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But there’s a lot we still don’t know about these intrusive thoughts of food

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A groundbreaking study emerging from the University of Gothenburg has shed new light on the persistent problem of improper waste disposal, revealing that the emotional response of disgust plays a critical role in shaping public behavior in shared environments. Traditionally, waste management failures have been attributed largely to social norms and carelessness. However, this new research emphasizes the powerful influence of sensory and emotional perceptions, particularly disgust sensitivity, on how individuals interact with waste disposal spaces.

The conventional wisdom posits that people’s waste disposal habits are mainly influenced by the behaviors of those around them—if littering is common, individuals are more likely to follow suit. While this social contagion effect is well-documented, it overlooks a vital psychological component: the visceral reaction humans have to unclean environments. When people perceive a space, such as a waste disposal room, as dirty or revolting, their discomfort and aversion can drive them to avoid engaging in proper disposal behavior, ironically exacerbating the original problem.

Dr. Jacob Sohlberg, a political scientist spearheading this research, explains that disgust—a fundamental human emotion designed to protect us from contamination—can paradoxically undermine environmental cleanliness. “People sensitive to disgust may actively avoid spending time in waste disposal areas if these spaces are perceived as repugnant, increasing the likelihood of haphazard waste disposal elsewhere,” Sohlberg notes. This new perspective shifts waste management research beyond the realm of pure social compliance and into the intricate interplay of human emotion and environmental cues.

The study focused on disadvantaged neighborhoods in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, areas where littering is notably problematic and causes significant concern among residents. Prior empirical evidence uncovered that in these communities, residents view littering as a problem as severe as crime and unemployment, issues typically regarded as more pressing societal challenges. This underscores the urgency of addressing waste disposal inefficiencies comprehensively, taking into account not only social policies but human psychological tendencies.

The research team proposed three pivotal hypotheses. First, that unclean waste disposal environments heighten the incidence of improper waste disposal. Second, that individuals with heightened disgust sensitivity are disproportionately likely to dispose of waste incorrectly. Third, that the adverse effect of dirty surroundings on waste disposal behavior is magnified in those with high disgust sensitivity. These hypotheses guided a multifaceted research design involving field intervention, experimental manipulation, and large-scale surveys.

In a hands-on field study conducted over three weeks in Gothenburg, researchers allied with a local municipal housing company to observe waste disposal behavior in real time. Two waste stations were meticulously cleaned daily, while eight stations served as controls with no intervention. The results were revealing: stations subjected to extra cleaning saw a marked decrease in littering and erroneous waste disposal. Conversely, control stations showed no significant change, highlighting the tangible benefits of environmental maintenance on public behavior.

To directly examine the psychological mechanisms at play, the team designed a controlled experiment involving more than 300 residents from a disadvantaged Gothenburg neighborhood. Participants were exposed to images of either a pristine or a filthy waste disposal station. Those who viewed the dirty environment reported a significantly lower willingness to use the waste station properly, particularly among those scoring high on a disgust sensitivity scale. This experimental approach confirmed a causal link between perceived environmental cleanliness, disgust, and waste disposal intentions.

Expanding on these results, a third study reached over one thousand participants across socioeconomically challenged neighborhoods in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland through an online experiment that mirrored the earlier design. The data robustly supported the preliminary findings: perceptions of dirty waste disposal spaces increased self-reported intentions to mismanage waste, with disgust sensitivity intensifying this effect. Such consistency across different populations and methodologies affirms the generalizability of the emotional response’s role in waste behavior.

From a policy standpoint, this research translates into actionable strategies. Municipal authorities and housing agencies aiming to mitigate littering and improve waste management efficacy should prioritize the cleanliness and aesthetic quality of waste disposal areas. A well-maintained waste station not only encourages proper disposal but also fosters a community-wide perception of care and order, potentially creating a virtuous cycle of environmental stewardship and social norm adherence.

The societal implications of these findings extend beyond mere environmental tidiness. Cleaner waste disposal areas improve residents’ quality of life, enhancing neighborhood attractiveness and reducing public health risks associated with waste mismanagement. Moreover, better-managed waste systems facilitate the achievement of broader sustainability goals, lowering contamination risks and enhancing recycling efficacy.

Researchers anticipate that integrating psychological insights such as disgust sensitivity into urban planning and public health campaigns will refine waste management interventions. This emotionally informed approach moves beyond traditional messaging and enforcement, incorporating environmental design considerations that shape unconscious behavioral drivers effectively.

Ultimately, the research from the University of Gothenburg propels the discourse on waste disposal into new dimensions, showcasing the synergy between human psychology, environmental conditions, and collective action. It serves as a reminder that solving public sanitation issues necessitates nuanced understanding of both societal structures and the fundamental, innate emotional systems governing human behavior.

As cities worldwide grapple with mounting waste challenges, the integration of emotion-focused research provides a promising avenue to foster healthier public spaces. Keeping waste disposal environments not only clean but also psychologically inviting may very well be the key to reducing littering and promoting sustainable waste habits in vulnerable urban communities.

Subject of Research: Waste disposal behavior and disgust sensitivity in socioeconomically disadvantaged public environments.

Article Title: How Disgust Sensitivity Shapes Waste Disposal Behavior in Everyday Public Environments: Experimental and Difference-in-Differences Studies in the Nordic Countries

News Publication Date: 28-Apr-2026

Web References:
DOI Link

Image Credits: Photo: Emelie Asplund, featuring Jacob Sohlberg, political scientist at University of Gothenburg.

Keywords: Disgust sensitivity, waste disposal behavior, littering, public environment, environmental psychology, socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods, waste management, recycling, behavioral intervention, urban sanitation.

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The image most of us have of a gratitude journal is a little precious. A leather notebook, a quiet corner, a candle maybe, and a person carefully composing several lines about the sunset and the smell of coffee. It looks like a ritual you have to earn the time for.

This was the image I used to have of it at least, and I think because it looks like that for some, many of us never start, or start once and quietly let it go.

