Studies

This is the paper that introduced the Strange Situation, the observational procedure Ainsworth devised to study the bond between a caregiver and a child aged roughly nine to thirty months. The…

This is the book-length report of the Baltimore study, in which Ainsworth and colleagues set out the Strange Situation procedure, the classification system built from it, and the home observations…

This is the meta-analysis of the peak-end rule and duration neglect, and it is the reference to reach for before quoting either. The two claims it pools are that a remembered experience is judged…

Almiron-Roig and colleagues examine the popular claim that liquid calories fail to satisfy, and find the evidence weaker than the claim. The idea, that drinks bypass the mechanisms producing…

Alter and Oppenheimer test whether processing fluency, the principle that people tend to prefer information that is easy to process, shows up in share prices. Three studies are reported, one in the…

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, is the principal authority for psychiatric diagnosis in the…

Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec's paper proposed coherent arbitrariness: that the absolute level of what people will pay is arbitrary and easily influenced, while the relative ordering of their…

Ariely and Zauberman's paper concerns something the peak-end literature usually leaves implicit: where one experience ends and the next begins. An extended episode has no natural boundaries, and how…

Arkes and Blumer's paper is the standard experimental demonstration of the sunk cost effect, and its best-known study was run in the field. Customers approaching the box office of a university…

Arkes and Ayton examine a puzzle. Adult humans routinely honour sunk costs, continuing an endeavour because of what has already been spent. Animals are widely said to do the same, under the name…

Armstrong reviews nonlinear pricing as a method of price discrimination, under both monopoly and oligopoly supply. The topics covered include when it is profitable to offer quantity discounts and…

Asch's monograph reports the line-judgment studies, among the most repeated experiments in psychology. A participant sat with a group of others, all of them working for the experimenter, and judged…

This is the published critique of a paper reporting that rigorous methods produce very high replication rates. Its argument, carried in its title, is that a claim about scientific rigour has to meet…

Bakermans-Kranenburg and colleagues meta-analysed seventy studies of programmes intended to improve parental sensitivity and infant attachment security, covering several thousand families…

This is the paper behind the best-known demonstration of behavioural priming. Participants unscrambled sentences containing words associated with old age, and were then timed as they walked down the…

Barton, Zlatevska and Oppewal meta-analyse the effect of product scarcity cues on consumer purchase intentions, motivated by the fragmented state of a literature in which retailers deploy many kinds…

Bateman, Munro and Poe take the decoy effect into choice experiments and contingent valuation, the methods used to value goods that have no market price. A dominated choice is one in which an option…

Baumeister and Leary's review argues that the need to belong is not one motive among many but a fundamental human drive, and they test that claim against the evidence rather than asserting it. Their…

This is the paper that introduced ego depletion. Four experiments shared one design: do something requiring self-control, then see how well self-control works afterwards. People made to eat radishes…

This paper's title states its claim: that ego depletion is the best replicated finding in social psychology. It was published while the large coordinated replication attempts were reporting effects…

This is not a study. It is the support page of Beat, the United Kingdom's eating disorder charity, and it appears in an article's sources because the article touched on disordered eating and the…

Beknazar-Yuzbashev and colleagues note that the sunk cost effect, endlessly discussed in practice and in teaching, remains difficult to demonstrate cleanly, and argue that the usual test design is…

Belanger-Gravel and colleagues meta-analysed twenty-six studies testing whether implementation intentions, the technique of deciding in advance exactly when, where and how you will act, increase…

Belanger-Gravel and colleagues meta-analysed twenty-six studies testing whether implementation intentions, the technique of deciding in advance exactly when, where and how you will act, increase…

Bellezza and colleagues examine how observers react to nonconforming behaviours, such as entering a luxury boutique in gym clothes rather than an elegant outfit, or wearing red sneakers in a…

Jonah Berger tested whether physiological arousal on its own makes people more likely to pass information on. Undergraduates were made more aroused by jogging on the spot, or kept calm by sitting…

Berger and Schwartz ask why certain products are talked about more than others, both immediately after consumers first experience them and in the months that follow. They analyse a unique data set…

Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman asked why some online content spreads more than other content, using every article the New York Times published over a three-month period and tracking which ones…

Berger reports an extended replication asking whether luxury brand labels and green labels really work as costly signals of social status. Costly signalling theory explains why people pay a premium…

Berger reports an extended replication asking whether luxury brand labels and green labels really work as costly signals of social status. Costly signalling theory explains why people pay a premium…

Berger reports an extended replication asking whether luxury brand labels and green labels really work as costly signals of social status. Costly signalling theory explains why people pay a premium…

Berger reports an extended replication asking whether luxury brand labels and green labels really work as costly signals of social status. Costly signalling theory explains why people pay a premium…

Bernstein and Turban measured what happens to human interaction when an office loses its walls, in two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters moving to more open space. Rather…

Berridge's paper is the standing statement of the incentive salience position, that dopamine mediates wanting rather than liking. No abstract is published for it in OpenAlex, Crossref or Semantic…

Berridge and Robinson set out the distinction this vault returns to constantly: wanting and liking are produced by different systems in the brain, even though the two words are used interchangeably…

Berry and colleagues fed identical standardised meals to a thousand twins and unrelated adults and measured what happened in their blood afterwards, then validated the findings in a separate…

Blatt and Zuroff argue that depression is not one condition but at least two, distinguished by what makes a person vulnerable to it. In one, the trigger is disruption of relationships, with the…

Bokhorst and colleagues studied a hundred and fifty-seven pairs of identical and non-identical twins to separate genetic from environmental influences on infant attachment. The result is unusual in…

Bolton and colleagues report a series of studies on when consumers judge a price to be unfair. The consistent finding is that consumers are inclined to believe the selling price of a good or service…

Bond and Smith gathered a hundred and thirty-three conformity studies from seventeen countries, all using the Asch line-judgment task, and asked two questions the original experiments could not…

This entry records a correction rather than a source. The first volume of Bowlby's Attachment and Loss, published in 1969 and revised in 1982, is the founding statement of attachment theory. A…

Breines and Chen tested the objection most often raised against self-compassion, that being kind to yourself after failing removes the motivation to improve. Four experiments found the opposite…

Brewer's paper introduces optimal distinctiveness theory, and its starting point is a criticism of how psychology had treated the self. Most theories described an individual concept, separate from…

Britton and colleagues address a gap in the evidence on mindfulness programmes: the harms had barely been measured. They built a structured interview covering forty-four possible effects and had an…

