Co-designing "healthy eating" interventions with supermarket retailers: Consumers did not fall in the trap & altered shelf placement alone did not improve the (official) healthiness of food purchases

The effect of a shelf placement intervention on sales of healthier and less healthy breakfast cereals in supermarkets: A co-designed pilot study. Leanne Young et al. Social Science & Medicine, September 1 2020, 113337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113337

Highlights

• Co-designing healthy eating interventions with supermarket retailers is feasible.

• Altered shelf placement alone did not improve the healthiness of food purchases.

• Customers noted brand preferences and price as key determinants of purchases.

• In-store promotions present opportunities to improve healthiness of food purchases.

• Product promotional strategies should align with healthy eating interventions.

Abstract: Supermarkets are the principal source of grocery food in many high-income countries. Choice architecture strategies show promise to improve the healthiness of food choices. A retailer-academic collaboration was formed to co-design and pilot selected commercially sustainable strategies to increase sales of healthier foods relative to less healthy foods in supermarkets. Two co-design workshops, involving supermarket corporate staff and public health nutrition academics, identified potential interventions. One intervention, more prominent shelf placement of healthier products within one category (breakfast cereals), was selected for testing. A pilot study (baseline, intervention and follow-up, 12-weeks each) was undertaken in six supermarkets (three intervention and three control) in Auckland, New Zealand. Products were ranked by nutrient levels and profile, and after accounting for the supermarkets’ space management principles, healthier products were placed at adult eye level. The primary outcome was change in sales of healthier products relative to total category sales. Secondary outcomes were nutrient profile of category sales, in-store product promotions, customer perceptions, and retailer feedback. There was no difference in proportional sales of more prominently positioned healthier products between intervention (56%) and control (56%) stores during the intervention. There were no differences in the nutrient profile of category sales. A higher proportion of less healthy breakfast cereals were displayed in intervention versus control stores (57% vs 43%). Most customers surveyed supported shelf placement as a strategy (265, 88%) but noted brand preferences and price were more salient determinants of purchases. Retailers were similarly supportive but balancing profit, health/nutrition and customer satisfaction was challenging. Shelf placement alone was not an effective strategy to increase purchases of healthier breakfast cereals. This study showed co-design of a healthy eating intervention with a commercial retailer is feasible, but concurrent retail environment factors likely limited the public health impact of the intervention.

Keywords: SupermarketsDietsShelf placementCo-designNutritionChoice architecture

4. Discussion

In this pilot study, the co-designed intervention, more prominent shelf placement of healthier products, had no effect on healthier breakfast cereal sales. Whilst small increases in sales were shown in two cereal segments and for two of the three intervention stores these were not statistically significant. Altering the shelf placement of products was the sole change made to the food category; therefore, this study was useful to test the effectiveness of this strategy in isolation. This single strategy study was unique compared to many supermarket interventions (Adam and Jensen, 2016; Hartmann-Boyce et al., 2018), which commonly test multiple strategies (signage, placement, education, price) and therefore the effect of individual strategies within a multi-faceted intervention is usually less able to be determined (Cameron et al., 2016). Despite this, a systematic review found that single and multi-strategy interventions share the same high success rate (70%) (Cameron et al., 2016). Inclusion of a whole category rather than individual products within a category was also a distinctive feature of this study. However, the findings suggest that shelf placement alone (in the absence of other strategies) is a weak lever for influencing the healthiness of shopper purchases in the breakfast cereal category.

Secondly, there was no effect of the shelf placement intervention on the nutritional composition of sales within the breakfast cereal category. This intervention was implemented in a ‘real world’ supermarket setting. Therefore, the nutritional ranking of breakfast cereals by cereal category segment (by researchers) was subject to the usual supermarket space management criteria for shelf placement. These included segmentation (e.g. all oats grouped together), brand blocking (brands located together), pack size blocking (similar sized packages located together) and visual appeal of products on shelves that aim to make product selection easy for shoppers. These requirements and that just over half (56%) of the products did not change position resulted in relatively small differences in the nutritional composition of products located in prominent versus non-prominent shelf locations, which are likely reasons for the lack of effect on nutrient sales. Interviews with store staff supported the notion that space management criteria compromised the ideal placement of products. Furthermore, the range of nutrient composition values (e.g. energy) was narrow for some smaller segments, e.g. biscuits (n = 12).

