Sunday, July 14, 2019

People touch their sexual partner’s saliva with little discomfort; partially from such observations, proposal is that pathogen avoidance also depends on target relationship value

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More valued relationship partners engender less pathogen avoidance. Joshua Tybur. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. ...

27 societies around the world: Long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression

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Ko, Ahra, Cari M. Pick, Jung Y. Kwon, Michael Barlev, Jaimie Krems, Michael E. W. Varnum, PhD, Rebecca Neel, et al. 2019. “Family Matters: R...
Saturday, July 13, 2019

The positive lessons learned from previous sex, romance, & cohabitation seem overwhelmed by the negative carryover, affecting relationship attitudes, sexual satisfaction, commitment, & stability

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Busby, D. M., Willoughby, B. J., & McDonald, M. L. (2019). Is it the sex, the romance, or the living together? The differential impact o...

Sensitive periods are widespread in nature; for plasticity to be adaptive, organisms require reliable information about the environment, but information's reliability varies

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Phenotypic plasticity across the lifespan: a model of sensitive periods when the reliability of information varies. Nicole Walasek, Willem F...

Aggressive Video Games are Not a Risk Factor for Future Aggression in Youth: A Longitudinal Study

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Aggressive Video Games are Not a Risk Factor for Future Aggression in Youth: A Longitudinal Study. Christopher J. Ferguson1●C. K. John Wang....
Friday, July 12, 2019

Psychiatric diagnostic classification: DSM-5 contains heterogeneous diagnostic categories; pragmatic criteria give clinical flexibility but undermine the diagnostic model, which is a disingenious categorical system

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Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification. Kate Allsopp, John Read, Rhiannon Corcoran, Peter Kinderman. Psychiatry Research, Vo...

Ineffective altruism: "Doing the “most good” can actually come to be viewed as less moral when it incurs the opportunity cost of helping someone socially closer in much less severe need."

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Law, Kyle F., Dylan Campbell, and Brendan Gaesser. 2019. “Biased Benevolence: The Morality of Effective Altruism.” PsyArXiv. July 11. doi:10...

Parenthood leads to considerable changes in individual risk attitudes over time; risk aversion increase as early as two years before becoming a parent; effects disappear when the child becomes older

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Parenthood, risk attitudes and risky behavior. Katja Görlitz, Marcus Tamm. Journal of Economic Psychology, July 11 2019, 102189. https://doi...

Brain activity and connectivity changes in response to nutritive natural sugars, non-nutritive natural sugar replacements and artificial sweeteners

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Brain activity and connectivity changes in response to nutritive natural sugars, non-nutritive natural sugar replacements and artificial swe...

Analyzed over 1 million posts from over 4,000 individuals, several social media platforms: Human behavior qualitatively and quantitatively conforms to the principles of reward learning (like rats)

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Lindström, Björn, Martin Bellander, Allen Chang, Philippe N. Tobler, and David M. Amodio. 2019. “A Computational Reinforcement Learning Acco...

Urban Civility: City Dwellers Are Not Less Prososcial Than Their Rural Counterparts

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Urban Civility: City Dwellers Are Not Less Prososcial Than Their Rural Counterparts. Grace Westlake, David Coall. Evolutionary Psychological...

Those who possess extreme political views are also found to report higher levels of happiness

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Happy partisans and extreme political views: The impact of national versus local representation on well-being. Jeremy Jackson. European Jour...
Thursday, July 11, 2019

For women, having a child/children, higher scores on neuroticism, substance abuse predicted relationship formation; for men, age & openness were predictors

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Demographics, Personality and Substance-Use Characteristics Associated with Forming Romantic Relationships. Eilin K Erevik et al. Evolutiona...

Trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors; it is less clear whether trigger warnings are explicitly harmful

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Jones, Payton J., Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally. 2019. “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with ...

