WSJ Column

Appeared in the October 9, 2021, print edition.

Published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Open Network, the study explored the relationship between home improvement grants and street crime in Philadelphia. It found a tight link between municipally funded house repairs and a drop in crime on those blocks with a city-funded overhauled home.

The streets of many of Philadelphia’s older neighborhoods are lined with graceful, colorfully painted Victorian row houses. But with more than 23% of the city’s residents living in poverty, many of these architectural gems have been showing the wear-and-tear of neglect for decades. Since 1995 the city government has been offering home-repair grants—up to $20,000 to low-income homeowners—to assist with costly maintenance jobs.

This Basic Systems Repair Program does not cover cosmetic upgrades, like fixing cracked windows or painting, but instead addresses the structural problems that beset old houses, such as leaky roofs, broken sewer lines, dangerous wiring and damaged plumbing. The goal is to prevent evictions and abandoned homes and thus to preempt broken neighborhoods. The program differs from the controversial “broken windows” theory of the 1980s, which suggested that eliminating surface signs of deterioration—while escalating the policing of minor offenses—would reduce serious crime; that approach did not feature investing in the community itself, or its homes.

“From the city’s perspective, there are multiple social costs when a house becomes uninhabitable and vacant,” said Vincent Reina, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors. “A vacant house becomes a vacant lot. Historically there has been a lack of investment in communities of color. So we asked, what does this small investment do?”

To find out, the research team merged data from 19,869 city blocks with each block’s crime data, focusing on the years from 2006 to 2013. Over a third of those blocks had received a home repair grant during that time. Blocks with at least one house repaired ultimately were compared with blocks where owners were on the waiting list, who formed a natural control group. Using census tract data, the researchers statistically controlled for demographic and economic variables, seasonal fluctuations in crime and “regression toward the mean”—which happens when extreme findings level off over time.

The results showed that blocks with a single house repair subsequently had a 21.9% reduction in crime compared with blocks with houses on the waiting list. Additional houses repaired on a block were linked with further drops in crime—up to a maximum of four houses, after which the curve flattened.

This was an observational study, so it remains unclear exactly why fixing the plumbing or roof of a home might lead to fewer homicides or thefts on that block. But Dr. Eugenia South, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the study’s lead author, has some ideas.

A maintained house might lead to a reduction in stress and a boost in mental health, which lead to a “cascade of good things” she said. “Perhaps it’s easier not to get mad at a neighbor’s barking dog or to connect with neighbors if there’s no mold in the house causing a child’s asthma.” In short, the study may be telling us in numbers what the Staple Singers told us in the next verse of their song: “Truth and trust” are what make a house a home.

Humans are primed to perceive faces wherever there’s a mere suggestion of one because our daily survival hinged on this trick eons ago, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences). Millennia later, the human brain still uses that neural shortcut to assess the level of interpersonal threat in a new situation. “You have to recognize people right away and know if they’re friend or foe, and you need to know it quickly,” explained David Alais, a psychology professor at the University of Sydney who led the study. “If there are two eyes, a nose and a mouth, there’s a response,” he said. “The brain can’t help but see something as a face, even if you know it’s a cheese grater. This highly evolved face recognition area exists in the brain because we’re the most social species on the planet.”

Pareidolias aren’t all about faces; they also include animal shapes identified in clouds formations or scenarios perceived in Rorschach tests. But those patterns are imagined; they emerge in a slower process of cognitive interpretation, rather than the ultra-fast matching triggered by the classic face template.

Two of Prof. Alais’s colleagues published a study last year that showed that observing face pareidolias engages the same region of the brain as observing a real human face. The region, called the fusiform gyrus, lines the base of the occipital and temporal lobes and is specialized for facial recognition. It becomes briefly excited in response to an illusory image but within 250 milliseconds, activation shifts to a different part of the brain. indicating that our perception of the object has moved on, too. We no longer see a face, but a car grill or the head of a mop.

“The brain doesn’t seem to think it has made a mistake,” said Prof. Alais. “Imagine someone looms up in your visual field and you have to work out their intentions. It’s more adaptive to have false positives than to miss a threatening face, because that could be the end of you.”

