Sunday, September 1, 2019

Disgust lowers olfactory threshold

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Disgust lowers olfactory threshold: a test of the underlying mechanism. Kai Qin Chan, Roel van Dooren, Rob W. Holland & Ad van Knippenbe...

Our findings demonstrate that higher-order cognition is influenced by fluctuations in internal brain states, providing a physiological basis for variability in complex human behavior

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Endogenous fluctuations in the dopaminergic midbrain drive behavioral choice variability. Benjamin Chew, Tobias U. Hauser, Marina Papoutsi, ...

Found no detrimental effects on physiological health, & saw subjective health improvements (greater for those who engaged in more intense forms) in kavadi attam, a high-risk extreme ritual practice

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Effects of Extreme Ritual Practices on Psychophysiological Well-Being. Dimitris Xygalatas, Sammyh Khan, Martin Lang, Radek Kundt, Eva Kundt...

Chess players are generally of higher academic standing, but more importantly it is shown statistically that learning chess increases a student’s academic performance (chess makes them smarter)

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The Effect of Chess on Standardized Test Score Gains. David I. Poston, Kathryn K. Vandenkieboom. SAGE Open, August 31, 2019. https://doi.or...

Affective perception of Euro banknotes: The relationship between affective scores and the nominal value appears to be logarithmic (Weber’s law) rather than linear

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Affective perception of Euro banknotes: cognitive factors and interindividual differences. Valerio Manippa et al. Psychological Research, Au...

They add political words to their bios at a higher rate than any other category of words, & are now more likely to describe themselves by their political affiliation than their religious affiliation

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Using Twitter Bios to Measure Changes in Social Identity: Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time? Nick Rogers, Jason ...

Neurodata suggests that the computational principles driving aesthetic appreciation can only be understood if seen as rooted in functional mechanisms that evolved to help regulate adaptive behavior

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The Neurobiology of Sensory Valuation. Martin Skov. In The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Aesthetics, edited by Marcos Nadal and Oshin Vartani...

People Images & Algorithmic Inferences on Physical Attractiveness: Complain of the algorithms’ reductionist nature, their potential to infringe on users’ autonomy & well-being, & ethical & legal considerations

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What Is Beautiful Continues to Be Good: People Images and Algorithmic Inferences on Physical Attractiveness. Maria Matsangidou, Jahna Otterb...

Disability paradox: The apparent discrepancy between the level of well‐being that disabled people self‐report, and the level of well‐being that nondisabled people predict disabled people to have

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Disability and Well-Being. Alex Gregory. In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. New York: (forthcoming). https:...
Saturday, August 31, 2019

Do People Want to Be More Moral? They reported a lower desire to change more morally-relevant traits (e.g., honesty, compassion), compared to less morally-relevant traits (e.g., anxiety, sociability)

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Sun, Jessie, and Geoffrey Goodwin. 2019. “Do People Want to Be More Moral?” PsyArXiv. August 26. doi:10.31234/osf.io/9gux6 Abstract: Most ...

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less

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10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. Garett Jones. https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Dem...

The Honeymoon Is Over: Sex-differentiated Changes in Sexual Desire Predict Marital Dissatisfaction

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The Honeymoon Is Over: Sex-differentiated Changes in Sexual Desire Predict Marital Dissatisfaction. James K. McNulty, Jessica A. Maxwell, An...

People high in neuroticism & extraversion were the most vulnerable to rumors; women are more vulnerable to rumors than men (could it be to protect the offspring???)

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Who falls for rumor? Influence of personality traits on false rumor belief. Kaisheng Lai et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volu...

Room for agreement: Policies that make the poorest wealthier, while keeping the status of the wealthiest, are seen as fair by both Democrats & Republicans & among high- and low–income individuals

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Toni Rodon and Marc Sanjaume, "How fair is it? An experimental study of perceived fairness of distributive policies," The Journal ...
Friday, August 30, 2019

Evidence from San Francisco's 1994 change in law about Effects of Rent Control Expansion: Rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, but there was a loss of housing supplyin the long run

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Diamond, Rebecca, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian. 2019. "The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: E...

Fear in infancy: Lessons from snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers

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LoBue, V., & Adolph, K. E. (2019). Fear in infancy: Lessons from snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers. Developmental Psychology, 55(9...

It’s Not the Media, Stupid: Many in the Western world strongly believe things that are barely ever mentioned in the mainstream media, just as many firmly reject or ignore some of the messages that are repeated incessantly by them

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It’s Not the Media, Stupid. Kenneth Newton, August 29 2019. The Political Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12732 Abstract: It ...

Effects of the personality characteristics of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (the Dark Triad) on political ambition: Those traits are significantly related to ambition

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The Dark Triad and nascent political ambition. Rolfe Daus Peterson & Carl L. Palmer. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, A...

