Highly influential “dual-process” accounts of human cognition postulate the coexistence of a slow accurate system with a fast error-prone system. But why would there be just 2 systems rather than, say, one or 93?
Here, we argue that a dual-process architecture might reflect a rational tradeoff between the cognitive flexibility afforded by multiple systems and the time and effort required to choose between them. We investigate what the optimal set and number of cognitive systems would depend on the structure of the environment.
We find that the optimal number of systems depends on the variability of the environment and the difficulty of deciding when which system should be used. Furthermore, we find that there is a plausible range of conditions under which it is optimal to be equipped with a fast system that performs no deliberation (“System 1”) and a slow system that achieves a higher expected accuracy through deliberation (“System 2”).
Our findings thereby suggest a rational reinterpretation of dual-process theories.
…We study this problem in 4 different domains where the dual systems framework has been applied to explain human decision-making: binary choice, planning, strategic interaction, and multi-alternative, multi-attribute risky choice. We investigate how the optimal cognitive architecture for each domain depends on the variability of the environment and the cost of choosing between multiple cognitive systems, which we call metareasoning cost.
As predicted and consistent with prior findings, the distribution was positively skewed. Most participants lied infrequently and most lies were told by a few prolific liars. Approximately 3⁄4ths of participants were consistently low-frequency liars. Across participants, lying comprised 7% of total communication and almost 90% of all lies were little white lies. About 58% of the variance was explained by stable individual differences with approximately 42% of the variance attributable to within-person day-to-day variability.
The data were consistent with both the existence of a few prolific liars and good/bad lie days.
[Keywords: Deception, lies, lying over time, prevalence, prolific liars, truth-default theory (TDT)]
Digital media defines modern childhood, but its cognitive effects are unclear and hotly debated. We estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background. We analyzed 9855 children from the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after 2 years.
At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming had no correlation. After 2 years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming. Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence, contrary to prior research on the effect of watching TV.
Broadly, our results are in line with research on the malleability of cognitive abilities from environmental factors, such as cognitive training and the Flynn effect.
[Keywords: children, cognitive abilities, development, digital media, genetics, intelligence, polygenic scores, screen time, socioeconomic status, TV, video games]
A central paradox in the mental health literature is the tendency for black Americans to report similar or better mental health than white Americans despite experiencing greater stress exposure. However, black Americans’ higher levels of certain coping resources may explain this finding. Using data from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (n = 1,186), we examine whether black Americans have higher levels of self-esteem, social support, religious attendance, and divine control than white Americans and whether these resources, in turn, explain the black–white paradox in mental health. In adjusted models, the black–white paradox holds for depressive symptoms and any DSM-IV disorder. Findings indicate that black Americans have higher levels of self-esteem, family social support, and religiosity than white Americans. Causal mediation techniques reveal that self-esteem has the largest effect in explaining black–white differences in depressive symptoms, whereas divine control has the largest effect in explaining differences in disorder.
2021-vohs.pdf: “A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect”, Kathleen D. Vohs, Brandon J. Schmeichel, Sophie Lohmann, Quentin F. Gronau, Anna J. Finley, Sarah E. Ainsworth, Jessica L. Alquist, Michael D. Baker, Ambra Brizi, Angelica Bunyi, Grant J. Butschek, Collier Campbell, Jonathan Capaldi, Chuting Cau, Heather Chambers, Nikos L. D. Chatzisarantis, Weston J. Christensen, Samuel L. Clay, Jessica Curtis, Valeria De Cristofaro, Kareena del Rosario, Katharina Diel, Yasemin Doğruol, Megan Doi, Tina L. Donaldson, Andreas B. Eder, Mia Ersoff, Julie R. Eyink, Angelica Falkenstein, Bob M. Fennis, Matthew B. Findley, Eli J. Finkel, Victoria Forgea, Malte Friese, Paul Fuglestad, Natasha E. Garcia-Willingham, Lea F. Geraedts, Will M. Gervais, Mauro Giacomantonio, Bryan Gibson, Karolin Gieseler, Justina Gineikiene, Elana M. Gloger, Carina M. Gobes, Maria Grande, Martin S. Hagger, Bethany Hartsell, Anthony D. Hermann, Jasper J. Hidding, Edward R. Hirt, Josh Hodge, Wilhelm Hofmann, Jennifer L. Howell, Robert D. Hutton, Michael Inzlicht, Lily James, Emily Johnson, Hannah L. Johnson, Sarah M. Joyce, Yannick Joye, Jan Helge Kaben, Lara K. Kammrath, Caitlin N. Kelly, Brian L. Kissell, Sander L. Koole, An, Krishna, Christine Lam, Kelemen T. Lee, Nick Lee, Dana C. Leighton, David D. Loschelder, Heather M. Maranges, E. J. Masicampo, Kennedy Mazara, Jr., Samantha McCarthy, Ian McGregor, Nicole L. Mead, Wendy B. Mendes, Carine Meslot, Nicholas M. Michalak, Marina Milyavskaya, Akira Miyake, Mehrad Moeini-Jazani, Mark Muraven, Erin Nakahara, Krishna Patel, John V. Petrocelli, Katja M. Pollak, Mindi M. Price, Haley J. Ramsey, Maximilian Rath, Jacob A. Robertson, Rachael Rockwell, Isabella F. Russ, Marco Salvati, Blair Saunders, Anne Scherer, Astrid Schütz, Kristin N. Schmitt, Suzanne C. Segerstrom, Benjamin Serenka, Konstantyn Sharpinskyi, Meaghan Shaw, Janelle Sherman, Yu Song, Nicholas Sosa, Kaitlyn Spillane, Julia Stapels, Alec J. Stinnett, Hannah R. Strawser, Kate Sweeny, Dominic Theodore, Karine Tonnu, Yasmijn van Oldenbeuving, Michelle R. vanDellen, Raiza C. Vergara, Jasmine S. Walker, Christian E. Waugh, Feline Weise, Kaitlyn M. Werner, Craig Wheeler, Rachel A. White, Aaron L. Wichman, Bradford J. Wiggins, Julian A. Wills, Janie H. Wilson, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Dolores Albarracín (2021-09-14):
We conducted a preregistered multilaboratory project ( k = 36; n = 3,531) to assess the size and robustness of ego-depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Each laboratory implemented one of two procedures that was intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of self-control. Confirmatory tests found a nonsignificant result ( d = 0.06). Confirmatory Bayesian meta-analyses using an informed-prior hypothesis (δ = 0.30, SD = 0.15) found that the data were 4× more likely under the null than the alternative hypothesis. Hence, preregistered analyses did not find evidence for a depletion effect. Exploratory analyses on the full sample (i.e., ignoring exclusion criteria) found a statistically-significant effect ( d = 0.08); Bayesian analyses showed that the data were about equally likely under the null and informed-prior hypotheses. Exploratory moderator tests suggested that the depletion effect was larger for participants who reported more fatigue but was not moderated by trait self-control, willpower beliefs, or action orientation.
First study manipulating wine prices using a framed field experiment.
Blind intensity ratings differ for 3 wines of different price and expert rating.
Blind pleasantness ratings do not differ for the same 3 wines.
Pleasantness of the budget wine increased when presented with a fake higher price.
Past experimental laboratory and correlational data from observational research has shown that knowledge of the price of wine influences the consumer’s subjective experience. However, there is limited prior research that has explicitly manipulated price information in a realistic wine tasting setting.
A total of 140 participants tasted 3 different low-priced, mid-priced and high-priced wines with open, deceptive, or no price information and rated them for taste intensity and pleasantness.
In our community sample, intensity of taste ratings for open, deceptive and blind price information reflected retail prices, thus more expensive wines were rated as more intense in taste. However, while pleasantness ratings did not differ for open and no price information, deceptive up-pricing of low-price wine statistically-significantly influenced ratings for pleasantness, whereas deceptive down-pricing of high-price wine had no effect on pleasantness ratings. Thus, pricing information differentially influences the consumer’s subjective experience of wine, with no effects on intensity of taste ratings and no effects on pleasantness ratings with correct or no price information, but increased pleasantness of low-price wine when provided with a deceptive higher price.
Thus, in wine may lay the truth, but its subjective experience may also lie in the price.
[Keywords: wine perception, price information, consumer experience, framed field experiment]
“Energy compensation and adiposity in humans”, Vincent Careau, Lewis G. Halsey, Herman Pontzer, Philip N. Ainslie, Lene F. Andersen, Liam J. Anderson, Lenore Arab, Issad Baddou, Kweku Bedu-Addo, Ellen E. Blaak, Stephane Blanc, Alberto G. Bonomi, Carlijn V.C. Bouten, Maciej S. Buchowski, Nancy F. Butte, Stefan G.J.A. Camps, Graeme L. Close, Jamie A. Cooper, Sai Krupa Das, Richard Cooper, Lara R. Dugas, Simon D. Eaton, Ulf Ekelund, Sonja Entringer, Terrence Forrester, Barry W. Fudge, Annelies H. Goris, Michael Gurven, Catherine Hambly, Asmaa El Hamdouchi, Marije B. Hoos, Sumei Hu, Noorjehan Joonas, Annemiek M. Joosen, Peter Katzmarzyk, Kitty P. Kempen, Misaka Kimura, William E. Kraus, Robert F. Kushner, Estelle V. Lambert, William R. Leonard, Nader Lessan, Corby K. Martin, Anine C. Medin, Erwin P. Meijer, James C. Morehen, James P. Morton, Marian L. Neuhouser, Theresa A. Nicklas, Robert M. Ojiambo, Kirsi H. Pietiläinen, Yannis P. Pitsiladis, Jacob Plange-Rhule, Guy Plasqui, Ross L. Prentice, Roberto A. Rabinovich, Susan B. Racette, David A. Raichlen, Eric Ravussin, John J. Reilly, Rebecca M. Reynolds, Susan B. Roberts, Albertine J. Schuit, Anders M. Sjödin, Eric Stice, Samuel S. Urlacher, Giulio Valenti, Ludo M. Van Etten, Edgar A. Van Mil, Jonathan C.K. Wells, George Wilson, Brian M. Wood, Jack Yanovski, Tsukasa Yoshida, Xueying Zhang, Alexia J. Murphy-Alford, Cornelia U. Loechl, Amy H. Luke, Jennifer Rood, Hiroyuki Sagayama, Dale A. Schoeller, William W. Wong, Yosuke Yamada, John R. Speakman, IAEADLW database group (2021-08-27; biology, exercise):
Degree of energy compensation varied between people of different body composition
Understanding the impacts of activity on energy balance is crucial. Increasing levels of activity may bring diminishing returns in energy expenditure because of compensatory responses in non-activity energy expenditures. This suggestion has profound implications for both the evolution of metabolism and human health. It implies that a long-term increase in activity does not directly translate into an increase in total energy expenditure (TEE) because other components of TEE may decrease in response—energy compensation.
We used the largest dataset compiled on adult TEE and basal energyexpenditure (BEE) (n = 1,754) of people living normal lives to find that energy compensation by a typical human averages 28% due to reduced BEE; this suggests that only 72% of the extra calories we burn from additional activity translates into extra calories burned that day. Moreover, the degree of energy compensation varied considerably between people of different body compositions. This association between compensation and adiposity could be due to among-individual differences in compensation: people who compensate more may be more likely to accumulate body fat. Alternatively, the process might occur within individuals: as we get fatter, our body might compensate more strongly for the calories burned during activity, making losing fat progressively more difficult.
Determining the causality of the relationship between energy compensation and adiposity will be key to improving public health strategies regarding obesity.
[Keywords: activity, basal metabolic rate, daily energy expenditure, energy management models, exercise, Homo sapiens, trade-offs, weight loss, energy compensation]
Figure 2: Energy compensation in humans. (A) Total energy expenditure (TEE; MJ∙d−1) and (B) activity energy expenditure (AEE; MJ∙d−1) as a function of basal energy expenditure (BEE; MJ∙d−1) in 1,754 subjects included in this study, controlling for sex, age, and body composition. (A) illustrates how the slope of the TEE-BEE relationship is <1 (compared to the 1:1 dotted line), whereas (B) illustrates the negative relationship between AEE andBEE.
…To further illustrate the compensation occurring at the within-individual level, we ran a second bivariate mixed model with AEE and BEE as the dependent variables. In this model, the within-individual covariance was statistically-significantly negative (Table S2B). The within-individual correlation (±SE) between AEEand BEE was r = −0.58 ± 0.08 (Figure 4B). Hence, during extended periods when the studied cohort expended more energy on activity, they compensated by reducing energy expended on basal processes (but individuals with higher-than-average AEE do not necessarily have alower-than-average BEE). The within-individual slope in these peopleindicates particularly strong energy compensation between AEE and BEE (Figure 4B). That is, in this sample of people, the calories they burn during bouts of activity are almost entirely compensated for by reducing energy expended on other processes such that variation in activity had little impact on TEE.
Figure 4: Energy trade-offs within individuals. Residual (A) total energy expenditure (TEE; MJ∙d−1) and (B) activity energy expenditure (AEE; MJ∙d−1) as a function of basal energy expenditure (BEE; MJ∙d−1) in elderly men and women (n = 68) with 2 pairs of TEE-BEE measures each. Within-individual slopes are illustrated by the thin black lines connecting the 2 residual values (gray dots; extracted from the bivariate mixed model; Table S2) for each individual.
Various domains of life are improving over time, meaning the future is filled with exciting advances that people can now look forward to (e.g., in technology).
3 preregistered experiments (n = 1,602) suggest that mere awareness of better futures can risk spoiling otherwise enjoyable presents. Across experiments, participants interacted with novel technologies—but, via random assignment, some participants were informed beforehand that even better versions were in the works. Mere awareness of future improvement led participants to experience present versions as less enjoyable—despite being new to them, and despite being identical across conditions. They even bid more money to be able to end their participation early.
Why? Such knowledge led these participants to perceive more flaws in present versions than they would have perceived without such knowledge—as if prompted to infer that there must have been something to improve upon (or else, why was a better one needed in the first place?)—thus creating a less enjoyable experience. Accordingly, these spoiling effects were specific to flaw-relevant stimuli and were attenuated by reminders of past progress already achieved.
All told, the current research highlights important implications for how today’s ever better offerings may be undermining net happiness (despite marking absolute progress). As people continually await exciting things still to come, they may be continually dissatisfied by exciting things already here.
[Keywords: change over time, well-being, enjoyment, technology, contrast effects]
Prior research has described women’s experiences with exercise-induced orgasm (EIO). However, little is known aboutmen’s experiences with EIO, the population prevalence of EIO, or theassociation of EIO with other kinds of orgasm. Using U.S. probability survey data, the objectives of the present research were to:
describe the lifetime prevalence of exercise-induced orgasm (EIO) and sleep orgasm;
assess respondents’ age at first experience of EIO as well as thetype of exercise connected with their first EIO;
examine associations between lifetime EIO experience and orgasm at respondents’ most recent partnered sexual event; and
examine associations between lifetime EIO experience and sleep orgasms.
Data were from the 2014 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (1,012 men and 1,083 women, ages 14 years and older).
About 9% of respondents reported having ever experienced exercise-induced orgasm. More men than women reported having experienced orgasm during sleep at least once in their lifetime (66.3% men, 41.8% women). The mean age for women’s first EIO was statistically-significantly older than men (22.8 years women, 16.8 years men). Respondents described a wide range of exercises as associated with their first EIO (i.e., climbing ropes, abdominalexercise, yoga). Lifetime EIO experience was associated with lifetime sleep orgasms but not with event-level orgasm during partnered sex.
Implications related to understanding orgasm and recommendations for clinicians and sex educators are discussed.
…Exercise-Induced Orgasm: In their reports of interviews with thousands of people living in the United States, Kinsey et al. (1948, 1953) ventured that about 5% of people had experienced orgasms from physical exercise or muscular tension. However, questions about orgasms during exercise were not standardized in their interviews, and thus their estimate was based largely on information volunteered by respondents.
To our knowledge, there has been only one systematic study of exercise-induced orgasm (EIO) (Herbenick & Fortenberry, 2011). That study used an online convenience survey that specifically recruited women who had prior experience with sexual arousal or orgasm from exercise. Thus, the study design was not situated to estimate a population-based prevalence of EIO. Also, the researchers surveyed only women, leaving men’s experience with exercise orgasms unexamined. In their convenience survey, Herbenick and Fortenberry found that women reported an average age of 19 years at first EIO experience and that the kinds of exercise participants recalled as most often associated with their first EIO were traditional abdominal exercises (e.g., sit-ups, crunches, Roman’s chair leg raises), climbing ropes or poles, and lifting weights—all of which engage the core musculature as part of strength training or stabilization (e.g., Oliva-Lozano & Muyor, 2020). This finding was consistent with descriptions of EIO in popular media, where the term “coregasm” was first coined by editors at Men’s Health magazine to reflect correspondence they had received from their readers about unexpectedly experiencing orgasms during exercises that engage core abdominal musculature, whether for strength or for stability (Men’s Health, 2007).
Most women in the Herbenick and Fortenberry (2011) survey indicated that they didn’t fantasize sexually in connection with experiencing EIO; also, most generally felt happy about their experience. However, the survey did not assess any aspects of respondents’ orgasm experiences outside of the exercise context, even though doing so might have helped to situate EIO within broader experiences of genitalresponse and orgasm. For example, it is not known to what extent EIO is an idiosyncratic experience—a bodily quirk, even—or if it reflects something larger about how a person’s body and orgasmic response are organized. The present research extends the limited literature on EIO by—in a U.S. nationally representativesample—assessing participants’ age at first EIO experience,examining EIO among men as well as adolescents, and exploringrelationships between EIO and other kinds or orgasm, including orgasms that occur during sleep.
[Keywords: exercise-induced orgasm, orgasm, sleep orgasm, nocturnal emission, probability sample]
Most research into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focuses on difficulties and challenges, potentially overlooking intact and even enhanced abilities.
Empirical evidence strongly suggests that individuals with ASD display enhanced rationality: judgments that are more objective and decision-making that is less biased than that of neurotypical individuals.
Enhanced rationality may confer distinct strengths to individuals with ASD and may provide insights into the mechanism or ‘irrationality’ in neurotypical individuals.
Challenges in social cognition and communication are core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but in some domains, individuals with ASD may display typical abilities and even outperform their neurotypical counterparts.
These enhanced abilities are notable in the domains of reasoning, judgment and decision-making, in which individuals with ASD often show ‘enhanced rationality’ by exhibiting more rational and bias-free decision-making than do neurotypical individuals.
