Thursday, September 20, 2018

Public Health in a Cross-National Lens: The Surprising Strength of the American System Compared to France and the UK

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Public Health in a Cross-National Lens: The Surprising Strength of the American System. Michael S. Sparer, Anne-Laure Beaussier. J Health Po...

Costly female appearance-enhancement provides cues of short-term mating effort: The case of cosmetic surgery

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Costly female appearance-enhancement provides cues of short-term mating effort: The case of cosmetic surgery. Hannah K. Bradshaw et al. Pers...

Reimagining of Schrödinger’s cat breaks quantum mechanics — and stumps physicists: In a multi-‘cat’ experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim

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Reimagining of Schrödinger’s cat breaks quantum mechanics — and stumps physicists. Davide Castelvecchi. Nature https://www.nature.com/articl...

In mice: Clearance of senescent glial cells prevents tau-dependent pathology and cognitive decline

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Clearance of senescent glial cells prevents tau-dependent pathology and cognitive decline. Tyler J. Bussian, Asef Aziz, Charlton F. Meyer, B...

Self-assessed intelligence & relations with constructs associated with intelligence, tendencies & opportunities to develop intelligence, constructs associated with biased self-assessments, & positive states and life achievements

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The “Other” Relationships of Self-Assessed Intelligence: A Meta-Analysis. Matt C. Howard, Joshua Cogswell. Journal of Research in Personalit...

People possess a functionally integrated mental system to detect conspiracies that in all likelihood has been shaped in an ancestral human environment in which hostile coalitions—that is, conspiracies that truly existed—were a frequent cause of misery

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Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological Mechanisms. Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Mark van Vugt. Perspectives on Psychological S...

Vegans view their diets as more central to their identity, take more pride in their diets, feel more stigmatized for following their diets, have stronger dietary motivations, & judge omnivorous dieters more harshly than do vegetarians

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A Comparison of Dietarian Identity Profiles Between Vegetarians and Vegans. Daniel L. Rosenfeld. Food Quality and Preference, https://doi.or...

Volunteering improves subjective well-being, offsetting 20-53pct of W-B losses from unemployment & 16-30pct of W-B losses from long-term health conditions, benefitting the most unhappy; don't last beyond a year

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Does Kindness Lead to Happiness? Voluntary Activities and Subjective Well-Being. Elisabetta Magnani, Rong Zhu. Journal of Behavioral and Exp...
Wednesday, September 19, 2018

People judged that altering some moral facts was impossible—not even God could turn morally wrong acts into morally right acts; but thought that God could make physically impossible and logically impossible events occur

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Reinecke, Madeline G., and Zachary Horne. 2018. “Immutable Morality: Even God Could Not Change Some Moral Facts.” PsyArXiv. September 19. do...

Girls surpass boys in educational attainment: The best explanation is boys' greater dispersion of academic achievement

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What Explains the Gender Gap Reversal in Education? The Role of the Tail Hypothesis. Laurent Bossavie, Ohto Kanninen. Policy  Research  Work...

Canada Health System: The status quo represents a compromise struck decades ago between payers & physicians & organizations, & the current system works just well enough for those who both need it & vote; but cannot readily meet the changing health care needs of a population

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Lessons From the Canadian Experience With Single-Payer Health Insurance: Just Comfortable Enough With the Status Quo. Noah Ivers et al. JAMA...

Feedback loop of environmental unpredictability and harshness which destabilizes intrauterine hormonal conditions in mothers, leading to global health problems, and nonheterosexual preferences in female offspring; bonobos and lions examples are discussed

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A Life History Approach to the Female Sexual Orientation Spectrum: Evolution, Development, Causal Mechanisms, and Health. Severi Luoto, Indr...

Lead us not into temptation: The seven deadly sins as a taxonomy of temptations

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Lead us not into temptation: The seven deadly sins as a taxonomy of temptations. Edward Burkley, Melissa Burkley, Jessica Curtis, Thomas Hat...

Difficult to know if the effects of alcohol consumption on mate-selection are due to social factors or cohabitation leading to becoming more similar over time; found that genetic variants related to alcohol may, via effect on alcohol behaviour, influence mate selection

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Alcohol consumption and mate choice in UK Biobank: comparing observational and Mendelian randomization estimates. Laurence J Howe, Dan J Law...

Living longer with help from others: Seeking advice lowers mortality risk

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Living longer with help from others: Seeking advice lowers mortality risk. Rebecca K Delaney, Nicholas A Turiano, JoNell Strough. Journal of...

“Bad” agents are identified more quickly & accurately than benign ones; but incorrectly attributing bad character to good people damages existing relationships; cognitive mechanism permits flexible updating of beliefs to forgive sooner

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Siegel, Jenifer, Christoph Mathys, Robb Rutledge, and Molly Crockett. 2018. “Beliefs About Bad People Are Volatile.” PsyArXiv. September 17....

“Happiness pie” (approx 50% of differences are due to genetic factors, 10pct to life circumstances, & 40% available to be changed via volition) is a defective theory; & it is not clear how we can influence substantially our own happiness level

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Brown, Nicholas J. L., and Julia M. Rohrer. 2018. “Re-slicing the “happiness Pie”: A Re-examination of the Determinants of Well-being” PsyAr...
Tuesday, September 18, 2018

The Real Story of Those Empty New York City Storefronts : Retail employment is rising, in part, because of job growth outside of Manhattan; overall, the number of retail establishments in NYC is up 15% since 2007

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The Real Story of Those Empty New York City Storefronts. Michael Mandel. Progressive Policy Institute Blog, Sep 10 2018. https://www.progres...

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Psychological trauma and its relationship to enhanced memory control

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Hulbert, J. C., & Anderson, M. C. (2018). What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Psychological trauma and its relationship to enhance...

Should we men in search of girls feel lonely? Neil Shinhababu says we shouldn't, there are "Possible Girls" somewhere (although it is not really somewhere)

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Possible Girls. Neil Shinhababu. 2008. https://philpapers.org/archive/SINPG Abstract: I argue that if David Lewis’ modal realism is true, ...

Avoiding sedentary behaviors requires more cortical resources than avoiding physical activity: An EEG study

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Avoiding sedentary behaviors requires more cortical resources than avoiding physical activity: An EEG study. Boris Cheval et al. Neuropsycho...

Lucid nightmares: A survey of their frequency, features, and factors in lucid dreamers

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Stumbrys, T. (2018). Lucid nightmares: A survey of their frequency, features, and factors in lucid dreamers. Dreaming, 28(3), 193-204. http:...

Immunocompetence Handicap Hypothesis fails; but a context-dependent tradeoff between energetic investment in male reproductive effort and some aspects of immune function (complex interactions between physical characteristics, physiological processes, and immune activity)

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Life History Tradeoffs Between Testosterone and Immune Function Among Shuar Forager-Horticulturalists of Amazonian Ecuador. Theresa E. Gildn...

Arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently: The others, for some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things “as they really are” and to react to them in a “normal way”

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From the Fundamental Attribution Error to the Truly Fundamental Attribution Error and Beyond: My Research Journey. Lee Ross. Perspectives on...
Monday, September 17, 2018

Approximately 16% of all participants were classified as having illusory mental health, & scored significantly lower on scales indicative of interpersonal problems and structural personality dysfunctions

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Patients with illusory mental health: A challenge for psychotherapeutic treatment and empirical research in psychotherapy. Carsten Spitzer, ...

Inconsistent with the original study, participants' distrust of atheists (and gays and lesbians) did not vary by secular authority reminders

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Crawford, Jarret. 2018. “Replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012) Study 3.” PsyArXiv. September 17. doi:10.31234/osf.io/th9bp Abstract...

The upright walking posture group showed significantly improved psychological states including less low arousal negative affect, less sleepiness, less pain & marginally greater feelings of power than the slumped walking posture group

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The effects of walking posture on affective and physiological states during stress. Jessie Hackford, Anna Mackey, Elizabeth Broadbent. Journ...

