New research reveals how dread shapes decision-making

Research shows that for many, the dread of what might go wrong outweighs the pleasure of imagining what might go right
Photo Credit: Kyle Broad

Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary

• Main Discovery: The emotional impact of anticipating future negative outcomes (dread) is significantly more intense than the pleasure derived from imagining equivalent positive ones (savoring), heavily influencing economic behavior.
• Methodology: Researchers analyzed longitudinal data from nearly 14,000 individuals in a UK household survey spanning 1991 to 2024, tracking emotional responses to financial expectations alongside decisions involving risk and delay.
• Key Data: The study found that the emotional weight of dread is more than six times stronger than the positive feelings of savoring equivalent gains, whereas realized losses are only about twice as impactful as realized gains.
• Significance: This research theoretically links risk aversion with impatience, demonstrating that people often prefer immediate resolution not for efficiency, but to minimize the psychological burden of waiting and uncertainty.
• Future Application: These insights offer a new framework for addressing avoidance behaviors in sectors like healthcare and finance, specifically explaining why individuals delay beneficial medical screenings or investments to avoid the anxiety of waiting for results.
• Branch of Science: Behavioral Science and Cognitive Psychology

Hot spring bathing doesn't just keep snow monkeys warm

Video Credit: Abdullah Langgeng

Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary

• Main Discovery: Hot spring bathing behaviors in Japanese macaques actively reshape the host "holobiont," specifically modifying lice distribution and gut microbiota composition beyond simple thermoregulation or stress relief.
• Methodology: Researchers conducted a comparative study over two winters at Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park, utilizing behavioral observations, ectoparasite monitoring, and gut microbiome sequencing to analyze differences between female macaques that bathed regularly and those that did not.
• Key Data: Bathers exhibited distinct lice distribution patterns (suggesting disruption of activity or egg placement) and a lower abundance of specific bacterial genera, yet showed no increase in intestinal parasite infection rates or intensity despite sharing communal water sources.
• Significance: The study provides empirical evidence that voluntary animal behaviors act as direct drivers of host-parasite and host-microbe interactions, challenging the assumption that shared water sources in the wild necessarily amplify disease transmission risks.
• Future Application: Insights from this research will aid in modeling the co-evolution of behavior and health in social animals and offer comparative frameworks for understanding how cultural practices, such as communal bathing, influence microbial exposure in primates.
• Branch of Science: Primatology, Ethology, and Microbial Ecology
• Additional Detail: The findings underscore the concept of the holobiont—an integrated system of the host and its symbiotic organisms—as a dynamic entity modulated by behavioral choices rather than solely by environmental constraints.

How doubting your doubts may increase commitment to goals

Research explores what happens when people face goal obstacles
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline

When it comes to our most important long-term goals in life, it is not uncommon to face obstacles that may lead us to doubt whether we can achieve our ambitions.

But when life hands you doubts, the answer may be to question your doubts, a new study suggests.

A psychology professor found that when people who were worried about achieving an identity goal were induced to experience what is called meta-cognitive doubt, they actually became more committed to achieving their goal.

“What this study found is that inducing doubts in one’s doubts can provide a formula for confidence,” said Patrick Carroll, author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Lima.

Behavioral Science: In-Depth Description

Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / stock image

Behavioral Science is the systematic, interdisciplinary study of human and animal behavior, examining the cognitive, emotional, social, and biological drivers of action. Its primary goals are to empirically understand, explain, predict, and, in applied contexts, influence behavior at the individual, group, and societal levels.

Research finds self-control runs in the family

A WVU study finds when parents model discipline in work, health and finances, their teens tend to follow suit.
Photo Credit: Jennifer Shephard/WVU 

When it comes to self-control, adolescents tend to follow the patterns their parents establish, according to West Virginia University psychology research.

Professor Amy Gentzler of the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences led a six-month survey of 213 Appalachian adolescents and their parents, learning about their self-control in areas like health, work and school, money management, leisure activities and relationships.

She found that teens’ academic determination and the choices they made about wellness and money almost always reflected their mothers’, fathers’ or both parents’ self-control in similar areas.

The ability to resist immediate temptation in favor of long-term goals, self-control affects people’s academic achievement, physical health, financial stability and even the quality of their relationships, according to Gentzler.

The Two Sides of Flood Protection

Flood waters in Rosenheim, Deutschland
Photo Credit: Julian Schneiderath

Climate change is leading to stronger flood disasters. TU Wien and Joanneum Research have developed a new model that shows how private and public protection measures interact.

In many regions of the world, people will have to prepare for more severe flood events in the coming decades. There are two ways to tackle this problem: individuals can protect themselves – for example, through insurance or home modifications – or communities can work together to reduce flood risks, for instance by building dams or retention basins.

