Why does stress push people to habits like drinking?

A new study offers one of the clearest answers yet to the question of why stressful moments so often push people toward habits like drinking.

The research identifies a direct connection inside the brain that links stress to addiction‑related behaviors.

The work shows how alcohol disrupts the natural stress‑response system, making it harder for the brain to adapt or make good decisions.

The team, led by Jun Wang, professor in the neuroscience and experimental therapeutics department in the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine at Texas A&M University, published its findings in eLife.

The researchers found a pathway that connects the brain’s stress centers to the region responsible for habits and decision‑making. The stress centers include two small regions deep in the brain called the central amygdala (CeA) and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which are areas that react when we feel overwhelmed, anxious or threatened.

“What we’ve identified is a direct line of communication between the brain’s stress centers and the region that governs habits and actions, a connection that wasn’t previously understood well,” says Wang, the study’s senior author.

“Seeing stress signals travel straight into this decision‑making system gives us a clearer picture of why stressful experiences can so strongly influence behavior, sometimes in ways that become unhealthy.”

These stress centers send messages using a chemical called CRF (corticotropin‑releasing factor). CRF is the brain’s main stress signal, released to help the body and brain respond during challenging situations.

Until now, scientists didn’t know how CRF reached the dorsal striatum, the part of the brain that helps control our actions, especially habits. The new study shows that CRF‑sending cells in the stress centers send direct lines of communication into the dorsal striatum.

What CRF reaches inside the dorsal striatum are cells called cholinergic interneurons, or CINs. These are specialized cells that act like traffic controllers for the brain. They help determine whether we stay flexible and adjust our behavior or slip into automatic habits.

When the researchers applied CRF to these cells, the cells became more active. This increase in activity also boosted their release of acetylcholine, a natural brain chemical that supports learning, decision‑making and the ability to change plans when needed.

“Under normal conditions, this stress signal actually helps the brain stay flexible, not rigid,” Wang says. “It helps us pause, think and make better decisions, especially when something stressful is happening.”

The second major finding of the study shows how alcohol disrupts this helpful stress‑response system.

When alcohol was applied to the brain cells—during early withdrawal—it weakened the ability of CRF to activate the cholinergic interneurons. Alcohol on its own also slowed the activity of these cells.

In plain terms: Alcohol blocks the brain’s natural ability to adapt during stress.

“Alcohol essentially cuts the line of communication,” Wang says. “When that happens, the brain loses some of its ability to respond to stress in a healthy way. This may push a person toward automatic or habitual behaviors, like drinking.”

This disruption could help explain why stress makes people more likely to relapse during recovery from alcohol use disorder—and why addiction often involves rigid, difficult‑to‑change behavior patterns.

The discovery of this direct pathway gives scientists a clearer picture of how emotional stress can influence decision‑making and habit formation in the brain. It helps explain several well‑known but previously mysterious features of addiction:

• Stress is a powerful trigger for relapse: If alcohol has weakened the brain’s natural stress response, stressful moments may push a person right back into old habits.
• Addiction involves rigid, compulsive behaviors: If the brain’s “flexibility” system is disrupted, it becomes harder to break out of harmful routines.
• Withdrawal can make stress feel worse: The study found that even early withdrawal blunted CRF’s effects, meaning the brain might be especially vulnerable during this period.

Wang says the findings are impactful because if scientists understand where a system breaks, they can start figuring out how to fix it. “This pathway may be a promising target for helping people build resilience against addiction or relapse,” he says.

Because the study pinpointed some of the exact cells and receptors involved, it may guide the development of future treatments. For example, therapies might aim to:

• strengthen the activity of the cholinergic interneurons
• support CRF signaling during withdrawal
• protect this stress‑response circuit from alcohol’s effects.

By uncovering a precise biological link between stress and addiction‑related behaviors, the study offers a milestone in the effort to understand and eventually treat the forces that make addiction such a difficult disorder.

“This discovery gives us a map of how stress reaches the brain’s decision‑making machinery,” Wang says. “And importantly, it shows us how alcohol interferes with that map. That knowledge is powerful.”

This research was sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Source: Texas A&M University

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New paint changes color to reveal impacts

Imagine a paint that changes color depending on how hard its surface is hit.

It could be used on football helmets to monitor concussion-level impacts, to record the handling history of shipped packages, or placed on insoles to analyze an orthopedic patient’s gait.

