Popular music may be reflecting a growing culture of vices, according to new research from the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. The analysis of musical evolution found that song lyrics have become increasingly negative over the past six decades, with declining references to moral virtues. This could provide an important indicator of a cultural shift in society.

Conventional wisdom says the best predictions are the ones that minimize mistakes, but new research suggests that is not necessarily how people see it. A study published in Management Science has found that when people make or evaluate predictions, they care more about the possibility of being exactly right than about reducing the size of potential errors. In many cases, people prefer predictions that increase the chance of a perfect outcome, even if doing so creates a greater risk of larger mistakes.

In romantic relationships, touch is usually considered part of everyday life: a quick back rub while cooking dinner, a hug after a long day at work or a lingering kiss before falling asleep. It's a simple way to show support, express affection and communicate sexual desire.

People make financial choices to avoid losing money or experiencing regret, rather than simply balancing expected monetary returns with their tolerance for financial risk, according to a new study led by Lisa Posey, associate professor of risk management in the Penn State Smeal College of Business.

Giving AI a human-like memory limitation may actually help it learn language better. In their new proof-of-principle study, Abishek Thamma (University of Amsterdam) and Micha Heilbron (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) show that small language models equipped with a transient memory learn grammar more efficiently when trained on child-scale amounts of language input. The findings demonstrate how insights from psycholinguistics can inspire new approaches to AI learning. The findings are published in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

New research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) suggests attitudes, particularly those that excuse harmful behavior, may be a stronger predictor of willingness to create deepfake pornography than personality traits. The findings are published in the Journal of Sexual Aggression.

Research examining Pride events across the U.K. has found that modern Pride celebrations have evolved into year-round community hubs that act simultaneously as protests, safe spaces and cultural festivals for local LGBTQIA+ communities.

Childhood rejection, discrimination and bullying can affect your well-being as an adult. If your friends, family or community pushed you away because of your sexuality or gender, these childhood experiences of prejudice can also affect your future relationships.

A new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg shows that a unique grammatical construction found in Estonia-Swedish dialects contradicts established assumptions about what is possible in Germanic languages.

Can economic inequality threaten liberal societies? This question lies at the heart of the POLAR project led by Markus Gangl, a sociologist at Goethe University Frankfurt. Several publications examining different aspects of the issue shed light on how trust in democracy, belief in meritocracy and perceptions of equal opportunity are changing.

Which major life events matter to young people? A study by the University of Zurich (UZH) shows that adolescents and young adults primarily cite positive, everyday developmental steps as formative events, for example, school and apprenticeships, friendships, first relationships, travel, and moving out of their parents' home. UZH researchers evaluated open-ended written responses from 1,442 participants in a long-term study. Each participant was surveyed at ages 15, 17, 20 and 24.

Men and women achieve similar economic outcomes in negotiations, but female negotiators foster stronger interpersonal relationships, which lead in turn to greater satisfaction with the result and a greater desire to negotiate with that woman again in the future.

Identifying risk factors is crucial to designing effective prevention strategies against bullying and cyberbullying. A study conducted by the Laboratory for Studies on Coexistence and Violence Prevention (LAECOVI) at the University of Córdoba has jointly analyzed emotional, cognitive and behavioral risk factors to identify different student profiles and determine which cognitive strategies are associated with them.