Brunstrom's review challenges the standard account of how much people eat. That account holds that meal size is settled during the meal, by the physiological and psychological processes that produce…

Buchanan and colleagues address a gap that has sat underneath fifty years of work on how one word speeds recognition of a related word. The effect is foundational to theories of how meaning is…

Burke and colleagues compared the settings in which physical activity programmes are delivered, pooling forty-four studies and more than two hundred comparisons across five outcomes: whether people…

Camerer and colleagues repeated eighteen laboratory experiments published in the two leading economics journals between 2011 and 2014. The methodology matters as much as the result: every…

Camerer and colleagues took twenty-one social science experiments published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015, the most visible journals in the field, and tried to repeat them properly…

Carney and Waters tested a small intervention against the particular problem of a racing mind at bedtime. Students reporting insomnia spent five nights either writing down their worries along with…

Carroll, Choi, Laibson, Madrian and Metrick identify an alternative to defaults that the popular literature almost never mentions: requiring people to make an explicit choice for themselves…

Carruth, Ramos and Miyake ran a preregistered replication of Job, Dweck and Walton's influential 2010 finding that ego depletion occurs only in people who believe willpower is a limited resource…

Carruth, Ramos and Miyake ran a preregistered replication of Job, Dweck and Walton's influential 2010 finding that ego depletion occurs only in people who believe willpower is a limited resource…

Carter and McCullough reanalysed the data from the large ego depletion meta-analysis using methods designed to detect and correct for small-study effects, the pattern that appears when small studies…

Castro and Berridge extended the hedonic hotspot work by testing all three major opioid receptor types rather than one, mapping where stimulating each changed how much rats appeared to enjoy a sweet…

Cesario's paper is a defence of priming research against the way failed replications were being interpreted, and it is worth reading precisely because it concedes a great deal. His argument is that…

Chabris and colleagues attempted to replicate both of the physical warmth experiments, the coffee cup and the therapeutic pad, and their write-up is as much about method as about the result. They…

Chioveanu and Zhou model identical sellers of a homogeneous product competing in both prices and price frames, meaning the ways in which price information is presented. Frame choices affect how…

Chioveanu and Zhou model identical sellers of a homogeneous product competing in both prices and price frames, meaning the ways in which price information is presented. Frame choices affect how…

No abstract could be found for this paper, so this page does not summarise it.

This is a regulator's document rather than research. Following an investigation into the sale of tickets for the Oasis reunion, the Competition and Markets Authority secured undertakings from the…

Cook and colleagues took the rumination-focused therapy out of the clinic and tested it as prevention rather than treatment. More than two hundred university students who were not depressed but…

Many Labs 5 tested the most common defence offered when a replication fails, that the replication was badly designed. The team selected ten studies from an earlier large replication project for…

Cummings and colleagues tracked the hormone ghrelin in ten healthy people fed on a fixed schedule, sampling their blood thirty-eight times across a full day. The pattern is the finding. Ghrelin rose…

Dang and colleagues ran a second multi-laboratory replication of ego depletion, using a different pair of tasks from the first one, following a pre-registered experiment that had reported a…

Darley and Latane's experiment is the origin of the bystander effect as a demonstrated finding rather than a story. Participants sat alone in a room communicating over an intercom and overheard…

This short paper by Dawkins and Carlisle is the origin of the phrase Concorde fallacy, and its argument is the opposite of how the phrase is usually used. They were addressing a claim in animal…

de Langhe, Fernbach and Lichtenstein document a disconnect between the objective quality information online user ratings convey and the extent to which consumers trust them. Analysing 1,272 products…

This is the meta-analysis that tested attachment theory's central causal claim: that a caregiver's sensitivity, meaning the ability to notice an infant's signals, read them correctly and respond…

Delgado and colleagues pooled the studies published between 2000 and 2017 that compared comprehension of the same text read on paper and on a screen, covering more than a hundred and seventy…

The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is taken by Buddhists as the record of the first sermon, delivered in the deer park at Sarnath. Later versions of the text centre on the Four Noble Truths, the…

Digdon and Koble tested three self-help techniques for students whose sleep was disturbed by a racing mind, delivered entirely by email: constructive worry, in which worries are converted into…

DiMeglio and Mattes gave fifteen people the same amount of extra carbohydrate every day for four weeks, once as a fizzy drink and once as jelly beans, with a four-week gap between. Everything else…

Doody argues that the sunk cost fallacy is often not a fallacy. The textbook position is that unrecoverable costs should never influence a current decision, since only future consequences matter…

Doyen and colleagues tried to repeat one of the most famous experiments in social psychology, in which people exposed to words associated with old age walked more slowly when leaving the laboratory…

Drissi-Daoudi, Doerig, Parkosadze, Kunchulia and Herzog investigate how stable an ambiguous colour percept is once it forms. The group had already shown that the first encounter with the dress…

Dulleck and Kerschbamer set out the economics of credence goods in the Journal of Economic Literature. A credence good is one whose quality the buyer cannot judge even after buying and using it, the…

This is the experimental test of the framework Dulleck and Kerschbamer had reviewed five years earlier. Dulleck and Kerschbamer, with Matthias Sutter, ran a credence goods game with 936 participants…

Dunbar sets out the social brain hypothesis in its fullest form. Group size covaries with relative neocortical volume in non-human primates, and the regression predicts a group size for modern…

Dunbar and Spoors asked people in several British populations to name the adults they contact at least once a month, and used the answers to measure the size and composition of real social networks…

Dunbar, Arnaboldi, Conti and Passarella use the frequency of bi-directional posts to define relationships in two Facebook datasets and a Twitter dataset, building ego-centric networks for more than…

This is the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's clinical practice guideline on behavioural and psychological treatment of chronic insomnia in adults. A task force reviewed the literature…

This paper argues that repetitive negative thinking should be treated as a process that runs across disorders rather than as a symptom belonging to any one of them. The observation behind it is that…

Elliot, Maier, Moller, Friedman and Meinhardt set out the case that red impairs performance on achievement tasks. The reasoning runs through context rather than through colour itself: in an…

Elliot and Niesta reported across five experiments that red, compared with other chromatic and achromatic colours, led men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Men appeared…

Elliot and Niesta reported across five experiments that red, compared with other chromatic and achromatic colours, led men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Men appeared…

Elliot reviews a decade of research on colour and psychological functioning and spends most of the article on its weaknesses. He records that important advances have been made in both theoretical…

Englich, Mussweiler and Strack demonstrate that the sentencing decisions of experienced legal professionals are influenced by sentencing demands that are irrelevant and, in the strongest version…

This line comes from chapter five of the Enchiridion, the short handbook of Stoic advice compiled by Arrian from the teaching of Epictetus in the second century. The handbook deliberately avoids…

The Letter to Menoeceus is preserved in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and it is the compact statement of Epicurus's ethics. Its argument is that pleasure is the highest good and…

Errington and colleagues report the Reproducibility Project in cancer biology, which repeated fifty experiments from twenty-three high-profile papers, covering a hundred and fifty-eight separate…

No abstract could be found for this paper, so this page does not summarise it.

