Monday, October 29, 2018

How The High Priests Of Science Lost Their Status & Prestige

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How The High Priests Of Science Lost Their Status & Prestige John Horgan, The Wall Street Journal, October 19 2018 Stephen Hawking an...

Pornography consumption was associated with an impersonal approach to sex among both men and women; among both adolescents and adults; and across countries, time, and methods

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Pornography and Impersonal Sex. Robert S Tokunaga, Paul J Wright, Joseph E Roskos. Human Communication Research, hqy014, https://doi.org/10....

30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands: No atoll lost land area, 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted; atolls affected by rapid sea‐level rise did not show a distinct behavior

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A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades. Virginie K. E. Duvat. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate C...

This evidence supports my claim that the threat of conventional retaliation is sufficient to deter a preventive strike against emerging nuclear state

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Closing the Window of Vulnerability: Nuclear Proliferation and Conventional Retaliation. Jan Ludvik. Security Studies, https://doi.org/10.10...

From 2013, Secret Codes of Political Propaganda: The Unknown System of Writing Teams

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From 2013, Secret Codes of Political Propaganda: The Unknown System of Writing Teams. Wen-Hsuan Tsai and Peng-Hsiang Kao. The China Quarterl...

Brain Tissue–Volume Changes in Cosmonauts: Gray-matter volume decreases, cerebrospinal fluid increases

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Brain Tissue–Volume Changes in Cosmonauts. Angelique Van Ombergen et al. N Engl J Med 2018; 379:1678-1680, October 25, 2018, DOI: 10.1056/NE...

Attributes associated with sexual attractiveness in female bodies (waist-to-hip ratio) are processed rapidly in the stream of visual processing

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Waist‐to‐hip ratio affects female body attractiveness and modulates early brain responses. Marzia Del Zotto, David Framorando, Alan J. Pegna...

Those paired with an opposite-sex partner exerciced a higher levels of intensity and traveled greater distances during their workouts; and even more if single

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Going the distance, going for speed: Honest signaling and the benefits of exercising with an opposite-sex partner. Michael D. Baker et al. E...

Endogenous Emotion Generation Abilities Support Adaptive Emotion Regulation & More Happiness

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Engen, Haakon, Philipp Kanske, and Tania Singer. 2018. “Endogenous Emotion Generation Abilities Support Adaptive Emotion Management.” PsyArX...
Sunday, October 28, 2018

Imprisonments in hospitals in at least 30 other countries, including Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China & Thailand, Lithuania & Bulgaria, & others in Latin America & the Middle East

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AP Investigation: Hospital patients held hostage for cash. MARIA CHENG. AP, October 25, 2018. https://apnews.com/daf47512c8f74e869b722782299...

Paraventricular thalamic neurons represent multiple salient features of sensory stimuli, like reward, aversiveness, novelty, & surprise; the nucleus thus provides context-dependent salience encoding

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Dynamic salience processing in paraventricular thalamus gates associative learning. Yingjie Zhu, Gregory Nachtrab, Piper C. Keyes, William E...

Stereotypes about wealthy people’s personality are accurate albeit somewhat exaggerated; wealthy people can be characterized as stable, flexible, & agentic individuals who are focused more on themselves than on others

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Leckelt, Marius, David Richter, Carsten Schröder, Albrecht C. P. Küfner, Markus M. Grabka, and Mitja Back. 2018. “The Rich Are Different: Un...

Researchers at Brown U found that alcohol hijacks a conserved memory pathway in the brain and changes which versions of genes are made, forming the cravings that fuel addiction

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Alcohol Activates Scabrous-Notch to Influence Associated Memories. Emily Petruccelli et al. Neuron, October 25, 2018. https://doi.org/10.101...

Literature said property crimes have more instrumental motives, require planning, & hence are particularly sensitive to permanent changes in cost & benefits, but violent crime declines in U.S. cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high

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Chalfin, Aaron and Danagoulian, Shooshan and Deza, Monica, More Sneezing, Less Crime? Seasonal Allergies, Transitory Costs and the Market fo...
Saturday, October 27, 2018

Despite philosophical & conventional wisdom dating back to the ancients, researchers have only recently begun to uncover evidence that extreme standing on “normal” or “desirable” personality traits might be maladaptive

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Extreme Personalities at Work and in Life. Nathan T. Carter, Joshua D. Miller, Thomas A. Widiger. Current Directions in Psychological Scienc...

27% of participants have kept a financial secret from their partner; and both marital & life satisfaction were lower for participants who have experienced financial infidelity than in those who have not

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Jeanfreau, M., Noguchi, K., Mong, M. D., & Stadthagen, H. (2018). Financial Infidelity in Couple Relationships. Journal of Financial The...
Friday, October 26, 2018

Bacon's ideas are central in the culture of growth; his epistemology derives from his jurisprudence &, hence, reflects common-law culture, which can help explain the coincidence of early political & economic development in England

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Toward understanding 17th century English culture: A structural topic model of Francis Bacon's ideas. PeterGrajzl, Peter Murrell. Journa...

