Eyewitness identification bias, PTSD treatment dropout, and more scientific findings

Seeing the same person in multiple lineups increases the likelihood an eyewitness will identify that person as the culprit, even if the person is innocent, a phenomenon called the ­repeated-suspect effect. Research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied shows how factors related to memory and social expectations may shape this effect, potentially increasing the risk of misidentification. In one experiment with 316 university students, participants who saw a biased lineup (in which the innocent suspect stood out) showed a stronger repeated-suspect effect than those who saw a fair lineup (in which all lineup members looked similar). Another experiment with 303 university students highlighted the role of social expectations: Participants were more likely to report feeling influenced by the researcher’s presence when they saw multiple lineups or when they saw a biased lineup.
DOI: 10.1037/xap0000553

Data suggest that members of the military—including active service members and veterans—are more likely to discontinue treatment for ­post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than civilians. But are they more likely to stop some trauma-focused treatments than others? To find out, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 181 studies that included 124,092 veterans and service members and 232 treatments. The results, published in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, indicated that the estimated dropout rate across all treatments was 25.6%. Weekly cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure therapy, and virtual reality exposure therapy had the highest estimated dropout rates; weekly present-centered therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and group-based exposure therapy had the lowest. The researchers note that treatments with higher dropout rates can still make a meaningful difference; understanding and addressing the reasons for dropout can help keep military members engaged with their mental health care, supporting their health and well-being over the long term.
DOI: 10.1037/tra0002070

Children as young as 4 years old can use evidence to dispute false causal claims, an ability that continues to develop through age 5.5, according to a longitudinal study in Developmental Psychology. A total of 179 German children participated in the study across two time points. At each session, the children interacted with various blocks, learning which blocks activated a light (e.g., blocks with dots). When presented with a false causal claim (“big blocks activate the light; dots do not matter”), 55% of the children produced a valid counterargument at age 4, and 71% did so at age 5.5. When asked to pick between two blocks to disprove the false claim, most children chose the block that provided unconfounded evidence (e.g., small block with dot) over the one that provided confounded evidence (e.g., big block with dot), regardless of age. The findings indicate that the foundation for scientific reasoning emerges early in childhood and continues to develop with age.
DOI: 10.1037/dev0002080

Across cultures and languages, people show broad similarities in how they think about deceptive statements, according to research in American Psychologist. In an online study, 3,666 participants from Chile, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States read scenarios featuring deceptive statements, such as a person saying “I ate some of the cookies” when they had eaten all of them. While these kinds of statements are true in a literal sense, they may be interpreted as implying something untrue. Participants indicated whether they thought the person making each statement had lied and whether they had said something true or false. Across countries, participants’ judgments followed broadly similar patterns. When they deemed a statement false, they were also highly likely to deem it a lie, suggesting they considered the implicit meaning when determining deceit. Further studies can clarify whether similar patterns emerge in other contexts and for other kinds of deception, such as lying by omission.
DOI: 10.1037/amp0001626

While personality traits are thought to influence how long we live, evidence for specific associations is inconsistent across studies. To bring clarity to these findings, researchers conducted a preregistered meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. The meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined data from 569,859 people across 28 eligible studies that included death data and measures of the Big Five personality traits. Overall, higher levels of trait neuroticism were linked with a higher likelihood of early death, and this association was stronger for younger participants. In addition, higher levels of trait extraversion and conscientiousness were linked with a lower risk of premature death, specifically in samples from North America and Australia. Various health factors (e.g., physical activity, anxiety) partly explained the associations between some of the traits, in line with the idea that personality may influence health behaviors. The associations with neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness remained consistent even when the researchers accounted for all Big Five traits in one statistical model, suggesting each of the three traits has an independent effect on mortality. Further research is needed to determine whether these findings generalize beyond high-income countries.
DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000577

Having conversations with someone who holds an opposing viewpoint may shift attitudes more than people expect, according to research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In several online studies, participants in the United States and United Kingdom underestimated how much their attitudes and their conversation partner’s attitudes would change after talking about a topic on which they disagreed. Findings showed that these conversations—on topics ranging from dogs and cats to cancel culture to President Biden’s job performance—tended to shift participants’ attitudes somewhat closer together, and these shifts lasted up to 1 week. Although participants often assumed they disagreed on fundamental grounds, engaging in conversation tended to reveal unexpected points of connection. Participants who learned that conversations could lead to attitude change were more interested in talking to someone with an opposing viewpoint. Future studies can clarify how factors such as the number of conversation partners, conversational structure, and presence of an audience affect these findings.
DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000469

