Aphantasia: We show that this condition, but not the general population, is associated with a flat-line physiological response (skin conductance levels) to reading and imagining frightening stories

The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia. Marcus Wicken, Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearson. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, March 10 2021. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1370012191680827395

Abstract: One proposed function of imagery is to make thoughts more emotionally evocative through sensory simulation, which can be helpful both in planning for future events and in remembering the past, but also a hindrance when thoughts become overwhelming and maladaptive, such as in anxiety disorders. Here, we report a novel test of this theory using a special population with no visual imagery: aphantasia. After using multi-method verification of aphantasia, we show that this condition, but not the general population, is associated with a flat-line physiological response (skin conductance levels) to reading and imagining frightening stories. Importantly, we show in a second experiment that this difference in physiological responses to fear-inducing stimuli is not found when perceptually viewing fearful images. These data demonstrate that the aphantasic individuals' lack of a physiological response when imaging scenarios is likely to be driven by their inability to visualize and is not due to a general emotional or physiological dampening. This work provides evidence that a lack of visual imagery results in a dampened emotional response when reading fearful scenarios, providing evidence for the emotional amplification theory of visual imagery.

We judge others to be more deserving of the liar label than one’s self; and we think that the others lie based on their disposition

You Liar! Attributions of Lying. Drew A. Curtis. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, March 11, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X21999692

Rold Degen's take: The others lie simply because they are liars, but we always have a good reason for our lies

Abstract: Language is vastly important in shaping cognitions. The word “liar” is used in a variety of social contexts and deception literature, eliciting numerous images, and is rarely the object of research. Two studies explored how people think of the social cognitive label of “liar.” In Study 1, the actor-observer difference in the liar attribution was examined, in how people view their own lying compared to others’ lies. Additionally, attitudes and acceptability of self and others’ lies were investigated. In Study 2, the liar attribution was examined across various types of lies. Results indicated that people judge others to be more deserving of the liar label than one’s self and others lie based on their disposition. Additionally, people held more negative attitudes toward others who lie but were more accepting of others who lie.

Keywords: liar, lying, attribution, actor-observer difference, attitudes, acceptability

Analysis of 10 countries: Men behaved more prosocially than women, transferring more to an anonymous partner in a prisoner’s dilemma game; this difference in behavior is bigger in more gender egalitarian countries

Dorrough, A. R., & Glöckner, A. (2020). Sex differences concerning prosocial behavior in social dilemmas are (partially) mediated by risk preferences but not social preferences: An in-depth analysis across 10 countries. Social Psychology, Mar 2021. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000434

Abstract: Previous results on the prosociality of men and women in social dilemmas are mixed. Studies find more prosocial behavior for men and women; and a meta-analysis (Balliet et al., 2011) reports an overall null effect. Including samples (N = 1,903) from 10 countries that vary concerning gender inequality (e.g., China, Colombia, Sweden), we investigated sex differences in social dilemmas and drivers of these potential differences. We found that men behaved more prosocially, in that they transferred more of their endowment to their interaction partner. This sex difference was descriptively observed for all countries and was partially mediated by differences in risk but not social preferences. Gender inequality did not predict the difference in magnitude of sex differences between countries. 

From 2020... Personality matters for student behavior: Higher conscientiousness and agreeableness predict less absenteeism, cheating, misuse of resources, lack of effort, rule-breaking, etc.

Cuadrado D, Salgado JF, Moscoso S (2020) Individual differences and counterproductive academic behaviors in high school. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0238892. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238892

Abstract: Counterproductive academic behaviors (CAB) is a problem that has plagued academic institutions for centuries. However, research has mostly been focused on higher learning institutes in North America. For this reason, literature on CAB must be expanded to other geographical areas and academic levels. The present research analyses the prevalence and correlates of CAB in a sample of Spanish high school students. The results indicate that CAB is a common phenomenon, cheating and low effort behaviors being the most prevalent forms. Correlational analyses revealed that conscientiousness (ρ = -.55, p < .01), emotional stability (ρ = .28, p < .01), and agreeableness (ρ = -.26, p < .05) are predictors of CAB. Multiple regression analyses showed that conscientiousness is the dimension exerting the strongest impact on CAB (β = -.64, p < .01), followed by agreeableness, and emotional stability. These three dimensions accounted for 51% of CAB variance. Last, implications for theory and practice are described.

Discussion

This study has contributed to expand the knowledge on CAB in a context where primary research is severely lacking: the high school level of a country outside of the United States and Canada. The main objectives of this research were: (1) to examine the level of prevalence of overall CAB as well as its facets in this context; (2) to study the relationship of the Big Five model of personality and GMA with CAB and its facets; and (3) to develop an explicative model that summarizes the predictive effects of these individual differences on CAB.

