Saturday, December 1, 2018

When Those We Love Misbehave: For the most part, we evaluate them & their unethical actions less harshly, but exhibit greater negative effects on our own morality & perceived relationships when close others act unethically, compared to strangers

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When the Ones We Love Misbehave: Exploring Moral Processes in Intimate Bonds. Rachel Chubak Forbes. Master of Arts Thesis, Psychology. Unive...

Are Bigger Brains Smarter? There is a consistent association. Evidence From a Large-Scale Preregistered Study

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Are Bigger Brains Smarter? Evidence From a Large-Scale Preregistered Study. Gideon Nave et al. Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.117...
Friday, November 30, 2018

Depression treatments: The effects are probably overestimated, relapse rates for patients who respond are very high (about 50% over 2 years), there is little evidence for long-term effectiveness, & there are the problems of publication bias, sponsorship bias, & others

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The Challenges of Improving Treatments for Depression. Pim Cuijpers. JAMA. Published online November 30, 2018. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.17824 I...

The article thus challenges the general notion that ‘terrorism always ends’; only certain types of jihadists will end, while others—such as al-Qaida & Islamic State—may survive indefinitely

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Jihadism after the ‘Caliphate’: towards a new typology. Anne Stenersen. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/1...

Is creativity, hands-on modeling and cognitive learning gender-dependent?

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Is creativity, hands-on modeling and cognitive learning gender-dependent? Julia Mierdel, Franz X. Bogner. Thinking Skills and Creativity, Vo...

Animated Disney female characters that exhibit low WHRs should be perceived as good; lower waist-to-hip ratio is more commonly associated with Disney princesses than Disney female villains

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Aung, T., & Williams, L. (2018). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Whose figure is the fairest of them all? Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, ...

Some articles on psychology of animals

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The mating preferences of female fruitflies are strongly influenced by the existing preferences they observe in other females, generating...

From 2017: Exceptionalism is not exceptional in relation to sexual and reproduction mechanisms — Contrasts of human and animal sexuality

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Exceptionalism is not exceptional in relation to sexual and reproduction mechanisms: Contrasts of human and animal sexuality. Roy J. Levin. ...

From 2013: Sexual Wiring of Women's Breasts — Neuroscientists establish breasts as sexual organs

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Sexual Wiring of Women's Breasts. Nigel Barber. Psychology Today, May 07, 2013. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/...

The mating preferences of female fruitflies are strongly influenced by the existing preferences they observe in other females, generating traditions that are repeatedly passed on to others and spread in the population

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Culture and conformity shape fruitfly mating. Andrew Whiten et al. Science Vol. 362, Issue 6418, pp. 998-999. DOI: 10.1126/science.aav5674 S...
Thursday, November 29, 2018

Vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening; snake phobia, & not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening

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The evil eye effect: vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening. Sinan Alper, Elif Oyku Us & Dicle Rojda Tasman. Cognition and Em...

In matters of the heart, as in many other matters generally, we adhere to existing states (“status quo bias”) & value them more (“endowment effect”)

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I Have, Therefore I Love: Status Quo Preference in Mate Choice. Gul Gunaydin et al. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, https://doi....

Psychopathy and homicide are importantly linked and that psychopathic personality functioning is a significant risk factor for various forms of lethal violence

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Psychopathic killers: A meta-analytic review of the psychopathy-homicide nexus. Bryanna Fox, Matt DeLisi. Aggression and Violent Behavior, h...

An oxytocin receptor gene has been associated with emotional traits such as positive affect and related constructs such as optimism and self-esteem; this seems not replicable

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The Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) Variant rs53576 is Not Related to Emotional Traits or States in Young Adults. Tamlin S. Conner et al. Fron...

Mindfulness not related to behavioral & speech markers of emotional positivity (or less negativity), interpersonally better connected (quality or quantity), or prosocial orientation (more affectionate, less gossipy or complaining)

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Dispositional mindfulness in daily life: A naturalistic observation study. Deanna M. Kaplan, L. Raison, Anne Milek, Allison M. Tackman, Thad...
Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Those who minimize (vs. acknowledge) the extent to which their group is the target of discrimination report better well-being across myriad indicators: body mass index, social well-being, self-esteem, depression, & mental illness diagnosis

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The Palliative Effects of System Justification on the Health and Happiness of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals. Alexandra...

