Author: dispatchtimes news

The brain’s fear response, long understood as a way to distinguish danger from safety, may instead blur those boundaries, scientists report. In a study led by researchers at the Douglas Research Centre at McGill University and the University of Toronto Scarborough, mice were trained to link one environment with danger and another with safety. The research, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests fear can make the brain’s representations of safe and dangerous experiences overlap. “Our findings suggest fear may blur the boundary between danger and safety rather than sharpen it,” said senior author Mark Brandon, Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of…

A brief cognitive reframing technique has been shown to dampen neural responses to aversive sensory input in autistic children and teens, according to a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Led by Urvi T. Shah, with senior author Shulamite A. Green, the research finds that a short session of cognitive reappraisal reduced activity in brain regions that process touch and sound, even if participants did not immediately report less distress. Sensory over-responsivity is a common feature for many with neurodevelopmental or psychiatric conditions, including autism. It can interfere with daily routines, social interactions and emotional…

A small study suggests the brain’s response to psilocybin may depend on the context in which the session occurs, rather than there being a universal increase in a key synaptic marker. In healthy adults, a single dose did not produce a statistically significant overall rise in SV2A, a PET-detectable protein linked to synapses, one week after dosing. Yet participants who took psilocybin in a calm room with a curated music playlist reported more intense mystical-type experiences and showed larger changes in the marker. The research was led by Annette Johansen of Copenhagen University Hospital and colleagues, and used positron emission…

A new study published in Communications Psychology indicates that how often a preschooler blinks naturally may offer a window into how their brain is maturing and developing self-control. The researchers found that children who blink more often per minute tended to perform better on a test of mental flexibility and showed greater activity in a region behind the forehead important for the task. Executive function encompasses a suite of higher‑order mental skills that enable children to hold information in mind, resist distractions, and switch between different rules or goals. These abilities expand rapidly between the ages of three and six…

A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology challenges a common assumption: political opponents are less open to opposing viewpoints than many people think. It was led by psychologist André Mata of the University of Lisbon, with colleagues from Linköping University in Sweden. Researchers say the work sheds light on the psychological barriers to cross‑party dialogue and whether reframing how we view opponents can encourage conversations across the political divide. In the first two studies, the team surveyed 198 participants in Portugal and 402 in Sweden. They asked participants to rate their own willingness to listen to…

A new small study published in Psychological Science suggests that tiny reflections of light on the surface of the eye, known as eye glints, help observers track where someone is looking, even as lighting and head positions change. Gaze direction is central to social interaction. People typically determine where someone is looking by the contrast between the dark iris and the white of the eye, but shadows or a turning head can distort perception and mislead viewers. Researchers Gwenisha J. Liaw and Colin J. Palmer, of the National University of Singapore, investigated whether the brain uses eye glint as a…

A new qualitative study analysing written memories of survivors from the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting reveals that under extreme threat, memories can be selective and patterned rather than universally impaired. The memory patterns centre on vivid sensory recall, escape-focused spatial awareness, and acts of heroism, with time often described as slowed or fractured. The work, led by William Ridgway of NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Centre and a lecturer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was published in Psychological Science and uses survivors’ own words to understand how they remember a catastrophic event they experienced together. The Las…

A Belgrade-based study published in the International Journal of Psychology has found that two psychological vulnerabilities—dark personality traits and flawed cognitive reasoning—both predict rule-breaking, but operate independently rather than forming a single causal pathway. The researchers recruited 514 participants from the general population, most of whom were university students, and conducted the study online. They measured levels of the Dark Tetrad—psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism—and assessed cognitive styles that influence decision-making and self-perception. Within the Dark Tetrad, individuals scoring highly on psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism were more likely to report rule-breaking behaviour, while narcissism did not emerge as a predictor…

A global study involving more than 11,000 new mothers across 31 countries has found that around a quarter perceive childbirth as traumatic, and about 7% develop childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder, or CB-PTSD. The findings are published in The British Journal of Psychiatry and form part of the INTERSECT project led by experts from City, University of London. The researchers defined a traumatic birth as one in which the person giving birth believes she or her baby faced serious injury or death during labour, delivery, or immediately afterwards. With roughly 140 million births occurring worldwide each year, the study emphasises that…

Google’s AI Overviews, a feature that reads multiple sources to craft a single, customised paragraph at the top of the search results, is increasingly shaping how users access information. A large-scale study finds these summaries activate in 13.7% of queries and can influence which sources readers see first, with potential consequences for publishers’ revenue. The research, led by Haofei Xu, Umar Iqbal and Jacob M. Montgomery of Washington University in St Louis, examined when the feature triggers, where it sources its material, how accurately it summarises those sources, and the economic impact on the original publishers. The system relies on…