Adult participants who chewed gum while studying a 9‐min lesson on a mental mathematics strategy outperformed a nonchewing condition on a subsequent problem‐solving test, whereas also reporting higher levels of postlesson alertness

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Chewing gum while studying: Effects on alertness and test performance. Paul Ginns, Theresa Kim, Eleni Zervos. Applied Cognitive Psychology, ...

The intense selection of chickens for production traits (egg laying) is thought to cause undesirable side effects & changes in behavior due to trade-offs from energy expenditure; contrary to expectations, productive hens show increased cognitive skills

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More Than Eggs – Relationship Between Productivity and Learning in Laying Hens. Anissa Dudde, E. Tobias Krause, Lindsay R. Matthews & La...
Thursday, October 25, 2018

Rolf Degen summarizing: Across cultures, women agreed about which male faces signalled a penchant for sexual unfaithfulness, but actual hit rate was low, indicating that potential cheaters evolved to hide their true nature

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Impressions of sexual unfaithfulness and their accuracy show a degree of universality. Clare A. M. Sutherland et al. PLOS One, https://journ...

Ignorance of History and Perceptions of Racism: Another Look at the Marley Hypothesis

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Ignorance of History and Perceptions of Racism: Another Look at the Marley Hypothesis. Jason E. Strickhouser, Ethan Zell, Kara E. Harris. So...

The activity of midbrain dopamine neurons & mesolimbic dopamine levels are consistently modulated by anticipated future reward more strongly & consistently than effort, even after weighting reward & effort on behavior equally

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What Is the Relationship between Dopamine and Effort? Mark E.Walton and Sebastien Bouret. Trends in Neurosciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j...

Competition- & mate-related cues & interactions rapidly increase testosterone; these increases map onto ongoing and future competitive and mate-seeking behaviours; testosterone administration rapidly modulates neural processing & behaviour

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Human social neuroendocrinology: Review of the rapid effects of testosterone. Shawn N.Geniole, Justin M.Carré. Hormones and Behavior, Volume...

The Moral Machine gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries: Differences correlate with modern institutions and deep cultural traits

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The Moral Machine experiment. Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon ...

Sex & the city. Are financial decisions driven by emotions? Our findings suggest that agents incorrectly attribute their good mood to positive economic perspectives rather than positive emotions

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Sex & the city. Are financial decisions driven by emotions? Giampaolo Gabbi, Giovanna Zanotti. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Fi...

Rodents' ultrasonic vocalizations are actively produced by both sexes during sexual interactions, contrary to earlier assumptions; male-typical and female-typical vocal behaviors can be identified

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Vocal Signals of Sexual Motivation in Male and Female Rodents. Marcela Fernández-Vargas. Current Sexual Health Reports, https://link.springe...
Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Despite their limited optical resolution, Drosophila melanogaster’s neuronal architecture has the capability to extract & encode a rich feature set that allows flies to re-identify individual conspecifics with surprising accuracy

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Schneider J, Murali N, Taylor GW, Levine JD (2018) Can Drosophila melanogaster tell who’s who? PLoS ONE 13(10): e0205043. https://doi.org/10...

Voters appear to be sorting on non-political neighborhood attributes that covary with partisan preferences rather than explicitly seeking politically congruent neighbors; location must have some influence on political preference, rather than the other way around

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Does residential sorting explain geographic polarization? Gregory J. Martin & Steven W. Webster. Political Science Research and Methods,...

Jackdaws delayed longest in entering their nest-box after encountering a stimulus that should not move independently, suggesting they recognized the movement as unexpected

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Wild jackdaws are wary of objects that violate expectations of animacy. Alison L. Greggor, Guillam E. McIvor, Nicola S. Clayton, Alex Thornt...

Canada: Secularized women are found to have lower fertility rates compared with the actively religious; the strictly seculars, a proxy identifier for the atheists, have the lowest fertility & the highest likelihood of remaining childless

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Religiosity, Secularity and Fertility in Canada. Maryam Dilmaghani. European Journal of Population, https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...

The experience of a childhood trauma increases a person’s ability to take the perspective of another and to understand their mental and emotional states, & this impact is long-standing

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Elevated empathy in adults following childhood trauma. David M. Greenberg et al. PLOS One, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203886 Abst...

Abstinence from social media increased time spent engaged in browsing the Internet, working, childcare, and cooking/cleaning; time in social media was negatively associated with quality of day

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Where does the time go? An experimental test of what social media displaces and displaced activities’ associations with affective well-being...
Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality: Inequality is at its most damaging when it arises between close competitors

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Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality. D. B. Krupp, Thomas R. Cook. Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1177...