This page should not be read as a study, because the source is not one. Hooked is a trade book for product managers and founders, published by Portfolio, in which Eyal sets out a four part model of…

Fanelli argues against the framing that has become standard in discussions of scientific reliability. The reproducibility crisis narrative holds that most published findings are unreliable and that…

Feitosa-Santana, Lutze, Barrionuevo and Cao approached the dress with standard clinical colour vision measures, since no existing colour vision theory fully accounted for the split. Fifty-two…

This is the meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials of self-compassion interventions, and it matters because most of the self-compassion literature is correlational. Correlations between…

Ferreri and colleagues report the causal test that this literature otherwise lacks. Participants listened to music in three separate sessions, having been orally administered a dopamine precursor…

Festinger's 1954 paper proposes that people have a drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities, and that this drive explains a great deal of social behaviour. His argument begins with why…

Filetti and colleagues asked whether a friend reduces stress or adds to it, and found that the answer depends on what the friend is doing there. Young parents reliably buffer a child's stress…

Fincham, Strauss, Montero-Marin and Cavanagh meta-analysed randomised controlled trials of breathwork, searching seven databases and two trial registers to February 2022 and identifying 1,325…

Fogg's short conference paper sets out the behaviour model that carries his name, and its usefulness comes from how little it contains. A behaviour happens, he argues, only when three things are…

Fraley tested the two competing accounts of how early attachment relates to later attachment. The prototype account holds that early representations persist and continue to influence behaviour…

Frankenbach and colleagues tested a plausible worry about nostalgia. The research on it reports benefits to the sense of self, to feeling life has meaning and to social connection, but people high…

Frattaroli meta-analysed a hundred and forty-six randomised studies of expressive writing and disclosure, the practice of writing or talking about personal and meaningful experiences. Earlier and…

Frattaroli meta-analysed a hundred and forty-six randomised studies of expressive writing and disclosure, the practice of writing or talking about personal and meaningful experiences. Earlier and…

Frederick, Lee and Baskin ask where the attraction effect actually works rather than demonstrating it again. Consumer research has documented dozens of cases in which adding an irrelevant third…

Fredrickson and Kahneman established duration neglect. Participants watched pleasant and unpleasant film clips that varied in both length and intensity, rating how they felt moment by moment during…

Friedman and colleagues went looking for the sunk cost fallacy in a controlled setting and largely failed to find it. Participants played a computer game in which they dug for treasure on an island…

Fudenberg, Levine and Maniadis re-examined the anchoring manipulation used in the most famous demonstration outside psychology, in which people considered their own identification digits before…

Gabaix and Laibson explain why hidden fees survive competition. Bayesian consumers infer that hidden add-on prices, such as the cost of ink for a printer, are likely to be high, so if all consumers…

Gabaix and Laibson explain why hidden fees survive competition. Bayesian consumers infer that hidden add-on prices, such as the cost of ink for a printer, are likely to be high, so if all consumers…

Celia Gaertig and Joseph Simmons tested why a chance at a reward, such as a small chance of getting a product free, often beats a sure discount worth the same on average. Across five studies with…

Gao and colleagues reviewed twenty-one studies on what keeps adults attending instructor-led group fitness classes, sorting the evidence by which psychological factor was tested. Self-efficacy came…

Gao and colleagues reviewed twenty-one studies on what keeps adults attending instructor-led group fitness classes, sorting the evidence by which psychological factor was tested. Self-efficacy came…

Geary and Flinn's commentary accepts the tend-and-befriend proposal and argues that it was drawn too narrowly. Their case is that the evolutionary frame needs to include features of human social…

Gerlitz and Hulsbeck systematically reviewed the relationship between office concepts and individual and organisational performance, searching publications between 2005 and 2022 and narrowing 429…

Givon and colleagues take a step back from the evidence that naming feelings changes them, and ask what naming a feeling actually involves. Their proposal is that affect labelling works like…

Gjestvang and colleagues recruited a hundred and twenty-five untrained people who had just joined one of twenty-five gyms in Oslo, and measured them at the start, after three months and after a…

Golaszewski and colleagues surveyed more than five hundred adults to ask why belonging to an exercise group is associated with exercising more, testing whether the route runs through social support…

This is the meta-analysis of implementation intentions, the technique of specifying in advance the situation in which you will act and exactly what you will do, in the form of an if-then plan. The…

This is the meta-analysis of implementation intentions, the technique of specifying in advance the situation in which you will act and exactly what you will do, in the form of an if-then plan. The…

Gollwitzer and colleagues tested what happens when someone announces an intention connected to the kind of person they want to become, such as telling others they intend to read law journals…

Goyal and colleagues asked what meditation programmes actually do for stress-related health, and answered it by reviewing the trials rather than by running one. They searched the literature…

Graf and colleagues take on a measurement question sitting underneath a large body of consumer research. Processing fluency is recruited constantly as an explanatory construct, yet how best to…

Vladas Griskevicius and five colleagues tested whether spending and helping can work as costly signals, displays that are believable because they cost something, by putting people into a romantic…

Griskevicius, with Joshua Tybur and Bram Van den Bergh, tested the costly signalling account of green buying across three experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The…

Griskevicius, with Joshua Tybur and Bram Van den Bergh, tested the costly signalling account of green buying across three experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The…

Groh and colleagues pooled eighty samples, covering more than four thousand children, to ask how much early attachment predicts how well a child gets on with other children later. Security was…

Gross and Borkovec ran an experiment that is unusually direct. Rather than studying people with insomnia, they took good sleepers and gave them something to think about: participants were told they…

Grossmann and Kross tested a pattern named after Solomon, the king celebrated for his judgment whose own household was a disaster: people reason more wisely about other people's problems than about…

Hagger and colleagues meta-analysed eighty-three studies of ego depletion and reported a medium-sized effect, which for several years was the evidence everyone cited. The review also reported…

This is the first large coordinated attempt to replicate ego depletion, and it was designed to settle the argument rather than add to it. Twenty-three laboratories ran the same standardised…

