Children who start school behind in mathematics are at-risk of staying behind throughout schooling and into adulthood. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on the best criteria for the early identification of these at-risk students. Using a unique 1st to 10th grade study of academic development (n = 445), we assessed the sensitivity and specificity of different ability-achievement and achievement-only criteria for identifying risk of mathematics learning difficulties (MLD) and adolescent innumeracy. The outcome criterion was based on the risk of innumeracy in 10th grade (< 25th mathematics percentile). The achievement-only cutoffs were mathematics scores below the 10th to 35th percentile (at 5 percentile increments, inclusive) in 1st grade and across 1st and 2nd grade, and teacher-reported in-class attentive behavior. The best combination of sensitivity (.589) and specificity (.878) was found for an achievement cutoff below the 25th percentile in 1st grade. We then examined growth in mathematics from 1st to 10th grade for different at-risk and typically achievement groups using latent score change (LCS) models. The models revealed that at-risk students were behind their peers in 1st grade, with a widening gap across the school years. However, not all at-risk students were identified indicating that additional factors need to be considered in follow-up studies. Until that time, low-achieving 1st graders, independent of cognitive ability, attentive behavior, and parental socioeconomic status, are at risk for long-term difficulties in mathematics and innumeracy in adolescence.

BACKGROUND:Understanding which specific behavioral and emotional problems are uniquely associated with achievement and thus potential targets for developing educational interventions. METHODS:Child Behavior Checklist syndrome scales and standardized measures of mathematics and reading achievement were analyzed using structural equation modeling in a community California cohort (N = 252) and the clinically diverse Healthy Brain Network cohort (N = 3,583). RESULTS:Attention and social problems were uniquely associated with lower achievement beyond overall psychopathology levels defined by the covariances among syndrome scores. Attention problems were consistently related to poorer mathematics and reading achievement across clinical status, development, and sex. Social problems showed age- and sex-specific patterns and were associated with lower achievement throughout development for girls but only during adolescence for boys. Models examining achievement-to-psychopathology relationships resulted in poorer fits than psychopathology-to-achievement models in typically developing children and adolescents. However, bidirectional relationships emerged in clinical samples, particularly between attention problems and mathematics achievement and between social problems and reading achievement. CONCLUSIONS:Specific behavioral problems, rather than overall psychopathology, are consistently associated with academic difficulties. Educational screening and interventions should prioritize attention regulation across all developmental stages and implement sex-differentiated social skill support, beginning earlier for girls and during adolescence for boys. These findings replicate across independent samples, demonstrating robust relationships with direct implications for school-based educational and mental health services.

The current meta-analysis of sex differences in mathematics builds upon the foundation laid by two large-scale analyses conducted years ago (e.g., Lindberg et al., 2010; Else-Quest et al., 2010). This meta-analysis provides a needed update and draws on a novel mix of studies, from experimental research to large-scale assessments, while offering a more detailed, current mapping of where, when, and in which mathematical domains sex differences emerge and change across grades. The review covers 2010 to 2022, and focuses on how sex differences in mathematics vary across grade level, mathematical content (e.g., arithmetic, geometry), geographic region, and national levels of gender equality. Using PRISMA guidelines, we synthesized 440 studies with 1,210 effect sizes, encompassing over 15 million participants. Random-effects multilevel models revealed a small but significant overall male advantage (d = 0.08), with stronger effects emerging in later grades for geometry (d = 0.54) and broad mathematics (d = 0.26). These differences were more pronounced in countries with higher gender equality, as measured by indices such as the Global Gender Gap Index, and in regions such as Northern America, Europe and Central and South America. Results indicate that sex differences in mathematics are content- and grade-specific, with a growing male advantage in later grades, especially in spatially intensive content areas like geometry. Overall, the findings support the role of both biological and socio-cultural factors in shaping sex differences in mathematics and underscore the importance of targeted interventions to address these gaps in mathematical education. This study provides a comprehensive and contemporary picture of sex differences in mathematics across grades and content domains by updating prior research through an analysis that covers over 15 million students across 440 studies published since 2010. This meta-analytic review shows a small overall male advantage in mathematics. The gap, however, becomes more pronounced in later grades, especially in mathematics domains with a strong spatial component such as geometry. The meta-analytic results suggest that the gap might be narrowed with the development of interventions that explicitly incorporate the use of spatial strategies into instruction in some mathematics areas.