Background: Aggression-related sexual fantasies (ASF) are considered an important risk factor for sexual aggression, but empirical knowledge is limited, in part because previous research has been based on predominantly male, North-American college samples, and limited numbers of questions.
Aim: The present study aimed to foster the knowledge about the frequency and correlates of ASF, while including a large sample ofwomen and a broad range of ASF.
Method: A convenience sample of n = 664 participants from Germany including 508 (77%) women and 156 (23%) men with a median age of 25 (21–27) years answered an online questionnaire. Participants were mainly recruited via social networks (online and in person) and were mainly students. We examined the frequencies of (aggression-related) sexual fantasies and their expected factor structure (factors reflecting affective, experimental, masochistic, and aggression-related contents) via exploratory factor analysis. We investigated potential correlates (eg, psychopathic traits, attitudes towards sexual fantasies) as predictors of ASF using multipleregression analyses. Finally, we examined whether ASF would positively predict sexual aggression beyond other pertinent risk factors using multiple regression analysis.
Outcomes: The participants rated the frequency of a broad set of 56 aggression-related and other sexual fantasies, attitudes towards sexual fantasies, the Big Five (ie, broad personality dimensions including Neuroticism and Extraversion), sexual aggression, and other risk factors for sexual aggression.
Results: All participants reported non-aggression-related sexual fantasies and 77% reported at least one ASF in their lives. Being male, frequent sexual fantasies, psychopathic traits, and negative attitudes towards sexual fantasies predicted more frequent ASF. ASF were the strongest predictor of sexual aggression beyond other risk factors, including general aggression, psychopathic traits, rape myth acceptance, and violent pornography consumption.
Clinical Translation: ASF may be an important risk factor for sexual aggression and should be more strongly considered in prevention and intervention efforts.
Strengths & Limitations: The strengths of the present study include using a large item pool and a large sample with a large proportion of women in order to examine ASF as a predictor of sexual aggression beyond important control variables. Its weaknesses include the reliance on cross-sectional data, that preclude causal inferences, and not continuously distinguishing between consensual and non-consensual acts.
Conclusion: ASF are a frequent phenomenon even in the general population and among women and show strong associations with sexual aggression. Thus, they require more attention by research on sexual aggression and its prevention.
[Keywords: aggressive sexual fantasies, sexual aggression, psychopathic traits, rape myths acceptance, Big Five]
What explains the acquisition of exceptional human performance? Does a focus on intensive specialized practice facilitate excellence, or is a multidisciplinary practice background better? We investigated this question in sports.
Our meta-analysis involved 51 international study reports with 477 effect sizes from 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers. Predictor variables included starting age, age of reaching defined performance milestones, and amounts of coach-led practice and youth-led play (e.g., pickup games) in the athlete’s respective main sport and in other sports.
Analyses revealed that (a) adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes; (b) higher performing youth athletes started playing their main sport earlier, engaged in more main-sport practice but less other-sports practice, and had faster initial progress than did lower performing youth athletes; and (c) youth-led play in any sport had negligible effects on both youth and adult performance.
We illustrate parallels from science: Nobel laureates had multidisciplinary study/working experience and slower early progress than did national-level award winners. The findings suggest that variable, multidisciplinary practice experiences are associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
…On the other hand, Sir Chris Hoy, the most successful racing cyclist of all time, did not start track cycling until age 17 and won his first gold medal at age 26 (Mackay, 2017). College basketball player Donald Thomas started practicing the high jump at age 22 and became world champion in the high jump at age 23 (Denman, 2007). Furthermore, athletes widely regarded as the greatest of all time in their sports, Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps, and Sir Chris Hoy, all played a diverse range of sports throughout childhood and adolescence rather than specializing in their main sport at an early age (Epstein 2019; Landers, 2017; Hawkins, 2014; Mackay, 2017; DeHority, 2020).
…This research focused on sports, but analogous findings have been reported for at least one nonathletic domain: science. Graf 2015 [Die Wissenschaftselite Deutschlands: Sozialprofil und Werdegänge zwischen 1945 und 2013] examined the biographies of the 48 German Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economy, and medicine/physiology since 1945. 42 had multidisciplinary study and/or working experiences. Compared with winners of the Leibnitz prize—Germany’s highest national science award—Nobel laureates were less likely to have won a scholarship as a student and took statistically-significantly longer to earn full professorships and to achieve their award. Taken together, the observations suggest that early multidisciplinary practice is associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
We propose 3 interrelated hypotheses.
The first is the sustainability hypothesis: Childhood/adolescent participation in multiple sports is associated with a lower risk of later overuse injury and burnout (for reviews, see Bell et al 2018; Waldron et al 2020).
World-class senior athletes may have reached that level in part because they were less encumbered by injury or burnout (Rugg et al 2018; Wilhelm et al 2017).
The second is the multiple-sampling-and-functional-matching hypothesis: The focus on one main sport emerges from an athlete’s experiences in multiple sports, which increases the odds that an athlete will select a sport at which he or she is particularly talented (Güllich, 2017; Güllich & Emrich, 2014).
Athletes who engage in multiple sports during early athletic development are more likely to find the sport that best matches their talents and preferences. Athletes who discover their optimal sports match are more likely to be world-class athletes than if they select and focus on a less-than-optimal sports match. A minority of athletes became senior world-class athletes despite specializing early. According to this hypothesis, those few successful early-specializing athletes likely either selected their optimal sport without sampling by luck or were talented in multiple sports, one of which was their selected sport.
The third is the transfer-as-preparation-for-future-learning (PFL) hypothesis: More varied earlier learning experiences facilitate later long-term domain-specific skill learning and refinement (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999; Güllich, 2017).
The PFL hypothesis corresponds to central tenets of general learning theory (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999) and of self-organization of complex systems according to ecological-dynamics theory (Araújo et al 2010; Davids et al 2012). The PFL hypothesis rests on 2 premises. One is that amplified variation in learning tasks and situations may facilitate athletes’ ability to adapt their intentions and perceptual and motor actions in learning (e.g., Araújo et al 2010; Davids et al 2012). For example, practicing broader ranges of skills and experiencing varied practice drills, conditioned game formats, or varying coach-athlete interaction may provide the learner enhanced opportunities to adapt to different coaching styles, adapt their attentional focus or the intention for specific actions (e.g., to dribble, pass, or shoot in game situations). The other premise is that experience of greater variation in learning methodologies may provide an athlete with enhanced opportunities to understand the principles that lead to individually more or less effective learning, which facilitates the development of the elite athlete’s competencies for self-regulation in learning (for review, see Jordet, 2015). At the same time, experience of more varied learning methodologies may also increase the probability of encountering particularly functional individual learning solutions (i.e., an intraindividual-selection effect).
Our second and third hypotheses are supported by the fact that multisport coach-led practice but not youth-led play in various sports facilitated long-term senior performance.
In addition, all 3 hypotheses are supported by 2 specific findings from several previous studies (Güllich, 2014a, 2018b; Güllich & Emrich, 2014; Güllich et al 2017, 2019; Hardy et al 2013; Hornig et al 2016; Moesch et al 2011). First, multiple studies suggest a delayed, moderator effect, such that childhood/adolescent other-sports practice facilitates later efficiency of practice in one’s main sport during adulthood—performance improvement per invested practice time. Second, this developmental advantage is not the result of better physical/physiological development but rather improved perceptual-motor learning.
The hypotheses may also explain the converse predictor effects on junior performance. The highest junior-age performers mostly exhibited a highly specialized childhood/adolescent participation pattern that likely compromised the sustainability of their subsequent development into adulthood. They were more likely hampered by later overuse injury or burnout, the choice of their focus sport was more likely suboptimal, and the narrowed range of learning experiences likely limited their opportunities to expand their potential for future learning. This background helps explain why the populations of successful juniors and of successful seniors are not identical but are partly distinct populations: Most successful juniors do not become successful seniors, whereas most of the successful seniors were not as successful in former junior competitions (see Method section). Taken together, an early-specialization pattern may reinforce rapid success through junior age but displays reduced sustainability in that it limits an athlete’s potential for subsequent long-term improvement.
Sex and gender are key to people’s lives, and are the focus of scientific and popular interest and controversy. Sex-related psychological characteristics reflect more than socialization; they are influenced by sex hormones present during sensitive periods of development, particularly androgens that are present prenatally. Studies of females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) show how prenatal androgens affect behavior across the life span; these hormones have large effects on interest and engagement in gendered activities, moderate effects on spatial abilities, and relatively small (or no) effects on gender identity, gender cognitions, and gendered peer involvement. In addition to showing the complexity of androgens’ effects on gendered behavior, studies of females with CAH provide an opportunity to test theories of gender development, gain insight into how nature and nurture work together, and examine mechanisms of development. The implications of this work have often been misunderstood, so we consider what it means—and does not mean—for biology to influence gender-related behavior.
2021-nieh.pdf: “Geometry of abstract learned knowledge in the hippocampus”, Edward H. Nieh, Manuel Schottdorf, Nicolas W. Freeman, Ryan J. Low, Sam Lewallen, Sue Ann Koay, Lucas Pinto, Jeffrey L. Gauthier, Carlos D. Brody, David W. Tank (2021-06-16):
Hippocampal neurons encode physical variables such as space or auditory frequency in cognitive maps. In addition, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in humans have shown that the hippocampus can also encode more abstract, learned variables. However, their integration into existing neural representations of physical variables is unknown.
Here, using 2-photon calcium imaging, we show that individual neurons in the dorsal hippocampus jointly encode accumulated evidence with spatial position in mice performing a decision-making task in virtual reality. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction showed that population activity was well-described by approximately 4 to 6 latent variables, which suggests that neural activity is constrained to a low-dimensional manifold. Within this low-dimensional space, both physical and abstract variables were jointly mapped in an orderly manner, creating a geometric representation that we show is similar across mice.
The existence of conjoined cognitive maps suggests that the hippocampus performs a general computation—the creation of task-specific low-dimensional manifolds that contain a geometric representation of learned knowledge.
In this review, I provide a pessimistic assessment of the indirect measurement of attitudes by highlighting the persisting anomalies in the science of implicit attitudes, focusing on their validity, reliability, predictive power, and causal efficiency, and I draw some conclusions concerning the validity of the implicit bias construct.
…We do not know what indirect measures measure; indirect measures are unreliable at the individual level, and people’s scores vary from occasion to occasion; indirect measures predict behavior poorly, and we do not know in which contexts they could be more predictive; in any case, the hope of measuring broad traits is not fulfilled by the development of indirect measures; and there is still no reason to believe that they measure anything that makes a causal difference. These issues would not be too concerning for a budding science; they are anomalies for a 30-year-old research tradition that has been extremely successful at selling itself to policy makers and the public at large. So, should social psychologists pack up and move to other research topics or should they stubbornly try to address the anomalies pointed out in this article? It is unwise to predict the future of science, and the issues presented here could well be resolved by the many psychologists working on indirect measures, but it would also be unwise to dismiss them as mere challenges to be addressed in the course of normal science.
A few years ago, the first CNN surpassed human performance on ImageNet. However, it soon became clear that machines lack robustness on more challenging test cases, a major obstacle towards deploying machines “in the wild” and towards obtaining better computational models of human visual perception. Here we ask: Are we making progress in closing the gap between human and machine vision? To answer this question, we tested human observers on a broad range of out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets, adding the “missing human baseline” by recording 85,120 psychophysical trials across 90 participants. We then investigated a range of promising machine learning developments that crucially deviate from standard supervised CNNs along three axes: objective function (self-supervised, adversarially trained, CLIP language-image training), architecture (e.g. vision transformers), and dataset size (ranging from 1M to 1B). Our findings are threefold. (1.) The longstanding robustness gap between humans and CNNs is closing, with the best models now matchingor exceeding human performance on most OOD datasets. (2.) There is still a substantial image-level consistency gap, meaning that humans make different errors than models. In contrast, most models systematically agree in their categorisation errors, even substantially different ones like contrastive self-supervised vs. standard supervised models. (3.) In many cases, human-to-model consistency improves when training dataset size is increased by one to three orders of magnitude. Our results give reason for cautious optimism: While there is still much room for improvement, the behavioural difference between human and machine vision is narrowing. In order to measure future progress, 17 OOD datasets with image-level human behavioural data are provided as a benchmark here: https://github.com/bethgelab/model-vs-human/
Personality traits are associated with memory in older adulthood: Individuals higher in conscientiousness and openness and lower in neuroticism tend to perform better on memory-recall tasks. We conducted a preregistered study to replicate these associations in a large, multinational cohort and test whether the associations varied by national-level socioeconomic indicators (e.g., per capita gross domestic product). Multilevel modeling was used to analyze data from 71,566 individuals (age: M = 67.9 years, SD = 9.5; 57% women) across 26 European countries and Israel. Higher conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion and lower neuroticism were associated with better memory performance, even when analyses accounted for risk factors including diabetes, hypertension, obesity, emotional disorders, and sleeping problems. Consistent with the resource-substitution hypothesis, results showed that higher conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism were associated with better memory in countries with lower gross domestic product. This pattern suggests that psychological (trait) resources may help compensate for country-specific disadvantaged contexts.
[media] Different species of animals can discriminate numerosity, the countable number of objects in a set. The representations of countable numerosities have been deciphered down to the level of single neurons. However, despite its importance for human number theory, a special numerical quantity, the empty set (numerosity zero), has remained largely unexplored. We explored the behavioral and neuronal representation of the empty set in carrion crows.
Crows were trained to discriminate small numerosities including the empty set. Performance data showed a numerical distance effect for the empty set in one crow, suggesting that the empty set and countable numerosities are represented along the crows’ “mental number line.” Single-cell recordings in the endbrain region nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) showed a considerable proportion of NCL neurons tuned to the preferred numerosity zero. As evidenced by neuronal distance and size effects, NCL neurons integrated the empty set in the neural number line. A subsequent neuronal population analysis using a statistical classifier approach showed that the neuronal numerical representations were predictive of the crows’ success in the task. These behavioral and neuronal data suggests that the conception of the empty set as a cognitive precursor of a zero-like number concept is not an exclusive property of the cerebral cortex of primates.
Zero as a quantitative category cannot only be implemented in the layered neocortex of primates, but also in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.
The conception of “nothing” as number “zero” is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics. To explore whether precursors of zero-like concepts can be found in vertebrates with a cerebrum that anatomically differs starkly from our primate brain, we investigated this in carrion crows. We show that crows can grasp the empty set as a null numerical quantity that is mentally represented next to number one. Moreover, we show that single neurons in an associative avian cerebral region specifically respond to the empty set and show the same physiological characteristics as for countable quantities. This suggests that zero as a quantitative category can also be implemented in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.
[OSF] There is widespread public and academic interest in understanding the uses and effects of digital media. Scholars primarily use self-report measures of the quantity or duration of media use as proxies for more objective measures, but the validity of these self-reports remains unclear. Advancements in data collection techniques have produced a collection of studies indexing both self-reported and log-based measures.
To assess the alignment between these measures, we conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis of this research.
Based on 106 effect sizes, we found that self-reported media use correlates only moderately with logged measurements, that self-reports were rarely an accurate reflection of logged media use and that measures of problematic media use show an even weaker association with usage logs.
These findings raise concerns about the validity of findings relying solely on self-reported measures of media use.
There is ample evidence that attractive individuals, across diverse domains, are judged more favourably. But most research has focused on single/one-shot decisions, where decision-makers receive no feedback following their decisions, and outcomes of their judgements are inconsequential to the self. Would attractive individuals still be judged favourably in experience-based decision-making where people make iterative decisions and receive consequential feedback (money gained/lost) following each decision?
To investigate this question, participants viewed headshots of 4 financial partners presented side-by-side and repeatedly (over 50–100 trials) selected partners that would help maximize their profits. Following every partner-selection, participants received feedback about the net monetary gains/losses the partner had conferred. Unbeknownst to participants, 2 partners (one attractive, one unattractive) were equally advantageous (conferred net-gains overtime) and 2 partners (one attractive and one unattractive) were equally disadvantageous (conferred net-losses overtime).
Even though attractive and unattractive partners were equally profitable and despite receiving feedback, participants selected attractive partners more throughout the task were quicker to reselect them even when they conferred losses and judged them as more helpful. Indeed, attractive-disadvantageous partners were preferred to the same extent (or more) as unattractive-advantageous partners. Importantly, the effect of attractiveness on decision-making was fully explained by the perceived trustworthiness of the financial partners.
[Keywords: experience-based decision-making, facial attractiveness, implicit bias, incidental cues, person perception, social decision-making]
We find that in Alzheimer’s disease and its mouse models, induced expression of Axl and Mer in amyloid plaque-associated microglia was coupled to induced plaque decoration by the TAM ligandGas6 and its co-ligand phosphatidylserine. In the APP/PS1 mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, genetic ablation of Axl and Mer resulted in microglia that were unable to normally detect, respond to, organize or phagocytose amyloid-β plaques. These major deficits notwithstanding, TAM-deficient APP/PS1 mice developed fewer dense-core plaques than APP/PS1 mice with normal microglia.
Our findings reveal that the TAM system is an essential mediator of microglial recognition and engulfment of amyloid plaques and that TAM-driven microglial phagocytosis does not inhibit, but rather promotes, dense-core plaque development.
Cognitive control guides behaviour by controlling what, when, and how information is represented in the brain. For example, attention controls sensory processing; top-down signals from prefrontal and parietal cortex strengthen the representation of task-relevant stimuli. A similar ‘selection’ mechanism is thought to control the representations held ‘in mind’—in working memory. Here we show that shared neural mechanisms underlie the selection of items from working memory and attention to sensory stimuli.
We trained rhesus monkeys to switch between 2 tasks, either selecting one item from a set of items held in working memory or attending to one stimulus from a set of visual stimuli. Neural recordings showed that similar representations in prefrontal cortex encoded the control of both selection and attention, suggesting that prefrontal cortex acts as a domain-general controller. By contrast, both attention and selection were represented independently in parietal and visual cortex. Both selection and attention facilitated behaviour by enhancing and transforming the representation of the selected memory or attended stimulus. Specifically, during the selection task, memory items were initially represented in independent subspaces of neural activity in prefrontal cortex. Selecting an item caused its representation to transform from its own subspace to a new subspace used to guide behaviour. A similar transformation occurred for attention.
Our results suggest that prefrontal cortex controls cognition by dynamically transforming representations to control what and when cognitive computations are engaged.