Border wall expansion, 2007-2010, harmed Mexican workers & high-skill U.S. workers, but benefited U.S. low-skill ones; reduced trade costs between US & Mexico by 25% should have reduced Mexico to US migration with welfare gains

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Border Walls. Treb Allen, Cauê de Castro Dobbin, Melanie Morten. NBER Working Paper No. 25267, Nov 2018, https://www.nber.org/papers/w25267 ...

To quantify partisan audience bias, we developed a domain-level score by leveraging the sharing propensities of registered voters on a large Twitter panel; we found little evidence for the "filter bubble'' hypothesis

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Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search. Ronald E. Robertson et al. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW...

Young adult mental health and functional outcomes among individuals with remitted, persistent and late-onset ADHD

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Agnew-Blais, J., Polanczyk, G., Danese, A., Wertz, J., Moffitt, T., & Arseneault, L. (2018). Young adult mental health and functional ou...

Attitudes towards robots became more negative between 2012 and 2017; robots assisting at work showed the strongest negative trend; countries with a larger share of older citizens evaluated robots more favorably

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Are robots becoming unpopular? Changes in attitudes towards autonomous robotic systems in Europe. Timo Gnambs, Markus Appel. Computers in Hu...

The impact of pseudo-psychological demonstrations make people believe that one can read a person’s mind by evaluating micro expressions, psychological profiles & muscle activities, & can prime a person’s behaviour through subtle suggestions

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Fake science: The impact of pseudo-psychological demonstrations on people’s beliefs in psychological principles. Yuxuan Lan, Christine Mohr,...

Doubling the permissible length of a Tweet led to more polite, less informal, more analytical, and overall healthier discussions online

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Jaidka, Kokil and Zhou, Alvin and Lelkes, Yphtach, Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion (Novem...

Study with rats sheds light on why women are roughly twice as likely as men to develop depression, anxiety and other stress-related problems, including difficulty with attention

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Early Life Stress Drives Sex-Selective Impairment in Reversal Learning by Affecting Parvalbumin Interneurons in Orbitofrontal Cortex of Mice...
Tuesday, November 27, 2018

When asking for assistance, is it beneficial to incentivize a helper by offering a motivated gift (gift with the hope of getting support in return)? Sometimes undermine the assistance that people hope to receive. A third of Americans had given such gift at least once

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aknin, Lara, Dylan Wiwad, and Yuthika Girme. 2018. “Not All Gifts Are Good: The Potential Practical Costs of Motivated Gifts.” PsyArXiv. Nov...

Dystopian novels/movies enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action; no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust & efficacy

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It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes. Calvert W. Jones and Celia Paris. Perspectives...

Men who more strongly endorsed hostile sexism underestimated the power they had compared with their partners’ reports; this perception predicted greater aggression toward female partners; this was not the result of generally being more dominant & aggressive

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An Interdependence Account of Sexism and Power: Men's Hostile Sexism, Biased Perceptions of Low Power, and Relationship Aggression. Emil...

Reading faces: Participants correctly identified the high-narcissism male & female, & the high-psychopathy male significantly more often than by chance, & the high-psychopathy female significantly less often

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Are dark triad cues really visible in faces? Victor Kenji M. Shiramizu, Luca Kozm, Lisa M. DeBruine, Benedict C. Jones. Personality and Indi...

School achievement engenders high expectations about future prospects, yet markets are only contingently sensitive to that achievement; the misalignment schools-markets is perceived by academics as morally unacceptable

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Magni-Berton, R., & Ríos, D. (2018). Why do academics oppose the market? A test of Nozick’s hypothesis. Current Sociology. https://doi.o...
Monday, November 26, 2018

Sensation seeking & the factor intellect/imagination predict liking of horror & frequency of use; gender, educational level, & age are also correlated; people seek out horror media with threatening stimuli that they perceive to be plausible

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Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Johnson, J. A. (2018). Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology...

Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017: Consistent with observed trends in the hurricane landfalls, the updated normalized loss estimates also show no trend

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Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017. Jessica Weinkle, Chris Landsea, Douglas Collins, Rade Musulin, Ryan ...

