Volume 7 Issue 6, June 2023

Cases of scientific misconduct can have a massive impact on scholars (especially junior scholars), and repercussions may last years. They need support, writes Marret K. Noordewier.

There is a global geographical divide in mental health that exacerbates the mental health crisis. Equitable involvement of young people can help, writes Manvi Tiwari.

Ongoing strike action has hit UK universities in recent months. Undergraduate student Kelsey Trevett explains why they are fully supportive of their striking lecturers.

Victims frequently report immobility during rape and sexual assault, often using the term ‘freezing’. Neuroscientific evidence suggests fear and threat can block cortical neural circuits for action control, leading to involuntary immobility. Defence arguments that blame victims for freezing are thus inappropriate and unjust.

The African Union has committed to gender equity for the continent. Yet women are underrepresented in education, in the workplace and in leadership positions. We must act now to achieve gender equity and combat existing structures of discrimination. We propose actions to help women to get there, stay there and thrive as leaders.

Protests calling for ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ in Iran have been met with government crackdowns, affecting universities across the country. In response, Iranian academics abroad have formed the International Community of Iranian Academics. Founding member Encieh Erfani talks to Nature Human Behaviour about their work.

Many policymakers turn to the military to reduce crime. Yet, evidence describing the effects of military policing is nearly nonexistent. Blair and Weintraub evaluate the effects of military policing on crime and human rights violations in Cali, Colombia. Their results suggest crime incidence and insecurity perceptions did not decrease, which leaves lessons for the design and implementation of security policies.

Why do expressions of emotion seem so heightened on social media? Brady et al. argue that extreme moral outrage on social media is not only driven by the producers and sharers of emotional expressions, but also by systematic biases in the way people that perceive moral outrage on social media.

Refugee adolescents in German schools have fewer friends and are more often rejected than their classmates. However, refugees are less rejected in more diverse classrooms because, first, other ethnic minority peers are more accepting of refugees and, second, majority-group peers build more positive relationships with refugees in more diverse settings.

The authors summarize the most recent developments in twin studies, recent results from twin studies of new phenotypes and new insights into twinning as a phenotype. They also provide an updated overview of twin concordance and discordance for major diseases and mental disorders.

Blair and Weintraub evaluate a military policing programme in Cali, Colombia. They find little to no evidence that the programme reduced crime, improved citizens’ perceptions of safety or mitigated human rights abuses.

Using data on roughly half a million cases and 10,000 judges from Pakistan and India, Mehmood et al. estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions. They find that fasting increases judicial leniency and reduces reversals of decisions in higher courts.

Boda et al. find that refugee adolescents in Germany have fewer friends and are more often rejected in school. However, ethnic diversity supports social integration, with majority group peers building more positive ties to refugees in more diverse settings.

Can individuals be motivated to accurately identify misinformation? Across four experiments, Rathje et al. provide support for financial incentives improving accuracy, and reducing partisan bias in judgements of political news headlines.

Flamino et al. examine changes in the political news media and influencer landscape of Twitter between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections.

Using a Twitter field survey, the authors show that individuals systematically overperceive individual and collective moral outrage.

This umbrella review of meta-analytic evidence reveals that previously reported benefits of physical exercise on cognitive function may have been exaggerated. The authors emphasize the importance of obtaining stronger evidence to confirm the causal relationship between regular physical exercise and enhancements in cognitive functioning.

Williams et al. show that structural and functional brain asymmetry is already seen in the newborn brain, but that adult patterns of brain asymmetry are not fully developed.

Feher da Silva et al. question the evidence for ‘model-free’ learning as an automatic process in humans.

Aquino et al. show using human brain recordings that the pre-supplementary motor area encodes an integrated utility signal for each choice option and, subsequently, the decision itself.

The authors introduce a deep learning framework to reproduce sequences of response times and use it to provide evidence for a stability–flexibility trade-off underlying task-switching costs.

Kopal and colleagues built computational bridges between rare CNVs in a clinical dataset and their deep phenotypic profiling in ~40,000 UK Biobank participants. Results show that CNVs are associated with many organ systems across the entire body.