A new book explores how humans evolved to be wired for intimacy. It can save our lives. Intimate relationships provide stability, safety, and reassurance, especially when we are in pain. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Adapted from THE INTIMATE ANIMAL by Justin Garcia, PhD. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. Jen and Dave's second child was born in November 2002. Two weeks later, on a cold Thursday night, the phone rang.

This paper introduces Democracy-in-Silico, an agent-based simulation where societies of advanced AI agents, imbued with complex psychological personas, govern themselves under different institutional frameworks. We explore what it means to be human in an age of AI by tasking Large Language Models (LLMs) to embody agents with traumatic memories, hidden agendas, and psychological triggers. These agents engage in deliberation, legislation, and elections under various stressors, such as budget crises and resource scarcity. We present a novel metric, the Power-Preservation Index (PPI), to quantify misaligned behavior where agents prioritize their own power over public welfare. Our findings demonstrate that institutional design, specifically the combination of a Constitutional AI (CAI) charter and a mediated deliberation protocol, serves as a potent alignment mechanism. These structures significantly reduce corrupt power-seeking behavior, improve policy stability, and enhance citizen welfare compared to less constrained democratic models. The simulation reveals that an institutional design may offer a framework for aligning the complex, emergent behaviors of future artificial agent societies, forcing us to reconsider what human rituals and responsibilities are essential in an age of shared authorship with non-human entities.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As with many mysteries of the mind, science doesn't have one neat answer. "You'll get as many answers to the question'What is the purpose of dreaming?' as there are dream psychologists," says Deirdre Barrett, dream researcher at Harvard University and author of The Committee of Sleep. According to Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, dreams offered vital clues to unresolved conflicts buried deep within our psyche. But Freud's theory, introduced in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, sparked plenty of controversy.

Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) offers insights into cultural and social dynamics. Yet, the validity of methods for measuring kinds of LSC has yet to be established due to the absence of historical benchmark datasets. To address this gap, we develop a novel three-stage evaluation framework that involves: 1) creating a scalable, domain-general methodology for generating synthetic datasets that simulate theory-driven LSC across time, leveraging In-Context Learning and a lexical database; 2) using these datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of various methods; and 3) assessing their suitability for specific dimensions and domains. We apply this framework to simulate changes across key dimensions of LSC (SIB: Sentiment, Intensity, and Breadth) using examples from psychology, and evaluate the sensitivity of selected methods to detect these artificially induced changes. Our findings support the utility of the synthetic data approach, validate the efficacy of tailored methods for detecting synthetic changes in SIB, and reveal that a state-of-the-art LSC model faces challenges in detecting affective dimensions of LSC. This framework provides a valuable tool for dimension- and domain-specific bench-marking and evaluation of LSC methods, with particular benefits for the social sciences.

Psychological trauma can manifest following various distressing events and is captured in diverse online contexts. However, studies traditionally focus on a single aspect of trauma, often neglecting the transferability of findings across different scenarios. We address this gap by training language models with progressing complexity on trauma-related datasets, including genocide-related court data, a Reddit dataset on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), counseling conversations, and Incel forum posts. Our results show that the fine-tuned RoBERTa model excels in predicting traumatic events across domains, slightly outperforming large language models like GPT-4. Additionally, SLALOM-feature scores and conceptual explanations effectively differentiate and cluster trauma-related language, highlighting different trauma aspects and identifying sexual abuse and experiences related to death as a common traumatic event across all datasets. This transferability is crucial as it allows for the development of tools to enhance trauma detection and intervention in diverse populations and settings.

There was a time before the turn of the millennium when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a full-throated accounting of himself and the things he cared about. He recalls his voice then as "unusually strong," so much so that he could fill large auditoriums with his words. The independent presidential candidate recounts those times somewhat wistfully, telling interviewers that he "can't stand" the sound of his voice today -- sometimes choked, halting and slightly tremulous. Spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological condition, in which an abnormality in the brain's neural network results in involuntary spasms of the muscles that open or close the vocal cords. My my voice doesn't really get tired. "I feel sorry for the people who have to listen to me," Kennedy said in a phone interview with The Times, his voice sounding as strained as it does in his public appearances.

With El Niño slated to drop a warm, wet winter on most of the US in the coming months, everybody's going to need something good to read while the weather outside is frightful. Engadget's well-read staff have some suggestions: our favorite books of 2023! We've got a phenomenal assortment of genres and titles for you this year, from horror and true crime to rom-coms and fantasy adventures, here to provide months of entertainment for even the most voracious reader. I love horror movies but horror novels are kind of hit and miss for me. I was immediately pulled into Final Girl Support Group, though, which does a lot of winking and nodding at classic slasher flicks while creating a completely unique story. Grady Hendrix's novel doesn't satirize the final girl, but imagines what life might be like for them after the end of their movie. Each of the main characters is (loosely) based on the final girl of a classic slasher, though their storylines don't feel contrived or predictable. It reads like a fast-paced thriller but, like so many of the best horror movies, it's also a poignant reflection on trauma.

Emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), has become a buzz phrase in recent years as part of a wider trend of'therapy talk' being used in day-to-day conversations. But relationship experts say a mismatch in EQ is often the source of breakdowns in marriages and partnerships. One of the first problems in most relationships on the rocks is a lack of communication, according to psychologist Dr. Scott Lyons, and a key part of communication is emotional intelligence. 'Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions,' he told DailyMail.com. He said that while you might be able to have fun with a romantic partner who has low EQ, the connection may not go much deeper.

TJ Arriaga, who fell in love with an AI robot, shares how he developed feelings for Phaedra, the robot, and was ultimately rejected by her and highlights how this app is causing trauma to people on'Jesse Watters Primetime.' The notion of falling in love with an AI robot has stepped outside the world of science fiction and the movie "Her," as rapidly advancing AI technology creates an opportunity for online relationships to blossom. Replika, a company that enables users to make personalized chatbots, says the goal of their technology is to "create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation." "It's a space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams – your'private perceptual world,'" says the website founded by Eugenia Kuyda. T.J. Arriaga, a recently divorced musician who created a bot named Phaedra through Replika shared with "Jesse Watters Primetime" the details behind his emotional relationship with the bot.

Late last month, the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. would send thirty-one M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Meanwhile, in New York, a Ukrainian delegation, including a representative of the Territorial Defense Forces, had gathered to consider other types of aid. The goal, according to an ad for the event, was to promote "the psychological and spiritual resilience of Ukrainian people living in trauma, crisis, and war." The delegation met at a studio in Chelsea run by a Polish artist named Agnieszka Pilat. She paints with the aid of mobile robots on loan from Boston Dynamics; a yellow robot that resembled a dog pattered around the space as the audience arrived.