Academic gains of students enrolled in public schools compared to students of private BIP-creativity elementary schools (that aim to promote the development of talent, intelligence & personality): no differences at the end of fourth grade

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Who is ahead at the end of elementary school? Student achievement gains in private BIP-Creativity schools and public schools. Frank Lipowsky...

The Heritability of Self-control: Meta-analysis based on a sample size of >100.000 individuals, published between 1996 and 2018, reveal that heritability is around 60%

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Willems, Yayouk, Nicky Boesen, Jian-Bin Li, Meike Bartels, and Catrin Finkenauer. 2018. “The Heritability of Self-control: A Meta-analysis.”...

Vegetarians reported lower self-esteem, lower psychological adjustment, less meaning in life, & more negative moods than semi-vegetarians & omnivores; also reported more negative social experiences than omnivores & semi-vegetarians

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Relationships between Vegetarian Dietary Habits and Daily Well-Being. John B. Nezlek, Catherine A. Forestell & David B. Newman. Ecology ...

The five stages in coping with dying & bereavement does not measure up to the standards of a sound theory in contemporary thinking, can actually do damage when misapplied or applied too rigidly, & should be set aside

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The ‘five stages’ in coping with dying and bereavement: strengths, weaknesses and some alternatives. Charles A. Corr. Mortality, https://www...

Longevity might increase together with numbers of cortical neurons through their impact on three main factors: delay of sexual maturity, which postpones the onset of aging; lengthening of

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Longevity and sexual maturity vary across species with number of cortical neurons, and humans are no exception. Suzana Herculano‐Houzel. Jou...

Early humans, rather than being "killer apes” in the Pleistocene and early Holocene, lived as relatively peaceful hunter-gathers for some 15,000 generations, from the emergence of modern Homo sapiens up until the invention of agriculture

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Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New Light on Old Debates. Richard B. Lee. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 47:513-531 (Volume publi...
Monday, October 22, 2018

Ventral pallidum encodes relative reward value earlier and more robustly than nucleus accumbens, challenging the existing model of information flow in the ventral basal ganglia

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Ventral pallidum encodes relative reward value earlier and more robustly than nucleus accumbens. David Ottenheimer, Jocelyn M. Richard &...

Personality-trait profiles were predicted reliably from a subset of the body-shape features; extraversion & conscientiousness were predicted with the highest consensus, followed by openness traits

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First Impressions of Personality Traits From Body Shapes. Ying Hu, Connor J. Parde, Matthew Q. Hill, Naureen Mahmood, Alice J. O’Toole. Psyc...

Effects of paracetamol on empathy-like behavior in Sprague Dawley rats: It reduced empathy-like behavior, with rats helping less drowning conspecifics

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Acetaminophen (paracetamol) affects empathy-like behavior in rats: Dose-response relationship. Sevim Kandis et al. Pharmacology Biochemistry...

Cichocka et al. (2016) report evidence that conservatism (specifically social conservatism) is associated with noun preference. This study replicates the finding.

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Crawford, Jarret. 2018. “Examining the Effects of Political Orientation on Noun Preference: A Replication of Cichocka Et Al. (2016).” PsyArX...

Our results suggest that childhood trauma in humans is associated with changes in cortical fields that are implicated in the perception or processing of the abuse

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Psychobiological Consequences of Child Maltreatment. Christine Heim. The Biology of Early Life Stress. In  Child Maltreatment Solutions Netw...

Century of Decline in General Intelligence? Testing Predictions from the Genetic Selection and Neurotoxin Hypotheses authors found that this last did not significantly predict variance of g factor

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What Caused over a Century of Decline in General Intelligence? Testing Predictions from the Genetic Selection and Neurotoxin Hypotheses. Mic...

Studies confirmed the existence of a social norm that one cannot simultaneously support two competing groups or teams

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You Can’t Root for Both Teams!: Convergent Evidence for the Unidirectionality of Group Loyalty. Daniel J. Kruger et al. Evolutionary Psychol...

Examining Cross‐Cultural Differences in Academic Faking in 41 Nations: Faking was positively related to the cultural dimensions of gender egalitarianism, humane orientation, and in‐group collectivism

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Examining Cross‐Cultural Differences in Academic Faking in 41 Nations. Clemens B. Fell, Cornelius J. König. Applied Psychology, https://doi....
Sunday, October 21, 2018

Our findings challenge the notion of pervasive biases towards female‐biased infection immunity and the role of testosterone in driving these differences

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Sexual dimorphism in immunity across animals: a meta‐analysis. Clint D. Kelly et al. Ecology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13164 Abst...

Children -but not chimpanzees- exhibit ‘over-imitation’, i.e. they show a propensity for faithfully copying demonstrated actions, even when these actions are irrelevant for achieving a demonstrated outcome

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The social side of imitation in human evolution and development: Shared intentionality and imitation games in chimpanzees and 6-month old in...