When I went looking at the actual research on this, I expected it to be flimsier than the hype. It was, in fact, sturdier than I thought, and also much smaller and less precious than the candle version suggests.

A quick note before we go further: I am a curious generalist, not a psychologist. What follows is my reading of the research, not advice for your situation. The studies here are observational or short experimental trials, and population-level patterns are not promises about what any one person will feel.

The modern science of this traces back to a 2003 paper by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens.” As put by the researchers, across three experiments, “gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison group.” The findings suggested that taking account of what we have in life has emotional and interpersonal benefits. 

The benefits are also well backed up by experts like those at UCLA Health who not that gratitude can help to reduce depression and anxiety, relieve stress and even improve heart health. 

But here’s the twist. Doing it more often does not always appear to be better. A frequency study led by Sonja Lyubomirsky, reported by the Greater Good Science Center, found that people who journaled once a week for six weeks felt happier afterward, while people who did it three times a week did not. The likely reason is the thing that quietly undermines most good feelings. As Emmons puts it, “We adapt to positive events quickly, especially if we constantly focus on them. It seems counterintuitive, but it is how the mind works.” That single line reframes the whole thing for me. The instinct, if you believe something is good for you, is to do it harder and more often.

The writing is something I think we should touch on, too. It’s not just a way of recording the gratitude, it seems. It might be where a lot of the work happens. Emmons describes it this way: “Writing helps to organize thoughts, facilitate integration, and helps you accept your own experiences and put them in context.”

I think most of us already feel grateful for things in a vague, passing way. The dog is fine, the work email got sorted, a friend texted back. These thoughts float by and dissolve. Putting one of them into a sentence forces you to decide what it actually was and why it mattered, and that small act of naming is what seems to give it weight. The guidance that has settled out of this body of work leans toward depth over breadth, one thing properly felt rather than ten things listed flat.

The reassuring thing is that the experts do not ask for the candle. Emmons is blunt about it: “You don’t need to buy a fancy personal journal to record your entries in, or worry about spelling or grammar.” And against all the tidy tips, he keeps one honest caveat in play, that “there is no one right way to do it.” That line matters more than any of the prescriptions around it, because it takes the pressure off getting it right.

So the version I would actually defend is almost embarrassingly small. A few lines, once or twice a week, on whatever is at hand. Not a ritual, not a system, just the act of jotting down a few things we are grateful for. 

If the reason you are reading about gratitude is that things have felt heavy lately, that is worth taking seriously. A journal is a fine thing, but a good therapist is a better one when the weight is real.

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Most conversations about menopause, to the extent they happen in a clinical setting at all, start and end at the same set of symptoms. Hot flashes. Night sweats. Sleep disruption. Mood changes. These are real, they are common, and for many women they are severe enough to significantly affect quality of life. But they are also, in an important sense, the surface of a much deeper physiological story — one that involves the brain directly, in structural and functional terms, and one that most women are not hearing from the people who are supposed to be helping them navigate this transition.

The cognitive dimension of menopause — the memory changes, the concentration difficulties, the particular kind of mental fatigue that many women in their late forties and fifties describe — has been systematically underrepresented in clinical guidance and research funding for decades. That is beginning to change, but the change is arriving slowly, and the practical consequence is that women are frequently left to interpret their own symptoms without context, without a framework, and without information about interventions whose effectiveness is, at this point, reasonably well supported by evidence — provided the timing is right. The timing, it turns out, is everything.

What the brain actually goes through

A 2026 review published in The Lancet titled “Advances in understanding of cognitive symptoms during menopause” brought together the current state of evidence on what happens neurologically during this transition, and the picture it presents is more specific and more structural than the popular understanding of menopause typically includes. Estrogen is not merely a reproductive hormone. It has well-documented neuroprotective effects — it supports synaptic plasticity, promotes the production of acetylcholine (a neurotransmitter central to memory and attention), and appears to modulate the brain’s inflammatory response. When estrogen levels decline during the menopausal transition, the brain is not simply losing a hormone. It is losing a system of support it has relied on throughout adulthood.

The structural consequences are measurable. Research cited by the Menopause Society has documented reductions in gray matter volume in the frontal and temporal cortex and in the hippocampus — precisely the regions involved in memory formation, executive function, and the ability to hold and manipulate information in working memory. These reductions are not subtle on a population level. They are consistent enough across studies to be considered a feature of the menopausal transition rather than an incidental variation. What this means, practically, is that the brain fog many women report during perimenopause is not psychosomatic, not a side effect of stress or poor sleep alone, and not a symptom that politely awaits acknowledgment before making itself felt in daily life.

The cognitive symptoms women are experiencing but not naming

There is a particular kind of suffering that comes from experiencing symptoms you cannot name, in a domain where your reports have historically been met with skepticism or normalization. Many women going through perimenopause describe a cognitive texture that is difficult to articulate precisely because it is diffuse — not a single dramatic deficit but a constellation of subtle difficulties that compound over time. Forgetfulness that feels qualitatively different from ordinary absentmindedness. Difficulty holding a thread of thought through a complex task. A kind of mental friction that wasn’t there before, an extra effort required to do things that previously felt automatic.

The research vocabulary for this cluster of experiences covers attention, working memory, verbal memory, and executive function — all the cognitive capacities associated with the prefrontal and hippocampal regions where gray matter reductions have been documented. The SWAN (Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation) cohort, which has followed women longitudinally through the menopausal transition for over two decades, found that cognitive performance declines measurably during perimenopause. Crucially, the SWAN data also suggests that this decline may not be permanent — there is evidence of possible reversal, or at least stabilization, in the postmenopausal phase as the brain adapts to its new hormonal environment.

That potential reversal is important information. It means that what women experience during perimenopause is not necessarily a preview of permanent cognitive decline but a transition period with its own arc — one that the brain navigates, imperfectly and with varying degrees of difficulty, toward a new equilibrium. The problem is that understanding this arc, and making informed decisions about whether and how to intervene, requires a conversation that is not yet happening routinely in clinical settings.

