Monday, August 20, 2018

Plutarch already said it: Pay less attention to the social networks...

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Speaking of the Twitter of his era, Plutarch said: "τί γὰρ χαλεπόν ἐστιν ἐν ταῖς ὁδοῖς τὰς ἐπὶ τῶν τάφων ἐπιγραφὰς μὴ ἀναγιγνώσκειν, ...

People think about the future more often than the past (30% compared to 13%), and prospective memory occupies our thoughts approximately 13–15% of the time, of which 61% were internally cued, rather than externally triggered

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Hey buddy, why don’t we take it outside: An experience sampling study of prospective memory. Francis T. Anderson, Mark A. McDaniel. Memory ...

Accounting for the shared environment in cognitive abilities and academic achievement with measured socioecological context

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Accounting for the shared environment in cognitive abilities and academic achievement with measured socioecological contexts. Laura E. Engel...

Well-being benefits and costs of an extraverted behavior intervention conducted in everyday life: positive and negative affects, feelings of authenticity, and tiredness—more introverted participants had weaker positive affect increases

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Jacques-Hamilton, Rowan, Jessie Sun, and Luke Smillie. 2018. “Costs and Benefits of Acting Extraverted: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” PsyA...

Rolf Degen summarizing: The actual clientele for "green" and "ethical" products is far smaller than the share of people who advocate those, constituting what Timur Kuran calls "preference falsification."

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Green consumption: Closing the intention‐behavior gap. Hung Vu Nguyen, Cuong Hung Nguyen, Thoa Thi Bao Hoang. Sustainable Development, https...

People high in brooding rumination were also more likely to report thinking about a past experience when probed at random during the day; optimists were more likely to report more vivid and positive future-oriented, but not past-oriented thoughts

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Thinking about the past and future in daily life: an experience sampling study of individual differences in mental time travel. Roger E. Bea...

Men sexually fantasized more frequently about sadistic, impersonal, pre/tactile courtship disorder, and bodily function themes, while women reported a greater use of masochistic fantasies; there was no sex difference regarding the use of romantic fantasies

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Bartels, Ross, and Craig A. Harper. 2018. “An Exploration of the Factor Structure of Gray Et Al.’s Sexual Fantasy Questionnaire.” PsyArXiv. ...
Sunday, August 19, 2018

Umpteenth time the citizen is willingly robbed: Gov't utility makes less efficient panels, closes production line, retools premises & tries again with federal (Italian gov't) and confederal (EU Commision) money

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In Shadow of Mt. Etna, Europe Makes a Last Stand for Solar. Stanley Reed and Keith Bradsher. The New York Times, Aug 18 2018, https://www.ny...

Enhancing CCTV: Pixel averages improve face identification from poor‐quality images

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Enhancing CCTV: Averages improve face identification from poor‐quality images. Kay L. Ritchie et al. Applied Cognitive Psychology, https://d...

Human testes are relatively small for body size: Copulatory and Postcopulatory Sexual Selection in Primates

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Copulatory and Postcopulatory Sexual Selection in Primates. A F Dixson. Folia Primatologica 2018;89:258–286. https://doi.org/10.1159/0004881...

White-collar offenders, including those holding high-trust organizational positions, engaged in regulatory income tax violations and regulatory traffic violations at significantly higher levels than did controls

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Rule-violating behaviour in white-collar offenders: A control group comparison. Joost HR van Onna, Victor R van der Geest, Adriaan JM Denker...

Antisocial personality constructs: Tactical and strategic image cultivation and defense behavior

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Profiles and profile comparisons between Dark Triad constructs on self‐presentation tactic usage and tactic beliefs. William Hart, Gregory K...

Memory for everyday driving: Large number of “false alarm” answers suggested recall was coloured by what usually happens on familiar roads

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Memory for everyday driving. Samuel G. Charlton, Nicola J. Starkey. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, Volume...
Saturday, August 18, 2018

Astonishing numbers of people remain blissfully unaware of fundamental truths about their own bodies

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Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise. Chris Potter, ENT & Audiology News, Vol 27, no 3, July/Aug 2018. https://www.entandaudi...

Spoilers Affect the Enjoyment of Television Episodes but Not Short Stories

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Spoilers Affect the Enjoyment of Television Episodes but Not Short Stories. Thomas A. Daniel, Jeffrey S. Katz. Psychological Reports, https:...
Friday, August 17, 2018

Native speakers of Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and English inflate their earnings less when they use a foreign language; it's due to a dual system account that suggests that self‐serving dishonesty is an automatic tendency, supported by a fast and intuitive system

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Honesty Speaks a Second Language. Yoella Bereby‐Meyer et al. Topics in Cognitive Science, Jul 2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12360 Abstr...

Memory distortion may not always be maladaptive: in some cases, distortion can result from a memory system that optimally combines information in the service of the broader goals of the person

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The adaptive nature of false memories is revealed by gist-based distortion of true memories. Timothy Brady, Daniel Schacter, George Alvarez....
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....