Thirdly, in-store product display promotions appear to have interacted with the shelf placement intervention. There were multiple breakfast cereals on in-store displays across all six stores (n = 1268), with a slightly higher proportion in intervention stores (54%) and a higher proportion of less healthy, less prominent products compared to control stores. Per store, there were 19 breakfast cereals (includes flavour variants of products) each week in aggregated displays (4–6 actual display areas per store featuring multiple products and product variants) (data was collected at one time point each week). Store managers are provided with guidance from a national display matrix, which provides product promotional options within a category/segment for each designated display space. When products are on promotion the entire brand range may be included (healthy and less healthy). It is possible that at the time of the audit the healthier choices had already sold out on displays and gaps were filled by other, less healthy products in the range. It is also plausible that the higher number of promotions for less healthy products in intervention stores may have been orchestrated by store personnel (consciously or unconsciously) to feature higher selling, more profitable products, that had been moved to less prominent shelf positions, and thus counteracted shelf prominence of healthier products. Data on in-store promotions were not collected in the pre- or post-intervention periods therefore change in the type of promotions over time could not be determined.

The lack of effect of prominent placement on product sales shown in our study generally aligns with findings from Foster et al. (2014) who suggested that brand loyalty and product preferences may be dominant in this particular category. Brand loyalty in the breakfast cereal category also emerged as a strong theme from our shopper survey, with shoppers commenting that they tended to purchase the same brand repeatedly. Similarly, strong shopper preferences and habitual purchase behaviours were found in an experiment examining the effects of a change of placement for types of bread (de Wijk et al., 2016). The bread category was described as less able to be ‘nudged’ because a nudge needs to be of sufficient strength to overrule usual purchase habits. Other mechanisms in the environment can also influence habitual health behaviours and consumer choices (Wilson et al., 2016), for example, product price, nutrition labelling/information and availability (Arno and Thomas, 2016). Price was another key factor that shoppers highlighted in our current study as influencing product choice, although brands with high loyalty tend to use price less to generate sales compared to minor brands (Empen et al., 2011).

This study had several strengths. It utilised co-design to enhance the likely fiscal sustainability of the intervention. This process allowed a strong working relationship to be built with the retail partner, which facilitated intervention delivery, access to sales and promotional data, and possible future research opportunities. Intervention selection was informed by commercial knowledge and not preconceived by researchers. A single strategy, more prominent shelf placement of healthier products within an entire food category, was piloted in a real-world environment using a controlled study design to determine potential effectiveness. Inclusion of pre-intervention and follow-up periods allowed measurement of change over time. Supermarket sales data was used as a direct measure of change in shopper purchases to determine the effect of the intervention rather than reliance on self-reported purchases (Bandy et al., 2019). Weekly product auditing and retailer follow-up of anomalies resulted in high intervention compliance.

The study was however, limited by its small sample size (6 stores) and lack of randomisation. Although, it has been acknowledged that randomisation in supermarket intervention design is difficult due to the innate nature of real-life implementation (Escaron et al., 2013). The original aim was to pilot the intervention in a limited number of stores with the intention that if findings were promising, a larger sufficiently powered randomised controlled trial would be conducted. However, our experience working alongside a major retailer suggests that successful interventions would likely be rolled out to a larger number of stores very quickly, with little time for a larger randomised controlled study to be organised. Other limitations to note briefly include lack of alignment of the intervention with other concomitant breakfast cereal promotions (price reductions, mailers, and in-store displays), lower compliance with product planograms in control stores, selection of a category where customer brand loyalty and purchase habits are strong which likely minimised potential impact, and relatively small difference in the healthiness of prominent and less prominent products. More research is needed to understand the effects of the range of in-store promotions, including price, on sales within the supermarket environment. Other categories where shoppers do not purchase the same products habitually may also have been more suited to testing shelf placement, for example, convenience foods, ready meals or soups.