The timing problem with hormone therapy

The most consequential piece of information in the current evidence base — and the one most likely to remain unshared in a routine clinical visit — is that the effectiveness of hormone therapy for cognitive outcomes is not uniform across time. It depends critically on when treatment is initiated, and the window during which initiation appears most beneficial is the same window during which most women are still actively navigating the transition and most actively need support.

An observational study published in Neurology found that estrogen therapy initiated in midlife — during or shortly after the menopausal transition — was associated with improved verbal memory. The same intervention initiated later in life showed no such association. This is not a minor calibration note. It is a fundamental characteristic of how the intervention works, and it means that a woman who waits until her sixties to discuss hormone therapy with a doctor, perhaps because the cognitive conversation never happened in her fifties, may have missed the window during which that therapy could have meaningfully supported brain health.

This timing dependence is sometimes described as the “critical window hypothesis” — the idea that the neuroprotective effects of estrogen are most available when the brain’s estrogen receptors are still responsive and the menopausal transition is still underway. The research supporting this hypothesis is actively contested. A 2025 meta-analysis in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, applying stricter risk-of-bias criteria, found no evidence for a cognitive benefit tied to the timing of hormone therapy. Other analyses, including a Weill Cornell meta-analysis of 34 randomised trials, found timing-dependent effects on verbal memory for certain formulations. The broad signal is present in parts of the literature, but it is not yet settled science. Individual variation, hormonal formulation, and interaction with other risk factors all affect outcomes in ways the research has not fully resolved.

But the broad signal — that earlier intervention is more effective than later intervention for cognitive outcomes — is consistent enough that leading researchers have begun calling explicitly for earlier, more routine discussion of these options with patients.

The UK Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists identified the cognitive effects of menopause as one of its top ten research priorities — a designation that reflects both the seriousness of the issue and the relative thinness of the clinical infrastructure currently built around it.

Why the conversation isn’t happening

The reasons the conversation isn’t happening are multiple, and none of them are particularly flattering to the systems involved. Menopause has historically been undertreated and under-researched relative to its prevalence and impact. The WHI study of the early 2000s, which raised concerns about hormone therapy and was widely interpreted as a broad warning against it, cast a long shadow over the field — even though subsequent analysis substantially revised that picture, particularly for younger women and for the specific question of cognitive outcomes. That shadow has been slow to lift from clinical practice.

There is also the matter of consultation time. A standard appointment is not well structured for a conversation that requires explaining neurological mechanisms, walking through evidence about timing and formulation, discussing individual risk factors, and arriving at a genuinely informed decision. Many women do not bring the cognitive symptoms up, partly because they are uncertain whether they are real or significant, partly because they have absorbed the cultural message that menopause is something to be endured rather than managed. And many clinicians, even those who are receptive, do not ask — either because it falls outside their training, because they are uncertain of the evidence, or simply because the appointment ends before the topic arises.

What changes if the conversation does happen — earlier, more routinely, and with better information on both sides — is that women can make decisions about their own brain health during the window in which those decisions carry the most weight. Not all women will want or be appropriate candidates for hormone therapy. There are legitimate individual differences in risk profile, personal preference, and clinical judgment that should shape those decisions. But the decision cannot be made well if the information never arrives. The current situation, in which timing matters enormously and most women are not told that timing matters, is not an acceptable equilibrium — and the evidence base is strong enough that calling for more routine clinical discussion is not premature.

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We tend to think of laughter as a social performance — the audible signal that something is funny, the punctuation on a joke well received. Even people who study emotion professionally can drift into treating laughter as essentially expressive, as the outward visible surface of an inner state. But a growing body of research is pushing back against that framing, and the pushback is coming from neuroscience rather than philosophy.

Laughter, it turns out, is a biological event with measurable consequences for the hormonal environment, the neural reward system, and — in the case of children — the actual architecture of the developing brain. It is not merely the sign of a good mood. It is, in important respects, a driver of one.

A 2026 book, “The Brain Loves to Laugh” by Dr. Jacqueline Harding, an early childhood researcher at Middlesex University, published by Routledge, brought a degree of biological specificity to this question that has rarely been attempted at the developmental level. Harding’s analysis synthesized research across neuroscience, developmental psychology, and endocrinology to ask what laughter does to the brain — not in the abstract, but in the physiological and structural sense, and particularly during the period when the brain is most susceptible to experience-dependent shaping. The findings complicate the idea that laughter is something that happens to children. They suggest it is something that happens inside them, at a level that shapes who they become.

The reward circuit connection

One of the more striking findings in Harding’s analysis is the mapping of laughter onto the brain’s mesolimbic reward system — the same distributed network activated by food, sex, social bonding, and other stimuli that evolution has decided are worth pursuing. This is not a metaphor about how laughter feels good. It is a description of neural architecture. The experience of genuine laughter recruits the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the prefrontal cortex in patterns that overlap substantially with other primary rewards. Dopamine is released. So are serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin.

What this means, from a developmental standpoint, is that laughter is not a secondary or incidental feature of a child’s emotional life. It is wired into the same motivational circuitry that drives learning, attachment, and the pursuit of pleasure more broadly. The child who laughs is not simply reacting — their brain is generating the same neurochemical conditions associated with reward and approach behavior that are foundational to motivated engagement with the world.

This helps explain something that developmental researchers have noted for decades but struggled to fully account for: the surprising intensity with which young children seek out the experiences and people that make them laugh, long before they have language to explain why.

It also reframes laughter’s developmental timeline. Laughter precedes speech — children laugh reliably before they produce words, and the emergence of shared laughter between caregiver and infant is one of the earliest markers of social bonding. The fact that this emerges so early, and that it maps onto the same reward circuitry as other primary biological drives, is not coincidental. It appears to be how the social brain bootstraps itself into function before language is available to do the same work.

