The nocebo effect may influence the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine

People’s negative expectations and general attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine are significantly correlated with the occurrence and intensity of its most common side effects such as fatigue, muscle pain, headache and injection site pain. This is suggested by a study published in Psychological Science and led by scientists from the University of Bologna, who investigated how adverse effects reported after vaccination can be influenced by the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect.

Scientists study the mediating role of ‘FoMO’ given the trend towards ‘problematic smartphone use’ among adolescents

Researcher at the Department of Social Psychology of the University of Malaga Christiane Arrivillaga has participated in an international study conducted at the University of Toledo that aims to analyze how emotion dysregulation and FoMO—that is, the fear of missing out—together with a need to stay online to know what other people are doing, serve as factors to predict the possible problematic smartphone use among young people.

Openseize: A novel open-source software to analyze large-scale digital signals

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an indispensable tool used by clinicians to diagnose neurological diseases and by researchers to study and discover brain circuit mechanisms that support sensory, mnemonic, and cognitive processing. A new software—Openseize—created by Dr. Matthew Caudill, an investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, can now analyze massive amounts of one-dimensional digital signals including huge EEG datasets. The study was published in the Journal for Open Source Software.