News by Subject Social & Behavior

Faking your emotions at work to appear more positive likely does more harm than good, according to a University of Arizona researcher. Allison Gabriel with the Eller College of Management says those who try to be genuinely positive with their co-workers reap 'significant benefits.'

Years of observational studies suggest that prosecutors' race and class biases are among the primary drivers for disparities in criminal justice. Recent University of Arizona-led research indicates otherwise.

But social supports can reduce the negative effects of childhood stress. Childhood adversity is a significant problem in the US, particularly for children growing up in poverty. Those who experience poverty have a much higher risk of being exposed to violence and suffering from a lack of social support, which can have long-term consequences including higher rates of diabetes, cancer, and other diseases.

Pet dogs are highly receptive to commands from their owners. But is this due to their training or do dogs have an innate ability to understand human signals? A new study finds that 80% of untrained stray dogs successfully followed pointing directions from people to a specific location. The results suggest that dogs can understand and respond to complex gestures without any training, meaning that dogs may have an innate connection to human behaviors.

Research from Michigan State University is one of the first to identify common attributes of cybercrime networks, revealing how these groups function and work together to cause an estimated $445-600 billion of harm globally per year.

Illinois hospital visits associated with homelessness have tripled since 2011 and conservative estimates of homelessness using hospital-based data exceeded similar estimates from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.

According to received wisdom, local activism against the establishment of industrial plants follows a cycle, with its highest intensity a short time after mobilization. If a firm stands, activism fades. New research by Fabrizio Perretti and Alessandro Piazza in Strategic Management Journal analyzes the American anti-nuclear movement and finds that the strategic decisions made by a firm affect both the evolution of activism in its own sector and the emergence of mobilization in other industries.

A new study shows that there is a huge disproportion in the level of funding for social science research into the greatest challenge in combating global warming -- how to get individuals and societies to overcome ingrained human habits to make the changes necessary to mitigate climate change.

Blood culture surveillance programs are critical for estimating the prevalence of typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, but cases can be missed when patients don't seek medical care, or seek medical care and don't have a blood culture test. Researchers writing in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have now calculated inflation factors that can be used to adjust these incidence rates to account for under-detection.