
<p>The drive to support hierarchical systems only appeared when a person’s sense of control was left unmanaged in the neutral writing condition. This interaction provides evidence that personal control acts as a psychological bridge between technological threats and a preference for inequality.</p>
<p>The third experiment explored whether the perceived orderliness of society could act as a buffer against these technological anxieties. The researchers recruited 458 Chinese participants for this phase. Instead of reading news articles, the participants watched curated online videos to manipulate their perception of robots.</p>
<p>In the high-threat condition, participants watched a video showing highly advanced robots successfully performing complex tasks like moving boxes, opening doors, and engaging in conversations. In the low-threat condition, the video showed robots struggling to complete these same basic tasks. This visual method allowed the researchers to see if simply observing robotic capabilities could trigger the same psychological responses as reading about them.</p>
<p>Next, the researchers manipulated the participants’ perceptions of social order by having them read fabricated essays. One essay described a highly ordered world with robust laws and regulations perfectly equipped to handle ethical challenges related to artificial intelligence. The second essay described a disordered, unprepared world lacking adequate legal frameworks.</p>
<p>Following these tasks, participants once again rated their preference for workplace hierarchies. The data showed that the orderliness of the social system completely altered the participants’ reactions. In the disordered society condition, observing highly capable robots significantly increased the participants’ preference for hierarchy.</p>
<p>However, in the ordered society condition, the robotic threat had no significant impact on their desire for strict social rankings.</p>
<p>“In Study 3, we found that when the social system was perceived as orderly, the effect of perceived robot threat on hierarchical preference was no longer significant,” Yu said. “This result suggests that to avoid the negative psychological consequences of robot development, an important step is to establish a stable and reliable system of robot governance. Only by anchoring technology within an ethical and regulatory framework can we ensure its healthy and beneficial development.”</p>
<p>While these findings provide new insights into human psychology, there are a few limitations to consider. The experiments focused specifically on physical robots, but participants might have mentally merged this concept with broad artificial intelligence algorithms.</p>
<p>“There are two important limitations worth noting,” Yu explained. “First, our research may have inadvertently conflated robots with artificial intelligence. Both robots and AI can elicit similar realistic and identity-based threats, but they also differ in their focal points.”</p>
<p>Future research should examine whether the fear of a computer program taking over cognitive tasks produces the same desire for hierarchy as a physical robot taking over manual labor. Additionally, the researchers point out that their data comes exclusively from Eastern populations.</p>
<p>“Second, there is the limitation of cultural sensitivity,” Yu said. “All of our participants were from China, a culture that strongly emphasizes power distance and has a relatively high acceptance of unequal hierarchical structures. Thus, it remains unknown whether the above effects would take a different form in Western societies, which place greater emphasis on egalitarianism.”</p>
<p>Because cultural backgrounds shape how people view social rankings, future studies should include Western participants to determine if this tendency is a universal human trait. Another area for future exploration involves how social class and wealth might influence the ways people cope with the growing presence of advanced machinery. The research team plans to continue exploring these topics.</p>
<p>“Our lab has long focused on the moral psychology of artificial intelligence,” Yu said. “We believe that, in the age of intelligence, research should pay special attention to two meta-questions: how people perceive artificial intelligence, and how artificial intelligence affects people.”</p>
<p>“The present study is one of our explorations into the latter question,” Yu continued. “In the future, our laboratory will continue to deepen our work in this area and further investigate the psychological and behavioral adaptations accompanying the intelligent transformation of society.”</p>
<p>Understanding these mental adaptations will be vital as technology continues to change the workplace and society at large. The psychological need for order might influence how organizations integrate automated systems in the coming years.</p>