What the cortisol data shows

Beyond the reward system, Harding’s analysis is specific about what laughter does to the hormonal environment — and the finding that has attracted the most attention is the effect on cortisol. Cortisol is the primary stress hormone in humans, produced by the adrenal glands in response to perceived threat or demand. It is not inherently harmful — cortisol plays important roles in metabolism, immune function, and alertness — but chronically elevated cortisol is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes, and in developing children, sustained cortisol elevation has particular consequences for neural development that research has tracked with increasing precision.

Laughter, Harding’s analysis found, physically lowers circulating cortisol. This is not a claim about mood or subjective wellbeing. It is a measurable change in the hormonal environment, and it comes paired with a reduction in epinephrine — the other major stress-response neurochemical — while simultaneously raising the neurochemicals associated with positive affect and social connection. A systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies on spontaneous laughter and cortisol levels provides convergent evidence for this effect across populations, and a 2025 meta-analysis of laughter interventions in children found large effect sizes for anxiety reduction in pediatric patients — specifically in hospital settings using structured clown-therapy interventions. This suggests the hormonal mechanism has meaningful real-world consequences, not just lab-based correlates.

The phrase “physically lowers cortisol” is worth pausing on. It is not unusual, in popular writing about emotional states, to describe psychological experiences in language that implies biological reality without committing to it. The research here does commit. When a person laughs — genuinely laughs, not a performed social laugh but the involuntary kind — the body produces less of the hormone associated with threat-response and more of the hormones associated with approach, bonding, and reward. That is a biological event. Its consequences are biological consequences.

How this restructures the developing brain

The most significant dimension of Harding’s analysis, from a developmental perspective, is the argument about what repeated emotional experiences do to the architecture of a young brain. Early emotional states, she argues, do not merely pass through a child — they become embedded in its neural structure. The brain develops in the context of its dominant emotional environment, and the circuits that are most frequently activated during early childhood are the circuits that develop most robustly. This is a version of the Hebbian principle — neurons that fire together wire together — applied to affective experience at scale.

The implication is that a child who experiences frequent shared laughter is not simply having more pleasant moments than a child who does not. They are developing, gradually and through repetition, a brain that has built stronger infrastructure around the states associated with those moments: reward, safety, approach, connection, the resolution of playful tension. The prefrontal network that laughter activates — and that humor, as a cognitively demanding activity requiring the resolution of conflicting ideas, exercises with particular intensity — is the same network involved in executive function, emotional regulation, and the management of stress.

This last point about humor as cognitive work is underappreciated. Harding’s analysis notes that humor is genuinely demanding — understanding a joke requires holding two incompatible frameworks simultaneously and resolving the incongruity between them. That is not a trivial cognitive task, and doing it repeatedly appears to exercise the neural machinery of flexible thinking in ways that have downstream effects on cognitive and emotional resilience. The child who laughs a lot is, in this account, also a child whose brain is being worked in particular ways that matter for development.

The co-regulation dimension of this is equally important. When an adult and child share laughter — when the adult’s face and voice and body communicate delight, and the child’s nervous system responds to that signal — what is happening is not merely bonding in the social sense. Research into parent-child co-regulation during positive shared experiences — including play and laughter — has found measurable physiological coordination between caregiver and child, including heart rate alignment and coordinated brain activity, suggesting their nervous systems are actively attuned during these moments.

The child’s limbic system is, through that alignment, acquiring a working model for what regulated emotional states look like and feel like — a model it can eventually deploy independently. Co-regulation through shared joy is, in this sense, a form of instruction in self-regulation that requires no words and no deliberate teaching.

What remains when the laughter fades

There is a temptation, when encountering research like this, to reach immediately for prescriptions — to convert findings about laughter and neural development into a program, a set of recommendations, a checklist of things parents should do more often. That is probably not the most useful response to what the science is showing. The research does not describe a deficit to be corrected. It describes a mechanism that is already operating in most children’s lives, in the ordinary texture of play and silliness and shared delight that tends to happen naturally when adults and children spend time together without too much pressure on either side.

What the neuroscience adds is a more accurate description of what is actually happening during those moments. The child who collapses in giggles is not simply expressing happiness. Their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is producing less cortisol. Their reward network is receiving a signal that the present moment is safe and worth approaching. Their prefrontal circuitry is being exercised in ways that contribute to cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation.

Their nervous system is synchronizing with the nervous system of the person laughing with them, and that synchrony is building a model they will carry forward. None of this requires anything more complicated than what most adults, at their best, already bring to the children in their lives. The science is not an instruction manual. It is an explanation for something that was already working.

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When George Mason University‌‌ scientists ran thousands of virtual simulations looking for the best ways to optimize group dynamics in future Moon bases, including NASA’s planned ARTEMIS mission base facility, they found that smaller crew sizes and longer mission durations adversely affected task completion, whereas shorter missions and frequent astronaut replacement mitigated challenges.

The Moon base simulations also found that extreme events such as moonquakes and radiation exposure increased group stress, resulting in what they described as an “emotional penalty that is applied multiplicatively” to the likelihood that the entire crew would execute the task.

Although the team behind the model reported no scenarios that resulted in a complete Lord of the Flies-level breakdown of crew cooperation, they said that their simulations explored the internal human and external environmental factors “that are more likely to lead to sustainable versus catastrophic scenarios on the Moon in the next couple of decades,” including planned NASA missions to the Moon and Mars as well as the burgeoning commercial space market.

Virtual Astronauts Evaluated on Task Performance

In a published paper detailing the study’s results, the George Mason University team behind the Lunar Base simulations noted that recent technological advancements and the emergence of the burgeoning commercial space industry “have led to substantial leaps in planning for future space missions.”

“The largest planned upcoming mission is the Artemis program, supported by NASA and the international Artemis Accords, which aims to create the first permanent human presence on the Moon and in deep space (the Moon to Mars architecture),” the study authors explain.

