Annotated bibliography of files in the directory /docs/psychology/.
2009-01-01–2021-04-09
in progress
certainty: log
importance: 0
Files
1897-bryan.pdf: “Studies in the physiology and psychology of the telegraphic language”, William Lowe Bryan, Noble Harter (1897):Studied individual differences in telegraphic writing. A preliminary study was conducted, in which operators were cross-examined on aspects of psychological or physiological importance. On the basis of this, a study was undertaken on 60 Ss, who were asked to write a sentence requiring attention. There were constant differences required in the times for a given character. Further tests were made, and schools were requested to provide typical curves of improvement. Results reveal that there were distinct specialties in telegraphy. The rate of receiving varied greatly, and exceeded sending rate. Both external and subjective disturbances affected inexperienced operators. The best age to learn telegraphy was 18–30 yrs. The variations in the value of a character depended on its place in the sentence. Homotaxic variation was an inverse measure of skill, while the inflection variation increased with expertise.
1899-william.pdf: “Studies on the telegraphic language: The acquisition of a hierarchy of habits”, William Lowe Bryan, Noble Harter (1899-01-01):Investigated the different stages involved in learning telegraphy. One S was tested each week on: (1) rate of receiving letters not making words, (2) rate of receiving letters making words, but not sentences, and (3) rate of receiving letters making words and sentences. Results indicate that a hierarchy of psycho-physical habits were required to receive the telegraphic language. From an early period, letter, word and higher habits made gains together, but not equally. No plateau appeared between the learning of letters and words; the first one occurred after the learning of words. Later, there was a second ascent, representing the acquisition of higher language habits. Effective speed was largely dependent upon the mastery of these habits, which led to greater accuracy in detail. Concluded that the rate of progress, depended partly on the rate of mental and nervous processes, but far more on how much was included in each process.
1949-hovland-theamericansoldier-v3-experimentsonmasscommunication.pdf1949-stouffer-theamericansoldier-v1-adjustmentduringarmylife.pdf1949-stouffer-theamericansoldier-v2-combatanditsaftermath.pdf1950-horney-neurosisandhumangrowth-ch11-resignationtheappealoffreedom.pdf: “Neurosis and Human Growth: Chapter 11: 'Resignation: The Appeal of Freedom'”, Karen Horney (1950-01-01):One of the most original psychoanalysts after Freud, Karen Horney pioneered such now familiar concepts as alienation, self-realization, and the idealized image, and she brought to psychoanalysis a new understanding of the importance of culture and environment. Karen Horney was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1885 and studied at the University of Berlin, receiving her medical degree in 1913. From 1914 to 1918 she studied psychiatry at Berlin-Lankwitz, Germany, and from 1918 to 1932 taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. She participated in many international congresses, among them the historic discussion of lay analysis, chaired by Sigmund Freud. Dr. Horney came to the United States in 1932 and for two years was Associate Director of the Psychoanalytic Institute, Chicago. In 1934 she came to New York and was a member of the teaching staff of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute until 1941, when she became one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. In Neurosis and Human Growth, Dr. Horney discusses the neurotic process as a special form of the human development, the antithesis of healthy growth. She unfolds the different stages of this situation, describing neurotic claims, the tyranny or inner dictates and the neurotic’s solutions for relieving the tensions of conflict in such emotional attitudes as domination, self-effacement, dependency, or resignation. Throughout, she outlines with penetrating insight the forces that work for and against the person’s realization of his or her potentialities.
…Chapter 11 (32 Pages): Resignation: The Appeal of Freedom
The Third major solution of the intrapsychic conflicts consists essentially in the neurotic’s withdrawing from the inner battlefield and declaring himself uninterested. If he can muster and maintain an attitude of “don’t care,” he feels less bothered by his inner conflicts and can attain a semblance of inner peace. Since he can do this only by resigning from active living, “resignation” seems a proper name for this solution. It is in a way the most radical of all solutions and, perhaps for this very reason, most often produces conditions that allow for a fairly smooth functioning. And, since our sense of what is healthy is generally blunted, resigned people often pass for “normal.”
1950-stouffer-theamericansoldier-v4-measurementandprediction.pdf1955-abramson.pdf: “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25): Xv. the Effects Produced By Substitution of a Tap Water Placebo”, H. A. Abramson, M. E. Jarvik, A. Levine, M. R. Kaufman, M. W. Hirsch (1955):The purpose of this paper is to study the responses given to a questionnaire by subjects who received a tap water ‘placebo’ instead of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), and to relate the number of responses to other variables. These variables are: body weight, number of responses on a health questionnaire, arithmetic test scores, scores on the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, and Rorschach test responses.
…Figure 4 shows for each question the percentage and number of subjects out of 28 who gave a positive response at least once during the 0.5, 2.5, and 4.5-hour intervals. The questions appear in the figure in the order of decreasing percentages of response to them. The time of the response and the magnitude are disregarded in this tabulation. The question receiving the greatest percentage response was (Subject 24), “Are your palms moist?” As many as 60.7 per cent reported this symptom. Half of the subjects reported headache (Subject 13), fatigue (Subject 44), and drowsiness (Subject 45). About 36 per cent reported anxiety (Subject 47). Illness (Subject 1), and dizziness (Subject 15) were reported by 28.6 per cent of the group and 25 per cent indicated a dream-like feeling (Subject 46), increased appetite (Subject 6), unsteadiness (Subject 16), a hot feeling (Subject 22), heaviness of hands and feet (Subject 30), and weakness (Subject 43). There were 19 questions which received positive responses from between 10 and 22 per cent of the subjects. Less than 10 per cent of the group (or no more than two subjects) responded positively to the remaining questions, but each question received a positive response from at least one subject.
…The findings point out that a substance such as tap water, which is generally considered chemically and pharmacologically inactive, is capable of eliciting certain responses from certain subjects who believe they have received lysergic acid diethylamide. These observations emphasize once more the need for placebo controls in studies investigating the effects of drugs; without them changes which are produced merely by the situation and not by the drug are frequently falsely attributed to the action of the drug…Most subjects who respond to a placebo tend to do so most markedly during the first 0.5 hour after receiving the substance. At this time their anticipation of, and anxiety about, the effects of LSD-25 are probably greatest. Gradually the effects wear off, as the anticipation wears off. Individual differences exist in the time of peak effect, but this is the most common finding. The questions which elicited the greatest percentage response from the group were those related to anxiety (moist palms and feeling anxious) or to phenomena which commonly occur without the presence of any foreign agent (drowsiness, fatigue, and headache). The remaining questions received random responses. The fact that there is a wide range in the number of positive responses made to the questionnaire is of major interest.
1963-gussow.pdf: “A Preliminary Report of Kayak Angst Among the Eskimo of West Greenland: A Study in Sensory Deprivation”, Zachary Gussow (1963):Sensory deprivation experiences and isolation phenomena belong to the broader field of environmental stress and, as such, research in this area is of importance to the anthropologist concerned with mental disorder. In one form or another sensory deprivation is a universal experience. It is present in such diverse events as research experiments, sleep, vision experiences, ‘highway hypnosis’ and kayak-angst. Sensory deprivation and isolation may be culturally required, recommended, unavoidable or even individually sought out. Reactions are variable and are dependent upon the interplay of a number of factors. Experiences may be occupationally linked, as in the confused and disoriented reactions reported by aviators flying solo or in positions cut off from the rest of the crew. Creative people who seek out retreats in order to work more efficiently and productively, as well as persons on the couch in psychoanalytic treatment are also experiencing sensory deprivation, though in a mild form.
In kayak-angst the Eskimo of West Greenland provide us with an instance of a group where severe sensory deprivation reactions are culturally typical for the adult male segment of the population and forms a part of their routinized, seasonal, if not everyday, round of life.
Kayak-angst (kayak-phobia, kayak-dizziness) is well known throughout all districts of West Greenland. It is also known to occur among the Polar Eskimo and in East Greenland, though an intensive search of the literature, extensive correspondence, and interviews with eastern Canadian Eskimos has failed so far to document it for other Eskimo groups. Kayak-angst is scarcely mentioned in English written accounts, with the exception of brief references in Freuchen, Birket-Smith and a few others. On the other hand there is a considerable body of material in the Scandinavian languages, much of it gathered by Danish physicians. The condition was reported as early as 1806 and in 1949 Dr. Av M. Ch. Ehrstrom diagnosed 24 cases in one of the northern districts. Kenneth I. Taylor, a student of anthropology with considerable kayak experience informs me (private communication) that as recently as 1959 he met three such individuals in Northwest Greenland. In 1900, Meldorf estimated that 10% of all men in the Julianhaab district over the age of 18 suffered from kayak-angst. Others have regarded it as the ‘national disease’ of the West Greenland Eskimo.
Material for the present paper is based on an analysis of 13 cases out of the 60 kayak-angst individuals medically examined and interviewed by Bertelsen in 1905.
Kayak-Angst Syndrome
Typically, kayak-angst afflict male hunters out alone on a calm, ‘mirroring’ slightly wavy sea or lake, close to or at a distance from shore, either while paddling or sitting quietly. Under these conditions of sea, and especially with the sun directly overhead or in his eyes, there develops a lowering in the level of consciousness brought on by the absence of external reference points at a time when the hunter is involved in a visually ‘fixed’ or staring position demanding minimal or repetitive movements. A lesser number report they are equally affected in storms, windy or rough weather. Some claim not to have attacks when in the company of others and consequently will never hunt alone. A few report attacks when others are around, though claim they are less severe at this time. On the other hand some report that the presence of others increases their anxiety. One man was afraid their kayaks might collide, particularly in storms. Another said he felt at ease only in the company of men he trusted.
1967-satloff.pdf: “Psychiatry and the Nuclear Submarine”, Aaron Satloff (1967-10-01):[Survey of naval personnel at a shipyard and all attached vessels, with examination of psychiatry referrals. The results indicate that formal records on psychiatric casualties from submarine patrols grossly underestimate the true rate of psychiatric issues among submarine crew, with a more plausible rate of ~3.8%, despite intensive screening.]
1968-serxner.pdf: “An Experience in Submarine Psychiatry”, Jonathan L. Serxner (1968-07-01):The psychiatric experience of a medical officer on two submerged Polaris submarine patrols, each lasting two months, is presented. One psychiatric emergency—an acute paranoid schizophrenic reaction—was managed, and some minor anxiety reactions and depressions were treated. The author suggests the nature of the submarine’s psychological atmosphere by means of a brief discussion of the submarine as a physical entity, the patrol cycle, and the procedures of personnel selection and training.
1969-earls.pdf: “Human Adjustment to an Exotic Environment: The Nuclear Submarine”, Jim H. Earls (1969-01):My intention here is to provide observational data on one aspect of the submarine environment: the adjustment of men to prolonged submergence aboard a nuclear-propelled Polaris-missile-firing submarine. These observations were made while I was serving as the medical officer aboard two Polaris submarines. Discussions with fellow submarine medical officers led me to believe that adjustment patterns reported herein are not isolated occurrences but are perhaps common to many Polaris submarine crews. It is recognized, however, that human adjustment is a complex function and is affected by many variables. It is not my intention to claim that the adjustment pattern described in this paper applies to all submarine crews.
…The Polaris submariner is a highly screened individual placed into a chronically stressful and frustrating environment. When the individual begins to develop feelings of anger in response to the frustrations, he is faced by a cultural structure which does not readily permit the expression of anger. He is then forced to turn the anger inward and then experiences a depressive phenomenon in reaction to operative stresses. The course of this depressive phenomenon is believed to be a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Polaris submarine crews. A similar adjustment pattern has been reported from other isolated environments. It is believed that the Polaris submarine represents an ideal laboratory in which to study the dynamics of group adjustment to unusual environments.
1972-martindale.pdf: “Father's Absence, Psychopathology, and Poetic Eminence”, Colin Martindale (1972):Ratings of degree of psychopathology and of probability of cross-sexual identification were made on temporally stratified samples of 42 eminent English and French poets. 55% of Ss had life histories indicating some possibility of cross-sexual identification; of these, 30% came from father-absent homes. 48% exhibited some symptoms of psychopathology; of these, 15% were rated as psychotic. Psychopathology and cross-sexual identification were highly related. Reasons why temporally stratified samples should yield high incidence rates on the variables were explored.
1974-ghiselli.pdf: “Some perspectives for industrial psychology”, Edwin E. Ghiselli (1974-01-01):Discusses several matters deemed important to industrial psychologists. It is suggested that, given the intangible character of psychological variables, it would be fruitful to obtain the ideas of ordinary people about the variables that are important in occupational behavior. Industrial psychologists ought to study organizations as “individuals” rather than just regarding them as social environments. The use of simulated organizations (e.g., mathematical models) would facilitate such investigations. Industrial psychologists should consider the differences among people to be quantitative rather than qualitative. Consequently, they should not devote their time to investigating differences among arbitrary types of people, but rather should direct their attention to the quantitative variables (e.g., social factors) which underlie those qualitatively different categories. The role and nature of theory and the impermanence of facts which emerge from empirical studies are also discussed.
1975-cronbach.pdf: “Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology”, Lee J. Cronbach (1975-01-01):Aptitude * Treatment interactions are demonstrated with reference to G. Domino’s studies (1968 and 1971) of instructor demand and student personality and J. K. Majasan’s (1972) study which found that achievement in college psychology was greatest when the student’s position on a scale of beliefs regarding behaviorism and humanism were similar to his instructor’s. Further evidence on interactions in social psychology, personality, learning, and experimental psychology is cited. It is suggested that higher order interactions make it unlikely that social scientists will be able to establish generalizations applicable beyond the laboratory or that generalizations established in the field work will be maintained. Social research should be less concerned with hypothesis testing and more concerned with interpreting findings in local contexts.
1979-kenrick.pdf: “Misattribution Under Fear-Producing Circumstances: Four Failures to Replicate”, Douglas T. Kenrick, Robert B. Cialdini, Darwyn E. Linder (1979):Four studies were done in an attempt to test the misattribution explanation of earlier findings showing a connection between aversive arousal and attraction. All four studies indicated that subjects do not attribute arousal to a female confederate when a clear and salient aversive stimulus is present. Instead, subjects correctly assigned causality to the experimental situation. All four studies also failed to reproduce the original attraction finding, i.e., aversive circumstances were not found to enhance attraction for the confederate.
1980-siegel.pdf: “The Psychology of Life After Death”, Ronald K. Siegel (1980-10-01):Traditionally, people’s concern with an afterlife has been of interest only to philosophy and religion. The recent explosion of popular articles and books about life after death has now reached the medical and psychiatric journals, in which “scientific” reports cite evidence from survivors of clinical death and from deathbed visions of terminal patients, among other sources of data. This article critically reviews the evidence in light of ethological, anthropological, and psychological findings. The similarity of afterlife visions to drug-induced hallucinations invites a rational framework for their experimental analysis. From observations of animals burying their dead, through awareness of the seasonal rebirth of nature, to recognition of inherited characteristics, early homo sapiens developed the concept of life after death in an effort to explain these behaviors and their underlying feelings. Cross-cultural studies confirm that the experiences of dying and visiting “the other side” involve universal elements and themes that are predictable and definable. These phenomena arise from common structures in the brain and nervous system, common biological experiences, and common reactions of the central nervous system to stimulation. The resultant experience can be interpreted as evidence that people survive death, but it may be more easily understood as a dissociative hallucinatory activity of the brain.
[APA version: Reviews evidence from survivors of clinical death, using ethological, anthropological, and psychological findings. The similarity of afterlife visions to drug-induced hallucinations invites a rational framework for the present experimental analysis. From observations of animals burying their dead, through awareness of the seasonal rebirth of nature, to recognition of inherited characteristics, early Homo sapiens developed the concept of life after death in an effort to explain these behaviors and their underlying feelings. Cross-cultural studies confirm that the experiences of dying and visiting “the other side” involve universal elements and themes that are predictable and definable. These phenomena arise from common structures in the brain and nervous system, common biological experiences, and common reactions of the CNS to stimulation. The resultant experience can be interpreted as evidence that people survive death, but it may be more easily understood as a dissociative hallucinatory activity of the brain.]
1981-latham-increasingproductivitythroughperformanceevaluations.pdf1981-siegel.pdf: “'The psychology of life after death': Reply”, Ronald K. Siegel (1981-11-01):[Responds to I. Stevenson’s (1981) criticism of the author’s (see record 1981-25195-001) discussion of life after death. The author argues that he does not consider himself an expert on survival of the human personality after death and he defends his choice of reference materials.]
1981-tversky.pdf: “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice”, A. Tversky, Daniel Kahneman (1981-01-30):The psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of probabilities and outcomes produce predictable shifts of preference when the same problem is framed in different ways. Reversals of preference are demonstrated in choices regarding monetary outcomes, both hypothetical and real, and in questions pertaining to the loss of human lives. The effects of frames on preferences are compared to the effects of perspectives on perceptual appearance. The dependence of preferences on the formulation of decision problems is an important concern for the theory of rational choice.
1982-carter.pdf: “Neonatal decortication and adult female sexual behavior”, C. Sue Carter, Diane M. Witt, Bryan Kolb, I.Q. Whishaw (1982-10):Neonatal lesions of the cerebral cortex in female rats did not eliminate female sexual behavior as measured by lordosis. However, lordosis in response to prolonged low levels of estradiol benzoate (1.0 μg/
day for 6 days) was attenuated in lesioned females. Following estradiol benzoate plus progesterone (0.5 mg) treatment the probability of lordosis increased markedly in the decorticate females, but still remained below control levels. Decorticate females were mounted by the male at least as often as control females. Hopping and darting and rejection behaviors on the part of the female were virtually eliminated in the decorticate group. However, these females continued to direct sniffing behavior toward the male at levels above those of the controls. 1985-whishaw.pdf: “The mating movements of male decorticate rats: evidence for subcortically generated movements by the male but regulation of approaches by the female”, I.Q. Whishaw, B. Kolb (1985-10):The study shows that although many features of copulation in decorticate male rats are normal, copulatory success is importantly dependent upon the control of approaches exerted by the normal female rat. Copulation by neonatally decorticated adult rats and normal adult rats was studied in cohabitation and videotaped tests. Seven of 10 decorticate rats and 6 of 6 normal rats sired pups in the cohabitation test. When initially paired with ovariectomized and primed female rats, in the videotaped tests, all normal rats, but only one decorticated rat, copulated. All decorticate rats made movements indicative of sexual interest including: treading on the female’s back, passing over the female, and sniffing the female’s genitals. After activating stimulation, 5 of 6 remaining decorticated males copulated. After one successful mount the remaining copulatory patterns proceeded relatively normally. Numbers of mounts, intromissions, ejaculations, postejaculatory songs, and the intromission and ejaculatory patterns were like those of control rats, although the decorticate rats had fewer mount bouts and showed abnormalities in the execution of movements. Precopulatory movements were notated, using the Eshkol-Wachmann system, and compared with copulatory movements. Non-copulatory and copulatory approaches were similar, except that clasping appeared to be the key movement involved in the transition of an approach movement into a copulatory movement. The analysis also showed that the females’ movements of hopping, turning, and kicking were important for regulating the males’ approaches, and were instrumental in the success achieved by the decorticated males. The study shows that although the cortex, insofar as it facilitates the appearance of certain movements and contributes to their efficiency, is involved in male sexual activity, in its absence well organized sexual activity is possible, although this is dependent, in part, upon the behaviour of the female.
1989-crawford.pdf: “Human grief: Is its intensity related to the reproductive value of the deceased?”, Charles B. Crawford, Brenda E. Salter, Kerry L. Jang (1989-04):Thurstone’s method of comparative judgement was used to measured the intensity of grief that parents of high-reproductive value, moderate-reproductive-value, and low-reproductive value were expected to experience at the death of male and female children of different ages. The results were correlated with reproductive values for male and female British Columbians and for !Kung Bushwomen. Grief ratings were more highly correlated with reproductive value than with age and more highly correlated with reproductive values of !Kung Bushwomen than with those of British Columbians. The correlations were higher for male-stimulus than for female-stimulus children. The correlations of female ratings with reproductive value were higher than male ratings with reproductive value, although not as high as expected. However, the correlation between grief ratings and reproductive value did not increase as the reproductive value of the raters declined.
1990-murphy.pdf: “The Lifetime Risk of Suicide in Alcoholism”, George E. Murphy, Richard D. Wetzel (1990-04-01):Current estimates of the lifetime risk of suicide in alcoholism (11% to 15%) are shown statistically to be untenable. Examination of the mortality from suicide in all published follow-up studies of alcoholics containing the requisite data permits calculation of a much smaller lifetime suicide risk: about 2% in untreated and 2.21% in outpatient-treated probands. Studies of alcoholics identified from hospital admissions yield a lifetime risk of about 3.4% for the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries. It is higher in the Scandinavian and European countries with high suicide rates, but not in those with low national suicide rates. The population at risk is shown to be about half of that commonly estimated, and consists of seriously affected alcoholics. While the annual incidence of suicide in the United States is about 1.3% currently, only that quarter of the population identifiably psychiatrically ill is at substantial risk. Despite the seemingly minuscule lifetime risk of 2% to 3.4%, the likelihood of suicide in conservatively diagnosed alcoholism is between 60 and 120 times that of the non-psychiatrically ill. Such alcoholism contributes about 25% of the suicides.