Chemophobia: Most laypeople are unaware of the similarities between natural & synthetic chemicals in terms of certain toxicological principles; view of “chemical substances” are mostly negative

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“Chemophobia” Today: Consumers’ Knowledge and Perceptions of Chemicals. Rita Saleh, Angela Bearth, Michael Siegrist. Risk Analysis, July 9 2...

Those who reported engaging in extramarital sex at baseline were significantly more likely to be separated or divorced 2 years later; extramarital sex with a close personal friend made things much worse

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Extramarital Sex and Marital Dissolution: Does Identity of the Extramarital Partner Matter? Lindsay T. Labrecque, Mark A. Whisman. Family Pr...

Beliefs about the manifestation of personality traits in facial features: Those with stronger beliefs are more confident in their inferences & rely more on them when making decisions

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Jaeger, Bastian, Anthony M. Evans, Marielle Stel, and Ilja van Beest. 2019. “Who Judges a Book by Its Cover? The Prevalence, Structure, and ...

Attractiveness is positively related to World Cup performance in male, but not female, biathletes

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Attractiveness is positively related to World Cup performance in male, but not female, biathletes. Tim W Fawcett Jack Ewans Alice Lawrence A...

Europe: Even minor forms of criminal justice contact may affect health; police-initiated contact was associated with worse health & wellbeing; stronger effect when police treatment was unsatisfactory

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The thin blue line of health: Police contact and wellbeing in Europe. Valerio Baćak, Robert Apel. Social Science & Medicine, July 9 2019...

Absolute pitch: Myths, evidence and relevance to music education and performance

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Absolute pitch: Myths, evidence and relevance to music education and performance. Jill Carden, Tony Cline. Psychology of Music, July 9, 2019...

Life Events and Prosocial Behaviors Among Young Adults: Considering the Roles of Perspective Taking and Empathic Concern

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Life Events and Prosocial Behaviors Among Young Adults: Considering the Roles of Perspective Taking and Empathic Concern. Alexandra N. Davis...
Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Defaults may not directly get people to behave as intended, such as saving more, eating healthy food or donating to charity

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Abstract: Defaults may not directly get people to behave as intended, such as saving more, eating healthy food or donating to charity. Rathe...

Author proposes that depression, addictions, self-harm are evolutionary, adaptive solutions to avoid suicide

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Adaptation to the Suicidal Niche. C. A. Soper. Evolutionary Psychological Science, July 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...

Alcohol Consumption in Later Life and Mortality in the United States: Results from 9 Waves of the Health and Retirement Study

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Alcohol Consumption in Later Life and Mortality in the United States: Results from 9 Waves of the Health and Retirement Study. Katherine M. ...
Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Life-Course Criminal Trajectories of Mafia Members

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Life-Course Criminal Trajectories of Mafia Members. Gian Maria Campedelli et al. Crime & Delinquency, July 7, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1...

Replicable: People regard themselves as better than the average, thinking of themselves as better described by positive character traits than the others

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Alicke (1985): Pre-registered replication and extension. Pui Yan Mok, Gilad Feldman. Preprint, June 2019. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30198.04164 A...

The Impact of Shared Book Reading on Children’s Language Skills: Negligible

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Noble, Claire, Giovanni Sala, Michelle Lowe, Jamie Lingwood, Caroline F. Rowland, Fernand Gobet, and Julian Pine. 2018. “The Impact of Share...
Monday, July 8, 2019

Individuals become more religious if an earthquake recently hit close by; this may help explain why religiosity has not vanished as some scholars once predicted

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Acts of God? Religiosity and Natural Disasters Across Subnational World Districts Jeanet Sinding Bentzen. The Economic Journal, uez008, May ...

How Children Come to Care About Reputation: The tendency to assume that others could evaluate one’s behavior and the default preference to elicit positive instead of negative evaluations

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Evaluative Audience Perception (EAP): How Children Come to Care About Reputation. Sara Valencia Botto, Philippe Rochat. Child Development Pe...

Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-analytic Evaluation of Perspective-taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern

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McAuliffe, William H., Evan C. Carter, Juliana Berhane, Alexander Snihur, and Michael E. McCullough. 2019. “Is Empathy the Default Response ...
Sunday, July 7, 2019

The effects of psychotherapy for depression are small; unadjusted meta-analyses of psychotherapies overestimate the effects considerably: only 23% of the studies are of low risk of bias

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Was Eysenck right after all? A reassessment of the effects of psychotherapy for adult depression. P. Cuijpers, E. Karyotaki, M. Reijnders an...

Gender differences in orthorexic eating behaviors: Women were more likely to report pathologically healthful eating than men

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Gender differences in orthorexic eating behaviors: A systematic review and meta-analytic integration. Jana Strahler. Nutrition, July 4 2019....
Saturday, July 6, 2019

A balanced review of the literature & evaluation of the data indicate that adult neurogenesis in human brain is improbable; the focus of research should be the preservation of neurons, not replacement

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A balanced evaluation of the evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans: implication for neuropsychiatric disorders. Alvaro Duque, Reynold Sp...

Rolf Degen summarizing: People who were made feel morally superior actually acted more morally - but only in public, not in private, exposing our penchant for moral hypocrisy

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Self-enhancement in moral hypocrisy: Moral superiority and moral identity are about better appearances. Mengchen Dong, Jan-Willem van Prooij...
Friday, July 5, 2019

Many of us today are inclined toward socialism (explicit cooperation) & against laissez-faire capitalism (implicit cooperation) because the first was much more genetically beneficial during previous generations of our species

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Evolutionary psychology, economic freedom, trade and benevolence. John Levendis, Robert B. Eckhardt and Walter Block. Review of Economic Per...

These correlational findings speak against the Pollyanna hypothesis: Happiness does not seem to preclude caring about local and global issues

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Do happy people care about society’s problems? Kostadin Kushlev, Danielle M. Drummond, Samantha J. Heintzelman & Ed Diener. The Journal ...

Monkeys did better than bonobos spitting water into a vertical tube to make a peanut float upwards until it comes into reach (floating peanut task; FPT); great apes require visual feedback for initially solving the FPT

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Innovative problem solving in great apes: the role of visual feedback in the floating peanut task. Sonja J. Ebel, Martin Schmelz, Esther Her...

Reproductive Success, Relationship Orientation, and Sexual Behavior in Heterosexuals: Relationship With Chronotype, Sleep, and Sex

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Reproductive Success, Relationship Orientation, and Sexual Behavior in Heterosexuals: Relationship With Chronotype, Sleep, and Sex. Ali Kasa...

The likelihood of smiles and the duration of smiles increased with age; attribute this to greater expression of positive emotion in older people; women smiled more than men over all

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Faded Smiles? A Largescale Observational Study of Smiling from Adolescence to Old Age. Daniel McDuff & Stephanie Glass. IEEE Transaction...

Those who reported being hit on more often than hitting on others showed higher self-esteem scores, than those who reported being hit on fewer times relative to number of times hitting on others

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Associations between Self-esteem and Experiences from Short-term Dating Contexts. Marthe Kristine Dingen. NTNU Psychology School, April 2019...
Thursday, July 4, 2019

Death awareness: Terror management or cognitive adaptation to time management?

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Death awareness: Terror management or cognitive adaptation to time management? X.T. Wang, Peng Wang. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31...

Activating pathogen threat consistently made dense social environments seem more crowded, & consistently generated more negative affect toward these environments; people were more likely to choose uncrowded environments

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The infectiousness of crowds: Crowding experiences are amplified by pathogen threats. Iris M. Wang, Joshua M. Ackerman. Human Behavior and E...

Mothers of very young children report more dates than fathers of very young children; single parents of children less than 5 report higher frequency of sexual activity & more first dates in the past 3 months than those of older children

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Using conjoint analysis to assess men’s relationship interest in women with and without children. Viviana Weekes-Shackelford, Justin K Mogil...

