Artificial intelligence doesn't just learn how humans talk. It may also be learning who gets listened to. A new study from researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that large language models, the technology behind popular AI chatbots, change the way they communicate depending on the social role they're assigned in a conversation.

New research reveals it takes around 25 minutes for patients and therapists to truly “connect”. 

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology and led by Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, discovered that heart-rate synchrony - a key marker of emotional alignment - builds gradually during music therapy, peaking only after 20-25 minutes. 

The findings suggest monitoring heart-rate data during therapy could highlight hidden moments of connection, while shorter sessions risk missing meaningful moments between patient and therapist. 

A new study of wild bats reveals that an animal’s immune system is shaped by more than its need to fight infections. Researchers from the University of Maryland found that sex, age and competition for mates influence how bats balance different types of immune defenses—providing new insight into how evolutionary pressures shape immune strategy.

Why do people make the choices they do? Researchers from the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and the University of Basel present their new approach to finding answers to that question. The approach combines observed choices with participants’ own descriptions of their decision processes, allowing researchers to study human behavior in greater detail than is possible with behavioral data alone. They merged behavioral experiments and free-text explanations, to uncover the reasons underlying human decisions with the help of large language models (LLM). Their results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).