Harrar and Spence report three experiments on whether the cutlery you eat with changes the taste of the food, varying weight, size, colour and shape independently. Yoghurt was perceived as denser…

Hartgerink and colleagues pooled a hundred and twenty studies using Cyberball, the online ball-tossing game in which a participant is left out by the other players, covering nearly twelve thousand…

Hazan and Shaver's paper is the one that carried attachment theory into adult life. Its proposal is that romantic love is an attachment process of the same kind studied in infants, and that the…

Peter Herman, Deborah Roth and Janet Polivy reviewed research on how the presence of other people affects how much we eat, which had produced three apparently conflicting findings. Social…

Herr and colleagues examine when priming a concept makes a subsequent judgment move towards it and when it pushes the judgment the other way. Both happen. Prime a mild example of hostility and an…

Hesselmann set out to test one of the two findings from the well-known study on internet use and memory: the claim that being asked a hard factual question automatically brings the idea of the…

Higgs's paper examines memory for recent eating and its influence on how much a person eats next. No abstract is published for it in OpenAlex, Crossref or Semantic Scholar, and this publication has…

This is the medical dissertation that named nostalgia. Hofer, a Swiss medical student, coined the word in 1688 from the Greek for homecoming and pain, to describe what he took to be a disease he…

Hogg and colleagues test uncertainty-identity theory, whose claim is that identifying with a group is a way of resolving uncertainty about oneself. The mechanism is that a group supplies a…

Hollands and colleagues produced the Cochrane review of whether the size and shape of portions, packages and tableware change how much people consume, covering food, alcohol and tobacco, in adults…

Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton conducted the meta-analytic review that gave this subject its authority, asking how far social relationships influence mortality risk, which aspects are most…

Holt-Lunstad, Smith, Baker, Harris and Stephenson return to the question their earlier meta-analysis raised, asking about the overall and relative magnitude of social isolation and loneliness as…

Huber, Payne and Puto report the finding that became the decoy effect. An asymmetrically dominated alternative is one that is dominated by a single item in the choice set but not by another. Adding…

This episode of I Love Lucy, first broadcast on 19 January 1953, is cited here as an audience record rather than as a piece of television. In it the central character gives birth to a son, and the…

Inzlicht and colleagues propose an alternative to the idea that self-control runs on a limited resource. Their objection is both theoretical, since no plausible physical resource has been…

Janiszewski and Uy examine the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic, which has been used to account for a wide variety of numerical judgements, and show that the precision of the anchor changes how…

Job, Dweck and Walton proposed that ego depletion depends on what a person believes about willpower. Across four studies they reported that individual differences in lay theories moderated the…

Johnson and Goldstein's policy forum is the piece that carried the default effect out of economics and into public life. Using a combination of national data and experiments, they examine what the…

Johnson and Whisman meta-analysed fifty-nine studies, covering more than fourteen thousand adults, on whether women ruminate more than men. The question matters because the leading theory of why…

This is the cold-water experiment, and it remains the clearest demonstration that people will choose more suffering over less. Participants held one hand in painfully cold water for sixty seconds…

Kahneman and colleagues built the Day Reconstruction Method to solve a measurement problem. Asking people how satisfied they are with life gets a judgment shaped by comparison and expectation…

Keller's paper is the sharpest published challenge to attachment theory's claim to universality. Her argument is that the theory describes one cultural strategy for raising children, in which the…

Kemp and colleagues tested whether the peak-end rule holds for experiences that last days rather than minutes. Forty-nine students on holidays averaging a week sent daily text messages reporting how…

Kendzierski's study is an early demonstration that how people categorise themselves predicts what they do. She sorted participants into three groups by whether being an exerciser was part of their…

This paper extends the exercise self-schema work from the author's earlier study, which had shown that people who consider being an exerciser part of who they are exercise more, plan more and keep…

Killingsworth and Gilbert built a smartphone application that contacted people at random moments during ordinary life and asked three things: what they were doing, how they felt, and whether they…

King and colleagues followed nearly two hundred young adult drinkers for a decade, giving each of them the same alcohol challenge at the start, at five years and at ten, alongside repeated…

Kircanski and colleagues took affect labelling out of the laboratory and into a clinical procedure. People afraid of spiders were repeatedly exposed to a live spider while doing one of four things…

Klein, Ratliff, Vianello and colleagues tested variation in the replicability of thirteen classic and contemporary psychological effects across 36 independent samples totalling 6,344 participants…

Klein, Ratliff, Vianello and colleagues tested variation in the replicability of thirteen classic and contemporary psychological effects across 36 independent samples totalling 6,344 participants…

This is the data paper accompanying the first Many Labs project, publishing the dataset from Klein, Ratliff, Vianello and colleagues' replication of thirteen classic and contemporary psychological…

Many Labs 2 tested twenty-eight published findings, classic and recent, across a hundred and twenty-five samples in thirty-six countries, with more than fifteen thousand participants and protocols…

Many Labs 2 tested twenty-eight published findings, classic and recent, across a hundred and twenty-five samples in thirty-six countries, with more than fifteen thousand participants and protocols…

Kritz and colleagues updated an earlier review that had found real groups, meaning programmes built deliberately on group dynamics, outperformed individual approaches to physical activity. With…

Krol and Krol address a specific problem in the decoy literature: recent studies had reported that the attraction effect fails to replicate when options are presented pictorially rather than as…

Kross and colleagues ran seven studies, with nearly six hundred participants in total, on a change small enough to sound trivial: whether people think about themselves using I or using their own…

Lades, Samahita, Martin, Sunstein and Baekgaard address a gap in the sludge literature, which had described the problem without establishing who bears it. Drawing on a nationally representative…

Lafer-Sousa, Hermann and Conway produced the first systematic study of the dress photograph. The image's pixels are brown and blue, colours associated with natural illuminants, while popular reports…

Lally and colleagues ran the study that produced the number everyone misquotes. Ninety-six volunteers each chose one eating, drinking or activity behaviour to perform daily in the same context, such…

Lange and Eggert tested the glucose explanation of willpower, which held that self-control consumes blood sugar and that a sugary drink restores it, a claim that had reached the point where merely…

Larrick, Morgan and Nisbett tested whether the cost-benefit rules of economics transfer to ordinary life, and whether they can be taught. Two groups were examined: people with extensive formal…

Leary and colleagues ran five studies on how self-compassionate people handle unpleasant events, using different methods each time: daily reports of real events, imagined scenarios, reactions to…

Lehmann and Calin-Jageman ran the replication that is hardest to argue with. Red had been reported to enhance attraction for women rating men and for men rating women. To ensure rigour, the authors…

