Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
5 papers
This review sums up research showing that being in or exposed to nature is linked to better mental functioning and mood. Lab and field experiments find short-term improvements in stress and mood from nature sights, sounds, and walks in green places. Population studies also find people living near green or…
This 2014 review explains that the brain’s reward system — especially a region called the striatum — responds not only to things like food or money but also to social outcomes such as praise. The authors summarize many studies showing that the striatum carries signals when people evaluate social rewards,…
Anxiety has long been linked to worse performance in evaluative social settings such as sex, sport, and stage. This paper asks three main questions: how each field understands anxiety and performance, what they can learn from one another, and how they could share useful ideas. The authors review existing models…
This paper looks at whether trainee psychedelic therapists should be required to take psychedelic drugs so they can understand patients' experiences. The authors review the idea that first-person psychedelic trips give special knowledge, and they argue this benefit is not clearly unique or proven. They conclude that forcing trainees to…
Emotional intelligence (EI) here means real, testable skills for noticing, understanding, using, and managing emotions. Researchers now favor ability-based tests over self-reports because self-reports often look like personality. But ability-based EI has measurement problems and only small, inconsistent links to real-world outcomes. Some studies find tiny or near-zero links with…
