The National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (NIH OBSSR) recently held the final installment of their 2026 BSSR Festival Webinar Series. The webinar, “Recent Discoveries in Basic Behavioral and Social Sciences Research,” featured two NIH-funded researchers, and one NIH intramural Senior Investigator, who each shared their work’s important real-life applications which benefit health and wellbeing.
After an introduction by OBSSR Director Jane Simoni, PhD, the three speakers began their talks. Panelists included:
- Lauren Atlas, PhD, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH),
- Emily Falk, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, and
- Jeremy Wolfe, PhD, Harvard Medical School; former FABBS Board President, and current Council Representative for the Vision Sciences Society (VSS)
Dr. Atlas opened the researcher talks, explaining her focus on understanding how psychological factors shape pain, emotion, and clinical outcomes. She examines interpersonal processes, considering how interactions between patient and provider can impact health outcomes. Dr. Atlas highlighted two categories of her work: (1) patient perceptions of providers and (2) provider perceptions of patient pain. Patients make judgements about their provider based on competence, warmth or perceived similarity, and their established relationship. Previous studies have shown that people prefer more competent looking faces across domains (i.e., politics, CEOs, etc.), including medical professionals (facial traits which affect competency may include expression, gaze, mature features, and symmetry). Similarity and social category (e.g., socioeconomic status) also impact patient assessments of their providers. Dr. Atlas shared study results which revealed that when patients found their provider to be more similar to them, they expected less pain during medical procedures, with results varying based on the race and sex of the provider. Dr. Atlas’s findings have implications for social scenarios in which first impressions matter — for example, for headshots of medical professionals on websites where patients may choose a provider. On the pain assessment side, providers are also impacted by social influences. Using the Prkachin and Solomon Pain Intensity (PSPI) metric — an observational pain scale — studies have shown that pain judgements differ as a function of patient race, ethnicity, and sex.
Next, Dr. Falk, explored perspectives from communications and neuroscience on processes associated with successful health messaging and the facilitation of behavior change. Health advice suggesting lifestyle changes typically causes people to become defensive; the people for whom the message may be most relevant, then, are likely to reject those messages. Instead, Dr. Falk’s work focuses on the activation of value or reward and self-relevance, because making choices that are congruent with one’s sense of self tend to also feel rewarding. In one study, Dr. Falk and her team asked participants to write about their core values during brain scans. Then, participants were shown health coach messages such as “the more you sit, the more damage it does to your body.” Over the following month, participants whose prefrontal cortex responded more during the scan (when they were focusing on their core values) showed increased physical activity. Dr. Falk shared the results of another study which focused on gain- versus loss-framing in health messaging. Using fMRI scans, her team found that those with a lower baseline activity level respond more to gain-framing messaging (i.e., what they might gain if they are active), while those with a higher baseline activity level responded more to loss-framing messages (i.e., what they might lose if they are inactive).
Finally, Dr. Wolfe described the cognitive mechanisms behind look but fail to see (LBFTS) errors, in which humans commonly miss visual cues in plain sight. LBFTS errors have a number of causes, including limited or misguided vision, incomplete processing, or metacognitive mistakes. Through a series of scanpaths, which track eye movement across specific imagery, Dr. Wolfe demonstrated how vision can be misguided — it becomes fixated near a planted target while looking for other features, but never attends to that target. Processing can also affect success in locating a target, as a number of participants in Dr. Wolfe’s study scrutinized or fixated on the target (planted in a radiology scan), but did not report it as abnormal. Finally, one’s thinking about themself could be categorically wrong — many people think if they look at an image, they will see everything there, and may not scrutinize the image thoroughly. Dr. Wolfe’s studies have shown that even if a person’s vision is near the target on a first pass, there is only a 50 percent chance of their next eye movement landing on the target (further screenings tend to show the target ultimately being found). Dr. Wolfe’s scanpath studies demonstrate the direct implications LBFTS errors have for a number of activities, such as radiology, security, and driving.