It was long assumed that only humans can distinguish the living from the dead. Renewed interest in this question over the last decade has led several authors to assert that non-human primates are also aware of death. We investigate this issue by comparing the behaviours of monkeys and great apes toward helpless conspecifics, basing our analysis on published reports.
We first examine the behaviours of mothers towards the body of their dead offspring. They may carry the corpse for days or more before abandoning it. They groom, inspect and protect it, sometimes allowing group members to explore it, and rare cases of cannibalism have been reported. No substantial difference is observed in the way that monkeys and great apes treat the bodies of infants.
We then examine responses to collapsed (still able to move and react) and inanimate (unresponsive or dead) conspecifics. Monkeys and great apes guard, care for and inspect their helpless partners, and also manipulate and mobilize them. Through these actions, individuals may inform themselves about the state of their partners, test their responsiveness and/or attempt to rouse them. It appears that only chimpanzees and gorillas show violent action such as display behaviours and the rough treatment of bodies. They can also make distress calls, and periods of “stunned silence” sometimes occur in chimpanzees, indicating that they are experiencing intense emotion.
Finally, we argue that while both monkeys and great apes detect body dysfunction through the victims’ inability to wake up and move, only great apes can understand that something serious has happened. The signs of emotional disturbance reported in them indicate that they may believe that inanimate conspecifics have entered a state of “dormancy”, meaning that they are unlikely to regain wakefulness. However, there is no evidence that any non-human primates are aware of mortality.
Introduction: Head injury is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. Long-term associations of head injury with dementia in community-based populations are less clear.
Methods: Prospective cohort study of 14,376 participants (mean age 54 years at baseline, 56% female, 27% Black, 24% with head injury) enrolled in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Head injury was defined using self-report and International Classification of Diseases, Ninth/Tenth Revision (ICD-9/10) codes. Dementia was defined using cognitive assessments, informant interviews, and ICD-9/10 and death certificate codes.
Results: Head injury was associated with risk of dementia (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.44, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.3–1.57), with evidence of dose-response (1 head injury: HR = 1.25, 95% CI = 1.13–1.39, 2+ head injuries: HR = 2.14, 95% CI = 1.86–2.46). There was evidence for stronger associations among female participants (HR = 1.69, 95% CI = 1.51–1.90) versus male participants (HR = 1.15, 95% CI = 1.00–1.32), p-for-interaction < 0.001, and among White participants (HR = 1.55, 95% CI = 1.40–1.72) versus Black participants (HR = 1.22, 95% CI = 1.02–1.45), p-for-interaction = 0.008.
Discussion: In this community-based cohort with 25-year follow-up, head injury was associated with increased dementia risk in a dose-dependent manner, with stronger associations among female participants and White participants.
Figure 2: Kaplan-Meier curve for cumulative dementia incidence by head injury frequency, n = 14,376. Log-rank p-value < 0.001
Non-human primates respond to the death of a conspecific in diverse ways, some which may present phylogenetic continuity with human thanatological behaviours. Of these responses, infant corpse carrying by mothers (ICC) is the most-frequently reported. Despite its prevalence, quantitative analyses of this behaviour are scarce and inconclusive.
We compiled a database of 409 published cases across 50 different primate species of mothers’ responses to their infants’ deaths to test hypotheses proposed to explain between-species and within-species variation in corpse carrying. Using Bayesian phylogenetic regressions, we preliminarily identified three factors as possible predictors of ICC occurrence. However, using an information-theoretic approach, no combination of these predictors performed better than the null model, offering no support for any of the hypotheses we tested. In contrast, for those cases where infants’ corpses were carried, infant age affected ICC duration, with longer ICC observed for younger infants.This result may provide support for hypotheses that suggest that ICC is a by-product of a strong mother-infant bond.
The results are discussed in the context of the evolution of emotion and their implications for evolutionary thanatology are considered.
…I thought I would add a few remarks on my very first job as chess teacher, which I did at ages 14–15.
Chess teaching isn’t mainly about chess. A chess teacher has to have a certain mystique above all, while at the same time being approachable. Even at 14 this is possible. Your students are hiring you at least as much for your mystique as for the content of your lessons.
Not everyone…wanted to be a better chess player. For some, taking the lesson was a substitute for hard work on chess, not a complement to it. The lesson for them was a fun social experience, and it kept the game of chess salient in their minds. They became “the kind of person who takes chess lessons.” I understood this well at the time. Some of the students wanted to show you their chess games, so that someone else would be sharing in their triumphs and tragedies. That is an OK enough way to proceed with a chess lesson, but often the students were more interested in “showing” than in listening and learning and hearing the hard truths about their play.
Students are too interested in asking your opinion of particular openings. At lower-tier amateur levels of chess, the opening just doesn’t matter that much, provided you don’t get into an untenable position too quickly. Nonetheless openings are a fun thing to learn about, and discussing openings can give people the illusion of learning something important…
What I really had to teach was methods for hard work to improve your game consistently over time. That might include for instance annotating a game or position “blind”, and then comparing your work to the published analysis of a world-class player, a la Alexander Kotov’sThink Like a Grandmaster. [The book is not concerned with advising where pieces should be placed on the board, or tactical motifs, but rather with the method of thinking that should be employed during a game. Kotov’s advice to identify candidate moves and methodically examine them to build up an “analysis tree” remains well known today.] I did try to teach that, but the demand for this service was not always so high.
The younger chess prodigy I taught was quite bright and also likable. But he had no real interest in improving his chess game. Instead, hanging out with me was more fun for him than either doing homework or watching TV, and I suspect his parents understood that. In any case, early on I was thinking keenly about talent and the determinants of ultimate success, and obsessiveness seemed quite important. All of the really good chess players had it, and without it you couldn’t get far above expert level.
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)]
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.
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.
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.
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]
His contributions were prodigious and spanned psychopathy and personality disorders, psychiatric classification and diagnosis, dissociation, memory and trauma, neuroscience, and cultural sensitivity. He authored, coauthored, and co-edited more than 500 articles and book chapters and 20 books, including the Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology. His intellectual reach extended to writing introductory psychology and graduate textbooks, to op-eds and coverage in major news outlets, TV appearances, radio programs, podcasts, and lectures across the world. He made his mark in editorial roles including as editor-in-chief of Clinical Psychological Science, and as past editor and founder of the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice.
[part 2]Given the research that suggests men attend to nipples and that nipple erection is triggered by sexual excitement (among other triggers), we questioned whether men see nipple erection as a sign of sexual interest. Our findings indicate that men (but not women) see women as sexier when they have nipple erection and also see themselves as sexier, supporting the idea that nipple erection is perceived signaling arousal or sexual interest.
To determine whether female nipple erection is perceived as a sign of sexual arousal or interest, male and female participants were asked to rate photos of real women with and without salient nipple erection on a series of 16 emotional and physiological states, including positive, negative, and sexually aroused states. Nipple erection salience was rated by independent raters, and faces in photos were obscured to prevent discerning emotional states from facial cues.
Men clearly projected more sexy and positive emotions onto the stimuli when the stimuli displayed erect nipples. Whereas women did project more positive emotions with erect nipples, they did not differ in their expression of sexy. We also observed that men’s self-ratings of sexy and positive emotions were the same as their ratings of the stimuli. Women, however, reported statistically-significantly less sexy and positive emotions for themselves relative to the stimuli.
[part 1] This study shows that men are more likely to do things for sexualized women, in this case, women with nipple erection. Women, however, would prefer to avoid women with nipple erection socially. This can have implications for sex and dating strategies, and female interaction in social settings.
Previous research has shown that men perceive nipple erection as signaling more sexually receptive states. This study intended to determine if this perception changed male hypothetical behavior. For example, would men be more willing to assist women with nipple erection as opposed to those without?
Participants were asked to rate pictures of women with and without salient nipple erection (faces were obscured to prevent discerning emotional states).
Men perceived women with nipple erection as more deserving of altruism, especially if that altruism involved greater interaction with the woman, and they expected these same women to behave more altruistically toward them. They also believed the women with erect nipples should be included in their social groups. Women, on the other hand, did not perceive them as deserving of greater altruistic behaviors, did not expect greater altruistic behaviors from them, and did not want to include them into their social groups.
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.
The proliferation of media streaming services has increased the volume of personalized video consumption, allowing marketers to reach massive audiences and deliver a range of customized content at scale. However, relatively little is known about how consumers’ psychological makeup is manifested in their media preferences. The present paper addresses this gap in a preregistered study of the relationship between movie plots, quantified via user-generated keywords, and the aggregate personality profiles of those who “like” them on social media. We find that movie plots can be used to accurately predict aggregate fans’ personalities, above and beyond the demographic characteristics of fans, and general film characteristics such as quality, popularity, and genre. Further analysis reveals various associations between the movies’ psychological themes and their fans’ personalities, indicating congruence between the two. For example, films with keywords related to anxiety are liked more among people who are high in Neuroticism and low in Extraversion. In contrast, angry and violent movies are liked more by people who are low in Agreeableness. Our findings provide a fine-grained mapping between personality dimensions and preferences for media content, and demonstrate how these links can be leveraged for assessing audience psychographics at scale.
Supplementary Figure 1: Correlations between dimensions of the aggregate fan personality (AFPP), aggregate fan demographic profile(AFDP) and Metadata variables, across MoviesExtremes of movie correlations: movies with the highest/lowest correlation to Openness to ExperienceExtremes: ExtraversionExtremes: Agreeableness
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.
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.
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), 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 (eg., that a novel technology will control their mind), making them less likely to discover the underlying “secret” (Thomas & Didierjean, 2016). 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 (eg., 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).
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 (eg., the struggle of completing the most difficult task) more than the end (eg., 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.
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.
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; ie., 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 examinethe 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.
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.
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 (eg., adding control conditions).
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” (eg., 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.
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 providea 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 (eg., 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.
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 andthe 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.
Humans have tended to believe that we are the only species to possess certain traits, behaviors, or abilities, especially with regard to cognition. Occasionally, we extend such traits to primates or other mammals—species with which we share fundamental brain similarities. Over time, more and more of these supposed pillars of human exceptionalism have fallen. Nieder et al 2020 now argue that the relationship between consciousness and a standard cerebral cortex is another fallen pillar (see the Perspective by Herculano-Houzel). Specifically, carrion crows show a neuronal response in the palliative end brain during the performance of a task that correlates with their perception of a stimulus. Such activity might be a broad marker for consciousness.
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 2-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.
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 [eg “Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills”, Pika et al 2020]), 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.
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).]
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]
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.
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]
Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the most common factors people have to deal with when performing their daily working tasks. Researchers have marginally investigated the effect of noise on software engineers’ performance.
In this paper, we present the results of 2 replicated experiments whose main goal was to increase the body of knowledge, by confirming or not the results of the baseline experiments, on the effect of noise while comprehending functional requirements specifications and fixing faults in source code. The results of the replicated experiments suggest that: (1) noise does not statistically-significantly affect the comprehension of functional requirements specifications and (2) noise statistically-significantly and negatively affects fixing faults if this task lasts 30 minutes, while it does not have a statistically-significant impact if the task lasts 60 minutes.
The results of the replications confirm to a large extent those of the baseline experiments and allow us to postulate, as done for the baseline experiments, that fixing faults is more vulnerable to noise than comprehending the specifications of functional requirements.
Objective:: Efforts to prevent depression, the leading cause of disability worldwide, have focused on a limited number of candidate factors. Using phenotypic and genomic data from over 100,000 UK Biobank participants, the authors sought to systematically screen and validate a wide range of potential modifiable factors for depression.
Methods:: Baseline data were extracted for 106 modifiable factors, including lifestyle (eg., exercise, sleep, media, diet), social (eg., support, engagement), and environmental (eg., green space, pollution) variables. Incident depression was defined as minimal depressive symptoms at baseline and clinically-significant depression at follow-up. At-risk individuals for incident depression were identified by polygenic risk scores or by reported traumatic life events. An exposure-wide association scan was conducted to identify factors associated with incident depression in the full sample and among at-risk individuals. Two-sample Mendelian randomization was then used to validate potentially causal relationships between identified factors and depression.
Results:: Numerous factors across social, sleep, media, dietary, and exercise-related domains were prospectively associated with depression, even among at-risk individuals. However, only a subset of factors was supported by Mendelian randomization evidence, including confiding in others (odds ratio = 0.76, 95% CI = 0.67, 0.86), television watching time (odds ratio = 1.09, 95% CI = 1.05–1.13), and daytime napping (odds ratio = 1.34, 95% CI = 1.17–1.53).
Conclusions:: Using a two-stage approach, this study validates several actionable targets for preventing depression. It also demonstrates that not all factors associated with depression in observational research may translate into robust targets for prevention. A large-scale exposure-wide approach combined with genetically informed methods for causal inference may help prioritize strategies for multimodal prevention in psychiatry.
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.
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.
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 (eg., 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]
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.
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 (eg. ‘You can change even your most basic qualities’) and granular beliefs that the individual Big Five personality domains can change (eg. ‘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]
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 (ie., 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.
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
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.
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]
This study examines the timing of pop-up advertising appearance and its effect on perceived intrusiveness, advertising irritation and advertising avoidance. Experiment was designed to build a virtual Internet environment (including the main content on the webpage and a pop-up ad) and to manipulate the timing of the pop-up advertising appearance. Participants were invited to participate in two experiments, and then assigned to a specific target browsing task; their advertising browsing activities during the task were measured. In order to measure their cognitive advertising avoidance, an eye-tracking device was utilised to gain objective and accurate psychological information. Results showed that earlier pop-up advertising appearances are associated with a lower consumer fixation count and fixation length; in contrast, pop-up advertising that appears later is associated with a higher fixation count and fixation length. This study attempts to gain more objective and accurate psychological data by using an eye-tracking device to collect information about eye movements associated with the appearance of pop-up advertising to better analyse consumer behaviours towards them. These results offer insights to Internet advertisers and Internet platform companies on how to provide more efficient Internet advertising.
Grit has been suggested as a predictor of academic success over and above established constructs like conscientiousness (C) but has only been compared to brief inventories of trait-level C. This study examined the difference between using a brief inventory of C (Big Five Inventory [BFI]) and a facet-level inventory (NEO PersonalityInventory–Revised [NEO PI-R]) as controls for grit in an undergraduate sample (n = 1,394). Grit exhibited strong correlations with C, particularly the facets of self-discipline and achievement striving. When BFI was used, both grit and C added small increments in explained variancewhile controlling for each other. When NEO PI-R was used, grit could not explain any additional variance in university grade and minuscule amounts (4%) in high school grade. Facets of C added moderate amounts (16%–54%) of incremental variance to both university and high school grades when controlling for grit. The results demonstrated that different outcomes are to be expected depending upon the choice of C measure.
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.
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 (eg., 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.
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 (ie. 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× 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.
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]
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]
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 (eg. 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.
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.
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.
Visual illusions have been widely used to compare visual perception among birds and mammals to assess whether animals interpret and alter visual inputs like humans, or if they detect them with little or no variability.
Here, we investigated whether a nonavian reptile (Pogona vitticeps) perceives the Müller-Lyer illusion, an illusion that causes a misperception of the relative length of 2 line segments. We observed the animals’ spontaneous tendency to choose the larger food quantity (the longer line). In test trials, animals received the same food quantity presented in a spatial arrangement eliciting the size illusion in humans; control trials presented them with 2 different-sized food portions.
Bearded dragons statistically-significantly selected the larger food quantity in control trials, confirming that they maximized food intake. Group analysis revealed that in the illusory test trials, they preferentially selected the line length estimated as longer by human observers. Further control trials excluded the possibility that their choice was based on potential spatial bias related to the illusory pattern.
Our study suggests that a nonavian reptile species has the capability to be sensitive to the Müller-Lyer illusion, raising the intriguing possibility that the perceptual mechanisms underlying size estimation might be similar across amniotes.
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.
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.
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.
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 (ie., 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-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.
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.
Most adolescents exhibit very late chronotypes and attend school early in the morning, a misalignment that can affect their health and psychological well-being. Here we examine how the interaction between the chronotype and school timing of an individual influences academic performance, studying a unique sample of 753 Argentinian students who were randomly assigned to start school in the morning (07:45), afternoon (12:40) or evening (17:20). Although chronotypes tend to align partially with class time, this effect is insufficient to fully account for the differences with school start time. We show that (1) for morning-attending students, early chronotypes perform better than late chronotypes in all school subjects, an effect that is largest for maths; (2) this effect vanishes for students who attend school in the afternoon; and (3) late chronotypes benefit from evening classes. Together, these results demonstrate that academic performance is improved when school times are better aligned with the biological rhythms of adolescents.
Reaching 95%-ile isn’t very impressive because it’s not that hard to do…most people can become (relatively) good at most things…Personally, in every activity I’ve participated in where it’s possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. “Real world” activities typically can’t be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy. We’ll start by looking at Overwatch (a video game) in detail because it’s an activity I’m familiar with where it’s easy to get ranking information and observe what’s happening, and then we’ll look at some “real world” examples where we can observe the same phenomena, although we won’t be able to get ranking information for real world examples1.
Overwatch: At 90%-ile and 95%-ile ranks in Overwatch, the vast majority of players will pretty much constantly make basic game losing mistakes. These are simple mistakes like standing next to the objective instead of on top of the objective while the match timer runs out, turning a probable victory into a certain defeat. See the attached footnote if you want enough detail about specific mistakes that you can decide for yourself if a mistake is “basic” or not…When I first started playing Overwatch (which is when I did that experiment), I ended up getting rated slightly above 50%-ile…Some things you’ll regularly see at slightly above 50%-ile are:
Supports (healers) will heal someone who’s at full health (which does nothing) while a teammate who’s next to them is dying and then dies
Players will not notice someone who walks directly behind the team and kills people one at a time until the entire team is killed
Players will shoot an enemy until only one more shot is required to kill the enemy and then switch to a different target, letting the 1-health enemy heal back to full health before shooting at that enemy again
After dying, players will not wait for their team to respawn and will, instead, run directly into the enemy team to fight them 1v6. This will repeat for the entire game (the game is designed to be 6v6, but in ranks below 95%-ile, it’s rare to see a 6v6 engagement after one person on one team dies)
Players will clearly have no idea what character abilities do, including for the character they’re playing
Players go for very high risk but low reward plays (for Overwatch players, a classic example of this is Rein going for a meme pin when the game opens on 2CP defense, very common at 50%-ile, rare at 95%-ile since players who think this move is a good idea tend to have generally poor decision making).