1991-lykken.pdf: “What's Wrong With Psychology Anyway?”, David T. Lykken (1991):[Lykken’s (1991) classic criticisms of psychology’s dominant research tradition, from the perspective of the Minnesotan psychometrics school, in association with Paul Meehl: psychology’s replication crisis, the constant fading-away of trendy theories, and inability to predict the real world the measurement problem, null hypothesis statistical-significance testing, and the granularity of research methods.]
I shall argue the following theses:
- Psychology isn’t doing very well as a scientific discipline and something seems to be wrong somewhere.
- This is due partly to the fact that psychology is simply harder than physics or chemistry, and for a variety of reasons. One interesting reason is that people differ structurally from one another and, to that extent, cannot be understood in terms of the same theory since theories are guesses about structure.
- But the problems of psychology are also due in part to a defect in our research tradition; our students are carefully taught to behave in the same obfuscating, self-deluding, pettifogging ways that (some of) their teachers have employed.
1992-rymer.pdf: “A Silent Childhood”, Rymer (1992-04-13):Annals Of Science about a case of child abuse in which a child named Genie was kept isolated from the world, locked in a restraining harness in a silent bedroom in her parent’s house in Temple City, California. She was either harnessed to an infant’s potty chair, unable to move anything except her fingers and hands, feet and toes, she was left to sit, tied-up, hour after hour, often into the night, day after day, month after month, year after year. At night, when Genie was not forgotten, she was placed into another restraining garment—a sleeping bag which her father had fashioned to hold Genie’s arms stationary. In effect, it was a straight jacket. Describes her environment, and the “toys” she was given to “play” with. Because of two plastic raincoats that were sometimes hung in the room, she had an inordinate fondness for anything plastic. She was incarcerated by her father for 11 1⁄2 of the first 13 years of her life in a silent room. She could not speak when she was rescued, and only learned to talk when she reached the hospital. Tells about the fallout, both in human terms and legally, surrounding the research into her linguistic abilities. Investigations of Genie’s brain unveiled the utter dominance of her “spatial” right hemisphere over her “linguistic” left…This may have been why she was unable to grasp grammar—because she was using the wrong equipment…From the misfortunes of brain-damaged people, it is clear that language tasks are dispersed within their left-hemisphere home. Someone whose brain is injured above the left ear will still be able to speak, but there will be no idea behind the word strings…Tells about a suit her mother, Irene, brought against the hospital when her therapy sessions with hospital staff were included in research results by Susan Curtiss, a graduate student studying Genie. The results of Curtiss’s doctorate study seemed to both confirm and deny linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory about language acquisition. Genie was shuttled from foster home to foster home after the scientists at the hospital (including the head of research, David Rigler, who adopted her for four years) ran out of grant money. She is currently institutionalized in an adult home for the mentally retarded, and in the words of one scientist, Jay Shurley, filled with a soul-sickness, and sinking into an apparent’ replica of an organic dementia.
1993-birkenholz.pdf#page=36: “Pilot Study of Agricultural Literacy: Final Report: Table 4: Percentage of Respondents Answering Agricultural Knowledge Statements Correctly and Incorrectly”, Robert H. Birkenholz (1993-12-01):A study assessed the knowledge and perceptions of U.S. citizens regarding agriculture, food, and natural resources. Data were collected from 2,005 respondents representing the following groups: purposely selected primarily white Indiana high school students and primarily black Michigan high school students, randomly selected rural Missouri adults attending one of several town meetings, and randomly selected urban Missouri adults contacted in various settings (including churches, libraries, and grocery stores). Adults were more knowledgeable about agriculture than were high school students. Respondents were most knowledgeable and positive about natural resources and least knowledgeable and positive about agricultural policy. No differences among ethnic groups’ perceptions of agriculture or between rural and urban Missouri adults’ knowledge of agricultural concepts were discovered. The study recommendations included the following: integrating agricultural instruction throughout elementary and secondary school curricula, developing agricultural literacy instructional efforts targeting inner city minority students, broadcasting television agricultural literacy programs for adults in urban areas, and establishing a National Center for Agricultural Literacy to coordinate agricultural literacy efforts at a national level. (Appended are knowledge statement responses by group, 12 data charts, and the survey instrument. Contains 12 references and 20 tables.)
1993-lipsey.pdf: “The Efficacy of Psychological, Educational, and Behavioral Treatment: Confirmation from Meta-Analysis”, Mark W. Lipsey, David B. Wilson (1993-12-01):Conventional reviews of research on the efficacy of psychological, educational, and behavioral treatments often find considerable variation in outcome among studies and, as a consequence, fail to reach firm conclusions about the overall effectiveness of the interventions in question. In contrast, meta-analysis reviews show a strong, dramatic pattern of positive overall effects that cannot readily be explained as artifacts of meta-analytic technique or generalized placebo effects. Moreover, the effects are not so small that they can be dismissed as lacking practical or clinical-significance. Although meta-analysis has limitations, there are good reasons to believe that its results are more credible than those of conventional reviews and to conclude that well-developed psychological, educational, and behavioral treatment is generally efficacious.
1993-magnusson.pdf: “The Prevalence of Seasonal Affective Disorder Is Low Among Descendants of Icelandic Emigrants in Canada”, Andrés Magnússon, Jóhann Axelsson (1993-12-01):Objective: To examine whether a genetic selection within the Icelandic population helps it to adapt to the long arctic winter.
Participants and Setting: The target population was a group of adults in the Interlake district of Manitoba, Canada, wholly descended from Icelandic emigrants. The ancestry of every individual in this group can be traced back to 1840.
Design: The Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire was mailed to a random sample of the study population. The data were compared with results obtained with similar methods in populations in Iceland and on the eastern seaboard of the United States.
Main Outcome Measures: Prevalence rates of seasonal affective disorder and subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder.
Results: The prevalence rates of seasonal affective disorder and subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder were found to be 1.2% and 3.3%, respectively, in this group of Canadians of wholly Icelandic descent. These are statistically-significantly lower than those measured with similar methods among people living along the east coast of the United States (ϰ2 = 12.6 and 14.4, respectively, p < 0.001). Standardized rate ratio for this group compared with the American group was 0.18 for seasonal affective disorder and 0.38 for subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder.
Conclusions: This is the second study to find the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder and subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder to be lower among Icelanders or their descendants than among populations along the east coast of the United States. The results indicate that the relationship between prevalence of these disorders and geographic latitude is more complex than has previously been suggested; genetic adaptation in Icelandic populations may play an important role.
1995-sieber.pdf: “Deception Methods in Psychology: Have They Changed in 23 Years?”, Joan E. Sieber, Rebecca Iannuzzo, Beverly Rodriguez (1995):To learn whether criticism and regulation of research practices have been followed by a reduction of deception or use of more acceptable approaches to deception, the contents of all 1969, 1978, 1986, and 1992 issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology were examined. Deception research was coded according to type of (non)informing (e.g., false informing, consent to deception, no informing), possible harmfulness of deception employed (e.g., powerfulness of induction, morality of the behavior induced, privacy of behavior), method of deception (e.g., bogus device or role, false purpose of study, false feedback), and debriefing employed. Use of confederates has been partly replaced by uses of computers. “Consent” with false informing declined after 1969, then rose in 1992. Changes in the topics studied (e.g., attribution, socialization, personality) largely accounted for the decline in deception in 1978 and 1986. More attention needs to be given to ways of respecting subjects’ autonomy, to appropriate debriefing and desensitizing, and to selecting the most valid and least objectionable deception methods.
1996-moes.pdf: “Personality Characteristics of Successful Navy Submarine Personnel”, Gregory S. Moes, Rakesh Lall, W. Brad Johnson (1996-04-01):This study evaluated the personality characteristics of senior enlisted and occupationally successful Navy submarine personnel. One hundred subjects completed the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality (SNAP). Results indicated that the traits of detachment, propriety, and workaholism were most descriptive of the sample. 37% met SNAP criteria for a personality disorder, typically antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, or avoidant. The results are discussed in terms of adaptation to environmental demands aboard submarines. Suggestions for further research are offered.
1996-murphy-individualdifferencesandbehaviorinorganizations.pdf1996-petrie.pdf: “Environment is not the Most Important Variable in Determining Oral Morphine Consumption in Wistar Rats”, B. F. Petrie (1996-04-01):The role of differential housing on sucrose-morphine consumption in outbred Wistar rats was investigated in two studies. The results of earlier research, indicating rats housed in a quasi-natural colony drank statistically-significantly less sucrose-morphine than rats isolated in standard laboratory cages, could not be replicated, as the consumption of sucrose-morphine by the isolated animals in the present two studies was reduced. It is possible that during a colony conversion the supplier inadvertently introduced strain differences making the present rats more resistant to xenobiotic consumption. Discussion documents the role of genetics in morphine consumption.
1998-persinger.pdf: “Putative Perception of Rotating Permanent Magnetic Fields following Ingestion of LSD”, M. A. Persinger (1998-10-01):While sitting alone in complete darkness, 3 participants who had ingested psychotropic concentrations of lysergic acid diethylamide reported diffuse blobs of white, purplish, or greenish-yellow lights as two horseshoe magnets rotated at 0.5 Hz. The experiences were not reported when the magnets were stationary or removed from the apparatus. The estimated peak-to-peak variation in field strength at the distance of perception was between 50 and 500 nanoTesla. An association between these results and possible ergot-induced perceptions of “magnet light” reported during the last century by von Reichenbach (1851) is suggested.
1998-shrum.pdf: “The Effects of Television Consumption on Social Perceptions: The Use of Priming Procedures to Investigate Psychological Processes”, L. J. Shrum, Robert S. Wyer, Jr., Thomas C. O'Guinn (1998-03-01):Two studies investigated the extent to which heavy television viewing affects consumers’ perceptions of social reality and the cognitive processes that underlie these effects. Both studies found evidence that heavy viewers’ beliefs about social reality are more consistent with the content of television programming than are those of light viewers. The use of a priming methodology provided support for the notion that television is a causal factor in the formation of these beliefs and that a failure to discount television-based exemplars in forming these beliefs accounts for its influence. Implications of these results for a heuristic processing model of television effects are discussed.
1999-kruger.pdf: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, Justin Kruger, David Dunning (1999-12):People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error.
Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
[Note: Dunning-Kruger is largely or entirely an artifact of measurement error (regression to the mean + ceiling/
floor effects) and a statistical illusion.] 2000-mcabee.pdf: “Prolonged survival with hydranencephaly: report of two patients and literature review”, Gary N. McAbee, Allison Chan, Edmund L. Erde (2000-07):Infants with hydranencephaly are presumed to have a reduced life expectancy, with a survival of several weeks to months. Rarely, patients with prolonged survival have been reported, but these infants may have had other neurologic conditions that mimicked hydranencephaly, such as massive hydrocephalus or holoprosencephaly. We report two infants with prenatally acquired hydranencephaly who survived for 66 and 24 months. We reviewed published reports to ascertain the clinical and laboratory features associated with survival of more than 6 months. This review demonstrates that prolonged survival up to 19 years can occur with hydranencephaly, even without rostral brain regions, with isoelectric electroencephalograms, and with absent-evoked potentials. Finally, the ethical aspects of these findings, as they relate to anencephaly and organ transplantation, are discussed.
2001-bloom.pdf: “Précis of How Children Learn the Meanings of Words”, Paul Bloom (2010-11-19 01-41-26Z):Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, children’s understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life.
2001-jensen.pdf: “Vocabulary and general intelligence”, Arthur R. Jensen (2001):Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, children’s understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life.
2001-laplane.pdf: “Auto-Activation deficit: A basal ganglia related syndrome”, D. Laplane, B. Dubois (2001-09-01):We draw attention to a new syndrome related to basal ganglia pathology. It is characterized by a deficit in spontaneous activation of mental processing, observed in behavioral, cognitive, or affective domains, which can be totally reversed by external stimulation that activates normal patterns of response. In addition, patients with auto-activation deficit (AAD) typically express the feeling that their mind is empty when they are not stimulated, a symptom that is sometimes difficult to recognize.
AAD, also designated “psychic akinesia,” differs from the inertia or abulia observed in patients with frontal lesions in that behavioral, cognitive, and emotional abilities become normal under external stimulation. This is particularly striking for executive functions, which are essentially preserved under test conditions. The dramatic effect of external stimulation on these patients may appear to resemble what has been called “kinesia paradoxica” on a motor point of view, except that, in the present case, external stimulation always activates all aspects of behavior.
The syndrome is mainly encountered following lesions of the basal ganglia and is thought to result from the disruption of passing fibers mediating the internal activation of mental processing. We believe that the concept may generate some new lines of research into the non-motor roles of the basal ganglia such as behavioral activation, cognitive processing, affectivity, and conscious awareness.
2001-lynn.pdf: “Sex differences in general knowledge”, Richard Lynn, Paul Irwing, Thomas Cammock (2001-01):A general information or knowledge test, which was shown to measure 19 domains of general knowledge, six first-order factors and one second-order general factor, was constructed. Data obtained from 469 female and 167 male undergraduates were tested for sex differences using Student’s t and Hotelling’s multivariate t. It was found that males obtained statistically-significantly higher means than females on the second-order general factor and on four of the six first-order factors identified as information about Current Affairs, Physical Health and Recreation, Arts and Science. Females obtained a statistically-significantly higher mean than males on the first-order factor identified as Family. There was no sex difference on the remaining first-order factor identified as Fashion. The results confirm the findings in a number of standardisation samples of the Wechsler tests that males obtain higher average scores than females on the Information subtests and that this is not attributable to a bias in favor of males on these tests. [Keywords: general knowledge, sex differences, structural equations modeling, gender, interests]
2002-gilbert.pdf: “Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes”, Daniel T. Gilbert, Jane E. J. Ebert (2002-01-01):People prefer to make changeable decisions rather than unchangeable decisions because they do not realize that they may be more satisfied with the latter. Photography students believed that having the opportunity to change their minds about which prints to keep would not influence their liking of the prints. However, those who had the opportunity to change their minds liked their prints less than those who did not (Study 1). Although the opportunity to change their minds impaired the post-decisional processes that normally promote satisfaction (Study 2a), most participants wanted to have that opportunity (Study 2b). The results demonstrate that errors in affective forecasting can lead people to behave in ways that do not optimize their happiness and well-being.
2003-haney.pdf: “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and 'Supermax' Confinement”, Craig Haney (2003):This article discusses the recent increase in the use of solitary-like confinement, especially the rise of so-called supermax prisons and the special mental health issues and challenges they pose. After briefly discussing the nature of these specialized and increasingly widespread units and the forces that have given rise to them, the article reviews some of the unique mental-health-related issues they present, including the large literature that exists on the negative psychological effects of isolation and the unusually high percentage of mentally ill prisoners who are confined there. It ends with a brief discussion of recent caselaw that addresses some of these mental health issues and suggests that the courts, though in some ways appropriately solicitous of the plight of mentally ill supermax prisoners, have overlooked some of the broader psychological problems these units create.
2006-02-05-nytimes-thatwhichdoesnotkillmemakesmestranger.html2006-deady.pdf: “Height in women predicts maternal tendencies and career orientation”, Denis K. Deady, Miriam J. Law Smith (2006-01-01):Previous research has shown that variation in sex-specific personality traits in women can be predicted by measures of physical masculinisation (second to fourth digit ratio and circulating testosterone). This study aimed to test the hypothesis that certain sex-specific traits in women (maternal tendencies and career orientation) could be predicted by one index of masculinisation, height. Data was collected via online questionnaires. In pre-reproductive women (aged 20–29, n = 679), increasing height related to decreasing maternal personality (lower importance of having children, lower maternal/
broodiness) and decreasing reproductive ambition (fewer ideal number of children, older ideal own age to have first child). Increasing height also related to increasing career orientation (higher importance of having a career, and higher career competitiveness). In post-reproductive women (aged over 45, n = 541), increasing height related to decreased reproductive events (fewer children, had first child at older age) and increased career orientation. Results provide further support for previous studies that show physical masculinisation is associated with psychological masculinisation. 2006-ozer.pdf: “Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes”, Daniel J. Ozer, Verónica Benet-Martínez (2006-02-01):Personality has consequences. Measures of personality have contemporaneous and predictive relations to a variety of important outcomes. Using the Big Five factors as heuristics for organizing the research literature, numerous consequential relations are identified. Personality dispositions are associated with happiness, physical and psychological health, spirituality, and identity at an individual level; associated with the quality of relationships with peers, family, and romantic others at an interpersonal level; and associated with occupational choice, satisfaction, and performance, as well as community involvement, criminal activity, and political ideology at a social institutional level. [Keywords: individual differences, traits, life outcomes, consequences]
2006-polidoro-houdinisimpossibledemonstration.html: “Notes on a Strange World: Houdini’s Impossible Demonstration”, Massimo Polidoro (Skeptical Inquirer) (2006-07):[Account of a magic trick demonstrated by Harry Houdini to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (as related by Houdini’s lawyer in his memoirs), which Houdini intended to caution Doyle in his enthusiasm for seances/
mediums/ paranormal by showing how Doyle could be fooled. Doyle was fooled, but apparently did not believe Houdini’s assurance that it was merely a trick as Houdini did not disclose how he did it. The trick involved a black slate writing board suspended in the middle of a room by wires while a cork ball soaked in white ink, one of several Doyle cut open to prove there was no magnets or electronics involved; Doyle went outside and wrote down a phrase (“Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin”) on a piece of paper; on returning, Doyle showed the phrase to Houdini, and then Doyle placed the cork ball against the slate; the ball did not fall but stuck to the slate, and, moving on its own, wrote out the phrase.
The trick was never disclosed, but was almost certainly based on a trick Houdini bought from a fellow magician & friend, Max Berol. In this trick, the magician reads the paper slip and secretly signals it to an assistant, possibly steganographically via pre-arranged gestures or choices of words in their patter; the authentic cork ball is swapped for a magnetic one via sleight-of-hand; it is then held against the slate board by a long thin rod which moves solely in the space ‘behind’ the board where the subject cannot see, by the assistant who is hidden behind a wall and manipulating the rod through a small hatch; the assistant, having been told the phrase by the magician’s encoded message, can now write the phrase backwards on the board by carefully moving the rod.]
2006-porter.pdf: “Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans”, Jess Porter, Brent Craven, Rehan M. Khan, Shao-Ju Chang, Irene Kang, Benjamin Judkewitz, Jason Volpe, Gary Settles, Noam Sobel (2006-12-17):Whether mammalian scent-tracking is aided by inter-nostril comparisons is unknown. We assessed this in humans and found that (1) humans can scent-track, (2) they improve with practice, (3) the human nostrils sample spatially distinct regions separated by ~3.5 cm and, critically, (4) scent-tracking is aided by inter-nostril comparisons. These findings reveal fundamental mechanisms of scent-tracking and suggest that the poor reputation of human olfaction may reflect, in part, behavioral demands rather than ultimate abilities.
2006-wakslak.pdf: “Seeing the forest when entry is unlikely: Probability and the mental representation of events”, Cheryl J. Wakslak, Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman, Rotem Alony (2006-01-01):Conceptualizing probability as psychological distance, the authors draw on construal level theory (Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003) to propose that decreasing an event’s probability leads individuals to represent the event by its central, abstract, general features (high-level construal) rather than by its peripheral, concrete, specific features (low-level construal). Results indicated that when reported probabilities of events were low rather than high, participants were more broad (Study 1) and inclusive (Study 2) in their categorization of objects, increased their preference for general rather than specific activity descriptions (Study 3), segmented ongoing behavior into fewer units (Study 4), were more successful at abstracting visual information (Study 5), and were less successful at identifying details missing within a coherent visual whole (Study 6). Further, after exposure to low-probability as opposed to high-probability phrases, participants increasingly preferred to identify actions in ends-related rather than means-related terms (Study 7). Implications for probability assessment and choice under uncertainty are discussed. [Keywords: probability, likelihood, construal level theory, psychological distance, abstract]
2008-alper.pdf: “Anesthetizing the Public Conscience: Lethal Injection and Animal Euthanasia”, Ty Alper (2008-08-05):Lawyers challenging lethal injection on behalf of death row inmates have frequently argued that lethal injection protocols do not comport with standard practices for the euthanasia of animals. This article studies state laws governing animal euthanasia and concludes that many more states than have previously been recognized ban the use of paralyzing agents in animal euthanasia. In fact, 97.6% of lethal injection executions in this country have taken place in states that have banned, for use in animal euthanasia, the same drugs that are used in those states during executions. Moreover, a study of the legislative history of state euthanasia laws reveals that the concerns raised about paralyzing drugs in the animal euthanasia context are identical in many ways to the concerns that lawyers for death row inmates are currently raising about the use of those drugs in the lethal injection executions of human beings. This article takes an in depth look at animal euthanasia and its relationship to lethal injection by examining in Part I the history and origins of the paralyzing drugs that veterinarians and animal welfare experts refuse to allow in animal euthanasia; in Part II the standards of professional conduct for veterinary and animal shelter professionals; in Part III, the state laws and regulations governing animal euthanasia; and finally in Part IV, the legislative history that led to the enactment of the various states’ animal euthanasia laws and regulations. [Keywords: death penalty, lethal injection, animal euthanasia, capital punishment.]