Lehmann and Calin-Jageman ran the replication that is hardest to argue with. Red had been reported to enhance attraction for women rating men and for men rating women. To ensure rigour, the authors…

Leunissen and colleagues combined the affect measures from forty-one experiments that induced nostalgia, covering more than four and a half thousand participants, to settle what kind of feeling it…

Levy-Gigi and Shamay-Tsoory tested two conditions that ought to matter for naming feelings: when you do it, and how strong the feeling is. In the first experiment, participants labelled their…

Lieberman and colleagues used brain imaging to ask why putting feelings into words helps. Participants viewed distressing images while either labelling the emotion the image produced or encoding it…

Lieberman and colleagues moved affect labelling out of the scanner and asked whether it changes what people report feeling. Across four studies, naming the emotion produced by a distressing image…

Lin, Zheng and Wang meta-analysed the research on Solomon's paradox, combining six studies and twenty effect sizes to ask whether the pattern holds and how large it is. It does hold for…

Lindenfors, Wartel and Lind test whether there is statistical support for the widespread belief that humans can maintain stable relationships with approximately 150 people, a figure originating in…

This is a company's own financial disclosure, cited as industry data rather than as independent evidence. Live Nation Entertainment reported record total revenue for 2025, with the concerts division…

This entry covers the body of work on reconstructive memory and the misinformation effect: the finding that memory is not a recording that can be played back, but an account rebuilt each time it is…

This is a pre-registered replication of the bottomless soup bowl experiment, in which a bowl refills slowly and invisibly as the diner eats. The original is one of the most repeated demonstrations…

Loui and colleagues test an evolutionary claim about music as affective communication by comparing a special population against normal variation. They examine white matter connectivity in BW, a case…

Luguri and Strahilevitz report what the paper describes as the first public experimental evidence on dark patterns, meaning interfaces whose designers knowingly confuse people, make it hard for them…

MacBeth and Gumley produced the first systematic review of the relationship between self-compassion and mental health, combining twenty samples from fourteen studies, all of which used the same…

Madden and colleagues report the closest thing to a controlled test of an organ donation default. Wales introduced a soft opt-out system in December 2015 while England kept its opt-in system, which…

The Madhupindika Sutta, the eighteenth discourse of the Majjhima Nikaya, is cited here for its account of papanca, usually translated as conceptual proliferation. The passage traces a sequence…

Madrian and Shea analysed what happened to saving behaviour at one large company when it switched its retirement plan to automatic enrolment. They report two findings. Participation was…

Maier, Bartos, Stanley, Shanks, Harris and Wagenmakers reply to the Mertens meta-analysis by arguing that its finding of moderate publication bias is the real headline. They reanalyse the same…

Maier, Bartos, Stanley, Shanks, Harris and Wagenmakers reply to the Mertens meta-analysis by arguing that its finding of moderate publication bias is the real headline. They reanalyse the same…

This is the chapter that introduced the disorganised classification to attachment research. The original Strange Situation procedure sorted infants into three patterns, and a proportion of children…

Mairon and colleagues tested a claim that had been gathering momentum, that experiencing something in the presence of another person attending to the same thing intensifies the experience…

Malle meta-analysed a hundred and seventy-three studies of one of the best-known ideas in social psychology, the actor-observer asymmetry: the claim that people explain their own behaviour by…

Maniadis, Tufano and List present new evidence on the strength of anchoring results in economic valuation, and use the case to make a wider methodological argument. Their theoretical framework sets…

Manning, Levine and Collins went back to the archives behind one of the most retold stories in psychology, the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 and the thirty-eight witnesses said to have watched…

This is the paper that goes after the mechanism behind Norton's IKEA effect, and it should be read with that paper rather than as a second confirmation of it. Marsh, with Patricia Kanngiesser and…

Mas-Herrero, Zatorre, Rodriguez-Fornells and Marco-Pallares documented specific musical anhedonia, and the paper's title states the finding: a dissociation between musical and monetary reward…

This is clinical patient guidance rather than research, and the citation itself records why it is here: it marks a boundary. An article dealing with hunger and blood sugar needed to distinguish the…

McComb, Vanman and Tobin pooled forty-eight experimental studies, covering more than seven and a half thousand participants, that tested what happens when people are shown social media content from…

This paper sets two accounts of how a service experience is judged against each other. One holds that the first moments dominate, since an early impression colours everything that follows. The other…

Mertens, Herberz, Hahnel and Brosch meta-analysed the choice architecture literature across many behavioural domains and reported that these interventions are effective and widely applicable. Their…

This is a short letter to a journal, written during the public argument over failures to replicate behavioural priming studies, and its point is a distinction that the argument kept collapsing…

Meyer and colleagues went back to one of the most repeated findings in popular psychology, that printing a question in a hard-to-read font makes people think more carefully and answer…

Miron-Shatz tested how people evaluate a whole day, using large samples in the United States, France and Denmark who reconstructed the previous day episode by episode and reported how they felt…

Mitchell and colleagues followed people through three real events, a trip to Europe, a Thanksgiving holiday and a three-week cycling trip, measuring what they expected beforehand, how they felt…

Modirrousta-Galian and Philip Higham reanalysed the evidence that gamified inoculation games such as Bad News and Go Viral teach people to spot fake news, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology…

Morewedge and colleagues tested whether reasoning biases can be trained away, a question on which the field had largely given up. Earlier attempts at training had achieved little, which pushed…

Morrot, Brochet and Dubourdieu began by analysing the language wine experts use, and found that the smells they name are overwhelmingly things that share the colour of the wine in the glass: red…

Morrow and Nolen-Hoeksema's study is the experimental counterpart to the response styles theory the same author proposed. The theory holds that what people do when their mood drops determines how…

Muris and Petrocchi raise a measurement problem that changes how the whole self-compassion literature should be read. The standard scale contains two kinds of item: half describe self-compassion…

This short paper continues the argument about how the Self-Compassion Scale should be scored, replying to the case for a single total score. The position defended here is that compassionate and…

Mussweiler, Strack and Pfeiffer tested whether anchoring can be reduced deliberately, and found one strategy that works. Their reasoning comes from the selective accessibility model, in which an…

This is a broadcaster's press release, cited as an audience record. It reports that Super Bowl LX reached a peak audience of around 137.8 million viewers late in the second quarter, described as the…

Neff's paper defines self-compassion as a construct with three components: kindness towards oneself in pain or failure rather than harsh self-criticism, recognition that the experience is part of…

This is the companion paper that built the instrument, the Self-Compassion Scale, which made the construct measurable and produced the research that followed. It reports a series of studies…

This paper reports the first tests of the Mindful Self-Compassion programme, an eight-week course designed to teach the skill rather than merely measure it. A small pilot found gains in…

This is the largest examination of how the Self-Compassion Scale is structured, using twenty samples and more than eleven thousand people across seven English and thirteen non-English datasets…

This is a reply in the continuing argument about how the Self-Compassion Scale should be scored. The criticism it answers holds that the scale contains two different things, items describing…

This review, by the researcher who defined the construct, is the most complete single statement of the self-compassion literature. It sets out the theoretical model as six elements, three present…

No abstract could be found for this paper, so this page does not summarise it.