Regarding the first goal, the results demonstrate that Spanish high school students often engage in counterproductive academic behaviors. The descriptive analyses of the CAB measure showed very high percentages of occurrence, indicating that most of the surveyed students have engaged in these negative practices during high school. One of the most worrisome aspects of the results is the fact that almost 83% and 82% of the sample acknowledges to having engaged in cheating and low effort behaviors at some point. Out of these rates, almost 17% and 21% of the sample confess to behaving in such ways always or almost always. These rates do not seem to differ much from empirical evidence gathered in the American context (described in the introduction section), nor are they very different from the occurrence rates found at other educational levels across the globe. For instance, the study by Teixeira and Rocha [52] reported on the percentage of college students engaging on deviant behaviors during examinations in different countries. Their findings yielded percentages as high as 83% in Brazil (N = 100), 71.6% in Austria (N = 519), 79.6% in Turkey (N = 528), or 84.6% in Slovenia (N = 321). Trost [53] found that 81% of 322 university students in Sweden had lied about a significant matter to get special treatment in the correction of their exams. Cuadrado, Salgado, and Moscoso [54] also report very similar results using a sample of 379 Spanish college students. The percentages of the students engaging in CAB at least once in college were 76.5%, 23.5%, 77.9%, 43.5%, and 76.2% for cheating, misuse of resources, absenteeism, breach of rules, and low effort behaviors, respectively.

In essence, the descriptive analyses indicated once again that CAB is a common phenomenon among high school students, with similar or even higher rates than those published in other countries and educational stages.

The next set of findings concerns the CAB correlates. Consistent with previous results, conscientiousness was the personality dimension most strongly linked to overall CAB and, especially, to three out of the five CAB facets (cheating, absenteeism, and low effort). Agreeableness was also a valid predictor of overall CAB and the best predictor of misuse of resources and breach of rules. Both dimensions appeared to be inversely linked to academic counterproductivity and yielded true effect sizes higher in magnitude than those reported in previous meta-analysis on this topic [see 17, 18]. For instance, there were .31 and .13 units of correlation of difference for conscientiousness and agreeableness, respectively, between the results found in the current research and the effect sizes published by Cuadrado et al. [17] using samples of high school students. This further backs up the hypothesis that even in high school, the more a student scores in conscientiousness and agreeableness, the less likely they are to engage in CAB.

In line with the findings by Cuadrado et al. [17] and supporting the research hypothesis, extraversion appeared as a direct and valid predictor of cheating behaviors. As it happened with conscientiousness and agreeableness, the true validity found in the current research was considerably larger (ρ = .19 vs. ρ = .43).

There were unexpected results referring to emotional stability. Neither meta-analyses by Giluk and Postlethwaite [18] nor by Credé et al. [16] found a link between this dimension and negative academic behaviors. In the meta-analysis of Cuadrado et al. [17] emotional stability appeared as a valid predictor of overall CAB at the high school level, however, the magnitude of the effect size was very low (ρ = .06). In the current research it seems that the most emotionally stable individuals are more prone to commit CAB than their unstable counterparts, especially regarding low effort behaviors, misuse of resources, and absenteeism. A possible explanation supporting this positive relationship might be the fact that emotional stable individuals tend to score high in traits such as tranquility, calmness, or imperturbability [20–23]. A higher score in these characteristics could make these individuals less prone to show a sense of urgency, to be more carefree, and hence, to have less qualms about not attending classes, not completing their classwork on time, not striving academically, or using academic supplies and equipment in an improper manner.

Regarding GMA, the results did not emerge as expected. GMA appeared as a weak predictor of overall CAB and its facets. In no case the results were significant. Additionally, the directionality was not as expected; except for the cheating facet, the validity coefficients were positive. These results are different to previous findings by Cuadrado et al. [17], Paulhus and Dubois [19], and Credé et al. [16]. Some possible explanations of these differences could be the sampling error effect or the existence of moderating variables that might be affecting the results. Consequently, more primary research on this relationship is needed.

The last goal of this research was to create an explicative model of CAB by incorporating the most powerful predictors found at the correlational level. The estimated model showed that the variables most highly linked to CAB (conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability) explain more than half of the CAB variance. Conscientiousness was the variable with the highest predictive weight, which is also consistent with previous findings [see 54].

Suggestions for practitioners and future research

The empirical findings of the current research are important for applied purposes in the context of secondary education. First, academic administrators, faculty, and parents must be made aware of the fact that CAB is not an isolated problem affecting only a few specific academic institutions at certain academic levels in +a limited number of countries. Although research has been mostly performed in the higher education system of North America, empirical evidence indicates that it is a widespread phenomenon across the world that can be found in the lowest to the highest levels of education. The present study showed that levels of occurrence among the students of a Spanish high school are very high. For this reason, applied measures must be designed and taken into practice. Some of these deterrent measures are related to the variables examined in this study. It was shown that emotional stability, agreeableness, and especially conscientiousness predict CAB and its facets. The use of personality measures in secondary education cannot be conceived in the same way as in higher education or occupational contexts, where these instruments can be used to make high-stakes decisions (e.g., to determine access to a masters course, to a PhD program, or to an occupational position). However, knowing the personality profiles of the students, especially in small-sized classrooms, may be of some utility in high schools. The use of personality instruments could help identify those students with certain personality characteristics that, potentially, make them more likely to engage in CAB and, consequently, may need more personalized attention in the performance of certain academic activities like tests or examinations. This would reduce their chances of engaging in prohibited conducts and help increase the fairness of assessments by preventing dishonest students from getting a higher grade than they deserve.