<p>“We would like to emphasize that social psychology plays an indispensable role in the current era of rapid technological advancement,” Yu said. “As society becomes increasingly intelligent, we ought to pay more attention to the adaptive psychological dynamics that arise from this process, including not only direct reactions to AI but also indirect compensatory strategies.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.70079" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Perceived Robot Threat Enhances Preference for Hierarchy</a>,” was authored by Liying Xu, Yijun Zhao, Xiaofan Zhou, Fu Bai, and Feng Yu.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/being-asked-to-help-dampens-the-joy-of-doing-good-according-to-children-in-multiple-countries/" 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;">Being asked to help dampens the joy of doing good, according to children in multiple countries</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 23rd 2026, 16:00</div>
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<p><p>A study of 6-11-year-old children across 5 countries found that children believed individuals are more willing to help and share when they decide to do so spontaneously compared to when it is requested of them. However, how much requests diminish this perceived willingness varied across cultures. The research was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002145"><em>Developmental Psychology</em></a>.</p>
<p>According to the Self-Determination theory, a widely used theoretical framework in psychology, humans have three basic psychological needs. Those are needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy means feeling that your actions are freely chosen and personally endorsed i.e., self-determined. Competence means feeling capable, effective, and able to master challenges. Relatedness means feeling connected, cared for, and significant to other people.</p>
<p>While being autonomous is very important for both well-being and maintaining motivation, humans are often in situations where they face external obligations, such as expectations to reciprocate other people’s deeds or respond to their requests. Such situations might undermine their need for autonomy and a sense of self-determination i.e., the sense that their actions are freely chosen. This may reduce their motivation to perform the requested actions. However, honoring obligations plays a central role in areas of human life that are essential for social functioning, including prosocial behaviors.</p>
<p>Study author Anneliese Skrobanek and her colleagues hypothesized that human cultures will vary in the degree to which children’s desires to help and satisfaction with the situation will differ in situations when they are requested to do something compared to situations when they are able to do that spontaneously. They expected that these differences would be higher in individualistic cultures such as those in Germany and the United States, than in cultures that are less individualistic such as Japan, India, and Ecuador.</p>
<p>These authors conducted a study involving 686 children from the five mentioned countries. The children were between 6 and 11 years old. In total, there were two groups of children from Germany, a group of 91 and a group of 125 children, 110 from Ecuador, 122 from Japan, 126 from India, and 112 from the U.S. 40% of U.S. children were girls, and 58% of the Japanese children. In the other groups, girls were around 50% of the group.</p>
<p>Children completed an online experiment which was, depending on the group, either unmoderated (using a pre-recorded virtual agent) or moderated by an experimenter. The experiment consisted of 4 stories (vignettes), each presented as three or four pictures. Each story started with introducing the story protagonist (e.g. a girl named Emma), proceeding with explaining the scenario (e.g. they see their mother cleaning the kitchen) and ended with a prosocial behavior (e.g., the protagonist helps the mother clean).</p>
<p>There were versions that included a picture showing the other character requesting help or prosocial behavior from the protagonist and versions without it. The study authors wanted to see whether children’s perceptions differ when there is a request to behave prosocially.</p>
<p>Overall, two vignettes were about helping in the household (with cooking and cleaning), and two were about sharing a common good (a spot on a swing and a spot to watch animals). Each child viewed 2 vignettes with a request to act prosocially (one helping, one sharing), and two without such a request. After understanding the vignette, the child rated whether the protagonist felt compelled to help/share, how much the protagonist wanted to help/share, and how the protagonist felt about helping/sharing.</p>
<p>The study authors found that children’s ratings of the desire to help in depicted scenarios depended on their culture. German, U.S., Japanese, and Indian children attributed a lower desire to help to the story protagonist when the character was requested to help than in scenarios where the protagonist helped spontaneously. Ecuadorian children’s ratings of the protagonist’s desire to help did not differ between the two conditions. The situation was identical with children’s ratings of the protagonist’s satisfaction with helping.</p>
