The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published by National Academies Press
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One of the most prestigious science journals in the world, PNAS publishes a huge variety of open access science with a particular focus on research of general interest to the public.
Articles Featured in our Library:
East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways.
we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen.
Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate.
Feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness.
Pride is a highly pleasant emotion; this internal reward can incentivize people to undertake and persevere at costly but socially valued courses of action. Pride has a full-body display featuring an erect and expanded posture and gaze directed at the audience and thus it appears to generate common knowledge about the individual’s enhanced value. This display conveys achievement and dominance, is produced by congenitally blind individuals, and is recognized by young children and by adults across cultures.
All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around 11°C–15°C mean annual temperature (MAT).
Political opponents respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts.
We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language.
How to change your mind, according to science.
individuals’ facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names.
… integration rather than segregation is the typical outcome. However, the tendency toward adaptation and integration can be impeded when economic frictions in the form of income inequality and housing cost are present.
In a large cross-national statistical study of risk factors for democratic erosion, we establish that economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes.