Paris Agreement cost of $819–$1,890 billion per year in 2030 would reduce emissions in 1% of what is needed to limit average temperature rise to 1.5C; global costs from extreme weather have declined 26% over the last 28 years

Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies. Bjorn Lomborg. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 156, July 2020, 119981. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.119981

Abstract

Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today's welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.

Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.

Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.

Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP.

Climate policies also have costs that often vastly outweigh their climate benefits. The Paris Agreement, if fully implemented, will cost $819–$1,890 billion per year in 2030, yet will reduce emissions by just 1% of what is needed to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Each dollar spent on Paris will likely produce climate benefits worth 11¢.

Long-term impacts of climate policy can cost even more. The IPCC's two best future scenarios are the “sustainable” SSP1 and the “fossil-fuel driven” SSP5. Current climate-focused attitudes suggest we aim for the “sustainable” world, but the higher economic growth in SSP5 actually leads to much greater welfare for humanity. After adjusting for climate damages, SSP5 will on average leave grandchildren of today's poor $48,000 better off every year. It will reduce poverty by 26 million each year until 2050, inequality will be lower, and more than 80 million premature deaths will be avoided.

Using carbon taxes, an optimal realistic climate policy can aggressively reduce emissions and reduce the global temperature increase from 4.1°C in 2100 to 3.75°C. This will cost $18 trillion, but deliver climate benefits worth twice that. The popular 2°C target, in contrast, is unrealistic and would leave the world more than $250 trillion worse off.

The most effective climate policy is increasing investment in green R&D to make future decarbonization much cheaper. This can deliver $11 of climate benefits for each dollar spent.

More effective climate policies can help the world do better. The current climate discourse leads to wasteful climate policies, diverting attention and funds from more effective ways to improve the world.

7. Conclusion

As municipalities, counties, and even countries declare a “climate emergency,” it is apparent that global warming is often being presented as an existential challenge requiring urgent and strong climate policies to avoid devastation.

This article has shown that these claims are misleading and often incorrectly describe the issue and its future. While climate change is real, human caused, and will have a mostly negative impact, it is important to remember that climate policies will likewise have a mostly negative impact. Thus, we must account for the effects of both to find the policies that will achieve the highest welfare gains.

7.1. Baseline welfare keeps increasing

This article first established how the baseline development for the world has improved dramatically and is likely to continue. Welfare has increased and will increase dramatically. While GDP per person is often criticized, it effectively captures some of the most important impacts for humans and the environment: longer life, less child deaths, better education, higher development, lower malnutrition, less poverty, more access to water, sanitation, and electricity, and better environmental performance. Most importantly, it strongly captures the most important welfare indicator, subjective well-being.

Welfare per capita has increased 16-fold from 1800 to today (Fig. 1), and it is likely to increase another 5–10 times by the end of the century. Likewise, the global income gap is closing (Fig. 2) and the world could by 2100 be less unequal than it has been in the last two hundred years (Fig. 3).

One of the main reasons we have become much better off is that we have access to much more energy. From 1800 until today, each person in the world has access to four times as much energy (Fig. 4). Because of efficiency gains, human benefits from energy have increased even more: Each person in Great Britain has obtained 18 times more domestic heating, 170 times more transport, and 21,000 times more light. This trend will continue towards 2100.

While many believe that renewables are slated to take over the world, this is unlikely to happen soon (Fig. 5). Indeed, by mid-century we will likely get less energy from renewables than we did in the last mid-century in 1950. By 2100, in the middle-of-the-road scenario, the world will still get 77% of its energy from fossil fuels.

That is why much of our progress in the 21st century will remain bound to fossil fuels (unless we innovate cheap green energy). Cutting back fossil fuels helps alleviate global warming but at the same time has real costs to human development. Thus, it is crucial to identify the size of the problem of global warming and the effectiveness of its solutions.