While engineers will test and plan for potential equipment failures, the authors also note that the success of any future base on the Moon, Mars, in orbit, or elsewhere in deep space will depend on how well the astronauts interact with each other in an extremely challenging environment. This gap led researcher Raymond Vera and colleagues at George Mason University in Virginia, USA, to develop their agent-based module (ABM) simulation tool for the Lunar Base.

According to the study authors, the model’s main objective is to “simulate a theoretical lunar mission environment” including the primary surface habitat (Moon Base) and the orbiting Gateway station, “for astronauts to perform relevant space mission tasks.”

“The successful completion of the mission is measured by task performance, which is significantly influenced by cognitive skills, psychological state, and interpersonal relationships, in addition to the exogenous factors of the extreme environment,” they explain.

Different Personality Types and Skillsets Improve Simulation Accuracy

To make their simulated astronauts as realistic as possible, the George Mason team said they randomly assigned each one with “DISC personality types” such as dominant, influential, steady, or conscientious. The virtual astronauts were also given different professional skills, physical health parameters, and what the researchers termed “other characteristics.”

With their virtual astronauts programmed and ready, Vera’s team had to create the perfect simulated Moon base, complete with task assignments, base operations requirements, and environmental factors gleaned from previous isolated, extreme environment missions and simulations.

“Drawing from the literature on proxy environments (extreme environments on Earth (i.e., Antarctica), space analogs, and past space missions), and on theories of small group complex systems and team science, we created a highly probable representation or simulation of expected social interactions between astronauts, and astronauts with the lunar environment for the Artemis program (i.e., Artemis IV (Lunar Gateway) and Artemis V (Lunar South Pole Base)),” the study authors explained.

Like real humans, the virtual astronauts learned to adapt over time in response to interpersonal dynamics and environmental conditions, becoming more efficient at performing routine tasks. These improvements resulted in the virtual astronauts advancing in skill level over time.

Because the Moon, Mars, and space itself are all challenging environments for humans, Vera’s team periodically introduced ‘extreme’ events into the virtual astronauts’ daily routine. In more basic scenarios, the astronauts had to work together to overcome broken equipment or a malfunctioning rover. During more challenging conditions, the virtual astronauts inhabiting the simulated Lunar Base were exposed to moonquakes and “intense radiation events.”

Thousands of Simulations Including Moonquakes and Radiation Events

First, the researchers noted that “Monte Carlo simulations consisting of tens of thousands of iterations show trade-offs in productivity and psychological well-being.” For example, a subset of the thousands of Moon base simulations involving more mundane tasks was mostly successful, with compatible personality and skill types working together to complete tasks accurately and in a timely fashion.

However, as mission duration became extended, incidents of task failure and virtual astronaut stress increased. To address this issue, a statement announcing the findings noted that “increasing crew size helped to optimize advancement in professional skill levels and boosted chances of teamwork-enhancing personality compatibility.” In short, adding more virtual astronauts with more diverse skills and personality types to the existing group of overworked or overtasked astronauts helped to stabilize the base’s operations.

To evaluate psychological health, the model evaluated coping capacity (the astronaut’s internal emotional state), and group tension defined by the researchers as “interpersonal strain.”

“These factors change over time based on personality interactions, environmental stressors, and unexpected activities,” the researchers explained.

For example, while increased crew size and improved virtual astronaut skills “boosted chances of teamwork-enhancing personality compatibility,” the team found that factors such as “longer mission duration and lack of astronaut replacements” introduced unnecessary psychological stress that “decreased performance on mission tasks” across the entire crew.

When the virtual astronauts experienced more extreme events, such as simulated radiation or moonquakes, they showed increased signs of stress, including reduced coping capacity and higher tension levels. The researchers said this convergence of stresses and reduced coping capacity can add up over time, resulting in an “emotional penalty that is applied multiplicatively to the task execution likelihood.”

“Scenario analysis shows that increasing crew size results in optimizing skill specialization and increasing the chance of teamwork personality compatibility,” the team explained in their findings. “In contrast, prolonged mission durations, higher learning rates, and the absence of astronaut replacements introduces additional psychological stress resulting in a decrease of task performance.”

Human Factors Increasingly Important in the Commercial 21st Century Space Age

The researchers suggested that future efforts could include examining the physiological effects of extended space missions and communication delays with Earth, which can reach several minutes depending on the base’s distance.

When discussing the implications of their work, the team said that using simulations like theirs “demonstrates how agent-based modeling can help mission planners evaluate operational resilience, team structures, and workload dynamics in support of future lunar exploration.”

“As humanity prepares to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, understanding human behavior becomes just as important as understanding engineering systems,” the study authors conclude. “Although human psychology and team science have been crucial for the success of past space missions, from the Apollo program and Skylab to the Space Shuttle (STS) and the International Space Station (ISS), human factors and social behavior will become even more ubiquitous and essential for space missions in the new era of commercial space.”

The study “Lunar base agent-based modeling – A benchmark for simulating crewed space missions” was published in PLOS One.

 Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Microdosing is typically associated with psychedelics, specifically small, sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin or LSD that some people use to improve focus, mood, or anxiety. However, a new national survey upends this common association.

A research team at the University of California, San Diego, found that cannabis is the most widely microdosed substance in the United States. An estimated 24 million adults reported having microdosed cannabis at some point, nearly double the number who reported microdosing psilocybin or LSD. The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, is among the first to examine national patterns of microdosing across multiple substances.

“Microdosing is often discussed in the context of psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD, but what surprised us most was that cannabis microdosing was almost twice as common,” said Kevin Yang, MD, a resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine and first author of the study. “That suggests conversations about microdosing may be overlooking a large group of people who are using small amounts of cannabis in similar ways.”

Survey Results

The team surveyed 1,525 adults across the U.S. in late 2023 using a probability-based panel designed to reflect the U.S. population to understand these trends nationally. They asked people whether they had ever intentionally taken very small amounts—roughly one-fifth to one-twentieth of a usual recreational dose—of substances like cannabis, psilocybin, LSD, or MDMA. The idea behind microdosing is to avoid the strong psychoactive effects while still hoping for subtle benefits.