<p>Children’s answers in scenarios that explored the desire to share and satisfaction with sharing followed a similar pattern. German, U.S., Indian, and Japanese children believed that the story protagonist was less willing to share and less satisfied with sharing when the other characters requested it, while Ecuadorian children rated the two situations equally. Further analyses revealed that children’s responses might depend on how much they have internalized prosocial norms i.e., norms that they should help and share.</p>
<p>“We find that obligations decreased prosocial motivation in children from populations with common denominators such as a higher SES [socioeconomic status], urbanization, and similar parenting values. Still, there is cross-cultural variation in the sensitivity to obligations. We provide the first evidence for the role of internalization of prosocial norms in the sensitivity to obligations.”, study authors concluded.</p>
<p>The study contributes to the scientific understanding of prosocial motivation. However, it should be noted that study authors assessed children’s perceptions and feelings using single-item measures. This did not allow them to examine how reliable the responses are. Additionally, study authors note that the Ecuadorian group was the only group of children from a rural setting with a relatively lower socioeconomic status. Therefore, it remains unknown whether the observed differences are purely cultural or stem from differences in socioeconomic status and urbanization.</p>
<p>The paper, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002145">Others’ Requests May Dampen the Desire to Do Good: The Effect of Requests on Children’s Prosocial Motivation Across Five Cultures,</a>” was authored by Anneliese Skrobanek, Patricia Kanngiesser, Jahnavi Sunderarajan, Jorge David Mantilla Salgado, Saiwa Sisa Quimbo Yacelga, Shoji Itakura, Marie M. Morita, Masanori Yamaguchi, Nadia Chernyak, Lucy M. Stowe, and Joscha Kärtner.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/problematic-sexual-behavior-may-be-an-early-warning-sign-for-psychosis/" 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;">Problematic sexual behavior may be an early warning sign for psychosis</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 23rd 2026, 14:00</div>
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<p><p>Recent evidence suggests that difficulties with sexual health might serve as an early warning sign for mental health challenges. A new study published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2026.05.026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Journal of Psychiatric Research</a></em> found that young adults who report mild, non-clinical psychotic experiences also tend to show higher rates of problematic pornography use, hypersexuality, and certain sexual dysfunctions. These findings provide evidence that screening for sexual behavioral issues could help identify individuals who might be at a higher risk of developing a severe psychiatric condition.</p>
<p>To understand this research, it helps to look at the different ways sexual health is defined in clinical settings. Sexual functioning generally refers to the physical and emotional processes involved in an intimate encounter. This category includes general sexual desire, psychological arousal, the physical ability to maintain an erection or natural lubrication, and the capacity to reach a satisfying orgasm.</p>
<p>When these natural physical processes become consistently difficult or distressing, an individual might experience a sexual dysfunction. This can lead to low self-esteem, marked personal distress, and a significant decrease in a person’s overall quality of life. On the other hand, dysfunctional sexual behavior relates more to a person’s actions and a lack of self-control.</p>
<p>This behavioral category includes hypersexuality, which involves an intense preoccupation with sexual fantasies and a strong urge to act on them. It also includes the problematic, compulsive consumption of pornography. Both of these behavioral issues can disrupt daily life and harm interpersonal relationships.</p>
<p>Scientists have observed that sexual dysfunctions are noticeably higher among people with diagnosed mental health conditions, including schizophrenia. Often, these sexual issues are viewed simply as side effects of psychiatric medications. Drugs used to treat severe mental illnesses can alter brain chemistry in ways that negatively affect a person’s sexual desire and physical arousal.</p>
<p>However, researchers are beginning to suspect that sexual difficulties are not just side effects of clinical treatments. Some scientists propose that a decline in sexual health might be an inherent feature of the psychiatric illnesses themselves. They suggest that these sexual issues could appear early on, before a full psychiatric disorder ever takes root.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giacomo-Ciocca" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Giacomo Ciocca</a>, an associate professor of clinical psychology and sexual psychopathology at Sapienza University of Rome, explained the team’s motivation for looking into this dynamic. “The main reason that led us to explore the eventual relationship between problematic sexuality and psychosis onset is the prevention of psychotic risk,” Ciocca said. “In many cases, psychosis is preceded by several subclinical conditions that the literature defines as at-risk mental states. However, sexual problems and problematic sexuality are scarcely included in these pre-clinical categories.”</p>
