News by Subject Social & Behavior

Familiar voices are easier to understand and this advantage holds even if when we aren't able to identify who those familiar voices belong to, according to research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Health costs associated with noise from changing flight patterns over populated urban landscapes far outweigh the benefits of reduced flight times, according to a new study. The researchers used flights from LaGuardia airport that have historically flown over Flushing Meadows and the US Tennis Center in Queens -- known as the TNNIS route -- as a case study to explore the trade-offs between more efficient flight routes and suffering on the ground.

A team from the University of Kansas has investigated the 'Speech-to-Song Illusion,' where a spoken phrase is repeated and begins to sound as if it were being sung.

Wind turbines are a source of clean renewable energy, but some people who live nearby describe the shadow flicker, the audible sounds and the subaudible sound pressure levels as 'annoying.' They claim this nuisance negatively impacts their quality of life. Researchers in Canada set out to investigate how residential distance from the wind turbines affects people's health; they report their new analysis in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

The preliminary results show that sounds of nature that were played in the fruit and vegetable section of a grocery shop had a clear impact on the shop's sales. The sales of fruit and vegetables showed an increase of 20 percent compared to the previous week and 13 percent compared to the week that followed.

Children and adolescents who grow up with one or more of these environmental risk factors are likely to resort to violence, aggression and crime as adults, irrespective of an underlying mental illness. This is according to a new study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, which is published by Springer Nature

Ambient music played in restaurants plays a major role in whether you order a healthy or unhealthy meal.

New research from The Ohio State University has found that young people with subtle hearing loss -- the kind they aren't even aware of -- are putting demands on their brains that typically wouldn't be seen until later in life.