Newell and Shanks use anchoring as a test case for the theory behind behavioural priming. That framework assumes primes have broad effects, influencing a wide range of downstream behaviours, and…

This is the independent audience measurement for the same broadcast, and the reason both it and the broadcaster's release are cited. Nielsen's final figure for Super Bowl LX, using its combined big…

This is the second clinical test of affect labelling, applied to fear of public speaking rather than to spiders. The technique is the same: while facing the feared situation, the person names what…

Nisbett and Timothy Wilson reviewed the evidence on whether people can report on their own mental processes, in Psychological Review. It is a review of a literature rather than an experiment, so it…

Nivison and colleagues asked how much infant attachment really predicts, and did it the hard way: registered analyses of two landmark longitudinal studies, the Minnesota study of risk and adaptation…

This is the paper that introduced response styles theory, the account of why depressive episodes last as long as they do. Its claim is that what people do when their mood drops matters more than the…

This is the paper that introduced response styles theory, the account of why depressive episodes last as long as they do. Its claim is that what people do when their mood drops matters more than the…

Nolen-Hoeksema and colleagues review two decades of work on rumination and are notably willing to report where the original theory did not hold. Well supported: rumination worsens depression…

Nook and colleagues tested the assumption behind common advice, that naming an emotion helps a person then manage it. Two experiments say the opposite. In the first, participants either watched…

Northcraft and Neale took anchoring out of the laboratory and into a property market. Estate agents and student participants toured a house and were given a full information package that included a…

Norton and Weiss set out to test a definition of courage that treats it as behaviour rather than feeling: approaching something despite being afraid, rather than not being afraid. Thirty-two people…

Norton, with Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely, reported the four studies that named the IKEA effect, in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Participants assembled IKEA storage boxes, folded origami and…

Ntoumanis and colleagues meta-analysed seventy-three experimental studies in which an intervention based on self-determination theory was used in health promotion or disease management, and which…

Ntoumanis and colleagues meta-analysed seventy-three experimental studies in which an intervention based on self-determination theory was used in health promotion or disease management, and which…

This is the coordinated multi-laboratory test of one of behavioural priming's showpiece findings, the claim that people asked to think about professors before a general knowledge quiz answer more…

Olivola identifies a version of the sunk cost effect that the theory had not predicted. Every existing account treats it as a private matter, a person responding to their own past investment. Across…

The Open Science Collaboration replicated 100 experimental and correlational studies from three psychology journals, using high-powered designs and original materials where available. The headline…

The Open Science Collaboration replicated 100 experimental and correlational studies from three psychology journals, using high-powered designs and original materials where available. The headline…

Oppenheimer tested a strategy most students admit to using: making your vocabulary more complicated so you sound cleverer. Across five experiments he found it backfires. When the same essay was…

Orben and Przybylski's paper is as much about method as about screens. Their argument is that the large social datasets used to study adolescents and technology contain so many variables that a…

Ott and colleagues challenge the conclusion of the cross-species sunk cost study on statistical grounds. Their argument is a form of attrition bias. In a task where subjects can quit at any moment…

Payne and colleagues set out to show that priming effects can be obtained reliably when the experiment is designed differently. Rather than comparing groups of people, they used a procedure in which…

Pecina, Cagniard, Berridge, Aldridge and Zhuang used a genetic mutant approach to ask what dopamine does in natural reward. A dopamine transporter knockdown mutation preserving only a tenth of…

Pecina and Berridge set out to find where in the brain pleasure is actually amplified, rather than where reward-related activity appears. Working in rats, they injected an opioid drug at many…

Peperkoorn, Roberts and Pollet present three studies whose results did not support the prediction, drawn from colour-in-context theory, that red clothing raises attractiveness ratings. The work was…

Peperkoorn, Roberts and Pollet present three studies whose results did not support the prediction, drawn from colour-in-context theory, that red clothing raises attractiveness ratings. The work was…

Pettibone tested a prediction from dynamic, connectionist models of decision making such as decision field theory, in which context effects arise from a series of pairwise comparisons between…

Philpot and colleagues point out that fifty years of bystander research answered a question about individuals, whether any one person is less likely to help when others are present, and left the…

Piqueras-Fiszman, Giboreau and Spence tested plate colour where it matters, in a working restaurant, with complex food and diners who had come out to eat. Earlier studies had shown that identical…

Plassmann and colleagues gave people wine to taste inside a brain scanner, telling them the prices. The prices were invented and some of the wines were repeated under two different labels, so the…

Platts, Seddigh, Berntson and Westerlund tested a claim that had rested largely on self-report. Earlier research associating open-plan offices with higher sickness absence depended on people…

Pollet, Roberts and Dunbar examine how extraversion relates to the size of the different layers of a social network, and to the emotional intensity of the relationships inside them, across 117…

This is the live music industry's own year-end analysis, cited for a pattern rather than a headline. For 2025 it reported that total grosses and ticket sales fell while average prices rose, with…

Powers and colleagues examined whether perfectionism helps or hinders people in reaching their goals, across five studies covering several life domains. The literature had been unsettled because…

This paper reported an unusually encouraging result. Four coordinated laboratories tested sixteen newly discovered social and behavioural effects using rigour-enhancing practices throughout…

Skyler Prowten and colleagues repeated a widely cited experiment by Jonah Berger from 2011, in which undergraduates made more physically aroused, by jogging on the spot, were more likely to email a…

Przybylski and Weinstein tested the assumption underneath most screen-time advice, that more use means worse mental wellbeing, using a representative sample of more than a hundred thousand English…

Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman propose that beauty is not a property sitting in the object but a report on the viewer's own processing. Their claim is that the more easily a thing is taken in, the…

Redelmeier and Kahneman took the peak-end finding into a hospital. Nearly three hundred patients undergoing colonoscopy or lithotripsy reported their pain in real time throughout the procedure, and…

