Psychology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Do mathematical skills that children acquire in the classroom transfer to real-world settings — and vice versa? Evidence from five large groups of children in India reveals that current school-based teaching practices are failing to bridge the gap. An innovative approach is needed to connect abstract maths to intuitively meaningful contexts and problems.

Overcrowding can lead to disaster, and yet the dynamics of dense groups of people are poorly understood. Analysis of a festival uncovers collective rotational movements that emerge at critical densities, which could be universal.

As powerful institutions increasingly promote AI systems, efforts to align those systems with human morality have grown. An open-source AI system aims to predict human moral judgments across a broad spectrum of everyday situations expressed in natural language. Identifying the limitations of such systems offers important insights for future work.

Here the authors show that an emotion regulation intervention for reducing negative intergroup emotions in conflicts can decrease negative emotions not only in treated participants but also in nontreated participants through emotion regulation contagion.

Do mathematical skills that children acquire in the classroom transfer to real-world settings — and vice versa? Evidence from five large groups of children in India reveals that current school-based teaching practices are failing to bridge the gap. An innovative approach is needed to connect abstract maths to intuitively meaningful contexts and problems.

Overcrowding can lead to disaster, and yet the dynamics of dense groups of people are poorly understood. Analysis of a festival uncovers collective rotational movements that emerge at critical densities, which could be universal.

Search engines, GPS maps and other tech can alter our ability to learn and remember. Now scientists are working out what AI might do.

An interdisciplinary approach to healthcare highlights the significant role of collaboration between healthcare professionals to ensure comprehensive patient care. Integrative approaches in disease management are essential to improving patient outcomes and healthcare quality, as they emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, effective doctor-patient communication, and the incorporation of cultural perspectives into medical practice. The pitfalls of fragmented care and absent teamwork between healthcare professionals often result in a narrow medical perspective, which negatively impacts patient outcomes. In this process, doctor-patient communication is a key factor in providing quality care and improving health outcomes. Communication gaps between health professionals and patients, influenced by beliefs and expectations, risk giving rise to two errors that can compromise the therapeutic alliance: the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy and the nocebo effect. To address these challenges, it is crucial to prioritize effective communication strategies that enhance patient understanding and foster shared decision-making. Furthermore, integrating a Bayesian interpretation of the human mind into healthcare helps discourage reliance on a singular perspective, ensuring a broader understanding of patient needs and contexts informs medical decisions. Looking forward, the adoption of a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to patient treatment and the incorporation of patient preferences into treatment decisions can enable continuous learning among healthcare professionals, ultimately contributing to a truly patient-centered healthcare system.