News by Subject Social & Behavior

Employees who mentally reattach to work in the morning are more engaged at work, according to a new study.

Peer approval is the best indicator of the tendency for new college students to drink or smoke according to new research from Michigan State University. This new finding is key to help universities address the problems of underage or binge drinking.

It is no secret that a bad mood can negatively affect how we treat others. But can it also make us more distrustful? Yes, according to a new study, which shows that negative emotions reduce how much we trust others, even if these emotions were triggered by events that have nothing to do with the decision to trust. The study was carried out by an international research team from the University of Zurich and the University of Amsterdam.

Researchers have identified changes in brain connectivity and brain activity during rest and reward anticipation in children with anhedonia, a condition where people lose interest and pleasure in activities they used to enjoy. The study, by scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, sheds light on brain function associated with anhedonia and helps differentiate anhedonia from other related aspects of psychopathology.

When humans make certain types of mistakes, the size of their pupils change. This may offer clues as to what's going on in the brain when people make suboptimal decisions, University of Arizona researchers found.

Choosing to forget something might take more mental effort than trying to remember it, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin discovered through neuroimaging.

Employees bullied by their bosses are more likely to report unfairness and work stress, and consequently become less committed to their jobs or even retaliate, according to a Portland State University study.

Without an intact hippocampus, forming new memories is impossible. Researchers from Arizona State University and Stanford University found an equally important role for the hippocampus: feeding information to brain areas responsible for learning. Using fMRI, the research team found it was the hippocampus that encoded associations between relevant features of the environment during learning and that the associations encoded in the hippocampus were used by brain systems responsible for learning.