About 9.4% of adults said they had microdosed cannabis at some point, compared to 5.3% for psilocybin, 4.8% for LSD, and 2.2% for MDMA. While fewer people reported currently microdosing, cannabis still led the way, with 3.3% of adults saying they use it in this way now.

People’s reasons for microdosing varied depending on the substance. Most cannabis microdosers said they were looking for medical benefits, like easing anxiety, depression, or chronic pain. On the other hand, those who microdosed psychedelics or MDMA tended to be after a gentler version of the recreational effects, rather than using them for health reasons.

Mental Health and Policy Patterns

The study found that people who rated their mental health as poor were more likely to report microdosing any substance. About 21% of adults with poor mental health said they had microdosed cannabis, compared to about 8% of those who described their health as excellent.

It is not yet clear whether people are microdosing as a way to cope with mental health challenges or for other reasons. Since the study was cross-sectional, capturing data at a single point in time, the researchers could not determine whether microdosing influences mental health or if people with mental health concerns are simply more drawn to the practice.

The study also found that people microdosed psychedelics more often in places that have decriminalized possession. This suggests that changes in policy may influence both access to these substances and people’s willingness to report using them.

The Evidence Gap

Although many people report microdosing, the researchers note that scientific evidence of its effects remains limited. Researchers have conducted few placebo-controlled trials, and those studies have produced inconsistent results so far. Most people who microdose do not test their substances, which raises concerns about contamination and dosing mistakes, especially with unregulated psychedelics.

Senior author Eric Leas, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health, pointed to a gap between public enthusiasm and clinical evidence. “There’s a lot of anecdotal enthusiasm around microdosing, especially for mental health,” Leas said. “But we still need rigorous studies to determine whether these perceived benefits are real, who might benefit and what the potential risks could be.”

These findings come at a time when cannabis legalization and psychedelic policy reforms are changing laws across the United States. As these changes continue, the researchers emphasize that understanding how and why people microdose will become increasingly important.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

A team of Canadian researchers studying the possible anxiety-reducing effects of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, has revealed that the chemical compound makes an innately aggressive species of fish less aggressive and lazier compared to undrugged fish without reducing its overall social activities.

The research team behind the discovery said future research will be needed to confirm their findings, explore how the active ingredient in magic mushrooms alters neural signaling, identify the active serotonin pathways involved in these behavioral changes, and determine why certain behaviors are altered by exposure while others appear to remain unaffected.

Testing Magic Mushrooms to Evaluate Changes in Fish Aggressiveness

According to a statement announcing the research, over 200 mushroom species contain the active compound psilocybin. The majority of these species belong to the genus Psilocybe, including the well-known magic mushrooms popularized in the counterculture era for their psychoactive properties.

When this substance is ingested by mammals, it can bind to serotonin receptors that are involved in the regulation of behavior and emotions. Notably, these chemically induced changes can affect aggression, appetite, and overall mood. However, the researchers note, the effect of psilocybin on animals “remains largely undescribed.”

Since conducting experiments on human subjects poses significant challenges and limitations, the researchers examined whether these behavioral and mood changes also occur in fish. This led the team to choose the amphibious mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus), which they described as “innately aggressive,” especially when paired with another fish.

“Their aggressive behaviors are straightforward, and subtle changes can easily be detected,” the team explained. “Therefore, this model ensures all observed effects are caused by psilocybin treatment rather than genetic differences between fish.”

‘Dosed’ Fish Appear to Selectively Reduce Energetically Costly Behaviors

After selecting three genetically distinct laboratory-bred lines of mangrove rivulus, they exposed one to psilocybin, whereas the second line served as  “stimulus fish,” intended to trigger behaviors in the ‘drugged’ fish. The team said that the third selected line was used to “quantify whole-body concentrations and absorption of psilocybin” rather than for behavioral evaluation.

During the experiment’s first phase, fish from the first group were placed in a tank already containing the second line of ‘stimulus’ fish. Critically, the two groups were separated by an opaque cover placed over a fiberglass mesh barrier. The researchers said this arrangement allowed the fish to see and smell each other but prevented direct contact.

During this five-minute adjustment period, the team measured behavior to establish a baseline. When the five minutes expired, the barrier was removed, and the interaction between the two fish groups was closely monitored for signs of behavioral or mood changes.

Twenty-four hours after the first phase was completed, the team placed the fish from the first ‘focal’ group in a water tank containing dissolved psilocybin. The fish remained in the psilocybin-enriched tank for 20 minutes to ensure sufficient saturation, then were returned to the tank with the stimulus fish from the previous day’s experiments. Like before, the fish remained separated for five minutes by the opaque mesh barrier before it was removed.

Once again, the team monitored interactions between the two groups to determine whether the ‘drugged’ fish exhibited any behavioral changes. They also looked for potential clues to the fish’s mood. This included measuring the time the fish spent moving and their aggression levels, such as the frequency of swimming ‘bursts’ toward other fish.

According to the researchers, when they compared the fish in the first group’s activities before and after exposure to psilocybin, several changes were observed. Among the most prevalent was an overall reduction in activity after exposure to magic mushrooms’ key ingredient.

“Dosed fish (spent) less time moving than control fish when paired with a conspecific,” they explained, “and performed fewer swimming bursts compared to specimens that hadn’t received psilocybin treatment.”

The study’s senior author, Dr. Suzie Currie, a biologist at The University of British Columbia, defined swimming bursts as “high‑energy attack behaviors that represent an escalation of aggression towards the stimulus fish” but stop short of making physical contact.

“Other types of aggressive behaviors, like head‑on displays, are more about communication and social assessment and require very little energy,” Dr. Currie explained.