7.2. Climate impacts real but often vastly exaggerated

There are two major reasons why most people believe global warming is making things worse, whereas the data shows this mostly to be untrue. First, it is because of the so-called Expanding Bull's-Eye effect (Fig. 7). In just 20 years, the number of exposed houses on floodplains in Atlanta increased by 58% (while becoming more valuable). Not surprisingly, when a flood hits more houses that are each more valuable, damages will go up. But adjusted for wealth, US flooding costs have declined almost tenfold from 0.48% of GDP in 1903 to 0.057% in 2017 (Fig. 10)

Second, adaptation is often ignored and that leads to vastly exaggerated impacts. One good example is coastal flooding, where increasing sea levels might confer costs of up to $100 trillion+ per year, if we do not adapt (Fig. 8). However, if we do adapt, the cost of both flooding and adaptation in percent of GDP will decline.

Globally, climate-related deaths have declined 95% over the past century, while the global population has quadrupled (Fig. 17). When we look at all weather-related catastrophes across the globe, their share of global GDP has not increased, but rather decreased since 1990 (Fig. 18).

7.3. Costs and benefits: Paris agreement

The Paris Agreement will cost between $819 billion–$1,890 billion per year in 2030 (Table 2), most likely towards the upper end. The beneficial impact of the 2016–30 Paris Agreement will be rather small, at 1% of the cuts needed to achieve 1.5°C or an immeasurable 0.03–0.04°C temperature reduction by 2100.

The costs of the Paris Agreement are much larger than its benefits. For every dollar spent on Paris, we will likely avoid 11¢ cents of climate damage (Table 3).

7.4. Costs and benefits: optimal climate policy

Shedding unsubstantiated fears of global warming makes it easier to achieve a rational climate policy, securing the highest possible welfare. Climate decisions need to consider two costs: climate costs and climate policy costs. This paper uses Nordhaus’ DICE model to find the climate policy that realistically will deliver the lowest combined welfare loss. This optimal policy will reach 3.75°C by 2100, still aggressively halving global emissions by 2100 compared to the no-policy scenario, saving about $18 trillion or 0.4% of GDP across the next five centuries (Fig. 26).

Aiming for much stronger climate policies will end up costing humanity much more than the benefits they provide. Trying to reach 2°C, which has become the least-ambitious target discussed internationally, could end up saddling humanity with more than $250 trillion in extra costs. The current level of climate ambition voiced by almost all policymakers and campaigners, while undoubtedly well-intentioned, will in total be hugely detrimental to the world, akin to cutting off one's arm to cure a wrist ache.

7.5. Climate policy in a world of many challenges

Yet, it is often argued that we need to proceed with strong climate policies to help the world and especially its poor. This is mostly bad advice. There are much more deadly environmental problems in the world (Fig. 27): indoor and outdoor air pollution kills almost 5 million people, while global warming kills perhaps 150,000. It is clear that global warming by any comparison is a small issue in a world still beset by problems of air pollution, lack of education, gender inequality, poor health, malnutrition, trade barriers, and international conflicts (Fig. 28). In the biggest UN-led global priority survey, global warming came in last, 16th of 16 priorities, with education, health, jobs, an end to corruption, and nutrition leading the field (Fig. 29).

There are many better ways to help than through traditional climate policies (Fig. 30). For climate, we should invest in green R&D and phase out fossil fuel subsidies. For the world's many other problems, we can do more good by halving coral reef loss, reducing child malnutrition, halving malaria infections, cutting tuberculosis deaths by 95%, expanding immunization, achieving universal access to contraception, and achieving freer trade. For a dollar spent, each of these policies would achieve hundreds or thousands of times more good than Paris.

7.6. The most important future choices

If we look at the future world outlook, we are likely to see a much richer humanity with much less poverty, more nutrition, better education, lower child mortality, longer lives, access to water, sanitation, and electricity, and better environmental performance. It will also be a world that will be less unequal and have much more access to energy.

We can see our choice of futures by looking at the five scenarios from IPCC. If we focus too much on global warming, we are likely to miss the by far most important investments in education and technological R&D to ensure we avoid the relatively poor scenarios of regional rivalry SSP3 or inequal SSP4. But even looking at the two richest scenarios from IPCC––the sustainable SSP1 and the fossil fuel-driven SSP5––an outsized focus on climate will make us choose less well. Aiming for the SSP1 is not bad. But the SSP5 world would be much better on almost all accounts. It would provide more energy, less poverty, less inequality, avoid more than 80 million premature deaths, and leave the average person in the developing world––after correcting for global warming––$48,000 better off each year by 2100. In total, choosing SSP1 in favor of SSP5 would leave the world half as rich, forgoing almost $500 trillion in extra annual welfare.

