Author: dispatchtimes news

A new cross‑disciplinary study led by Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice and Ian Shapiro of Tennessee State University finds that racial resentment among White Americans helps shape beliefs in election fraud, with real‑world social media chatter aligning more closely with a city’s Black population than with voting patterns. The researchers say the findings illuminate how fraud claims can be used to reject election results while maintaining faith in democracy, and the work appears in Political Behavior. Racial resentment, in the authors’ framework, is not simply overt hostility. It describes a subtler worldview that downplays the barriers…

A small pilot brain-imaging study conducted in Japan has found that listening to a participant’s preferred Japanese pop music may be associated with higher visual memory recall and better self-rated focus, compared with unpleasant noise or silence. The study involved five healthy university participants and used functional MRI to observe brain activity during the tasks, with findings published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Led by Yoshiko Tojo of the Ibaraki Prefectural University of Health Sciences, the research aimed to explore how self-selected J-Pop relates to visual memory retrieval and regional brain activity. Participants performed a visual memory task while lying…

A large new study analysing genetic data from the United Kingdom and the United States has found detectable footprints of assortative mating in the genome, with signatures linked to education and smoking appearing stronger among Americans born more recently. The research, published in Behavior Genetics, suggests that the genetic consequences of partner matching may be growing in the United States across twentieth-century birth cohorts. Assortative mating refers to the non-random pairing of individuals with similar characteristics, such as schooling, body measurements, or daily habits. Over generations, this pattern can concentrate particular traits within families and alter how inherited traits are…

A longitudinal study published in Psychological Medicine suggests that social difficulties in school and with family do not simply follow autism or ADHD traits in a straight line. Instead, day-to-day social struggles and mental health challenges appear to be linked in bidirectional, self-reinforcing cycles as children grow older. The research tracked 9,619 students from public elementary and junior high schools in a medium-sized municipality in central Japan, surveying each child once per school year from fourth through ninth grade. Data were collected from students, their parents and homeroom teachers over 11 grade cohorts between 2012 and 2023. Autistic traits were…

A Japanese study using a novel brain imaging tracer has found that tau protein buildup is common among people who develop psychosis after the age of 40, with two-thirds of late-onset cases showing tau pathology. The researchers report that many patients exhibited tau accumulation without the amyloid plaques typically associated with Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting multiple tau-related brain conditions may be at play. The work was published in Molecular Psychiatry. Late-onset psychosis refers to psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions that emerge after 40, and sometimes well into the later years. Clinically, it can present differently from earlier-onset psychosis, often…

A new study suggests that taking time to weigh up a political issue before you decide can boost how others judge your moral character, but only if your audience disagrees with you. The research, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, was led by Zachary N. Grey, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, who works with the Centre for Mind and Morality Lab and the Morality, Affect, and Politics Lab. The findings come amid enduring tensions in democratic societies where political disagreement often fuels hostility. The study notes that a 2016 Pew Research survey found that 47 per…

Direct eye contact from an adult speaker appears to shape which words babies learn by aligning the infant’s brain activity with the adult’s, a effect that may act as a learning switch. A new study, conducted across the United Kingdom and Singapore and published in Nature Communications, suggests that this one-way neural coordination helps link a caregiver’s gaze to an infant’s selective word learning. The research team involved Wei Zhang of Nanyang Technological University and Victoria Leong, a professor at NTU’s School of Social Sciences and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cambridge. Babies grow up amid a…

A landmark study from University College London has shown that the brain network governing motor skills can generate sleep replays entirely on its own, without the hippocampus at the helm. The finding, published in Nature Neuroscience, marks a significant shift in how scientists understand the separate memory systems that consolidate during rest. Memory is not a single phenomenon. The brain handles declarative memory—facts and events—differently from procedural memory, which underpins motor skills and habitual actions. For decades, researchers have debated how these distinct forms of memory are solidified during sleep. A prevailing idea held that the hippocampus acts as a…

A new study suggests a link between individuals’ preference for group-based inequality and the structure of their brains. Researchers report that young adults who score highly on social dominance orientation tend to have less grey matter in the anterior insula, a region associated with empathy and emotion processing, with reward sensitivity also playing a role. The work, published in Current Psychology and led by Jesús Adrián-Ventura of the University of Zaragoza and the Pseudo-Lab research group, hints that social and political worldviews may reflect underlying motivational and emotional differences. Social dominance orientation is a personality trait that gauges how much…

A new study finds that methylphenidate helps adults with ADHD weigh the costs of actions more accurately, improving decision-making that balances rewards against negative consequences. Conducted by Mads Lund Pedersen of the University of Oslo and colleagues, the study was published in Psychological Medicine. It used a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design involving 61 adults with ADHD and 63 healthy controls. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition marked by inattention, hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour, and people with the disorder often face choices that can lead to reckless outcomes. The experiment framed everyday decision-making as balancing the benefits of an…