Besides the use of personality measures as a preventive initiative, it has become more necessary than ever to promote additional integrity measures in high schools. As Bertram-Gallant and Drinan [55] state, systematic interventions performed by administrators, faculty, and students are needed to establish a climate of academic integrity. All the involved actors, especially students, must be aware of behaviors that qualify as CAB, the consequences of engaging in CAB, and the benefits of behaving in an honest manner. These actions may potentially reduce the prevalence of CAB.

The next suggestion refers to the response format of the personality measures. In the current study, a single-stimulus instrument was used to assess the Big Five dimensions of personality. This type of measures is widely used in the W/O psychology and the educational psychology field. However, they show substantial correlation with social desirability and impression management in students [56]. It is known that forced-choice inventories, especially quasi-ipsative tests, are a preferable option when it comes to control faking or social desirability [57–61]. Furthermore, quasi-ipsative personality inventories have shown a similar or a better predictive validity than personality tests with other formats in the prediction of important criteria in both occupational and educational contexts [62–64]. In the study of CAB, only Cuadrado et al. [50] have analyzed this question using a quasi-ipsative questionnaire for higher education students. Hence, it is necessary to examine whether predictive validity of the Big Five personality model is similar or higher at the high school level by using quasi-ipsative personality measures.

In regard to the social desirability concern, meta-analytical evidence indicates that students scoring higher in this variable also tend to underreport their engagement in cheating behaviors [41]. Despite the fact that percentages of engagement in CAB found in the current research were very high, results could be even higher if they were controlled for a measure of social desirability. Researchers should address this question at the high school level.

We also suggest making further efforts in the study of the intelligence-CAB relationship. Given that neither the magnitude nor the directionality of the results were the expected, we recommend researchers to study more in depth the link between these variables in the Spanish secondary education context.

It is also recommended to expand the study of CAB to other practices that have not been contemplated in the current research. Although we have examined a wide range of CAB behaviors, there are some other facets that need to be further studied. One example is plagiarism of written projects defined as “submitting another person’s work as an original work or a project done by oneself but previously submitted in the past, as well as any other behavior that consists of the dishonest alteration of others’ work” [17]. Levels of occurrence of such behavior are believed to have increased in recent years due to technological advances and the expanded use of the Internet in multiple phases of the students’ academic life. Thus, it would be interesting to replicate the current study and analyze plagiarism behaviors.

Additionally, we suggest testing some possible moderating variables that could have affected our results. For instance, the high schools that participated in this research were without exception public institutions. It could be interesting to replicate this research in private schools. Other contextual variables as well as individual differences other than personality and intelligence should be also addressed in future research.

Limitations of the study

It is important to consider the limitations of this study. First, the time restrictions in the data collection made it impossible to administer all the instruments to a part of the sample. As a direct consequence, the sample size for the personality measure was smaller than the sample size obtained for the GMA and CAB measures. It is known that small samples increase sampling error, causing a random variation of the observed validity from the true validity [42]. Also, because the sampling error is unsystematic, it cannot be corrected in a single correlation and there is no possibility to control its effects unless the validity coefficients are integrated in a meta-analysis, hindering the replicability of the results as well.

A second potential limitation is that the questionnaires were not anonymous. Although the rates of engagement in counterproductivity were very high, it is possible that anonymity would yield even higher prevalence levels, especially in those dimensions where rates were lower (e.g., misuse of resources).

Having tried a classic psychedelic at least once in life had significantly higher odds of greater self-reported overall health & significantly lower odds of being overweight or obese vs. having a normal weight

Associations between lifetime classic psychedelic use and markers of physical health. Otto Simonsson, James D Sexton, Peter S Hendricks. Journal of Psychopharmacology, March 9, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881121996863

Abstract

Background: In recent years, there has been significant research on the mental health effects of classic psychedelic use, but there is very little evidence on how classic psychedelics might influence physical health.

Aims: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the associations between lifetime classic psychedelic use and markers of physical health.

Methods: Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2015-2018) with 171,766 (unweighted) adults aged 18 or above in the United States, the current study examined the associations between lifetime classic psychedelic use and three markers of physical health (self-reported overall health, body mass index, and heart condition and/or cancer in the past 12 months) while controlling for a range of covariates.

Results: Respondents who reported having tried a classic psychedelic at least once in their lifetime had significantly higher odds of greater self-reported overall health and significantly lower odds of being overweight or obese versus having a normal weight. The association between lifetime classic psychedelic use and having a heart condition and/or cancer in the past 12 months approached conventional levels of significance, with lower odds of having a heart condition and/or cancer in the past 12 months for respondents who had tried a classic psychedelic at least once.

Conclusion: The results of the present study suggest that classic psychedelics may be beneficial to physical health. Future research should investigate the causal effects of classic psychedelics on physical health and evaluate possible mechanisms.