People will have terrible aim and will miss four or five shots in a row when all they need to do is hit someone once to kill them
If a single flanking enemy threatens a healer who can’t escape plus a non-healer with an escape ability, the non-healer will probably use their ability to run away, leaving the healer to die, even though they could easily kill the flanker and save their healer if they just attacked while being healed.
Having just one aspect of your gameplay be merely bad instead of atrocious is enough to get to 50%-ile…Another basic situation that the vast majority of 90%-ile to 95%-ile players will get wrong is when you’re on offense, waiting for your team to respawn so you can attack as a group. Even at 90%-ile, maybe 1⁄4 to 1⁄3 of players won’t do this and will just run directly at the enemy team…For anyone who isn’t well into the 99%-ile, reviewing recorded games will reveal game-losing mistakes all the time. For myself, usually ranked 90%-ile or so, watching a recorded game will reveal tens of game losing mistakes in a close game (which is maybe 30% of losses, the other 70% are blowouts where there isn’t a single simple mistake that decides the game).
It’s generally not too hard to fix these since the mistakes are like the example above: simple enough that once you see that you’re making the mistake, the fix is straightforward because the mistake is straightforward…if you look at the median time played at 50%-ile, people who are stably ranked there have put in hundreds of hours (and the median time played at higher ranks is higher). Given how simple the mistakes we’re discussing are, not having put in enough time cannot be the case for most players. A common complaint among low-ranked Overwatch players in Overwatch forums is that they’re just not talented and can never get better. Most people probably don’t have the talent to play in a professional league regardless of their practice regimen, but when you can get to 95%-ile by fixing mistakes like “not realizing that you should stand on the objective”, you don’t really need a lot of talent to get to 95%-ile.
…One thing that’s curious about this is that Overwatch makes it easy to spot basic mistakes (compared to most other activities). After you’re killed, the game shows you how you died from the viewpoint of the player who killed you, allowing you to see what led to your death. Overwatch also records the entire game and lets you watch a replay of the game, allowing you to figure out what happened and why the game was won or lost. In many other games, you’d have to set up recording software to be able to view a replay. If you read Overwatch forums, you’ll see a regular stream of posts that are basically “I’m SOOOOOOFRUSTRATED! I’ve played this game for 1200 hours and I’m still ranked 10%-ile, [some Overwatch specific stuff that will vary from player to player]”. Another user will inevitably respond with something like “we can’t tell what’s wrong from your text, please post a video of your gameplay”. In the cases where the original poster responds with a recording of their play, people will post helpful feedback that will immediately make the player much better if they take it seriously. If you follow these people who ask for help, you’ll often see them ask for feedback at a much higher rank (eg., moving from 10%-ile to 40%-ile) shortly afterwards. It’s nice to see that the advice works, but it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.
It appears to be common for Overwatch players (well into 95%-ile and above) to:
Want to improve
Not get feedback
Improve slowly when getting feedback would make improving quickly easy
Overwatch provides the tools to make it relatively easy to get feedback, but people who very strongly express a desire to improve don’t avail themselves of these tools.
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.
Background: A recently published randomized controlled trial compared single-dose psilocybin with single-dose niacin in conjunction with psychotherapy in participants with cancer-related psychiatric distress. Results suggested that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy facilitated improvements in psychiatric and existential distress, quality of life, and spiritual well-being up to seven weeks prior to the crossover. At the 6.5-month follow-up, after the crossover, 60–80% of participants continued to meet criteria for clinically-significant antidepressant or anxiolytic responses.
Methods: The present study is a long-term within-subjects follow-up analysis of self-reported symptomatology involving a subset of participants that completed the parent trial. All 16 participants who were still alive were contacted, and 15 participants agreed to participate at an average of 3.2 and 4.5 years following psilocybin administration.
Results: Reductions in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, demoralization, and death anxiety were sustained at the first and second follow-ups. Within-group effect sizes were large. At the second (4.5 year) follow-up approximately 60–80% of participants met criteria for clinically-significant antidepressant or anxiolytic responses. Participants overwhelmingly (71–100%) attributed positive life changes to the psilocybin-assisted therapy experience and rated it among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.
Conclusion: These findings suggest that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy holds promise in promoting long-term relief from cancer-related psychiatric distress. Limited conclusions, however, can be drawn regarding the efficacy of this therapy due to the crossover design of the parent study. Nonetheless, the present study adds to the emerging literature base suggesting that psilocybin-facilitated therapy may enhance the psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being of patients with life-threatening cancer.
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.
Native advertising is a type of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. In practice, the choice between display and in-feed native advertising presents brand advertisers and online news publishers with conflicting objectives. Advertisers face a trade-off between ad clicks and brand recognition, whereas publishers need to strike a balance between ad clicks and the platform’s trustworthiness. For policy makers, concerns that native advertising confuses customers prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue guidelines for disclosing native ads. This research aims to understand how consumers respond to native ads versus display ads and to different styles of native ad disclosures, using randomized online and field experiments combining behavioral clickstream, eye movement, and survey response data. The results show that when the position of an ad on a news page is controlled for, a native ad generates a higher click-through rate because it better resembles the surrounding editorial content. However, a display ad leads to more visual attention, brand recognition, and trustworthiness for the website than a native ad.
[Keywords: native advertising, public policy, eye-tracking, field experiments, advertising disclosure]
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 (eg., 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.
“‘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.
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.
Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.
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.
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 variancein 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.
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 ofdemand 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.
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 (eg., insects, crabs), and cephalopods (eg., 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.
Is Bloom’s “Two Sigma” phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the “2 Sigma Problem”: how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (ie., more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring?
In a related vein, this large-scale meta-analysis shows large (>0.5 Cohen’s d) effects from direct instruction using mastery learning. “Yet, despite the very large body of research supporting its effectiveness, DI has not been widely embraced or implemented.”
The literatures examined here are full of small sample, non-randomized trials, and highly heterogeneous results.
Tutoring in general, most likely, does not reach the 2-sigma level that Bloom suggested. Likewise, it’s unlikely that mastery learning provides a 1-sigma improvement.
But high quality tutors, and high quality software are likely able to reach a 2-sigma improvement and beyond.
All the methods (mastery learning, direct instruction, tutoring, software tutoring, deliberate practice, and spaced repetition) studied in this essay are found to work to various degrees, outlined below.
This essay covers many kinds of subjects being taught, and likewise many groups (special education vs regular schools, college vs K-12). The effect sizes reported here are averages that serve as general guidance.
The methods studied tend to be more effective for lower skilled students relative to the rest.
The methods studied work at all levels of education, with the exception of direct instruction: There is no evidence to judge its effectiveness at the college level.
The methods work substantially better when clear objectives and facts to be learned are set. There is little evidence of learning transfer: Practicing or studying X subject does not improve much performance outside of X.
There is some suggestive evidence that the underlying reasons these methods work are increased and repeated exposure to the material, the testing effect, and fine-grained feedback on performance in the case of tutoring.
Long term studies tend to find evidence of a fade-out effect, effect sizes decrease over time. This is likely due to the skills being learned not being practiced.
Bloom noted that mastery learning had an effect size of around 1 (one sigma); while tutoring leads to d = 2. This is mostly an outlier case.
Nonetheless, Bloom was on to something: Tutoring and mastery learning do have a degree of experimental support, and fortunately it seems that carefully designed software systems can completely replace the instructional side of traditional teaching, achieving better results, on par with one to one tutoring. However, designing them is a hard endeavour, and there is a motivational component of teachers that may not be as easily replicable purely by software.
Overall, it’s good news that the effects are present for younger and older students, and across subjects, but the effect sizes of tutoring, mastery learning or DI are not as good as they would seem from Bloom’s paper. That said, it is true that tutoring does have large effect sizes, and that properly designed software does as well. The DARPA case study shows what is possible with software tutoring, in the case the effect sizes went even beyond Bloom’s paper.
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.
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 (ie., 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].
This paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction. I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees’ orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization’s inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.
…Some held out hope that one or two people at the top knew of these design and operation issues; however, they were often disabused of this optimism. For example, a manager walked the CEO through the map, presenting him with a view he had never seen before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, “This is even more fucked up than I imagined.” The CEO revealed that not only was the operation of his organization out of his control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.
But as the projects ended and the teams disbanded, a puzzle emerged. Some team members returned, as intended by senior management, to their prior roles and careers in the organization. Some, however, chose to leave these careers entirely, abandoning what had been to that point successful and satisfying work to take on organizational change roles elsewhere. Many took new jobs with responsibility for organizational development, Six Sigma, total quality management (TQM), business process re-engineering (BPR), or lean projects.Others assumed temporary contract roles to manage BPR project teams within their own or other organizations.
…Despite being experienced managers, what they learned was eye-opening. One explained that “it was like the sun rose for the first time….I saw the bigger picture.” They had never seen the pieces—the jobs, technologies, tools, and routines—connected in one place, and they realized that their prior view was narrow and fractured. A team member acknowledged, “I only thought of things in the context of my span of control.”…The maps of the organization generated by the project teams also showed that their organizations often lacked a purposeful, integrated design that was centrally monitored and managed. There may originally have been such a design, but as the organization grew, adapted to changing markets, brought on new leadership, added or subtracted divisions, and so on, this animating vision was lost. The original design had been eroded, patched, and overgrown with alternative plans. A manager explained, “Everything I see around here was developed because of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn’t engineered.” Another manager described how local, off-the-cuff action had contributed to the problems observed at the organizational level:
“They see problems, and the general approach, the human approach, is to try and fix them….Functions have tried to put band-aids on every issue that comes up. It sounds good, but when they are layered one on top of the other they start to choke the organization. But they don’t see that because they are only seeing their own thing.”
Finally, analyzing a particular work process, another manager explained that she had been “assuming that somebody did this [the process] on purpose. And it wasn’t done on purpose. It was just a series of random events that somehow came together.”]
The understanding, quantification and evaluation of individual differences in behavior, feelings and thoughts have always been central topics in psychological science. An enormous amount of previous work on individual differences in behavior is exclusively based on data from self-report questionnaires. To date, little is known about how individuals actually differ in their objectively quantifiable behaviors and how differences in these behaviors relate to big five personality traits. Technological advances in mobile computer and sensing technology have now created the possibility to automatically record large amounts of data about humans’ natural behavior. The collection and analysis of these records makes it possible to analyze and quantify behavioral differences at unprecedented scale and efficiency. In this study, we analyzed behavioral data obtained from 743 participants in 30 consecutive days of smartphone sensing (25,347,089 logging-events). We computed variables (15,692) about individual behavior from five semantic categories (communication & social behavior, music listening behavior, app usage behavior, mobility, and general daytime & nighttime activity). Using a machine learning approach (random forest, elastic net), we show how these variables can be used to predict self-assessments of the big five personality traits at the factor and facet level. Our results reveal distinct behavioral patterns that proved to be differentially-predictive of big five personality traits. Overall, this paper shows how a combination of rich behavioral data obtained with smartphone sensing and the use of machine learning techniques can help to advance personality research and can inform both practitioners and researchers about the different behavioral patterns of personality.
Information about a person’s income can be useful in several business-related contexts, such as personalized advertising or salary negotiations. However, many people consider this information private and are reluctant to share it. In this paper, we show that income is predictable from the digital footprints people leave on Facebook. Applying an established machine learning method to an income-representative sample of 2,623 U.S. Americans, we found that (1) Facebook Likes and Status Updates alone predicted a person’s income with an accuracy of up to r = 0.43, and (2) Facebook Likes and Status Updates added incremental predictive power above and beyond a range of socio-demographic variables (ΔR2 = 6–16%, with a correlation of up to r = 0.49). Our findings highlight both opportunities for businesses and legitimate privacy concerns that such prediction models pose to individuals and society when applied without individual consent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive consequences for psychological well-being, physical health, and relationships. Here we instead examine the consequences for individuals’ incomes and number of children, as these are the currencies that matter most in theories that emphasize the power of self-interest, namely economics and evolutionary thinking.
Drawing on both cross-sectional (Studies 1 [GSS] and 2 [ESS]) andpanel data (Studies 3 [UKHLS] and 4 [PSID]), we find that prosocial individuals tend to have more children and higher income than selfish individuals. An additional survey (Study 5) of lay beliefs about how self-interest impacts income and fertility suggests one reason selfish people may persist in their behavior even though it leads to poorer outcomes: people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes.
Our findings have implications for lay decisions about the allocation of scarce resources, as well as for economic and evolutionary theories of human behavior.
[Keywords: selfishness, altruism, folk psychology, fertility, income]
…In Study 5 we examined whether a sample of Americans were aware of the negative effects of selfishness. For the most part, they turned out to have accurate intuitions—especially about the negative associations that selfishness has with social relations, psychological well-being, and number of children. Thus, whereas Crocker et al 2017 (p. 315) call the finding that selfishness does not promote well-being paradoxical, our study indicates that laypeople do not view it as such. Instead, the empirical finding that runs counter to lay intuitions is that selfishness is not associated with the highest incomes. Given people’s expectations, this finding is the real paradox of self-interested behavior. If people understood that prosociality pays, then selfish people might engage in more prosociality for selfish reasons. Under their incorrect beliefs, however, it is rational for selfish people to act selfishly.
Perceived mental health from men’s facial appearance reflected actual mental health.
Results held for subclinical autistic quotient, depressive symptoms, and schizotypy.
Accuracy was not explained by attractiveness or other appearance variables.
Mental health vulnerability could lead to negative social evaluation.
Previous work shows that mental health can be evident from neutral facial appearance. We assessed the accuracy of mental health perceptions from facial appearance, and how perceived mental health related to other appearance cues, specifically attractiveness, perceived physical health, and masculinity.
We constructed composite images from men scoring high and low on autistic quotient, depressive symptoms, and schizotypy inventories, and asked observers to rate these images for mental health. We found perceived mental health reflected actual mental health in all cases. Furthermore, the accuracy of mental health inference was not fully explained by other appearance cues.
We consider implications of accurate mental health detection from appearance, and the possibility that appearance could be a risk factor for mental health issues.
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 (eg., 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.
This paper explores the use of language models to predict 20 human traits from users’ Facebook status updates. The data was collected by the myPersonality project, and includes user statuses along with their personality, gender, political identification, religion, race, satisfaction with life, IQ, self-disclosure, fair-mindedness, and belief in astrology. A single interpretable model meets state of the art results for well-studied tasks such as predicting gender and personality; and sets the standard on other traits such as IQ, sensational interests, political identity, and satisfaction with life. Additionally, highly weighted words are published for each trait. These lists are valuable for creating hypotheses about human behavior, as well as for understanding what information a model is extracting. Using performance and extracted features we analyze models built on social media. The real world problems we explore include gendered classification bias and Cambridge Analytica’s use of psychographic models.
A randomized control trial with 432 small and medium enterprises in Mexico shows positive impact of access to 1 year of management consulting services on total factor productivity and return on assets. Owners also had an increase in “entrepreneurial spirit” (an index that measures entrepreneurial confidence and goal setting). Using Mexican social security data, we find a persistent large increase (about 50%) in the number of employees and total wage bill even 5 years after the program. We document large heterogeneity in the specific managerial practices that improved as a result of the consulting, with the most prominent being marketing, financial accounting, and long-term business planning.
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.
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.
Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles?
We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries.
We find large cross-country differences in the adoption of management practices, with the US having the highest size-weighted average management score.
We present a formal model of “Management as a Technology”, and structurally estimate it using panel data to recover parameters including the depreciation rate and adjustment costs of managerial capital (both found to be larger than for tangible non-managerial capital). Our model also predicts (1) a positive impact of management on firm performance; (2) a positive relationship between product market competition and average management quality (part of which stems from the larger covariance between management with firm size as competition strengthens); and (3) a rise in the level and a fall in the dispersion of management with firm age.
We find strong empirical support for all of these predictions in our data.
Finally, building on our model, we find that differences in management practices account for about 30% of total factor productivity differences both between countries and within countries across firms.
Modern society depends on the flow of information over online social networks, and users of popular platforms generate significant behavioral data about themselves and their social ties. However, it remains unclear what fundamental limits exist when using these data to predict the activities and interests of individuals, and to what accuracy such predictions can be made using an individual’s social ties. Here we show that 95% of the potential predictive accuracy for an individual is achievable using their social ties only, without requiring that individual’s data. We use information theoretic tools to estimate the predictive information within the writings of Twitter users, providing an upper bound on the available predictive information that holds for any predictive or machine learning methods. As few as 8–9 of an individual’s contacts are sufficient to obtain predictability comparable to that of the individual alone. Distinct temporal and social effects are visible by measuring information flow along social ties, allowing us to better study the dynamics of online activity. Our results have distinct privacy implications: information is so strongly embedded in a social network that in principle one can profile an individual from their available social ties even when the individual forgoes the platform completely.
Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as ‘tags’, created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences.
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.
The human reference genome is part of the foundation of modern human biology, and a monumental scientific achievement. However, because it excludes a great deal of common human variation, it introduces a pervasive reference bias into the field of human genomics. To reduce this bias, it makes sense to draw on representative collections of human genomes, brought together into reference cohorts. There are a number of techniques to represent and organize data gleaned from these cohorts, many using ideas implicitly or explicitly borrowed from graph based models. Here, we survey various projects underway to build and apply these graph based structures—which we collectively refer to as genome graphs—and discuss the improvements in read mapping, variant calling, and haplotype determination that genome graphs are expected to produce.
Prior research investigating the mate preferences of women and their parents reveals 2 important findings with regard to physical attractiveness. First, daughters more strongly value mate characteristics connoting genetic quality (such as physical attractiveness) than their parents. Second, both daughters and their parents report valuing characteristics other than physical attractiveness most strongly (eg., ambition/industriousness, friendliness/kindness). However, the prior research relies solely on self-report to assess daughters’ and parents’ preferences.
We assessed mate preferences among 61 daughter-mother pairs using an experimental design varying target men’s physical attractiveness and trait profiles. We tested 4 hypotheses investigating whether a minimum level of physical attractiveness was a necessity to both women and their mothers and whether physical attractiveness was a more important determinant of dating desirability than trait profiles.
These hypotheses were supported. Women and their mothers were strongly influenced by the physical attractiveness of the target men and preferred the attractive and moderately attractive targets. Men with the most desirable personality profiles were rated more favorably than their counterparts only when they were at least moderately attractive. Unattractive men were never rated as more desirable partners for daughters, even when they possessed the most desirable trait profiles.