In the late 1970s, when Texas was considering whether to adopt Oklahoma’s three-drug lethal injection formula for the execution of prisoners, Dr. Ralph Gray, the doctor in charge of medical care in Texas prisons, consulted with a Texas veterinarian named Dr. Gerry Etheredge.1 Dr. Etheredge told Dr. Gray that veterinarians used an overdose of one drug, an anesthetic called sodium pentobarbital, to euthanize animals and that it was a “very safe, very effective, and very cheap” method of euthanasia.2 Dr. Etheredge remembers that Dr. Gray had only one objection to using a similar method to execute human beings. “He said it was a great idea,” Dr. Etheredge recalled, “except that people would think we are treating people the same way that we’re treating animals. He was afraid of a hue and cry.”3 Texas rejected Dr. Etheredge’s one-drug, anesthetic-only recommendation and, in 1982, became the first state to actually use lethal injection—via the three-drug formula—as a method of execution.4 This history is almost hard to believe in light of the fact that three decades later, death row inmates in Texas, as well as in nearly every other death penalty state, are challenging the three-drug formula on the grounds that the method is less reliable, and therefore less humane, than the method used to euthanize animals.5
…It was through the use of curare in vivisection that people began to consider the implications of what curare did not do, namely serve any anesthetic function. While curare inhibits all voluntary movement, it does nothing at all to affect consciousness, cognition, or the ability to feel pain.46…Dr. Hoggan, described the experience of a dog subjected to vivisection while paralyzed by curare.51 Curare, he testified, was used to:
render [the] dog helpless and incapable of any movement, even of breathing, which function was performed by a machine blowing through its windpipe. All this time, however, its intelligence, its sensitiveness, and its will, remained intact . . . . In this condition the side of the face, the interior of the belly, and the hip, were dissected out . . . continuously for ten consecutive hours . . . .52
In 1868, the Swedish physiologist A. F. Holmgren condemned curare as “the most cruel of all poisons.”53..in 1864 Claude Bernard offered another description of such a deceptively peaceful death:
A gentle sleep seems to occupy the transition from life to death. But it is nothing of the sort; the external appearances are deceitful. . . . [I]n fact . . . we discover that this death, which appears to steal on in so gentle a manner and so exempt from pain is, on the contrary, accompanied by the most atrocious sufferings that the imagination of man can conceive.81
No inmate has ever survived a botched lethal injection, so we do not know what it feels like to lie paralyzed on a gurney, unable even to blink an eye, consciously suffocating, while potassium burns through the veins on its way to the heart, until it finally causes cardiac arrest. But aided by the accounts of people who have suffered conscious paralysis on the operating table, one can begin to imagine.
2008-goldstein.pdf: “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings”, Robin Goldstein, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber, John W. Emerson, Alexis Herschkowitsch, Jacob Katz (2008):Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine.
In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a non-negative relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical-significance is improved further.
These findings suggest that non-expert wine consumers should not anticipate greater enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of a wine simply because it is expensive or is appreciated by experts.
2008-macknik.pdf: “Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research”, Stephen L. Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson, Susana Martinez-Conde (2008-07-30):Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers’ deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques. [See their “Table 1: Psychological Assumptions” for a taxonomy.]
2008-mashour.pdf: “Inverse zombies, anesthesia awareness, and the hard problem of unconsciousness”, George A. Mashour, Eric LaRock (2008-12):Philosophical (p-) zombies are constructs that possess all of the behavioral features and responses of a sentient human being, yet are not conscious. P-zombies are intimately linked to the hard problem of consciousness and have been invoked as arguments against physicalist approaches. But what if we were to invert the characteristics of p-zombies? Such an inverse (i-) zombie would possess all of the behavioral features and responses of an insensate being, yet would nonetheless be conscious.
While p-zombies are logically possible but naturally improbable, an approximation of i-zombies actually exists: individuals experiencing what is referred to as “anesthesia awareness.” Patients under general anesthesia may be intubated (preventing speech), paralyzed (preventing movement), and narcotized (minimizing response to nociceptive stimuli). Thus, they appear—and typically are—unconscious. In 1–2 cases/
1000, however, patients may be aware of intraoperative events, sometimes without any objective indices. Furthermore, a much higher percentage of patients (22% in a recent study) may have the subjective experience of dreaming during general anesthesia. p-zombies confront us with the hard problem of consciousness—how do we explain the presence of qualia? I-zombies present a more practical problem—how do we detect the presence of qualia? The current investigation compares p-zombies to i-zombies and explores the “hard problem” of unconsciousness with a focus on anesthesia awareness.
[Keywords: Consciousness, Hard problem of consciousness, Hard problem of unconsciousness, Zombies, Inverse zombies, Anesthesia awareness, Awareness during general anesthesia]
2009-bohannon.pdf: “Can People Distinguish Pâté From Dog Food?”, John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein, Alexis Herschkowitsch (2009-04-01):Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging.
To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with 5 unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the 5 was dog food.
Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the 5 samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, p < 0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.
[Popularizations: Bohannon 2009, Bohannon et al 2010.]
2010-sinn.pdf: “Personality and performance in military working dogs: Reliability and predictive validity of behavioral tests”, David L. Sinn, Samuel D. Gosling, Stewart Hilliard (2010-10-01):Quantification and description of individual differences in behavior, or personality differences, is now well-established in the working dog literature. What is less well-known is the predictive relationship between particular dog behavioral traits (if any) and important working outcomes.
Here we evaluate the validity of a dog behavioral test instrument given to military working dogs (MWDs) from the 341st Training Squadron, USA Department of Defense (DoD); the test instrument has been used historically to select dogs to be trained for deployment.
A 15-item instrument was applied on three separate occasions prior to training in patrol and detection tasks, after which dogs were given patrol-only, detection-only, or dual-certification status. On average, inter-rater reliability for all 15 items was high (mean = 0.77), but within this overall pattern, some behavioral items showed lower inter-rater reliability at some time points (<0.40). Test-retest reliability for most (but not all) single item behaviors was strong (>0.50) across shorter test intervals, but decreased with increasing test interval (<0.40). Principal components analysis revealed four underlying dimensions that summarized test behavior, termed here ‘object focus’, ‘sharpness’, ‘human focus’, and ‘search focus’. These four aggregate behavioral traits also had the same pattern of short-term, but not long-term test-retest reliability as that observed for single item behaviors.
Prediction of certification outcomes using an independent test data set revealed that certification outcomes could not be predicted by breed, sex, or early test behaviors. However, prediction was improved by models that included two aggregate behavioral trait scores and three single item behaviors measured at the final test period, with 1 unit increases in these scores resulting in 1.7–2.8 increased odds of successful dual-certification and patrol-only certification outcomes. No improvements to odor-detection certification outcomes were made by any model. While only modest model improvements in prediction error were made by using behavioral parameters (2–7%), model predictions were based on data from dogs that had successfully completed all three test periods only, and therefore did not include data from dogs that were rejected during testing or training due to behavioral or medical reasons.
Thus, future improvements to predictive models may be more substantial using independent predictors with less restrictions in range. Reports of the reliability and validity estimates of behavioral instruments currently used to select MWDs are scarce, and we discuss these results in terms of improving the efficiency by which working dog programs may select dogs for patrol and odor-detection duties using behavioral pre-screening instruments. [Keywords: military dog, personality, reliability, predictive validity, behavioral instrument]
2011-hess.pdf#page=5: “A Qualitative Study of Agricultural Literacy in Urban Youth: What Do Elementary Students Understand about the Agri-Food System?”, Alexander J. Hess, Cary J. Trexler (2011-11-01):Agricultural literacy of K-12 students is a national priority for both scientific and agricultural education professional organizations. Development of curricula to address this priority has not been informed by research on what K-12 students understand about the agri-food system. While students’ knowledge of food and fiber system facts have been studied, in-depth research into broader student understandings of the system have largely been ignored. This study employed semi-structured interviews to compare urban elementary students’ understandings with nationally developed benchmarks for agri-food system literacy. Findings indicate that no participant had ever grown their own food, raised a plant, or cared for an animal. Participation in school field trips to farms or a visit to a relative’s garden were the most frequently mentioned agricultural experience. Participants could readily name common food items, but could not accurately elaborate on the origins of common foods. Post-production activities, like food processing, were not well understood. Students’ agriculturally related experiences did not appear to influence their understanding about where food comes from or what happens to food as it travels from farm to plate. [Keywords: agriculture literacy, elementary, food and fiber literacy]
Table 2: Number and Percentage of Informants Correctly Stating Cheeseburger Origin Cheeseburger component Component origin Number of informants correctly stating origin (%) Meat patty Animal 17 (94) Lettuce Plant 17 (94) Cheese Animal 16 (90) Pickle Plant 16 (90) Tomato Plant 16 (90) Onion Plant 14 (78) Bun Plant 5 (28) Table 3: Number and Percentage of Informants Correctly Describing Common Food Origins Cheeseburger component Component origin Number of informants correctly describing origin (%) Cheese Cow’s milk 13 (72) Meat patty Beef animal 10 (56) Tomato Tomato plant 9 (50) Lettuce Lettuce plant 8 (44) Onion Bulb onion plant 7 (39) Bun Flour/ wheat plant 5 (28) Pickle Cucumber bush 4 (22) …IS informants also provided inaccurate statements or what appeared to be guesses (e.g., Logan inaccurately described horses found at racetracks as the source of bread and chicken, while Montie guessed that the meat patty came from a pig). Suzanne was coded nonexistent (N) because she said she was not sure or did not know when asked about the agricultural crop for each cheeseburger component. Lynn was coded incompatible elaborate (IE) because she gave inaccurate and elaborate descriptions about the origins of the pickle, meat patty, and bun. The following excerpt exemplifies Lynn’s comments:
INTERVIEWER (1): OK, how about the pickles, [you said] they come from lions and tigers or was it lions? [Shook head affirmatively] OK, how do we get those [pickles] from lions and tigers?
LYNN (L): My granny just told me that when she was little girl, her mom used to go get lions and used to go hunt lions and tigers because they used to live by them and they used to cut them and they used to cut the pickles with [from] them.
I: Oh, OK, and how about the bread?
L: Well, my mommy told me that the bread comes from an animal. But I don’t know what animal. She just said it comes from an animal.
…10 informants (56%) were coded CI because their responses included both compatible and incompatible statements in comparison with the expert proposition. Denise, for example, provided both compatible and incompatible statements by saying that meat and milk come from farms, but vegetables, like the tomato, come from the store:
INTERVIEWER (1): Why do we have farms?
DENISE (D): So we so we can have lots of food and stuff to drink.
I: Lots of food and stuff to drink. And what do we get to drink that’s from the farm?
D: What do we get? We get milk.
I: What kind of food do we get from the farm?
D: We get meat and chicken wings and pig feet.
I: Where do you think they grow tomatoes?
D: In the backyard.
I: So you think Jack in the Box got their tomato from someone’s backyard?
D: No.
I: Where do you think they got it?
D: The store.
I: From the store, OK. Where do you think the store got it?
D: I’m not sure.
2011-mccarthyjones.pdf: “The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults”, Simon McCarthy-Jones, Charles Fernyhough (2011-12):Highlights:
- We develop a questionnaire to assess a number of qualities of inner speech.
- We examine its correlations with psychopathology in young adults.
- The inner speech questionnaire was found to have satisfactory psychometrics.
- Anxiety, but not depression, correlated with specific varieties of inner speech.
- Proneness to auditory hallucinations correlated with levels of dialogic inner speech.
Abstract: A resurgence of interest in inner speech as a core feature of human experience has not yet coincided with methodological progress in the empirical study of the phenomenon. The present article reports the development and psychometric validation of a novel instrument, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ), designed to assess the phenomenological properties of inner speech along dimensions of dialogicality, condensed/
expanded quality, evaluative/ motivational nature, and the extent to which inner speech incorporates other people’s voices. In response to findings that some forms of psychopathology may relate to inner speech, anxiety, depression, and proneness to auditory and visual hallucinations were also assessed. Anxiety, but not depression, was found to be uniquely positively related to both evaluative/ motivational inner speech and the presence of other voices in inner speech. Only dialogic inner speech predicted auditory hallucination-proneness, with no inner speech variables predicting levels of visual hallucinations/ disturbances. Directions for future research are discussed. [Keywords: Anxiety, Auditory hallucination, Cognitive behavioral therapy, Depression, Dialogic, Inner speech, Rumination, Vygotsky] 2012-herculanohouzel.pdf: “The remarkable, yet not extraordinary, human brain as a scaled-up primate brain and its associated cost”, Suzana Herculano-Houzel (2012-06-19):Neuroscientists have become used to a number of “facts” about the human brain: It has 100 billion neurons and 10- to 50-fold more glial cells; it is the largest-than-expected for its body among primates and mammals in general, and therefore the most cognitively able; it consumes an outstanding 20% of the total body energy budget despite representing only 2% of body mass because of an increased metabolic need of its neurons; and it is endowed with an overdeveloped cerebral cortex, the largest compared with brain size.
These facts led to the widespread notion that the human brain is literally extraordinary: an outlier among mammalian brains, defying evolutionary rules that apply to other species, with a uniqueness seemingly necessary to justify the superior cognitive abilities of humans over mammals with even larger brains. These facts, with deep implications for neurophysiology and evolutionary biology, are not grounded on solid evidence or sound assumptions, however.
Our recent development of a method that allows rapid and reliable quantification of the numbers of cells that compose the whole brain has provided a means to verify these facts. Here, I review this recent evidence and argue that, with 86 billion neurons and just as many nonneuronal cells, the human brain is a scaled-up primate brain in its cellular composition and metabolic cost, with a relatively enlarged cerebral cortex that does not have a relatively larger number of brain neurons yet is remarkable in its cognitive abilities and metabolism simply because of its extremely large number of neurons.
2013-hurlburt.pdf: “Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking”, Russell T. Hurlburt, Christopher L. Heavey, Jason M. Kelsey (2013-12-01):Highlights:
- Inner speaking is a common but not ubiquitous phenomenon of inner experience.
- There are large individual differences in the frequency of inner speaking (from near 0% to near 100%).
- There is substantial variability in the phenomenology of naturally occurring moments of inner speaking.
- Use of an appropriate method is critical to the study of inner experience.
- Descriptive Experience Sampling is designed to apprehend high fidelity descriptions of inner experience.
Abstract: Inner speaking is a common and widely discussed phenomenon of inner experience. Based on our studies of inner experience using Descriptive Experience Sampling (a qualitative method designed to produce high fidelity descriptions of randomly selected pristine inner experience), we advance an initial phenomenology of inner speaking. Inner speaking does occur in many, though certainly not all, moments of pristine inner experience. Most commonly it is experienced by the person as speaking in his or her own naturally inflected voice but with no sound being produced. In addition to prototypical instances of inner speaking, there are wide-ranging variations that fit the broad category of inner speaking and large individual differences in the frequency with which individuals experience inner speaking. Our observations are discrepant from what many have said about inner speaking, which we attribute to the characteristics of the methods different researchers have used to examine inner speaking.
2013-kurzban.pdf: “An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance”, Robert Kurzban, Angela Duckworth, Joseph W. Kable, Justus Myers (2013-12-04):Why does performing certain tasks cause the aversive experience of mental effort and concomitant deterioration in task performance? One explanation posits a physical resource that is depleted over time. We propose an alternative explanation that centers on mental representations of the costs and benefits associated with task performance. Specifically, certain computational mechanisms, especially those associated with executive function, can be deployed for only a limited number of simultaneous tasks at any given moment. Consequently, the deployment of these computational mechanisms carries an opportunity cost—that is, the next-best use to which these systems might be put. We argue that the phenomenology of effort can be understood as the felt output of these cost/
benefit computations. In turn, the subjective experience of effort motivates reduced deployment of these computational mechanisms in the service of the present task. These opportunity cost representations, then, together with other cost/ benefit calculations, determine effort expended and, everything else equal, result in performance reductions. In making our case for this position, we review alternative explanations for both the phenomenology of effort associated with these tasks and for performance reductions over time. Likewise, we review the broad range of relevant empirical results from across sub-disciplines, especially psychology and neuroscience. We hope that our proposal will help to build links among the diverse fields that have been addressing similar questions from different perspectives, and we emphasize ways in which alternative models might be empirically distinguished. 2014-chanturia.pdf: “The Idiom Principle Revisited”, Anna Siyanova-Chanturia, Ron Martinez (2014-01-26):John Sinclair’s Idiom Principle famously posited that most texts are largely composed of multi-word expressions that ‘constitute single choices’ in the mental lexicon. At the time that assertion was made, little actual psycholinguistic evidence existed in support of that holistic, ‘single choice’, view of formulaic language. In the intervening years, a number of studies have shown that multi-word expressions are indeed processed differently from novel phrases. This processing advantage, however, does not necessarily support the holistic view of formulaic language. The present review aims to bring together studies on the processing of multi-word expressions in a first and second language that have used a range of psycholinguistic techniques, and presents why such research is important. Practical implications and pathways for future research are discussed.
2014-hambrick.pdf: “Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?”, David Z. Hambrick, Frederick L. Oswald, Erik M. Altmann, Elizabeth J. Meinz, Fernand Gobet, Guillermo Campitelli (2014-07):- Ericsson and colleagues argue that deliberate practice explains expert performance.
- We tested this view in the two most studied domains in expertise research.
- Deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain expert performance.
- Other factors must be considered to advance the science of expertise.
Twenty years ago, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed that expert performance reflects a long period of deliberate practice rather than innate ability, or “talent”. Ericsson et al. found that elite musicians had accumulated thousands of hours more deliberate practice than less accomplished musicians, and concluded that their theoretical framework could provide “a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance” (p. 392). The deliberate practice view has since gained popularity as a theoretical account of expert performance, but here we show that deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research—chess and music. For researchers interested in advancing the science of expert performance, the task now is to develop and rigorously test theories that take into account as many potentially relevant explanatory constructs as possible. [Keywords: Expert performance, Expertise, Deliberate practice, Talent]
2014-park.pdf: “Automatic Personality Assessment Through Social Media Language”, Gregory Park, H. Andrew Schwartz, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Margaret L. Kern, Michal Kosinski, David J. Stillwell, Lyle H. Ungar, Martin E. P. Seligman (2014-11-03):Language use is a psychologically rich, stable individual difference with well-established correlations to personality. We describe a method for assessing personality using an open-vocabulary analysis of language from social media.
We compiled the written language from 66,732 Facebook users and their questionnaire-based self-reported Big Five personality traits, and then we built a predictive model of personality based on their language. We used this model to predict the 5 personality factors in a separate sample of 4,824 Facebook users, examining (a) convergence with self-reports of personality at the domain-level and facet-level; (b) discriminant validity between predictions of distinct traits; (c) agreement with informant reports of personality; (d) patterns of correlations with external criteria (e.g., number of friends, political attitudes, impulsiveness); and (e) test-retest reliability over 6-month intervals.
Results indicated that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures: they agreed with self-reports and informant reports of personality, added incremental validity over informant reports, adequately discriminated between traits, exhibited patterns of correlations with external criteria similar to those found with self-reported personality, and were stable over 6-month intervals. Analysis of predictive language can provide rich portraits of the mental life associated with traits.
This approach can complement and extend traditional methods, providing researchers with an additional measure that can quickly and cheaply assess large groups of participants with minimal burden. [Keywords: language, personality assessment, measurement, big data, social media]
2014-shen.pdf: “When Correcting for Unreliability of Job Performance Ratings, the Best Estimate Is Still 0.52”, Winny Shen, Jeffrey M. Cucina, Philip T. Walmsley, Benjamin K. Seltzer (2014-12-01):In this commentary we answer 3 questions that are often posed when debating the usefulness and accuracy of correcting criterion-related validity coefficients for unreliability: (a) Is 0.52 an inaccurate estimate? (b) Do corrections for criterion unreliability lead us to choose different selection tools? (c) Is too much variance explained?