<p>Psychotic-like experiences provide a unique window into this early stage of psychological vulnerability. These experiences are mild, subclinical symptoms that resemble psychosis, such as hearing brief whispers or harboring unusual, paranoid thoughts. People who have these mild symptoms do not have a diagnosed psychotic illness, but they are at a higher risk of developing one later in life.</p>
<p>Studying people with psychotic-like experiences allows scientists to observe the psychological factors associated with psychosis risk without the confusing influence of heavy psychiatric drugs. Because these individuals are not taking medication that alters their sexuality, they provide a much purer picture of how mental health and sexual health intersect. The authors of the current study wanted to explore if these mild psychotic symptoms are linked to specific sexual problems.</p>
<p>To test their ideas, the researchers recruited a sample of 582 young adults through an online survey platform. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 35 years old, with an average age of 24.5 years. The sample included 404 individuals assigned female at birth and 178 individuals assigned male at birth.</p>
<p>To ensure their findings were not influenced by existing psychiatric treatments, the researchers applied strict inclusion rules. They excluded anyone who was currently taking medication for a mental health condition. They also removed any participants who had a history of psychiatric hospitalization or who were currently receiving formal care from mental health services.</p>
<p>Participants completed a series of five detailed questionnaires for the research project. First, they took a 16-item test designed to measure the presence and intensity of psychotic-like experiences over the past month. This questionnaire asked participants to answer true or false to statements about unusual perceptions or beliefs, and then rate how much distress each experience caused them.</p>
<p>The researchers used three other assessments to evaluate sexual habits and physical functioning. They used a 19-item test to measure hypersexual behavior, which looked at how often participants used sex to cope with emotional distress, their ability to control sexual impulses, and the negative consequences of their sexual actions. A separate five-item scale evaluated the severity of problematic pornography use over the past six months, which helped identify individuals at risk of compulsive consumption.</p>
<p>To measure physical sexual functioning, the scientists used a standardized scale that looks at five core elements of human sexual response. These elements included general sexual desire, psychological arousal, physical lubrication or penile erection, the ability to easily reach an orgasm, and the level of satisfaction felt during that orgasm. Finally, the participants completed a comprehensive 53-item survey to measure recent symptoms of depression.</p>
<p>After collecting the data, the scientists divided the participants into two distinct groups. The first group consisted of 197 individuals who scored high enough on the psychotic-like experiences questionnaire to be considered at an elevated clinical risk. The second group consisted of 385 control subjects who reported very few or no psychotic-like experiences.</p>
<p>The researchers found that the mere presence of psychotic-like experiences was strongly associated with dysfunctional sexual behaviors. Specifically, individuals in the high-risk group reported higher levels of hypersexuality compared to the control group across all measured areas. This included using sex as a coping mechanism for bad moods, struggling to control sexual urges, and suffering negative life consequences due to their sexual actions.</p>
<p>The high-risk group also showed much higher rates of problematic, compulsive pornography consumption. When looking at physical sexual functioning, the researchers found that people with a high number of psychotic-like experiences reported more difficulties in actually reaching an orgasm. Other functional areas, like general sexual desire, did not show the same strong connection to these mild psychotic symptoms.</p>
<p>“Our results clearly demonstrate that sexual problems, such as sexual dysfunctions, sexual dysregulations, and sexual compulsivity, can be considered as risk factors for psychosis in more vulnerable people,” Ciocca said. “Hence, from a clinical point of view, it is important to assess during the prevention programs and during counseling the sexual health of youth. Problematic sexuality, therefore, could also be inserted into the other clinical criteria to identify the psychotic risk.”</p>