Improving Prediction of Real-Time Loneliness and Companionship Type Using Geosocial Features of Personal Smartphone Data

Improving Prediction of Real-Time Loneliness and Companionship Type Using Geosocial Features of Personal Smartphone Data. Congyu Wu et al. arXiv October 2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.09807.pdf

Abstract: Loneliness is a widely affecting mental health symptom and can be mediated by and co-vary with patterns of social exposure. Using momentary survey and smartphone sensing data collected from 129 Androidusing college student participants over three weeks, we (1) investigate and uncover the relations between momentary loneliness experience and companionship type and (2) propose and validate novel geosocial features of smartphone-based Bluetooth and GPS data for predicting loneliness and companionship type in real time. We base our features on intuitions characterizing the quantity and spatiotemporal predictability of an individual’s Bluetooth encounters and GPS location clusters to capture personal significance of social exposure scenarios conditional on their temporal distribution and geographic patterns. We examine our features’ statistical correlation with momentary loneliness through regression analyses and evaluate their predictive power using a sliding window prediction procedure. Our features achieved significant performance improvement compared to baseline for predicting both momentary loneliness and companionship type, with the effect stronger for the loneliness prediction task. As such we recommend incorporation and further evaluation of our geosocial features proposed in this study in future mental health sensing and context-aware computing applications.

8 Discussion

In this section we reflect on our outcome variables and approach in the grander context of understanding human behavior and enhancing human well-being through mobile sensing and data analytics. 

Temporal resolution The two related outcomes examined in this paper, loneliness and companionship type, fall in two overlapping yet distinguishable areas in ubiquitous computing research, namely mental health sensing and context-aware computing, respectively. Context-aware computing emphasizes a computer’s inference of its user’s activity and surroundings in real-time, thus naturally having a moment-to-moment granularity. However, mental health sensing tasks span a wider range of temporal resolutions. On the low end, we see condition diagnosis tasks observe participants for as long as two months consecutively and then offer a judgment about whether a participant is with a clinical condition such as depression. On the high end reside real-time tracking tasks like the one presented in this paper, which do not aim at a medical diagnosis but focus on raising timely warnings. In the middle of the scale, a number of studies have adopted temporal resolutions ranging from daily and every few days to weekly and bi-weekly. The differences in temporal resolution points to different types, formats, and content of intervention: following a diagnosis, traditional intervention programs may be applied as treatment, whereas predictions of higher temporal resolutions will enable just-in-time adaptive intervention via mobile platforms. Question as to what sensing-intervention scheme will be most efficacious for what cohorts and conditions remains open, challenging, and critical for successful future applications of smart mental health.

Social context Companionship type is a key aspect of an individual’s social context, but far from the entire picture. The extent to which companionship type was captured in this paper covers the existence of a companion and (if true) the nature of a companion but does not consider the number of people surrounding a participant, differences in distance, and the interaction behavior, which altogether constitute a holistic social context in which one is situated. To combat the arbitrariness in defining social context seen in extant literature and to systematically delineate the various aspects of social context sensing, we argue that a formalized response variable definition for future social context inference tasks is needed. We propose that four components, quantity, quality, distance, and interaction, be specified in a definition of social context in future context-aware computing work. Quantity refers to the number of individuals and quality refers to their social significance. The distance element, can be categorized into groups such as “within personal space”, “within social space”, and “beyond social space” based on Edward Hall’s proxemics theory [10]. The interaction element defines the type of in-person verbal interaction taking place, 18 which may include absence of interaction, interaction among others only, interaction involving self. Such a 4-pronged taxonomy will also help phrasing EMA questions to acquire ground truth in future sensing studies: as opposed to only asking “who are you with”, more detailed and rigorous questions may be administered.