Although it’s commonly assumed that work stressors lead to burnout, data from 2,131 employees in Germany suggest that the relationship may work the other way around. Researchers collected data from the employees at five points over a 24-month period. The findings, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, indicate that employees who reported increased burnout over a 6-month interval tended to have more work stressors in the following 6 months. This pattern was consistent across different types of work stressors and over longer time intervals. The reverse relationship—increased stressors predicting higher burnout—emerged only among employees who had consistently low job resources (such as low autonomy and low social support) and employees who had high levels of stressors. Additional analyses indicated that burnout has a stronger overarching effect on stressors than stressors have on burnout. According to the researchers, these findings underscore the importance of examining within-person change across variables to understand causal relationships.
DOI: 10.1037/ocp0000417

People may experience connection and companionship (social ­well-being) while also experiencing loneliness and disconnection (social ill-being), especially during times of social transition, according to a study in PLOS One. Researchers collected data from 4,812 adults (ages 18 to 95), including measures of social well-being, social ill-being, recent life changes, perceived stress, and recent relationship experiences. Overall, both young adults and older adults had high levels of social well-being, while young adults had higher levels of social ill-being. Cluster analysis indicated that about 61% of participants clustered into a group characterized by high social well-being and moderate social ill-being. People in this group tended to be younger, more educated, and female; they also reported more life changes over the past year. The findings suggest that feelings of loneliness may be coupled with connection and companionship, especially amid the social transience and life transitions of early adulthood.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0334787opens in new window

Word-finding ability is associated with variation in executive function among healthy adults, according to a study of natural speech in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. In two studies, 67 healthy older adults (ages 65 to 75) and 174 healthy adults (ages 18 to 90) completed measures of working memory, response inhibition, task switching, and other cognitive abilities related to executive function. They also verbally described two complex images. Natural speech analysis indicated that greater word-finding difficulties in the verbal descriptions were associated with lower executive function abilities in both samples, even after accounting for age, gender, and education. That is, healthy adults who had slower or more hesitant speech tended to perform worse on the executive function tasks. The researchers posit that natural speech analysis may offer a relatively accessible tool for detecting subtle cognitive changes that is not confounded by practice effects over time.
DOI: 10.1044/2025_JSLHR-24-00268opens in new window

The brain makes ongoing predictions about what will happen next, influencing how we remember things in motion, a phenomenon called representational momentum. A series of seven online experiments in Psychological Science suggests that representational momentum also affects how people remember changes in brightness, color saturation, and proportion. In one online experiment, 215 participants watched an animation of a gray square becoming brighter or darker. The animation stopped at a random point and then disappeared. When asked to pick the frame that looked like the one they had seen last, participants tended to select a square that was about 5.54 frames ahead in the sequence. For example, when they had seen a square getting brighter, they remembered the last frame as brighter than it was. The researchers replicated these results under varying conditions and found similar effects with changes in color saturation and proportion, but not changing hue. Together, these experiments highlight the predictive nature of the brain and its effects on perceptual memory.
DOI: 10.1177/09567976251395074opens in new window

Does exposure to multiple languages confer health benefits? To find out, researchers examined health data from 86,149 participants in 27 European countries. For each participant, they calculated a biobehavioral age gap, which reflected the difference between the participant’s chronological age and their predicted age based on factors such as functional ability, cognition, cardiometabolic conditions, and sensory impairments. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses published in Nature Aging indicated that people from multilingual countries tended to have smaller biobehavioral age gaps. In other words, people from countries with high levels of multilingualism were less likely to experience accelerated aging, while people from countries with low levels of multilingualism were more likely to experience accelerated aging. These patterns held even after accounting for other country-level linguistic, physical, social, socioeconomic, and political factors. While the findings suggest that living in a multilingual environment may confer health benefits, individual-­level data are needed to determine whether speaking multiple languages directly affects healthy aging.
DOI: 10.1038/s43587-025-01000-2opens in new window