The paint is the latest innovation coming from the Tufts University Silklab, led by Fiorenzo Omenetto, a professor of engineering. Omenetto and research assistant professors Marco Lo Presti and Giulia Guidetti developed the paint to quantitatively measure the site and force of an impact without using any electronic circuitry or sensors.

The innovative substance is made with a color‑changing polymer surrounded by a silk protein polymer shell, and can be painted on surfaces of almost any size, texture, or contour.

The potential applications cover a wide range of measurements, from the subtle changes in pressure when analyzing the surface aerodynamics of cars and planes to the powerful impacts that could occur from military or industrial blast exposure.

The researchers even collaborated with Grammy Award-winning drummer Terri Lyne Carrington to demonstrate how the paint can reveal patterns of impact on a drum skin surface.

The research appears in the journal Advanced Science.

How does it work?

The tiny spherical particles in the coating—each about the size of a human blood cell—contain a core of color‑changing polymer called polydiacetylene, surrounded by a harder polymer shell made of silk fibroin proteins derived from the common silk moth.

The core polymer undergoes a blue-to-red transition when under mechanical stress, such as being squeezed, twisted, or stretched. At the microscopic level, the mechanical stress twists the chemical backbone of the inner polymer, affecting how electrons move along its length.

That in turn affects how the electrons absorb photons and causes the core polymer to change from deep blue to bright red. Because the amount of red increases with how hard the surface of the paint particles are hit, the paint can act like a built‑in force meter.

“You can tune the hardness of the shell so that you can extend the response of the paint to different levels of forces,” says Guidetti. The silk shell also prevents false triggers, so the paint only changes color when it is hit with a meaningful force.

Once the color changes, it stays changed, providing a permanent record of the level of force and its location on the surface. Additional hits in the same location provide an additive response, and the level of color change can be converted directly into newtons—the conventional unit to measure force.

The paint in its current form detects forces ranging from 100 to 770 newtons—levels comparable to that from a light hammer tap to a strong punch from a UFC fighter.

The paint can be brushed, sprayed, or drop cast (poured and then evaporated dry) to form films on many types of surfaces, including paper, plastic, wood, and metal, and on a wide range of objects that may benefit from displaying an impact profile of their use.

“You can paint it on anything from helmets to footwear and clothing, or on ropes and cables to measure stress,” says Omenetto.

Because it doesn’t rely on electronics, the coating is lightweight, inexpensive, and easy to scale up. It performs reliably even on curved or flexible surfaces, allowing one to capture complex impact patterns with fine detail.

Science and art

In one experiment, the researchers worked with renowned drummer Terri Lyne Carrington to demonstrate how the paint, applied to the drumheads, could be used as an analytical tool to show the location, forces, angles, and patterns of drumstick strikes during a performance, a bit reminiscent of sports analytics graphs such as basketball shot charts.

The experiment arose out of a longstanding collaboration between the Tufts Silklab and the Global Jazz Institute at Berklee College of Music.

“It’s an unusual collaboration, but based on a fundamentally simple principle,” says Omenetto. “In the work we do we start with a fixed input—silk—and end up with a thousand different things you can creatively think of for applications, such as a sensing paint. In music, you have equally fixed inputs such as the 12 notes of a chromatic scale that are reassembled in a myriad of tunes and improvisations.

“Having a dialogue between scientists and musicians about what represents a new idea and how it is generated leads to an incredibly rich interaction,” he says.

“This inspiration from great musicians helps scientists reframe their point of view and think of a ‘beautiful question’ that goes beyond mere lab work and addresses a bigger context and global impact.”

Omenetto says he asked Carrington if she would like to play some of her songs so they could visualize them on the drumskin. Carrington improvised and played songs from her 2019 album Waiting Game. The result looked like an abstract piece of art.

Omenetto wonders if the hit pattern could have any use for new drummers learning the instrument.

“It could help with training drummers to hit the center of the drum head, which is important for sound quality,” says Carrington.

“And it would show if a drummer has tendencies to hit other places, like closer to the rim. In other words, you could see more easily when your aim is off.”

Carrington also reflects on the crossover between the arts and technology. “Music is mathematical and scientific, so it is not surprising to me that I was drawn to the idea Fio presented. Great improvised music has a lot of questions and answers and problem solving,” says Carrington, but ultimately “the heart and mind—the human condition—is what really makes music good or not.”

Source: Tufts University

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TV ads don’t work nearly as well as believed

Traditional TV ads are far less effective than believed, according to real-time viewership data.

