From the article: An online survey in Australia explored the links between “dark” personality traits and the perpetration of online “catfishing” (deceiving and exploiting another person). Results showed that people with higher levels of psychopathy, sadism and narcissism were more likely to perpetrate catfishing. The study was published in Computers in Human Behavior.

Catfishing is a form of online deception where someone steals or creates a fake identity to trick others into forming an online relationship, often with the goal of financial exploitation.

The word “catfishing” itself came from a 2010 documentary “Catfish”, telling a story about a young man starting a relationship with a young woman he met on Facebook, only to discover that most of the information about her was false. This popular documentary led many people to come forward and report going through similar experiences that included online scams, harassment, and stalking.

One avenue of research into the issue of catfishing is the study of personality traits of people who engage in such practices. The set of four personality traits called “the Dark Tetrad” is particularly important in this approach, as previous studies have linked all of these traits to proneness to deceptive and exploitative behaviors.

From the article: Indigenous communities hold rights to more than half of the world’s land, but only a measly 10% is officially recognized and protected. Despite their persistent struggle for justice, political will has been lacking in many countries. According to a new study, we should all care about this struggle.

A team of researchers showed that indigenous communities are good stewards of nature and whenever they are given the right to manage land, they tend to make it better for the natural environment.

Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder have found that indigenous communities in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest who have formal recognition of their land rights reduce deforestation and increase forest cover. This supports previous studies suggesting that land rights can mitigate climate change and reduce biodiversity loss and suggests that granting native populations stewardship could be an important tool for environmental protection.

“Our study adds an important piece to the growing body of evidence that tenure in Indigenous lands has often improved forest outcomes—including now in the Atlantic Forest, which has experienced high deforestation pressures over a long period of time,” Rayna Benzeev, lead author of the study and researcher, said in a statement.

From the article: A lack of quality sleep can cause aggressive behavior, according to recent longitudinal findings published in the journal Biological Psychology. Brain imaging data revealed that the effect may be related to reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex and increased activity in the limbic regions.

Good sleep is paramount to the healthy functioning of our brains and bodies. Studies have shown that a lack of quality sleep can hinder our ability to regulate our thoughts and emotions and inflict consequences on our behavior. One of these consequences might be increased aggression.

While multiple studies have indicated a link between poor sleep and aggressive behavior, the direction of this relationship remains unclear — does poor sleep actually cause aggressive behavior? Study authors Haobo Zhang and Xu Lei conducted a longitudinal study to attempt to answer this question. Through neuroimaging data, they also explored the potential brain mechanism responsible for the relationship between sleep and aggression.

“As sleep plays an important role in the physical and mental health of individuals, we thought to uncover the causal relationship and mechanisms between sleep quality and aggressive behaviour in order to raise public awareness of the importance of sleep,” said Lei, a professor and director of the Sleep and NeuroImage Center at Southwest University in China.

Zhang and Lei obtained data from the Behavioral Brain Research Project of Chinese Personality (BBP), an ongoing study of undergraduate students from Chongqing, China. They focused on data collected from two time points separated by two years. For the current analysis, the sample consisted of around 450 students between the ages of 16 and 26 years old.

At both time points, the participants completed an assessment of their subjective sleep quality in the past month, and a measure of aggression that included the sub-dimensions of hostility, physical aggression, impulsiveness, and anger. Students also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity.

From the article: A new study on a large sample of mothers and daughters provides evidence that mothers with healthier lifestyles tend to have daughters with fewer depressive symptoms. The link appeared to be achieved through the healthy lifestyles of daughters. But this association was not present in sons. The study was published in Psychological Medicine.

The prevalence of depression among adolescents had seen an increase in recent years. In the United States, estimates show that 8.7% of adolescents had a depressive episode in the past 12 months in 2005, but this percentage grew to 11.3% in 2014. Around half of adolescents diagnosed with depression or major depressive disorder, as it is officially called, also suffer from other psychiatric disorders. In adults, depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide.

While there are biological factors that increase the risk of depression, a growing body of scientific research shows that modifiable healthy lifestyle factors can reduce depression risk. “A healthy diet, non-smoking, being physically active, having a normal body mass index (BMI), and light-to-moderate alcohol consumption are independently associated with less depressive symptoms among adults,” wrote Wei-Chen Wang and colleagues in their study.

The researchers wanted to investigate whether the lifestyle of mothers during their offspring’s childhood and adolescence might be associated with depression in their children. They defined the healthy lifestyle of mothers in terms of eating a healthy diet, having a normal body-mass index, never smoking, being physically active, and having light-to-moderate alcohol consumption.

From the article: Research published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy finds that compulsive sexual behavior is related to religious practices requiring intense commitment and inflexible expectations for belief and behavior. The study found that when moral disapproval is utilized to maintain religious commitment and behaviors, there seems to be a connection between religiosity and compulsive sexual behaviors.

Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD) is a recent addition to the International Classification of Diseases, Eleventh Revision (ICD-11). The ICD-11 identifies the symptoms of compulsive sexual behaviors as “as a persistent pattern of failure to control intense sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behavior that causes marked distress or social impairment (WHO, 2018).” Previous studies have found relationships between compulsive sexual behaviors and strong religious belief or religiosity.