News by Subject Social & Behavior

A comprehensive analysis of 437 studies from around the world provides the best evidence to date that narcissism is an important risk factor for both aggression and violence, researchers said. The link between narcissism and aggression was found for all dimensions of narcissism and for a variety of types of aggression. Results were similar regardless of gender, age, whether they were college students, or country of residence.

What happens in the brain when people think about the future? Research from University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Joseph Kable finds that two sub-networks play a role. One focuses on creating the new event. Another evaluates whether that event is positive or negative.

Parks played an important role for people seeking respite from the toll of social isolation during the pandemic, and according to new research from Drexel University, they did so without increasing the spread of COVID-19. The study looked at how people used 22 parks in Philadelphia and New York during the height of the pandemic and it found no strong correlation between park use and the number of confirmed cases in surrounding neighborhoods.

Older adults were significantly affected by isolation and stress during Oregon's initial COVID-19 lockdown last spring, but they were also able to find connection and meaning in community, new hobbies and time for themselves, a recent Oregon State University study found.

The millions of people who have chronic sinusitis deal not only with stuffy noses and headaches, they also commonly struggle to focus and experience depression and other symptoms that implicate the brain's involvement in their illness. New research links sinus inflammation with alterations in brain activity, specifically with the neural networks that modulate cognition, introspection and response to external stimuli.

If relatives of people with mental illness become better at accepting the difficult emotions and life events they experience - which is what training in compassion is about - their anxiety, depression and stress is reduced. These are the results of a new study from the Danish Center for Mindfulness at Aarhus University.

A group of scientists have discovered a node in the brains of male mice that modulates the sounds they make in social situations. This discovery, published in Nature, could help identify similar locations in the human brain, and potentially lead to a better understanding of social disorders such as autism or depression.

Eric Shattuck, assistant professor of research in the UTSA Institute for Health Disparities Research (IHDR) at The University of Texas at San Antonio, is studying the phenomenon of social distancing in response to infectious disease and its effects on pathogen transmission and the health of individuals and communities. Many animals, including humans, exhibit behavioral changes during the early stages of an infection, including reduced social contacts, called sickness behavior. His findings suggest innate social distancing might help prevent the infection from spreading within social groups.

Researchers found that people who frequently engage in "persuasive bullshitting" are actually quite poor at distinguishing intentionally profound or scientifically accurate fact from impressive but meaningless fiction and are also much more likely to fall for fake news headlines.