There was a honeymoon effect during the marriage year; happiness levels were significantly higher than the baseline within 3 years of marriage; marriage, on average, enhances happiness more and longer for women than for men

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Marriage and Happiness: Evidence from Taiwan. Hung-Lin Tao. Journal of Happiness Studies, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-0...

While the predicted correlation does not replicate for every single available measure of support for inequality, the overall data pattern strongly suggests that for males, but not females, upper‐body strength correlates positively with support for inequality

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Upper‐Body Strength and Political Egalitarianism: Twelve Conceptual Replications. Michael Bang Petersen, Lasse Laustsen. Political Psycholog...
Sunday, September 16, 2018

Taxes matter for innovation: higher personal and corporate income taxes negatively affect the quantity, quality, and location of inventive activity at the macro and micro levels; at the macro level, there are cross-state spillovers or business-stealing

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Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century. Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas, Stefanie Stantcheva. NBER Working Paper No. 24982, Se...

Participants’ dishonesty seems to be independent to payoff uncertainty; they lie when lies generate certain payoffs, but do not lie more when lies can reduce payoff uncertainty; participants do not use lies as a strategy to secure their payoffs

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Uncertain lies How payoff uncertainty affects dishonesty. Jeremy Celse et al. Journal of Economic Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep...

Further declines in divorce rates: Marriage is become more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, & cohabitation has grown less stable

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Cohen, Philip N. 2018. “The Coming Divorce Decline.” SocArXiv. September 15. doi:10.31235/osf.io/h2sk6 Abstract: This paper analyzes the odd...

Of 1857 small mammal visits we recorded, only two occasions showed evidence of what could be considered as voluntary wheel running behavior; over hundred-fold fewer than previously reported

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Does voluntary wheel running exist in Neotropical wild mammals? Peter van Lunteren et al. bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/409409 Abstract: ...
Saturday, September 15, 2018

Paraphilic thoughts & behaviors are not really a deviation from normalcy, rather they are quite widespread in the young population: Men report a higher prevalence of voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, & frotteurism; women a higher prevalence of fetishism and masochism

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Castellini G, Rellini AH, Appignanesi C, et al. Deviance or Normalcy? The Relationship Among Paraphilic Thoughts and Behaviors, Hypersexuali...

The First-Daughter Effect: The Impact of Fathering Daughters on Men’s Preferences for Gender-Equality Policies

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The First-Daughter Effect: The Impact of Fathering Daughters on Men’s Preferences for Gender-Equality Policies. Elizabeth A Sharrow, Jesse H...

Confirmation bias theory of salience: consumers tend to disregard information (like a tax) that does not align with their intention to purchase an item, and this lack of alignment increases in the size of the tax

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Naomi Feldman, Jacob Goldin, and Tatiana Homonoff (2018), Raising the Stakes: Experimental Evidence on the Endogeneity of Taxpayer Mistakes,...

Gender-Based Occupational Segregation and Sex Differences in Sensory, Motor, and Spatial Aptitudes

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Gender-Based Occupational Segregation and Sex Differences in Sensory, Motor, and Spatial Aptitudes. Michael Baker, Kirsten Cornelson. Demogr...

The psychology of vegetarianism: Recent advances and future directions

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The psychology of vegetarianism: Recent advances and future directions. Daniel L. Rosenfeld. Appetite, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2018....

What people prefer and what they think they prefer in short- and long-term partners: The effects of the menstrual cycle phase, hormonal contraception, pregnancy, and the marital and the parenthood status on partner preferences

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What people prefer and what they think they prefer in short- and long-term partners. The effects of the phase of the menstrual cycle, hormon...

First detect gender, then attractiveness: Attractiveness follows gender in terms of underlying neural processes; early face attractiveness assessment seems to rely on gender-stereotypes

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First gender, then attractiveness: Indications of gender-specific attractiveness processing via ERP onsets. Claus-Christian Carbon e al. Neu...

