EurekAlert! News by Subject: Social & Behavior - News by Subject: Social & Behavior

Social & Behavior

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 2-Nov-2025 07:11 ET (2-Nov-2025 12:11 GMT/UTC)

7-Oct-2025

Assessing overconfidence among national security officials

Dartmouth College
Peer-Reviewed Publication

National security officials are "overwhelmingly overconfident," which hinders their ability to accurately assess uncertainty, according to new research by a Dartmouth government professor. When they thought statements had a 90% chance of being true, the statements were only true about 60% of the time, according to the study. But that bias can be mitigated with just two minutes of training. The findings are published in the Texas National Security Review.

7-Oct-2025

Kennesaw State researcher aims to discover how ideas spread in the digital age

Kennesaw State University
Grant and Award Announcement

Mehmet Aktas’s project studies how information flows within networks of people. Traditional approaches treat communication like a chain of one-to-one interactions, but research shows ideas are often exchanged in groups. The team is using a new mathematical tool called the “sheaf Laplacian,” which allows them to represent group interactions with far more accuracy than older methods.

7-Oct-2025

Sleep patterns linked to variation in health, cognition, lifestyle, and brain organization

PLOS
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers led by Aurore Perrault at Concordia University, Canada and Valeria Kebets at McGill University, Canada, have used a complex data-driven analysis to uncover relationships among multiple aspects of sleep and individual variation in health, cognition, and lifestyle. Published on October 7^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, the study reveals five sleep-biopsychosocial profiles and their associated patterns of functional connectivity among brain-regions.

Journal: PLOS Biology

7-Oct-2025

UBCO study finds sex ed fails 2SLGBTQIA+ students

University of British Columbia Okanagan campus
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new student-led study from UBC Okanagan has found that young adults who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+ report receiving significantly less affirming and inclusive sexual health education than their cisgender, heterosexual peers.

Yet these same students demonstrate higher levels of sexual health literacy.

The study, led by Phoebe Hodgson, a recent UBCO graduate in gender, women and sexuality studies with a minor in psychology, looks at how young adults with different gender and sexual identities experienced sexual education during their high school years.

Journal: The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality

7-Oct-2025

Parker receives funding for Elementary Education Program Professional Development School (PDS)

George Mason University
Grant and Award Announcement

Audra Parker, Professor and Elementary Education (ELED) Academic Program Coordinator, College of Education and Human Development (CEHD), received funding for: “Elementary Education Program Professional Development School (PDS).”

Funder: Loudoun County Public Schools

7-Oct-2025

Tayac receives funding for community engagement project

George Mason University
Grant and Award Announcement

Gabrielle Tayac, Associate Professor, History and Art History, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), received funding for the project: “INCL: Indigenous America 250 Community Engagement PHASE 2.”

Funder: National Park Service

7-Oct-2025

Location, individual circumstances impact caregiver well-being, researchers find

Penn State
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Roughly a quarter of adults in the U.S. are caring for elderly family members or children with an illness or disability — and sometimes both at the same time. Despite family caregiving consuming time and resources for both individuals and governments, social scientists don’t fully understand how it affects the people who do the caregiving, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. In collaboration with colleagues at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, the researchers conducted an expansive study of caregiver well-being, finding that the type of geographic location and individual circumstances can impact a caregiver’s health, comfort and happiness even more than their state’s family care policies.

Journal: Rural Sociology
Funder: U.S. Department of Agriculture