Keywords: Classic psychedelics, psilocybin, LSD, health, body mass index, cancer, heart disease

Discussion

The present study investigated the association between lifetime classic psychedelic use and three markers of physical health (self-reported overall health, BMI, and heart condition and/or cancer in the past 12 months). Findings show that respondents who reported having ever used a classic psychedelic had significantly higher odds of greater self-reported overall health and significantly lower odds of being overweight or obese as compared to having a normal weight. The association between lifetime classic psychedelic use and having a heart condition and/or cancer in the past 12 months approached conventional levels of significance, with lower odds of having a heart condition and/or cancer in the past 12 months for respondents who had tried a classic psychedelic at least once. Taken together, these results suggest that classic psychedelics may have long-term beneficial effects beyond improved mental health.

While the acute transcendent experience occasioned by classic psychedelics may presumably induce long-term changes in health behaviour that contribute to better physical health, it is plausible that there are other key mechanisms through which classic psychedelics could influence physical health, including improvements on various indices of mental health beyond the simple absence of psychological distress (e.g. increased prosociality, trait mindfulness and purpose in life; Griffiths et al., 2018; Murphy-Beiner and Soar, 2020), many of which are well-known risk factors for physical maladies (Chaddha et al., 2016; Germann, 2020; Hernandez et al., 2018); immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory effects of relevance to physical health (Flanagan and Nichols, 2018; Frecska et al., 2013, 2016; Szabo, 2015, 2019; Szabo et al., 2014; Thompson and Szabo, 2020; Tourino et al., 2013; Winkelman and Sessa, 2019); and high affinity to receptor subtypes (e.g. serotonin 2A receptors) that are implicated in the pathophysiology of different physical disorders (Nichols, 2009; Thompson and Szabo, 2020). Future research is needed to better understand potential causal pathways of classic psychedelics on physical health.

There are several limitations with the present study that need serious consideration before the results are interpreted. First, the cross-sectional design of the study limits causal inference. The analyses controlled for multiple sources of potential confounding, but the associations might have been obscured by response bias or latent variables that were not controlled for (e.g. a common factor predisposing one to classic psychedelic use may also predispose one to healthy lifestyle behaviours including physical activity). Second, the dataset did not contain information on frequency of classic psychedelic use, dose used or context of use. The present study could therefore not evaluate frequency, dose or context-specific relationships between classic psychedelic use and physical health markers. Third, it is also not possible to rule out that classic psychedelic use might have caused harm on the individual level, even if it did not obfuscate the population-level associations. Fourth, given the potential importance of immunomodulatory and inflammatory factors in the current study, it would have been sensible to also control for regular anti-inflammatory drug (e.g. nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)) use, but assessment of this behaviour was not included in the NSDUH. Fifth, BMI has been widely used as a screening tool for overweight or obesity, but it does not account for details such as fat distribution, which limits its utility as a marker of physical health (Prentice and Jebb, 2001). Finally, it is noted that some associations of lifetime classic psychedelic use were somewhat modest in size (e.g. heart condition and/or cancer in the past year). However, even modest effects can have substantial impacts at the population level. For instance, considering approximately 1.2 million people die from heart disease or cancer every year in the United States alone (Heron, 2019), even a small decrease (e.g. 11%) in the prevalence of these illnesses could translate to thousands of lives saved annually.

The Difficulty of Listening to Talkers With Masks: Meta-cognitive monitoring (the ability to adapt self-judgments to actual performance) worsens

Unmasking the Difficulty of Listening to Talkers With Masks: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Elena Giovanelli et al. i-Perception, March 10, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669521998393

Abstract: Interactions with talkers wearing face masks have become part of our daily routine since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an on-line experiment resembling a video conference, we examined the impact of face masks on speech comprehension. Typical-hearing listeners performed a speech-in-noise task while seeing talkers with visible lips, talkers wearing a surgical mask, or just the name of the talker displayed on screen. The target voice was masked by concurrent distracting talkers. We measured performance, confidence and listening effort scores, as well as meta-cognitive monitoring (the ability to adapt self-judgments to actual performance). Hiding the talkers behind a screen or concealing their lips via a face mask led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort. Moreover, meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker. These findings have implications on everyday communication for typical-hearing individuals and for hearing-impaired populations.

Keywords: speech processing, multisensory, speech in noise, facial masks, COVID-19

Discussion

In the present work, we mimicked a real multitalker video call to measure the impact of different visual conditions on speech comprehension in typical hearing participants. Results showed that hiding the talkers behind a black screen or concealing their lips via a face mask led to lower performance and lower listening confidence scores as well as increased listening effort. These differences between listening conditions suggest that the actual audio-visual benefit coming from vision relies on lip reading and demonstrate the impact of face masks on speech comprehension. Understanding a talker wearing a face mask in noise was, in our study, comparable to not seeing him or her at all. Importantly, these findings emerged in a context in which we disentangled the impact of visual information related to wearing a mask from the voice distortions generated by the mask. In this way, our results can be interpreted as the consequences of altering or removing visual information from lip movements in speech processing.