[1. Yes; 2. No, because rank-order of tools’ utility is preserved by the corrections; 3. No, because while everything is correlated r = 0.30 on average, most of those variables are unknowable at hiring time and also adding up variables ignores diminishing returns/
intercorrelations between the predictors, so one will never predict perfectly.] Conclusion: Based on our review of the evidence, the 0.52 estimate of the interrater reliability of supervisor ratings of job performance is an appropriate estimate; corrections for unreliability do not appear to change our decisions regarding the choice of one selection tool over another; and most variables may be more strongly correlated than people expect, making it difficult to demonstrate continued incremental validity in predicting job performance when adding additional predictors. We agree with LeBreton et al. that psychologists need to be careful when applying and interpreting corrections, and we are thankful that they sponsored a discussion on the topic. Corrections are critical for both basic science (i.e., estimating population parameters) and practice (i.e., recognizing artifacts attenuating estimates on which our work may be evaluated by stakeholders, courts, and other third parties). Ultimately, the appropriate use of corrections depends on the purpose of the project. If the goal is to explain variation among a sample of incumbents on observed criterion scores, then no corrections need to be made. If the goal is to explain variation among incumbents on a true score for job performance, then a correction for unreliability is not only desirable but necessary. Finally, if the goal is to estimate how much variation among applicants is explained by a predictor for a true score on job performance, then corrections for range restriction and unreliability are indispensable. This goal represents the target validity inference that was included in Binning and Barrett’s (1989) figure, but (rather interestingly) is omitted from LeBreton et al.’s reproduction of that figure. We believe that the target validity inference is the most important inference in personnel selection; it provides the critical link from the observed predictor to the criterion construct (see also Putka & Sackett, 2010).
2014-vyssoki.pdf: “Direct Effect of Sunshine on Suicide”, Benjamin Vyssoki, Nestor D. Kapusta, Nicole Praschak-Rieder, Georg Dorffner, Matthaeus Willeit (2014-09-10):Importance: It has been observed that suicidal behavior is influenced by sunshine and follows a seasonal pattern. However, seasons bring about changes in several other meteorological factors and a seasonal rhythm in social behavior may also contribute to fluctuations in suicide rates.
Objective: To investigate the effects of sunshine on suicide incidence that are independent of seasonal variation.
Design, Setting, and Participants: Retrospective analysis of data on all officially confirmed suicides in Austria between January 1, 1970, and May 6, 2010 (n = 69 462). Data on the average duration of sunshine per day (in hours) were calculated from 86 representative meteorological stations. Daily number of suicides and daily duration of sunshine were differentiated to remove variation in sunshine and variation in suicide incidence introduced by season. Thereafter, several models based on Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Correlation of daily number of suicides and daily duration of sunshine after mathematically removing the effects of season.
Results: Sunshine hours and number of suicides on every day from January 1, 1970, to May 6, 2010, were highly correlated (r = 0.4870; p < 10−9). After differencing for the effects of season, a mathematical procedure that removes most of the variance from the data, a positive correlation between number of suicides and hours of daily sunshine remained for the day of suicide and up to 10 days prior to suicide (rmaximum = 0.0370; p < 10−5). There was a negative correlation between the number of suicides and daily hours of sunshine for the 14 to 60 days prior to the suicide event (rminimum = −0.0383; p < 10−5). These effects were found in the entire sample and in violent suicides.
Conclusions and Relevance: Duration of daily sunshine was statistically-significantly correlated with suicide frequency independent of season, but effect sizes were low. Our data support the hypothesis that sunshine on the day of suicide and up to 10 days prior to suicide may facilitate suicide. More daily sunshine 14 to 60 days previously is associated with low rates of suicide. Our study also suggests that sunshine during this period may protect against suicide.
2016-feinberg.pdf: “The nature of primary consciousness. A new synthesis”, Todd E. Feinberg, Jon Mallatt (2016-07-01):While the philosophical puzzles about “life” that once confounded biology have all been solved by science, much of the “mystery of consciousness” remains unsolved due to multiple “explanatory gaps” between the brain and conscious experience. One reason for this impasse is that diverse brain architectures both within and across species can create consciousness, thus making any single neurobiological feature insufficient to explain it. We propose instead that an array of general biological features that are found in all living things, combined with a suite of special neurobiological features unique to animals with consciousness, evolved to create subjective experience. Combining philosophical, neurobiological and evolutionary approaches to consciousness, we review our theory of neurobiological naturalism that we argue closes the “explanatory gaps” between the brain and subjective experience and naturalizes the “experiential gaps” between subjectivity and third-person observation of the brain. [Keywords: primary consciousness, neurobiological naturalism, explanatory gaps, hard problem, subjectivity, evolution]
2016-hauschild.pdf: “Fitness tests and occupational tasks of military interest: a systematic review of correlations”, Veronique D. Hauschild, David W. DeGroot, Shane M. Hall, Tyson L. Grier, Karen D. Deaver, Keith G. Hauret, Bruce H. Jones (2016-11-03):Physically demanding occupations (ie, military, firefighter, law enforcement) often use fitness tests for job selection or retention. Despite numerous individual studies, the relationship of these tests to job performance is not always clear.
This review examined the relationship by aggregating previously reported correlations between different fitness tests and common occupational tasks.
Search criteria were applied to PUBMED, EBSCO, EMBASE and military sources; scoring yielded 27 original studies providing 533 Pearson correlation coefficients (r) between fitness tests and 12 common physical job task categories. Fitness tests were grouped into predominant health-related fitness components and body regions: cardiorespiratory endurance (CRe); upper body, lower body and trunk muscular strength and muscular endurance (UBs, LBs, TRs, UBe, LBe, TRe) and flexibility (FLX). Meta-analyses provided pooled r’s between each fitness component and task category.
The CRe tests had the strongest pooled correlations with most tasks (8 pooled r values 0.80–0.52). Next were LBs (six pooled r values >0.50) and UBe (4 pooled r values >0.50). UBs and LBe correlated strongly to 3 tasks. TRs, TRe and FLX did not strongly correlate to tasks.
Employers can maximise the relevancy of assessing workforce health by using fitness tests with strong correlations between fitness components and job performance, especially those that are also indicators for injury risk. Potentially useful field-expedient tests include timed-runs (CRe), jump tests (LBs) and push-ups (UBe). Impacts of gender and physiological characteristics (eg, lean body mass) should be considered in future study and when implementing tests.
2016-jussim.pdf: “Stereotype accuracy: One of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology”, Lee Jussim, Jarret T. Crawford, Stephanie M. Anglin, John R. Chambers, Sean T. Stevens, Florette Cohen (2016):Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. It took social psychology nearly a century to recognize that not only had it been declaring stereotypes to be inaccurate on the basis of little data, but once the data started to come in, to accept that this data often (though not always) demonstrated moderate to high stereotype accuracy. This resistance to the data has constituted a substantial impediment to understanding the existence, causes, and consequences of both stereotype accuracy and inaccuracy.
…This chapter discusses stereotype accuracy as one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. This chapter is divided into three major sections. The first, “History of Obstacles to Social Psychology Accepting Its Own Data on Stereotype Accuracy”, reviews some of the obstacles social psychology has faced with respect to accepting that stereotype (in)accuracy is an empirical question, and that the empirical data do not justify assumptions, definitions, or declarations that stereotypes are inaccurate. The second, “The Empirical Assessment of Stereotype (In)Accuracy”, summarizes what is now an impressive body of literature assessing the (in)accuracy of racial, gender, age, national, ethnic, political, and other stereotypes. The third, “Stereotype (In)Accuracy: Knowns, Unknowns, and Emerging Controversies”, summarizes broad and emerging patterns in that body of literature, highlighting unresolved controversies, and identifying important directions for future research.
2016-lemaitre.pdf: “Individuals with pronounced schizotypal traits are particularly successful in tickling themselves”, Anne-Laure Lemaitre, Marion Luyat, Gilles Lafargue (2016-04-01):Highlights:
- We assessed tickling sensation in healthy subjects with pronounced schizotypal traits.
- They were particularly successful in tickling themselves.
- The ability to self-tickle was linked to feelings of control by outside forces.
- Thus, the formation of odd beliefs may be related to sensory prediction deficits.
Abstract: We assessed self-tickling sensations in a group of participants high in schizotypal traits (n = 27) and group of participants low in schizotypal traits (n = 27). The groups were formed by screening a pool of 397 students for extreme scores in the French version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. As observed in a previous study involving psychiatric people with auditory hallucinations and/
or passivity experiences our results showed that self-applied tactile stimulations are felt to be more ticklish by healthy individuals high in schizotypal traits. In contrast, there were no statistically-significant intergroup differences in the mean tickle rating in the externally-produced tickling condition. Furthermore, more successful self-tickling was associated with more frequent self-reports of unusual perceptual experiences (such as supernatural experiences) and passivity experiences in particular (such as a feeling of being under the control of an outside force or power). [Keywords: schizotypy, schizophrenia, agency, delusions, passivity experiences, ticklishness, efference copy, predictive sensorimotor process] 2016-olson.pdf: “Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic”, Jay A. Olson, Mathieu Landry, Krystèle Appourchaux, Amir Raz (2016-07-01):Highlights:
- We deceived participants into believing a machine could influence their thoughts.
- Participants chose arbitrary numbers while inside the machine.
- They felt less control and made slower decisions during the apparent influencing.
- Some participants reported feeling an unknown source controlling their decisions.
- This method may model psychiatric symptoms such as thought insertion.
In order to study the feeling of control over decisions, we told 60 participants that a neuroimaging machine could read and influence their thoughts. While inside a mock brain scanner, participants chose arbitrary numbers in two similar tasks. In the Mind-Reading Task, the scanner appeared to guess the participants’ numbers; in the Mind-Influencing Task, it appeared to influence their choice of numbers. We predicted that participants would feel less voluntary control over their decisions when they believed that the scanner was influencing their choices. As predicted, participants felt less control and made slower decisions in the Mind-Influencing Task compared to the Mind-Reading Task. A second study replicated these findings. Participants’ experience of the ostensible influence varied, with some reporting an unknown source directing them towards specific numbers. This simulated thought insertion paradigm can therefore influence feelings of voluntary control and may help model symptoms of mental disorders. [Keywords: sense of agency, thought insertion, volition, deception, magic, phenomenology]
2016-thomas.pdf: “Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones”, Cyril Thomas, André Didierjean (2016-09-01):Highlights:
- Implanting an unfamiliar idea in the mind can prevent from finding an obvious one.
- Highlighting false solutions divert suspicion away from the secret of the trick.
- Even if subjects search for alternative solutions most of them fail to discover it.
In everyday life, several factors limit the human capacity to think differently. The present study shows that implanting an unlikely and unfamiliar idea in the mind can prevent participants from finding a more obvious one. To demonstrate this, we used a technique often adopted by magicians to misrepresent the method of a trick: the false solution. Our results reveal that a single exposure to an unlikely false solution (the magician can influence the spectator’s choice with his gesture) before the presentation of a card trick can prevent participants from finding the real (more obvious) secret of a trick, even if they are invited to search for an alternative solution. [Keywords: magic, fixing effect, Einstellung, problem solving, illusion]
2017-fassnidge.pdf: “A deafening flash! Visual interference of auditory signal detection”, Christopher Fassnidge, Claudia Cecconi Marcotti, Elliot Freeman (2017-03-01):- Some people claim to hear what they see: a visually-evoked auditory response (V-EAR).
- We assess the prevalence and perceptual reality of V-EAR for the first time.
- 22% of subjects confirmed they heard faint sounds accompanying silent visual flashes.
- V-EAR is perceptually real enough to interfere with detection of real sounds.
- V-EAR may be a normally-occurring precursor to visual-to-auditory synaesthesia.
In some people, visual stimulation evokes auditory sensations. How prevalent and how perceptually real is this?
22% of our neurotypical adult participants responded ‘Yes’ when asked whether they heard faint sounds accompanying flash stimuli, and showed statistically-significantly better ability to discriminate visual ‘Morse-code’ sequences. This benefit might arise from an ability to recode visual signals as sounds, thus taking advantage of superior temporal acuity of audition. In support of this, those who showed better visual relative to auditory sequence discrimination also had poorer auditory detection in the presence of uninformative visual flashes, though this was independent of awareness of visually-evoked sounds. Thus a visually-evoked auditory representation may occur subliminally and disrupt detection of real auditory signals. The frequent natural correlation between visual and auditory stimuli might explain the surprising prevalence of this phenomenon. Overall, our results suggest that learned correspondences between strongly correlated modalities may provide a precursor for some synaesthetic abilities.
2017-franklin.pdf: “Risk Factors for Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors”, Joseph C. Franklin, Jessica D. Ribeiro, Kathryn R. Fox, Kate H. Bentley, Evan M. Kleiman, Xieyining Huang, Katherine M. Musacchio, Adam C. Jaroszewski, Bernard P. Chang, Matthew K. Nock (2017):Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are major public health problems that have not declined appreciably in several decades. One of the first steps to improving the prevention and treatment of STBs is to establish risk factors (i.e., longitudinal predictors).
To provide a summary of current knowledge about risk factors, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies that have attempted to longitudinally predict a specific STB-related outcome. This included 365 studies (3,428 total risk factor effect sizes) from the past 50 years. The present random-effects meta-analysis produced several unexpected findings: across odds ratio, hazard ratio, and diagnostic accuracy analyses, prediction was only slightly better than chance for all outcomes; no broad category or subcategory accurately predicted far above chance levels; predictive ability has not improved across 50 years of research; studies rarely examined the combined effect of multiple risk factors; risk factors have been homogenous over time, with 5 broad categories accounting for nearly 80% of all risk factor tests; and the average study was nearly 10 years long, but longer studies did not produce better prediction.
The homogeneity of existing research means that the present meta-analysis could only speak to STB risk factor associations within very narrow methodological limits—limits that have not allowed for tests that approximate most STB theories. The present meta-analysis accordingly highlights several fundamental changes needed in future studies. In particular, these findings suggest the need for a shift in focus from risk factors to machine learning-based risk algorithms.
2017-mercier.pdf: “How Gullible are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science”, Hugo Mercier (2017-05-18):A long tradition of scholarship, from ancient Greece to Marxism or some contemporary social psychology, portrays humans as strongly gullible—wont to accept harmful messages by being unduly deferent. However, if humans are reasonably well adapted, they should not be strongly gullible: they should be vigilant toward communicated information. Evidence from experimental psychology reveals that humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. They check the plausibility of messages against their background beliefs, calibrate their trust as a function of the source’s competence and benevolence, and critically evaluate arguments offered to them. Even if humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, an adaptive lag might render them gullible in the face of new challenges, from clever marketing to omnipresent propaganda. I review evidence from different cultural domains often taken as proof of strong gullibility: religion, demagoguery, propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, erroneous medical beliefs, and rumors. Converging evidence reveals that communication is much less influential than often believed—that religious proselytizing, propaganda, advertising, and so forth are generally not very effective at changing people’s minds. Beliefs that lead to costly behavior are even less likely to be accepted. Finally, it is also argued that most cases of acceptance of misguided communicated information do not stem from undue deference, but from a fit between the communicated information and the audience’s preexisting beliefs.
[Keywords: epistemic vigilance, gullibility, trust]
2018-bailey.pdf: “Prevention: Necessary But Insufficient? A 2-Year Follow-Up of an Effective First-Grade Mathematics Intervention”, Drew H. Bailey, Lynn S. Fuchs, Jennifer K. Gilbert, David C. Geary, Douglas Fuchs (2018-10-25):We present first-grade, second-grade, and third-grade impacts for a first-grade intervention targeting the conceptual and procedural bases that support arithmetic. At-risk students (average age at pretest = 6.5) were randomly assigned to three conditions: a control group (n = 224) and two variants of the intervention (same conceptual instruction but different forms of practice: speeded [n = 211] vs. nonspeeded [n = 204]). Impacts on all first-grade content outcomes were statistically-significant and positive, but no follow-up impacts were statistically-significant. Many intervention children achieved average mathematics achievement at the end of third grade, and prior math and reading assessment performance predicted which students will require sustained intervention. Finally, projecting impacts 2 years later based on nonexperimental estimates of effects of first-grade math skills overestimates long-term intervention effects.
2018-brouwers.pdf: “Pristine inner experience while silent reading: It’s not silent speaking of the text”, Vincent P. Brouwers, Christopher L. Heavey, Leiszle Lapping-Carr, Stefanie Moynihan, Jason Kelsey, Russell T. Hurlburt (2018-01-01):We used Descriptive Experience Sampling to explore the pristine inner experience of 16 college students while reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway short stories. We provide rich descriptions of the phenomena while reading. Visual imagery was frequent. Although many theorists presume the ubiquitous presence of an inner voice that narrates the text as it is read, we found that only about 3% of samples involved such inner narration. Words were experienced during about a quarter of all samples, including: a focus on specific words from the text (but which were not merely inner reading), words innerly spoken in response to the text (content was related to the text but not of the text itself), and innerly spoken unrelated words (apparently not connected to the text). We suggest that presuppositions account for others’ overestimation of silent speech frequency, and discuss the impact of these findings on understanding reading and consciousness science.
[Keywords: Descriptive Experience Sampling; inner speaking; inner speech; iterative method; phenomenology; pristine inner experience; reading; silent reading]
2018-fassnidge.pdf: “Sounds from seeing silent motion: Who hears them, and what looks loudest?”, Christopher J. Fassnidge, Elliot D. Freeman (2018-06-01):Some people hear what they see: car indicator lights, flashing neon shop signs, and people’s movements as they walk may all trigger an auditory sensation, which we call the visual-evoked auditory response (vEAR or ‘visual ear’). We have conducted the first large-scale online survey (n > 4000) of this little-known phenomenon. We analysed the prevalence of vEAR, what induces it, and what other traits are associated with it.
We assessed prevalence by asking whether respondents had previously experienced vEAR. Participants then rated silent videos for vividness of evoked auditory sensations, and answered additional trait questions.
Prevalence appeared higher relative to other typical synaesthesias. Prior awareness and video ratings were associated with greater frequency of other synaesthesias, including flashes evoked by sounds, and musical imagery. Higher-rated videos often depicted meaningful events that predicted sounds (e.g., collisions). However, even videos containing abstract flickering or moving patterns could also elicit higher ratings, despite having no predictable association with sounds. Such videos had higher levels of raw ‘motion energy’ (ME), which we quantified using a simple computational model of motion processing in early visual cortex. Critically, only respondents reporting prior awareness of vEAR tended to show a positive correlation between video ratings and ME.
This specific sensitivity to ME suggests that in vEAR, signals from visual motion processing may affect audition relatively directly without requiring higher-level interpretative processes. Our other findings challenge the popular assumption that individuals with synaesthesia are rare and have ideosyncratic patterns of brain hyper-connectivity. Instead, our findings of apparently high prevalence and broad associations with other synaesthesias and traits are jointly consistent with a common dependence on normal variations in physiological mechanisms of disinhibition or excitability of sensory brain areas and their functional connectivity. The prevalence of vEAR makes it easier to test such hypotheses further, and makes the results more relevant to understanding not only synaesthetic anomalies but also normal perception. [Keywords: individual differences, audiovisual perception, synaesthesia]
2018-hennecke.pdf: “Doing Despite Disliking: Self-regulatory Strategies in Everyday Aversive Activities”, Marie Hennecke, Thomas Czikmantori, Veronika Brandstätter (2018-12-10):We investigated the self-regulatory strategies people spontaneously use in their everyday lives to regulate their persistence during aversive activities. In pilot studies (pooled N = 794), we identified self-regulatory strategies from self-reports and generated hypotheses about individual differences in trait self-control predicting their use. Next, deploying ambulatory assessment (N = 264, 1940 reports of aversive/
challenging activities), we investigated predictors of the strategies’ self-reported use and effectiveness (trait self-control and demand types). The popularity of strategies varied across demands. In addition, people higher in trait self-control were more likely to focus on the positive consequences of a given activity, set goals, and use emotion regulation. Focusing on positive consequences, focusing on negative consequences (of not performing the activity), thinking of the near finish, and emotion regulation increased perceived self-regulatory success across demands, whereas distracting oneself from the aversive activity decreased it. None of these strategies, however, accounted for the beneficial effects of trait self-control on perceived self-regulatory success. Hence, trait self-control and strategy use appear to represent separate routes to good self-regulation. By considering trait-approaches and process-approaches these findings promote a more comprehensive understanding of self-regulatory success and failure during people’s daily attempts to regulate their persistence. 2018-watts.pdf: “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes”, Tyler W. Watts, Greg J. Duncan,, Haonan Quan (2018):We replicated and extended Shoda, Mischel, and Peake’s (1990) famous marshmallow study, which showed strong bivariate correlations between a child’s ability to delay gratification just before entering school and both adolescent achievement and socioemotional behaviors. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, we found that an additional minute waited at age 4 predicted a gain of approximately one tenth of a standard deviation in achievement at age 15. But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment. Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from being able to wait at least 20 s. Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically-significant.