The interaction between these approaches can be represented in mathematical models. A research team led by TU Wien used extensive data, that had surveyed thousands of Austrian households to study how natural conditions and human behavior interact in flood protection. Minimizing flood damage requires both approaches – individual and public.

Mystery solved: New study reveals how DNA repair genes play a major role in Huntington's disease

Dr. Xiangdong William Yang
Photo Credit: Courtesy of UCLA/Health

A new UCLA Health study has discovered in mouse models that genes associated with repairing mismatched DNA are critical in eliciting damages to neurons that are most vulnerable in Huntington's disease and triggering downstream pathologies and motor impairment, shedding light on disease mechanisms and potential new ways to develop therapies. 

Huntington’s disease is one of the most common inherited neurodegenerative disorders that typically begins in adulthood and worsens over time. Patients begin to lose neurons in specific regions of the brain responsible for movement control, motor skill learning, language and cognitive function. Patients typically live 15 to 20 years after diagnosis with symptoms worsening over time. There is no known cure or therapy that alters the course of the disease.

The cause of Huntington's disease was discovered over three decades ago--a "genetic stutter" mutation involves repeats of three letters of the DNA, cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG), in a gene called huntingtin. Healthy individuals usually have 35 or fewer CAG repeats, but people inherited with mutation of 40 or more repeats will develop the disease. The more CAG repeats a person inherits, the earlier the disease onset occurs. However, how the mutation causes the disease remains poorly understood. 

Researchers identify distinct sleep types and their impact on long-term health

Photo Credit: Sam Moghadam Khamseh

Poor sleep habits are strongly associated with long-term chronic health conditions, according to decades of research. To better understand this relationship, a team led by researchers in Penn State’s College of Health and Human Development identified four distinct patterns that characterize how most people sleep. These patterns are also predictive of long-term health, the researchers said.

Soomi Lee, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, led a team in identifying these sleep patterns and their correlation to overall health. Their results were published in Psychosomatic Medicine.

Using a national sample of adults from the Midlife in the United States study, the team gathered data on approximately 3,700 participants’ sleep habits and their chronic health conditions across two time points 10 years apart. The data included self-reported sleep habits, including sleep regularity and duration, perceived sleep satisfaction and daytime alertness, as well as the number and type of chronic conditions.

Physically impaired primates find ways to modify their behaviors to compensate for their disabilities

Infant macaque at the Awajishima Monkey Center.
Photo Credit: Sarah Turner

Primates show a remarkable ability to modify their behaviors to accommodate their physical disabilities and impairments according to a new literature review by Concordia researchers.

Whether the disabilities are the result of congenital malformations or injuries, many primate species exhibited behavioral flexibility and innovation to compensate for their disabilities. They also benefitted from flexible and innovative behavior by their mothers early in life and from their peers within their population group as they aged.

Researchers at the Primatology and Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (PIES) Lab looked at 114 studies and published their findings in the American Journal of Primatology.

The survey also revealed something the researchers had not anticipated.

“Brogan Stewart, a PhD candidate and the paper’s lead author, noticed that a high proportion of the papers mentioned a connection to human activity as a potential or actual cause of impairment,” says co-corresponding author Sarah Turner, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment in the Faculty of Arts and Science.

“The disabilities may be the result of primates being caught in snares intended for other animals, or farmers trying to deter crop foraging. Perhaps they are the result of vehicle collision, or sometimes there are links between a small population’s genetics and the impairments, or diseases transmitted from people or contaminants in the environment.”

Study finds childhood bullying linked to distrust and mental health problems in adolescence

Photo Credit: Mikhail Nilov

A new study, co-led by UCLA Health and the University of Glasgow, found that young teenagers who develop a strong distrust of other people as a result of childhood bullying are substantially more likely to have significant mental health problems as they enter adulthood compared to those who do not develop interpersonal trust issues.

The study, published in the journal Nature Mental Health on Feb. 13, is believed to be the first to examine the link between peer bullying, interpersonal distrust, and the subsequent development of mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and anger. 

Researchers used data from 10,000 children in the United Kingdom who were studied for nearly two decades as part of the Millennium Cohort Study. From these data, the researchers found that adolescents who were bullied at age 11 and in turn developed greater interpersonal distrust by age 14 were around 3.5 times more likely to experience clinically significant mental health problems at age 17 compared to those who developed less distrust.

How antibiotic-resistant bacteria can teach us to modify behavior

UCLA researchers used knowledge of biological resistance to build a framework for modifying behavior that contributes to climate change.
Photo Credit: Arndt-Peter Bergfeld

Most people want to do something about climate change, but lifestyle trade-offs and a narrowing window to enact broad changes to industrial, transportation, and consumption patterns are daunting enough to make them resist.  

Resistance has different meanings across different fields of study. But UCLA biologists who study resistance in the natural world believe insights gleaned from some of its smallest inhabitants could help identify barriers to social changes, including those required to resolve human–wildlife conflicts, and formulate specific strategies for overcoming them.

