Psychology and neuroscience
Mind & Matter covers psychology and neuroscience: what the evidence says about how brains work and why people do what they do, with limited patience for overclaimed studies.
In an object-choice task at a Ugandan sanctuary, the pointing arm was not enough. The hidden items were tools for getting grapes, not the fruit itself. Adding the chimpanzee's name and food grunts lifted the group above 50 percent. Pointing without those sounds did not.
Sep 11, 2026
The evidence is real and more specific than the phrase. Touch lowered two measured stress responses where verbal support did not. A 110-person imaging study found no detectable difference among friends, dating, cohabiting and married partners, but its authors warned that it might be underpowered to detect relationship-type effects.
Sep 11, 2026
Across 132 papers containing 148 independent samples, attachment anxiety and avoidance were associated with lower relationship satisfaction. Avoidance had the larger pooled correlation, but these self-report data do not show that insecurity causes dissatisfaction or directly measure whether love feels calm.
Sep 10, 2026
A 2013 study found that skill at reappraising a bad situation tracked with fewer depressive symptoms when the stressor was uncontrollable, and with more when it was something the person could act on. That result sits inside a broader argument that no coping strategy is uniformly effective, and that what predicts adjustment is matching the strategy to the situation. The researchers making that argument also report that their own measures predict future outcomes poorly.
Sep 10, 2026
The 2016 paper synthesizes five decades of work in rats and dogs. It argues that default passivity is unlearned and that what animals learn is control. Whether the revised neural mechanism explains human hopelessness remains untested.
Sep 10, 2026
Bruk and colleagues named the self-other gap in how people evaluate vulnerability. Gibson, Harari and Marr identified a different workplace boundary condition involving rank. The studies measured different outcomes, so the second did not directly reverse the first.
Sep 10, 2026
A 2013 CT experiment showed that expert readers could look directly at an unexpected gorilla without reporting it. The finding concerns attention, not a clinical cancer-miss rate.
Sep 9, 2026
Research cannot predict what a child will remember about a grandparent. Emotional memories can be vivid but reconstructed, odours may cue childhood scenes, and adult grandchild closeness is associated with wellbeing.
Sep 9, 2026
Night owls sometimes score higher on selected tests while morning types do better in classrooms and wellbeing surveys. The difference often lies in timing, sleep and what each measure rewards.
Sep 5, 2026
Creative experts had younger-looking functional-connectivity patterns, and a small controlled gaming experiment moved the same modelled measure. Neither result shows that biological ageing was reversed.
Sep 5, 2026
Natural-water swims were recalled more positively than open-air pool visits, with autonomy and competence accounting for the difference. The cross-sectional survey cannot show that the setting caused the lift.
Sep 5, 2026
A small outdoor experiment found lower average blood-pressure measurements while people viewed pool water. Its design removes ocean spray, but not every contextual difference between the three scenes.
Sep 5, 2026
Twin studies and common-variant studies are not measuring precisely the same quantity. The gap between their estimates reveals what genetics can see, what it misses and why personality is so difficult to measure.
Sep 4, 2026
Two small MRI studies linked introversion to particular prefrontal measurements. Larger studies and a meta-analysis found little that replicated, and none tested career success.
Sep 4, 2026
