Thursday, August 16, 2018

Evidence from the Berlin Wall: Positive relationship between urban density & productivity in a virtuous circle of ‘cumulative causation’

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The Economics of Density: Evidence From the Berlin Wall. Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm, Nikolaus Wolf. Econometri...

Prenatal and postnatal cortisol and testosterone are related to parental caregiving quality in fathers, but not in mothers

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Prenatal and postnatal cortisol and testosterone are related to parental caregiving quality in fathers, but not in mothers. Peter A. Bos et ...

Small to moderate effect sizes suggest that working together with a friend and simply having a friend were related significantly and positively both to cognitive and academic performance outcome

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Do Friendships Afford Academic Benefits? A Meta-analytic Study. Kathryn R. Wentzel, Sophie Jablansky, Nicole R. Scalise. Educational Psychol...

The Psychology of Euthanasia: Why There Are No Easy Answers

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The Psychology of Euthanasia: Why There Are No Easy Answers. Miguel Ricou & Tony Wainwright. European Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1...

Placebo and nocebo effects constitute a major part of treatment success in medical interventions; there is interest in optimizing placebo effects to improve existing treatments and in examining ways to minimize nocebo effects to improve clinical outcome

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Psychobiological Mechanisms of Placebo and Nocebo Effects: Pathways to Improve Treatments and Reduce Side Effects. Keith J. Petrie and Winfr...
Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Thrifty targets are perceived as more intelligent, higher in self-control, more likable, emotionally closer to participants, lower in perceived vanity, lower in valuation of wealth in other, cheaper, and lower in short-term mating effort

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Thrifty Spending as a (Paradoxically) Costly Signal: Perceptions of Others' Traits and Mating Patterns as a Function Of Their Spending S...

False memories can be caused by sleep deprivation, mindfulness meditation, and exposure to fake news, & no one is immune – not even people who can remember nearly every detail of their own lives

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Current Directions in False Memory Research. Cara Laney, Elizabeth F. Loftus. Chapter 18 of Diversity in Harmony – Insights from Psychology:...
Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Duping delight is the pleasure or satisfaction derived from successfully deceiving another person; may at first seem pathological behavior engaged by only a minority of the most deviant, but looked at more broadly, can be widely observed

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Measuring Deception: A Look at Antecedents to Deceptive Intent. Randall J. Boyle, Jeffrey A. Clements and Jeffrey Gainer Proudfoot. The Amer...

We find that at least 31.2% of the citations to retracted articles happen a year after the article has been retracted, that 91.4% of these post-retraction citations are approving, & that problematic research continues to be approvingly cited long after the problems have been publicized

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Propagation of Error: Approving Citations to Problematic Research. Ken Cor and Gaurav Sood. https://github.com/recite/propagation_of_error A...

People often have food leftovers, which may impact their eating behavior; given equal actual consumption, larger (vs. smaller) food leftovers made people feel they ate less; as a result, larger (vs. smaller) food leftovers led people to eat more and exercise less later

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Out of proportion? The role of leftovers in eating-related affect and behavior. Aradhna Krishna, Linda Hagen. Journal of Experimental Social...

An experimental investigation into pornography’s effect on men’s perceptions of the likelihood of women engaging in porn-like sex

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An experimental investigation into pornography’s effect on men’s perceptions of the likelihood of women engaging in porn-like sex. Dan Mille...

Liberals prefer the following in their narrative TV programs: innovative structure & style, ambiguous/nuanced depictions of moral issues, storylines that extend beyond individual episodes, diverse casts, & explicit depictions of sexuality & gore

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Split screens: A content analysis of American liberals’ and conservatives’ respective television favorites. Nick Rogers. Psychology of Popul...

Construing minds as different from bodies entails the intuition that mental well-being has little material substrate which in turn attenuates health-sustaining behaviors

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Mind-Body Dualism and Health Revisited. How Belief in Dualism Shapes Health Behavior. Pascal Burgmer, Matthias Forstmann. Social Psychology ...

Sexual coercion perpetrators were more accurate than other violent men in the recognition of female facial disgust; female facial expressions of disgust could be subtle cues to their sexual infidelity that motivate sexual coercion in some men

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Facial emotion recognition in violent men. Domagoj Švegar, Karolina Horvat, Igor Kardum. International Journal of Psychology, https://doi.or...

The value of odorants in selecting a romantic partner seems to reflect two different underlying attitudes: One values all aspects of the smell of a lover, while the other only finds it important that the lover does not smell badly

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Olfactory Awareness and the Self-Reported Importance of Olfactory Information in Romantic Interest. Michelle VanHatten, Caitlin Cunningham, ...

Older age was correlated to better scores on each of the four financial decision‐making measures, and has more experience‐based knowledge, & less negative emotions about financial decisions (both of which are particularly helpful for better financial decision-making)

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Age differences in financial decision making: The benefits of more experience and less negative emotions. Wiebke Eberhardt, Wändi Bruine de ...
Monday, August 13, 2018

Early life deprivation promotes the development of strategies that minimize the downside costs of uncertainty across domains, which results in greater risk-aversion, present-orientation, & prosociality; these effects need not be dependent on salient cues to mortality

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An uncertainty management perspective on long-run impacts of adversity: The influence of childhood socioeconomic status on risk, time, and s...

Women are attracted to men who display heroism and altruism, this preference is higher when the male is attractive compared to unattractive, and preferences for prosocial traits were higher when seeking a long-term compared to a short-term partner

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Margana, Lacey, Manpal S. Bhogal, James E. Bartlett, and Daniel Farrelly. 2018. “Exploring Altruism and Heroism: The Effects of Physical Att...