Our visual manipulation also impacted on the ability to successfully judge one’s own cognitive processes while engaged in a task, namely, meta-cognitive monitoring. Face masks reduced meta-cognitive monitoring abilities. In this condition, participants’ listening confidence about their performance was less consistent with their objective performance (e.g., they could be confident about their performance, when in fact their speech comprehension was poor, or vice versa). This result is in line with previous work concerning the effect of face masks on confidence in reading emotions (Carbon, 2020), which found lower confidence and accuracy scores in recognizing expressions displayed by faces wearing surgical masks. This result supports the idea that hiding the lower part of a face undermines the efficacy of a conversation not only linguistically but also from a nonverbal point of view. While this result merits further investigation, it may suggest that when interacting with people wearing a mask, we not only feel less confident about our listening experience overall, but we are also less capable of monitoring whether we understood the message correctly or not. In addition, the confusion they generate on emotional reading of face expressions could further contribute to lowering the efficacy of our everyday life communications, preventing us from reconstructing the emotional tone of a conversation, which could partially contribute to better speech comprehension. This novel result is particularly interesting because compensatory strategies (e.g., asking our conversational partner to speak slower or in a louder voice) are typically triggered by adequate meta-cognitive monitoring of the success of the communication exchange (Boldt & Gilbert, 2019).

In June 2020, the World Health Organization warned about the potential risks and harms of face masks on daily communications. As evidenced by this study, when a talker wears a face mask the listening effort increases, while performance and confidence in what we listen decrease (see also Coniam, 2005; Llamas et al., 2009; Saunders et al., 2020). This could potentially result in stress and misunderstandings during communications, and even lead to risky behaviors, such as pulling down face masks or reducing social distancing while trying to understand each other better. In this study, we intentionally focused on a population of young adults, native speakers of Italian (the language used in the experiment), who reported no hearing difficulties. This is because we reasoned that any effect observed in this sample could only be exacerbated in populations that experience difficulties with language and communication. These populations include hearing children developing their L1, for whom the observation of adults’ mouths can play a key role in an educational context (Spitzer, 2020); hearing children and adults learning a new language (L2); adults and aging people with normal hearing but sensitive to noisy contexts (Tremblay et al., 2015); and obviously all the populations with hearing loss or profound deafness. We believe it is a social priority to extend research on the effects of face masks on communication as well as other aspects of interpersonal perception (such as emotional processing or personal identity identification: Carbon, 2020) to all these populations.

The question arises them of how we can combine safe behavior and effective communication. One approach is to consider the introduction of transparent masks on a large scale. At the moment, they are only used in few medical settings (e.g., in the United Kingdom; Action on Hearing Loss, 2020), but they are gaining increasing attention among the hearing-impaired community (Taylor-Coleman, 2020). Even though this solution may seem the best way to reinstate lip reading into verbal communication, the current generation of transparent masks have several limitations. On the one hand, their materials impact greatly on the high frequencies of the human voice (Corey et al., 2020) affecting consonant perception (Divenyi et al., 2005; Roth et al., 2011). On the other hand, transparent masks are difficult to find because there is only a limited number of producers (Chodosh et al., 2020). Finally, in many countries, these devices are not approved by health authorities.

To conclude, our findings provide a clear example of the audio-visual nature of speech processing, and they emphasize the perceptual and meta-cognitive limitations that result from occluding the face of our conversational partner. From the methodological point of view, our study represents a successful attempt to investigate audio-visual communication using an on-line task and simulating an ordinary listening context, such as the video call with a limited number of talkers. Clearly, when conducting hearing research online, a number of criteria need to be relaxed. It would be important to replicate and extend these observations running similar experimental protocols in a more controlled laboratory context in which individual hearing thresholds are also measured (unlike here). Moreover, it would also be important to increase the number of trials per participant (that said, our linear mixed-effect model approach to the analysis implies that we worked on a dataset of 1728 measures overall). Future experiments should also consider using audio tracks recorded both with and without masks, in order to objectively estimate the actual transmission loss produced by the masks and directly compare the effects of those distortions on speech comprehension. It is clear that such a comparison should necessarily exploit professional audio tools and accurate measures, only obtainable in a laboratory context. Nonetheless, our results agree with a vast literature on the multisensory contributions to speech perception and already provide support to recent petitions that pressured the main video conferencing platforms to offer real-time speech-to-text captioning (Chodosh et al., 2020). Most importantly, our findings indicate that audio-visual communication should be pursued even in the case of the health constraints imposed by a world pandemic. This is necessary for everyone, but especially for those individuals for whom face masks could become a severe obstacle to social inclusion.

Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson

Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson (Sexual Personae, Yale Univ. Press, 1990, p 638-9)

Changed formatting, changed continuity, split whenever & wherever I liked:

• Dickinson’s nature has two faces, savage and serene.
• heaven is stasis, a permafrost of nonbeing.
• The bride poems are clever hoaxes that turn princesses into pumpkins, mere chunks of debris.
• Corpses drop into the grave with a thud. A frequent finale is a slow fade, the voice fumbling for words, as consciousness gutters out.
• The sadomasochistic poems are the tectonic, the slow brute contortions of the frigid mineral world. It is botany versus geology, spring destroyed by winter. 
•  Speaking of the widespread “horror of reptiles,” G. Wilson Knight claims we would prefer death by tiger to death by boa constrictor or octopus: “From such cold life we have risen, and the evolutionary thrust has a corresponding backward disgust. … And since we do not know what to make of tentacles mindlessly groping and distrust the clammy sea-moistures of the body, we fear especially our sex-organs with multiform inhibitions, seeing in them shameful serpentine and salty relations. And yet this fear is one with a sort of fascination."