Sensing hardware In this paper our core approach is feature engineering, utilizing Bluetooth and GPS data from Android smartphones. The capability of feature engineering in human-centric sensing and inference is inevitably bounded by both (a) the availability and degree of integration of a sensor and (b) the absolute content a sensor captures. In our large participant cohort, 88% were iPhone users, from whom Bluetooth data were unavailable; therefore to further utilize the predictive power of Bluetooth data in mental health sensing and context-aware computing practice, other wearable devices such as smart watches may provide a better habitat for relevant data processing and analytics. In existing literature on social behavior inference, Bluetooth data is the most utilized smartphone sensor but it is not nearly sufficient to distinguish finer grained scenarios such as the social contexts defined with the four components proposed in the previous paragraph. Introduction and fusion of novel or previously overlooked mobile sensors may offer new and more effective solutions to social context detection. Magnetometer and audio sensing are candidate options, as we are observing recent studies using phone-embedded magnetometer to detect coexistence for epidemiology applications [13] as well as ongoing work on wearable voice sensors [14], which have the potential to support emotional state prediction in daily life.

Professional translators with a dominant neurotic personality trait are the most creative; those with a dominant conscientious personality trait prefer literal translation choices (experience & age also have this last preference)

Different strokes for different folks -Exploring personality in professional translation. Ella Wehrmeyer, Ella Wehrmeyer, Sarita Antunes. Translation Cognition & Behavior 3(2):187. Oct 2020. DOI: 10.1075/tcb.00040.weh

Abstract: Until recently, the translator’s personality was a relatively unexplored area of research, but growing evidence points to the influence of personality on the translator’s decisions. Although findings are not always statistically significant, empirical research indicates that professional translators profiles differ from that of the local population, and that certain personality types are more likely to make creative translation choices in translation. This article explores the relationship between personality traits as defined by the Big Five Inventory (McCrae and Costa 1989), and translation choices as defined by Baker (2018) and Molina & Hurtado Albir (2016). The findings indicate that professional translators with a dominant neurotic personality trait are the most creative, whereas those with a dominant conscientious personality trait prefer literal translation choices. However, the findings also indicate that age and experience are competing variables, both indicating a preference for literal translation.

From 2014... Perceptions of actual sex differences may play a more important role than culturally based gender roles and socialization processes

From 2014... Gender Stereotypes of Personality: Universal and Accurate? Corinna E. Löckenhoff et al. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, January 30, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022113520075

Abstract: Numerous studies have documented subtle but consistent sex differences in self-reports and observer-ratings of five-factor personality traits, and such effects were found to show well-defined developmental trajectories and remarkable similarity across nations. In contrast, very little is known about perceived gender differences in five-factor traits in spite of their potential implications for gender biases at the interpersonal and societal level. In particular, it is not clear how perceived gender differences in five-factor personality vary across age groups and national contexts and to what extent they accurately reflect assessed sex differences in personality. To address these questions, we analyzed responses from 3,323 individuals across 26 nations (mean age = 22.3 years, 31% male) who were asked to rate the five-factor personality traits of typical men or women in three age groups (adolescent, adult, and older adult) in their respective nations. Raters perceived women as slightly higher in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness as well as some aspects of extraversion and neuroticism. Perceived gender differences were fairly consistent across nations and target age groups and mapped closely onto assessed sex differences in self- and observer-rated personality. Associations between the average size of perceived gender differences and national variations in sociodemographic characteristics, value systems, or gender equality did not reach statistical significance. Findings contribute to our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of gender stereotypes of personality and suggest that perceptions of actual sex differences may play a more important role than culturally based gender roles and socialization processes.