Phaesants: Apparently ‘poor’ cognitive performance (slow reversal speed suggesting low behavioural flexibility) correlates with fitness benefits in at least some circumstances, implying a novel mechanism by which continued exaggeration of cognitive abilities may be constrained

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The quick are the dead: pheasants that are slow to reverse a learned association survive for longer in the wild. Joah R. Madden, Ellis J. G....

Women: Exposure to thin models deteriorated body image while increasing body dissatisfaction and anxiety; conversely, exposure to overweight models improved body image and decreased body dissatisfaction but it did not affect anxiety

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Images of Thin and Plus-Size Models Produce Opposite Effects on Women’s Body Image, Body Dissatisfaction, and Anxiety. Silvia Moreno-Domíngu...
Sunday, August 12, 2018

Grooming helps animals remove dirt, parasites and other contaminants from skin and hair & may positively influence the animals’ affective state; cows spend about fivefold more time grooming compared with when brushes are not available

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Emilie McConnachie, Anne Marieke C. Smid, Alexander J. Thompson, Daniel M. Weary, Marek A. Gaworski, Marina A. G. von Keyserlingk: Cows are ...

Social behavior in mouse models of autism spectrum disorder normalized when investigators triggered the release of a specific signaling substance, serotonin, in a single part of the animals' brains

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5-HT release in nucleus accumbens rescues social deficits in mouse autism model. Jessica J. Walsh, Daniel J. Christoffel, Boris D. Heifets, ...

Gossip Drives Vicarious Learning and Facilitates Robust Social Connections

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Jolly, Eshin, and Luke J. Chang. 2018. “Gossip Drives Vicarious Learning and Facilitates Robust Social Connections.” PsyArXiv. August 11. do...

We designed a mobile video game to test spatial ability & tested more than 2.5 million people from every country; spatial ability of the population is correlated with country economic wealth, & gender inequality of a country is predictive of gender differences in navigation ability

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Global Determinants of Navigation Ability. Antoine Coutrot et al. Current Biology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.009 Highlights •...

People are averse to machines making morally-relevant driving, legal, medical, and military decisions, and that this aversion is mediated by the perception that machines can neither fully think nor feel

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People are averse to machines making moral decisions. Yochanan E. Bigman, Kurt Gray. Cognition, Volume 181, December 2018, Pages 21-34. http...
Saturday, August 11, 2018

Women preferred stoic men who worked even though they were experiencing health problems as long-term mates, disregarding the male's facial symmetry and physique; in short-term mate choice, disregarded stoicism

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Female Choice and Male Stoicism. Susan G. Brown, Susan Shirachi, and Danielle Zandbergen. Journal of Evolutionary Medicine, https://www.ashd...

Masturbation with a Tool by an Infant Male Chimpanzee

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Masturbation with a Tool by an Infant Male Chimpanzee. Michio Nakamura. Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Japan. http://mahale.m...

Sex and age preferences: Why is age so important in human mating?

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Conroy-Beam, D., & Buss, D. M. (2018). Why is age so important in human mating? Evolved age preferences and their influences on multiple...
Thursday, August 9, 2018

Pakistan's pivot to coal: Plan to spend $35bn loan from China on new power stations looks set to continue under Khan

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Pakistan’s pivot to coal to boost energy gets critics fired up. Kiran Stacey in Lahore July 31, 2018. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/c...

Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1·2 million individuals in the USA between 2011 and 2015: More exercise was not always better

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Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1·2 million individuals in the USA between 2011 and 2015: a cross-sectional study...

By 2050, stringent climate mitigation policy, if implemented evenly across all sectors & regions, would have a greater negative impact on global hunger & food consumption than the direct impacts of climate change due to indirect impacts on prices/supplies of agri commodities

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Risk of increased food insecurity under stringent global climate change mitigation policy. Tomoko Hasegawa, Shinichiro Fujimori, Petr Havlík...

Testosterone & self-perceived mate value increased following a manipulated “victory” in a sporting competition & were associated with heightened sociosexuality, & increased expectations toward approaching attractive women

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Tandem Androgenic and Psychological Shifts in Male Reproductive Effort Following a Manipulated “Win” or “Loss” in a Sporting Competition. Da...

Strong negative effects are attributed to sex dolls both in public & academic debates; sparse research points to strong positive outcomes as well: sex dolls can provide a lot of sexual & emotional satisfaction, create feelings of comfort, peace & even love

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Sex toys, sex dolls, sex robots: Our under-researched bed-fellows. N. Döring, S. Pöschl. Sexologies, Volume 27, Issue 3, July–September 2018...
Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Markers of Narcissism

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Holtzman, Nicholas S., Allison M. Tackman, Albrecht Kuefner, Fenne große Deters, Mitja Back, Brent Donnellan, James W. Pennebaker, et al. 20...

Participants lie significantly more in the random-draw task than in the real-effort task, leading to the conclusion lying about luck is intrinsically less costly than lying about performance

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Lying about luck versus lying about performance. Agne Kajackaite. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 153, September 201...

We study whether face-to-face group deliberation changes other-regarding preferences; social interactions do indeed change individuals’ preferences; specifically, individuals whose preferences are extremely egoistic and also unchanging tend to influence others the most

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Social interactions and the influence of “extremists”. Crawford Donna Harris. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 153, S...