<p>He added that mental health professionals should pay close attention to these warning signs. “Readers of our paper, psychologists and psychiatrists particularly, should take into consideration the sexological assessment during their clinical practice,” Ciocca said. “Sexual function and sexual behavior are pivotal aspects of psychological functioning. About this, our perspective can be considered Freudian. Therefore, a dysregulation of sexuality is an indicator of an eventual psychological suffering before it is manifest.”</p>
<p>Interestingly, the researchers noticed slightly different patterns when they looked at the personal distress caused by psychotic-like experiences, rather than just the number of symptoms. Participants who felt highly distressed by their unusual thoughts and perceptions reported additional physical sexual difficulties. Along with struggling to reach an orgasm, these distressed individuals also had trouble maintaining an erection or producing natural lubrication, and they felt less satisfied with their orgasms overall.</p>
<p>Because depression and age can heavily influence a person’s sex life, the scientists ran additional mathematical models to control for these two factors. Even after adjusting for age and depression, the differences in hypersexuality and problematic pornography use remained significant between the two groups. The difficulty in reaching an orgasm also remained higher for the group with more psychotic-like experiences.</p>
<p>The authors broke the data down further by biological sex to see if the trends held true for both men and women. Among the female participants, those with high levels of psychotic-like experiences continued to show greater hypersexuality and more compulsive pornography use than female control subjects. After controlling for depression and age, the female high-risk group did not show a significantly worse ability to reach an orgasm compared to the female control group.</p>
<p>Among the male participants, the high-risk group demonstrated higher hypersexuality than the male control group. Curiously, the male high-risk group actually reported slightly fewer difficulties with sexual arousal than the healthy male controls. The researchers suggest that this unexpected finding might reflect an overall heightened or poorly regulated sexual drive, which sometimes accompanies the early stages of a psychotic episode.</p>
<p>While these findings provide helpful insights, they are subject to a few limitations. The study relied on a specific type of online sampling, which resulted in a group made up largely of Italian university students. This means the findings might not accurately represent older adults, people from different cultural backgrounds, or the broader global population.</p>
<p>Additionally, the researchers relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires. People are sometimes hesitant to answer questions about their sexual behavior or unusual mental experiences honestly, which can introduce inaccuracies. The cross-sectional design of the study also means the researchers only captured a single snapshot in time.</p>
<p>Because the data was collected all at once, scientists cannot prove that psychotic-like experiences directly cause sexual problems, or vice versa. It is entirely possible that an unmeasured third factor is responsible for both the sexual issues and the unusual mental experiences. For example, the researchers did not account for anxiety symptoms or the use of recreational substances, both of which can heavily impact mental and sexual health.</p>
<p>Future research could follow participants over a long period to see how early sexual difficulties might predict the actual development of severe mental illnesses. Scientists could also include a wider range of psychological factors in their models to rule out other potential causes.</p>
<p>“Our auspice is the inclusion of sexual assessment into the prevention program for mental disorders, particularly psychosis,” Ciocca said. “When an adolescent suffers from specific sexual issues, such as sexual compulsivity, problematic use of pornography, and also the obsession with sexual function or performance, likely there is also psychological suffering. From this point of view, problematic sexuality should be considered as a marker for a mental disorder in both clinical and research fields.”</p>
<p>This line of inquiry remains a major focus for Ciocca and his team at the Department of Wellbeing, Health and Environmental Sustainability. “I would like to thank my collaborator Doctor Davide Doroldi,” Ciocca noted. “He, together with me, conducted a large part of this research, from formulating the hypotheses to interpreting the results. The study about the relationship between sexuality and psychopathology is the main object of our research group at Sapienza University of Rome.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2026.05.026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Is problematic sexuality a marker for the onset of mental disorders? A cross-sectional study on psychotic-like experiences and sexual behaviour in a non-clinical sample</a>,” was authored by Davide Doroldi, Giulia Origlia, Tessa Giannini, Tommaso B. Jannini, Tommaso Boldrini, Antonio Del Casale, Gabriele Lo Buglio, Grazia Spitoni, Erika Limoncin, Lorenzo Pelizza, and Giacomo Ciocca.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/brain-signatures-identify-which-teens-will-outgrow-adhd-symptoms/" 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 development patterns predict if childhood ADHD symptoms will fade or persist</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">May 23rd 2026, 12:00</div>