We conclude that a minimum level of physical attractiveness is a necessity for both women and their mothers and that when women and their parents state that other traits are more important than physical attractiveness, they assume potential mates meet a minimally acceptable standard of physical attractiveness.
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 (ie., 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.
People perceived as creepy are more likely to be male than female.
Females are more likely than males to perceive sexual threat from a creepy person.
Unpredictability is an important component of creepiness.
Some occupations and hobbies are more strongly linked with creepiness than others.
Surprisingly, until now there has never been an empirical study of “creepiness.” An international sample of 1341 individuals responded to an online survey. Males were perceived as being more likely to be creepy than females, and females were more likely to associate sexual threat with creepiness. Unusual nonverbal behavior and characteristics associated with unpredictability were also predictors of creepiness, as were some occupations and hobbies. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that being “creeped out” is an evolved adaptive emotional response to ambiguity about the presence of threat that enables us to maintain vigilance during times of uncertainty.
…3.4. Creepiness of hobbies: Just for fun, we asked our participants to list 2 hobbies that they thought of as creepy. Easily, the most frequently mentioned creepy hobbies involved collecting things (listed by 341 of our participants). Collecting dolls, insects, reptiles, or body parts such as teeth, bones, or fingernails was considered especially creepy. The second most frequently mentioned creepy hobby (listed by 108 participants) involved some variation of “watching.” Watching, following, or taking pictures of people (especially children) was thought to be creepy by many of our participants, and bird watchers were considered creepy by many as well. A fascination with pornography or exotic sexual activity and taxidermy were also frequently mentioned.
…An examination of Table 2 reveals that the following elements were thought to be very likely to be found in a creepy person: The appearance and nonverbal behavior items in the composite variable (Appearance/NVB), being of the opposite sex (probably due to the predominantly female sample in our study), being extremely thin, not looking the interaction partner in the eye, asking to take a picture of the interaction partner, watching people before interacting with them, asking about details of one’s personal life, having a mental illness, talking about his/her own personal life, displaying too much or too little emotion, being older, and steering the conversation toward sex.
Table 2: One sample t-test results for ratings of probable characteristics of a hypothetical. Creepy person interacting with friend of participant. [Note: All degrees of freedom (df) = 1340. Ratings are on a “1” (very unlikely that creepy person displayed this characteristic/behavior) to “5”(very likely that creepy person displayed this characteristic/behavior) scale.]
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.
Heritability estimation provides important information about the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to phenotypic variation, and provides an upper bound for the utility of genetic risk prediction models. Recent technological and statistical advances have enabled the estimation of additive heritability attributable to common genetic variants (SNP heritability) across a broad phenotypic spectrum. However, assessing the comparative heritability of multiple traits estimated in different cohorts may be misleading due to the population-specific nature of heritability. Here we report the SNP heritability for 551 complex traits derived from the large-scale, population-based UK Biobank, comprising both quantitative phenotypes and disease codes, and examine the moderating effect of three major demographic variables (age, sex and socioeconomic status) on the heritability estimates. Our study represents the first comprehensive phenome-wide heritability analysis in the UK Biobank, and underscores the importance of considering population characteristics in comparing and interpreting heritability.
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]
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.
An increasing number of domains are providing us with detailed trace data on human decisions in settings where we can evaluate the quality of these decisions via an algorithm. Motivated by this development, an emerging line of work has begun to consider whether we can characterize and predict the kinds of decisions where people are likely to make errors.
To investigate what a general framework for human error prediction might look like, we focus on a model system with a rich history in the behavioral sciences: the decisions made by chess players as they select moves in a game. We carry out our analysis at a large scale, employing datasets with several million recorded games, and using chess tablebases to acquire a form of ground truth for a subset of chess positions that have been completely solved by computers but remain challenging even for the best players in the world.
We organize our analysis around three categories of features that we argue are present in most settings where the analysis of human error is applicable: the skill of the decision-maker, the time available to make the decision, and the inherent difficulty of the decision. We identify rich structure in all three of these categories of features, and find strong evidence that in our domain, features describing the inherent difficulty of an instance are statistically-significantly more powerful than features based on skill or time.
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.
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).
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.
The “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits has received increasing attention.
There is no typological study among high-school students based on these traits.
Cluster analysis yielded 4 groups.
The “Dark Tetrad” cluster constituted 15% of the total sample.
Psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic traits constitute the Dark Tetrad of personality traits. While this construct has received increasing attention, to our knowledge, there is no typological study aiming to identify homogeneous groups of high-school students based on these traits. The aim of this study was (a) to identify a typology of high-school students based on the Dark Tetrad traits in a community sample and (b) to examine whether these profiles differ on psychopathological variables known to be associated with personality traits.
Participants were 615 high-school students who completed self-report questionnaires. Psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic traits were moderately correlated suggesting they may be overlapping but distinct constructs. Cluster analysis yielded 4 groups: a Low Traits group, a Sadistic-Machiavellian group, a Psychopathic-Narcissistic group, and a high traits group called the Dark Tetrad cluster which was high on all traits. The Dark Tetrad cluster constituted 15% of the total sample and was characterized by the highest levels of antisocial behaviors and suicidal ideations.
This study suggests that a substantial minority of non-clinical high-school students is characterized by the presence of high levels of the Dark Tetrad traits and self and other-aggression.
[Keywords: Dark Tetrad, Dark Triad, high-school students, personality traits, profiles]
Despite a century of research on complex traits in humans, the relative importance and specific nature of the influences of genes and environment on human traits remain controversial. We report a meta-analysis of twin correlations and reported variance components for 17,804 traits from 2,748 publications including 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs, virtually all published twin studies of complex traits. Estimates of heritability cluster strongly within functional domains, and across all traits the reported heritability is 49%. For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation. The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of the causes of individual differences in human traits thus far and will guide future gene-mapping efforts. All the results can be visualized using the MaTCH webtool.
The human genome is arguably the most complete mammalian reference assembly, yet more than 160 euchromatic gaps remain and aspects of its structural variation remain poorly understood ten years after its completion. To identify missing sequence and genetic variation, here we sequence and analyse a haploid human genome (CHM1) usingsingle-molecule, real-time DNA sequencing. We close or extend 55% ofthe remaining interstitial gaps in the human GRCh37 reference genome–78% of which carried long runs of degenerate short tandem repeats, often several kilobases in length, embedded within (G+C)-rich genomic regions. We resolve the complete sequence of 26,079 euchromatic structural variants at the base-pair level, including inversions, complex insertions and long tracts of tandem repeats. Most have not been previously reported, with the greatest increases in sensitivity occurring for events less than 5 kilobases in size. Compared to the human reference, we find a significant insertional bias (3:1) in regions corresponding to complex insertions and long short tandem repeats. Our results suggest a greater complexity of the human genome in the form of variation of longer and more complex repetitive DNA that can now be largely resolved with the application of this longer-read sequencing technology.
Objective: Personality traits predict both health behaviors and mortality risk across the life course. However, there are few investigations that have examined these effects in a single study. Thus, there are limitations in assessing if health behaviors explain why personality predicts health and longevity.
Method: Utilizing 14-year mortality data from a national sample of over 6,000 adults from the Midlife in the United States Study, we tested whether alcohol use, smoking behavior, and waist circumference mediated the personality-mortality association.
Results: After adjusting for demographic variables, higher levels of Conscientiousness predicted a 13% reduction in mortality risk over the follow-up. Structural equation models provided evidence that heavy drinking, smoking, and greater waist circumference significantly mediated the Conscientiousness-mortality association by 42%.
Conclusion: The current study provided empirical support for the health-behavior model of personality-Conscientiousness influences the behaviors persons engage in and these behaviors affect the likelihood of poor health outcomes. Findings highlight the usefulness of assessing mediation in a structural equation modeling framework when testing proportional hazards. In addition, the current findings add to the growing literature that personality traits can be used to identify those at risk for engaging in behaviors that deteriorate health and shorten the life span.
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 (ie., estimating population parameters) and practice (ie., 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 & Barrett 1989’s 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).
[Discussion of the creation of modern sports training: professional athletes, even NBA stars, typically did not ‘train’. Practice was about getting into shape and working with teammates, if even that much—one simply took one’s skills for granted. Coaches focused on strategy, not coaching.
A harbinger of the professionalization of professional athletes was basketball player Kermit Washington, on the verge of washing out of the NBA early on until he swallowed his pride and began tutoring with coach Pete Newell, who drilled Kermit on the basics repeatedly. Kermit eventually became an All-Star player and influenced other NBA players to engage in coaching and deliberate practice to improve their fundamentals. The modern paradigm is a ruthless quest for perfection in every dimension, quantified, and applying the latest science and technology to eek out even the slightest fraction of a second improvement; athletes are projects, with many different specialists examining them constantly for potential improvements, and as importantly, when not to practice lest they be injured.
And the results speak for themselves—performance has never been higher, the impossible is now done routinely by many professionals, this continuous improvement trend has spread to other domains too, including chess, classical music, business. Equally striking are domains which don’t see trends like this, particular American education.]
“You need to have the best PhDs onboard as well”, McClusky says. This technological and analytical arms race is producing the best athletes in history.
The arms race centers on an obsessive scrutiny of every aspect of training and performance. Trainers today emphasize sports-specific training over generalized conditioning: if you’re a baseball player, you work on rotational power; if you’re a sprinter, on straight-line explosive power. All sorts of tools have been developed to improve vision, reaction time, and the like. The Dynavision D2 machine is a large board filled with flashing lights, which ballplayers have to slap while reading letters and math equations that the board displays. Football players use Nike’s Vapor Strobe goggles, which periodically cloud for tenth-of-a-second intervals, in order to train their eyes to focus even in the middle of chaos. Training is also increasingly personalized. Players are working not just with their own individual conditioning coaches but also with their own individual skills coaches. In non-team sports, such as tennis and golf, coaches were rare until the seventies. Today, tennis players such as Novak Djokovic have not just a single coach but an entire entourage. In team sports, meanwhile, there’s been a proliferation of gurus. George Whitfield has built a career as a “quarterback whisperer”, turning college quarterbacks into NFL-ready prospects. Ron Wolforth, a pitching coach, is known for resurrecting pitchers’ careers—he recently transformed the Oakland A’s Scott Kazmir from a has-been into an All-Star by revamping his mechanics and motion. Then there’s the increasing use of biometric sensors, equipped with heart-rate monitors, G.P.S., and gyroscopes, to measure not just performance (how fast a player is accelerating or cutting) but also fatigue levels. And since many studies show that getting more sleep leads to better performance, teams are now worrying about that, too. The N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks have equipped players with Readiband monitors to measure how much, and how well, they’re sleeping.
All this effort may sound a bit nuts. But it’s how you end up with someone like Chris Hoy, the British cyclist who won two gold medals at the London Olympics in 2012, trailed by a team of scientists, nutritionists, and engineers. Hoy ate a carefully designed diet of five thousand calories a day. His daily workouts—two hours of lifting in the morning, three hours in the velodrome in the afternoon, and an easy one-hour recovery ride in the evening—had been crafted to maximize both his explosive power and his endurance. He had practiced in wind tunnels at the University of Southampton. He had worn biofeedback sensors that delivered exact data to his trainers about how his body was responding to practice. The eighty-thousand-dollar carbon-fibre bike he rode helped, too. Hoy was the ultimate product of an elaborate and finely tuned system designed to create the best cyclist possible. And—since his competitors weren’t slacking, either—he still won by only a fraction of a second.
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 (eg., 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]
The aim of this descriptive analysis was to examine sleep timing, circadian phase, and phase angle of entrainment across adolescence in a longitudinal study design. Ninety-four adolescents participated; 38 (21 boys) were 9–10 years (“younger cohort”) and 56 (30 boys) were 15–16 years (“older cohort”) at the baseline assessment. Participants completed a baseline and then follow-up assessments approximately every six months for 2.5 years. At each assessment, participants wore a wrist actigraph for at least one week at home to measure self-selected sleep timing before salivary dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) phase—a marker of the circadian timing system—was measured in the laboratory. Weekday and weekend sleep onset and offset and weekend-weekday differences were derived from actigraphy. Phase angles were the time durations from DLMO to weekday sleep onset and offset times. Each cohort showed later sleep onset (weekend and weekday), later weekend sleep offset, and later DLMO with age. Weekday sleep offset shifted earlier with age in the younger cohort and later in the older cohort after age 17. Weekend-weekday sleep offset differences increased with age in the younger cohort and decreased in the older cohort after age 17. DLMO to sleep offset phase angle narrowed with age in the younger cohort and became broader in the older cohort. The older cohort had a wider sleep onset phase angle compared to the younger cohort; however, an age-related phase angle increase was seen in the younger cohort only. Individual differences were seen in these developmental trajectories. This descriptive study indicated that circadian phase and self-selected sleep delayed across adolescence, though school-day sleep offset advanced until no longer in high school, whereupon offset was later. Phase angle changes are described as an interaction of developmental changes in sleep regulation interacting with psychosocial factors (e.g., bedtime autonomy).
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.
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.
Truth-Default Theory (TDT) is a new theory of deception and deception detection. This article offers an initial sketch of, and brief introduction to, TDT. The theory seeks to provide an elegant explanation of previous findings as well as point to new directions for future research. Unlike previous theories of deception detection, TDT emphasizes contextualized communication content in deception detection over nonverbal behaviors associated with emotions, arousal, strategic self-presentation, or cognitive effort. The central premises of TDT are that people tend to believe others and that this “truth-default” is adaptive. Key definitions are provided. TDT modules and propositions are briefly explicated. Finally, research consistent with TDT is summarized.
In this article, we describe a phenomenon we discovered while conducting experiments on walking and reaching. We asked university students to pick up either of two buckets, one to the left of an alley and one to the right, and to carry the selected bucket to the alley’s end. In most trials, one of the buckets was closer to the end point. We emphasized choosing the easier task, expecting participants to prefer the bucket that would be carried a shorter distance. Contrary to our expectation, participants chose the bucket that was closer to the start position, carrying it farther than the other bucket. On the basis of results from nine experiments and participants’ reports, we concluded that this seemingly irrational choice reflected a tendency to pre-crastinate, a term we introduce to refer to the hastening of subgoal completion, even at the expense of extra physical effort. Other tasks also reveal this preference, which we ascribe to the desire to reduce working memory loads.
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.
Some online display advertisements are annoying. Although publishers know the payment they receive to run annoying ads, little is known about the cost that such ads incur (eg., causing website abandonment). Across three empirical studies, the authors address two primary questions: (1) What is the economic cost of annoying ads to publishers? and (2) What is the cognitive impact of annoying ads to users? First, the authors conduct a preliminary study to identify sets of more and less annoying ads. Second, in a field experiment, they calculate the compensating differential, that is, the amount of money a publisher would need to pay users to generate the same number of impressions in the presence of annoying ads as it would generate in their absence. Third, the authors conduct a mouse-tracking study to investigate how annoying ads affect reading processes. They conclude that in plausible scenarios, the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns.
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.
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.
Traditionally, social scientists have studied socio-economic inequalities mainly by looking at the impact of individuals’ economic, cultural and social capital. Some scholars have recently argued that other types of resources, such as genetic and erotic capital, may also play a role in the processes that lead to the formation of social inequalities.
Using a unique longitudinal dataset, the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), this paper explores the impact of facial attractiveness on people’s socio-economic standing over the life course. Methodologically, we employ a set of multilevel Growth Curve Models.
2 findings clearly stand out from our analysis. Firstly, facial attractiveness does matter, both for men and women, and secondly, its impact is constant over the employment history.
A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this, we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on management practices to randomly chosen treatment plants and compared their performance to a set of control plants. We find that adopting these management practices raised productivity by 17% in the first year through improved quality and efficiency and reduced inventory, and within three years led to the opening of more production plants. Why had the firms not adopted these profitable practices previously? Our results suggest that informational barriers were the primary factor explaining this lack of adoption. Also, because reallocation across firms appeared to be constrained by limits on managerial time, competition had not forced badly managed firms to exit.
Restricted sleep duration among young adults and adolescents has been shown to increase the risk of morbidities such as obesity, diabetes or accidents. However there are few epidemiological studies on normal total sleep time (TST) in representative groups of teen-agers which allow to get normative data.
Purpose:
To explore perceived total sleep time on schooldays (TSTS) and nonschooldays (TSTN) and the prevalence of sleep initiating insomnia among a nationally representative sample of teenagers.
Methods:
Data from 9,251 children aged 11 to 15 years-old, 50.7% of which were boys, as part of the cross-national study 2011 HBSC were analyzed. Self-completion questionnaires were administered in classrooms. An estimate of TSTS and TSTN (week-ends and vacations) was calculated based on specifically designed sleep habits report. Sleep deprivation was estimated by a TSTN—TSTS difference >2 hours. Sleep initiating nsomnia was assessed according to International classification of sleep disorders (ICSD 2). Children who reported sleeping 7 hours or less per night were considered as short sleepers.
Results:
A serious drop of TST was observed between 11 yo and 15 yo, both during the schooldays (9 hours 26 minutes vs. 7 h 55 min.; p < 0.001) and at a lesser extent during week-ends (10 h 17 min. vs. 9 h 44 min.; p < 0.001). Sleep deprivation concerned 16.0% of chidren aged of 11 yo vs. 40.5% of those of 15 yo (p < 0.001). Too short sleep was reported by 2.6% of the 11 yo vs. 24.6% of the 15 yo (p < 0.001).
Conclusion:
Despite the obvious need for sleep in adolescence, TST drastically decreases with age among children from 11 to 15 yo which creates significant sleep debt increasing with age.
Three studies contribute to the literature on dominance and nonverbal behavior (Ellyson & Dovidio, 1985) by examining how a man’s choice to shave his head influences person perception. In Study 1, men with shaved heads were rated as more dominant than similar men with full heads of hair. In Study 2, men whose hair was digitally removed were perceived as more dominant, taller, and stronger than their authentic selves. Study 3 extends these results with nonphotographic stimuli and demonstrates how men experiencing natural hair loss may improve their interpersonal standing by shaving. Theories of signaling, norm violation, and stereotypes are examined as explanations for the effect. Practical implications for men’s psychological, social, and economic outlooks are also discussed.
[Herculano-Houzel 2009] 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.