People will often fight not for individual or collective material gain, but because of their commitment to abstract moral & sacred ideas; decisions to support or oppose war are descriptively deontological & are relatively insensitive to material costs or benefits

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The Moral Logic of Political Violence. Jeremy Ginges. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.11.001 Abstract: T...

Degree of perceived aggression in a robot's behavior did not have a significant impact on their decision to follow the robot's instruction; people often exhibit reactance in situations where they feel their freedom is being threatened

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S. Agrawal and M. Williams, "Would You Obey an Aggressive Robot: A Human-Robot Interaction Field Study," 2018 27th IEEE Internatio...

A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of the Sex-Creativity Relationship: There was female superiority in childhood & early adolescence, & male superiority was not found in adolescence & emerging adulthood

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A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of the Sex-Creativity Relationship in Childhood, Adolescence, and Emerging Adulthood: Findings of Mean and Varia...

Contra media reports, there is no “loneliness epidemic” among older adults; contra previous literature, loneliness may not have cardiometabolic implications; such nonreplications are increasingly common

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Loneliness does (not) have cardiometabolic effects: A longitudinal study of older adults in two countries. Social Science & Medicine, ht...
Sunday, November 25, 2018

Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong?

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Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck. Patrick Collison, Michael Nielsen. The Atlantic, Nov 16, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/scienc...

How does nature exposure make people healthier?: Evidence for the role of impulsivity and expanded space perception

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How does nature exposure make people healthier?: Evidence for the role of impulsivity and expanded space perception. Meredith A. Repke, Mere...

Sex workers sell information gleaned from their customers—specifically, corrupt police officers—to al-Shabaab; “If you want information here, you use the prostitutes and street kids"

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al-Shabaab’s Mata Hari Network. Katharine Petrich. War on the Rocks, Aug 14 2018. https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/al-shabaabs-mata-hari-ne...

Paperwork burdens, “sludge,” reduces access to important licenses, programs, & benefits; its defenses turn out to be more attractive in principle than in practice; a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential

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Sunstein, Cass R., Sludge and Ordeals (November 20, 2018). Duke Law Journal, Forthcoming. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3288192 Abstract:...

Choosing a meal to increase your appeal: How relationship status, sexual orientation, dining partner sex, and attractiveness impact nutritional choices in social dining scenarios

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Choosing a meal to increase your appeal: How relationship status, sexual orientation, dining partner sex, and attractiveness impact nutritio...

Social media as a source of political information do not reduce the compatibility of individual issue horizons: they are not caught in an 'echo chamber' or reduce issue diversity, top issue focus or issue overlap with others

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Stefan Geiß, Melanie Magin, Birgit Stark, Pascal Jürgens, „Common Meeting Ground” in Gefahr? Selektionslogiken politischer Informationsquell...

Sumatran orangutan mothers suppressed alarm calls up to 20 min until the model was out of sight in function of perceived danger for themselves & for an infant, suggesting high-order cognition

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Time-space–displaced responses in the orangutan vocal system. Adriano R. Lameira and Josep Call. Science Advances, Nov 14 2018, Vol. 4, no. ...
Saturday, November 24, 2018

Reward retroactively prioritizes memory for objects closest to the reward; there is a 24-hour delay & is stronger for mazes followed by a longer rest interval, suggesting a role for post-reward replay & overnight consolidation

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Retroactive and graded prioritization of memory by reward. Erin Kendall Braun, G. Elliott Wimmer & Daphna Shohamy. Nature Communications...

Ovulation, Sex Hormones, and Women’s Mating Psychology: No increase in preference for uncommited sex with men displaying putative fitness cues during the high-fertility phase of the menstrual cycle

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Jones, Benedict C., Amanda Hahn, and Lisa M. DeBruine. 2018. “Ovulation, Sex Hormones, and Women’s Mating Psychology.” PsyArXiv. November 24...

People evaluate their own voices as more attractive than the voices of others & that the self‐enhancement bias of voice attractiveness can be generalised to similar & familiar versions of self‐voice

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One's own and similar voices are more attractive than other voices. Zhikang Peng, Yanran Wang, Linghao Meng, Hongyan Liu. Zhiguo Hu. Aus...

Response to Baron and Jost's False Equivalence: Are Liberals and Conservatives in the U.S. Equally “Biased”?

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Partisan Bias and Its Discontents. Peter Ditto et al. Perspectives on Psychological Science, Nov 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...