Keywords: personality, gender/sex roles, developmental: child/adolescent, developmental: elderly

Heterosexuals that react in a negative manner when pondering or experiencing romantic or sexual overtures from persons of their same sex do so because of sexual prejudice & gender conforming reputation desire

Heterosexual People’s Reactions to Same-Sex Romantic or Sexual Overtures: The Role of Attitudes About Sexual Orientation and Gender. Laurel R. Davis-Delano, Sophie L. Kuchynka, Jennifer K. Bosson & Elizabeth M. Morgan. Archives of Sexual Behavior volume 49, pages 2561–2573, Aug 26 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-020-01804-w

Abstract: Why do some heterosexual people react in a negative manner when pondering or experiencing romantic or sexual overtures from persons of their same-sex, whereas other heterosexual people react more positively? To answer this question, this cross-sectional, correlational study examined individual difference predictors of heterosexual people’s responses to romantic or sexual overtures from same-sex persons. Our sample comprised 306 men and 307 women, ages 18–35 years, who were recruited from Mechanical Turk and identified as cisgender and heterosexual. Our hypotheses were premised on the theoretical construct of reactive group distinctiveness. Specifically, we explored predictors of heterosexual individuals’ negative perceptions of same-sex overtures. We found that more negative reactions to same-sex overtures were uniquely predicted by old-fashioned sexual prejudice, modern sexual prejudice, and desire to be perceived as gender conforming, via the mediators of social distance from same-sex sexual minority individuals and desire to be perceived as heterosexual. Gender moderated these relationships inconsistently. These findings indicate that two classes of individual differences—sexual prejudice and gender conforming reputation desire—are uniquely associated with heterosexual persons’ reactions to overtures from same-sex persons. We explain how these findings evidence the process of reactive group distinctiveness.

Two samples of male Croatian adolescents: We found no evidence that impersonal sexuality & pornography use increased the odds of subsequently reporting sexual aggression—regardless of participants’ predisposed risk

Testing the Confluence Model of the Association Between Pornography Use and Male Sexual Aggression: A Longitudinal Assessment in Two Independent Adolescent Samples from Croatia. Taylor Kohut, Ivan Landripet & Aleksandar Štulhofer. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Oct 20 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01824-6

Abstract: According to confluence model theorizing, pornography use contributes to sexual violence, but only among men who are predisposed to sexual aggression. Support for this assertion is limited to cross-sectional research, which cannot speak to the temporal ordering of assumed causes and consequences. To address this issue, we employed generalized linear mixed modeling to determine whether hostile masculinity, impersonal sexuality, and pornography use, and their interactions, predicted change in the odds of subsequently reported sexual aggression in two independent panel samples of male Croatian adolescents (N1 = 936 with 2808 observations; N2 = 743 with 2972 observations). While we observed the link between hostile masculinity and self-reported sexual aggression in both panels, we found no evidence that impersonal sexuality and pornography use increased the odds of subsequently reporting sexual aggression—regardless of participants’ predisposed risk. This study’s findings are difficult to reconcile with the view that pornography use plays a causal role in male sexual violence.

The new enthusiasm with which the media and health authorities are celebrating masturbation may be a desirable step toward further destigmatizing and normalizing solo sex; ditto with sex toys (although robots are excluded)

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Males who frequently engaged in extreme binges had exaggerated deficits on one of the visuospatial tasks, as did their female counterparts on the social-cognitive task, suggesting sex-specific vulnerabilities

Frequency of Recent Binge Drinking Is Associated With Sex-Specific Cognitive Deficits: Evidence for Condition-Dependent Trait Expression in Humans. Liana S. E. Hone et al. Evolutionary Psychology, October-December 2020: 1–13. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1474704920954445

Abstract: Evolutionary theory suggests that commonly found sex differences are largest in healthy populations and smaller in populations that have been exposed to stressors. We tested this idea in the context of men’s typical advantage (vs. women) in visuospatial abilities (e.g., mental rotation) and women’s typical advantage (vs. men) in social-cognitive (e.g., facial-expression decoding) abilities, as related to frequent binge drinking. Four hundred nineteen undergraduates classified as frequent or infrequent binge drinkers were assessed in these domains. Trial-level multilevel models were used to test a priori Sex  Group (binge drinking) interactions for visuospatial and social-cognitive tasks. Among infrequent binge drinkers, men’s typical advantage in visuospatial abilities and women’s typical advantage in social-cognitive abilities was confirmed. Among frequent binge drinkers, men’s advantage was reduced for one visuospatial task (delta d = 0.29) and eliminated for another (delta d = 0.75), and women’s advantage on the social-cognitive task was eliminated (delta d = 0.12). Males who frequently engaged in extreme binges had exaggerated deficits on one of the visuospatial tasks, as did their female counterparts on the social-cognitive task. The results suggest sex-specific vulnerabilities associated with recent, frequent binge drinking, and support an evolutionary approach to the study of these vulnerabilities.

Keywords: sex differences, sexual selection, alcohol, binge drinking, cognitive deficits, vulnerabilities

Discussion

There is now consistent evidence that men generally have better developed visuospatial abilities than women (e.g., Hyde, 2005; Jones et al., 2003; Lawton, 2010; MacDonald & Hewlett, 1999), whereas women generally have better developed socialcognitive skills than men (e.g., Hall, 1984; Merten, 2005; Thompson & Voyer, 2014). The magnitude of these sex differences varies across context, and an evolutionary perspective can situate these contextual influences in the framework of sexual selection (Darwin, 1871). Sexual selection in the context of human evolution includes visuospatial (favoring men) and social-cognitive (favoring women) sex differences that confer advantages in competition for mates or other reproductively important resources and discriminative mate choice under favorable conditions (Geary, 2021). Following Zahavi (1975) and research on condition-dependent trait expression in nonhuman species (Cotton et al., 2004; Johnstone, 1995), Geary (2015, 2019) proposed that these sex differences are condition dependent in humans, such that their development and expression is a reliable indicator of exposure to, and resistance to degradation by stressors. The current study is the first to directly test this hypothesis in humans, and to propose that recent, frequent binge drinking acts as a neurotoxic stressor disrupting cognitive abilities in sex-specific ways. The typical advantages of men in visuospatial abilities (Voyer et al., 1995) and of women in social-cognitive abilities (Hall, 1984; Thompson & Voyer, 2014) were replicated among a group of emerging adults who never or rarely engaged in binge drinking in the past month. These sex differences were greatly attenuated or even reversed in a group of emerging adults who at least occasionally engaged in binge drinking in the recent past. Given the prevalence of binge drinking in this population—current estimates place the percentage of college student binge drinkers at 40%–50% (Croteau & Morrell, 2019; Krieger et al., 2018)—these findings suggest that sex-specific deficits among college students might be widespread. Recent data also indicate that although the prevalence of binge drinking among adolescents has declined in recent years (Chung et al., 2018), emerging and young adults are engaging in more binge drinking than in the past, reflecting a secular shift in the age of peak binge drinking (Patrick et al., 2019). These high prevalence rates and increasing age of peak heavy episodic drinking are especially concerning in light of the current findings, given that mate competition and choice are most intense during this developmental period. During the years that coincide with elevated binge drinking rates, competition for mating-relevant resources peaks and creates a period of high risk and high reward with regard to engaging in mating effort (Hill & Chow, 2002). Indeed, binge drinking may be an attractive risk-taking behavior to emerging adults in part because it serves as a costly social signal with the potential to yield high gain in a competitive mating market (Aung et al., 2019). As would be expected of sexually selected costly signals (Zahavi, 1975), our findings highlight that binge drinking does indeed come with costs. Under natural conditions, condition-dependent traits are vulnerable to chronic malnutrition, disease, or social conflict and appear to be more sensitive to man-made toxins than other traits (see Geary, 2015, 2019). Although heavy episodic exposure to ethyl alcohol might not be as detrimental as chronic exposure to natural stressors or many other toxins, chronic, heavy exposure to alcohol can result in short-term and sometimes longer-term but subtle deficits in memory and cognition (e.g., Goudriaan et al., 2007). Binge drinking might then reveal sex-specific vulnerabilities in visuospatial and social-cognitive abilities. Some previous studies of alcohol use have assessed similar abilities but sex differences are not always reported (Folgueira-Ares et al., 2017). When they are reported, the pattern of sex-specific deficits is mixed (Haut et al., 1989; Weissenborn & Duka, 2003). These prior studies often have been based on relatively small samples and have used standard neuropsychological measures that typically are not optimal for assessing sex-specific deficits. For instance, there are often small sex differences in spatial working memory and pattern recognition (tasks found in the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery; CANTAB), but sex differences on these tasks are smaller than those found for tasks used in the current study. The difference is important because from an evolutionary