 

Remembering everyday events typically takes less time than the actual duration of the retrieved episodes, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the temporal compression of events in episodic memory

Slices of the past: how events are temporally compressed in episodic memory. Arnaud D’Argembeau, Olivier Jeunehomme & David Stawarczyk. Memory, Mar 9 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2021.1896737

Rolf Degen's take: Similar to the "life review" near death, where the whole life flashes before the inner eye at a time-lapse pace, our everyday memories also contain a compressed version of events, with a "lossy compression" mode, like MP3

Abstract: Remembering everyday events typically takes less time than the actual duration of the retrieved episodes, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the temporal compression of events in episodic memory. Here, we review recent studies that have shed light on how this compression mechanism operates. The evidence suggests that the continuous flow of experience is not represented as such in episodic memory. Instead, the unfolding of events is recalled as a succession of moments or slices of past experience that includes temporal discontinuities—portions of past experience are omitted when remembering. Consequently, the rate of event compression is not constant but depends on the density of recalled segments of past experience.

KEYWORDS: Episodic memoryevent segmentationcompressiontimeautobiographical memory

Trying to make someone else happy leads to greater subjective well-being than trying to make oneself happy; trying to make others happy is more personally beneficial than when others try to make us happy

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself. Liudmila Titova & Kennon M. Sheldon. The Journal of Positive Psychology, Mar 8 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1897867

Abstract: Americans are guaranteed the right to ‘pursue happiness’ for themselves. But might they be better off if they pursued happiness for others? In five studies, we compared the two strategies, showing that, ironically, the second pursuit brings more personal happiness than the first. Retrospective study 1 (N = 123) and experimental studies 2 (N = 96) and 3 (N = 141) show that trying to make someone else happy leads to greater subjective well-being than trying to make oneself happy. In all three studies, relatedness need-satisfaction mediated the condition differences. Study 4 (N = 175) extended the findings by showing that trying to make others happy is more personally beneficial than when others try to make us happy. Study 5 (N = 198) found that feeding strangers’ parking meters produced the effect even though the participant did not interact with the targeted other.

KEYWORDS: Well-beinghappinessSDTrelatedness

Sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public, much more so than population-level results (57%), or 29% for the public’s bottom half

Kalmoe, N., & Johnson, M. (2021). Genes, Ideology, and Sophistication. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1-12, Mar 2021. doi:10.1017/XPS.2021.4

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1369339571469684738

Abstract: Twin studies function as natural experiments that reveal political ideology’s substantial genetic roots, but how does that comport with research showing a largely nonideological public? This study integrates two important literatures and tests whether political sophistication – itself heritable – provides an “enriched environment” for genetic predispositions to actualize in political attitudes. Estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public – much more so than population-level results (57%) – but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half. This heterogeneity is clearest in the Wilson–Patterson (W-P) index, with similar patterns for individual index items, an ideological constraint measure, and ideological identification. The results resolve tensions between two key fields by showing that political knowledge facilitates the expression of genetic predispositions in mass politics.

Discussion

We set out to test whether political knowledge provides an “enriched environment” for genetic expression in ideology, as research on mass belief systems suggests it might do. Our approach leveraged the natural experiment derived by comparing identical and fraternal twin pairs (same-sex, raised together), a method common in behavioral genetics. The results handsomely supported our expectations: High-knowledge twin pairs show extraordinarily high heritability across varieties of ideology, while the least knowledgeable half showed more meager genetic influence, with robust results across alternative specifications. We conclude that genetic predispositions toward ideological beliefs are highly contingent (though not wholly dependent) on political knowledge for their actualization, because knowledge provides ideal conditions for making those connections.

How well does this sample reflect the national population on traits linked to ideology and knowledge? Minnesota Twin Study respondents are older and more educated than the American public, on average, but they are similarly interested in politics and unconstrained in attitudes, like national samples (Arceneaux, Johnson, and Maes Reference Arceneaux, Johnson and Maes2012). Crucially, we found that sample knowledge levels are proportionate to general population surveys. That makes these tests a reasonable basis for inferring general population dynamics on ideological heritability and political sophistication.

More broadly, we recognize our tests as the first look and not the last word. In particular, the small Minnesota samples prevent more precise subsample tests, and public access is limited for data enabling further tests. We look forward to future studies replicating and extending our results.