This is the randomised trial that followed, and it is the strongest evidence in the peak-end literature because it intervened rather than observed. Nearly seven hundred patients undergoing…

Reutner, Genschow and Wänke test the claim that red reduces food intake by acting as a danger signal that stops consumption. If that were the mechanism, red should suppress eating regardless of what…

Rhodes and colleagues reviewed the research on identity and self-schema in physical activity, asking whether seeing yourself as an active person adds anything to the standard social-cognitive…

Rhodes and colleagues reviewed the research on identity and self-schema in physical activity, asking whether seeing yourself as an active person adds anything to the standard social-cognitive…

This large British trial compared two psychological treatments for depression, with a question about cost as much as efficacy. Cognitive behavioural therapy is the best-evidenced treatment and…

Rime's review argues that emotion cannot be understood as a private event. His central observation, supported by a large body of his own research, is that people talk about emotional experiences…

Rithalia and colleagues conducted a systematic review of what presumed consent does to organ donation rates, covering five before-and-after studies of countries that changed their law, eight…

This is the original 1993 statement of the incentive-sensitisation theory, and it is organised around three questions. Why do addicted people crave drugs; why does craving persist long after…

Robinson and colleagues reviewed twenty-four experiments on whether attention and memory affect how much people eat, and combined the results. Four conclusions come out of it. Eating while…

Robinson and colleagues reviewed twenty-two experiments that manipulated how fast people ate and measured how much they then consumed. Combining them, eating more slowly was associated with eating…

Robinson and Berridge revisit the incentive-sensitisation theory of addiction thirty years after they proposed it, and the review is useful precisely because it engages with the objections. The…

Roisman and colleagues tested an idea that had become popular in the attachment literature: earned security, the person who describes a difficult childhood coherently and goes on to parent well…

Roisman and colleagues addressed a problem that had been quietly undermining the attachment literature: two different measures both called attachment, one a lengthy developmental interview about a…

Rolls and colleagues served fifty-one men and women lunch once a week for four weeks, varying only the amount of food presented, from a moderate portion to double it. People ate more when given…

Röseler and colleagues address a decade of research relating anchoring susceptibility to personality traits, including intelligence, the Big Five and narcissism, which has produced contradictory…

Roth and colleagues meta-analysed ninety-eight effect sizes on the sunk cost effect and made a distinction the literature had been blurring. Decisions where money has already been spent come in two…

Rozin and colleagues asked what actually tells a person a meal is over, and tested the answer with two patients whose amnesia was so severe they could not retain events for more than about a minute…

Rubin and colleagues document the reminiscence bump. When older adults recall their lives, memories cluster disproportionately in the years between roughly ten and thirty: the most memories, the…

This is the widely cited statement of self-determination theory for a general psychological audience, and the paper most people mean when they cite the theory itself. Its argument is that motivation…

Salganik, with Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts, built an artificial music market and published it in Science. In it 14,341 participants listened to and downloaded songs by bands they had never heard…

Salimpoor and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine what happens when a piece of music acquires reward value on first hearing. Participants listened to unfamiliar music…

Scaife and Bruner produced the first systematic description of infants following another person's gaze. They tested children across a range of ages, and reported that most infants of eight to ten…

Schaffer and Emerson's 1964 monograph reported a longitudinal study of Glasgow infants observed across their first eighteen months, and it is cited for findings that complicated the picture of…

Scheel, Schijen and Lakens compared what gets published when the decision to publish is made before the results are known. Registered Reports are reviewed and accepted on the basis of the question…

Schneider, Weinmann, Mohr and vom Brocke challenge the assumption that consumer ratings simply reflect consumer satisfaction, arguing that they can be influenced by the design of the rating system…

The title says what it found. Seabrooke, with Ariana Modirrousta-Galian and Philip Higham, re-examined the Bad News game using Indian true and fake news headlines in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review…

Seli and colleagues take aim at a number that had become common knowledge, the claim that people spend between a third and half of their waking lives mind wandering. Their objection is not that…

Shahab and Lades examine the relationship between sludge, as behavioural scientists use the term, and transaction costs as understood in economics. Both literatures use an analogy to friction, and…

Shanks identifies a statistical fault running through a large body of research on unconscious processing. The standard design measures two things: performance on some task, and awareness of the…

Shapira and Mongrain compared two brief online exercises, one designed to induce self-compassion and one to induce optimism, against a control task of writing about an early memory, with nearly two…

Sheil and colleagues characterise the subscription and cancellation flows of popular news websites in four countries and read them against recent regulatory changes. The premise is the asymmetry…

Shepherd, O'Carroll and Ferguson compared donation and transplant rates across forty-eight countries over thirteen years, controlling for extensive covariates and estimating the causal effect of the…

Sherman and Rivers argue that the category at the centre of psychology's most public argument does not exist. Social priming was the label attached to a set of high-profile findings that later…

This is a blog post rather than a paper, and it is cited because of what it does with the numbers everyone quotes. Discussion of the large reproducibility project in psychology usually reduces it to…

Smith, Windschitl and Bruchmann ran four studies on whether knowing about the subject reduces anchoring, a question the earlier literature had answered inconsistently. It does. Greater knowledge was…

Petrov and colleagues ran a registered, high-powered replication of a well-known set of studies claiming that sunk costs of time affect people less than sunk costs of money, on the reasoning that…

Song and Schwarz show that low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, and that this impression in turn produces perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether…

Sparrow, Liu and Wegner ran four experiments on what happens to memory when information is always retrievable. Two findings came out of them. First, when people were asked difficult factual…

No abstract could be found for this paper, so this page does not summarise it.