The study’s first author, Dayna Forsyth, a research associate and former MSc student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said the calming effect of psilocybin observed during their experiments appeared to “selectively reduce energetically costly, escalated behaviors” while other social display behaviors that require less energy remained largely unchanged.

“This suggests that this compound can selectively dampen escalated social conflict rather than shutting down behavior altogether,” Forsyth added.

Reducing Escalated Aggression Without Suppressing Social Interaction

When discussing the implications of their findings, Forsyth said their findings show that an acute, low dose of the active ingredient from magic mushrooms “significantly reduces activity and aggressive attack behavior during social interactions in adult mangrove rivulus fish.” The research added that the observed change was particularly significant, as the selected fish is a “naturally highly aggressive” species.

“These findings provide the first evidence that psilocybin can selectively reduce escalated aggression in a vertebrate model without suppressing social interaction,” added Currie.

When discussing the potential long-term impacts of their findings, the team said their work can provide “robust results” that can, in theory, ultimately be translated to humans. They also noted that their work could “help inform therapeutic research” by helping scientists further clarify which aspects of social behavior are most sensitive to psilocybin exposure.

Although the results were statistically significant, the researchers caution that their study faced several limitations that should be explored by future efforts. For example, they did not test any potential clinical treatments. They also noted that their findings “cannot be directly extrapolated” to humans exposed to psilocybin.

“The study also focused on single doses and short periods of exposure, and didn’t examine long-term effects, repeated dosing, or adaptation over time,” they added.

The team noted that future studies will be needed to determine whether the social changes observed after magic mushroom ingestion are sustained or transitory.

“Future studies can build on this work to explore how psilocybin alters neural signaling, which serotonin pathways are involved, and why some aspects of social behavior are affected while others are not,” Currie said, adding that “these are questions that are difficult or impossible to answer directly in humans.”

The study “The magic of mushrooms: Psilocybin influences behaviour in the mangrove rivulus fish, Kryptolebias marmoratus” was published in Frontiers in Behavioral Science.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Freezing solid is supposed to be the end. Ice forming inside a body generally stops the chemistry of life. For almost every animal on Earth, that is exactly how it works. The wood frog did not get the memo.

Each winter, Rana sylvatica lets a large share of the water in its body turn to ice, loses the mains signs of life we measure, and then, months later, restarts. The freezing is the famous part. The thawing is the part that should keep biologists awake.

What “frozen” actually means here

The common assumption is that freezing must mean slowing down, a deep chill that lowers the heart rate and breathing to a crawl. The wood frog does not slow down. It stops. When frozen, the frog shows no heartbeat, no breathing, no blood circulation, no muscle movement, and no detectable brain activity.

The proportion of ice is hard to believe. In a study published in Physiological Reviews, Kenneth and Janet Storey noted that around 65% of water in their bodies can be frozen as extracellular ice, with no physiological vital signs, before returning to normal life within hours of thawing. The ice forms outside the cells, in the spaces between them and around the organs, not inside the cells themselves. That distinction is most of the story.

Janet Storey, a research associate at the Institute of Biochemistry at Carleton University, has described the effect plainly. “They look like they’re totally dead, and then they’re not,” she told the Up Here. The frog looks dead because, by the ordinary measures, it is indistinguishable from dead. It is not.

It is tempting to reach for the phrase “clinically dead,” and the wording almost fits. “Clinical death refers to the medical state involving the complete and irreversible cessation of all body functions,” the cryobiologist Jon Costanzo of Miami University has explained. The word doing the work there is “irreversible.” A frozen wood frog reverses, spontaneously and completely, which is precisely why Costanzo has been careful that the frog only loosely qualifies, and why what its brain is doing during the freeze remains an open question.

How it survives

The trick is sugar. As explained by the folks at National Park Service, glucose keeps the the frogs blood from freezing. As they noted “Hibernating wood frogs can tolerate blood sugar levels 100 times higher than normal without the damage suffered by human diabetics when their blood sugar is only 2 to 10 times above normal”. 

Wild frogs even appear to rehearse the whole performance before committing to it. In Alaska, wood frogs go through repeated freeze-thaw cycles in early autumn before settling into the long freeze of winter, and those cycles seem to prime the system.

The reversal 

Restarting a stopped heart, rebooting a brain with no recorded activity, and clearing months of accumulated metabolic waste, all without permanent injury, is harder to account for than the freezing itself.

The field evidence is striking. Working with wild Alaskan frogs in their natural winter burrows, Larson and colleagues tracked 18 animals that stayed frozen for months at a stretch. The frogs survived being frozen for up to 218 days at minimum temperatures below minus 18 degrees Celsius, with every frog surviving. 

Recovery is fast once it begins. On thawing, the heart and brain restart spontaneously as the soil warms in spring, the contractions resuming on their own after months of silence. Why the restart works at all, after every vital sign has been absent for so long, is the question researchers find hardest to answer.

What the frog is quietly telling us

The wood frog is perhaps a working model for the long-running effort to freeze and bank human organs. A review by Al-Attar and Storey treats the frog’s natural freeze tolerance as a template for cryopreservation and biobanking. 

The gap that research is trying to close is large. As of her 2018 comments, Janet Storey noted that “so far there’s nobody that’s been able to freeze an entire organ and get it to survive and function when it comes back.” 

The stakes are concrete. Tens of thousands of people sit on the U.S. organ transplant waiting list at any given time, far more than the number of transplants performed each year. A way to bank organs for longer would likely change those numbers. 

The post More than 60% of the water in a wood frog’s body can freeze solid each winter: its heart stops, it stops breathing, and for more than 7 months it can lie essentially a frogsicle, before it thaws out in spring and simply hops away appeared first on Space Daily.

A groundbreaking paradigm shift in youth mental healthcare urges a comprehensive approach that extends support beyond the individual child to include their parents and caregivers. Alix Hearn, a child psychotherapist affiliated with Cambridge University, presents a compelling argument in her forthcoming book, Places of Safety, for redefining how mental health services engage with children and young people. She emphasizes the importance of viewing children as integral parts of an ecological system—a complex network of family, community, and cultural relationships—that is often neglected in traditional clinical frameworks overwhelmed by demand.