2019-antoniou.pdf: “The Advantages of Bilingualism Debate”, Mark Antoniou (2019-01):Bilingualism was once thought to result in cognitive disadvantages, but research in recent decades has demonstrated that experience with two (or more) languages confers a bilingual advantage in executive functions and may delay the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. However, conflicting evidence has emerged leading to questions concerning the robustness of the bilingual advantage for both executive functions and dementia incidence. Some investigators have failed to find evidence of a bilingual advantage; others have suggested that bilingual advantages may be entirely spurious, while proponents of the advantage case have continued to defend it. A heated debate has ensued, and the field has now reached an impasse. This review critically examines evidence for and against the bilingual advantage in executive functions, cognitive aging, and brain plasticity, before outlining how future research could shed light on this debate and advance knowledge of how experience with multiple languages affects cognition and the brain.
2019-archer.pdf: “The reality and evolutionary [importance] of human psychological sex differences”, John Archer (2019-03-20):The aims of this article are: (1) to provide a quantitative overview of sex differences in human psychological attributes; and (2) to consider evidence for their possible evolutionary origins. Sex differences were identified from a systematic literature search of meta-analyses and large-sample studies. These were organized in terms of evolutionary [importance] as follows:
- characteristics arising from inter-male competition (within-sex aggression; impulsiveness and sensation-seeking; fearfulness; visuospatial and object-location memory; object-centred orientations);
- those concerning social relations that are likely to have arisen from women’s adaptations for small-group interactions and men’s for larger co-operative groups (person-centred orientation and social skills; language; depression and anxiety);
- those arising from female choice (sexuality; mate choice; sexual conflict).
There were sex differences in all categories, whose magnitudes ranged from
- small (object location memory; negative emotions), to
- medium (mental rotation; anxiety disorders; impulsivity; sex drive; interest in casual sex), to
- large (social interests and abilities; sociosexuality); and
- very large (escalated aggression; systemizing; sexual violence).
Evolutionary explanations were evaluated according to whether:
- similar differences occur in other mammals;
- there is cross-cultural consistency;
- the origin was early in life or at puberty;
- there was evidence for hormonal influences; and
- where possible, whether there was evidence for evolutionarily derived design features.
The evidence was positive for most features in most categories, suggesting evolutionary origins for a broad range of sex differences. Attributes for which there was no sex difference are also noted. Within-sex variations are discussed as limitations to the emphasis on sex differences.
2019-curran.pdf: “I'm paid biweekly, just not by leprechauns: Evaluating valid-but-incorrect response rates to attention check items”, Paul G. Curran, Kelsey A. Hauser (2019-10-01):- Carelessness in self-report data can be detected with many methods.
- Embedding items in a scale with presumed ‘correct’ responses is one of these.
- Properties of these items can impact their usefulness.
- Individuals can provide valid justification for ‘incorrect’ responses.
- Researchers should know their items, and know the risk of not knowing those items.
Participant carelessness is a source of invalidity in psychological data (Huang, Liu, & Bowling, 2015), and many methods have been created to screen for this carelessness (Curran, 2016; Johnson, 2005). These include items that researchers presume thoughtful individuals will answer in a given way (e.g., disagreement with “I am paid biweekly by leprechauns”, Meade & Craig, 2012). This paper reports on two samples in which individuals spoke aloud a series of these questions, and found that (a) individuals do occasionally report valid justifications for presumed invalid responses, (b) there is relatively high variance in this behavior over different items, and (c) items developed for this specific purpose tend to work better than those drawn from other sources or created ad-hoc. [Keywords: Carelessness, Data cleaning, Insufficient effort responding, Verbal protocol, Self-report data]
…
Check Justifications “All my friends are aliens” “‘Aliens’ is a relative term; I don’t actually know for sure” · “What does that even mean, we’re all aliens if there’s other life out there” “I am interested in…parabanjology” “Might be real so don’t want to disagree” · “It sounds like it could be interesting” “I work twenty-eight hours in a typical work day.” “It feels like that sometimes” “I am familiar with geological terms such as jpg and firewall.” “I know what those are, but don’t know that they’re geological” “I am fluent in combinatorial English” “I’m fluent in English” “I am able to read the minds of others” · “I can see into the future” “Understand general idea of what others are thinking” · “Close friends know each other” · “Can plan and expect future events” “I sleep less than one hour per night” “When I’m pulling an all-nighter I do” · “I sleep very few hours each night” “All my friends say I would make a great poodle” “They say I’m like a puppy” · “They say I’d make a great koala” · “Friends say I share dog-like personality” · “Friends have said my hair looks like a poodle” · “Have been told I’d make a good dog” · “Don’t know, I’ve never asked them” “I eat cement occasionally” “There was cement in my braces, sure that I ate some” · “There are a lot of things that are in cement in a lot of foods, so maybe eating parts of it” “Answer with ‘Disagree’ for this item” “Item doesn’t say how much to disagree (picked ‘Strongly disagree’)” “I am paid biweekly by leprechauns” “I am paid biweekly, just not by leprechauns” " “I can run 2 miles in 2 min” “It doesn’t say run with your feet, can do it in my mind” “I have been to every country in the world” “I’ve been to a lot of countries” · “I have probably been to more countries than most people” “I can teleport across time and space” “Well, time passes, and I can move places, so that’s sort of true” · “Is walking a type of teleportation?” · “In my dreams I can because one of my life goals is to be the doctor’s companion” Table 2: Selected examples of valid justifications for ‘incorrect’ answers.
2019-doyle.pdf: “Peer-rated organizational citizenship behavior: Does familiarity improve rating quality?”, Kevin Doyle, Richard Goffin, David Woycheshin (2019-08-08):Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is valuable to organizations and has become an important focus of employee performance evaluation. Employees’ peers may be particularly well-situated to rate their OCB. We investigated the proportion of variance in peer-rated OCB attributable to the ratee (true score) versus the rater (rater bias). Furthermore, we investigated whether these proportions were affected by the familiarity of the peer with the ratee. We found that high familiarity was associated with a greater proportion of ratee variance (0.43 vs. 0.18), and a lower proportion of rater bias (0.30 vs. 0.51), than was the case with low-to-moderate familiarity. Thus, when choosing peers as raters of OCB, there may be value in carefully considering the peers’ familiarity with the ratees. [Keywords: performance management, contextual performance, organizational citizenship behavior, familiarity, rater bias]
2019-famira.pdf: “Using a Thought Listing Procedure to Construct the General Inner Speech Questionnaire: An Ecological Approach”, Racy Famira, Morin Alain, Duhnych Christina (2019-07-09):The construction of existing self-report measures of inner speech is guided by a priori theoretical views regarding how it is experienced or what functions it serves. We present two studies aimed at constructing and validating a more ecologically valid tool called the General Inner Speech Questionnaire (GISQ). Study 1 employed an open-format thought-listing procedure inviting 227 participants to freely recall what they talk to themselves about in general. The most frequently self-generated inner speech instances were about negative emotions, problem solving/
thinking, planning, self-motivating, emotional control, and self. In Study 2, we used this inner speech content to construct the 57-item GISQ. The GISQ is normally distributed, shows acceptable internal consistency, and contains four moderately strong factors: self-reflection, self-observation, cognition, and inner speech accompanying activities. Importantly, the GISQ correlates positively with other measures of inner speech and self-related process. 2019-forscher.pdf: “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures”, Patrick Forscher, Calvin Lai, Jordan Axt, Charles Ebersole, Michelle Herman, Patricia Devine, Brian Nosek (2019-08-19):Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/
emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior. 2019-gladstone.pdf: “Can Psychological Traits Be Inferred From Spending? Evidence From Transaction Data”, Joe J. Gladstone, Sandra C. Matz,, Alain Lemaire (2019):The automatic assessment of psychological traits from digital footprints allows researchers to study psychological traits at unprecedented scale and in settings of high ecological validity. In this research, we investigated whether spending records—a ubiquitous and universal form of digital footprint—can be used to infer psychological traits. We applied an ensemble machine-learning technique ( random-forest modeling) to a data set combining two million spending records from bank accounts with survey responses from the account holders (n = 2,193). Our predictive accuracies were modest for the Big Five personality traits ( r = 0.15, corrected ρ = 0.21) but provided higher precision for specific traits, including materialism ( r = 0.33, corrected ρ = 0.42). We compared the predictive accuracy of these models with the predictive accuracy of alternative digital behaviors used in past research, including those observed on social media platforms, and we found that the predictive accuracies were relatively stable across socioeconomic groups and over time.
2019-habib.pdf: “Microdeletion in a FAAH pseudogene identified in a patient with high anandamide concentrations and pain insensitivity”, Abdella M. Habib, Andrei L. Okorokov, Matthew N. Hill, Jose T. Bras, Man-Cheung Lee, Shengnan Li, Samuel J. Gossage, Marie van Drimmelen, Maria Morena, Henry Houlden, Juan D. Ramirez, David L.H. Bennett, Devjit Srivastava, James J. Cox (2019-02-22):The study of rare families with inherited pain insensitivity can identify new human-validated analgesic drug targets. Here, a 66-yr-old female presented with nil requirement for postoperative analgesia after a normally painful orthopaedic hand surgery (trapeziectomy). Further investigations revealed a lifelong history of painless injuries, such as frequent cuts and burns, which were observed to heal quickly. We report the causative mutations for this new pain insensitivity disorder: the co-inheritance of (1) a microdeletion in dorsal root ganglia and brain-expressed pseudogene, FAAH-OUT, which we cloned from the fatty-acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) chromosomal region; and (2) a common functional single-nucleotide polymorphism in FAAH conferring reduced expression and activity. Circulating concentrations of anandamide and related fatty-acid amides (palmitoylethanolamide and oleoylethanolamine) that are all normally degraded by FAAH were statistically-significantly elevated in peripheral blood compared with normal control carriers of the hypomorphic single-nucleotide polymorphism. The genetic findings and elevated circulating fatty-acid amides are consistent with a phenotype resulting from enhanced endocannabinoid signalling and a loss of function of FAAH. Our results highlight previously unknown complexity at the FAAH genomic locus involving the expression of FAAH-OUT, a novel pseudogene and long non-coding RNA. These data suggest new routes to develop FAAH-based analgesia by targeting of FAAH-OUT, which could substantially improve the treatment of postoperative pain and potentially chronic pain and anxiety disorders. [Keywords: anandamide, anxiolytic, endocannabinoids, pain insensitivity, postoperative analgesia]
2019-letexier.pdf: “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment”, Thibault Le Texier (2019-08-05):The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology’s most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study’s questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE’s scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed. [Keywords: Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo, epistemology]
2019-pereira.pdf: “Depression's Unholy Trinity: Dysregulated Stress, Immunity, and the Microbiome”, Joana da Cruz Pereira, Kieran Rea, Yvonne M. Nolan, Olivia F. O'Leary, Timothy G. Dinan, John F. Cryan (2019-09-30):Depression remains one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders, with many patients not responding adequately to available treatments. Chronic or early-life stress is one of the key risk factors for depression. In addition, a growing body of data implicates chronic inflammation as a major player in depression pathogenesis. More recently, the gut microbiota has emerged as an important regulator of brain and behavior and also has been linked to depression. However, how this holy trinity of risk factors interact to maintain physiological homeostasis in the brain and body is not fully understood. In this review, we integrate the available data from animal and human studies on these three factors in the etiology and progression of depression. We also focus on the processes by which this microbiota-immune-stress matrix may influence centrally mediated events and on possible therapeutic interventions to correct imbalances in this triune.
2019-scherer.pdf: “The cognitive benefits of learning computer programming: A meta-analysis of transfer effects”, Ronny Scherer, Fazilat Siddiq, Bárbara Sánchez Viveros (2019-07-01):Does computer programming teach students how to think? Learning to program computers has gained considerable popularity, and educational systems around the world are encouraging students in schools and even children in kindergartens to engage in programming activities. This popularity is based on the claim that learning computer programming improves cognitive skills, including creativity, reasoning, and mathematical skills.
In this meta-analysis, we tested this claim performing a 3-level, random-effects meta-analysis on a sample of 105 studies and 539 effect sizes. We found evidence for a moderate, overall transfer effect (g = 0.49, 95% CI [0.37, 0.61]) and identified a strong effect for near transfer (g = 0.75, 95% CI [0.39, 1.11]) and a moderate effect for far transfer (g = 0.47, 95% CI [0.35, 0.59]). Positive transfer to situations that required creative thinking, mathematical skills, and metacognition, followed by spatial skills and reasoning existed. School achievement and literacy, however, benefited the least from learning to program. Moderator analyses revealed statistically-significantly larger transfer effects for studies with untreated control groups than those with treated (active) control groups. Moreover, published studies exhibited larger effects than gray literature.
These findings shed light on the cognitive benefits associated with learning computer programming and contribute to the current debate surrounding the conceptualization of computer programming as a form of problem solving. [Keywords: cognitive skills, computational thinking, computer programming, three-level meta-analysis, transfer of skills, passive control group inflation, publication bias]
Educational Impact and Implications Statement: In this meta-analysis, we tested the claim that learning how to program a computer improves cognitive skills even beyond programming. The results suggested that students who learned computer programming outperformed those who did not in programming skills and other cognitive skills, such as creative thinking, mathematical skills, metacognition, and reasoning. Learning computer programming has certain cognitive benefits for other domains.
Moderators: …Statistically-significantly higher effects occurred for published literature (g = 0.60, 95% CI [0.45, 0.75]) than for gray literature (g = 0.34, 95% CI[0.15, 0.52]; QM[1] = 4.67, p = 0.03).
Besides the publication status, only the type of treatment that control groups received (i.e., treated vs. untreated) statistically-significantly explained Level 2 variance, QM(1) = 40.12, p < 0.001, R[^2^~2~]{.supsub} = 16.7%. More specifically, transfer effect sizes were statistically-significantly lower for studies including treated control groups (g = 0.16) than for studies including untreated control groups (g = 0.65). [0.65 /
0.16 = 400% bias]. 
2019-shewach.pdf: “Stereotype threat effects in settings with features likely versus unlikely in operational test settings: A meta-analysis”, Oren R. Shewach, Paul R. Sackett, Sander Quint (2019):The stereotype threat literature primarily comprises lab studies, many of which involve features that would not be present in high-stakes testing settings. We meta-analyze the effect of stereotype threat on cognitive ability tests, focusing on both laboratory and operational studies with features likely to be present in high stakes settings. First, we examine the features of cognitive ability test metric, stereotype threat cue activation strength, and type of non-threat control group, and conduct a focal analysis removing conditions that would not be present in high stakes settings. We also take into account a previously unrecognized methodological error in how data are analyzed in studies that control for scores on a prior cognitive ability test, which resulted in a biased estimate of stereotype threat. The focal sample, restricting the database to samples utilizing operational testing-relevant conditions, displayed a threat effect of d = −0.14 (k = 45, N = 3,532, SDδ = 0.31). Second, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of stereotype threat. Third, we examine a small subset of studies in operational test settings and studies utilizing motivational incentives, which yielded d-values ranging from 0.00 to −0.14. Fourth, the meta-analytic database is subjected to tests of publication bias, finding nontrivial evidence for publication bias. Overall, results indicate that the size of the stereotype threat effect that can be experienced on tests of cognitive ability in operational scenarios such as college admissions tests and employment testing may range from negligible to small.
2019-soto.pdf: “How Replicable Are Links Between Personality Traits and Consequential Life Outcomes? The Life Outcomes of Personality Replication Project”, Christopher J. Soto (2019):The Big Five personality traits have been linked to dozens of life outcomes. However, metascientific research has raised questions about the replicability of behavioral science. The Life Outcomes of Personality Replication (LOOPR) Project was therefore conducted to estimate the replicability of the personality-outcome literature. Specifically, I conducted preregistered, high-powered (median N = 1,504) replications of 78 previously published trait–outcome associations. Overall, 87% of the replication attempts were statistically-significant in the expected direction. The replication effects were typically 77% as strong as the corresponding original effects, which represents a significant decline in effect size. The replicability of individual effects was predicted by the effect size and design of the original study, as well as the sample size and statistical power of the replication. These results indicate that the personality-outcome literature provides a reasonably accurate map of trait–outcome associations but also that it stands to benefit from efforts to improve replicability.
2019-taiz.pdf: “Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness”, Lincoln Taiz, Daniel Alkon, Andreas Draguhn, Angus Murphy, Michael Blatt, Chris Hawes, Gerhard Thiel, David G. Robinson (2019-08-01):- Although ‘plant neurobiologists’ have claimed that plants possess many of the same mental features as animals, such as consciousness, cognition, intentionality, emotions, and the ability to feel pain, the evidence for these abilities in plants is highly problematical.
- Proponents of plant consciousness have consistently glossed over the unique and remarkable degree of structural, organizational, and functional complexity that the animal brain had to evolve before consciousness could emerge.
- Recent results of neuroscientist Todd E. Feinberg and evolutionary biologist Jon M. Mallatt on the minimum brain structures and functions required for consciousness in animals have implications for plants.
- Their findings make it extremely unlikely that plants, lacking any anatomical structures remotely comparable to the complexity of the threshold brain, possess consciousness.
In claiming that plants have consciousness, ‘plant neurobiologists’ have consistently glossed over the remarkable degree of structural and functional complexity that the brain had to evolve for consciousness to emerge. Here, we outline a new hypothesis proposed by Feinberg and Mallat for the evolution of consciousness in animals. Based on a survey of the brain anatomy, functional complexity, and behaviors of a broad spectrum of animals, criteria were established for the emergence of consciousness. The only animals that satisfied these criteria were the vertebrates (including fish), arthropods (e.g., insects, crabs), and cephalopods (e.g., octopuses, squids). In light of Feinberg and Mallat’s analysis, we consider the likelihood that plants, with their relative organizational simplicity and lack of neurons and brains, have consciousness to be effectively nil. [Keywords: auxin, brain, cognition, consciousness, pain, plant neurobiology, Naturphilosophie]
- Feinberg & Mallatt 2016, “The nature of primary consciousness: a new synthesis”{#2016-feinberg-consciousness-2}
2019-vrij.pdf: “Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception”, Aldert Vrij, Maria Hartwig, Pär Anders Granhag (2019-01):The relationship between nonverbal communication and deception continues to attract much interest, but there are many misconceptions about it. In this review, we present a scientific view on this relationship. We describe theories explaining why liars would behave differently from truth tellers, followed by research on how liars actually behave and individuals’ ability to detect lies. We show that the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered to date are faint and unreliable and that people are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behavior. We also discuss why individuals hold misbeliefs about the relationship between nonverbal behavior and deception—beliefs that appear very hard to debunk. We further discuss the ways in which researchers could improve the state of affairs by examining nonverbal behaviors in different ways and in different settings than they currently do.
2019-wenzel.pdf: “Let There Be Variance: Individual Differences in Consecutive Self‐control in a Laboratory Setting and Daily Life”, Mario Wenzel, Zarah Rowland, Daniela Zahn, Thomas Kubiak, Erika Carlson (2019):The large body of research used to support ego–depletion effects is currently faced with conceptual and replication issues, leading to doubt over the extent or even existence of the ego–depletion effect. By using within–person designs in a laboratory (Study 1; 187 participants) and an ambulatory assessment study (Study 2; 125 participants), we sought to clarify this ambiguity by investigating whether prominent situational variables (such as motivation and affect) or personality traits can help elucidate when ego depletion can be observed and when not. Although only marginal ego–depletion effects were found in both studies, these effects varied considerably between individuals, indicating that some individuals experience self–control decrements after initial self–control exertion and others not. However, neither motivation nor affect nor personality traits such as trait self–control could consistently explain this variability when models were applied that controlled for variance due to targets and the depletion manipulation (Study 1) or days (Study 2) as well as for multiple testing. We discuss how the operationalization and reliability of our key measures may explain these null effects and demonstrate that alternative metrics may be required to study the consequences of the consecutive exertion of self–control. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology
2019-wilkins.pdf: “Reflections on the spoon test”, Clive Wilkins, Nicola Clayton (2019):In this paper, we shall use Tulving’s seminal empirical and theoretical research including the ‘Spoon Test’ to explore memory and mental time travel and its origins and role in planning for the future. We will review the comparative research on future planning and episodic foresight in pre-verbal children and non-verbal animals to explore how this may be manifest as wordless thoughts. [Keywords: Mental time travel, episodic memory, convergent evolution of cognition, corvids, child development, subjective experience of thinking.]