So it makes sense that we perceive feelings in face pareidolias. In the Royal Society study, 17 students were asked to rate the emotion expressed in a random series of 800 images that included a variety of human faces interspersed with illusory ones—on handbags, halved green peppers, cappuccino foam, plastic jugs and mop-heads. The expression ratings were fairly consistent: A “very angry” human face and a “very angry” handbag were given roughly the same scores.

The researchers also recognized a known cognitive bias called “positive serial dependence,” which means that the characteristics of one face influenced the perception of the next one in the series. In this study, the happiness perceived on a human face made the pareidolia that came after it look happier, and vice versa. The angry manhole cover made the subsequent human face look angrier.

It turns out that the brain sees ordinary objects as human faces with feelings, tricking us into thinking they’re the real thing, at least for a moment. They’re like the emoticons or emojis we use when typing messages. As basic as they are, said Prof. Alais, “Clearly they convey that very human thing: their emotions.”

So says a newly published study of male baboons from Kenya’s Amboseli Park. The park’s baboon troops have been under scientific scrutiny for 50 years, says Jenny Tung, the study’s lead author and a professor of evolutionary anthropology and biology at Duke University. Nine generations of family and friend networks already have been mapped out. “The observers are the proverbial flies on the wall.” said Dr. Tung. “They record each birth, what each baboon does, its early life experience, who they are competing with and who wins.”

In the new study, published in the journal eLife, Dr. Tung’s team combined the behavioral records of 245 adult males with data about their genetic health from blood samples. Knowing each male’s position in its troop, the researchers could match an animal’s social status to the wear and tear on his body, as revealed by changes to his DNA called methylation markers. These are the body’s estimates of an animal’s aging process, which is how the researchers discovered that males who have high social status have characteristics in their DNA that make them look older than they really are.

Jockeying to be top baboon, it turns out, was the opposite of Botox. The DNA of alpha males suggested they were nearly a year older than their chronological age, subtracting more than 11% of the average eight-year male lifespan. “But if males lost rank, they stopped looking older than their chronological age,” said Dr. Tung. “We were able to show that the clock can speed up or slow down as males move up or down the social ladder.”

Why would fierce competition speed up the epigenetic clock? “You have to make it to the top and stay there,” she said. “That’s when you get to mate. Following around females that are potentially fertile takes some work!”

Such surveillance and sparring is stressful, in other words. Work by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford has shown that relentless pressure—whether physical or interpersonal—promotes the secretion of glucocorticoids, hormones that ramp up heart rates, blood pressure and energy levels and also mess with immunity and metabolism. “Type A baboons are the ones who see stressors that other animals don’t,” Dr. Sapolsky said in a lecture. “For example, having your worst rival taking a nap 100 yards away gets you agitated.”

Though the researchers can’t explain why maintaining high status has an aging effect, high levels of glucocorticoids are one clue. In late April the same team published a study showing that female Amboseli baboons with high levels of these hormones also live shorter lives.

What does it all mean for us? High status is usually related to better health in humans. The less fortunate tend to have higher rates of disease, as we’ve seen with the coronavirus. But there are also some parallels. The relentless responsibility of a top job can age you, as we can see in the pre- and post-presidency photos of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Indeed, according to a 2019 study, CEOs who faced hostile takeovers had their lives cut short, on average, by two years.

What’s the point of being top dog if you pay for that status with your life? For baboons, it means leaving behind many more surviving offspring—which means life might have been short, but evolutionarily speaking, it sure was sweet.

For vulnerable small children, the answer is a resounding yes. The opportunity to form a trusting relationship with a teacher is the best predictor of high-functioning among preschoolers who are at risk, according to a new study of homeless youngsters. “The study includes children we don’t know a lot about, children who are doubled-up”—that is, in families who are living with others because they lack resources to obtain their own housing. “These are kids who are a little more invisible,” said Mary Haskett, the lead author and a psychology professor at North Carolina State University.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that 1.4 million American children under age 6 were homeless in 2017-2018, a record high. The number has surely climbed due to pandemic-related job loss, but the rise of remote learning makes it harder to track. “There are no eyes or ears of teachers to see signs of homelessness, no buses to reroute, no places for quiet conversations with parents,” said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit devoted to reducing homelessness.

