Sunday, November 8, 2020

COVID-19: Narcissism & Machiavellianism predicted greater negative affect & perceptions of threat during the pandemic, while psychopathy predicted positive affect; conversely, sadism predicted greater positive affect

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Is the COVID-19 pandemic even darker for some? Examining dark personality and affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to the COVID-19...

High-status individuals had a stronger status motive, in part, because they were more confident in their ability to achieve (or retain) high status, but not because of other possible mechanisms (e.g., task self-efficacy)

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The Possession of High Status Strengthens the Status Motive. Cameron Anderson, John Angus D. Hildreth, Daron L. Sharps. Personality and Soci...

Rats: Even under conditions of low food motivation, food sharing occurred on only 1% of the sharing opportunities, inconsistent with claims in the literature that rats are altruistically motivated to share with other rats

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Wan, Haoran, Cyrus Kirkman, Greg Jensen, and Timothy D. Hackenberg. 2020. “Failure to Find Altruistic Food Sharing in Rats.” PsyArXiv. Novem...

Evidence from a Panel of Transition Economies: The flat tax reforms increase annual GDP growth by 1.36 percentage points for a transitionary period of approximately one decade

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The Macroeconomic Effects of Flat Taxation: Evidence from a Panel of Transition Economies. Brian Wheaton. Harvard Univ., October 24, 2020. h...

Corporal punishment in schools increases educational attainment, increases later-life social trust & trust in institutions, leads to less authoritarian attitudes toward child-rearing, to greater tolerance of free speech, & decreases later-life crime

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Petrova, Maria, Gautam Rao, and Brian Wheaton. “The Long-Run Effects of Corporal Punishment in Schools,” Harvard Working Paper, Nov 2020. ht...
Saturday, November 7, 2020

Masculinity & femininity affect disgust by gender; reframing disgust in terms of caregiving eliminates the gender gap in disgust; & the caregiving frame unexpectedly strengthens the relationship between disgust & political ideology

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Slimy worms or sticky kids: How caregiving tasks and gender identity attenuate disgust response. Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz (a1) and Amanda Fri...

Age trends in malevolent personality conform to established patterns of normative change, indicating temporary disruption in adolescence and social maturation across adulthood

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Age differences in Machiavellianism across the life span: Evidence from a large‐scale cross‐sectional study. Friedrich M. Götz  Wiebke Bleid...

Rolf Degen summarizing... Across the world, the number of people who were “very” or “extremely” concerned about fake news was far higher than the number of people who had actually seen any

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Fletcher R. (2021) How News Audiences Think About Misinformation Across the World. In: Jayakumar S., Ang B., Anwar N.D. (eds) Disinformation...

Parenting Styles in Gay Families: The homosexual parents reported a warmer parenting style, more cooperation, and less irritation with the temperament of the firstborn child

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Parenting Styles in Gay Families. Christine Neresheimer. PhD Thesis, Zurich Univ, 2020.  https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-191334 Rolf Degen's...

Rising Ethnic Diversity in the United States Accompanies Shifts Toward an Individualistic Culture

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Rising Ethnic Diversity in the United States Accompanies Shifts Toward an Individualistic Culture. Alex C. Huynh, Igor Grossmann. Social Psy...

Moral foundations and political orientation: The basic differences about conservatives and liberals are supported; results may be less generalizable across samples and political cultures than previously thought

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Kivikangas, J. M., Fernández-Castilla, B., Järvelä, S., Ravaja, N., & Lönnqvist, J.-E. (2020). Moral foundations and political orientati...
Friday, November 6, 2020

Within-person grade variability was largely unstable across subjects & ages & not associated with any of 15 variables that typically explain between-person differences in school performance (e.g. IQ, socioeconomic status, personality traits)

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Wright, Megan, and Sophie von Stumm. 2020. “Within-person Variability in School Performance.” PsyArXiv. November 6. doi:10.31234/osf.io/5ne3...

Fukushima Daiichi: Each standard deviation increase in the influx of temporarily relocated survivors within 100 m of a resident’s home address was associated with a decrease in their trust in both people from their community and outside of it

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Evaluation of Trust Within a Community After Survivor Relocation Following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Krisztina Gero et al...

Confidence is sexy and it can be trained: Examining male social confidence in initial, opposite‐sex interactions

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Confidence is sexy and it can be trained: Examining male social confidence in initial, opposite‐sex interactions. Norman P. Li  Jose C. Yong...

That humans are the rational animal may be overstated; we're not so much rational animals but rather the rationalizing animal

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Yong, J. C., Li, N. P., & Kanazawa, S. (2020). Not so much rational but rationalizing: Humans evolved as coherence-seeking, fiction-maki...

Human neonates prefer colostrum to mature milk; there is evidence for an olfactory bias toward the “initial milk”

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Human neonates prefer colostrum to mature milk: Evidence for an olfactory bias toward the “initial milk”? Magali Klaey‐Tassone  Karine Duran...

Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans: Facebook users across 225 jurisdictions, data on 60,000 topics

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Obradovich, Nick, Ömer Özak, Ignacio Martín, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, Edmond Awad, Manuel Cebrián, Rubén Cuevas, et al. 2020. “Expanding the Me...

US: Females are now more likely to report drinking and getting drunk in the past month than their male peers for the first time since researchers began measuring such behaviors

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Gender Differences in the Epidemiology of Alcohol Use and Related Harms in the United States. Aaron White. American Academy of Anti-Aging, P...
Thursday, November 5, 2020

Hippocampal Volume and Navigational Ability: The Map(ping) Is Not to Scale

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Weisberg, Steven M., and Arne Ekstrom. 2020. “Hippocampal Volume and Navigational Ability: The Map(ping) Is Not to Scale.” PsyArXiv. Novembe...

How the COVID‐19 pandemic has changed our lives: A study of psychological correlates across 59 countries

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How the COVID‐19 pandemic has changed our lives: A study of psychological correlates across 59 countries. Elisabet Alzueta  Paul Perrin  Fio...

Dreams: Deep neural networks face the issue of overfitting as they learn (performance on one data set increases but the network's performance fails to generalize); dreams can be the "noise injections" in the form of corrupted inputs

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The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization. Erik Hoel. arXiv.org, Sep 24 2020. arXiv:2007.09560 Abstract: Understanding o...

Women were more likely to baby talk to their dog and speak gently/whisper to their dog, while young adults were more likely to use collar correction/jerk the leash

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Owner Sex and Human–Canine Interactions at the Park. Shelly Volsche et al. Anthrozoös, Volume 33, 2020 - Issue 6, Pages 775-785. Nov 4 2020....

Women’s productivity responds more to wage increses and their turnover responds less to wage changes than men’s, which can lead to occupational pay gaps

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The Payoffs Of Higher Pay: Elasticities Of Productivity And Labor Supply With Respect To Wages. Natalia Emanuel · Emma Harrington (Job Marke...

Album and song sales have a remarkably short period of economic viability. Sales of whole albums approach zero by the end of their first year of release; individual tracks maintain meaningful sales volumes for longer

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Copyright and Economic Viability: Evidence from the Music Industry. Kristelia García  James Hicks  Justin McCrary. Journal of Empirical Lega...

Experiencing an object as pleasurable is a prerequisite for judging it to be beautiful; but to qualify as beautiful, an object must elicit especially high levels of pleasure & be matched to internal learned models of what counts as beautiful

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The nature of beauty: behavior, cognition, and neurobiology. Martin Skov  Marcos Nadal. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, November...