Traits that are exaggerated in one sex relative to the other sex might be more vulnerable to stressor exposure because the development and expression of these traits are costly. Sex differences in such traits should therefore be smaller in populations with high stressor exposure. We tested this prediction in humans, by examining the magnitude of men's advantage in spatial cognition and women's advantage in emotion recognition, across nations that varied in their level of development. As predicted, men's advantage in spatial cognition was larger in nations relatively buffered from stressors. However, in contrast to our prediction, women's advantage in emotion recognition was constant across nations, suggesting aspects of men's cognition might be particularly vulnerable to early or current conditions. The samples were biased toward higher income and healthier individuals for nations in which men's spatial cognition was compromised, thus, we are likely underestimating the effects of living conditions on men's spatial cognition. The results further our understanding of how social and environmental conditions can have sex-specific effects on human cognition.

Exceptional insights into the organization of human cognitive abilities and some of the underlying brain mechanisms have emerged over the past 120 years. More recent studies have resulted in the identification of potential genetic and very basic brain mechanisms (e.g., synaptic plasticity) that undergird human cognition. These knowledge gains have been largely atheoretical, that is, they followed the emergence of new technologies, such as brain imaging methods and genome-wide association studies. The current proposal provides a theory-driven, evolutionary framework for studying human cognition using the frontoparietal and default mode networks as examples. The approach organizes the study of complex cognition around four dimensions: the pressures that drove the evolution of these networks, network functional competencies, the underlying biological mechanisms, and their development. The approach integrates the study of complex cognitive abilities across multiple dimensions and provides directions for future studies.

As nicely explained by Costello et al. (2026), evolution provides a powerful metatheory for more fully understanding many traits and phenomena that are of interest to psychologists. I add to their thoughtful discussion by elaborating on how Darwin's sexual selection-competition for mates and discriminating mate choices-provides a heuristic for understanding sex differences and can be used to generate predictions about how the magnitude of these differences can vary across time and place. The basic prediction is that reductions in disease burden, nutritional deficits, and intense social conflict and gains in personal freedom will result in an increase in the magnitude of many sex differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The study sought to identify the parental, child, and classroom predictors of gains in children's (n = 86) cardinal knowledge of number words and numerals (child Mage = 3.83 years; parent Mage = 35.17 years). Children's cardinal and related knowledge was assessed at the beginning of preschool, and their cardinal knowledge assessed again five months later. Children's executive functions, working memory, and intelligence were also assessed. Parents (n = 86) reported on their math anxiety, attitudes, beliefs, and home numeracy activities, and their academic achievement and intelligence were assessed. A parent-child number talk task assessed the content and complexity of quantitative talk in the home. Classroom measures included children's attentive behavior, and teacher-reported mathematics content presented in these classrooms. Children showed substantive gains in cardinal knowledge of number words (d = 0.57) and numerals (d = 0.65). A series of Bayesian and standard regression analyses revealed that complexity of parental number talk predicted gains in children's understanding of the cardinal values of number words (β = 0.27) and numerals (β = 0.25). Gains for number words were also predicted by children's executive functions (β = 0.30), whereas gains for numerals were predicted by recognition of numerals (β = 0.24). The results provide insights into the most critical contributors to children's emerging conceptual understanding of number.

Social media (SM) platforms allow users to communicate rapidly, exchange information, and create and share real-time content. Currently, 4.5 billion people use social media worldwide, making it an influential part of daily life. Beyond information sharing, social media facilitates communication, transfers information, and serves as a platform for advertising and shaping public opinion. Researchers analyse these aspects to understand and describe societal realities. The primary purpose of this paper is to analyse social media’s impact on global research. The research included an analysis of the most popular social platforms, considering the number of Web of Science (WoS) articles relating to them and the year in which the platform was established or the Monthly Active Users (MAU) factor. Data were collected based on the WoS database in the topic (which contains texts of title, abstract, author keywords, and Keywords Plus) of the articles, where phrases containing names of SM platforms were used. Quantitative research is a type of research that analyses data numerically to find relationships and statistical regularities of searched phrases. The impact of social media on the dissemination of research and findings was analysed based on the results of the study and also on the literature data. This research reveals a lack of correlation between the number of articles indexed in the WoS and the MAU of individual social media platforms. This observation raises an important question: do social media researchers focus on studying the platforms used by the majority, thereby providing a more accurate representation of current social dynamics? This article is helpful for researchers, policymakers, and social media platform developers seeking to understand the role of social media in shaping modern communication and public discourse. The most important finding of the paper is the low correlation between the number of SM users and the impact of social media platforms on learning, as exemplified by the Twitter (Note: Twitter was an American social networking service rebranded as X in 2023. As the period of data analysed in this paper covered the years up to 2022, the authors decided to stay with the name Twitter) platform, which is the 17th largest SM platform but is the 2nd (after Facebook) in implications for science.

On average men are taller and more muscular than women, which confers on them advantages related to female choice and during physical competition with other men. Sexual size dimorphisms such as these come with vulnerabilities due to higher maintenance and developmental costs for the sex with the larger trait. These costs are in keeping with evolutionary theory that posits large, elaborate, sexually selected traits are signals of health and vitality because stressor exposure (e.g. early disease) will compromise them (e.g. shorter stature) more than other traits. We provide a large-scale test of this hypothesis for the human male and show that with cross-national and cross-generational improvements in living conditions, where environmental stressors recede, men’s gains in height and weight are more than double those of women’s, increasing sexual size dimorphism. Our study combines evolutionary biology with measures of human wellbeing, providing novel insights into how socio-ecological factors and sexual selection shape key physical traits.

Men's overrepresentation in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is long standing and not fully understood. Since STEM fields drive much of the innovation that fuels economic growth, by not fully utilizing the potential of half the population, economies may be thereby missing out on valuable contributions. Thus, understanding this gap in representation is crucial. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of gender differences in the number of tertiary STEM students and graduates in the European Union from 1991 to 2019, with a focus on geographic representation and secular changes in the magnitude of these differences. A unique spatiotemporal analysis was performed for dentifying the extent of gender inequality in STEM fields across Europe. The analysis show that the general increase in participation in higher education doubled the number of women in tertiary education but not in STEM fields. Thus, women are consistently underrepresented among graduate entrepreneurs, especially in STEM. The results also revealed smaller gender differences in STEM in Central and Eastern European as well as Scandinavian countries than in Western European countries, but similar patterns across generations were observed. This work identifies the relationship between women's growth in STEM fields, the effectiveness of chosen policy measures, and the untapped potential of women to fill a possible shortage of graduates in STEM fields.

There is a long-standing debate regarding the magnitude of gender differences in academic achievement. Using data from a robust and nationally representative sample of 146,227 Italian-fifth-graders, we investigated whether academic anxiety is related to gender differences in mathematics and reading achievement. Across six independent samples, boys had higher performance in mathematics (ds =-0.13 to-0.21) and girls had higher performance in reading (ds = 0.07 to 0.21) and higher test anxiety (ds = 0.30 to 0.37). Meta-analytic procedures indicated these patterns were stable across samples. Path analyses within and across samples suggested about one-third of the academic gender gaps can be accounted for by test anxiety. In particular, with control of test anxiety girls' advantage in reading achievement increased, while boys' advantage in mathematics decreased. Educational statement: The current study provides an extensive exploration of how test anxiety potentially influences gender differences in mathematics and reading achievement. Test anxiety appears to lower girls' performance on achievement tests and thus underestimating their advantages in reading and overestimating boys' advantages in mathematics. One implication is that efforts to reduce test anxiety will enhance performance on achievement tests, especially for test-anxious girls, and through this provide more accurate estimates of academic competencies.

Mathematics and reading abilities are foundational academic skills that are robustly correlated across development, suggesting shared cognitive mechanisms. To identify their common neural architecture, we conducted the largest cross-domain meta-analysis to date (179 experiments, 3308 participants). By analyzing activation patterns across simple and complex tasks in both children and adults, we uncovered three key insights into how the brain supports academic performance and learning. First, while mathematical processing recruits frontal-parietal regions and reading frontal-temporal regions, both domains rely on shared cognitive control networks. The salience network in particular, anchored by the bilateral insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, supports both mathematical and reading processes, particularly during complex tasks. Second, children show broader engagement of these cognitive control networks than adults across both domains. Third, adults demonstrate more specialized posterior network engagement for domain-specific processing while maintaining prefrontal recruitment for challenging tasks, suggesting a developmental shift toward efficient, specialized processing. These findings suggest the ability to engage and coordinate cognitive control networks might represent a fundamental mechanism in academic performance and learning.

Although crucial for mathematical problem solving and long-term STEM achievement, visuospatial skills remain a significant challenge for many students in the United States. Therefore, it is critical to explore how spatial skill interventions can be integrated into mathematics curriculum. This research examines the effects of Project VisMO, a hands-on, origami-based curriculum and after-school program, on elementary school children's visuospatial skills, mathematical competencies, and mathematics anxiety and attitudes. An initial randomized control trial (RCT) of the online VisMO program, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic with 179 elementary students, demonstrated promising results in enhancing spatial vocabulary and reducing mathematics anxiety. Two follow up studies of the VisMO program were conducted, featuring a 5-week and a 12-week intervention. Both studies confirmed improvements in spatial vocabulary, a reduction in math anxiety, and potential geometry gains. We discuss the need for further research on the in-person program and the importance of designing structured professional development for educators to enhance their self-efficacy and knowledge of incorporating visuospatial interventions into their teaching.

A meta-analytical approach was used to test the greater male variability hypothesis using the mathematics and reading performance of more than 26 million Italian children across second, fifth, and eighth-grade. In keeping with the hypothesis, boys were more variable than girls in mathematics performance especially in more developed geographic regions with larger sex differences. However, there was no clear pattern for sex differences in variability in reading performance, although there was a trend for boys to be more variable in regions with larger sex differences, favoring girls. These results provide a robust test of the greater male variability hypothesis and suggest that it is not a ubiquitous phenomenon but rather varies across traits.

We explored the relation between the quantitative competencies and executive functions of 130 children (65 boys) at preschool entry (M = 3.83 years) and their parents’ (M = 35.0 years) cognitive abilities, academic achievement, mathematics attitudes, beliefs, and anxiety, and home numeracy activities. Children’s quantitative competencies were defined by simple (counting, enumeration, numeral recognition) and complex (spontaneous focus on number, cardinal knowledge) skills and knowledge. Bayesian and standard regressions indicated that higher parental reading achievement was associated better simple quantitative competencies, whereas higher parental math anxiety was associated with lower complex competencies, especially for cardinal knowledge of number words and numerals. Core models revealed that children with strong executive functions and parents with low math anxiety had substantive advantages over their peers in cardinal knowledge at preschool entry. High parental math anxiety clustered with lower parental math achievement, less confidence in their math competencies, and an avoidance of numerical information, but not with the reported frequency of home numeracy activities or positive math attitudes. Thus, the mechanism through which parents’ math anxiety might influence young children’s emerging cardinal knowledge is unclear.

The study examined students' spatial collaborative problem-solving behaviors when engaging in a design task dependent on spatial reasoning. Thirty undergraduate students working alone and collaboratively were tested on performance differences in solving an origami Sonobe cube as an active hands-on spatial problem solving task. Epistemic network analysis and sequential pattern mining were conducted to reveal the relationships among collaborative problem solving behaviors and students' embodied engagement displayed in low - versus high-performing student pairs. The core findings were that successful student pairs (higher scores on their final sketches) engaged more in sketching and gesturing in their collaborative problem-solving process, whereas their less successful peers engaged more in trial-and-error or heuristic experimentation by manipulating the origami units. This study can contribute to developing specific pedagogical strategies that better prepare students for collaboration on tasks that require a high level of spatial cognition.

The question of whether males or females are the more variable sex is long-standing, and yet to be fully answered. We investigate the relationships between body mass and variation across species using a phylogenetically informed analysis of the body mass of 337 species representing six mammalian orders. Within each order, we found that the larger sex is typically the more variable sex, whether male or female, and the variation-size relationship is arguably often close to unity. Thus, size may be the main or even sole driver of variability in at least some orders. Deviations from the expected 1 : 1 relationship emerged, however, in regressions of male : female mass variance against male : female mean mass, for Chiroptera and Rodentia, which both presented hyperallometric relationships suggesting that drivers over and above size influence differences in variation between the sexes. In Chiroptera, most species have larger females. The y-intercept value for Artiodactyla and Primates were significantly greater than 0 suggesting greater male variation in species where the sexes are of commensurable size. Historic belief of exclusively greater male variability may have resulted from a focus on species with intense male-male competition and, thus, larger male body sizes. Our results suggest that it is often size, not sex per se, that influences within-sex variability, although additional sex-specific factors might be present in at least some orders.

Background: In February 2022, Russian Federation troops attacked Ukraine on several fronts, thereby starting a war that continues to this day. The invasion garnered worldwide opposition, leading to sanctions imposed on politicians and corporations in the Russian Federation. The war has also left its mark on art, culture, and science. Methods: In this study, we analyse the war in Ukraine and how scholars around the world have examined it. The analysis is divided into three parts: (1) a comprehensive review of the number of articles and conference proceedings related to the Russia-Ukraine war in the Web of Science (WoS) disciplines/categories; (2) the main topics and directions chosen by the authors; and (3) a summary of studies focused on COVID-19 during the war. The latter topic is particularly important, as the COVID-19 situation in Ukraine was already complex before the 2022 invasion, and the ongoing military actions have further exacerbated it. For the above analyses, we utilised a WoS database from 2014 (covering the first Russian attack on Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions) through December 2022. Results and Conclusions: For academics, the war in Ukraine has become a significant subject of study. As it proliferated, culminating in a direct mass attack in February 2022, research efforts f forts involved more and more scientific fields. These fields range from political science and sociology research to psychology and marketing to engineering science or supply chains.

Independent of overall achievement, girls' intraindividual academic strength is typically reading, whereas boys' strength is typically mathematics or science. Sex differences in intraindividual strengths are associated with educational and occupational sex disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Paradoxically, these sex differences are larger in more gender-equal countries, but the stability of this paradox is debated. We assessed the stability of the gender-equality paradox in intraindividual strengths, and its relation to wealth, by analyzing the academic achievement of nearly 2.5 million adolescents across 85 countries and regions in five waves (from 2006 to 2018) of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Girls' intraindividual strength in reading and boys' strength in mathematics and science were stable across countries and waves. Boys' advantage in science as an intraindividual strength was larger in more gender-equal countries, whereas girls' advantage in reading was larger in wealthier countries. The results have implications for reducing sex disparities in STEM fields.

Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving ...Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In ...