Plant avoidance behaviors in Shuar infants and toddlers (Amazonians in southeastern Ecuador)

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Plant avoidance behaviors in Shuar infants and toddlers. Annie E. Wertz, Alejandro S. Erut, Andrew Marcus Smith, Claudia Elsner, H. Clark Ba...

A meta-analysis of sex differences in human navigation skills: Children younger than 13 years showed much smaller effect sizes (d = .15) than older age groups

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A meta-analysis of sex differences in human navigation skills. Alina Nazareth et al. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, July 3 2019. https:/...
Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Interpretation of reports about crimes are affected by motivations to construct & protect our worldview; liberals attribute crimes more to religion for Christian rather than Muslim offenders; opposite effect for conservatives

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Perpetrator Religion and Perceiver’s Political Ideology Affect Processing and Communication of Media Reports of Violence. Samia Habib, Levi ...

Having a second child, which is common in Switzerland, correlates negatively with mothers’ life satisfaction; the mothers’ life satisfaction trajectories reflect work–family conflict

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The Parenthood and Happiness Link: Testing Predictions from Five Theories. Małgorzata Mikucka, Ester Rizzi. European Journal of Population, ...

It can be suggested that standard hardcore pornography on the whole is not currently harmful, but there are not many benefits associated with it; & when taken to excess there may be problems that arise

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Development and implications of pornography use: a narrative review. James Binnie & Paula Reavey. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, Jul ...

Gender effects and cooperation in collective action: Mixed-sex groups were the most effective in cooperation, although cooperation level varied significantly; men demonstrated a higher level of trust and gratitude than women

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Gender effects and cooperation in collective action: A laboratory experiment. Anastasia Peshkovskaya, Tatiana Babkina, Mikhail Myagkov. Rati...

The fusiform face area (FFA) responds to visual expertise; neuropsychological data says not only to process faces, it also contributes to non-face expertise recognition (cars, birds, radiographs)

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P-curving the Fusiform Face Area: Meta-Analyses Support the Expertise Hypothesis. Edwin J. Burns, Taylor Arnold, Cindy M. Bukach. Neuroscien...

Trigger warnings had no significant effect on changes to affect or learning but did significantly increase perceptions of warnings as necessary (not for oneself, obviously, but for the others)

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Boysen, G. A., Isaacs, R. A., Tretter, L., & Markowski, S. (2019). Trigger warning efficacy: The impact of warnings on affect, attitudes...
Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Factors of social partners' selection: who helps/harms others (signal of how someone may act towards ourselves) & who acts like/unlike others (capacity for coordination)

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The selection of social partners based on the moral actions of the group vs. the individual. Brandon M. Woo, Jason Paul Mitchell. Human Beha...

Nuclear Twin Family analysis: Political orientation is often assumed to be shaped by socialization processes, but previous studies have shown substantial genetic variance components in party affiliation, political attitudes & behaviors

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Hufer, A., Kornadt, A. E., Kandler, C., & Riemann, R. (2019). Genetic and environmental variation in political orientation in adolescenc...

Direct evidence for transport of RNA from the mouse brain to the germline and offspring?

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Direct evidence for transport of RNA from the mouse brain to the germline and offspring. Elizabeth A. O’Brien, Kathleen S. Ensbey, Bryan W. ...

Traditional postpartum care: Alloparenting has been considered as an important factor in raising children; additional help can enhance further reproductive opportunity of new mother & her key role on enhancing the fitness of the newborn

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Traditional postpartum care: Alloparenting from an evolutionary perspective. Sangkwon Woo, Mark V. Flinn, Robert S. Walker. Human Behavior a...

‘I Do Not Exist’: Pathologies of Self Among Western Buddhists

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‘I Do Not Exist’: Pathologies of Self Among Western Buddhists. Judith Pickering. Journal of Religion and Health, June 2019, Volume 58, Issue...