Hearn’s thesis rests heavily on attachment theory, a psychological model that elucidates the foundational human need for secure, reliable relationships, primarily established during early childhood through parental caregiving. Her clinical insights suggest that mental health struggles in youth frequently reflect not only individual pathology but also intergenerational patterns of emotional processing and relational dynamics. Parents’ abilities to provide safety and support are, in themselves, shaped by their antecedent experiences, creating a cascade of concealed emotional legacies, or “ghostly attachments,” transmitted often without conscious awareness. This concept revives the notion that unresolved trauma and attachment disruption ripple forward across generations, influencing behavioral and emotional responses.

The current landscape of child mental health services tends to isolate the young person as a discrete entity requiring intervention. Hearn critiques this reductionist view, asserting that children often manifest symptoms that are less about their individual deficits and more about unprocessed relational tensions within the family unit. She advocates for a systemic clinical approach, wherein therapists engage with parents or caregivers concurrently, to uncover and address these deep-rooted emotional histories. This method challenges prevailing therapeutic models focused solely on the child and highlights the necessity of a dual-generation strategy in treatment protocols.

Clinical practice and referral patterns frequently reveal that youth exhibiting withdrawn or aggressive behaviors, or tendencies toward self-harm, may be reacting to deficits in emotional support stemming from attachment insecurities. Hearn’s research corroborates that such behaviors are often manifestations of unmet developmental needs as well as the intergenerational transmission of coping mechanisms influenced by the parents’ own upbringing. Her book delineates how these “unremembered hauntings” shape the psychobiological framework within which a child’s mental health trajectory unfolds.

A particularly poignant exploration in Places of Safety addresses the epigenetic and psychosocial ramifications of collective historical trauma. Hearn provides case studies where familial responses to atrocities like the Holocaust serve as paradigmatic examples of how mass trauma imprints, via both genetic and psychological channels, continue to influence descendants’ attachment patterns and emotional regulatory capacities. This intersection of psychodynamic and epigenetic research underscores how large-scale sociohistorical crises exert pervasive effects on family systems, affecting mental health outcomes in nuanced and enduring ways.

Research into epigenetics, the dynamic modulation of gene expression in response to environmental stressors, fortifies Hearn’s thesis about the biological embedding of trauma and anxiety within family lineages. The transgenerational transmission of stress-induced gene regulation changes presents new avenues for understanding the persistent impact of socio-political turmoil on child development. Hearn’s sensitivity to contemporary global conflicts, such as those in the Middle East and Ukraine, frames her argument within a broader context of ongoing crisis, where trauma is not merely historical but immediately relevant to populations exposed to violence and displacement.

Beyond individual and familial systems, Hearn situates the current youth mental health crisis within the wider framework of global environmental instability, proposing that ecological anxiety driven by climate change acts as a collective psychosocial stressor. Drawing on the findings of The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Youth Mental Health, she asserts that the pervasive “polycrisis” of simultaneous global shocks erodes foundational feelings of safety and security. Adults, often unknowingly, transmit anxieties about the future to younger generations, exacerbating emotional dysregulation and mental health challenges in children and adolescents.

In a novel therapeutic proposition, Hearn introduces the concept of “green care,” advocating for an intentional reconnection with the natural environment as a source of emotional security and healing. The environment is conceived not merely as a backdrop but as an attachment figure with intrinsic therapeutic potential. Detachment from nature, she argues, compounds a fragmented sense of belonging and identity among youth, exacerbating feelings of alienation and division. This ecological perspective enriches traditional psychological models by integrating holistic considerations of place, community, and environment.

Hearn highlights the profound discrepancy between adult perceptions of resilience and the realities faced by contemporary youth. Generational misunderstandings, often encapsulated in sentiments like “in my day we just carried on,” fail to capture the context of collective anxiety catalyzed by uncertain futures and environmental degradation. She foregrounds a vital existential question: in a world perceived as “on fire,” what anchors remain for children to develop secure attachments and a robust sense of self?

Clinicians, educators, and policymakers stand at a crossroads, prompted to embrace an integrative system that simultaneously addresses children’s needs and the supporting emotional infrastructures of their families. Hearn’s clinical experience and numerous scholarly collaborations underline that effective mental health interventions must acknowledge and intervene in the relational ecology surrounding children. This perspective requires reevaluating service models, resource allocation, and therapeutic curricula to transcend child-centric interventions and encompass family systems and environmental contexts.

Places of Safety emerges as a timely and critically needed blueprint for reforming youth mental health care amidst a rapidly evolving socio-political and ecological landscape. Its fusion of attachment theory, clinical experience, epigenetics, and ecological psychology offers a multidimensional framework that could reshape how mental health professionals understand and treat young people’s emotional difficulties. As youth mental health referrals face unrelenting pressure, this systemic approach promises a more comprehensive, compassionate, and effective path forward.

The book’s London launch signals the beginning of what Hearn anticipates will be a broader conversation, catalyzing a “sea change” in the mental health field. By advocating for a nuanced recognition of the interconnectedness of child and adult mental health, familial legacy, and environmental factors, Hearn challenges entrenched paradigms and invites a collective reimagining of how society nurtures its youngest members in an unstable world.

Subject of Research: Youth mental health, attachment theory, intergenerational trauma, ecological psychology, epigenetics
Article Title: Revolutionary Insights on Youth Mental Health Call for Family-Centered Psychotherapy and Ecological Healing
News Publication Date: Not specified (book launch event on 2 June)
Web References:

• Places of Safety, Karnac Books
• The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Youth Mental Health
  Keywords: Youth mental health, attachment theory, intergenerational trauma, psychotherapy, ecological psychology, epigenetics, green care, climate anxiety, family therapy, behavioral psychology, clinical psychology, child development

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