We analyze whether IQ influences trading behavior, performance, and transaction costs. The analysis combines equity return, trade, and limit order book data with two decades of scores from an intelligence (IQ) test administered to nearly every Finnish male of draft age. Controlling for a variety of factors, we find that high-IQ investors are less subject to the disposition effect, more aggressive about tax-loss trading, and more likely to supply liquidity when stocks experience a one-month high. High-IQ investors also exhibit superior market timing, stock-picking skill, and trade execution.
Figure 1: Cumulative distribution of the cross-section of investors’ annualized portfolio returns. This figure plots the cumulative distribution (CDF) of the cross-section of investors’ annualized returns for subgroups of investors sorted by IQ (stanines 1–4 or stanine 9). The sample excludes investors who held stocks for fewer than 252 trading days in the sample period. Returns for each investor are annualized from the average daily portfolio returns computed over days the investor held stocks. The daily portfolio return is the portfolio-weighted average of the portfolio’s daily stock returns. The latter are close-to-close returns unless a trade takes place in the stock, in which case execution prices replace closing prices in the calculation. The returns are adjusted for dividends, stock splits, and mergers. IQ data [n = 87,914] are from 1/1982 to 12/2001. Remaining data are from 1/1995–11/2002.
Background: Chronotype refers to individuals’ preference for morning or evening activities. Its two dimensions (morningness and eveningness) are related to a number of academic outcomes.
Aims: The main goal of the study was to investigate the incremental validity of chronotype as a predictor of academic achievement after controlling for a number of traditional predictors. In so doing, a further aim was ongoing validation of a chronotype questionnaire, the Lark-Owl Chronotype Indicator.
Sample: The sample comprised 272 students attending 9th and 10th grades at five German high schools. Data was also obtained from 132 parents of these students.
Method: Students were assessed in class via self-report questionnaires and a standardized cognitive test. Parents filled out a questionnaire at home. The incremental validity of chronotype was investigated using hierarchical linear regression. Validity of the chronotype questionnaire was assessed by correlating student ratings of their chronotype with behavioural data on sleep, food intake, and drug consumption and with parent ratings of chronotype.
Results: Eveningness was a statistically-significant (negative) predictor of overall grade point average (GPA), math-science GPA, andlanguage GPA, after cognitive ability,conscientiousness, need for cognition, achievement motivation, and gender were held constant. Validity evidence for the chronotype measure was established by statistically-significant correlations with parent-ratings and behavioural data.
Conclusions: Results point to the possible discrimination of adolescents with a proclivity towards eveningness at school. Possible explanations for the relationship between chronotype and academic achievement are presented. Implications for educational practice are also discussed.
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.
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.
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 (eg., 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?
[Meditation by doctor interested in medical improvement/progress (elsewhere, checklists). In tennis, he had improved his performance enormously after just minutes of coaching from a young man who pointed out his errors. Coaches are used in many areas and often spot problems that highly-competent trained professionals continue to make. A good coach is emotionally supportive, careful, speaks with credibility so they are not reflexively dismissed, brings an independent eye to highlight blind spots, and always finds a way they can push themselves to improve and deliberately practice.
Gawande, having noticed his surgery success rates plateaued, considers a ‘medical coach’. Doctors are intensively taught up until they become full-fledged doctors, at which point they are cut loose to act as little gods in their domains, with no supervision. Yet, they are almost surely not perfect, and their skills may degrade over time. In domains far less important, like entertainment (arts/athletics), no individual believes they are perfect and they use personal coaches to constantly critique themselves, spot errors that untrained eyes would not, and strive for improvement. Why don’t we do the same thing in important things like surgeries? Why not coaches for doctors? Does the mystique of doctors intimidate themselves (and patients) away from acknowledging error and fallibility and improving?
Gawande talks a former medical professor into coaching him. Gawande, while proud of his surgical technique, is surprised how many flaws his coach notes, and embarrassed; he had become used to working on his own, with no accountability or external critique. Other doctors made fun of the idea of coaching (coaching for thee, not for me). But he worked on his errors, and feels positive about his improvements and the possibility of breaking out of his plateau.]
[First in a famous series of posts about trolling StarCraft 2 players (2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11). In a sudden fit of perversity, the author, Gheed, decides to test players in the lowest-ranked group of players (‘bronze’).
His test is to, at the start of every game, use the ‘worker rush’ strategy: immediately send all of your initial units (workers) over to the enemy to attack them. A worker rush is one of the best-known & easiest strategies in all of SC to defeat: all the opponent has to do is literally a single keyboard command (‘A’ then mouse click, to instruct their workers to counter-attack), which is taught in the tutorial, and victory is guaranteed.
His (already limited) faith in humanity is undermined as he is appalled to discover that this works a considerable fraction of the time, that losing players employ spastic actions and inexplicable ‘strategies’ which do not and could never work, that players get really angry when they lose to it despite it being their fault because worker rushes are trivially defeated, that it works on the same players multiple times, that it works on players who Gheed informs how to defeat it and also players who he had tutored to some degree, on players that claim to spend many hours watching e-sports SC matches and reading SC forums (and know the relevant jargon), and it even works on players who the online Battle.net statistics show have played thousands of games or come from higher leagues.]
This article is a cross-linguistic investigation of the hypothesis that the average information rate conveyed during speech communication results from a trade-off between average information density and speech rate. The study, based on seven languages, shows a negative correlation between density and rate, indicating the existence of several encoding strategies. However, these strategies do not necessarily lead to a constant information rate. These results are further investigated in relation to the notion of syllabic complexity.
Background: The language faculty is probably the most distinctive feature of our species, and endows us with a unique ability to exchange highly structured information. In written language, information is encoded by the concatenation of basic symbols under grammatical and semantic constraints. As is also the case in other natural information carriers, the resulting symbolic sequences show a delicate balance between order and disorder. That balance is determined by the interplay between the diversity of symbols and by their specific ordering in the sequences. Here we used entropy to quantify the contribution of different organizational levels to the overall statistical structure of language.
Methodology/Principal Findings: We computed a relative entropy measure to quantify the degree of ordering in word sequences from languages belonging to several linguistic families. While a direct estimation of the overall entropy of language yielded values that varied for the different families considered, the relative entropy quantifying word ordering presented an almost constant value for all those families.
Conclusion: Our results indicate that despite the differences in the structure and vocabulary of the languages analyzed, the impact of word ordering in the structure of language is a statistical linguistic universal.
This paper estimates the internal rate of return (IRR) to education for men and women of the Terman sample, a 70-year long prospective cohort study of high-ability individuals. The Terman data is unique in that it not only provides full working-life earnings histories of the participants, but it also includes detailed profiles of each subject, including IQ and measures of latent personality traits. Having information on latent personality traits is important as it allows us to measure the importance of personality on educational attainment and lifetime earnings.
Our analysis addresses two problems of the literature on returns to education: First, we establish causality of the treatment effect of education on earnings by implementing generalized matching on a full set of observable individual characteristics and unobserved personality traits. Second, since we observe lifetime earnings data, our estimates of the IRR are direct and do not depend on the assumptions that are usually made in order to justify the interpretation of regression coefficients as rates of return.
For the males, the returns to education beyond high school are sizeable. For example, the IRR for obtaining a bachelor’s degree over a high school diploma is 11.1%, and for a doctoral degree over a bachelor’s degree it is 6.7%. These results are unique because they highlight the returns to high-ability and high-education individuals, who are not well-represented in regular data sets.
Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are statistically-significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have statistically-significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years. Therefore, estimates from samples with shorter durations underestimate the treatment effects.
In this informal article, I’ll describe the “recognition method”—a simple, powerful technique for memorization and mental calculation. Compared to traditional memorization techniques, which use elaborate encoding and visualization processes [1], the recognition method is easy to learn and requires relatively little effort…The method works: using it, I was able to mentally multiply two random 10-digit numbers, by the usual grade-school algorithm, on my first attempt! I have a normal, untrained memory, and the task would have been impossible by a direct approach. (I can’t claim I was speedy: I worked slowly and carefully, using about 7 hours plus rest breaks. I practiced twice with 5-digit numbers beforehand.)
…It turns out that ordinary people are incredibly good at this task [recognizing whether a photograph has been seen before]. In one of the most widely-cited studies on recognition memory, Standing [2] showed participants an epic 10,000 photographs over the course of 5 days, with 5 seconds’ exposure per image. He then tested their familiarity, essentially as described above. The participants showed an 83% success rate, suggesting that they had become familiar with about 6,600 images during their ordeal. Other volunteers, trained on a smaller collection of 1,000 images selected for vividness, had a 94% success rate.
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]
We analyze a data set comprised of academic records of undergraduates at the University of Oregon from 2000-2004. We find correlations of roughly 0.35 to 0.5 between SAT scores and upper division, in-majorGPA (henceforth, GPA). Interestingly, low SAT scores do not precludehigh performance in most majors. That is, the distribution of SATscores after conditioning on high GPA (e.g., 3.5 or even 4.0) typically extends below 1000 (the average among test takers). We hypothesize that “overachievers” overcome cognitive deficits through hard work, and discuss to what extent they can be identified from high school records. Only a few majors seem to exhibit a “cognitive threshold”—such that high GPA (mastery of the subject matter) isvery unlikely below a certain SAT threshold (i.e., no matter how dedicated or hard working the student). Our results suggest that almost any student admitted to university can achieve academic success, if they work hard enough. In addition to our primary result, we find that the best predictor of GPA is a roughly equally weightedsum of SAT and high school GPA, measured in standard deviation units. Using a sub-population of honors college students, we can estimate how students at elite universities would fare at a typical state university, allowing us to comment on issues such as grade inflation. Finally, we observe that 1) SAT scores fluctuate little on retest(very high reliability), 2) SAT and GRE scores (where available) correlate at roughly 0.75 (consistent with the notion that both tests measure a stable general cognitive ability) and 3) the SAT distribution of students that obtained a degree does not differ substantially from that of the entering class.
Fluid intelligence involves novel problem-solving and may be susceptible to poor sleep. This study examined relationships between adolescent sleep, fluid intelligence, and academic achievement. Participants were 217 adolescents (42% male) aged 13 to 18 years (mean age, 14.9 years; SD = 1.0) in grades 9–11. Fluid intelligence was predicted to mediate the relationship between adolescent sleep and academic achievement. Students completed online questionnaires of self-reported sleep, fluid intelligence (Letter Sets and Number Series), and self-reported grades. Total sleep time was not statistically-significantly related to fluid intelligence nor academic achievement (both p > 0.05); however, sleep difficulty (eg. difficulty initiating sleep, unrefreshing sleep) was related to both (p < 0.05). The strength of the relationship between sleep difficulty and grades was reduced when fluid intelligence was introduced into the model; however, the z-score was not statistically-significant to confirm mediation.Nevertheless, fluid intelligence is a cognitive ability integral in academic achievement, and in this study has been shown it to be susceptible to sleep impairments (but not duration) in adolescents.
For example, in 1992 out of a random sample of US adults, 7% could not do item SCOR300, which is to find the expiration date on a driver’s license. 26% could not do item AB60303, which is to check the “Please Call” box on a phone message slip when they’ve been told:
James Davidson phones and asks to speak with Ann Jones, who is at a meeting. He needs to know if the contracts he sent are satisfactory and requests that she call before 2:00PM. His number is 259-3860. Fill in the message slip below.
Only 52% could do item AB30901, which is to look at a table on page 118 of the 1980 World Almanac and answer:
According to the chart, did U.S. exports of oil (petroleum) increase or decrease between 1976 and 1978?
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.
This paper uses data on German consumer magazines observed between 1992 and 2004 to analyze the extent to which consumers (dis-)like advertising. We estimate logit demand models separately for the six most important magazine segments in terms of circulation. We find little evidence for readers disliking advertising. On the contrary, we show that readers in many magazine segments appreciate advertising.
Readers of Women’s magazines, Business and politics magazines as well as Car magazines—market segments where advertisements are relatively more informative—appreciate advertising while advertising is nuisance to readers of Adult magazines, a segment where advertisements are particularly uninformative. Demand for interior design magazines is not well identified. Our logit demand estimates are confirmed by logit demand models with random coefficients and by magazine-specific monopoly demand models.
[Keywords: two-sided markets, advertising, mean group estimation, random coefficients model, media markets, nuisance]
Some teachers are dramatically more effective than others, but traditional indicators of competence (eg., certification) explain minimal variance in performance. The rigors of teaching suggest that positive traits that buffer against adversity might contribute to teacher effectiveness.
In this prospective longitudinal study, novice teachers (n = 390) placed in under-resourced public schools completed measures of optimistic explanatory style, grit, and life satisfaction prior to the school year. At the conclusion of the school year, teacher effectiveness was measured in terms of the academic gains of students. All 3 positive traits individually predicted teacher performance. When entered simultaneously, however, only grit and life satisfaction remained statistically-significant predictors.
These findings suggest that positive traits should be considered in the selection and training of teachers.
[Keywords: learned helplessness, explanatory style, grit, life satisfaction, teacher performance]
In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner.
Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task (epistemic Stroop effect). Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task.
These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information.
[Keywords: beliefs, comprehension, situation model, truth value, validation]
The study discussed the importance of test validity, often established when making decisions that may affect a student’s future. The decisions made by policymakers and educators must not adversely affect any particular subgroups of students (i.e., year of administration, gender, ethnicity, level English proficiency, socioeconomic status, and disability status).
The study discussed the testing of measurement invariance across subgroups on an assessment as a process of validation. Methods used to detect measurement invariance at the test, subtest, and item levels were reviewed and 3 of these methods were applied to a reading test for administrative, gender, and ethnic subgroups.
The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how to detect measurement invariance using
hierarchical linear modeling at the test level, typically used by policymakers,
confirmatory factor analysis at the subtest level for instructional designers, and
Rasch item analysis at the item level for psychometricians.
The results of the study provided validity evidence that supported the comparison across administration years at the test, subtest, and item levels. Validity evidence also supported the comparison of gender subgroups at the subtest level via partial scalar invariance and at the item level. Finally, the results provided evidence that supported the comparison of ethnic groups at the subtest level via partial scalar invariance.
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]
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.
Students completed 4 psychometric tests soon after arriving at university: the NEO–PI-R measure of the Big Five personality traits (Costa & McCrae 1992); the Study Process Questionnaire, which measures approaches to learning (Biggs 1978); and 2 measures of cognitive ability: the Wonderlic IQ Test (Wonderlic, 1992) and the Baddeley Reasoning Test (Baddeley 1968) of fluid intelligence (gf). A year later they completed comprehensive essay-based exams and received a mean score based on 6 examinations.
Academic performance (AP) correlated with ability, achieving and deep learning approaches, Openness and Conscientiousness. Together, these variables explained 40% of the variance in AP. Path analyses indicated that the effects of ability on AP were mediated by personality and learning approaches.
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.
Like me, the author Imran Ghory is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever.
Dan Kegel had a similar experience hiring entry-level programmers.
…Maybe it’s foolish to begin interviewing a programmer without looking at their code first. At Vertigo, we require a code sample before we even proceed to the phone interview stage…It’s a shame you have to do so much pre-screening to have the luxury of interviewing programmers who can actually program. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so damn depressing.
The ability of personality traits to predict important life outcomes has traditionally been questioned because of the putative small effects of personality. In this article, we compare the predictive validity of personality traits with that of socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability to test the relative contribution of personality traits to predictions of three critical outcomes: mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment. Only evidence from prospective longitudinal studies was considered. In addition, an attempt was made to limit the review to studies that controlled for important background factors. Results showed that the magnitude of the effects of personality traits on mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment was indistinguishable from the effects of SES and cognitive ability on these outcomes. These results demonstrate the influence of personality traits on important life outcomes, highlight the need to more routinely incorporate measures of personality into quality of life surveys, and encourage further research about the developmental origins of personality traits and the processes by which these traits influence diverse life outcomes.
The authors examined relations between the Big Five personality traits and academic outcomes, specifically SAT scores andgrade-point average (GPA).
Openness was the strongest predictor of SAT verbal scores, and Conscientiousness was the strongest predictor of both high school and college GPA. These relations replicated across 4 independent samples and across 4 different personality inventories. Further analyses showed that Conscientiousnesspredicted college GPA, even aftercontrolling for high school GPA and SAT scores, and that the relation between Conscientiousnessand college GPA was mediated, both concurrently and longitudinally, by increased academic effort and higher levels of perceived academic ability. The relation between Openness and SAT verbal scores was independent of academic achievement and was mediated, both concurrently and longitudinally, by perceived verbal intelligence.
Together, these findings show that personality traits have independent and incremental effects on academic outcomes, even after controlling for traditional predictors of those outcomes.
Table 1: Previous Findings on Personality and Academic Outcomes in CollegeTable 3: Big Five Correlates of SAT Verbal and Math ScoresTable 5: Big Five Correlates of GPA
We conducted an experiment with different forms and types of ads. An artificial Web site was created for the experiment that contained images, prices, and descriptions of familiar products and product categories. The products were those that would be carried by a general store and included food, health care, and household products. Nine search tasks were assigned to participants that would force them to traverse a variety of portions of the site…The experimental websites were accessed over the Internet in a controlled laboratory setting by 536 undergraduate students.
…This study provides clear support for an assertion that users will adopt more negative intentions when a site displays advertisements than when the site does not. It is also clear that advertisements interfere with retention of site content and that features of advertisements also have important effects on retaining both site and ad content. Inline ads permit both site and ad content to be remembered more clearly than popups and popunders, a finding that is most interesting because it suggests the action of closing the advertisement window distracts users from the site, and further, it is visible for a shorter time. When ads are markedly different from the content of the site, they theoretically stimulate more effort as users work toward an important goal, and users remember more about both the Web site and the advertisement. It is interesting to note that while these effects might on the surface appear small, they are quite consistent and highly statistically-significant. Extrapolating to millions of site visitors, even small differences can amount to an urgent problem for management. Finally, it is also clear that popups and popunders are considered to be more intrusive than inline ads. Users seem to prefer not to have to divert their attention from their searching task or take additional steps to close the popup or pop-under windows.
When presented with the option to use a new instructional technology, students often face an approach-avoidance conflict. This study explored promotion and prevention orientations, concepts linked to approach and avoidance in Higgins’s regulatory focus theory, in the choice to attend lectures or watch them online. Openness, a core disposition in the Big Five Model of personality, and positive attitudes towards the utility of the Internet, reflect promotion orientations that are potentially related to the choice to watch lectures online. By contrast, neuroticism, another core disposition in the Big Five Model, and anxiety about the Internet as a computer technology, reflect a prevention orientation that is potentially related to the choice of attending lectures in class. The results illustrate that both promotion and prevention are at work in the choice to attend lectures or to watch them online. Neuroticism and anxiety about the Internet as a computer technology were related to the choice to attend lectures in class, whereas the perceived utility of the Internet was related to the choice to watch lectures online. Instructional mode choice was not related to examination performance, suggesting that the choice to attend lectures or watch them online has more to do with individual differences in promotion and prevention orientations than with pedagogical characteristics that impact learning.
