NEWS

Plenty of surveys ask people what they do for the environment, such as whether they recycle, cycle to work or buy eco-friendly products. A new scale developed by Shayan Shaikh and Nicholas Ashill takes a different tack. It asks not what people do, but how consistently environmental concern sits at the centre of their decisions, treating that concern as a stable trait rather than a set of habits shaped by circumstance. Across six studies involving more than 1,800 participants,

Psychologists have long known that difficult childhoods are statistically linked to psychopathic traits in adulthood. A study led by Virgil Zeigler-Hill, drawing on nearly 4,900 adults, asks a more precise question. Does it matter whether a childhood was harsh, or whether it was simply unpredictable? The distinction matters because life history theory, an evolutionary framework for development, treats the two as different signals about the world. Harshness refers to a consist

We are often told that being in touch with our feelings is good for us. A large Spanish study complicates that advice. It finds that paying close attention to your emotions tends to help only when you can also make sense of those emotions and do something about them. Raquel Gómez-Leal, Pablo Fernández-Berrocal and Alberto Megías-Robles surveyed 2,578 Spanish adults using a well-established questionnaire that separates three emotional skills, namely how much attention people p