Even with all the hype around streaming, traditional TV still dominates ad spend. Advertisers are putting $139 billion into linear ads this year, compared to just $33 billion for ads on streaming/connected TV.

“We show TV ads are only about half as effective as we thought.”

With no way to track individual behavior among traditional TV viewers, it’s difficult to determine whether all that spending gets results.

New research from the University of Notre Dame helps determine the return on investment for TV ads, ironically by using digital data.

By combining massive datasets that track exactly what households watch and buy second by second, the study separates the real impact of TV ads from other factors.

Traditional methods of measurement, which rely mostly on ratings and aggregate market data, appear to overestimate ad effectiveness by 55% in a study of advertising for food delivery services, according to Shijie Lu, an associate professor of marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Lu’s research appears in Marketing Science.

Imagine that a household watches only part of a live game. If a food delivery ad airs during the portion they watched, they may see it; if it airs earlier or later, they may miss it. That timing difference creates a kind of natural experiment, helping the researchers isolate the ad’s true effect from other factors, such as which households were already more likely to order food. Researchers could not easily do this before with traditional TV measurement. Smart TV tracking now provides second-by-second household viewing data, making this kind of measurement possible at a much finer level.

Using LG smart TV data, Lu and coauthors Tsung-Yiou Hsieh from Oklahoma State University and Rex Yuxing Du from the University of Texas at Austin analyzed the viewing habits of millions of people who opted in to sharing their viewing data, letting the researchers see exactly what was on peoples’ screens—broadcast networks such as NBC and ABC, specifically—over a four-month period. The study didn’t track streaming apps like Hulu or Amazon. LG watched what viewers watched and connected that data to people’s food delivery app usage to measure ad impact.

“This is a game-changer,” Lu says, “because we can now link precise TV viewing data with real purchase history to measure TV ad effectiveness more credibly.

“Brands are overestimating their campaigns and wasting money on ineffective placements,” he says.

“We show TV ads are only about half as effective as we thought. When corrected, the real sales impact is much lower, which has important implications for how advertisers evaluate performance and allocate spending.”

In addition to showing that traditional measures greatly overstated the effects of TV ads, the new measurement method revealed additional insights that could help companies better target their ads.

Data show that promotions for first-time buyers increase retention. Viewers’ responsiveness to ads peaks within two days of purchasing food on a delivery app, with the highest engagement rate found among customers who have ordered two to four times previously. Young, tech-savvy sports fans are better prospects than older news viewers.

“The old ways of measuring TV ads are missing an important part of the picture, because they do not fully account for who is more likely to see ads and who is more likely to buy,” Lu says.

Traditional TV ad tracking confuses ad effectiveness with pre-existing habits (like who is already likely to buy or who watches a lot of TV), leading to inflated results. This research fixes that by isolating the random timing of ad slots within shows, allowing the team to accurately measure the true sales lift of TV ads and determine how that impact varies based on a customer’s history.

The study provides a powerful tool for more precisely measuring the return on investment of TV advertising. By targeting ads based on what viewers actually buy—not just demographics like age or gender—this approach brings digital-level precision to TV.

Source: University of Notre Dame

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What can history tell us about AI?

As the AI era unfolds around us, historians reflect on lessons learned from the rollout of the internet and other technological revolutions.

In an essay posted to X on February 10, artificial intelligence entrepreneur Matt Shumer put it bluntly: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.”

Shumer’s words, which have racked up 86 million views to date, rattled the nerves of an already-rattled public—and fueled fear for what the future may hold as the AI revolution threatens to disrupt work and ignite or topple the economy.

According to historians, anxieties like these have surfaced during all previous technological revolutions, from the assembly line that altered manufacturing to the trains, cars, and airplanes that shortened travel times to the internet that put information at our fingertips.

One notable difference with AI is the unprecedented speed at which the technology is advancing, with newer tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 enabling users to write complex computer code, analyze data, or generate reports in a matter of seconds, or even engage in several tasks at once through a process called multi-agent teaming.

Below, two political economy historians, Louis Hyman and Angus Burgin, offer perspective on the AI-fueled shift we are experiencing and the concerns it sparks.

Hyman specializes in labor, capitalism, and the changing nature of work in the United States and has authored or edited five books on the history of American capitalism, including Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (Viking, 2018). Burgin focuses on intellectual history and the political economy of technology in the US.