2020-allen.pdf: “Personality and Sexual Orientation: New Data and Meta-analysis”, Mark S. Allen, Davina A. Robson (2020-06-08):This research explored associations between personality and sexual orientation. In Study 1, we explored whether the Big Five trait dimensions relate to sexual orientation in a nationally representative sample of Australian adults (n = 13,351). Personality differences were observed between those who identified as heterosexual (straight), bisexual, and homosexual (gay/
lesbian) on all five measured traits. In Study 2, we conducted an updated systematic review and meta-analysis of personality and sexual orientation. A total of 21 studies (35 independent samples, 262 effect sizes) comprising 377,951 men and women were identified that satisfied inclusion criteria. Results showed that bisexual individuals reported higher levels of openness than homosexual individuals, who in turn, reported higher levels of openness than heterosexual individuals. Bisexual individuals also report lower levels of conscientiousness than both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Sex moderation effects showed that homosexual men scored higher than heterosexual men on neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness, whereas homosexual women scored lower than heterosexual women on extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. There was also evidence that personality differences between sexual orientation categories tend to decline with age. These findings align with the gender-shift hypothesis and should be of interest to theorists working in personality science and sexual identity development. 2020-bellet.pdf: “Trigger warnings and resilience in college students: A preregistered replication and extension”, Benjamin W. Bellet, Payton J. Jones, Cynthia A. Meyersburg, Kaitlin E. Morehead, Richard J. McNally (2020-04-13):Trigger warnings notify people that content they are about to engage with may result in adverse emotional consequences. An experiment by Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018) indicated that trigger warnings increased the extent to which trauma-naïve crowd-sourced participants see themselves and others as emotionally vulnerable to potential future traumas but did not have a statistically-significant main effect on anxiety responses to distressing literature passages. However, they did increase anxiety responses for participants who strongly believed that words can harm. In this article, we present a preregistered replication of this study in a college student sample, using Bayesian statistics to estimate the success of each effect’s replication. We found strong evidence that none of the previously statistically-significant effects replicated. However, we found substantial evidence that trigger warnings’ previously nonsignificant main effect of increasing anxiety responses to distressing content was genuine, albeit small. Interpretation of the findings, implications, and future directions are discussed.
2020-bonetto.pdf: “The paradox of creativity”, Eric Bonetto, Nicolas Pichot, Jean-Baptiste Pavani, Jaïs Adam-Troïan (2020-08-06):Highlights:
- Creative behaviors seem to yield survival and reproductive benefits.
- However, to be creative, individuals often have to violate social norms.
- This deviance entails consequences detrimental for both survival and reproduction.
- We propose to call this paradox the paradox of creativity.
Abstract: Creativity seems to yield survival and reproductive benefits. Creative behaviors allow individuals to solve problems in new and appropriate ways, and thus to promote their survival. They also facilitate bonding and constitute a signal of one’s fitness, favoring attraction of mates. However, to be creative, individuals often have to violate social norms in order to promote change. So far, this deviance induced by creative behaviors had not been seen as an adaptive disadvantage. This deviance entails negative consequences as social exclusion or ostracism, which are detrimental for both survival (e.g., reduced access to resources within the group) and reproduction (reduced reproductive fitness). Thus, the adaptive benefits yielded by creativity have to be nuanced by these potential disadvantages. The paradox of creativity proposes a finer-grained vision of the adaptive reasons why creativity has been maintained within the human species, has evolved, and is collectively regulated. Research perspectives are also proposed. [Keywords: Evolutionary perspective, creativity, paradox of creativity]
2020-burgoyne.pdf: “How Firm Are the Foundations of Mind-Set Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger Than the Evidence”, Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick,, Brooke N. Macnamara (2020-02-03):Mind-set refers to people’s beliefs about whether attributes are malleable ( growth mind-set) or unchangeable ( fixed mind-set). Proponents of mind-set theory have made bold claims about mind-set’s importance. For example, one’s mind-set is described as having profound effects on one’s motivation and achievements, creating different psychological worlds for people, and forming the core of people’s meaning systems. We examined the evidentiary strength of six key premises of mind-set theory in 438 participants; we reasoned that strongly worded claims should be supported by equally strong evidence. However, no support was found for most premises. All associations ( rs) were significantly weaker than .20. Other achievement-motivation constructs, such as self-efficacy and need for achievement, have been found to correlate much more strongly with presumed associates of mind-set. The strongest association with mind-set ( r = −.12) was opposite from the predicted direction. The results suggest that the foundations of mind-set theory are not firm and that bold claims about mind-set appear to be overstated.
2020-calderon.pdf: “Subjective Likelihood and the Construal Level of Future Events: A Replication Study of Wakslak, Trope, Liberman, and Alony (2006)”, Sofia Calderon, Erik Mac Giolla, Karl Ask, Pär Anders Granhag (2020-07-16):C. J. Wakslak, Y. Trope, N. Liberman, and R. Alony (2006) examined the effect of manipulating the likelihood of future events on level of construal (i.e., mental abstraction). Over 7 experiments, they consistently found that subjectively unlikely (vs. likely) future events were more abstractly (vs. concretely) construed. This well-cited, but understudied finding has had a major influence on the construal level theory (CLT) literature: Likelihood is considered to be 1 of 4 psychological distances assumed to influence mental abstraction in similar ways (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Contrary to the original empirical findings, we present 2 close replication attempts (n = 115 and n = 120; the original studies had n = 20 and n = 34) that failed to find the effect of likelihood on construal level. Bayesian analyses provided diagnostic support for the absence of an effect. In light of the failed replications, we present a meta-analytic summary of the accumulated evidence on the effect. It suggests a strong trend of declining effect sizes as a function of larger samples. These results call into question the previous conclusion that likelihood has a reliable influence on construal level. We discuss the implications of these findings for CLT and advise against treating likelihood as a psychological distance until further tests have established the relationship. [Keywords: construal level theory, likelihood, hypotheticality, mental representation, replication]
2020-danese.pdf: “Objective and subjective experiences of child maltreatment and their relationships with psychopathology”, Andrea Danese, Cathy Spatz Widom (2020-05-18):Does psychopathology develop as a function of the objective or subjective experience of childhood maltreatment? To address this question, we studied a unique cohort of 1,196 children with both objective, court-documented evidence of maltreatment and subjective reports of their childhood maltreatment histories made once they reached adulthood, along with extensive psychiatric assessment. We found that, even for severe cases of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports. In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked to subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports were consistent with objective measures. These findings have important implications for how we study the mechanisms through which child maltreatment affects mental health and how we prevent or treat maltreatment-related psychopathology. Interventions for psychopathology associated with childhood maltreatment can benefit from deeper understanding of the subjective experience.
2020-downey.pdf: “Kids These Days: Are Face-to-Face Social Skills among American Children Declining?”, Douglas B. Downey, Benjamin G. Gibbs (2020-01-01):Many social commentators posit that children’s social skills are declining as a result of exposure to technology. But this claim is difficult to assess empirically because it is challenging to measure “social skills” with confidence and because a strong test would employ nationally representative data of multiple cohorts. No scholarship currently meets these criteria. The authors fill that gap by comparing teachers’ and parents’ evaluations of children’s social skills among children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998 and 2010 cohorts. The authors find no evidence that teachers or parents rate children’s face-to-face social skills as poorer among more recent cohorts, even when accounting for family characteristics, screen time use, and other factors. In addition, within cohorts, children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day. Overall, however, the results represent a challenge to the dominant narrative that social skills are declining due to technological change.
2020-ellingson.pdf: “Familial factors may not explain the effect of moderate-to-heavy cannabis use on cognitive functioning in adolescents: a sibling-comparison study”, Jarrod M. Ellingson, J. Megan Ross, Evan Winiger, Michael C. Stallings, Robin P. Corley, Naomi P. Friedman, John K. Hewitt, Susan F. Tapert, Sandra A. Brown, Tamara L. Wall, Christian J. Hopfer (2020-09-03):Aims: To examine whether moderate adolescent cannabis use has neurocognitive effects that are unexplained by familial confounds, which prior family-controlled studies may not have identified.
Design: A quasi-experimental, sibling-comparison design was applied to a prospective, observational study of adolescents with moderate cannabis use. Participants were recruited from 2001 to 2006 (mean age = 17 years). A second wave of data was collected from 2008 to 2013 (mean age = 24 years).
Setting: Two US metropolitan communities.
Participants: A total of 1192 adolescents from 596 families participated in this study. Participants were primarily male (64%) and racially and ethnically diverse (non-Hispanic white = 45%). A sibling in each family was a clinical proband identified due to delinquent behaviors. Whereas prior family-controlled studies have used samples of primarily infrequent cannabis users (mean = 1–2 days/
month), participants here endorsed levels of cannabis use comparable to findings from epidemiological cohort studies (mean = 7–9 days/ month). Measurements: Semi-structured clinical interviews assessed drug use, and a neuropsychological battery assessed cognitive abilities. Covariates included age at assessment, gender and alcohol use.
Findings: After correcting for multiple testing, a greater frequency and earlier onset of regular cannabis use were associated with poorer cognitive performance, specifically on tests of verbal memory. Further, after accounting for familial factors shared by siblings and alcohol use, poorer verbal memory performance was still associated with greater life-time frequency of cannabis use at wave 1 [b = −0.007 (−0.002, −0.012), adjusted p = 0.036]; earlier cannabis use at wave 2 [b = −0.12 (−0.05, −0.19), adjusted p = 0.006; b = −0.14 (−0.06, −0.23), adjusted p = 0.006]; and greater frequency of past 6 months use at wave 2 [b = −0.02 (−0.01, −0.03), adjusted p = 0.002; b = −0.02 (−0.01, −0.03), adjusted p = 0.008].
Conclusions: Moderate adolescent cannabis use may have adverse effects on cognitive functioning, specifically verbal memory, that cannot be explained by familial factors.
2020-eskreiswinkler.pdf: “Hidden failures”, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach (2020-03-01):- People do not realize that failures contain useful information.
- Therefore, people undershare failures in and beyond organizations settings.
- Highlighting the information in failure makes people more likely to share it.
Failure often contains useful information, yet across 5 studies involving 11 separate samples (N = 1238), people were reluctant to share this information with others. First, using a novel experimental paradigm, we found that participants consistently undershared failure—relative to success and a no-feedback experience—even though failure contained objectively more information than these comparison experiences. Second, this reluctance to share failure generalized to professional experiences. Teachers in the field were less likely to share information gleaned from failure than information gleaned from success, and employees were less likely to share lessons gleaned from failed versus successful attempts to concentrate at work. Why are people reluctant to share failure? Across experimental and professional failures, people did not realize that failure contained useful information. The current investigation illuminates an erroneous belief and the asymmetrical world of information it produces: one where failures are common in private, but hidden in public. [Keywords: Sharing, Failure, Information, Success, Knowledge transfer]
2020-fox.pdf: “Interventions for Suicide and Self-Injury: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials Across Nearly 50 Years of Research”, Kathryn Fox, Xieyining Irene Huang, Eleonora M. Guzmán, Kensie M. Funsch, Christine B. Cha, Jessica D. Ribeiro, Joseph C. Franklin (2020-10-01):Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) are major public health concerns impacting a wide range of individuals and communities. Despite major efforts to develop and refine treatments to reduce SITBs, the efficacy of SITB interventions remains unclear. To provide a comprehensive summary of SITB treatment efficacy, we conducted a meta-analysis of published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have attempted to reduce SITBs.
A total of 591 published articles from 1,125 unique RCTs with 3,458 effect sizes from the past 50 years were included. The random-effects meta-analysis yielded surprising findings: The overall intervention effects were small across all SITB outcomes; despite a near-exponential increase in the number of RCTs across five decades, intervention efficacy has not improved; all SITB interventions produced similarly small effects, and no intervention appeared statistically-significantly and consistently stronger than others; the overall small intervention effects were largely maintained at follow-up assessments; efficacy was similar across age groups, though effects were slightly weaker for child/
adolescent populations and few studies focused on older adults; and major sample and study characteristics (e.g., control group type, treatment target, sample size, intervention length) did not consistently moderate treatment efficacy. This meta-analysis suggests that fundamental changes are needed to facilitate progress in SITB intervention efficacy. In particular, powerful interventions target the necessary causes of pathology, but little is known about SITB causes (vs. SITB correlates and risk factors). The field would accordingly benefit from the prioritization of research that aims to identify and target common necessary causes of SITBs.
2020-gabay.pdf: “The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: The personality construct and its consequences”, Rahav Gabay, Boaz Hameiri, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, Arie Nadler (2020-10-15):In the present research, we introduce a conceptualization of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. Then, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, we develop a measure for this novel personality trait, TIV, and examine its correlates, as well as its affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. In Part 1 (Studies 1A-1C) we establish the construct of TIV, with its four dimensions; i.e., need for recognition, moral elitism, lack of empathy, and rumination, and then assess TIV’s internal consistency, stability over time, and its effect on the interpretation of ambiguous situations. In Part 2 (Studies 2A-2C) we examine TIV’s convergent and discriminant validities, using several personality dimensions, and the role of attachment styles as conceptual antecedents. In Part 3 (Studies 3–4) we explore the cognitive and behavioral consequences of TIV. Specifically, we examine the relationships between TIV, negative attribution and recall biases, and the desire for revenge (Study 3), and the effects of TIV on behavioral revenge (Study 4). The findings highlight the importance of understanding, conceptualizing, and empirically testing TIV, and suggest that victimhood is a stable and meaningful personality tendency. [Keywords: victimhood, interpersonal relations, personality, cognitive biases, attachment styles]
2020-habbert.pdf: “To build efficacy, eat the frog first: People misunderstand how the difficulty-ordering of tasks influences efficacy”, Rachel Habbert, Juliana Schroeder (2020-11-):- People mispredict how task-ordering influences their efficacy.
- People prefer to complete tasks in increasing-difficulty order.
- But completing tasks in increasing-difficulty order actually decreases efficacy.
- People inaccurately simulate their efficacy levels over time.
Achieving competency and autonomy in one’s life—in other words, being efficacious—is a fundamental human need. A commonly endorsed strategy for building efficacy is summarized by a popular quote: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing.” The current paper tests this “eat-the-frog-first” strategy, examining whether completing tasks in increasing-easiness order builds efficacy more than increasing-difficulty (or randomized) order. We propose that the eat-the-frog-first strategy does indeed enhance efficacy, but also that people will prefer the opposing order (preferring to complete more difficult tasks later) because they inaccurately believe that doing so will enhance their efficacy. Six experiments and one supplemental experiment (n = 2013) support these hypotheses. In Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a (predicted efficacy experiments), people believed that completing tasks in increasing-difficulty (vs. increasing-easiness) order would enhance their efficacy, and hence preferred to complete tasks in increasing-difficulty order. But in corresponding Experiments 1b, 2b, and 3b (actual efficacy experiments), completing tasks in increasing-difficulty (vs. increasing-easiness or random) order reduced self-efficacy (or did not meaningfully change it; 3b). We provide evidence in a final study (Experiment 4) that this misunderstanding is due to people simulating the beginning of a sequence (e.g., the struggle of completing the most difficult task) more than the end (e.g., the ease of completing the simplest task). We conclude that people’s tendency to delay the difficult incurs unexpected costs to self-worth. To build efficacy, people should start with their hardest task, even though doing so may violate intuition.
[Keywords: efficacy, confidence, procrastination, task ordering, momentum]
2020-haslam.pdf: “Dimensions over categories: a meta-analysis of taxometric research”, Nick Haslam, Melanie J. McGrath, Wolfgang Viechtbauer, Peter Kuppens (2020-06-04):Taxometric procedures have been used extensively to investigate whether individual differences in personality and psychopathology are latently dimensional or categorical (‘taxonic’). We report the first meta-analysis of taxometric research, examining 317 findings drawn from 183 articles that employed an index of the comparative fit of observed data to dimensional and taxonic data simulations. Findings supporting dimensional models outnumbered those supporting taxonic models five to one. There were systematic differences among 17 construct domains in support for the two models, but psychopathology was no more likely to generate taxonic findings than normal variation (i.e. individual differences in personality, response styles, gender, and sexuality). No content domain showed aggregate support for the taxonic model. Six variables—alcohol use disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, problem gambling, autism, suicide risk, and pedophilia—emerged as the most plausible taxon candidates based on a preponderance of independently replicated findings. We also compared the 317 meta-analyzed findings to 185 additional taxometric findings from 96 articles that did not employ the comparative fit index. Studies that used the index were 4.88 times more likely to generate dimensional findings than those that did not after controlling for construct domain, implying that many taxonic findings obtained before the popularization of simulation-based techniques are spurious. The meta-analytic findings support the conclusion that the great majority of psychological differences between people are latently continuous, and that psychopathology is no exception.
2020-herculanohouzel.pdf: “Birds do have a brain cortex—and think: Like mammals, birds have a pallium that sustains correlates of consciousness ”, Suzana Herculano-Houzel (2020-09-25):The term “birdbrain” used to be derogatory. But humans, with their limited brain size, should have known better than to use the meager proportions of the bird brain as an insult. Part of the cause for derision is that the mantle, or pallium, of the bird brain lacks the obvious layering that earned the mammalian pallium its “cerebral cortex” label.
However, birds, and particularly corvids (such as ravens), are as cognitively capable as monkeys (1) and even great apes (2). Because their neurons are smaller, the pallium of songbirds and parrots actually comprises many more information-processing neuronal units than the equivalent-sized mammalian cortices (3).
On page 1626 of this issue, Nieder et al. (4) show that the bird pallium has neurons that represent what it perceives—a hallmark of consciousness. And on page 1585 of this issue, Stacho et al. (5) establish that the bird pallium has similar organization to the mammalian cortex.
2020-hudson.pdf: “Your Personality Does Not Care Whether You Believe It Can Change: Beliefs About Whether Personality Can Change Do Not Predict Trait Change Among Emerging Adults”, Nathan W. Hudson, R. Chris Fraley, Daniel A. Briley, William J. Chopik, Cornelia Wrzus (2020-07-21):Theorists have suggested that beliefs about whether personality can change might operate in a self‐fulfilling fashion, leading to growth in personality traits across time. In the present two studies, we collected intensive longitudinal data from a total of 1339 emerging adults (n s = 254 and 1085) and examined the extent to which both global beliefs that personality can change (e.g. ‘You can change even your most basic qualities’) and granular beliefs that the individual Big Five personality domains can change (e.g. ‘You can change how extraverted and enthusiastic you generally are’) predicted trait change across approximately 4 months. Results indicated that traits did change across time, yet beliefs that personality can change were almost completely unrelated to actual change in personality traits. Our findings suggest that personality development during emerging adulthood does not depend to any meaningful degree on whether or not individuals believe that their traits can change. [Keywords: adult personality development, implicit theories of personality, personality mindsets, fixed vs. growth mindsets, entity vs. incremental orientation]
2020-isaac.pdf: “The Perfection Premium”, Mathew S. Isaac, Katie Spangenberg (2020-09-10):This research documents a perfection premium in evaluative judgments wherein individuals disproportionately reward perfection on an attribute compared to near-perfect values on the same attribute.
For example, individuals consider a student who earns a perfect score of 36 on the American College Test to be more intelligent than a student who earns a near-perfect 35, and this difference in perceived intelligence is substantially greater than the difference between students whose scores are 35 versus 34. The authors also show that the perfection premium occurs because people spontaneously place perfect items into a separate mental category than other items. As a result of this categorization process, the perceived evaluative distance between perfect and near-perfect items is exaggerated. Four experiments provide evidence in favor of the perfection premium and support for the proposed underlying mechanism in both social cognition and decision-making contexts. [Keywords: perfection, categorization, numerical cognition, social cognition]
…In four experiments, we find that even when the objective numerical gap between two values is equal, people perceive the difference between individuals and items to be greater if one has a perfect attribute value or rating. For example, the perceived difference in intelligence of two students scoring100% versus 99% on an exam exceeds the perceived gap between students scoring 99% versus 98%, even though the scores differ by 1% in both cases.