[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.]
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]
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.
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.
A life span health-behavior model was investigated in this longitudinal study of personality influences on health. Teachers assessed 963 elementary schoolchildren on traits that formed scales assessing the dimensions of the five-factor (Big Five) model of personality. Smoking, alcohol use, body mass index (BMI), and self-rated health were assessed 40 years later in midlife. Childhood personality traits were statistically-significantly associated with all 4 outcomes, and the effects were consistently larger for women than men. For men and women, childhood Conscientiousness was associated with less adult smoking and better adult self-rated health and, for women only, with lower adult BMI. Mediation analyses suggested that the effects of Conscientiousness on self-rated health were partially mediated by smoking and BMI. These findings add to the growing evidence that childhood personality traits predict adult health outcomes and are discussed in terms of future testing of the life span health-behavior model.
[Summary of game designer & former Street Fighter player David Sirlin’s book on the psychology of competition, Playing to Win.
Sirlin diagnoses one of the most problematic mindsets as that of the “scrub”: the scrub is not just a bad player, they are a bad player who refuses to get better and takes pride in not getting better, in pretending as if parts of the game did not exist and any player who plays differently is immoral for doing so and they are to blame for the scrub losing. A scrub is self-handicapping, self-sabotaging, and can never get better because that would violate their made-up fantasy rules.
Aside from ensuring that they will predictably keep losing, scrubs typically are playing a far inferior & less fun game: their imaginary rules typically ban mechanics which are critical parts of balancing the game-design—every move should have an equal and opposite move, to create a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. As new subtleties are discovered, new tactics and strategies evolve, in an ever shifting landscape of expertise. If there was simply one ‘right’ move, that would be boring and allow for no skill. (As game designer Sid Meier has famously said in a variety of ways, “Games are a series of meaningful choices.”)
This can apply to life in general: those who will do what it takes to reach their goals (whatever those may be), and scrubs, who won’t because of imagined scruples and insistence on being handed success on a silver platter and will resentfully blame everyone but themselves for their failure.]
If you play in such a way as to maximize your chance of winning, it means abusing everything “cheap” that you can. It means frustrating the opponent, using bugs, and anything else you can think of that’s legal to do. When all this comes together, it gives you a deeper kind of fun than is possible at lower skill levels.
…It’s also totally fine to mess around with no intention of ever becoming really good. You don’t have to try to be the best at every game you play. I certainly don’t try that, it would be exhausting. But when I see someone else trying to be the best, I admire it, rather than condemn it. If that makes the game fall apart, I hold the game developer responsible, not the player.
But if you want to win—if that’s your intention—then you need to leave behind whatever mental baggage you have that would prevent you from making the moves that actually help you win. By doing that and practicing and learning, you can walk the path of continuous self-improvement that Playing to Win is really about.
This article reports findings of a meta-analytical study of research on distance education. The purpose of this study was to identify factors that affect the effectiveness of distance education. The results show that although the aggregated data of available studies show no statistically-significant difference in outcomes between distance education and face-to-face education as previous research reviews suggest, there is remarkable difference across the studies. Further examination of the difference reveals that distance education programs, just like traditional education programs, vary a great deal in their outcomes, and the outcome of distance education is associated with a number of pedagogical and technological factors. This study led to some important data-driven suggestions for and about distance education.
Priming researchers have long investigated how providing information about traits in one context can influence the impressions people form of social targets in another.
The literature has demonstrated that this can have 3 different effects: Sometimes primes become incorporated in the impression of the target (assimilation), sometimes they are used as standards of comparison (anchoring), and sometimes they cause people to consciously alter their judgments (correction).
In this article, we present meta-analyses of these 3 effects. The mean effect size was statistically-significant in each case, such that assimilation resulted in impressions biased toward the primes, whereas anchoring and correction resulted in impressions biased away from the primes. Additionally, moderator analyses uncovered a number of variables that influence the strength of these effects, such as applicability, processing capacity, and the type of response measure.
Based on these results, we propose a general model of how irrelevant information can bias judgments, detailing when and why assimilation and contrast effects result from default and corrective processes.
[Warning: at least 7 of the meta-analyzed studies in this paper are completely fraudulent, and made up by Diederik Stapel. See Levelt et al 2012.]
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular. Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?
The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular. If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular. But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things. At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn’t have taken it.
Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don’t think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn’t drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone? And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.
…This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn’t realize at the time, and in fact didn’t realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.
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.
The emergence of a complex language is one of the fundamental events of human evolution, and several remarkable features suggest the presence of fundamental principles of organization. These principles seem to be common to all languages. The best known is the so-called Zipf’s law, which states that the frequency of a word decays as a (universal) power law of its rank. The possible origins of this law have been controversial, and its meaningfulness is still an open question. In this article, the early hypothesis of Zipf of a principle of least effort for explaining the law is shown to be sound. Simultaneous minimization in the effort of both hearer and speaker is formalized with a simple optimization process operating on a binary matrix of signal-object associations. Zipf’s law is found in the transition between referentially useless systems and indexical reference systems. Our finding strongly suggests that Zipf’s law is a hallmark of symbolic reference and not a meaningless feature. The implications for the evolution of language are discussed. We explain how language evolution can take advantage of a communicative phase transition.
We argue that Non-sequential Recursive Pair Substitution (NSRPS) as suggested by Jiménez-Montaño and Ebeling can indeed be used as a basis for an optimal data compression algorithm.
In particular, we prove for Markov sequences that NSRPS together with suitable codings of the substitutions and of the substitute series does not lead to a code length increase, in the limit of infinite sequence length. When applied to written English, NSRPS gives entropy estimates which are very close to those obtained by other methods.
Using ca. 135 GB of input data from the project Gutenberg, we estimate the effective entropy to be ~1.82 bit/character. Extrapolating to infinitely long input, the true value of the entropy is estimated as ~0.8 bit/character.
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.
Previous work on estimating the entropy of written natural language has focused primarily on English. We expand this work by considering other natural languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. We present the results of PPM compression on machine-generated and human-generated translations of texts into various languages. Under the assumption that languages are equally expressive, and that PPM compression does well across languages, one would expect that translated documents would compress to approximately the same size. We verify this empirically on a novel corpus of translated documents. We suggest as an application of this finding using the size of compressed natural language texts as a mean of automatically testing translation quality.
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.
In the present study, the contributions of spatial and object features to chimpanzees’ comprehension of scale models were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously demonstrated the ability to use a scale model as an information source for the location of a hidden item were tested under conditions manipulating the feature correspondence and spatial-relational correspondence between objects in the model and an outdoor enclosure. In Experiment 1, subjects solved the task under two conditions in which one object cue (color or shape) was unavailable, but positional cues remained. Additionally, performance was above chance under a third condition in which both types of object cues, but not position cues, were available. In Experiment 2, 2 subjects solved the task under a condition in which shape and color object cues were simultaneously unavailable. The results suggest that, much like young children, chimpanzees are sensitive to both object and spatial-relational correspondences between a model and its referent.
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.
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]
Soon after Shannon defined the concept of redundancy it was suggested that it gave insight into mechanisms of sensory processing, perception, intelligence and inference. Can we now judge whether there is anything in this idea, and can we see where it should direct our thinking?
This paper argues that the original hypothesis was wrong in over-emphasizing the role of compressive coding and economy in neuron numbers, but right in drawing attention to the importance of redundancy. Furthermore there is a clear direction in which it now points, namely to the overwhelming importance of probabilities and statistics in neuroscience. The brain has to decide upon actions in a competitive, chance-driven world, and to do this well it must know about and exploit the non-random probabilities and interdependences of objects and events signalled by sensory messages. These are particularly relevant for Bayesian calculations of the optimum course of action.
Instead of thinking of neural representations as transformations of stimulus energies, we should regard them as approximate estimates of the probable truths of hypotheses about the current environment, for these are the quantities required by a probabilistic brain working on Bayesian principles.
Moreover, Benway (1998) showed that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. When participants in this study were asked to find specific information on a web page, the information was not found if it was embedded in a banner. Benway consequently named this phenomenon “banner blindness.” Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1⁄3 of the way down the page (Athenia Assoc., 1997).
…In our study, we were curious to simply explore how much users remember about a web page after viewing it—in particular, we were interested in investigating user memory of banner advertisements:
How well can users’ recall a banner advertisement on a web page?
How well can users’ recognize a banner advertisement on a web page?
Does animation affect user recall or recognition of an advertising banner?
…Very few participants were able to complete both the recognition and recall tasks correctly. Only 3 (9%) of participants were able to correctly recall both advertisements, recognize both companies, and correctly recall and recognize the state in which they were presented. On the other hand, participants who were unable to recall anything for either company banner or correctly indicate the animation state of the banner (40%) had a surprisingly high recognition rate of 79% for two correctly recognized ads. Results also show that of the 26% who recognized only one ad, the banner recognized was typically presented in the animated state. In other words, 7 out of 9 times the single banner correctly recognized was in the animated state. This indicates that animation may have some effect on recognition.
Results from this study indicate that recognition of the banner advertisements were fairly high (74% for both banners). In addition, about half of the participants were able to recall at least seeing an advertisement on the page—and many of these actually recalled the name of the company. These results show that most users did notice and remember the banners even though they were not part of the search tasks they were performing.
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.
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.]
How many of us have caught ourselves gazing into the eyes of a pet, wondering what thoughts lie behind those eyes? Or fallen into an argument over which is smarter, the dog or the cat? Scientists have conducted elaborate experiments trying to ascertain whether animals from chimps to pigeons can communicate, count, reason, or even lie. So does science tell us what we assume—that animals are pretty much like us, only not as smart? Simply, no. Now, in this superb book, Stephen Budiansky poses the fundamental question: “What is intelligence?” His answer takes us on the ultimate wildlife adventure to animal consciousness. Budiansky begins by exposing our tendency to see ourselves in animals. Our anthropomorphism allows us to perceive intelligence only in behavior that mimics our own. This prejudice, he argues, betrays a lack of imagination. Each species is so specialized that most of their abilities are simply not comparable. At the mercy of our anthropomorphic tendencies, we continue to puzzle over pointless issues like whether a wing or an arm is better, or whether night vision is better than day vision, rather than discovering the real world of a winged nighthawk, a thoroughbred horse, or an African lion. Budiansky investigates the sometimes bizarre research behind animal intelligence experiments: from horses who can count or ace history quizzes, and primates who seem fluent in sign language, to rats who seem to have become self-aware, he reveals that often these animals are responding to our tiny unconscious cues. And, while critically discussing scientists’ interpretations of animal intelligence, he is able to lay out their discoveries in terms of what we know about ourselves. For instance, by putting you in the minds of dogs or bees who travel by dead reckoning, he demonstrates that this is also how you find your way down a familiar street with almost no conscious awareness of your navigation system. Modern cognitive science and the new science of evolutionary ecology are beginning to show that thinking in animals is tremendously complex and wonderful in its variety. A pigeon’s ability to find its way home from almost anywhere has little to do with comparative intelligence; rather it is due to the pigeon’s very different perception of the world. That’s why, as Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” In this fascinating book, Budiansky frees us from the shackles of our ideas about the natural world, and opens a window to the astounding worlds of the animals that surround us.
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.
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.
This major section extends the IQ model into the domain of public opinion concerning what is to be accepted as factual. The domain of factual opinion often lacks the constraints imposed on performance outcomes by real consequences, and it adds the element of irreducible uncertainty that characterizes events not personally witnessed by all. Such considerations can work for or against success of the model. Uncertainty calls forth judgment, but loosening of practical constraints can add unpredictability to outcomes. Surveys concerning belief in conspiracy rumors and key beliefs about the O. J. Simpson trial provide the main data.
Conspiracy Rumors in Everyday Life
Although conspiracy themes among Whites have long been studied (Cohn, 1966; Harrington, 1996; Hofstadter, 1965), the many rumors centered around conspiracies, some quite elaborate, that have been afloat in the African-American community at one time or another have just recently drawn scholarly attention (Turner, 1993). Often, those rumors concern consumer products manufactured by White corporations and their imagined sponsorship by the Ku Klux Klan (eg., Kool cigarettes because of the K) or supposed adulteration of fast foods aimed at sterilizing Black males. Others target the government. Black celebrities, authority figures, academics, and media outlets sometimes lend credence to the rumors, and peers sometimes punish better informed individuals for defying the messages.
…Black organ donations are few because of distrust of the medical system and belief in myths (“Why More”, 1995), fostered, for example, by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan…“Public-health workers say that the discussion of AIDS as a plot against blacks has eroded the credibility of AIDS prevention campaigns and has made some blackssuspicious of AIDS tests and treatments”…The director of a Black studies program stated that they diverted attention “from the resolution of pressing social problems” (Myers, 1990, p. A19). Andrew Cooper, publisher of a Black newspaper in Brooklyn, warned that the rumors were dysfunctional for all, observing, “It is a danger to America to have a large group of its citizens believe that its government is in a conspiracy to eliminate them”…Rumor experts offer no account for why, if a rumor is believed by a certain percentage of Blacks, it will also be believed by a certain, but smaller, percentage of Whites…What did account for the more than 40-point race split in public opinion over O. J. Simpson’s guilt?…the Brawley case dominated the news…Finally, a 7-month grand jury investigation concluded that the entire affair was a hoax, originally contrived by Brawley and her mother to cover up the girl’s 4-day absence from home.
To show why the importance of intelligence is often misperceived, an analogy between single test items and single nontest actions in everyday life is drawn. 3 requirements of good test items are restated, and the analogy is employed to account for underrecognition of the importance of general intelligence in everyday actions, which often fail to meet the requirements and thus fail as intelligence measures for reasons that have little to do with their dependence on intelligence. A new perspective on the role of intelligence in nontest actions is introduced by considering its operation at 3 levels: that of the individual, that of the near context of the individual, and that of entire populations. Social scientists have misunderstood the operation and impact of IQ in populations by confining attention to the individual level. A population-IQ-outcome model is explained that tests for the pooled effects of intelligence at all 3 levels on differences between 2 populations in prevalences of certain outcomes. When the model fits, the difference between 2 populations in the outcome measured is found commensurate with the difference in their IQ or general intelligence distributions. The model is tested on and found to fit prevalences of juvenile delinquency, adult crime, single parenthood, HIV infection, poverty, belief in conspiracy rumors, and key opinions from polls about the O. J. Simpson trial and the earlier Tawana Brawley case. A deviance principle is extracted from empirical findings to indicate kinds of outcome the model will not fit. Implications for theories of practical and multiple intelligences are discussed. To understand the full policy implications of intelligence, such a fundamentally new perspective as that presented here will be needed.
Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essentially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across different arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individual’’s odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modern life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.
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.
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.pdf: “Individual Differences and Behavior in Organizations”, Kevin R. Murphy, Sheldon Zedeck, Leaetta M. Hough, Robert J. Schneider, Robert Hogan, Rex J. Blake, Jennifer M. George, Stephan J. Motowidlo, James T. Austin, Howard J. Klein, Michael Blake Gasser, Frederick L. Oswald, Jeffrey A. LePine, Daniel R. Ilgen…
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 (eg., false informing, consent to deception, no informing), possible harmfulness of deception employed (eg., powerfulness of induction, morality of the behavior induced, privacy of behavior), method of deception (eg., 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 (eg., 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
[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.
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× that of the non-psychiatrically ill. Such alcoholism contributes about 25% of the suicides.
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.
[WP; exponential necessary for invariance? Is there a connection to the power-laws in ML?] A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them.
To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (1) decays exponentially with this distance, and (2) does so in accordance with one of 2 metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary.
These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms.
Figure 1: 12 gradients of generalization. Measures of generalization between stimuli are plotted against distances between corresponding points in the psychological space that renders the relation most nearly monotonic. Sources of the generalization data (g) and the distances (d) are as follows. (A) g, McGuire (33); d, Shepard (7, 18). (B) g, Shepard (7, 17); d, Shepard (7,18). (C) g, Shepard (17); d, Shepard (8). (D) g, Attneave (25); d, Shepard(8). (E) g, Guttman and Kalish (4); d, Shepard (11). (F) g, Miller and Nicely (34); d, Shepard (35). (G) g, Attneave (25); d, Shepard (8). (H) g, Blough (36); d, Shepard (11). (I) g, Peterson and Barney (37); d, Shepard (35). (J) g and d, Shepard and Cermak (38). (K) g, Ekman (39); d, Shepard (18). (L) g, Rothkopf (40); d, Cunningham and Shepard (41). The generalization data in the bottom row are of a somewhat different type. [See (39) and the section “Limitations and Proposed Extensions”.]
[Transcript of a talk by mathematician and Bell Labs manager Richard Hamming about what he had learned about computers and how to do effective research (republished in expanded form as Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn; 1995 video). It is one of the most famous and most-quoted such discussions ever.]
At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, ‘You and Your Research’ to an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members and visitors at the Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986. This talk centered on Hamming’s observations and research on the question “Why do so few scientists make substantial contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” From his more than 40 years of experience, 30 of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.
1986-dahlstrom-mmpipatternsofamericanminorities.pdf: “MMPI Patterns of American Minorities”, W. Grant Dahlstrom, David Lachar, Leona E. Dahlstrom, Luther A. Diehl, Malcolm D. Gynther, Kevin L. Moreland, James T. Webb
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.
The study reported here was conducted to determine the relationship between a 2-week Gifted Students Institute summer program and the self-concepts of 37 gifted middle school students, ages 10 to 14.
To assess the relationship between the GSI program and the students’ self-concepts, the Me Scale (Feldhusen) and the Self-Esteem Inventory (Coopersmith) were administered on the first and final days of the 2-week program. Students also completed a program evaluation, and writing samples describing their personalities.
The results of the study indicated that it is possible to enhance gifted students’ self-concepts through provision of a supportive educational and social environment of a summer program on a university campus.
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.
[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.]
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.
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.]
This rejoinder to J. Patrick Gray’s and Linda Wolfe’s “The Loving Parent Meets the Selfish Gene” (Inquiry, this issue), which in turn was in response to the author’s “Human Tragedy and Natural Selection” (Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 4), briefly addresses their major objections and suggests that in many instances they have misunderstood the point of that paper.