The separate conversations, combined and edited for flow and clarity, appear below:

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Art films can make you more creative

A new study offers some of the strongest evidence yet that viewing art doesn’t just move us emotionally—it changes how we think.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara found that people who viewed artistic film shorts showed measurable increases in creative thinking compared with those who watched entertaining, “non-art,” videos.

“Art confronts us with the unexpected,” says psychological researcher Madeleine Gross, who led the study with coauthor Jonathan Schooler, also in the psychological and brain sciences department.

“It pushes us beyond surface-level perception, into broader, and more abstract ways of thinking and perceiving. Those same processes appear to support creative thinking.”

In the experiment, nearly 500 participants were randomly assigned to watch either a critically acclaimed animated short film or a humorous home-video compilation—the kind of content familiar to anyone who’s scrolled through social media reels. Afterward, each participant completed two tasks designed to capture different dimensions of creative thinking.

The first was a categorization task. Here, study participants were asked to rate how well various objects fit into a given category. For example: rate how much a car belongs in the category “vehicle.” Pretty straightforward. But what about a camel? Or a foot? That’s where things get interesting. People who are more willing to accept these offbeat examples are exhibiting what researchers call “conceptual expansion”—a loosening of the boundaries between mental categories. And when those boundaries loosen, ideas cross-pollinate, and new associations form. This is, in many ways, at the heart of creative thinking.

The second task measured creative production more directly. Participants were asked to create a short story that included three given words: “stamp,” “letter,” and “send.” Some stories were uncreative and predictable: “I was writing my friend a letter, so I put a stamp on it and took it to the post office to send.” Others were more inventive, using the words metaphorically (“…her words left a stamp in my mind”) or taking the prompt in a surprising direction. Independent judges rated the stories on their originality. Once again, the group that had watched the artistic shorts came out ahead.

Perhaps the most surprising outcome was that, in general, individuals who viewed the experimental films reported that they felt worse after, compared to individuals in the control group. They rated the films lower and reported more negative emotional states. Yet they still outperformed on every measure of creativity. It seems art can produce cognitive benefits without requiring the viewer to enjoy the experience.

So what’s going on? The study points to a specific mechanism. Art appears to work its cognitive magic by triggering “state openness”—a temporary shift toward a more receptive and exploratory mindset. This shift, the researchers found, fully explained the link between watching art and broader conceptual thinking. The common intuition that art “expands your mind” may be more literal than it sounds.

The films used in the study were sourced from Short of the Week, a highly selective film curation platform, and all fell into the “experimental” genre, reflecting works that resist simple interpretation, are visually surprising or narratively ambiguous. The control videos, on the other hand, were rapid-fire compilations of humorous animal clips and other domestic bloopers. They offered immediate gratification but little to chew on intellectually.

Though the results can’t yet be generalized beyond artistic short films—the study carries important implications. This is the first experimental demonstration that passive exposure to everyday art can promote creativity. Much prior research in arts and aesthetics lack true experimental control. In the present study, participants were randomly assigned to view art or an active control, meaning they had an equal chance of seeing either. The control was a strong comparison, one that could plausibly have explained the effects of art—as a product of mere entertainment or positive mood—yet didn’t. This stands in contrast to prior work that lacks proper controls altogether, and it also tells us art is doing something more.

The findings also speak to accessibility. Much aesthetics research has focused on museum visits, which remain out of reach for many people particularly across socioeconomic lines. Film, on the other hand, is one of the most widely consumed and accessible art forms. That it, too, can promote creative benefits underscores the promise of everyday art engagement.

Perhaps most importantly, this work could have real time applications. At a time when arts funding faces persistent pressure in schools and public budgets, the study provides a controlled, preregistered and transparently reported demonstration that brief encounters with art can temporarily drive changes in cognition that favor creativity.

“When there are debates about whether arts programs deserve more funding, studies like this offer something concrete to point to,” Gross says.

“The case isn’t closed but with evidence like this, the idea that art expands the mind is starting to look less like a metaphor, and more like a measurable psychological effect.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

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Your neighborhood may be aging you at the cellular level

Researchers have determined that neighborhood conditions may be driving aging at the cellular level.

Their study in Social Science and Medicine finds that people living in neighborhoods with fewer social and economic opportunities such as jobs and stable housing are more likely to have an abundance of CDKN2A RNA, a measure of cellular aging.