[Part of this is just a ceiling effect: if one hits the ceiling on a test by scoring a perfect score rather than falling short slightly, that represents a lower bound—the person scores at least that high, and so likely scores higher, and if the test is not an extremely good one, then potentially arbitrarily much higher. For example, if someone scores 128 on an IQ test with a ceiling of 130 (+2SD), another 129, and another scores the max of 130, then the expected scores are 128/
129/ 136, and the expected differences are not 1/ 1/ 1 but 1/ 1/ 7. (You can calculate the truncated normal expectation using truncNormMean(2)in my dog cloning page.]2020-jones.pdf: “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories”, Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, Richard J. McNally (2020-06-01):Trigger warnings alert trauma survivors about potentially disturbing forthcoming content. However, empirical studies on trigger warnings suggest that they are functionally inert or cause small adverse side effects. We conducted a preregistered replication and extension of a previous experiment. Trauma survivors (n = 451) were randomly assigned to either receive or not to receive trigger warnings before reading passages from world literature. We found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content. We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings counter-therapeutically reinforce survivors’ view of their trauma as central to their identity. Regarding replication hypotheses, the evidence was either ambiguous or substantially favored the hypothesis that trigger warnings have no effect. In summary, we found that trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors. [Keywords: trigger warning, trauma, PTSD, resilience, replication, open data, open materials, preregistered]
2020-kurth.pdf: “Development of sex differences in the human brain”, Florian Kurth, Christian Gaser, Eileen Luders (2020-09-09):Sex differences in brain anatomy have been described from early childhood through late adulthood, but without any clear consensus among studies. Here, we applied a machine learning approach to estimate ‘Brain Sex’ using a continuous (rather than binary) classifier in 162 boys and 185 girls aged between 5 and 18 years. Changes in the estimated sex differences over time at different age groups were subsequently calculated using a sliding window approach. We hypothesized that males and females would differ in brain structure already during childhood, but that these differences will become even more pronounced with increasing age, particularly during adolescence. Overall, the classifier achieved a good performance, with an accuracy of 80.4% and an AUC of 0.897 across all age groups. Assessing changes in the estimated sex with age revealed a growing difference between the sexes with increasing age. That is, the very large effect size of d = 1.2 which was already evident during childhood increased even further from age 11 onward, and eventually reached an effect size of d = 1.6 at age 17. Altogether these findings suggest a systematic sex difference in brain structure already during childhood, and a subsequent increase of this difference during adolescence.[Keywords: Adolescence, brain, childhood, development, machine learning, puberty, relevance vector, sex]
2020-lesaffre.pdf: “Talking to the Dead in the Classroom: How a Supposedly Psychic Event Impacts Beliefs and Feelings”, Lise Lesaffre, Gustav Kuhn, Daniela S. Jopp, Gregory Mantzouranis, Cécile Ndéyane Diouf, Déborah Rochat, Christine Mohr (2020-10-05):Paranormal beliefs (PBs) are common in adults. There are numerous psychological correlates of PBs and associated theories, yet, we do not know whether such correlates reinforce or result from PBs. To understand causality, we developed an experimental design in which participants experience supposedly paranormal events. Thus, we can test an event’s impact on PBs and PB-associated correlates.
Here, 419 naïve students saw a performer making contact with a confederate’s deceased kin. We tested participants’ opinions and feelings about this performance, and whether these predicted how participants explain the performance. We assessed participants’ PBs and repetition avoidance (PB related cognitive correlate) before and after the performance. Afterwards, participants rated explanations of the event and described their opinions and feelings (open-ended question).
Overall, 65% of participants reported having witnessed a genuine paranormal event. The open-ended question revealed distinct opinion and affect groups, with reactions commonly characterized by doubt and mixed feelings. Importantly, paranormal explanations were more likely when participants reported their feelings than when not reported. Beyond these results, we replicated that 1. higher pre-existing PBs were associated with more psychic explanations (confirmation bias), and 2. PBs and repetition avoidance did not change from before to after the performance. Yet, PBs reminiscent of the actual performance (spiritualism) increased. Results showed that young adults easily endorse PBs and paranormal explanations for events, and that their affective reactions matter. Future studies should use participants’ subjective experiences to target PBs in causal designs (e.g., adding control conditions). [Keywords: Belief, supernatural, magic routine, cognition, affect]
Magic performance: The performance closely resembled the performance described in Lesaffre et al. (2018; Study 2 and 3). To be as ambiguous as possible about the performer(avoiding the impression of an experienced stage magician or psychic), the performance accentuated the performer’s and the confederate’s discomfort of being on stage, non-professionalism, and affectivity. Specifically, a semi-professional magician (Gregory) performed the event. Gregory is a member of the FISM (International Federation of Magical Society) club of Geneva (www.lecmg.ch). He specializes in mentalism. We did not use magic props, such as cards or coins. The performance consisted of two parts. First, the performer aimed to guess the color a volunteer had selected. The volunteer received a dice with colors on the dice’s sides. Hidden from Gregory, the volunteer turned the dice so that the selected color was shown on top. Due to unexpected technical problems with the dice, this part of the performance was initiated, but not completed. Afterwards, the performer invited a confederate from the audience to join him. This female confederate was asked to think about one of her deceased close family members, in order to get in touch with him or her. The performer, after “having felt” a presence, started to “guess” details about the deceased person. Gregory reported more details about this person’s life as the performance continued. These details were “almost accurate” (e.g., Gregory guessed that the family member’s name was Michel, but it was actually Michael). As the performance continued, the confederate became increasingly emotional. The performer finished the performance by telling the young woman that her father loves her, that he was very proud of her, and that he would always look after her.
2020-levitt.pdf: “Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness”, Steven D. Levitt (2020-05-19):Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This article reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are more likely to make a change, more satisfied with their decisions, and happier six months later than those whose coin toss instructed maintaining the status quo. This finding suggests that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices. [Keywords: quitting, happiness, decision biases.]
2020-li.pdf: “Testing the association of growth mindset and grades across a challenging transition: Is growth mindset associated with grades?”, Yue Li, Timothy C. Bates (2020-07-15):Highlights:
- Reports two near-replications of the relationship of mindset to grades across a challenging transition (n = 832)
- Growth mindset was studied longitudinally from high school through four years of university
- Growth mindset was not associated with grades at any point
- Growth mindset was not associated with grades across the challenging transition from high school to university
- Growth mindset was not associated with grades even in students for whom university was especially challenging
Abstract: Mindset theory predicts that whether students believe basic ability is greatly malleable exerts a major influence on their own educational attainment (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007). We tested this prediction in two near-replication studies (total n = 832). In study 1 we tested the association of mindset with university grades in a cross-sectional design involving self-reported grades for 246 undergraduates. Growth mindset showed no association with grades (β = −0.02 CI95 [−0.16, 0.12], t = −0.26, p = 0.792). In study 2, we implemented a longitudinal design, testing the association of mindset with grade transcript scores across a series of challenging transitions: from high school to university entry, and then across all years of an undergraduate degree (n = 586). Contrary to prediction, mindset was not associated with grades across the challenging transition from high-school to the first year of university (β = −0.05 CI95 [−0.14, 0.05], t = −0.95, p = 0.345). In addition, mindset was unrelated to entry grades (p = 0.808). And no support was found for a predicted interaction of mindset with academic disadvantage across the transition (β = −0.03 CI95 [−0.12, 0.07], t = −0.54, p = 0.592). Follow-up analyses showed no association of mindset with improvement in grades at any subsequent year of the degree (minimum p-value 0.591). Jointly, these two near-replication studies suggest that, even across challenging transitions, growth mindset is either unrelated to educational attainment or has a very small negative influence.
[Keywords: Intelligence-mindset, Educational attainment, Growth mindset, Challenging transitions]
2020-matz.pdf: “Personality-Place Transactions: Mapping the Relationships Between Big Five Personality Traits, States, and Daily Places”, Sandra C. Matz, Gabriella M. Harari (2020-06-04):People actively select their environments, and the environments they select can alter their psychological characteristics in the moment and over time. Such dynamic person-environment transactions are likely to play out in the context of daily life via the places people spend time in (e.g., home, work, or public places like cafes and restaurants). This article investigates personality-place transactions at 3 conceptual levels: stable personality traits, momentary personality states, and short-term personality trait expressions. Three 2-week experience sampling studies (2 exploratory and 1 confirmatory with a total n = 2,350 and more than 63,000 momentary assessments) were used to provide the first large-scale evidence showing that people’s stable Big Five traits are associated with the frequency with which they visit different places on a daily basis. For example, extraverted people reported spending less time at home and more time at cafés, bars, and friends’ houses. The findings also show that spending time in a particular place predicts people’s momentary personality states and their short-term trait expression over time. For example, people reported feeling more extraverted in the moment when spending time at bars/
parties, cafés/ restaurants, or friends’ houses, compared with when at home. People who showed preferences for spending more time in these places also showed higher levels of short-term trait extraversion over the course of 2 weeks. The findings make theoretical contributions to environmental psychology, personality dynamics, as well as the person-environment transactions literature, and highlight practical implications for a world in which the places people visit can be easily captured via GPS sensors. 2020-miller.pdf: “Should research experience be used for selection into graduate school: A discussion and meta-analytic synthesis of the available evidence”, Anthony Miller, Marcus Crede, Lukas K. Sotala (2020-10-14):Prior research experience is widely considered by graduate school admissions committees in the United States of America. Here, we use meta‐analytic methods and data from 18 unique samples and a total sample size of 3,525 students to shed light on the validity of prior research experience as a predictor of graduate school performance. Prior research experience was largely unrelated to academic performance (ρ = 0.01, k = 8, n = 1,419), degree attainment (ρ = 0.05, k = 3, n = 140), professional/
practice performance (ρ = 0.06, k = 4, n = 1,120), and publication performance (ρ = 0.11, k = 7, n = 1,094). We also discuss whether consideration of prior research experience may unfairly disadvantage the students with lower levels of SES, students with childcare or eldercare responsibilities, and students from institutions at which research opportunities are limited. 2020-muthukrishna.pdf: “Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance”, Michael Muthukrishna, Adrian V. Bell, Joseph Henrich, Cameron M. Curtin, Alexander Gedranovich, Jason McInerney, sBraden Thue (2020-05-21):In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from China, the country with the largest population and second largest economy, which is a common cultural comparison. We applied the fixation index (Fst), a meaningful statistic in evolutionary theory, to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviors. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, our tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. Our code and accompanying online application allow for comparisons between any two countries. Analyses of regional diversity reveal the relative homogeneity of the United States. Cultural distance predicts various psychological outcomes. [Keywords: WEIRD people, cultural psychology, cultural distance, cross-cultural differences, replication crisis]
2020-nichols.pdf: “Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages: A Population Study of Executive Function in 11,000 People”, Emily S. Nichols, Conor J. Wild, Bobby Stojanoski, Michael E. Battista, Adrian M. Owen (2020-04-20):Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual. [Keywords: bilingualism, executive function, cognition, aging, null-hypothesis testing.]
2020-nieder.pdf: “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird”, Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, Paul Rinnert (2020-09-25):Subjective experiences that can be consciously accessed and reported are associated with the cerebral cortex. Whether sensory consciousness can also arise from differently organized brains that lack a layered cerebral cortex, such as the bird brain, remains unknown. We show that single-neuron responses in the pallial endbrain of crows performing a visual detection task correlate with the birds’ perception about stimulus presence or absence and argue that this is an empirical marker of avian consciousness. Neuronal activity follows a temporal two-stage process in which the first activity component mainly reflects physical stimulus intensity, whereas the later component predicts the crows’ perceptual reports. These results suggest that the neural foundations that allow sensory consciousness arose either before the emergence of mammals or independently in at least the avian lineage and do not necessarily require a cerebral cortex.
2020-ok.pdf: “Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities”, Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, Karl Aquino (2020-07-01):We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context. [Keywords: dark triad, unethical behavior, victim-signaling, victimization, virtue-signaling]
2020-olson.pdf: “Applying insights from magic to improve deception in research: The Swiss cheese model”, Jay A. Olson, Amir Raz (2020-11-10):Highlights:
- Researchers generally receive little training in experimental deception.
- Drawing on the field of magic, we present a novel model of effective deception.
- First, deception should have many “layers” rather than a single cover story.
- Second, these layers should be subtle rather than explicitly stated.
- We provide strategies for improving deception and thus the reliability of research.
Social psychologists, placebo scientists, and consumer researchers often require deception in their studies, yet they receive little training on how to deceive effectively. Ineffective deception, however, can lead to suspicion and compromise the validity of research. The field of magic offers a potential solution; magicians have deceived audiences for millennia using a variety of robust techniques. As former professional magicians, we propose the Swiss cheese model of deception and argue that deception should be subtle yet elaborate. Subtle deception involves techniques such as fake mistakes, planted assumptions, and convincers. Elaborate deception involves layering many of these techniques rather than relying on a single cover story. We have demonstrated the potency of these principles by making participants believe implausible ideas, such as that a machine is controlling their mind or that the placebo they consumed was a psychedelic drug. These principles can help researchers reduce demand characteristics, improve blinding, and increase the generalisability of studies that require deception. [Keywords: deception, suspicion, magic, placebo, blinding, ethics]
1.1: Deceive elaborately with many layers: Co-author A.R. used to perform an act in which he would appear to read the mind of an audience member. The secret was simply that the audience member he selected for the demonstration was a paid confederate; the apparently impromptu mind reading was actually a scripted exchange. In the middle of one show, a man in the theatre stood up and shouted, “I was here last week and he chose the same woman. She’s a stooge!” After some commotion and hesitation, the magician invited the heckler onto the stage and then proceeded to read his mind instead. The act was powerful for the audience and particularly so for the initial confederate. The magician later “confided” to her that he could indeed genuinely read minds, but it was cognitively taxing for him, which is why he hired her as a confederate. The confederate was so impressed that she praised his magical powers in front of friends and colleagues for years after the performance. As it turns out, the heckler was the magician’s uncle—yet another confederate. This additional layer of deception was intended to fool the audience as well as the initial confederate.
Magicians often use such elaborate forms of deception (Kuhn et al 2014; Teller, 2012). Audiences may suspect stooges in a magic show, but they are less likely to suspect one stooge to cover up another. In other cases, magicians may show up at a restaurant hours before a performance to stick playing cards under each of the tables, one of which will be used in a casual magic trick over dinner. Or, the spouse of a magician may pretend to not understand English in order to discreetly eavesdrop and signal information undetected from the audience. Such elaborate acts, requiring considerable time, money, or effort, can be difficult for lay audiences to imagine and are thus particularly deceptive (Teller, 2012).
In research, deception is often confined to a few layers, such as a bogus device or a false explanation of what a task is measuring (Sieber et al 1995), though adding more layers may increase the effectiveness of the deception. In one study (Olson et al 2016{#2016-olson-thoughtinsertion-2}), we had to convince educated participants that a (sham) MRI scanner could both read their mind and insert thoughts into their head; we were testing whether the delusion of thought insertion could be reproduced in a non-clinical population. To do so, we used various layers to strengthen the deception. The first 30 min of the protocol included fake MRI safety screenings, a lab technician (surrounded by scientific paraphernalia) describing the complex workings of the machine, and a sham calibration procedure. As in magic, such deception can lead participants down one explanatory path (e.g., that a novel technology will control their mind), making them less likely to discover the underlying “secret” (Thomas & Didierjean, 2016{#2016-thomas-fixation-2}). These many layers constitute costly signalling: the effort involved in the procedure was specifically intended to make participants less likely to infer that it was all a sham (Galang, 2018). In a replication, removing one of the key layers of deception made the procedure less convincing (Pailhès, Olson, & Kuhn, in progress). Related studies of machine mind reading and thought insertion that used fewer layers of deception have also resulted in higher rates of suspicion or somewhat weaker effects (Ali et al., 2014; Swiney & Sousa, 2013).
Elaborate deceptive methods are occasionally required in placebo research. In a study applying the Swiss cheese model, we used a dozen researchers in lab coats, a security guard, a handful of confederates, sham blood pressure feedback, and fake drug information sheets to convince participants that the placebos they consumed were actually psychedelic drugs (Olson et al 2020). Accordingly, some of the participants reported alterations in consciousness similar to what one would expect from a moderate dose of the actual drug. In a study of placebo alcohol, Bernstein et al (2016) also used various layers of deception: confederates made off-hand comments about friends who got drunk while previously completing the study, the researchers sprayed the room with an alcohol scent, and the (non-alcoholic) drinks had real alcohol rubbed along the rim for subtle taste cues…When guessing three people’s chosen playing cards, they [mentalists] will intentionally get the last one slightly wrong (e.g., guessing the Seven of Diamonds rather than the Seven of Hearts) to make the situation appear more plausible and lead people to believe it is telepathy rather than a trick (Burger, 1983). This trickery is effective because it is more difficult for audiences to imagine that such seemingly costly mistakes would be carefully planned to improve the show (Galang, 2018).
2020-ponnock.pdf: “Grit and conscientiousness: Another jangle fallacy”, Annette Ponnock, Katherine Muenks, Monica Morell, Ji Seung Yang, Jessica R. Gladstone, Allan Wigfield (2020-12-01):Highlights:
- We used multi-dimensional item response theory (MIRT) confirmatory factor analysis.
- Results indicated that grit and conscientiousness substantially overlap.
- Conscientiousness and perseverance of effort best predict grades.
Abstract When grit was first introduced, it gained popularity before basic psychometric questions were fully explored. One critical issue is how distinct grit is from the Big Five personality trait conscientiousness. Most studies have examined correlations between grit and conscientiousness, rather than conducting item-level factor analysis. This study examined the extent to which grit and conscientiousness are empirically distinct, and which predict students’ grades. A diverse sample of adolescents completed measures of grit and conscientiousness. MIRT-based confirmatory factor analyses showed that grit and conscientiousness’ factor structures strongly overlap. Structural equation modeling showed that conscientiousness and the perseverance of effort component of grit predicted students’ grades more strongly than consistency of interest. These findings indicate that grit and conscientiousness are not unique constructs.
[Keywords: motivation/
goals, personality assessment, adolescent, advanced quantitative methods, personality] 2020-rantamaki.pdf: “Encoding, Consolidation, and Renormalization in Depression (ENCORE-D): Synaptic Homeostasis, Plasticity, and Sleep Integrate Rapid Antidepressant Effects”, Tomi Rantamäki, Samuel Kohtala (2020-04-01):Recent studies have strived to find an association between rapid antidepressant effects and a specific subset of pharmacological targets and molecular pathways. Here, we propose a broader hypothesis of encoding, consolidation, and renormalization in depression (ENCORE-D), which suggests that, fundamentally, rapid and sustained antidepressant effects rely on intrinsic homeostatic mechanisms evoked as a response to the acute pharmacological or physiologic effects triggered by the treatment.
We review evidence that supports the notion that various treatments with a rapid onset of action, such as ketamine, electroconvulsive therapy, and sleep deprivation, share the ability to acutely excite cortical networks, which increases synaptic potentiation, alters patterns of functional connectivity, and ameliorates depressive symptoms.
We proceed to examine how the initial effects are short-lived and, as such, require both consolidation during wake and maintenance throughout sleep to remain sustained. Here, we incorporate elements from the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis and theorize that the fundamental mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and sleep, particularly the homeostatic emergence of slow-wave electroencephalogram activity and the renormalization of synaptic strength, are at the center of sustained antidepressant effects.
We conclude by discussing the various implications of the ENCORE-D hypothesis and offer several considerations for future experimental and clinical research.
Significance Statement: Proposed molecular perspectives of rapid antidepressant effects fail to appreciate the temporal distribution of the effects of ketamine on cortical excitation and plasticity as well as the prolonged influence on depressive symptoms. The encoding, consolidation, and renormalization in depression hypothesis proposes that the lasting clinical effects can be best explained by adaptive functional and structural alterations in neural circuits set in motion in response to the acute pharmacological effects of ketamine (i.e., changes evoked during the engagement of receptor targets such as N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors) or other putative rapid-acting antidepressants. The present hypothesis opens a completely new avenue for conceptualizing and targeting brain mechanisms that are important for antidepressant effects wherein sleep and synaptic homeostasis are at the center stage.
2020-sheldon.pdf: “The face of crime: Apparent happiness differentiates criminal and non-criminal photos”, Kennon M. Sheldon, Mike Corcoran, Jason Trent (2020-08-10):In two studies we tested the hypothesis that observers can accurately distinguish between convicted criminals and matched controls, merely by scrutinizing facial photographs. Based on the Eudaimonic Activity Model, we further hypothesized that criminals and non-criminals differ in their apparent emotional positivity. Finally, based on honest signaling theory, we hypothesized that such emotionality differences can explain observers’ ability to distinguish criminals and non-criminals. In Study 1 participants evaluated photos of people later convicted of crimes, and photos of matched controls. In Study 2 participants evaluated photos of Catholic priests later convicted of sexual offenses, and photos of the priests who replaced them at their parishes. All three hypotheses were supported. Furthermore, in Study 2, participants’ own facial photos were rated by assistants. Consistent with honest signal theories, observer’s facial positivity, as well as their self-rated positive affect, predicted their ability to perceive positive emotions in non-criminal faces. [Keywords: Happiness, eudaimonia, honest signaling theory, criminality, eudaimonic activity model, facial perceptions]
2020-soto.pdf: “Do Links Between Personality and Life Outcomes Generalize? Testing the Robustness of Trait–Outcome Associations Across Gender, Age, Ethnicity, and Analytic Approaches”, Christopher J. Soto (2020-04-04):The Big Five personality traits have been linked with a broad range of consequential life outcomes. The present research systematically tested whether such trait–outcome associations generalize across gender, age, ethnicity, and analytic approaches that control for demographic and personality covariates. Analyses of nationally representative samples from the Life Outcomes of Personality Replication project (n = 6,126) indicated that (a) most trait–outcome associations do generalize across gender, age, and ethnicity; (b) controlling for overlap between personality traits substantially reduces the strength of many associations; and (c) several dozen trait–outcome associations proved highly generalizable across all analyses. These findings have important implications for evaluating the robustness of the personality–outcome literature, updating the canon of established trait–outcome associations, and conducting future research.