Spence's review is the standard reference for the claim that colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue for setting people's expectations about the likely taste and flavour of…

Sperandei and colleagues followed the membership records of more than five thousand people who joined a gym in Rio de Janeiro over nine years, tracking each person for a year or until they…

This is another company disclosure cited as industry data. Sphere Entertainment reported that its Las Vegas venue took around 379 million dollars from approximately 1.7 million tickets across 2025…

Staw's study gave the field escalation of commitment. Business students allocated research funding to one division of a company, were told their decision had gone badly or well, and were then given…

Steptoe, Shankar, Demakakos and Wardle ask whether the effects of social isolation and loneliness on mortality are independent, or whether loneliness is the emotional pathway through which isolation…

Stewart and Goss re-examined whether plate colour affects taste, this time alongside plate shape and using plates with more angular corners than earlier work. Using a two-by-two between-subjects…

Sugden, Zheng and Zizzo ran the experiment that establishes when an anchor actually moves money. Rather than asking people to estimate an unknown quantity, they used real buying and selling…

Sweis and colleagues built two matched foraging tasks, one for rodents and one for humans, in which a subject waits for a reward and can abandon the wait at any point. Mice, rats and people all…

Szaszi, Higney, Charlton, Tipton and colleagues reply to the same meta-analysis from a different direction. Their reading is that nudge interventions may work under certain conditions, and that the…

Takano and Tanno sampled people's thoughts eight times a day for a week, at semi-random intervals, recording what they were thinking about and how they felt. People prone to rumination showed…

Taylor and colleagues argue that the standard account of the human stress response, fight or flight, was built largely on male subjects and describes only part of what happens. Their proposal is…

Taylor and colleagues reviewed the studies that measured adult attachment before and after psychological therapy, asking whether attachment representations change with treatment. Across both…

Teixeira and colleagues reviewed sixty-six studies on exercise motivation from the perspective of self-determination theory, covering experiments, cross-sectional surveys and studies that followed…

Teixeira and colleagues reviewed sixty-six studies on exercise motivation from the perspective of self-determination theory, covering experiments, cross-sectional surveys and studies that followed…

Thaler's 1980 paper is one of the founding documents of behavioural economics. Its purpose is to collect systematic departures from the standard economic model of the consumer and show that they are…

Thaler's short piece in Science names the concept this publication uses throughout its coverage of subscriptions and cancellation. He restates the argument of Nudge, that improving the choice…

Thomas and colleagues note that research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which one actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and on the psychology of reciprocity…

Torre and Lieberman review the research on affect labelling and argue for a particular way of classifying it. Naming a feeling reduces the response to it, but unlike deliberate strategies such as…

This is the psychometric paper that split rumination in two. The response styles questionnaire had treated rumination as one thing, and this analysis of its items found two components inside it…

Norman Triplett examined official racing records and found that cyclists rode faster when paced or when racing against other riders than when riding alone against the clock. He then built a…

Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 paper set out three heuristics people use when judging probability and quantity under uncertainty: representativeness, availability, and anchoring and adjustment…

Updegraff and colleagues went looking for research on a familiar pattern: a person who cannot follow their exercise plan exactly decides to do nothing at all rather than do a reduced version. They…

Vadillo, Gold and Osman examined the proposal that glucose is the limited resource behind ego depletion, which was what allowed the depletion metaphor to be presented as a physiological mechanism…

Vadillo, Gold and Osman examined the proposal that glucose is the limited resource behind ego depletion, which was what allowed the depletion metaphor to be presented as a physiological mechanism…

Valtorta, Kanaan, Gilbody, Ronzi and Hanratty undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis of the association between loneliness or social isolation and incident coronary heart disease and…

Van den Akker and colleagues compared four hundred and fifty-nine registered research plans in psychology against the papers that eventually reported them, looking specifically at the hypotheses…

Van Doorn, Wuillemin and Spence tested whether the colour of a mug changes how the coffee in it is perceived. In the first experiment, cafe latte drunk from a white mug was rated higher in flavour…

Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg pooled nearly two thousand Strange Situation classifications from eight countries to ask whether attachment patterns differ by culture. Their headline result is the…

This paper proposes that the effect of dinnerware size on how much people serve themselves is a version of a known visual illusion, the Delboeuf illusion, in which a circle looks larger or smaller…

Vine, Boyd and Pennebaker asked whether the range of emotion words a person actually uses tells you anything about their life. Rather than administering a vocabulary test, they measured the emotion…

Vohs and colleagues ran the largest test of ego depletion, with thirty-six laboratories and more than three and a half thousand participants, and a design intended to be fair to the theory rather…

Voinea and colleagues develop a philosophical comparison between social media platforms and slot machines, both described as hostile attentional scaffolds: structures in the environment that shape…

Wansink, Painter and North used self-refilling soup bowls to test whether visual cues about portion size change how much people eat without changing what they think they have eaten. Fifty-four…

Watkins and colleagues tested a therapy designed to target rumination specifically, rather than depression in general, in patients whose depression had persisted despite medication. Forty-two people…

Wegner's theory explains why trying not to think about something makes it more present. Any attempt to control the mind, he argues, sets two processes running. One searches for material consistent…

Weingarten trained rats to associate an arbitrary external signal, unrelated to food in itself, with being fed. Once the association was learned, presenting the signal caused the animals to eat even…

Whitelock and colleagues attempted to replicate a finding that had become standard advice, that paying close attention to a meal while eating it reduces how much you eat later. Two experiments, with…

This paper re-examines the brooding and reflection distinction rather than assuming it. Its design is the useful part: the factor structure of the rumination measure was tested separately in people…

Williams and Bargh reported two experiments connecting physical temperature to social judgment. In the first, participants who had briefly held a cup of hot coffee rather than iced coffee rated a…

Witzel, O'Regan and Hansmann-Roth ask whether individual differences in perceiving the dress come from a general perceptual strategy, the way an observer attributes features in a two-dimensional…

Witzel and Gegenfurtner review the state of the art on object colours, colour constancy and colour categories. Their framing argument is worth carrying into any discussion of colour perception…

This study's title states its finding: students who forgave themselves for having put off studying for an examination put it off less before the next one. The reasoning behind it is the useful part…

Worchel, Lee and Adewole asked people to rate the value and attractiveness of cookies that were in either abundant or scarce supply, and varied how the scarcity came about. In the scarce conditions…

Wyatt and colleagues used continuous glucose monitors on more than a thousand people across British and American cohorts, who ate thousands of standardised meals followed by tens of thousands of…

Yao, Oppewal and Wang examine how consumers respond to unit price increase tactics that change a product's price and its package size at the same time, the two options being cheaper and smaller or…

Yilmaz Balban and colleagues ran a remote randomised controlled study comparing three daily five-minute breathwork exercises against an equivalent period of mindfulness meditation over one month…

This imaging study is cited for the mechanism its title names: after sleep deprivation, the amygdala responds more strongly to unpleasant images, and its usual connection with the prefrontal regions…

Zaccaro and colleagues systematically reviewed slow breathing techniques, defined as fewer than ten breaths per minute, and their psychophysiological effects in healthy subjects, following PRISMA…

Zatorre and Salimpoor review how the brain gets from perceiving a pattern of sound to a pleasurable response. They identify auditory cortical circuits responsible for encoding and storing tonal…

Zessin and colleagues meta-analysed seventy-nine samples, more than sixteen thousand people, on the relationship between self-compassion and wellbeing. The overall association is moderate to large…