From 2017: Female Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR) is correlated to divorce frequency

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Chiappa, P., & Singh, S. (2017). Sexual dimorphism in waist-to-hip ratio and divorce frequency in human populations. Evolutionary Behavi...
Friday, September 14, 2018

Claim: Conversion To Buddhism Has Brought Literacy, Gender Equality And Well-Being To Dalits (2017)

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Conversion To Buddhism Has Brought Literacy, Gender Equality And Well-Being To Dalits. Manu Moudgil, IndiaSpend, July 1, 2017. www.indiaspen...

The fallacy of role substitution (the fallacy of differential reasoning): Acceptability of two different lines of reasoning (e.g., one for friends and one for enemies)

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The fallacy of role substitution (the fallacy of differential reasoning), in Smart Is asStupid Does: Exploring bases of erroneous reasoning ...

How Does the World Google the Internet, Anxiety, and Happiness?

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How Does the World Google the Internet, Anxiety, and Happiness? Snehasish Banerjee. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Vol. 2...

Supernatural agents reliably appear in nightmares & unpleasant dreams in association with diminished agency in the dreamer; diminished agency in an individual may facilitate supernatural agent cognitions

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Cognitions in Dreams. Patrick McNamara et al. Journal of Cognition and Culture, Volume 18, Issue 3-4, pages 428 – 450. DOI: 10.1163/15685373...

Size distortions are intrinsic to self-face representation, characterised for a tendency to overestimate its width: The metric map for self-face representation shows larger distortion for the nose, followed by the mouth and the eyes

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My true face: Unmasking one's own face representation. Laura Mora et al. Acta Psychologica, Volume 191, November 2018, Pages 63-68. http...

People’s judgments of morally-significant events were affected by the likelihood of the event: They were more upset about events that were unexpected (a robbery at a clothing store) than events that were more expected (a robbery at a convenience store)

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Powell, Derek, and Zachary Horne. 2018. “Expectations Bias Moral Evaluations.” PsyArXiv. September 13. doi:10.31234/osf.io/s7fu2 Abstract: P...

Cross-national gender differences in the enrollment in & completion of science, technology, engineering, & mathematics M. Open Online Courses: Females were less likely than males to enroll in STEM MOOCs, but were equally likely to complete them

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Cross-national comparison of gender differences in the enrollment in and completion of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Mas...
Thursday, September 13, 2018

Refutation: Some say that too many arguments might lead to counterproductive skepticism & reactance; but a larger number of counterarguments (4-6) led to as much or more belief reduction compared to a smaller number

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Refutations of Equivocal Claims: No Evidence for an Ironic Effect of Counterargument Number. K.H.Ecker et al. Journal of Applied Research in...

People’s interpretation of new evidence is often biased by their previous choices (confirmation bias); choices bias the accumulation process by selectively altering the weighting (gain) of subsequent evidence, akin to selective attention

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Confirmation Bias through Selective Overweighting of Choice-Consistent Evidence. Bharath Chandra Talluri et al. Current Biology, https://doi...

People with higher IQs not only being unable to solve problems unresolved, but are in some cases unwilling to address them; higher IQ is not always highly relevant to the problems, and in some cases, may displace other skills that better would apply to the solution of the problems

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Why Real-World Problems Go Unresolved and What We Can Do about It: Inferences from a Limited-Resource Model of Successful Intelligence. Robe...

Deception detection advances: From observing target persons' nonverbal behavior to analyzing their speech; from differences in levels of arousal to detection of cognitive processes or strategies adopted to be convincing; & from passively observing target persons to actively interviewing them

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Deception and truth detection when analyzing nonverbal and verbal cues. Aldert Vrij. Applied Cognitive Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1002/a...

Brain and psychological determinants of placebo pill response in chronic pain patients

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Brain and psychological determinants of placebo pill response in chronic pain patients. Etienne Vachon-Presseau, Sara E. Berger, Taha B. Abd...