Global warming is real and long-term has a significant, negative impact on society. Thus, we should weigh policies to make sure we tackle the negative impacts without ending up incurring more costs by engaging in excessively expensive climate policies. We cannot and must not do nothing. But the evidence also manifestly alerts us to the danger that we end up with too ambitious and overly costly climate policies, and a general outlook that puts the world on a growth path that will deliver dramatically less welfare, especially for the world's poorest.

The online behaviors of Islamic state terrorists in the United States: There is reason to believe that using the Internet may be an impediment to terrorists’ success

The online behaviors of Islamic state terrorists in the United States. Joe Whittaker.  Criminology & Public Policy, January 3 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12537

Research Summary: This study offers an empirical insight into terrorists’ use of the Internet. Although criminology has previously been quiet on this topic, behavior‐based studies can aid in understanding the interactions between terrorists and their environments. Using a database of 231 US‐based Islamic State terrorists, four important findings are offered: (1) This cohort utilized the Internet heavily for the purposes of both networking with co‐ideologues and learning about their intended activity. (2) There is little reason to believe that these online interactions are replacing offline ones, as has previously been suggested. Rather, terrorists tend to operate in both domains. (3) Online activity seems to be similar across the sample, regardless of the number of co‐offenders or the sophistication of attack. (4) There is reason to believe that using the Internet may be an impediment to terrorists’ success.

Policy Implications: The findings of this study have two important policy implications. First, it is vital to understand the multiplicity of environments in which terrorists inhabit. Policy makers have tended to emphasize the online domain as particularly dangerous and ripe for exploitation. While this is understandable from one perspective, simplistic and monocausal explanations for radicalization must be avoided. Terrorists operate in both the online and offline domain and there is little reason to believe that the former is replacing the latter. The two may offer different criminogenic inducements to would‐be terrorists, and at times they may be inseparably intertwined. Second, when policy responses do focus on online interventions, it is vital to understand the unintended consequences. This is particularly the case for content removal, which may inadvertently be aiding terrorists and hampering law enforcement investigations.

Daily Coffee Drinking Is Associated with Lower Risks of Cardiovascular and Total Mortality in a General Italian Population: Results from the Moli-sani Study

Daily Coffee Drinking Is Associated with Lower Risks of Cardiovascular and Total Mortality in a General Italian Population: Results from the Moli-sani Study. Emilia Ruggiero et al. The Journal of Nutrition, nxaa365, Dec 31 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxaa365

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1345941116680613888

Abstract

Background: An inverse relationship between coffee intake and mortality has been observed in several population cohorts, but rarely within Mediterranean countries. Moreover, the biological pathways mediating such an association remain unclear.

Objectives: We assessed the associations between coffee consumption and total and cause-specific mortality and examined the mediating roles of N-terminal pro B–type natriuretic peptide (NTproBNP), high-sensitivity Troponin I, blood glucose, lipid metabolism, and selected biomarkers of inflammation and renal function.

Methods: We longitudinally analyzed data on 20,487 men and women (35–94 years old at baseline) in the Moli-sani Study, a prospective cohort established in 2005–2010. Individuals were free from cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer and were followed-up for a median of 8.3 years. Dietary data were collected by a 188-item semi-quantitative FFQ. Coffee intake was standardized to a 30-mL Italian espresso cup size. HRs with 95% CIs were calculated by multivariable Cox regression.

