Friday, November 2, 2018

Better‐looking respondents give more morally permissive responses to most questions relating to sex; for issues not directly related to sexual opportunities, however, attractiveness does not predict significantly more acceptant attitudes

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Good Looks as a Source of Moral Permissiveness. Robert Urbatsch. Social Science Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12544 Abstract Objec...

Tentative support for the hypothesis that belief in free will increases support for economic inequality; but attempts to experimentally manipulate belief in free will are often underpowered to detect an overall change in a dependent variable

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Mercier, Brett G., Dylan Wiwad, Paul Piff, Lara aknin, Angela R. Robinson, and Azim Shariff. 2018. “Does Belief in Free Will Increase Suppor...

Women's chemosignals of high fertility increase mating motivation among man, encouraging them to act in a cooperative manner toward others, a response that may highlight their attractive qualities and thus attract mates

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Women's fertility cues affect cooperative behavior: Evidence for the role of the human putative chemosignal estratetraenol. Chen Oren, S...

Researchers frequently make inappropriate requests to statisticians: Removing/altering data to support the hypothesis; interpreting the findings on the basis of expectation, not results; not reporting the presence of key missing data; & ignoring violations of assumptions

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Researcher Requests for Inappropriate Analysis and Reporting: A U.S. Survey of Consulting Biostatisticians. Min Qi Wang, Alice F. Yan, Ralph...

Distortions of perceived volume and length of body parts

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Distortions of perceived volume and length of body parts. Renata Sadibolova, Elisa R. Ferrè, Sally A. Linkenauger, Matthew R. Longo. Cortex,...

Recent claims that people spend 40-50% of their waking lives mind wandering have become widely accepted & frequently cited; such simple quantitative estimates are misleading & potentially meaningless without serious qualification

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Seli, Paul, Roger E. Beaty, James A. Cheyne, Daniel Smilek, and Daniel L. Schacter. 2018. “How Pervasive Is Mind Wandering, Really?.” PsyArX...
Thursday, November 1, 2018

Congenital Amusia: Understanding of the Musical Mind and Brain

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Lee, Harin. 2018. “Congenital Amusia: Understanding of the Musical Mind and Brain.” PsyArXiv. November 1. doi:10.31234/osf.io/xbwfq Abstra...

Identification of depression subtypes and relevant brain regions using a data-driven approach

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Identification of depression subtypes and relevant brain regions using a data-driven approach. Tomoki Tokuda, Junichiro Yoshimoto, Yu Shimiz...

Maternal Age and Child Development: Each year the mother delays a first birth is associated with an increase in school achievement & a similar-sized reduction in behavior problems

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Maternal Age and Child Development. Greg J. Duncan, Kenneth T. H. Lee, Maria Rosales-Rueda, Ariel Kalil. Demography, https://link.springer.c...

Gay females are happier cohabiting, whereas marriage has a stronger well-being effect on gay males

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Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics: Are Same-Sex Relationships Different? Shuai Chen, Jan C. van Ours. Demography, https://link....

Testing the Kundera Hypothesis: Does Every Woman (But Not Every Man) Prefer Her Child to Her Mate? Almost.

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Testing the Kundera Hypothesis: Does Every Woman (But Not Every Man) Prefer Her Child to Her Mate? Carlos Hernández Blasi, Laura Mondéjar. E...

Hot Hand Fallacy & Robust Evidence That Belief in the Hot Hand Is Justified, and that expert observers can predict which shooters have a tendency to become hot

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Miller, Joshua B., and Adam Sanjurjo. 2018. “A Cold Shower for the Hot Hand Fallacy: Robust Evidence That Belief in the Hot Hand Is Justifie...
Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Locked-in individuals do not experience the anguish and turmoil that this horrifying situation would lead observers to expect

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Phenomenology of the Locked-In Syndrome: an Overview and Some Suggestions. Fernando Vidal. Neuroethics, https://link.springer.com/article/10...

Forecasting tournaments & epistemic humility: Turning polarized beliefs to nuanced probability judgments, incentivizing people to be flexible belief updaters whose views converge in response to facts, depolarizing debates

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Forecasting tournaments, epistemic humility and attitude depolarization. Barbara Mellers, PhilipTetlock, Hal R. Arkes. Cognition, https://do...

There was no evidence for a positive association between partner similarity & the three well-being measures; they discuss the implications of this finding for our understanding of partner choice & divorce

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Verbakel, Ellen, and Christiaan W. S. Monden. 2018. “Higher Well-being with Similar Partner? Testing the Similarity Hypothesis for Socio-dem...

Future clarity—the extent to which the future seems vivid and certain—is associated with the inclination to consume healthy food, abstain from cigarettes, participate in physical activity, & experience positive emotions

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Look into the crystal ball: Can vivid images of the future enhance physical health? Simon A Moss et al. Journal of Health Psychology, https:...

People infuse their passwords with autobiographical information; some people do it as mementos to cue autobiographical information

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People infuse their passwords with autobiographical information. Robbie J. Taylor & Maryanne Garry. Memory, https://doi.org/10.1080/0965...

We perceive good luck itself, rather than material goods, as a limited resource; there is a limited amount of good luck to get, and if another is lucky, he is robbing us

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Marciano, Deborah, Eden Krispin, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, and Leon Deouell. 2018. “Limited Resources or Limited Luck? Why People Perceive an...
Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Brain connectivity is associated with personality traits (Five-factor model of personality), forming a “global personality network”; that network is more similar between monozygotic twin pairs compared to the dizygotic twin pairs

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Intersubject similarity of personality is associated with intersubject similarity of brain connectivity patterns. Wei Liu, Nils Kohn, Guillé...

The Democratic State & How the Public Sector Promotes Human Happiness: Public employees are happier & exhibit greater life satisfaction; country differences in subjective well-being varies positively with the size of the public sector

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Well-Being and the Democratic State: How the Public Sector Promotes Human Happiness. Alexander Pacek, Benjamin Radcliff, Mark Brockway. So...

Men who engage in swinging have higher self-esteem, but women who engage in swinging have self-esteem comparable to others

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Swinging high or low? Measuring self-esteem in swingers. Amanda S. Ruzansky, Marissa A. Harrison. The Social Science Journal, https://doi.or...

Left-wing electoral victories cause significant and substantial short-term decreases in stock market valuations & in the US dollar value of the domestic currency, while the response of sovereign bond markets is muted

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Girardi, Daniele, "Political Shocks and Financial Markets: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from National Elections" (2018). UMAS...

Holding People Responsible for Ethical Violations: The Surprising Benefits of Accusing Others

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Building trust by tearing others down: When accusing others of unethical behavior engenders trust. Jessica A. Kennedy, Maurice E. Schweitzer...

Adoption as A Strategy to Fulfill Sex Preferences of U.S. Parents: Children were more likely to be of the missing sex (i.e., girls were more likely than were boys to have only preceding brothers)

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Adoption: A Strategy to Fulfill Sex Preferences of U.S. Parents. Ashley Larsen Gibby, Kevin J. A. Thomas. Journal of Marriage and Family, ht...
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...