They argue that many of the traits referred to are more cultural than genetic. That this is not the central issue is made clearer by stressing certain aspects of the view underlying the original article, chiefly concerning the extent of human irrationality and insensitivity.
In a recent Inquiry article Louis Pascal argues that the problem of massive starvation in the modern world is the result of a genetically-based human propensity to produce as many offspring as possible, regardless of ecological conditions.
In this paper biological and anthropological objections to Pascal’s thesis are discussed as well as the conclusions he draws from it. It is suggested that natural selection has produced humans who are flexible in their reproductive behavior in order to cope with rapidly changing environments.
The implications of both arguments for the population movement and the attempt to eliminate starvation are discussed.
In his original paper on the subject, Shannon found upper and lower bounds for the entropy of printed English based on the number of trials required for a subject to guess subsequent symbols in a given text. The guessing approach precludes asymptotic consistency of either the upper or lower bounds except for degenerate ergodic processes.
Shannon’s technique of guessing the next symbol is altered by having the subject place sequential bets on the next symbol of text. If Sn denotes the subject’s capital after n bets at 27 for 1 odds, and if it is assumed that the subject knows the underlying probability distribution for the process X, then the entropy estimate is Ĥn(X) = (1 − (1⁄n) log27Sn) log2 27 bits/symbol. If the subject does not know the true probability distribution for the stochastic process, then Ĥn(X) is an asymptotic upper bound for the true entropy. If X is stationary, EĤn(X) → H(X), H(X) being the true entropy of the process. Moreover, if X is ergodic, then by the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman theoremĤn(X) → H(X) with probability one.
Preliminary indications are that English text has an entropy of approximately 1.3 bits/symbol, which agrees well with Shannon’s estimate.
It is argued that too logical a mind is not favored by natural selection; rather, it is biologically useful to be able to rationalize away certain unpleasant aspects of reality.
In most cases this irrationality has to do either with our reproductive ideas or with our ways of viewing the future. In both cases the implications with regard to our ability to solve the current population growth/resource shrinkage crisis are decidedly negative. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this same phenomenon can be viewed as a selection among ideas and beliefs. Sometimes this selection is quite intense.
Indeed, there are certain ideas which the human mind simply cannot logically deal with, since if they should be true, then it is obvious that evolution will direct all its resources toward producing minds which will believe them to be false. An example of such an idea [global human population control/overpopulation crisis] is discussed.
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.
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 (eg., 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 (eg., 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.
Four experiments are reported which examined memory capacity and retrieval speed for pictures and for words. Single-trial learning tasks were employed throughout, with memory performance assessed by forced-choice recognition, recall measures or choice reaction-time tasks. The main experimental findings were: (1) memory capacity, as a function of the amount of material presented, follows a general power law with a characteristic exponent for each task; (2) pictorial material obeys this power law and shows an overall superiority to verbal material. The capacity of recognition memory for pictures is almost limitless, when measured under appropriate conditions; (3) when the recognition task is made harder by using more alternatives, memory capacity stays constant and the superiority of pictures is maintained; (4) picture memory also exceeds verbal memory in terms of verbal recall; comparable recognition/recall ratios are obtained for pictures, words and nonsense syllables; (5) verbal memory shows a higher retrieval speed than picture memory, as inferred from reaction-time measures. Both types of material obey a power law, when reaction-time is measured for various sizes of learning set, and both show very rapid rates of memory search.
From a consideration of the experimental results and other data it is concluded that the superiority of the pictorial mode in recognition and free recall learning tasks is well established and cannot be attributed to methodological artifact.
Previous work on the approach trajectories of hands to targets in tracking and aiming tasks had produced contradictory evidence about the shape of these curves. This paper shows that these trajectories are a function of the level of practice of the subject; an interpretation in terms of the theory of intermittent control of movements is advanced. Previous contradictory data can be resolved by reference to the subjects/ level of practice. In addition, this theory will encompass the differences between accurate and free movement trajectories reported earlier.
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.
1971-mcquown-thenaturalhistoryofaninterview.pdf: “The Natural History of an Interview”, Norman McQuown, Gregory Bateson, Ray L. Birdwhistell, Henry W. Brosin, Charles F. Hockett, Henry L. Smith Jr, George L. Trager
Proposes that the classification of homosexuality as hereditary or constitutional vs. acquired is outmoded. It is suggested that the differentiation should be between chronic, obligative, or essential vs. transient, facultative, or optional. Cytogenetics and statistical genetics do not elucidate etiology, but new research on fetal hormonal differentiation of sexual morphology, and especially of sexually dimorphic hypothalamic differentiation offers promising leads. The sum total of the sex-differential effects of assignment and rearing on gender identity differentiation is known, through observations of hermaphrodites, to be profound. Postpubertally, homosexuality does not correlate with hormonal measures presently available or with assessments of neuroperceptual sex differences in erotic arousal. It is concluded that sexual dimorphism of brain functioning in gender identity is the end product of sequential events of critical periods, with pre-natal and postnatal effects interacting, and the end product being extremely durable.
Arthur Jensen argues that the failure of recent compensatory education efforts to produce lasting effects on children’s IQ and achievement suggests that the premises on which these efforts have been based should be reexamined. He begins by questioning a central notion upon which these and other educational programs have recently been based: that IQ differences are almost entirely a result of environmental differences and the cultural bias of IQ tests. After tracing the history of IQ tests, Jensen carefully defines the concept of IQ, pointing out that it appears as a common factor in all tests that have been devised thus far to tap higher mental processes. Having defined the concept of intelligence and related it to other forms of mental ability, Jensen employs an analysis of variance model to explain how IQ can be separated into genetic and environmental components. He then discusses the concept of “heritability”, a statistical tool for assessing the degree to which individual differences in a trait like intelligence can be accounted for by genetic factors. He analyzes several lines of evidence which suggest that the heritability of intelligence is quite high (ie., genetic factors are much more important than environmental factors in producing IQ differences). After arguing that environmental factors are not nearly as important in determining IQ as are genetic factors, Jensen proceeds to analyze the environmental influences which may be most critical in determining IQ. He concludes that prenatal influences may well contribute the largest environmental influence on IQ. He then discusses evidence which suggests that social class and racial variations in intelligence cannot be accounted for by differences in environment but must be attributed partially to genetic differences. After he has discussed the influence on the distribution of IQ in a society on its functioning, Jensen examines in detail the results of educational programs for young children, and finds that the changes in IQ produced by these programs are generally small. A basic conclusion of Jensen’s discussion of the influence of environment on IQ is that environment acts as a “threshold variable.” Extreme environmental deprivation can keep the child from performing up to his genetic potential, but an enriched educational program cannot push the child above that potential. Finally, Jensen examines other mental abilities that might be capitalized on in an educational program, discussing recent findings on diverse patterns of mental abilities between ethnic groups and his own studies of associative learning abilities that are independent of social class. He concludes that educational attempts to boost IQ have been misdirected and that the educational process should focus on teaching much more specific skills. He argues that this will be accomplished most effectively if educational methods are developed which are based on other mental abilities besides IQ.
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.
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.
1967-henslin.pdf: “Craps and Magic”, James M. Henslin (1967-11-01):
Problem 1: How can these players operate simultaneously in both the dimensions of rationality and irrationality, of probability and magic?
These cab driver-crapshooters usually bet according to known probability (“rational” aspect of the game), yet they have many magical practices in their betting and shooting that make little sense to an outside observer (the “irrational” aspects of the game). Once one understands the players’ basic belief system, their system of cause and effect, one then sees that their magical practices are also “rational”, that is, the strategies these players use to maximize their own control over the dice when they are shooting and to minimize the control of other shooters are logically consistent within their belief system. Without understanding their belief system, we do not understand their behavior.
Problem 2: What is the origin of their magical behavior and belief system?
An attempt is made to reconcile theories of Malinowski and Kroeber concerning the origin of magic with principles of operant conditioning
[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.]
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.
This chapter is an attempt to formulate ideas about the operations performed by physiological mechanisms, and not merely a discussion of the physiological mechanisms of sensory pathways. It presents 3 hypotheses regarding the purpose of sensory relays.
The first one is the “password” hypothesis, which posits that, since animals respond specifically to specific stimuli, their sensory pathways must possess mechanisms for detecting such stimuli and discriminating between them.
The second hypothesis is the fashionable one that relays act as control points at which the flow of information is modulated according to the requirements of other parts of the nervous system.
Finally, the third hypothesis theorizes that reduction of redundancy is an important principle guiding the organization of sensory messages and is carried out at relays in the sensory pathways.
Although media stories relating to ‘needle fetishes’ appear to be relatively rare, clinical and medical case studies in the academic literature are almost non-existent. One of the very few academic case studies of pin fetishism was published back in a 1954 issue of the medical journal The Lancet. Dr. W. Mitchell and 2 other colleagues reported the case of an epileptic male with a safety pin fetish (in fact, there is a known association between epilepsy and sexual fetishism). For as long as he could remember, the patient had had a safety pin fetish and often entered a trance-like state when gazing at a safety pin. The man claimed that during his early childhood, contemplation of an actual or imagined safety pin evoked a feeling described by the man as “thought satisfaction”. During his teenage years, the ` thought satisfaction’ developed into absence seizures, and then motor automatisms. At the age of 38-years, the patient was given a temporal lobectomy. This completely eliminated both the epilepsy and his fetishistic desire for safety pins.]
Probably the first sustained attempt to explore the value of music as therapy was made by a group of psychiatrists at the Walter Reed Hospital, during World War II, under the stimulus of the large number of psychiatric casualties requiring treatment. This first pragmatic approach has fortunately been developed into a more permanent research organization by one of the participants, Miss Paperte, in her creation of the Music Research Foundation. The present article proposes to review very briefly the nascent research in this area and to set out the results of a 3-year research project supported partly by the Music Research Foundation and partly by the Graduate School of the University of Illinois.
…The aim of the research report in this and 2 succeeding articles9, 10, sustained partly by the author’s own research resources and partly by the Bonfils Fellowship and other assistance from the Musical Research Foundation, has been to investigate relations between musical choice and personality, in normal and pathological subjects. Secondarily, it aims to produce a music choice test for personality diagnosis11.
…A preliminary list of 200 musical excerpts, from different periods, countries, and styles was tried out with about 50 students and was cut down to 120 by eliminating any piece which seemed very similar to any other or which for some peculiar reason of instrument or period was deemed likely to be unreliable. We then arranged for a skilled pianist to record the 120 excerpts on piano, since we wished to eliminate any chance effects which might be due to cultural attachments of the subjects to particular instruments.
…Factorization of like and dislike reactions to 120 musical excerpts by a population of 196 “normal” men and women in early maturity has yielded 12 factors, 8 of which are confirmed by 2 independent rotations of the material, one more moderately confirmed, and 3 awaiting further research.
Although the definition and soundness of simple structure for these factors is of a high order, little attempt has been made here to infer their nature from the particular association of musical likes and dislikes connected with them, though in some cases “hunches” indicated by the data are mentioned. Our general hypothesis that these independent dimensions of choice will turn out to be personality and temperament factors rather than patterns of specific musical content or school seems sufficiently sustained.
Research leading to more extensive interpretation of the psychological meaning of the factors should be possible now that I.P.A.T. has made the above excerpts available on a single, 12 ins. long-playing record11. Our own interpretations will wait on our use of this instrument in research directed to relating these factors to measured personality factors and pathological syndromes.
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.”
1949-stouffer-theamericansoldier-v2-combatanditsaftermath.pdf: “The American Soldier, Volume 2: Combat and Its Aftermath”, Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr, M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, Leonard S. Cottrell Jr
This paper describes the development of relatively independent measures for 3 types of Introversion-Extroversion: Thinking. Social, and Emotional. The need for clarifying the concept of I-E and for devising new inventories can best be understood by reviewing the confusion concerning its nature and measurement. In the effort to simplify the original complex description of I-E by Jung, psychologists either have introduced new concepts or emphasized varying phases of Jung’s definition. In this process of elaboration, they have actually complicated rather than clarified the idea of I-E. The use of these terms in the popular literature has only added to the confusion. Unfortunately, introversion, at least in the popular writings on psychology, has come to denote an undesirable personality tendency which borders on a neurotic condition.
In general, the available I-E inventories purport to measure a general, undifferentiated trait. However, the intercorrelations between the published inventories are surprisingly low. Only 5 of the 19 coefficients of intercorrelation reported in the literature for nine inventories are above 0.40, and only 2 are above 0.80. The 2 coefficients above 0.80 are between 2 inventories and revised forms of these same inventories.
…This study has reduced the confusion in the field of measurement of I-E by getting away from the general undifferentiated concept of I-E. An inventory was constructed to measure, not a general trait, but 3 types or phases of I-E which were clearly defined. By a simple technique of item analysis, 3 homogeneous and relatively independent I-E tests were developed. Each test seems to be sufficiently reliable for individual prediction. The demonstrated ability of each test to discriminate between groups of college students which one would logically expect to be characteristically different in a given type of I-E justifies the conclusion that each test is sufficiently valid for the inventory to be employed in the diagnosis and counseling of college students.
Edward Thorndike saw that the subjects who did well at the start of the training also improved faster as the training progressed compared with the subjects who began more slowly. “As a matter of fact”, Thorndike wrote, “in this experiment the larger individual differences increase with equal training, showing a positive correlation with high initial ability with ability to profit by training.” The passage from the Bible doesn’t quite capture Thorndike’s results accurately because every subject improved, but the rich got relatively richer. Everyone learned, but the learning rates were consistently different.
When World War I erupted, Thorndike became a member of the Committee on Classification of Personnel, a group of psychologists commissioned by the U.S. Army to evaluate recruits [see Strong 1918]. It was there that Thorndike rubbed off on a young man named David Wechsler, who had just finished his master’s degree in psychology. Wechsler, who would become a famous psychologist, developed a lifelong fascination with tracing the boundaries of humanity, from lower to upper limits.
In 1935, Wechsler compiled essentially all of the credible data in the world he could find on human measurements. He scoured measures of everything from vertical jump to the duration of pregnancies to the weight of the human liver and the speeds at which card punchers at a factory could punch their cards. He organized it all in the first edition of a book with the aptly momentous title The Range of Human Capacities.
Wechsler found that the ratio of the smallest to biggest, or best to worst, in just about any measure of humanity, from high jumping to hosiery looping [knitting], was between 2 to one and 3 to one. To Wechsler, the ratio appeared so consistent that he suggested it as a kind of universal rule of thumb.
Phillip Ackerman, a Georgia Tech psychologist and skill acquisition expert, is a sort of modern-day Wechsler, having combed the world’s skill-acquisition studies in an effort to determine whether practice makes equal, and his conclusion is that it depends on the task. In simple tasks, practice brings people closer together, but in complex ones, it often pulls them apart. Ackerman has designed computer simulations used to test air traffic controllers, and he says that people converge on a similar skill level with practice on the easy tasks—like clicking buttons to get planes to take off in order—but for the more complex simulations that are used for real-life controllers, “the individual differences go up”, he says, not down, with practice. In other words, there’s a Matthew effect on skill acquisition.
Even among simple motor skills, where practice decreases individual differences, it never drowns them entirely. “It’s true that doing more practice helps”, Ackerman says, “but there’s not a single study where variability between subjects disappears entirely.”
“If you go to the grocery store”, he continues, “you can look at the checkout clerk, who is using mostly perceptual motor skill. On average, the people who’ve been doing it for 10 years will get through 10 customers in the time the new people get across one. But the fastest person with 10 years’ experience will still be about 3× faster than the slowest person with 10 years’ experience.”
An intention implies not so much a predetermined opportunity for its realization as it does a need or quasi-need whose dynamic state of tension makes opportunities. Therefore it may be asked whether such a need functions only to accomplish this task or whether the state of tension also influences other aspects of the person’s behaviour.
In the present study we shall investigate the influence of such tensions upon an achievement of memory. Specifically we shall seek to answer the question: What is the relation between the status in memory of an activity which has been interrupted before it could be completed and of one which has not been interrupted? We suspect that an unsatisfied quasi-need probably does influence even purely memorial retention.
The experiments reported here were conducted with 164 individual subjects (students, teachers, children), and in addition there were 2 group experiments (47 adults, 45 children). (The complete version of this article appeared as “Über das Behalten von erledigten und unerledigten Handlungen”, Psychol. Forsch., 1927, 9, pg1–85.)]
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.
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.
![Figure 1: Cumulative distribution of the cross-section of investors’ annualized portfolio returns. This figure plots the cumulative distribution (CDF) of the cross-section of investors’ annualized returns for subgroups of investors sorted by IQ (stanines 1–4 or stanine 9). The sample excludes investors who held stocks for fewer than 252 trading days in the sample period. Returns for each investor are annualized from the average daily portfolio returns computed over days the investor held stocks. The daily portfolio return is the portfolio-weighted average of the portfolio’s daily stock returns. The latter are close-to-close returns unless a trade takes place in the stock, in which case execution prices replace closing prices in the calculation. The returns are adjusted for dividends, stock splits, and mergers. IQ data [n = 87,914] are from 1/1982 to 12/2001. Remaining data are from 1/1995–11/2002.](/images/iq/2012-grinblatt-figure1-annualizedreturnsvsiqstanine.png)
![Figure 1: 12 gradients of generalization. Measures of generalization between stimuli are plotted against distances between corresponding points in the psychological space that renders the relation most nearly monotonic. Sources of the generalization data (g) and the distances (d) are as follows. (A) g, McGuire (33); d, Shepard (7, 18). (B) g, Shepard (7, 17); d, Shepard (7,18). (C) g, Shepard (17); d, Shepard (8). (D) g, Attneave (25); d, Shepard(8). (E) g, Guttman and Kalish (4); d, Shepard (11). (F) g, Miller and Nicely (34); d, Shepard (35). (G) g, Attneave (25); d, Shepard (8). (H) g, Blough (36); d, Shepard (11). (I) g, Peterson and Barney (37); d, Shepard (35). (J) g and d, Shepard and Cermak (38). (K) g, Ekman (39); d, Shepard (18). (L) g, Rothkopf (40); d, Cunningham and Shepard (41). The generalization data in the bottom row are of a somewhat different type. [See (39) and the section “Limitations and Proposed Extensions”.]](/images/psychology/1987-shepard-figure1-12gradientsofpsychologicalgeneralization.png)