Results: In comparison with no/rare coffee consumption (up to 1 cup/d), HRs for all-cause mortality across categories of coffee consumption (>1 to ≤2, >2 to ≤3, >3 to ≤4 and >4 cups/d) were 0.79 (95% CI, 0.65–0.95), 0.84 (95% CI, 0.69–1.03), 0.72 (95% CI, 0.57–0.92), and 0.85 (95% CI, 0.62–1.12), respectively. For CVD mortality, a nonlinear (P for non-linearity = 0.021) J-shaped association was found (magnitude of the relative reduction = 37%; nadir at 3–4 cups/d). Circulating levels of NTproBNP explained up to 26.4% of the association between coffee and all-cause mortality, while systolic blood pressure was likely to be on the pathway between coffee and CVD mortality, although to a lesser extent.

Conclusions: In this large cohort of Italian adults, moderate consumption (3–4 cups/d) of Italian-style coffee was associated with lower risks of all-cause and, specifically, of CVD mortality. Among the known biomarkers investigated here, NTproBNP likely mediates the relationship between coffee intake and all-cause mortality.

Keywords: coffee consumption, mortality risk, cardiovascular mortality, general population, Mediterranean diet

The development of the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the study of psychological functions has entered a new phase of sophistication; largely due to an increasing physiological knowledge of its effects

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and the Understanding of Behavior. David Pitcher, Beth Parkin, and Vincent Walsh. Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 72:- (Volume publication date January 2021). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-081120-013144

Abstract: The development of the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in the study of psychological functions has entered a new phase of sophistication. This is largely due to an increasing physiological knowledge of its effects and to its being used in combination with other experimental techniques. This review presents the current state of our understanding of the mechanisms of TMS in the context of designing and interpreting psychological experiments. We discuss the major conceptual advances in behavioral studies using TMS. There are meaningful physiological and technical achievements to review, as well as a wealth of new perceptual and cognitive experiments. In doing so we summarize the different uses and challenges of TMS in mental chronometry, perception, awareness, learning, and memory.

The development of the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in the study of psychological functions has entered a new phase of sophistication. This is largely due to an increasing physiological knowledge of its effects and to its being used in combination with other experimental techniques

Humans are an ultrasocial species; this sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics

The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation. Joseph Henrich and Michael Muthukrishna. Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 72:- (Volume publication date January 2021). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106

Abstract: Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history, and among behavioral domains. Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that considers how genetic and cultural evolution, and their interaction, may have shaped both the reliably developing features of our minds and the well-documented differences in cultural psychologies around the globe. We review the major evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed to explain human cooperation, including kinship, reciprocity, reputation, signaling, and punishment; we discuss key culture–gene coevolutionary hypotheses, such as those surrounding self-domestication and norm psychology; and we consider the role of religions and marriage systems. Empirically, we synthesize experimental and observational evidence from studies of children and adults from diverse societies with research among nonhuman primates.

Patients with focal lesions to the vmPFC were selectively impaired in projecting themselves to the future and in recognizing relative-future events

An asymmetry in past and future mental time travel following vmPFC damage. Elisa Ciaramelli, Filomena Anelli, Francesca Frassinetti. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, nsaa163, December 31 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaa163

Abstract: The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in mental time travel toward the past and the future is debated. Here, patients with focal lesions to the vmPFC and brain-damaged and healthy controls mentally projected themselves to a past, present or future moment of subjective time (self-projection) and classified a series of events as past or future relative to the adopted temporal self-location (self-reference). We found that vmPFC patients were selectively impaired in projecting themselves to the future and in recognizing relative-future events. These findings indicate that vmPFC damage hinders the mental processing of and movement toward future events, pointing to a prominent, multifaceted role of vmPFC in future-oriented mental time travel.

Keywords: mental time travel, self-projection, episodic memory, future thinking, vmPFC

Discussion

The present study investigated the effect of vmPFC damage on two component processes of MTT: the ability to project the self in time to assume different temporal perspectives (self-projection), and to determine, for each event in a series, whether it has already happened or is yet to happen relative to the currently assumed time perspective (self-reference). We found a striking asymmetry in the effect of vmPFC damage on both aspects of MTT, which hindered vmPFC patients’ possibility to project the self to the future, but not the past or the present, and to recognize relative-future but not relative-past events.

