Volume 7 Issue 4, April 2023

The ‘makeshift medicine’ framework describes how individuals address healthcare needs when they are unable to access the US healthcare system. The framework is applied to gender-affirming care, the health of people who inject drugs and abortion access. Recommendations for future research, advocacy and policy are made.

Predicting the future is something that humans have tried to do — in various ways — for a very long time. A paper by Grossmann et al. tests the ability of social scientists to predict societal change and finds that they are not particularly good at it.

Are people unwilling or unable to engage with information that runs against the views of their party? Tappin et al. push against this notion with a survey experiment that shows the public responds to counter-partisan policy arguments by changing their minds about these issues, even when they also see where party leaders stand on them.

With the world expansion of education, mothers have an increasingly important role in shaping the educational status of their children, particularly for daughters and in contexts with a high prevalence of mothers who are paired with a less-educated father.

How accurate are social scientists in predicting societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? Grossmann et al. report the findings of two forecasting tournaments. Social scientists’ forecasts were on average no more accurate than those of simple statistical models.

Yeo et al. use digital data on student behaviour (Wi-Fi connections and Learning Management System logins) to examine associations between sleep and academic outcomes.

Silverman et al. find that Black, Latinx and Indigenous (BLI) students receive lower grades than non-BLI students with similar patterns of motivation. This inequitable motivational payoff is linked to teachers’ racially biased beliefs about students.

An analysis of 52 million births in 26 countries shows small reductions in preterm birth during the first to third months of lockdown. Further research is needed to examine causal pathways.

Holt and Vinopal use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey to find that low-income people are more likely to wait, and to wait longer, when using basic services relative to high-income people.

This rapid realist review of universal interventions to promote inclusivity and acceptance of diverse sexual and gender identities in schools finds that interventions appear to work best when school staff are trained and the school climate is supportive. Interventions may be less effective for boys, gender minority students and bisexual students.

In a study examining 24 US policy issues and 48 persuasive information treatments, the authors find no evidence that US partisans’ receptivity to persuasive information is diminished by countervailing cues from favoured party leaders.

Against the backdrop of the world expansion of education and changes in parents’ educational pairing patterns, Hu and Qian provide global evidence on the importance of gender and the mother in intergenerational educational mobility.

In a series of experiments, Jangraw et al. show that people’s mood declines over time in common psychological tasks and during rest periods, but not in freely chosen behaviours.

Standard decision models assume that all options' values are encoded on a common scale by a unique representation system. Across nine experiments, Garcia et al. provide evidence that challenges this assumption: participants treat experiential and symbolic options asymmetrically.

Xie et al. combine intracranial recording, brain stimulation and lesion case study to show that the human medial temporal lobe is involved in the quality of short-term memory representation.

This meta-analysis examines how genetic variation is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, their overlap and their co-occurrence with disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorders.