Social Sciences

Nature or nurture? It’s the eternal question for so many human interactions and personality traits. Now, it appears, nature may play a larger role than nurture when it comes to family relationships between adolescents and their parents.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and George Washington University in Washington, D.C., used data on 674 families, each with a same-sex adolescent pair, to evaluate the factors that made up the relationships and individual p

If you suffered from piles, would you want your friends asking about your condition in public? Most people wouldn’t, yet new research suggests that the older you become the more likely you are to make someone blush with embarrassment in that way.

But old people may not intend to be rude: in fact, age-related changes in brain function may explain their lack of tact, according to a new Australian study just published in the journal Psychology and Aging.

Tests carried ou

Young children may be missing out on ‘pretend’ games like pirates and spacemen due to the demands of the school curriculum, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The project, led by Dr Sue Rogers at the University of Plymouth, found that reception classes were not always designed to meet the needs of 4-5 year olds. ‘Children of this age learn to make friends as well as to use their imagination through role play,’ says Dr Rogers. ‘We know th

One in seven businesses in Tayside, Scotland, have employed migrant workers in the past two years, and a similar proportion say they could or will do so again in the next two years.

These are among the initial finding of the first full-scale survey of migrant labour in Tayside, currently being carried out by Scottish Economic research, based at Abertay University’s Dundee Business School.

Six hundred local employers have responded to an initial survey, and SER is now con

Government efforts to increase employment by reforming incapacity benefits are likely to have a limited impact unless accompanied by more effective regional policies to create new jobs in Britain’s older industrial areas, according to a new report published by the thinktank Catalyst, and authored by academics at Sheffield Hallam and Cambridge Universities.

The government believes that many of the 2.7 million people on incapacity benefits could take up work, and sees this as a

New technology will exacerbate rather than ease the problem of identity theft, according to new research at the University of East Anglia.

Criminologist Dr Emily Finch will outline her new research on the increasingly sensitive issue at the BA Festival of Science in Dublin next week, concluding that the introduction of identity cards in the UK would fail to combat identity theft.

She will challenge the assumption that technology-based security systems provide the solu