Philip Converse (Reference Converse2000) always said that ideological analysis must account for huge variance in the public’s political knowledge – and that doing otherwise risked concealing more than it revealed. The tests here show the value of extending Converse’s exhortation to estimates of genetic influence in belief systems. Low-knowledge citizens may inherit genetic ideological predispositions like their high-knowledge peers, but those orientations are weak without the knowledge necessary to determine concrete attitudes and broader structures. Political knowledge is a key binding element for that political development. Merging two important and related but isolated fields in this way adds insight into the origins of ideology and the conditions for genetic influence in politics.

Assessed 3 a priori defined cohorts of sexual minorities (born 1956–1963, b. 1974–1981, & b. 1990–1997): Psychological distress & suicide behavior were not improved, were worse for the younger than the older cohorts

Meyer IH, Russell ST, Hammack PL, Frost DM, Wilson BDM (2021) Minority stress, distress, and suicide attempts in three cohorts of sexual minority adults: A U.S. probability sample. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0246827. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246827

Abstract: During the past 50 years, there have been marked improvement in the social and legal environment of sexual minorities in the United States. Minority stress theory predicts that health of sexual minorities is predicated on the social environment. As the social environment improves, exposure to stress would decline and health outcomes would improve. We assessed how stress, identity, connectedness with the LGBT community, and psychological distress and suicide behavior varied across three distinct cohorts of sexual minority people in the United States. Using a national probability sample recruited in 2016 and 2017, we assessed three a priori defined cohorts of sexual minorities we labeled the pride (born 1956–1963), visibility (born 1974–1981), and equality (born 1990–1997) cohorts. We found significant and impressive cohort differences in coming out milestones, with members of the younger cohort coming out much earlier than members of the two older cohorts. But we found no signs that the improved social environment attenuated their exposure to minority stressors—both distal stressors, such as violence and discrimination, and proximal stressors, such as internalized homophobia and expectations of rejection. Psychological distress and suicide behavior also were not improved, and indeed were worse for the younger than the older cohorts. These findings suggest that changes in the social environment had limited impact on stress processes and mental health for sexual minority people. They speak to the endurance of cultural ideologies such as homophobia and heterosexism and accompanying rejection of and violence toward sexual minorities.

Discussion

We started this project with the hypothesis that younger cohorts of sexual minority people would fare better than their older peers, who grew up in a more hostile social and legal environment than that of the younger cohorts. We found a strong cohort impact on the age of same-sex attraction milestones: Each successive cohort had earlier sexual identity milestone experiences of identifying as a sexual minority person, first sexual experience, and coming out. This likely indicates both greater comfort in coming out and shifting social norms around sexuality and youth. On one hand, these trends suggest that the younger cohorts reached developmental milestones related to their sexuality earlier than older cohorts, which is generally understood to be positive for adjustment. On the other hand, identifying and coming out as a sexual minority can confer risk, including greater exposure to minority stressors and victimization [52].

Indeed, contrary to our hypothesis, we found little evidence that social and legal improvements during the past 50 years in the status of sexual minority people have altered the experiences of sexual minority people in terms of exposure to minority stressors and resultant adverse mental health outcomes. Most tellingly, younger sexual minority people did not have less psychological distress or fewer suicide attempts than older sexual minority people.

Regarding minority stress, we found that members of the younger cohort did not experience less minority stress than members of older cohorts. This was consistent across both distal minority stressors, which measure direct exposure to external conditions, such as antigay violence, and proximal stressors, which measure how homophobia is internalized and learned. Members of the younger cohort did experience fewer of the victimization experiences we studied. But the measure of lifetime exposure to victimization presents a challenge. By their nature, lifetime measures would show higher prevalence among older people simply because they have more years in their lifetime and therefore, more opportunities for experiencing victimization. It this context, it is notable that the younger sexual minority people experienced more extreme victimization in their shorter lifespan. More than 1 in 3 (37%) experienced being hit, beaten, physically attacked, or sexually assaulted; almost half (46%) had someone threaten them with violence; and almost 3 in 4 (72%) were verbally insulted or abused. In terms of proximal minority stressors—internalized homophobia and felt stigma—we found members of the younger cohort recorded as high or higher levels of stress relative to their older counterparts.

Consistent with findings on the experience of minority stressors, we found high scores of psychological distress in the younger cohort. Although some research has suggested that this may be a general trend for younger adults to have higher levels of depressive symptoms, there appears to be a U-shaped relationship in the general population, with younger and older people exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms measured by the same scale we used [53]. We found a clear disadvantage to the younger cohort that seems unique to sexual minority people. Research has also shown that no significant bias in reporting patterns to this scale could explain the pattern of our results [54]. We also found that 30% of members of the younger cohort had attempted suicide. This is an alarming figure that was even higher than the high proportions of lifetime suicide attempts reported by the middle and older cohorts. By comparison, the proportion of young people aged 18–24 in the general population who have attempted suicide has been less than 4% [55].

Our findings are clearly inconsistent with the hypothesis. We started our hypothesis from a theoretical perspective that suggests that as social conditions improve, exposure to minority stressors and mental health problems would decrease. Our hypothesis was optimistic, but we were not blind to evidence to the contrary. As Russell and Fish [56] have shown, disparities by sexual identity have not been declining, but instead increasing. Most foretelling has been findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about exposure to stress among youth in high schools. Reports have consistently indicated that sexual minority youth experience significantly more stressful experiences than heterosexual youth and suffer significantly greater adverse health outcomes, including suicide ideation and attempts [57–60]. Our findings, thus, are consistent with studies that showed that minority stress and health disparities based on sexual orientation have not dissipated [56,61–64], despite the significant social and legal gains of the last decades.

