A Nudge-Based Intervention to Reduce Problematic Smartphone Use: Randomised Controlled Trial.

Problematic smartphone use is rising across the world. We tested an intervention with ten strategies that nudge users to reduce their smartphone use, for example by disabling non-essential notifications and changing their display to greyscale. Participants first completed baseline measures of smartphone use, well-being, and cognition before choosing which intervention strategies to follow for 2 to 6 weeks.

Stuck in a lockdown: Dreams, bad dreams, nightmares, and their relationship to stress, depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: An upsurge in dream and nightmare frequency has been noted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and research shows increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety during this time. Growing evidence suggests that dream content has a bi-directional relationship with psychopathology, and that dreams react to new, personally significant and emotional experiences. The first lockdown experience was an acute event, characterized by a combination of several unprecedent factors (new pandemic, threat of disease, global uncertainty, the experience of social isolation and exposure to stressful information) that resulted in a large-scale disruption of life routines.

Super Placebos: A Feasibility Study Combining Contextual Factors to Promote Placebo Effects.

Ample evidence demonstrates that placebo effects are modulated by contextual factors. Few interventions, however, attempt to combine a broad range of these factors. Here, we explore the therapeutic power of placebos by leveraging factors including social proof, positive suggestion, and social learning.

TTOM in action: Refining the variational approach to cognition and culture.

The target article "Thinking Through Other Minds" (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was both synthetic - building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; and prescriptive - showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamics can be applied to the emergence of social and cultural ecologies of mind.

Tripping on nothing: placebo psychedelics and contextual factors.

Rationale: Is it possible to have a psychedelic experience from a placebo alone? Most psychedelic studies find few effects in the placebo control group, yet these effects may have been obscured by the study design, setting, or analysis decisions.

Objective: We examined individual variation in placebo effects in a naturalistic environment resembling a typical psychedelic party.

Methods: Thirty-three students completed a single-arm study ostensibly examining how a psychedelic drug affects creativity.

Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture.

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as "shared expectations," the "selective patterning of attention and behaviour," "cultural evolution," "cultural inheritance," and "implicit learning" are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience.

Regimes of Expectations: An Active Inference Model of Social Conformity and Human Decision Making.

How do humans come to acquire shared expectations about how they ought to behave in distinct normalized social settings? This paper offers a normative framework to answer this question. We introduce the computational construct of 'deontic value' - based on active inference and Markov decision processes - to formalize conceptions of social conformity and human decision-making. Deontic value is an attribute of choices, behaviors, or action sequences that inherit directly from deontic cues in our econiche (e.

Corrigendum: Hypernatural Monitoring: A Social Rehearsal Account of Smartphone Addiction.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.

A variational approach to niche construction.

In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of living systems, and their selection in evolution, in terms of variational inference.

Hypernatural Monitoring: A Social Rehearsal Account of Smartphone Addiction.

We present a deflationary account of smartphone addiction by situating this purportedly antisocial phenomenon within the fundamentally dispositions of our species. While we agree with contemporary critics that the hyper-connectedness and unpredictable rewards of mobile technology can modulate negative affect, we propose to place the locus of addiction on an evolutionarily older mechanism: the human need to monitor and be monitored by others. Drawing from key findings in evolutionary anthropology and the cognitive science of religion, we articulate a model of smartphone addiction grounded in a general theory of human cognition.

Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention.

In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience.