Author: dispatchtimes news

A UK-based study has found that on days when people face more non-relationship stress — such as demanding days at work, traffic snarls or mounting bills — their feelings of love, passion and closeness toward their partner tend to dip. The research, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, involved 100 romantic couples from a large city in Britain and was led by Ece Yilmaz of the University of Ottawa with Sarah C. E. Stanton of the University of Edinburgh. Non-relationship stress refers to pressures and hassles that begin outside the couple, such as heavy workloads, transit problems,…

A small brain-imaging study conducted in China has found that resting-state brain activity in transgender women differs from that of both cisgender men and cisgender women, particularly in networks responsible for processing bodily sensations and movement. The work, carried out in Changsha, Hunan Province, suggests that transgender women’s brain function, in several measures, aligns more closely with that of men than with that of women. The study was published in Scientific Reports. The researchers, led by Xiongyu Li of the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, recruited 17 transgender women who met World Health Organization criteria for gender incongruence,…

A British schooling reform from 1972 appears to have reduced dementia diagnoses decades later, with new analysis showing an extra year of compulsory education lowered the risk even among those carrying a strong inherited predisposition to the condition. Dementia encompasses a range of neurodegenerative disorders marked by memory loss and declining cognitive function, with Alzheimer’s disease accounting for many cases. As life expectancy climbs, health researchers have pressed for modifiable life experiences that could delay or prevent the onset of dementia. Education has long been studied as a potential factor, though evidence has been mixed. A 2011 systematic review found…

A new study published in Nature Communications shows that when the healthy brain shifts from rest to demanding tasks, large-scale networks reconfigure flexibly; in individuals with psychiatric diagnoses this reconfiguration is dampened, or “flattened,” and the shifts may align more with a person’s symptom mix than with a formal label. Researchers examined how the brain coordinates information by analysing functional brain networks—groups of regions across the cortex and deeper structures that work together. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, they estimated functional connectivity by tracking how closely activity in different regions rises and falls together. The brain, they say,…

A group of psychologists and researchers has launched an October 2026 petition to form a Division of Psychedelic Science and Practice within the American Psychological Association (APA), inviting members to sign in support of giving the field an official home inside the nation’s largest psychological organisation. If approved, the division would be the APA’s 55th active division. The association has 56 numbered divisions, two of which are vacant, and has not added a new division since the creation of Division 56 (Trauma Psychology). Under Article VI of the APA Bylaws, establishing a new division requires petition signatures from at least…

A four-week online course of loving-kindness meditation did not outperform progressive muscle relaxation in reducing physical pain or boosting social well-being among healthy adults, a randomised trial has found. Participants who practised muscle relaxation reported a small rise in perceived social support, while those practising loving-kindness reported no such improvement; neither method showed a clear advantage on pain measures. Those whose sense of social support grew during the study tended to endure a painful task longer at follow-up, though the association was modest. Loving-kindness meditation is designed to cultivate warmth and compassion towards oneself and others, making its social aim…

A major study drawing on data from the UK Biobank has found that childhood weight can shape the risk of depression and anxiety later in life, but reaching a normal weight in adulthood may erase much of that vulnerability. The research, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, was led by Dong-Run Li, Ke-Ru Li and Bang-Quan Liu with corresponding author Qi-Jun Wu, all of China Medical University. The researchers analysed a vast cohort of 368,756 adults aged between 40 and 69 at recruitment, who had no prior depression or anxiety diagnoses when the study began. They tracked medical records…

A new study published in Royal Society Open Science finds that when a speaker’s full body is visible on video, a deeper-than-average voice heightens perceptions of dominance and physical formidability rather than attractiveness to women. The work, led by James E. Rutter and Lynda G. Boothroyd of Durham University, used paired videos and digitally altered voices to test how voice pitch and resonance influence judgments about men. The researchers revisit a long-running debate about why male voices deepen during puberty. They note that human voices exhibit marked sexual dimorphism, with puberty-driven changes lowering pitch and altering vocal resonance. These shifts…

A new wave of behavioural research suggests voters are not merely shortsighted about near-term economics. Instead, people appear to favour a steady upward trajectory, willing to tolerate poor starting conditions if progress remains consistently positive. The findings, published in the American Political Science Review, come from a collaboration between Markus Prior of Princeton University and Talbot M. Andrews of Cornell University. Their experiments tested competing theories about how democracies respond to economic data. Historically, analysts have described the electorate as shortsighted. In the sanctioning model, elections function as a performance review, with voters judging recent conditions and punishing or rewarding…