While some studies have pointed to links between children’s smartphone use and health, research in Pediatrics indicates that the age at which children get a smartphone may also matter. Examining data from 10,588 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, researchers found that 12-year-olds who had smartphones were more likely to meet criteria for depression, insufficient sleep, and obesity than their peers without smartphones. Furthermore, the researchers found small but significant associations with the age of smartphone acquisition: The younger the children were when they got their smartphones, the more likely they were to have insufficient sleep and obesity at age 12. Participants who got smartphones between ages 12 and 13 were more likely to have clinically significant mental health symptoms and insufficient sleep than their peers who remained phoneless at 13. The links between smartphone ownership and health were consistent even after accounting for factors such as race, ethnicity, household income, and ownership of other devices. Follow-up data can shed light on whether and how these associations change throughout adolescence.
DOI: 10.1542/peds.2025-072941opens in new window

When you hear someone speaking another language, the sounds that are discrete and intelligible to them may seem completely uninterpretable to you. A study in Nature sheds light on what happens in the brain when we hear familiar and unfamiliar languages. Researchers analyzed high-resolution direct brain recordings taken from 20 monolingual participants as they listened to natural speech in their native language and another language (either English, Spanish, or Mandarin). The researchers focused on activity in the superior temporal gyrus, an area of the brain that is critical for speech perception. While groups of neurons that responded to acoustic-phonetic features of speech tended to do so for both native and foreign languages, groups of neurons that responded to word-specific features (such as word boundaries) tended to do so for participants’ native language only. Additional data from eight bilingual participants indicated enhanced neural encoding for word- and sequence-level information for both languages. The findings suggest that the superior temporal gyrus plays a role in processing the fundamental features of speech and the aspects of speech that are learned through specific, daily experience.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09748-8opens in new window

Collaborative rule learning may lead to alignment in brain activity across people, according to research in PLOS Biology. Researchers used EEG hyperscanning to simultaneously record the brain activity of 24 participant pairs as they worked together to establish and apply specific rules for categorizing images. For comparison purposes, the researchers also created a group of pseudo pairs, matching participants who had seen the same images in the same order but had not collaborated as a pair. Using a new technique called interbrain representational similarity analysis, the researchers then measured the degree of information alignment reflected in the brain activity of each pair. Both real and pseudo pairs showed early alignment in brain activity about 50 to 165 milliseconds after an image appeared, suggesting shared visual representations. However, alignment in brain activity lasted longer among the real pairs and strengthened with feedback across trials, suggesting collaboration-specific neural representations. Together, the findings highlight the social dynamics of information alignment across brains. Future studies can explore how information alignment plays out with different types of social interactions and time scales.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003479opens in new window

Having the approval of friends may boost intercultural couples’ relationships more than having the approval of family or society, according to a study in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The findings, based on data from 757 adults across three online samples, indicated that the approval of friends was particularly linked with relationship quality among non-White couples. When the researchers explored potential cultural differences, they found that family approval was linked with relationship quality only for participants who identified as Latin American or Middle Eastern. Family approval was also linked with relationship quality for participants in newer relationships. According to the researchers, these results suggest that friends may play a unique role in affirming and supporting intercultural couples, many of whom experience discrimination and marginalization.
DOI: 10.1177/19485506251389441opens in new window

Researchers found no long-term differences in language skills between children who received a preschool language intervention and those who did not, suggesting that the early effects seen in first grade had faded by fourth grade. The study, published in Psychological Science, followed 301 preschoolers in Norway who were identified as having lower vocabulary skills. Some of the children were randomly assigned to a 30-week language-comprehension intervention, while others received instruction as usual. The intervention included story-focused conversation and language training related to vocabulary, grammar, and narrative skills. The researchers found that the initial intervention effects on children’s expressive language skills lasted into first grade and seemed to have the greatest benefits for children who began the intervention with the lowest skills. However, the effects did not last into fourth grade. According to the researchers, the findings highlight the importance of viewing interventions as a starting point for ongoing educational support.
DOI: 10.1177/09567976251392219opens in new window

Aging may bring experience and perspective, but how does it influence our ability to manage our emotions? Researchers examined daily diary data, collected over 28 days, from 133 younger adults (ages 20 to 35) and 119 older adults (ages 64 to 80). Each day, participants reported the most stressful situation that they encountered and the extent to which they used two emotion regulation strategies: reappraising and modifying the situation. They also reported the degree to which they felt the stressor was within their control. In general, older adults were more likely to report using both emotion regulation strategies, suggests a study in Emotion. Older adults varied their use of situation modification more over time and adjusted their approach in line with how much control they felt they had, indicating flexible, situation-specific use of the strategy. Unexpectedly, both younger and older adults used cognitive reappraisal more with stressors they saw as more controllable. Overall, the findings suggest that older adults may be particularly adept at adjusting their emotional responses to manage the stresses of daily life.
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001617