Biologists have long studied how agricultural pests become resistant to pesticides and how bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance. UCLA researchers have pinpointed several effective tactics to counter this resistance that could help humans embrace urgently needed changes, they suggest in a paper published in Evolutionary Applications. 

The team built a framework of biologically derived resistance management strategies, suggesting that the different views of resistance can help to identify friction points between humans and the natural world, and between humans and their social worlds.  

Poison dart frogs: Personality determines reproductive strategies

The Allobates femoralis species of poison dart frogs follows different strategies during reproduction according to their behavioral type.
Photo Credit: Eva Ringler

Poison frogs of the species Allobates femoralis are common in the rainforests in South America. Their highly poisonous relatives, such as frogs of the genus Phyllobates, were frequently used by indigenous people of Colombia to extract toxins by rubbing the skin onto arrowheads for the purposes of hunting and fighting. Allobates femoralis frogs are not poisonous. Like many other animal species, however, they have distinct personality traits. Both the males and females, for example, may be particularly bold, aggressive, or eager to explore. Poison frogs mate with several partners over the course of a reproductive period and their character traits have a considerable influence on the reproductive strategies employed by individual animals. 

Most of the previous studies in other animal taxa have examined the effect of personality traits on a single measure of reproductive success. In two recently published studies, researchers in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern have presented new results on the effects of different combinations of personality traits in both males and females on different components of reproductive success. They examined the influence of personality on mating success, the number of clutches produced, as well as the numbers of offspring that survive into adulthood. The researchers were able to show that certain personality traits are already present in poison dart frogs at tadpole stage and that they also persist after the subsequent metamorphosis. 

Researchers observe wolves hunting and killing sea otters and harbor seals on Alaska’s Katmai coast

Wolf with a sea otter on Alaska's Katmai coast.
Photo Credit: Kelsey Griffin

Firsthand observations of a wolf hunting and killing a harbor seal and a group of wolves hunting and consuming a sea otter on Alaska’s Katmai coast have led scientists to reconsider assumptions about wolf hunting behavior.

Wolves have previously been observed consuming sea otter carcasses, but how they obtain these and the frequency of scavenging versus hunting marine prey is largely unknown. Scientists at Oregon State University, the National Park Service and Alaska Department of Fish and Game are beginning to change that with a paper just published in Ecology.

In the paper, they describe several incidents they observed involving wolves and marine mammals in Katmai National Park that they believe haven’t been previously documented:

Stunting in infancy linked to differences in cognitive and brain function

Photo Credit: bethL

Children who are too short for their age can suffer reduced cognitive ability arising from differences in brain function as early as six months of age, according to new research.

Researchers from the University of Nottingham were part of a team led by the University of East Anglia who compared the ‘visual working memory’ – the memory capacity that holds visual cues for processing – in children who had stunted growth with those having typical growth.

Published today in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the study found that the visual working memory of infants with poor physical growth was disrupted, making them more easily distracted and setting the stage for poorer cognitive ability one year later.

Stunted growth had previously been linked with poor cognitive outcomes later in life, but this is the first time that this association has been found in infancy. It is also the first time stunted growth has been linked to functional differences in how the brain works in early development.

Bumblebees drop to shake off Asian hornets

Asian hornet
Photo Credit: Public Domain 

Bumblebees have a remarkably successful method for fighting off Asian hornets, new research shows.

When attacked, buff-tailed bumblebees drop to the ground – taking the hornets down with them. This either causes the hornet to lose its grip, or the bee raises its sting and tussles until the hornet gives up.

University of Exeter scientists witnessed over 120 such attacks, and were stunned to find that bumblebees fought off the hornets every time.

Despite this, they found bumblebee colonies had reduced growth rates in areas with high numbers of Asian hornets – suggesting the hornets still had a negative impact, even if their attacks at colony entrances usually failed.

Asian hornets (also known as yellow-legged hornets) have already invaded much of mainland Europe and parts of east Asia, and have recently been reported in the US for the first time.

Sightings in the UK and continental Europe are at record levels this year – raising fears for pollinators and prompting substantial control efforts.

Why Are Killer Whales Harassing and Killing Porpoises Without Eating Them

A killer whale in the Salish Sea is observed harassing a porpoise, a behavior that has long perplexed scientists. A study from Wild Orca and UC Davis’ SeaDoc Society investigates what may be behind it.
 Photo Credit: Courtesy Wild Orca

For decades, fish-eating killer whales in the Pacific Northwest have been observed harassing and even killing porpoises without consuming them — a perplexing behavior that has long intrigued scientists.