Before discussing, in turn, each aspect of vmPFC patients’ deficit in future-oriented MTT, we wish to emphasize that this deficit is not a common consequence of brain damage, for example reflective of a shortening of future time perspective following illness and perceived vulnerability (Ciaramelli et al., 2019). Indeed, problems with future-oriented MTT were consistently present in vmPFC patients but not in control patients with brain damage not involving vmPFC. Our results are also unlikely to reflect poor comprehension of self-projection or task instructions on the vmPFC patients’ part. Indeed, all participants, including vmPFC patients, were slower at recognizing events while assuming a past or future (compared to present) time perspective, a robust finding reflecting the cognitive cost of self-projection (Arzy et al., 2008, 2009; Anelli et al., 2016a,b; Gauthier et al., 2019). That this pattern was observed also in vmPFC patients strongly suggests they did indeed try and abandon the present moment to mentally move toward the subjective past and future. The vmPFC patients’ self-projection toward the future, however, went often awry, as indicated by an abnormal number of errors while processing events from that time perspective, as if patients failed at assuming (or maintaining) a future self-location, while they were normally capable to project the self back to the past. This finding aligns with recent neuroimaging evidence that during MTT the medial prefrontal cortex exhibit graded, progressively increasing activation with the succession of past, present and future self-projection (Gauthier et al., 2019).

The selective deficit in future-oriented self-projection we detected in vmPFC patients stands in contrast to previous studies showing a pervasive impairment in remembering the past and imagining the future in vmPFC patients (Bertossi et al., 2016a,b), which also characterizes amnesic patients with medial temporal lobe lesions (Race et al., 2011). These findings, however, are only apparently in conflict. Indeed, previous studies had used MTT tasks requiring both the adoption of past and future temporal perspective and the construction of complex events from those perspectives (Bertossi et al., 2016b), while the task we used here only involves the former. Thus, while impaired construction of both past and future experiences in previous studies may reflect a general problem in assembling detail-rich events, apparent even when vmPFC (as well as medial temporal lobe) patients have to construct atemporal experiences (Hassabis et al., 2007; Bertossi et al., 2016a; see also De Luca et al., 2018), the present findings insulate an additional problem vmPFC patients have in assuming a future temporal perspective, above and beyond their event construction deficit, which affects MTT upstream. In contrast, patients with medial temporal lobe lesions have proven able to project the self in (future) time (Dalla Barba, 2001; Arzy et al., 2009; Kwan et al., 2013; Craver et al., 2014), and their problems in imagining future experiences are likely to be fully explained by impaired event construction (McCormick et al., 2019). Indeed, a single-case study of an amnesic patient with bilateral medial temporal damage using the same paradigm we have used here found no impairment in self-projection (Arzy et al., 2009). Our findings make contact with previous evidence that vmPFC patients have more problems in constructing future compared to atemporal experiences (Bertossi et al., 2016a), an asymmetry not present in medial temporal lobe amnesia (Hassabis  et al., 2007), and that, when asked to enumerate personal future life events, vmPFC patients produce events less far ahead into the future than do brain-damaged controls, suggestive of a short future time perspective (Fellows  and Farah, 2005). Also, vmPFC patients (but, again, not medial temporal lobe amnesiacs; Kwan et al., 2013) show increased delay discounting (Sellitto et al., 2010; Peters and D’Esposito, 2016), in line with the view that they fail to conceive the future, even in purely semantic, abstract terms, hence devalue future rewards.