Since MODIS began collecting measurements we found a decrease in the total area burned each year: Between 2003 & 2019, that number has dropped by roughly 25 pct

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Building a Long-Term Record of Fire. Adam Voiland. NASA, August 21, 2019. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145421/building-a-long-te...

The Relationship Between Individual Differences in Gray Matter Volume and Religiosity and Mystical Experiences: A Pre‐registered Voxel‐based Morphometry Study

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The Relationship Between Individual Differences in Gray Matter Volume and Religiosity and Mystical Experiences: A Pre‐registered Voxel‐based...

Conspiracy theorists are less engaged in traditional left-right politics, have a less clear picture of “what goes with what”; & are associated with antigovernmental orientations and a lack of political efficacy

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Conspiratorial Thinking and Political Constraint. Adam M Enders. Public Opinion Quarterly, nfz032, August 26 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/p...

Smartphone Nonusers: Associated Sociodemographic and Health Variables

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Smartphone Nonusers: Associated Sociodemographic and Health Variables. Eduardo J. Pedrero-Pérez, Sara Morales-Alonso, Ester Rodríguez-Rives,...

From 2002: Same-Sex Sexual Partner Preference in Hormonally and Neurologically Unmanipulated Animals

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Same-Sex Sexual Partner Preference in Hormonally and Neurologically Unmanipulated Animals. Paul L. Vasey. Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol...
Thursday, August 29, 2019

Religiosity’s role on political attitudes is more heritable than social, & religiosity accounts for more genetic influence on political attitudes than personality; when including religiosity, personality’s influence is greatly reduced

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The Higher Power of Religiosity Over Personality on Political Ideology. Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, Amanda Friesen. Political Behavior, August ...

Why attitude to good people is not always positive?

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Why attitude to good people is not always positive: explanation based on decision theory. Part 3 (Why Should We Play Down Emotions: A Theo...

Why IQ Test Scores Are Slightly Decreasing: Possible System-Based Explanation for the Reversed Flynn Effect

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Why IQ Test Scores Are Slightly Decreasing: Possible System-Based Explanation for the Reversed Flynn Effect. Griselda Acosta, Eric Smith, an...

When their own payoff is unknown, all subjects prefer a more unequal distribution provided it makes everyone weakly better off; 25% burn money to make things less unequal, even when it does not make anyone better off

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Preferences over income distribution: Evidence from a choice experiment. Sophie Cetre et al. Journal of Economic Psychology, August 28 2019,...

Democrats tend to score higher than Republicans on open-minded cognitive style variables; but these partisan differences have very little relationships with how they assess the strength of arguments they disagree with

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Differences that don’t make much difference: Party asymmetry in open-minded cognitive styles has little relationship to information processi...

We sought to test whether stereotypes that women have better language skills than men would make men to underperform in language tests; found little evidence for stereotype threat effects on men in language tasks

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Chaffee, Kathryn E., Nigel M. Lou, and Kimberly A. Noels. 2019. “Does Stereotype Threat Affect Men in Language Domains?.” PsyArXiv. August 2...

Are Humans Prepared to Detect, Fear, and Avoid Snakes? The Mismatch between Laboratory and Ecological Evidence

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Are Humans Prepared to Detect, Fear, and Avoid Snakes? The Mismatch between Laboratory and Ecological Evidence. Carlos M. Coelho et al. Fron...
Wednesday, August 28, 2019

A difficult conversation: Delivering news of a fatal illness to one's own wife

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A Difficult Conversation. Martin B. Wice. August 27, 2019. JAMA. 2019;322(8):727-728. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.11757 [Full text, references, ...

Proximity (Mis)perception: Public Awareness of Nuclear, Refinery, and Fracking Sites

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Proximity (Mis)perception: Public Awareness of Nuclear, Refinery, and Fracking Sites. Benjamin A. Lyons, Heather Akin, Natalie Jomini Strou...

Science teams' impact is predicted more by the lower-citation rather than the higher-citation members; teams tend to assemble among individuals with similar citation impact in all fields of science and patenting

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Decoding team and individual impact in science and invention. Mohammad Ahmadpoor and Benjamin F. Jones. Proceedings of the National Academy ...

Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don’t

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Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don’t. S. Mo Jones-Jang, Tara Mortens...

Gangestad et al. (this issue) recently published alternative analyses of our open data & state that women show ovulatory shifts in preferences for men’s bodies; we think the results are not robust

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Penke, Lars, Julia Stern, Ruben C. Arslan, and Tanja M. Gerlach. 2019. “No Robust Evidence for Cycle Shifts in Preferences for Men's Bo...

Results bolster the small body of literature showing that flashbulb memories are subject to reconstructive processes & suggest that memories decay further between 3 & 5 months after events

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Krackow, E., Deming, E., Longo, A., & DiSciullo, V. (2019). Memories of learning the news of the 2016 U.S. presidential election results...