2020-sparks.pdf: “Negligible evidence that people desire partners who uniquely fit their ideals”, Jehan Sparks, Christine Daly, Brian M. Wilkey, Daniel C. Molden, Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick (2020-09-01):Laypersons and scholars often presume that people positively evaluate partners who match their ideal partner preferences: If Faye prefers kindness in a partner and Sonia prefers ambition, Faye should be especially attracted to kind partners and Sonia should be especially attracted to ambitious ones. However, to date, most published tests of this idea are imprecise and permit multiple interpretations of the data. The current studies improve upon prior tests by (a) having participants self-generate the ideal attributes that matter most to them and (b) using a yoked design to isolate the predictive power of self-generated (vs. other-generated) ideal attributes. Overall, participants were more romantically interested in blind-date partners (Study 1) and acquaintances/
friends/ romantic partners (Study 2) to the extent that they thought those individuals possessed the ideal attributes. But the positive association of these attributes with romantic interest was identical regardless of whether the attributes represented the participant’s self-generated ideals or someone else’s ideals. We also used a novel coding scheme to organize participants’ 1011 self-generated ideal attributes into 95 different attribute-categories; we then implemented three exclusion strategies (that differed in breadth vs. precision) using this scheme in order to maximize idiosyncratic variability between self-generated and other-generated ideals. All approaches revealed identical conclusions. Focused tests of ideal partner preference-matching may reveal that individual differences in ideal partner preferences poorly correspond to the attributes that uniquely inspire romantic interest. [Keywords: Ideal partner preferences, Person perception, Relationships, Predictive validity, Matching] 2020-stacho.pdf: “A cortex–like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain”, Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, Hermann Wagner, Markus Axer, Katrin Amunts, Onur Güntürkün (2020-09-25):Basic principles of bird and mammal brains: Mammals can be very smart. They also have a brain with a cortex. It has thus often been assumed that the advanced cognitive skills of mammals are closely related to the evolution of the cerebral cortex. However, birds can also be very smart, and several bird species show amazing cognitive abilities. Although birds lack a cerebral cortex, they do have pallium, and this is considered to be analogous, if not homologous, to the cerebral cortex. An outstanding feature of the mammalian cortex is its layered architecture. In a detailed anatomical study of the bird pallium, Stacho et al. describe a similarly layered architecture. Despite the nuclear organization of the bird pallium, it has a cyto-architectonic organization that is reminiscent of the mammalian cortex.
Although the avian pallium seems to lack an organization akin to that of the cerebral cortex, birds exhibit extraordinary cognitive skills that are comparable to those of mammals.
We analyzed the fiber architecture of the avian pallium with three-dimensional polarized light imaging and subsequently reconstructed local and associative pallial circuits with tracing techniques.
We discovered an iteratively repeated, column-like neuronal circuitry across the layer-like nuclear boundaries of the hyperpallium and the sensory dorsal ventricular ridge. These circuits are connected to neighboring columns and, via tangential layer-like connections, to higher associative and motor areas.
Our findings indicate that this avian canonical circuitry is similar to its mammalian counterpart and might constitute the structural basis of neuronal computation.
Introduction: For more than a century, the avian forebrain has been a riddle for neuroscientists. Birds demonstrate exceptional cognitive abilities comparable to those of mammals, but their forebrain organization is radically different. Whereas mammalian cognition emerges from the canonical circuits of the six-layered neocortex, the avian forebrain seems to display a simple nuclear organization. Only one of these nuclei, the Wulst, has been generally accepted to be homologous to the neocortex. Most of the remaining pallium is constituted by a multinuclear structure called the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR), which has no direct counterpart in mammals. Nevertheless, one long-standing theory, along with recent scientific evidence, supports the idea that some parts of the sensory DVR could display connectivity patterns, physiological signatures, and cell type–specific markers that are reminiscent of the neocortex. However, it remains unknown if the entire Wulst and sensory DVR harbor a canonical circuit that structurally resembles mammalian cortical organization.
Rationale: The mammalian neocortex comprises a columnar and laminar organization with orthogonally organized fibers that run in radial and tangential directions. These fibers constitute repetitive canonical circuits as computational units that process information along the radial domain and associate it tangentially. In this study, we first analyzed the pallial fiber architecture with three-dimensional polarized light imaging (3D-PLI) in pigeons and subsequently reconstructed local sensory circuits of the Wulst and the sensory DVR in pigeons and barn owls by means of in vivo or in vitro applications of neuronal tracers. We focused on two distantly related bird species to prove the hypothesis that a canonical circuit comparable to the neocortex is a genuine feature of the avian sensory forebrain.
Results: The 3D-PLI fiber analysis showed that both the Wulst and the sensory DVR display an orthogonal organization of radially and tangentially organized fibers along their entire extent. In contrast, nonsensory components of the DVR displayed a complex mosaic-like arrangement with patches of fibers with different orientations. Fiber tracing revealed an iterative circuit motif that was present across modalities (somatosensory, visual, and auditory), brain regions (sensory DVR and Wulst), and species (pigeon and barn owl). Although both species showed a comparable column-like and lamina-like circuit organization, small species differences were discernible, particularly for the Wulst, which was more subdifferentiated in barn owls, which fits well with the processing of stereopsis, combined with high visual acuity in the Wulst of this species. The primary sensory zones of the DVR were tightly interconnected with the intercalated nidopallial layers and the overlying mesopallium. In addition, nidopallial and some hyperpallial lamina-like areas gave rise to long-range tangential projections connecting sensory, associative, and motor structures.
Conclusion: Our study reveals a hitherto unknown neuroarchitecture of the avian sensory forebrain that is composed of iteratively organized canonical circuits within tangentially organized lamina-like and orthogonally positioned column-like entities. Our findings suggest that it is likely that an ancient microcircuit that already existed in the last common stem amniote might have been evolutionarily conserved and partly modified in birds and mammals. The avian version of this connectivity blueprint could conceivably generate computational properties reminiscent of the neocortex and would thus provide a neurobiological explanation for the comparable and outstanding perceptual and cognitive feats that occur in both taxa.
2020-terrier.pdf: “Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement”, Camille Terrier (2020-08-01):I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls in their evaluations. This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school. Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys. [Keywords: teachers, gender biases, progress, achievement inequalities]
2020-thoni.pdf: “Greater Male Variability in Cooperation: Meta-Analytic Evidence for an Evolutionary Perspective”, Christian Thöni, Stefan Volk, Jose M. Cortina (2020-11-10):Do men and women differ systematically in their cooperation behaviors? Researchers have long grappled with this question, and studies have returned equivocal results. We developed an evolutionary perspective according to which men are characterized by greater intrasex variability in cooperation as a result of sex-differentiated psychological adaptations. We tested our hypothesis in two meta-analyses. The first involved the raw data of 40 samples from 23 social-dilemma studies with 8,123 participants. Findings provided strong support for our perspective. Whereas we found that the two sexes do not differ in average cooperation levels, men are much more likely to behave either selfishly or altruistically, whereas women are more likely to be moderately cooperative. We confirmed our findings in a second meta-analytic study of 28 samples from 23 studies of organizational citizenship behavior with 13,985 participants. Our results highlight the importance of taking intrasex variability into consideration when studying sex differences in cooperation and suggest important future research directions.
2020-tu.pdf: “Computing Univariate Neurodegenerative Biomarkers with Volumetric Optimal Transportation: A Pilot Study”, Yanshuai Tu, Liang Mi, Wen Zhang, Haomeng Zhang, Junwei Zhang, Yonghui Fan, Dhruman Goradia, Kewei Chen, Richard J. Caselli, Eric M. Reiman, Xianfeng Gu, Yalin Wang (2020-04-06):Changes in cognitive performance due to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are closely correlated to the brain structure alteration. A univariate and personalized neurodegenerative biomarker with strong statistical power based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will benefit clinical diagnosis and prognosis of neurodegenerative diseases. However, few biomarkers of this type have been developed, especially those that are robust to image noise and applicable to clinical analyses. In this paper, we introduce a variational framework to compute optimal transportation (OT) on brain structural MRI volumes and develop a univariate neuroimaging index based on OT to quantify neurodegenerative alterations. Specifically, we compute the OT from each image to a template and measure the Wasserstein distance between them. The obtained Wasserstein distance, Wasserstein Index (WI) for short to specify the distance to a template, is concise, informative and robust to random noise. Comparing to the popular linear programming-based OT computation method, our framework makes use of Newton’s method, which makes it possible to compute WI in large-scale datasets. Experimental results, on 314 subjects (140 Aβ + AD and 174 Aβ- normal controls) from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline dataset, provide preliminary evidence that the proposed WI is correlated with a clinical cognitive measure (the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score), and it is able to identify group difference and achieve a good classification accuracy, outperforming two other popular univariate indices including hippocampal volume and entorhinal cortex thickness. The current pilot work suggests the application of WI as a potential univariate neurodegenerative biomarker.
2020-walter.pdf: “Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Across 45 Countries: A Large-Scale Replication”, Kathryn V. Walter, Daniel Conroy-Beam, David M. Buss, Kelly Asao, Agnieszka Sorokowska, Piotr Sorokowski, Toivo Aavik, Grace Akello, Mohammad Madallh Alhabahba, Charlotte Alm, Naumana Amjad, Afifa Anjum, Chiemezie S. Atama, Derya Atamtürk Duyar, Richard Ayebare, Carlota Batres, Mons Bendixen, Aicha Bensafia, Boris Bizumic, Mahmoud Boussena, Marina Butovskaya, Seda Can, Katarzyna Cantarero, Antonin Carrier, Hakan Cetinkaya, Ilona Croy, Rosa María Cueto, Marcin Czub, Daria Dronova, Seda Dural, Izzet Duyar, Berna Ertugrul, Agustín Espinosa, Ignacio Estevan, Carla Sofia Esteves, Luxi Fang, Tomasz Frackowiak, Jorge Contreras Garduño, Karina Ugalde González, Farida Guemaz, Petra Gyuris, Mária Halamová, Iskra Herak, Marina Horvat, Ivana Hromatko, Chin-Ming Hui, Jas Laile Jaafar, Feng Jiang, Konstantinos Kafetsios, Tina Kavčič, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, Nicolas Kervyn, Truong Thi Khanh Ha, Imran Ahmed Khilji, Nils C. Köbis, Hoang Moc Lan, András Láng, Georgina R. Lennard, Ernesto León, Torun Lindholm, Trinh Thi Linh, Giulia Lopez, Nguyen Van Luot, Alvaro Mailhos, Zoi Manesi, Rocio Martinez, Sarah L. McKerchar, Norbert Meskó, Girishwar Misra, Conal Monaghan, Emanuel C. Mora, Alba Moya-Garófano, Bojan Musil, Jean Carlos Natividade, Agnieszka Niemczyk, George Nizharadze, Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Anna Oleszkiewicz, Mohd Sofian Omar-Fauzee, Ike E. Onyishi, Baris Özener, Ariela Francesca Pagani, Vilmante Pakalniskiene, Miriam Parise, Farid Pazhoohi, Annette Pisanski, Katarzyna Pisanski, Edna Ponciano, Camelia Popa, Pavol Prokop, Muhammad Rizwan, Mario Sainz, Svjetlana Salkičević, Ruta Sargautyte, Ivan Sarmány-Schuller, Susanne Schmehl, Shivantika Sharad, Razi Sultan Siddiqui, Franco Simonetti, Stanislava Yordanova Stoyanova, Meri Tadinac, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Luis Diego Vega, Dwi Ajeng Widarini, Gyesook Yoo, Marta Zat’ková,, Maja Zupančič (2020-03-20):Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample (n = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, neither pathogen prevalence nor gender equality robustly predicted sex differences or preferences across countries.
2020-whiting.pdf: “Violence and mental disorders: a structured review of associations by individual diagnoses, risk factors, and risk assessment”, Daniel Whiting, Paul Lichtenstein, Seena Fazel (2020-10-20):In this Review, we summarise evidence on the association between different mental disorders and violence, with emphasis on high quality designs and replicated findings. Relative risks are typically increased for all violent outcomes in most diagnosed psychiatric disorders compared with people without psychiatric disorders, with increased odds in the range of 2–4 after adjustment for familial and other sources of confounding. Absolute rates of violent crime over 5–10 years are typically below 5% in people with mental illness (excluding personality disorders, schizophrenia, and substance misuse), which increases to 6–10% in personality disorders and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and to more than 10% in substance misuse. Past criminality and comorbid substance misuse are strongly predictive of future violence in many individual disorders. We reviewed national clinical practice guidelines, which vary in content and require updating to reflect the present epidemiological evidence. Standardised and clinically feasible approaches to the assessment and management of violence risk in general psychiatric settings need to be developed.
2021-grover.pdf: “High-frequency neuromodulation improves obsessive-compulsive behavior”, Shrey Grover, John A. Nguyen, Vighnesh Viswanathan, Robert M. G. Reinhart (2021-01-18):Nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from obsessive-compulsive behaviors, yet our mechanistic understanding of these behaviors is incomplete, and effective therapeutics are unavailable. An emerging perspective characterizes obsessive-compulsive behaviors as maladaptive habit learning, which may be associated with abnormal beta-gamma neurophysiology of the orbitofrontal-striatal circuitry during reward processing.
We target the orbitofrontal cortex with alternating current, personalized to the intrinsic beta-gamma frequency of the reward network, and show rapid, reversible, frequency-specific modulation of reward-guided but not punishment-guided choice behavior and learning, driven by increased exploration in the setting of an actor-critic architecture. Next, we demonstrate that chronic application of the procedure over 5 days robustly attenuates obsessive-compulsive behavior in a non-clinical population for 3 months, with the largest benefits for individuals with more severe symptoms. Finally, we show that convergent mechanisms underlie modulation of reward learning and reduction of obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
The results contribute to neurophysiological theories of reward, learning and obsessive-compulsive behavior, suggest a unifying functional role of rhythms in the beta-gamma range, and set the groundwork for the development of personalized circuit-based therapeutics for related disorders.
[See also: Scangos et al 2021; media: Nature, NYT.]
2021-morton.pdf: “Personality Structure in Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)”, F. Blake Morton, Lauren M. Robinson, Sabrina Brando, Alexander Weiss (2021-01-18):Comparative studies can help identify selective pressures that contributed to species differences in the number and composition of personality domains. Despite being adapted to an aquatic lifestyle and last sharing a common ancestor with primates some 95 million years ago, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) resemble nonhuman primate species in several behavioral and cognitive traits. For example, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), dolphins live in fission-fusion societies, use tools, and have relatively large brains.
To determine the extent to which these and other factors contribute to the evolution of dolphin personality, we examined personality structure in 134 bottlenose dolphins. Personality was measured in 49 dolphins using a 42-item questionnaire, and in 85 dolphins using a version of the questionnaire that included 7 additional items. We found four domains. Three—Openness, Sociability, and Disagreeableness—resembled personality domains found in nonhuman primates and other species. The fourth, Directedness, was a blend of high Conscientiousness and low Neuroticism and was unique to dolphins. Unlike other species, but like humans, dolphins did not appear to have a strong Dominance domain.
The overlap in personality structure between dolphins and other species suggests that selective pressures, such as those related to group structure, terrestrial lifestyles, morphology, and social learning or tool use are not necessary for particular domains to evolve within a species.
2021-scangos.pdf: “State-dependent responses to intracranial brain stimulation in a patient with depression”, Katherine W. Scangos (2021-01-18):Deep brain stimulation is a promising treatment for severe depression, but lack of efficacy in randomized trials raises questions regarding anatomical targeting. We implanted multi-site intracranial electrodes in a severely depressed patient and systematically assessed the acute response to focal electrical neuromodulation. We found an elaborate repertoire of distinctive emotional responses that were rapid in onset, reproducible, and context and state dependent. Results provide proof of concept for personalized, circuit-specific medicine in psychiatry.
[See also: Grover et al 2021; media: Nature, NYT.]
2021-utami.pdf: “Personality Classification of Facebook Users According to Big Five Personality Using SVM (Support Vector Machine) Method”, Ninda Anggoro Utami, Warih Maharani, Imelda Atastina (2021-02-19):Social media has become one of the most important things in daily life to communicate, show expression and exchange information. Facebook is one of the most widely used social media.
This research focuses on classifying the personality of Facebook users into one of the Big Five Personality Traits. There are 170 volunteers who are Facebook users who have been asked to fill out the Big Five Inventory questionnaire and have allowed their data to be scraped. Based on the data collected, the classifier is built using data mining techniques using Support Vector Machine (SVM) that aim to find out someone’s personality based on a Facebook account without having to fill in any questionnaire.
The best accuracy results in this study with a classification model that has been built at 87.5% using the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel. [Keywords: personality, Big Five Personality Traits, data mining, classification, support vector machine (SVM)]
2021-xiong.pdf: “The acute antisuicidal effects of single-dose intravenous ketamine and intranasal esketamine in individuals with major depression and bipolar disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis”, Jiaqi Xiong, Orly Lipsitz, David Chen-Li, Joshua D. Rosenblat, Nelson B. Rodrigues, Isabelle Carvalho, Leanna M.W. Lui, Hartej Gill, Flora Narsi, Rodrigo B. Mansur, Yena Lee, Roger S. McIntyre (2021-02-01):- Single-dose intravenous ketamine/
intranasal esketamine has rapid and robust acute effects in reducing suicidal ideation (SI). - Future high-quality research on the anti-SI efficacy of alternative administration routes and formulations of ketamine is needed.
- Dosage, routes of administration, and formulations are factors to be considered for optimizing SI treatment using ketamine.
The efficacy of ketamine in reducing suicidal ideation (SI) has been previously reported. We aimed to evaluate acute anti-SI effects of single-dose ketamine in different formulations/
routes of administration by pooling results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). A systematic search was conducted on Cochrane, Embase, Medline, and PubMed from inception to July 1st, 2020. Studies were selected based on pre-determined eligibility criteria. Effect sizes of different formulations/ routes at various time points were computed using random-effects models. With data from nine eligible RCTs (n = 197), the pooled effect size for anti-SI effects at the 24-h time point was 1.035 (n = 6, CI: 0.793 to 1.277, p < 0.001) for intravenous (IV) racemic ketamine and 1.309 (n = 1, CI: 0.857 to 1.761, p < 0.001) for intranasal (IN) esketamine. An additional five RCTs were available for qualitative analysis. RCTs were identified for oral/ sublingual ketamine for depression, however, none of these trials reported anti-SI effects preventing quantitative analysis for these routes of delivery. No RCTs for intramuscular (IM) ketamine were identified. The findings suggest that single-dose IV ketamine/ IN esketamine is associated with robust reductions in suicidal thoughts at 2-h, 4-h, and 24-h post-intervention. In addition, future studies on IM/ oral/ sublingual ketamine and comparative studies are warranted to evaluate the anti-SI efficacy of distinct formulations and routes of administration. [Keywords: glutamate, NMDA, suicidal ideation (SI), mood disorders] - Single-dose intravenous ketamine/
2021-zitek.pdf: “Individuals higher in psychological entitlement respond to bad luck with anger”, Emily M. Zitek, Alexander H. Jordan (2021):Highlights:
- Entitled individuals experienced, recalled, or imagined bad luck.
- They felt angry even though no intentional agent was responsible for their bad luck.
- Their heightened anger was specific to personally-experienced bad luck.
Three studies examined the relationship between psychological entitlement and anger in the context of bad luck. Anger is often described as an emotion that arises when a person experiences a negative outcome for which someone else was responsible. Simple bad luck, without an intentional agent clearly responsible for one’s misfortune, should therefore not usually engender anger. However, we predicted that individuals higher in psychological entitlement, with their high expectations for personal outcomes and tendency to moralize them, would be more likely to experience anger after bad luck as compared to individuals lower in psychological entitlement.
We found that psychological entitlement was, indeed, positively correlated with anger after bad luck, and with perceptions of injustice (Study 1). The relationship between entitlement and anger was specific to personally-experienced bad luck; entitlement was not correlated with anger when people recalled an unfair event (Study 2), or when they imagined that bad luck happened to someone else (Study 3). [Keywords: psychological entitlement, bad luck, anger, injustice]