Why would vmPFC be necessary for future-oriented self-projection? It has been shown that self-projection to one’s personal past/future typically originates from the activation of high-level knowledge structures, such as schematic representations of life time periods and the self (e.g. when I graduated and when I will have a child), to then possibly converge on specific events of one’s personal timeline (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; D’Argembeau and Mathy, 2011; D’Argembeau, 2020). Imagining the future relies more on schema-based knowledge than remembering the past, because we have no direct experience of future events (Anderson and Dewhurst, 2009; Berntsen and Bohr, 2010; Rubin, 2014). Knowledge about personal goals (e.g. I want to become a researcher) is especially effective in driving the construction of ones’ personal future (D’Argembeau and Mathy, 2011). The vmPFC is critical for appropriate processing of schema-related information (Burgess and Shallice, 1996; Ghosh et al., 2014), including knowledge about the self (Philippi et al., 2012; Verfaellie et al., 2019) and personal goals (D’Argembeau et al., 2010). We argue, therefore, that vmPFC patients failed to project the self to the future due to an inability in activating schematic knowledge critical to construct a mental representation of their personal future, so as to assume the perspective of their future self. This interpretation aligns with current views of the dynamics of MTT, according to which vmPFC initiates the activation of high-order autobiographical knowledge (e.g. lifetime periods and self schema), from which the hippocampus may then access (McCormick et al., 2019; D’Argembeau, 2020; Dafni-Merom and Arzy, 2020; see also Barry et al., 2019) or process (Schurr et al., 2018) specific experiences.

Orthogonal to their impairment in future self-projection, vmPFC patients additionally showed a deficit in self-referencing future events, that is, in recognizing events lying ahead in the future with respect to their assumed location in subjective time (whether past, present or future), which were misclassified more often than relative-past events. Healthy as well as brain-damaged controls showed a comparable performance in recognizing relative-future and relative-past events, hence the selective deficit evinced by vmPFC patients with relative-future events is unlikely to merely reflect task difficulty. Note, also, that vmPFC patients’ false recognition of future events also emerged in the past self-location condition, that is, when dealing with events that were not actually future (with respect to the present time), and therefore it does not simply denote a problem in distinguishing familiar from novel events, or factual from potential, hypothetical events (see also Anelli et al., 2018).

One is tempted to interpret vmPFC patients’ deficit as reflecting disordered chronology. The vmPFC, together with the basal forebrain, is indeed thought to support the correct assignment of memories to their correct place in time (Moscovitch, 1995; Tranel and Jones, 2006), and confabulation, a consequence of vmPFC damage, consists of memories that are often false in temporal context (Schnider, 2003; Gilboa et al., 2006; Bertossi et al., 2016b). Moreover, the vmPFC is engaged while individuals orient themselves in time (Peer et al., 2015), and determining the temporal distance between the self and an event engages the prefrontal cortex (Gauthier et al., 2019). Yet impaired chronology is again too general an interpretation for vmPFC patients’ performance in this task, as it would have led to an equal distribution of wrong attributions of relative-future events to the past and of relative-past events to the future, while vmPFC patients only showed an increased tendency to falsely recognize relative-future events as past.

According to one prominent view, the timing of one’s memories is not indicated by stable ‘time tags’ marking each of them in succession (Friedman, 1993), but dynamically reconstructed by strategic processes depending on retrieval goals (Burgess and Shallice, 1996). We propose that vmPFC patients’ false recognition of relative-future events reveals a specific deficit in monitoring novelty signals originating from events that, with respect to the current self-position in time, are yet to happen, which felt wrongly familiar. This deficit is reminiscent of other instances of false recognition in vmPFC patients. For example, in recognition memory tasks, vmPFC patients falsely recognize distractors that were targets in previous runs of the experiment (Schnider, 2003), or with which they had pre-experimental experience (Ciaramelli and Ghetti, 2007), as if they failed to appreciate that, in the context of the current run or experiment, they were novel. More generally, vmPFC patients tend to assimilate irrelevant information into activated schemata (Ghosh et al., 2014). One could argue, therefore, that vmPFC patients failed at using a schema of the current reality to identify (future) events that mismatched the schema because they were not previously experienced. This deficit had an impact on recognition of personal as well as general relative-future events, consistent with previous evidence of false recognition in both domains following vmPFC damage (Schnider, 2003; Gilboa et al., 2006; Ciaramelli and Ghetti, 2007), in fact depriving vmPFC patients fully of a view of the future.

