News by Subject Social & Behavior

Personality traits and mental health affect how people value personal control in decision making, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

Getting a jump on a low-income child's education can have a positive effect on social behavior even 40 years later, researchers find.

A team of researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Berkeley School of Public Health at UC Berkeley recently conducted a study designed to better understand how patient engagement and activation (PAE) practices are being integrated into clinical practice. What they found was a great deal of positive sentiment about PAE among the healthcare professionals surveyed, but much less understanding and implementation of PAE tools and approaches.

Age-related declines in abstract reasoning ability predict increasing depressive symptoms in subsequent years, according to data from a longitudinal study of older adults in Scotland. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Our ability to do things well suffers when we try to complete several tasks at once, but a series of experiments suggests that merely believing that we're multitasking may boost our performance by making us more engaged in the tasks at hand. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

People making decisions about life-and-death situations consider individuals' nationalities when deciding who should be sacrificed to save others, according to a study out of the University of Waterloo.

Adolescent marijuana use may alter how neurons function in brain areas engaged in decision-making, planning and self-control, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.