A study published today in Marine Mammal Science, co-led by Deborah Giles of Wild Orca and Sarah Teman of the SeaDoc Society, a program of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, looked at more than 60 years of recorded interactions between Southern Resident killer whales and porpoises in the Salish Sea to better understand why they exhibit this behavior.

Southern Resident killer whales are an endangered population, numbering only 75 individuals. Their survival is intimately tied to the fortunes of chinook salmon — also an endangered species. Without enough chinook salmon, these whales are in danger of extinction.

“I am frequently asked, why don’t the Southern Residents just eat seals or porpoises instead?” said Giles. “It's because fish-eating killer whales have a completely different ecology and culture from orcas that eat marine mammals — even though the two populations live in the same waters. So we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been speculation until now.”

New insights into the origin of food sharing among humans

Chimpanzees Gremlin and son Grendel, begging for food, at Gombe National Park, Tanzania.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Minnesota

As humans evolved to hunt, gather and share food, cooperation provided a key to our success as a species. While chimpanzees and other primates sometimes share food, humans stand out. As hunter-gatherers — the subsistence strategy that all humans followed until the invention of agriculture — our survival depended on daily sharing of food between unrelated adult males and females. 

While hunter-gatherers today depend heavily on hunting and cooking, long before these activities became important for our ancestors, species such as Australopithecus extracted foods such as roots, tubers and nuts. Since hunter-gatherers and nonhuman primates tend to share foods that are large, valuable and divisible, these nutrient-dense foods are likely candidates for sharing, and may have been susceptible to theft by hungry group members. 

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by College of Biological Sciences Professor Michael Wilson developed a conceptual and mathematical model of the evolution of food production and sharing in early human ancestors. The interdisciplinary team included an economist, a theoretical biologist, an anthropologist and a primatologist. 

Reindeer can show great performance at following human-given indications

Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Turku

An international team of researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, and the INRAE of Nouzilly, France, explored the ability of sledging reindeer to follow directional indications from humans. Their results highlight that reindeer, which are well habituated to humans, can make use of gestural cues very well with minimal training.

Working animals, such as equines, shepherd dogs, and logging elephants, spend a significant amount of time interacting closely with humans to fulfil specific tasks. Effective communication plays a crucial role in their working relationship. Animals' understanding of human cues, particularly manual pointing gestures, is an important aspect of this communication. 

The use of pointing gestures to communicate with others and to show them where to look or to go is very natural for humans. For other animals that do not use this means of communication, the gesture may not always be easy to understand. For this reason, the pointing gesture is often used in experiments to see if animals can understand cues that are specific to humans. 

“Many species, such as dogs, primates, horses, goats or elephants, have already shown great potential at following human gestures, but this has never been investigated in any deer species. “, says the lead author of the study, Doctoral Researcher Océane Liehrmann from the Department of Biology at the University of Turku, Finland. 

Our visual perception is more rational than we think

Our visual perception adapts flexibly and unconsciously to the decision context when it’s to our advantage.
Photo Credit: Colin Lloyd

Our visual perception depends more strongly on the utility of information than previously thought. This has been demonstrated in a series of experiments conducted by researchers at the Neuroscience Center Zurich. Cognitive biases can begin at the retina.

Are our senses there to provide us with the most complete representation of the world, or do they serve our survival? For a long time, the former was the dominant view in neuroscience. “Was” is the operative word here. In the last 50 years, psychologists such as Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky have shown that human perception is often anything but complete and instead is highly selective.

Experiments have now verified that there is a whole list of examples of cognitive biases. One of the most important is confirmation bias: we often process new information in a way that confirms our beliefs and expectations.

But up until now, researchers haven’t been able to fully explain under what conditions these distortions come into play and when exactly in the perceptual process they begin. A study by researchers led by University of Zurich Professor Todd Hare and ETH Professor Rafael Polania, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, now shows that the brain already adjusts the visual perception of things on the retina when it is in our interest to do so. Or, to put it another way, we unconsciously see things distorted when it comes to our survival, well-being, or other interests.

Researchers warn of future ‘fish wars’ as consequence of climate change

Photo Credit: Sabrina Eickhoff

How climate change could give rise to “fish wars” between nations is the subject of a new research project awarded a £1.1m grant by the US Department of Defense.

The project, entitled “Future Fish Wars: Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth”, is one of 11 to receive a total funding of $18m as part of the US Department of Defense's Minerva Research Initiative, which supports research in social and behavioral sciences on topics relevant to US national security.

The researchers aim to develop new economic theory and approaches to measure the economic value of fisheries in the context of climate change and growing geopolitical ocean conflict.

They say illegal fishing, contested claims to fishing rights and future conflicts are likely outcomes as fish swim for the poles as a result of climate change warming the oceans. 

Over three years, the research team will develop new economic theory for valuing multiple stocks of marine resources, which they will use alongside novel data on conflict and cooperative events to achieve a deeper understanding of future fisheries conflict.