Saturday, August 8, 2020

Country‐level optimism was negatively related to GDP per capita, population density, and democratic norms and positively related to income inequality and perceived corruption

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International Optimism: Correlates and Consequences of Dispositional Optimism across 61 Countries. Erica Baranski  Kate Sweeny  Gwendolyn Ga...

The Political Right Is Not More Credulous: Experimental Evidence Against Asymmetric Motivations to Believe False Political Information

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Is the Political Right More Credulous?: Experimental Evidence Against Asymmetric Motivations to Believe False Political Information. Timothy...

The unexpected small decline in Neuroticism suggests that, during the acute phase of COVID-19, feelings of anxiety and distress may be attributed more to the pandemic than to one’s personality

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Change in five-factor model personality traits during the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic. Angelina R. Sutin et al. PLoS, August 6 2...

Pigeons try to overthrow a stable social order's hierarchy just adding weights to the revolutionaries' bodies; mass loading causes the low-ranked male birds to immediately become more aggressive and rise-up the dominance hierarchy

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Artificial mass loading disrupts stable social order in pigeon dominance hierarchies. Steven J. Portugal, James R. Usherwood, Craig R. White...

Consistent with the proposition that people need to exert autonomy over their decisions, prosocial behavior is most likely to lead to happiness when actors have chosen to provide help

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Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy. Lara B. Aknin  Ashley V. Whillans. Social Issues and Policy Review, August 6 20...
Friday, August 7, 2020

Rather than the crisis fundamentally changing people psychologically, genetic differences between individuals seem to play a fundamental role in shaping psychological & behavioural responses to the COVID-19 crisis

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Genetic correlates of psychological responses to the COVID-19 crisis in young adult twins in Great Britain. Kaili Rimfeld et al. Aug 2020. h...

Imagining the future, remembering the past: Future events were simulated at proportionally higher speed than past events; the density of experience units representing the unfolding of events was lower for future episodes

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The temporal compression of events during episodic future thinking. Olivier Jeunehomme, Nathan Leroy, Arnaud D'Argembeau. Cognition, Aug...

Trait mindfulness do not reliably translate into a pattern of healthful behaviours in general, although trait mindfulness shows a stronger associations with health behaviours under certain conditions

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Trait mindfulness and health behaviours: a meta-analysis. Margarita Sala ,Catherine Rochefort,P. Priscilla Lui &Austin S. Baldwin. Healt...

Increasing Population Densities Predict Decreasing Fertility Rates over Time: A 174-nation Investigation

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Rotella, Amanda M., Michael E. W. Varnum, PhD, Oliver Sng, and Igor Grossmann. 2020. “Increasing Population Densities Predict Decreasing Fer...

Intelligence manifests itself in the brain in breaking a problem down into multiple subtasks, which are worked on in widely distributed processing units, showing signs of being focused on the common plan

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Integrated Intelligence from Distributed Brain Activity. John Duncan, Moataz Assem, Sneha Shashidhara. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August ...

Creative behaviors seem to yield survival & reproductive benefits; however, individuals often have to violate social norms; this deviance entails consequences detrimental for both survival and reproduction

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The paradox of creativity. Eric Bonetto et al. New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 60, January 2021, 100820. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideaps...
Thursday, August 6, 2020

From 2012... Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles

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From 2012... Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles. Troy R. Hawkins, Bhawna Singh, Guillaume...

The incidence rate of dementia in Europe and North America has declined by 13% per decade over the past 25 years, consistently across studies; incidence is similar for men and women

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Twenty-seven-year time trends in dementia incidence in Europe and the United States. The Alzheimer Cohorts Consortium, Frank J. Wolters et a...

The Origin of Our Modern Concept of Depression—The History of Melancholia From 1780-1880

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The Origin of Our Modern Concept of Depression—The History of Melancholia From 1780-1880: A Review. Kenneth S. Kendler. JAMA Psychiatry. 20...