Pooling 175 studies of 418,528 young people from 1981 to 2019, researchers found no rise in total emotional and behavioral problems. Aggression fell, while some attention, thought and teen anxiety-depression scores rose modestly.
People picked adults' real names from four options 27% to 30% of the time versus 25% chance, but not children's, and a neural network found same-name adult faces more alike in 60% of comparisons versus 52% for children, supporting a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a UK survey of 214 adults rating 80 adversities, 76% of the events scored above the midpoint of a trauma scale; more left-wing, older and ethnic minority participants were significantly more likely to call experiences traumatic.
Matching Chinese survey data with weather records, economists found that people whose mothers got more sunlight in the second trimester of pregnancy earn more as adults. The effect was larger for women, older workers, the rural-born and children of less-educated mothers.
Across ten studies, people seen as lacking credibility were judged more self-aware and sincere when they prefaced self-promotion with disclaimers like "I know this may seem hard to believe, but", while the same disclaimers did nothing or backfired for speakers already seen as credible.
Across 12,208 People’s Daily articles using the word "struggle", 68 to 85 percent dealt with domestic issues, and 176 Xi Jinping speeches on the US stressed cooperation, leading the authors to call China a limited, status quo power.
Following 12,211 Britons born in one week of March 1958, economists found childhood creativity predicted higher career earnings, better jobs and more education. In their working paper, one standard deviation more creativity meant about 2% higher pay.
Using lotto draws from Belgium and France and Euromillions data, two economists show that tickets containing the lucky number 7 earn significantly lower prizes, because parimutuel payouts are shared among the many players who choose it.
In a German survey of 1,504 people and three US experiments with 846 participants, perceived social breakdown raised support for authoritarianism (5.22 vs 3.51 on a 7-point scale) by first eroding political control and then creating political uncertainty.
In 536 five-month-old twins, eye tracking showed that sustained preference for faces over objects had a heritability of 0.46, with no detectable effect of shared family environment. Babies who looked longer at faces understood slightly more words at 14 months.