“Our health is shaped not only by individual behaviors, but also by the environments we live in,” says Mariana Rodrigues, a PhD student at New York University’s School of Global Public Health and the study’s first author.

“This study suggests that structural conditions may become biologically embedded and influence aging processes over time.”

Neighborhood factors such as green spaces, clean air, jobs, well-resourced schools, and affordable housing can influence our well-being. Studies show that people living in areas lacking these opportunities have a higher risk of chronic disease and shorter life expectancies, but less is known about the impact on health and aging at a cellular level.

As cells age, they stop dividing but remain metabolically active and secrete substances that fuel inflammation. These cellular changes are connected to frailty and aging-related diseases. Measures of cellular senescence—an indicator of biological aging—include: CDKN2A RNA abundance, which is involved in halting cell division; DNA damage response, reflecting genomic instability; and senescence-associated secretory phenotypes, which activate inflammatory pathways.

To understand the connection between neighborhood factors and cellular aging, the researchers analyzed data from 1,215 American adults in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, including blood samples measuring four molecular markers of cellular aging. They also assessed neighborhood opportunity based on a participant’s census tract using the Childhood Opportunity Index 3, which calculates 44 location-specific measures of education (e.g., test scores and graduation rates), health and environment (e.g., air and water quality, walkability, and health insurance coverage), and social and economic resources (e.g., employment, homeownership, and income).

The researchers found that people living in low-opportunity neighborhoods had significantly elevated CDKN2A RNA, even after accounting for other socioeconomic, health, and lifestyle factors. The association between neighborhood opportunity and CDKN2A expression was strongest for social and economic factors, meaning that cellular senescence may be driven by a neighborhood’s lower social and economic opportunity rather than by a lack of education, health, or environmental factors.

“Stressors related to income, jobs, and housing are not occasional, but persistent conditions that shape daily life,” says Adolfo Cuevas, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at NYU School of Global Public Health and the study’s senior author.

“Our findings suggest that chronic stress caused by economic deprivation and limited mobility may be the primary driver of cellular aging.”

The researchers hope that future studies will hone in on community-related factors that could buffer against health risks and continue to examine how neighborhood conditions influence aging over time, which could help pinpoint critical windows of exposure.

However, they note that many environmental factors that influence health are structural—”not things we can fix as individuals, but rather, what we should be addressing as a society,” noted Rodrigues.

“Improving neighborhood conditions, particularly social and economic resources, may be important for promoting healthy aging and reducing health disparities, but if we really want to address health disparities and improve health for everyone, it’s important to consider what needs to be changed at the structural level,” says Rodrigues.

Additional study authors are from the NYU School of Global Public Health as well as the University of California, Los Angeles.

Support for this work came from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Source: New York University

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How does narcissism affect relationships?

New research challenges the popular assumption that narcissists gradually damage their relationships over time.

The study used longitudinal data to track over 5,000 couples for up to six years. Participants completed questionnaires that measured two dimensions of narcissism: narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry.

“Narcissists have two different ways to maintain their inflated positive self-perceptions,” says Gwendolyn Seidman, lead author of the study and associate professor in Michigan State University’s psychology department.

“They can puff themselves up by trying to impress others (narcissistic admiration) or they can put other people down to show they are superior to them (narcissistic rivalry).”

Published in the Journal of Personality, the study found that narcissistic rivalry traits were consistently linked to lower relationship satisfaction for both partners, but contrary to earlier research, narcissistic admiration had no meaningful effect on either partner’s satisfaction.

In addition, the study found that the rate of decline was no steeper for couples where one partner scored highly on narcissism. This suggests that long-term effects of narcissism on romantic relationships may unfold in ways that are more nuanced than previously thought.

The study also looked at couples who had been together for a year or less—and found that narcissistic traits showed no association with satisfaction at all.

“People often assume that narcissists are charming at first but gradually damage their relationships over time. Our findings suggest that the reality may be more complicated,” says Seidman.

“Perhaps there is some turning point in the relationship where things change and satisfaction nosedives or perhaps the ‘honeymoon’ phase with narcissists is longer. Another possibility is that the harm caused by narcissists doesn’t show up directly in their partners’ overall relationship satisfaction. For example, narcissists may gradually erode their partners’ self-esteem or sense of agency.”

The researchers hope that by understanding how personality traits shape relationship experiences, clinicians and other researchers can better understand why some relationships struggle and how partners influence each other’s well-being over time.

Source: Michigan State University

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