Finally, contradicting writings about the declining significance of the LGBT community and sexual minority identity for the young cohort of sexual minority people, we found as high a sense of centrality of sexual minority identity and sense of connection with the LGBT community [35,36]. This is an important finding because it suggests that the LGBT community is still an important locale for connecting with LGBT identities, values that denounce homophobia, and role models for healthy sexual minority lives. As has been shown with older cohorts of sexual minorities, these are important resilience factors that allow sexual minority people to grow and overcome homophobia [2,65–69]. Connection with the LGBT community is also important for health information and the public health of LGBT communities, because resources serving sexual minorities have been organized under the LGBT banner for decades [70]. Studies have shown, for example, that gay and bisexual men who were connected to LGBT health resources were more likely than those who were not to use preexposure prophylaxis as HIV prevention [40]. However, this should not obscure the many challenges facing LGBT community organizers to overcome intracommunity rejection across race, social class, and other attributes [71].

There are many reasons why our hypothesis was not supported, and it is beyond our scope to explore these. Our approach was to examine cohort-wide patterns of change. In that, we may have missed the impact on specific segments of the populations. For example, we do not know whether White sexual minority people fared differently than ethnic minorities or how gender impacted the patterns we studied. This was, of course, purposeful because our theory was that the entire cohort would be affected by historical changes (even if not in equal ways). Also, it is plausible that social conditions, looked at as broadly as we did, do not reveal many other influences on stress exposure and mental health outcomes. For example, even if the social environment improved overall, it may have not improved in all microenvironments. Furthermore, it is possible that even as the social environment improves, the lived experience of sexual minority people continues to be challenging [72]. For example, a gay or lesbian teenager may be more accepted now than their older cohort peers had been when they were teenagers, but they were still a minority in their high school, deprived of opportunities for developing intimate relations. Also, a “developmental collision” may occur as sexual minority identity disclosure at younger ages coincides with normative developmental processes associated with adolescence [56]. Although the larger social context may have improved in such a way that emboldens younger generations to be out, the normative developmental context of adolescence remains one in which conformity is prized. Compulsions to conform to gender and sexual norms that privilege heterosexuality may continue to characterize adolescence in the United States [73]. Future analysis could determine whether some segments of the population benefited more than others from the improved social conditions and how improved social conditions impact the lived experience of sexual minority people.

Study limitations

Our study was limited in several important ways that are relevant to drawing conclusions about cohort differences. First, our purpose was to provide an overview of the status of stress and health in three cohorts of sexual minority people at one point using cross-sectional data. Obviously, this one-time picture limits our ability to discuss historical differences and trajectories, but we interpret the results to suggest that they reflect the impact of historical changes in the status of sexual minority people in society. Our interpretation is based on theory and our a priori categorization of the three cohorts. Because we aimed to capture the impact of historical context, we erred by ignoring potential differences among members of any age cohort that could have affected variability in cohorts. We assessed differences among three cohorts of sexual minority people but not differences by gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, neighborhood context, etc. This is consistent with our hypothesis about cohort differences. Regardless of variability in each cohort, we tested the hypothesis that the younger cohort, as a whole, fared better than older cohorts because members of the young cohort, across all strata, enjoyed better social conditions than members of older cohorts.

Second, like all measures, our measures of stress, coping, and health were limited in that each measure has its limitations and represents only a portion of complex constructs. For example, we assessed depressive symptoms and suicide attempts as proxies for the construct of mental health. Nonetheless, we present a variety of stress measures that include victimization and everyday discrimination, internalized minority stressors (felt stigma and internalized homophobia), and generalized distress, which is associated with mental health and suicide attempts—a clear and serious outcome and significant gauge of sexual minority health. The two measures that represent resilience assessed connection with the community and centrality of identity—two important elements of coping with minority stress.

Third, cohort (and the historical periods of interest) and age were confounded. That is, there was no way to avoid the fact that respondents who came of age in more distant historical periods are also older than respondents who grew up in the context of recent and improved social conditions. Therefore, it is plausible that some differences that we observed resulted from developmental or age-related changes rather than the impact of the different historical social environments. For example, internalized homophobia typically is expected to decline with age, as a person comes to terms with their same-sex attraction and comes out [32]. Our finding that internalized homophobia was higher in the younger than older cohort is consistent with that theory and could reflect the younger developmental stage of the younger cohort members. On the other hand, if social conditions have improved so greatly, we could have expected that internalized homophobia—which denotes rejection of oneself because of one’s same-sex attraction and identity—would cease to be an issue for younger people altogether. That is definitely not the case. Our findings show that some younger people still struggle with self-acceptance. So, although we cannot say with certainty that there is no age effect, we certainly can say that internalized homophobia has not ended in young sexual minority people.