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<p><p>Children experiencing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder face symptoms that can persist, emerge, or fade away completely as they grow older. A recent study published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00578-1"><i>Nature Mental Health</i></a> revealed that these different symptom paths are physically reflected in how the brain develops during adolescence, specifically in the growth and thinning of certain brain regions. The research highlights the potential for using brain scans to predict future symptom changes and emphasizes the need for long-term monitoring even after medical treatment begins.</p>
<p>Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, affects around five percent of children and adolescents worldwide. This developmental condition often results in varying clinical outcomes as children grow into teenagers and young adults. Some individuals continue to experience symptoms into adulthood, while others go through a remitting phase where their symptoms largely fade. Still, others follow an emergent path where behavioral issues actually worsen over time.</p>
<p>Predicting which adolescents will follow which path remains extremely difficult. A central reason for this difficulty is a lack of long-term brain imaging data showing exactly how adolescent brains mature. The physical development of the brain during these transitional years involves intense structural changes, including a major biological process called synaptic pruning.</p>
<p>During synaptic pruning, the brain naturally eliminates unused neural connections to increase mental efficiency. This normal trimming process causes the outer layer of the brain, known as the cerebral cortex, to thin over time. Variations in how quickly or slowly this thinning occurs can fundamentally impact how a person processes information, pays attention, and regulates their emotions later in life.</p>
<p>Qiang Luo, a researcher at Fudan University in China, led an international team of scientists to explore how typical brain maturation maps onto attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The team wanted to know if specific physical brain changes corresponded to different developmental symptom paths. They also evaluated whether standard medications prescribed for the condition altered those physical brain development paths.</p>
<p>The research team examined longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. This massive ongoing project tracks thousands of youth in the United States over many years, measuring environmental, physical, and mental health factors. The team focused on a diverse overarching group of 7,436 adolescents who received initial brain scans at roughly ten years of age.</p>
<p>The researchers categorized the adolescents into four distinct groups based on behavioral assessments provided over a subsequent two-year period. A massive control group experienced no elevated psychiatric symptoms. A much smaller persistent group showed high symptom levels at the beginning and the end of the two years. A remitting group started with high symptoms that eventually faded below the diagnostic threshold. Finally, an emergent group started with low symptoms that eventually worsened to clinical levels.</p>
<p>Assessments of the brain scans over time revealed distinct physical signatures for each group. The persistent group exhibited a faster rate of cortical thinning in certain frontal areas of the brain compared to the healthy control group. These specific frontal regions are typically associated with executive functions like complex decision making and cognitive control. An accelerated thinning is linked to deficits in these daily cognitive abilities.</p>
<p>In the emergent group, the brain also showed altered developmental rates. Individuals whose symptoms worsened over time demonstrated a slower rate of cortical thinning in the right posterior cingulate cortex. This region is a key component of the brain’s default mode network, which helps regulate mind-wandering and internal thoughts. By retaining connections that would typically be pruned away, the developing brain might struggle to shift focus outward when required in a classroom or social setting.</p>
<p>The remitting group, on the other hand, displayed a completely different biological signature. Adolescents whose symptoms faded experienced a faster physical volume expansion of the left hippocampus. The hippocampus is a deeper, primitive brain structure heavily involved in memory formation and emotion regulation. As this region grew faster, the adolescents showed corresponding behavioral improvements in school engagement, prosocial behaviors, and sleep quality.</p>
<p>To understand why these structural brain changes were happening, the researchers compared their localized brain maps to spatial gene expression databases. They analyzed which genes are naturally highly active in these specific changing brain regions. They found a strong overlap with genes responsible for organizing cellular synapses and managing chemical messengers like dopamine and serotonin.</p>
