Sunday, November 14, 2021

Rice farming in China had effects on polygenic scores for height, body mass index, depression, time discounting, reproduction, educational attainment, risk preference, alcohol metabolism capacity

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Relationship between rice farming and polygenic scores potentially linked to agriculture in China. Chen Zhu et al. Royal Society Open Scienc...

Urbanicity is a growing environmental challenge for mental health; here, we investigate correlations of urbanicity with brain structure and function, neuropsychology & mental illness symptoms in young people from China & Europe

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Global urbanicity is associated with brain and behaviour in young people. Jiayuan Xu et al, & CHIMGEN and IMAGEN Consortia. Nature Human...

Women: Greater pleasure (autonomous) motives related to higher sexual assertiveness, which in turn related to higher orgasmic function in casual sex; greater insecurity (nonautonomous) motives related to lower sexual assertiveness

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It’s The “Why”: Links between (Non)autonomous Sexual Motives, Sexual Assertiveness, and Women’s Orgasm in Casual Sex. Val Wongsomboon, Grego...

Facial feminization surgery had success in achieving goals of minimizing mis-gendering in public (appropriately identifying trans-women as female), & reduction in dysphoric feelings (improved patient satisfaction)

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Facial Feminization Surgery Review: Diagnosis, Preoperative Planning, Surgical Techniques, and Outcomes. Joshua Choe et al. Face, November 1...

Apis cerana workers apply materials (i.e. animal faeces in Vietnam, plant material in Japan) around nest entrances to repel giant hornets

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Giant hornet (Vespa soror) attacks trigger frenetic antipredator signalling in honeybee (Apis cerana) colonies. Heather R. Mattila et al. Ro...

Individuals recognize their lifestyle is more unsustainable than what is generally acceptable, yet they consider the lifestyle of others to be even more harmful; there are compensatory green beliefs on the biases in the estimated environmental impacts

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Biased perception of the environmental impact of everyday behaviors. Laura Pasca & Lucía Poggio. The Journal of Social Psychology, Nov 1...
Saturday, November 13, 2021

Divorcees do not repartner with someone of the same personality as their ex-spouse, and they are in some cases constrained by marriage market forces to repartner with less stabilizing personalities

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More of the Same? Comparing the Personalities of Ex-Spouse and New Partner after Divorce. Sascha Spikic, Dimitri Mortelmans and Dries Van Ga...

Do chimpanzees enjoy a virtual forest? A pilot investigation of the use of interactive art as a form of environmental enrichment for zoo-housed chimpanzees

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Do chimpanzees enjoy a virtual forest? A pilot investigation of the use of interactive art as a form of environmental enrichment for zoo-hou...

When and Why Does Gossip Increase Prosocial Behavior? When it is accurate rather than inaccurate; when targets are dependent on receivers rather than independent; when it is anticipated rather than actually experienced

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When and Why Does Gossip Increase Prosocial Behavior? Annika S. Nieper et al. Current Opinion in Psychology, November 12 2021. https://doi.o...

We trace the origins of porn hypnosis, both in early cinema’s theorization of the hypnotic screen and also in mid-twentieth-century brainwashing paranoia, examining the ways that the evil hypnotist mythos built up during this period

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Hypnosis and pornography: a cultural history. James Mackay & Polina Mackay. Porn Studies, Nov 11 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743....

Behavior causes: Phylogeny, natural selection, & genomics (ultimate causes); maturation, sensitive period effects, & routine environmental effects (intermediate); & hormonal/metabolic processes, neural circuitry, and eliciting stimuli (proximate)

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Nine Levels of Explanation — A Proposed Expansion of Tinbergen’s Four-Level Framework for Understanding the Causes of Behavior. Melvin Konne...

I review, replicate and extend the analysis from seven econometric papers studying how events that happened to and values held by our ancestors affect their descendants several generations afterwards (intergenerational persistence)

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Persistence - A critical review [abridged]. Jaime Sevilla. Nov 10 2021. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wWGi4jTNNMhz2pHhJ/persiste...

These results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation

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AI-tocracy. Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang & Noam Yuchtman. NBER Working Paper 29466, November 2021. DOI 10.3386/w29466 Abstra...
Friday, November 12, 2021

Musical tastes fluctuate throughout the day: "By integrating an artificial neural network with Spotify’s API, we show a general awareness of diurnal preference in playlists"

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Diurnal fluctuations in musical preference. Ole Adrian Heggli, Jan Stupacher and Peter Vuust. Royal Society Open Science, November 10 2021. ...

Microbiome differences in autism spectrum disorder may reflect dietary preferences that relate to diagnostic features, and we caution against claims that the microbiome has a driving role in ASD

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Autism-related dietary preferences mediate autism-gut microbiome associations. Chloe X. Yap et al. Cell, Nov 11 2021. https://doi.org/10.101...

Individuals with higher self-esteem had more lifelike and accurate images of themselves in their mind's eye

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The Self in the Mind’s Eye: Revealing How We Truly See Ourselves Through Reverse Correlation. Lara Maister et al. Psychological Science, Nov...