We end by noting some limitations and future directions of our work. The sample size is small, and therefore some effects may have gone undetected due to limited statistical power. Future studies involving more vmPFC patients will help confirm the selective deficit we observed in future MTT and link it to specific vmPFC subregions. Also, our results show that, even though control patients did not show a future MTT impairment at the group level, a few of them did, suggesting that other (e.g. temporo-parietal) regions may be causally linked to future self-projection and self-reference. Again, testing this hypothesis will require recruiting larger samples of patients, and with more homogeneous lesion sites than our control patient group. Finally, the task we used can detect whether patients place events correctly in the (relative) past and future, but not whether they would put the events in the correct chronological order with respect to one another within the past or the future. Thus, a future direction of the study is to test whether the disadvantage observed in vmPFC patients in processing future events is limited to the recognition of events, or it would extend to their ordering.

In summary, we have shown that vmPFC patients have a multifaceted impairment of future MTT, being unable to project themselves to the future, and to anticipate the events that await them in the future, pointing to a prominent role of vmPFC in future-oriented cognition. Future self-projection and self-reference have a profound impact on future-oriented choice: taking the perspective of one’s future self reduces discounting of future rewards (Peters and Büchel, 2010), and the anticipation of future events is associated with goal-directed behavior and motivation (Boyer, 2008). Thus, the future-oriented MTT deficit we detected in vmPFC patients is likely to play a role in their steep delay discounting (Sellitto et al., 2010), poor problem-solving (Peters et al., 2017) and apathy (Fellows and Farah, 2005). If so, cueing future thinking (Peters and Büchel, 2010), or the deployment of spatial attention toward future locations of the mental timeline (Anelli et al., 2016b), may be effective in pushing patients’ temporal horizon ahead into the future, reducing their shortsightedness.

Temporal Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Letter Writing with Future Self Can Mitigate Negative Affect

Chishima, Yuta, I-Ting H. Liu, and Anne E. Wilson. 2021. “Temporal Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Letter Writing with Future Self Can Mitigate Negative Affect.” PsyArXiv. January 2. doi:10.31234/osf.io/2yw67

Abstract: Novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is spreading across the world, threatening not only physical health but also psychological well-being. We reasoned that a broadened temporal perspective may attenuate current mental distress and tested a letter-writing manipulation designed to connect people to their post-COVID-19 future selves. Participants were randomly assigned to either send a letter to their future self (letter-to-future), send a letter to present self from the perspective of future self (letter-from-future), or a control condition. Participants in both letter-writing conditions showed immediate decrease in negative affect and increase in positive affect relative to the control condition. These effects were mediated by temporal distancing from the current situation. These findings suggest that taking a broader temporal perspective can be achieved by letter-writing with a future self and may offer an effective means of regulating negative affect in a stressful present time such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seeing others yawn selectively enhances vigilance: An eye-tracking study of snake detection

Seeing others yawn selectively enhances vigilance: an eye-tracking study of snake detection. Andrew C. Gallup & Kaitlyn Meyers. Animal Cognition, Jan 1 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-020-01462-4

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1345601521480855552

Abstract: While the origin of yawning appears to be physiologic, yawns may also hold a derived communicative function in social species. In particular, the arousal reduction hypothesis states that yawning signals to others that the actor is experiencing a down regulation of arousal and vigilance. If true, seeing another individual yawn might enhance the vigilance of observers to compensate for the reduced mental processing of the yawner. This was tested in humans by assessing how exposure to yawning stimuli alters performance on visual search tasks for detecting snakes (a threatening stimulus) and frogs (a neutral stimulus). In a repeated-measures design, 38 participants completed these tasks separately after viewing yawning and control videos. Eye-tracking was used to measure detection latency and distractor fixation frequency. Replicating previous evolutionary-based research, snakes were detected more rapidly than frogs across trials. Moreover, consistent with the view that yawning holds a distinct signaling function, there were significant interactions for both detection latency and distractor fixation frequency showing that vigilance was selectively enhanced following exposure to yawns. That is, after viewing videos of other people yawning, participants detected snakes more rapidly and were less likely to fixate on distractor frogs during trials. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for a social function to yawning in any species, and imply the presence of a previously unidentified psychological adaptation for preserving group vigilance.