<p>This genetic overlap provides a deep biological foundation for the outward behavioral changes observed. It suggests that the physical volume shifts seen on the brain scans are tied to the fundamental cellular processes governing how local neurons communicate with one another. Tracking these physical parameters essentially allows scientists to view genetic activity playing out on a large scale.</p>
<p>The researchers then investigated the role of ongoing medication use in these developmental outcomes. They matched adolescents with similar symptom severity at the start of the study who either received or did not receive medical treatments. The analysis showed that taking prescribed medication initially was not statistically significant in predicting an individual’s eventual entry into the remitting trajectory.</p>
<p>This lack of association between medication and sustained remission is an unexpected finding. Medical treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are widely recognized as highly effective at managing immediate behavioral symptoms. However, they might not fundamentally alter the underlying physical development of the brain over the long term. The researchers noted that individuals experiencing symptom remission still exhibited some persisting sleep problems and emotional regulation issues.</p>
<p>Following their initial physical analysis, the team tested whether these newly discovered brain signatures could forecast future behaviors. They fed the baseline brain scan data and behavioral scores into a machine learning computer model. The model accurately predicted symptom severity in the participants three years later at age thirteen. The physical brain measurements improved the accuracy of the predictions beyond using simple behavioral checklists alone.</p>
<p>The team subsequently validated their predictive model using completely separate groups of research participants. One validation group consisted of young adults aged twenty-three in a European neuroscience study. The researchers successfully replicated the specific link between hippocampal expansion and fading symptoms across both the young adult group and two other independent clinical samples. Observing this exact same brain expansion pattern in differing age groups bolsters the reliability of the initial finding.</p>
<p>The current study possesses some limitations to keep in mind. Because the research is observational, it cannot prove that the physical changes in the cortex and hippocampus directly cause symptom improvements or deteriorations. The findings only demonstrate a strong correlation between particular physical brain development rates and changing symptom paths over time.</p>
<p>Additionally, the different datasets used varying questionnaires to measure participant behavioral symptoms, which makes exact comparisons across the separate groups slightly complicated. The available information regarding the participants’ complete medication dosing histories was also somewhat limited. The researchers caution against drawing definitive conclusions about long-term drug impacts based purely on parental reports of recent medication usage.</p>
<p>Moving forward, scientists will need to conduct more frequent brain scans over longer periods to capture the true fluid dynamics of brain development. Focusing on lifestyle interventions that naturally influence continuous hippocampus growth, such as consistent aerobic exercise, might aid in creating new non-pharmacological therapies. By identifying the physical brain markers for these symptom paths, researchers have established a biological roadmap for developing targeted interventions aimed at bringing about long-lasting symptom remission.</p>
<p>The study, “Cortical thinning and hippocampal expansion as brain signatures of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptom trajectories,” was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00578-1"><i>Nature Mental Health</i></a> and was authored by Wenjie Hou, Daqian Zhu, Barbara J. Sahakian, Samuele Cortese, Christelle Langley, Lizhu Luo, Qingyang Li, Zixin Gu, Luolong Cao, Gareth J. Barker, Arun L. W. Bokde, Rüdiger Brühl, Sylvane Desrivières, Herta Flor, Hugh Garavan, Penny Gowland, Antoine Grigis, Andreas Heinz, Jean-Luc Martinot, Marie-Laure Paillère Martinot, Eric Artiges, Frauke Nees, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Luise Poustka, Michael N. Smolka, Sarah Hohmann, Nathalie Holz, Nilakshi Vaidya, Henrik Walter, Robert Whelan, Gunter Schumann, Li Yang, Tobias Banaschewski, Qiang Luo, and the IMAGEN Consortium.</p></p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
<p><strong>This information is taken from free public RSS feeds published by each organization for the purpose of public distribution. Readers are linked back to the article content on each organization's website. This email is an unaffiliated unofficial redistribution of this freely provided content from the publishers. </strong></p>
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