Upheaval and the loss of stability, privacy, and reliable access to the internet typically bounce many homeless children into a red zone, research shows. Yet a significant proportion do exceedingly well in school, and Prof. Haslett wanted to know why. “What are the protective factors? If we identify the buffers, we can promote resilience,” she said. For the study, which took place pre-pandemic, her research team began by selecting 314 “doubled-up” children in Head Start classrooms. Information about student performance was gathered through parent and teacher surveys, classroom observations and individual child assessments.

About two-thirds of these preschoolers made friends easily and learned well in the classroom. Despite their unstable living conditions, they seemed to be humming along nicely. The remaining one third showed various degrees of difficulty. Only 3.2% of the group was classified as “struggling.”

Success turned out to be tied to the quality of the bond between child and teacher—specifically, the degree of warmth and affection between them. “The probability of a child being classified as resilient increased dramatically as the quality of teacher relationships increased,” Dr. Haskett wrote.

It’s not the first time that a good teacher emerged as the most powerful predictor of a child’s success. In a landmark 2011 study of 2.5 million American students, a superb middle-school teacher presaged a preteen’s ability to finish college, live in a good neighborhood and earn more over a lifetime.

In this study we can’t say for sure what comes first, school success or relationships with teachers. Perhaps the teachers were responding to existing qualities in the thrivers—or as Tom Boyce, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, calls them, “dandelions.” In his 2019 book “The Orchid and the Dandelion,” Dr. Boyce refers to the 80% of children who can grow and succeed nearly anywhere as “dandelions,” while the 20% who are exquisitely sensitive to their environment he calls ”orchids.”

No matter the flower, “there’s an abundance of evidence that a teacher’s influence is very strong,” Dr. Boyce said, and I agree. When family life is uncertain, there’s nothing like a trusted teacher to help a child feel that the world is turning as it should.

Until recently, no one knew. Capturing in-the-moment psychological states has long been the role of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. As miraculous as this brain imaging technology can be, the machines can accommodate just one person. As such, they are not ideal for assessing the social brain.

Joy Hirsch, a professor of neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine, and a team of colleagues and students came up with a workaround that allowed them to peer under the metaphorical hoods of two people while they were interacting. The team used an alternative neuroimaging method called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, which deploys light to capture the changing energy requirements of the brain. Instead of lying alone and immobile inside a massive electronic doughnut, as happens with fMRI, fNIRS simply requires the conversation partners to don wired-up bathing caps. They are out in the open, free to gesticulate and move naturally.

In a study published last month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Dr. Hirsch and colleagues used this technique to assess the neural function of two people discussing controversial topics such as same-sex marriage and the death penalty. They discovered that “there’s a profound difference between our brains when we’re arguing versus when we’re agreeing,” Dr. Hirsch told me. It’s not just that arguing takes more effort; the difference is also qualitative, recruiting different swaths of neural real estate.

When the two participants agreed, an unexpected brain synchrony emerged. “There’s more looking at each other’s faces, there’s more social, sensory and motor cortex involvement,” Dr. Hirsch said. But when they argued, “there’s more engagement of the language and cognitive areas of the brain. A massive amount of thinking and strategizing goes on during disagreement.”

The study involved 38 people under age 30 who were recruited through fliers distributed around the Yale campus. Though the participants were all Yale students, their backgrounds were diverse and many had opposing opinions on controversial topics.

The researchers divided the subjects up into pairs and asked them to discuss an issue where they concurred and another on which they held opposing views. Each participant argued for their point of view while wearing a cap studded with fNIRS sensors for detecting shifts in blood flow in the brain, as well as a head-mounted camera and a microphone.

The study’s most striking finding was that when people agreed with each other, “their gestures, their facial expressions and their neural signals matched,” said Dr. Hirsch. The activity in their respective social and attentional neural networks and visual fields, as well as the engagement of the bits of the cortex that control touch, posture and empathy, began to mirror each other. Researchers call it neural coupling.

It should come as no surprise that there were fewer neural look-alikes during disagreements. When two brains are in conflict, Dr. Hirsch said, they engage many emotional and cognitive resources, like a symphony orchestra playing two different scores, whereas in agreement, the social interaction between them is more like a musical duet. “If synchrony is the hallmark of agreement, then through eye contact, gestures and the sensory system, perhaps certain topics might become less charged,” she ventured. One can only hope.