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> An informatics and computing professor found that the Climate TRACE consortium has underestimated vehicle carbon emissions in cities by a staggering 70%. 

> And archaeologists excavated and photoscanned a prehistoric man-made island located in a Scottish loch.

 

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May 9, 2026 report

Saturday Citations: Psychedelic therapeutics; interoception and well-being; a hidden linguistic bias

 

by Chris Packham, Phys.org

edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Robert Egan

---

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Also this week: 

1. Linguists have uncovered a hidden bias in human language; 
2. A study revealed how psychedelics confer therapeutically beneficial insights; a
3. Researchers reported on the connection between mental health, interoception and the experience of time.

Safety first

Researchers have assumed since the 1950s that meaning in language is divided into three emotional dimensions according to a framework called VAD: 

1. valence, or positive vs. negative; 
2. arousal, or excited vs. calm;  
3. dominance, or controlling vs. submissive. 

In a new study, researchers at the University of Vermont have upended that framework, finding that language is not organized simply by emotion but by a goodness-power-aggression-danger-structure (GPADS) circumplex framework. 

1. Their analysis reveals a long-hidden factor: Language is biased toward safety.

They call their new method of analytics "ousiometrics," from a Greek word for "essence." By analyzing large-scale, English-language texts to measure their meaning, they derived an average meaning score. For example, Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" maps to a grid defined by the opposing pairs dangerous/safe, weak/powerful, gentle/aggressive and bad/good.

In linguistics, the so-called Pollyanna principle describes the tendency of language to skew positive; in the study, the researchers write, 

"The Pollyanna principle's positivity bias is, in fact, a one-dimensional projection of an underlying safety bias." 

• The researchers speculate that if language does have a safety bias, the evolution of human communication may have been influenced by pressures that shaped survival.

Therapeutic tripping

As scientific investigation into psychedelics advances, researchers have learned that psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, confers long-term therapeutic effects on individuals with depression, anxiety and addiction. These effects can last for at least 30 days after administration. 

In a new study, researchers at UC San Francisco and Imperial College London now report that this is accompanied by likely anatomical brain changes that last for up to a month after the experience.

Volunteers in the study were healthy and had never previously taken psychedelics. Brain entropy refers to the diversity of neural activity occurring in the brain. 

• Researchers have linked this entropy to experiences of insight. 
• While researchers have hoped to derive non-psychedelic compounds to treat psychiatric disorders, the finding suggests that the psychedelic trip itself is responsible for the brain changes they observed. 

"Our data shows that such experiences of psychological insight relate to an entropic quality of brain activity and how both are involved in causing subsequent improvements in mental health. It suggests that the trip—and its correlates in the brain—is a key component of how psychedelic therapy works," says co-author Robin Carhart-Harris.

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Listen to your gut

Interoception is the sensory experience of your body's internal state. Higher interoceptive awareness is linked with well-being and emotional regulation. 

• But chronic anxiety, trauma or stress can mute this awareness. 
• Researchers have found that people with higher awareness of internal bodily signals have the healthiest sleep and digestion. 
• But the relationship between interoceptive awareness and continuity of consciousness is insufficiently understood.

> Scientists have suggested that this relationship may be connected to the individual's time perspective—their personal orientation toward the past, present and future. Researchers in Prague conducted a study with 152 adults who completed validated measures of interoceptive awareness, time perspective and self-rated indicators of somatic experience including sleep quality and digestion. 

>The volunteers with the highest interoceptive awareness reported better somatic functioning, and the association was partially influenced by time perspective. They conclude that interoceptive awareness and temporal orientation interact to maintain psychological and physiological stability.

Written for you by our author Chris Packham, edited by Lisa Lock, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive. If this reporting matters to you, please consider a donation (especially monthly). You'll get an ad-free account as a thank-you.

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