Two forms of victimhood (an egocentric one entailing only perceptions of one’s own victimhood, & one focused on blaming “the system”) are confined to neither “actual” victims nor those partisans on the losing side of elections

‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics. Miles T. Armaly & Adam M. Enders. Political Behavior, Jan 2 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-020-09662-x

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1345596994706935810

Abstract: Despite growing recognition among journalists and political pundits, the concept of victimhood has been largely ignored in empirical social science research. In this article, we develop a theory about, and use unique nationally-representative survey data to estimate, two manifestations of victimhood: an egocentric one entailing only perceptions of one’s own victimhood, and one focused on blaming “the system.” We find that these manifestations of victimhood cut across partisan, ideological, and sociodemographic lines, suggesting that feelings of victimhood are confined to neither “actual” victims nor those partisans on the losing side of elections. Moreover, both manifestations of victimhood, while related to candidate support and various racial attitudes, prove to be distinct from related psychological constructs, such as (collective) narcissism, system justification, and relative deprivation. Finally, an experiment based on candidate rhetoric demonstrates that some political messaging can make supporters feel like victims, which has consequences for subsequent attitudes and behavior.

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Perceiving oneself to be a victim is ubiquitous in American politics. As Horwitz (2018) remarks, “The victim has become among the most important identity positions in American politics” (553). This is no accident. Victimhood is a central theme of modern political messaging. For instance, a Republican strategist observed, “At a Trump rally, central to the show is the idea of shared victimization...Trump revels in it, has consistently portrayed himself as a victim of the media and of his political opponents...” (in Rucker 2019). However, if you consider Trump’s demographic characteristics (white and male) and his successes (in terms of wealth and being president), he is not a victim by any serious societal standard. While Trump’s supporters may, to varying degrees, be victims of certain social and political circumstances, the rallies at which the president is reveling in their shared victimhood are direct consequences of at least their recent political successes.

This narrative of victimization transcends Trump and other political elites. Regular Americans have broadly been considered, or considered themselves to be, victims—of China (Erickson 2018), immigrants (Politi 2015), income inequality (Ye Hee Lee 2015), and much more. It is in the interest of political candidates to cue victimhood, to make their potential supporters feel as though they have been wronged and that she is the best candidate to rectify things. If would-be constituents can be made to feel victimized, regardless of any “truth” of the matter, it may also be possible to demonstrate the relevance of such feelings to immediate political choices, such as voting or issue positions.

We demonstrate that a general sense of victimhood is an important ingredient of various political attitudes, beliefs, and orientations. Specifically, we investigate two manifestations of perceived victimhood—egocentric (i.e., “I am the victim because I deserve more than I get”) and systemic (i.e., “I am the victim because the system is rigged against me”). Much of the existing research on victimhood operates in the critical tradition (e.g., Horwitz 2018), or the concept is measured only very narrowly.Footnote1 We opt for a more general, flexible approach that allows us to record feelings of abstract victimization. Using nationally-representative survey data, we estimate and validate measures of both expressions of perceived victimhood. We find that these measures of victimhood are largely unrelated to political predispositions or sociodemographic characteristics. They are, however, related to, but both conceptually and empirically distinct from, various views of government (e.g., perceived corruption, efficacy, trust), of society and the world (e.g., system justification, conspiratorial thinking, relative deprivation), and personality traits (e.g., agreeableness, emotional stability, collective and trait narcissism, and entitlement). These relationships (or the lack thereof) suggest that perceived victimhood is neither a mere reflection of “true” victim status or previously identified personality traits, nor a post hoc justification for maintaining the status quo. Instead, it cuts across the social and political hierarchy.

More specifically, systemic and egocentric victimhood are also related to 2016 vote choice and candidate support. Those exhibiting higher levels of egocentric victimhood are more likely to have voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. However, those who exhibit systemic victimhood are less supportive and were less likely to vote for Trump in 2016. Perceived victimhood also relates to attitudes about a host of racial policies and racial resentment, reflecting the belief that others benefit disproportionately or unjustly at the victim’s expense. Finally, using an experiment with two different types of treatments, we find that both manifestations of victimhood are manipulable, including by elite messages. The sum of our evidence indicates that feelings of victimhood exist in the mass public, can be mobilized by political elites, and can potentially influence support for specific policies and candidates.