perspective, sex-specific vulnerabilities generally will be more evident for traits with larger sex differences (Geary, 2017). Our results provide preliminary evidence in support of this hypothesis. Men’s advantage on both visuospatial tasks was smaller among frequent binge drinkers than among infrequent binge drinkers and non-drinkers. Moreover, there was evidence for a dose-response effect for mental rotation, whereby very high and frequent exposures to ethyl alcohol (extreme binges) were related to worse performance, but only among men. At the same time, these same men did not show exaggerated deficits in the speed of identifying emotions displayed in facial Hone et al. 9 expressions. In judging line angles and position, binge drinking women were more accurate than were binge drinking men, a reversal of the standard sex difference in visuospatial abilities and of our findings for infrequent binge drinkers. We did not, however, find evidence for a dose-response effect for this measure. It is possible that men’s performance on this spatial measure is disrupted by more moderate levels of alcohol exposure with no further deficits emerging with added exposures, but this remains to be determined. In contrast, women who recently engaged in frequent binge drinking did not show visuospatial deficits relative to women who had not engaged in binge drinking, but they were slower at identifying emotions displayed in facial expressions, especially the expressions of other women. Men often display an advantage, relative to women, in judging anger on the faces of other men (see Geary, 2015). Here, this effect did not emerge for facial-expression decoding accuracy, or for reaction time. It is possible that the task used here did not include a sufficient number of angry male faces to provide a powerful test of this effect (which was not a primary focus of this study). There also was evidence of a dose-response effect in this measure, restricted to women. That is, women who frequently engaged in extreme binges were slower at emotion detection than were other women, but these same extreme binge drinking women did not show exaggerated deficits for mental rotation. This pattern is essentially a mirror image of that observed among men who frequently engaged in extreme binges. Nevertheless, follow-up studies with larger sample sizes of binge drinkers are need to determine if there are indeed sex-specific doseresponse effects for visuospatial and social-cognitive abilities. The overall pattern of sex-specific deficits found here is consistent with the expression of condition-dependent traits in other species (Cotton et al., 2004; Johnstone, 1995), and supports the more general hypothesis that the sex differences in visuospatial and social-cognitive abilities stem from different patterns of intrasexual competition among our male and female ancestors, respectively (Geary, 2015; Geary et al., 2014). Although this study was designed based on established predictions (Geary, 2015, 2019) that provided for a priori hypothesis testing based on well-established patterns in nonhuman species, the study provides only a quasi-experimental test of those predictions. It is possible that the differences we observed across frequent and infrequent binge drinkers preceded recent drinking episodes, as suggested by modestly lower vocabulary scores among the binge drinkers. If there were broader cognitive differences across the drinking groups, however, then the frequent binge drinkers should have performed more poorly than infrequent binge drinkers on all cognitive tasks, independent of sex and not in a sex-specific manner. Moreover, because vocabulary is a good indicator of general intelligence, any binge drinking group differences on the visuospatial and social-cognitive tasks should have disappeared with statistical control of vocabulary scores, but they did not. Different psychopathologies can also affect cognitive performance, for instance psychomotor slowing of responding in subjects with depression and anxiety (Bennabi et al., 2013; Gualtieri & Morgan, 2008). While we did not measure this in our study, and therefore could not fully control for this potential third variable, it is an interesting hypothesis to pursue in future studies. Concomitant drug use was also not measured, but can still influence cognitive performance (Davis et al., 2002; Quednow, 2017). It is currently unknown if drug use mitigates the interactive effects found here, or has an additive effect along with binge drinking frequency. Additionally, and as always, readers should interpret the results presented here with care in terms of multiple comparisons and post-hoc contrasts. Future research would benefit from the use of a longitudinal design that would permit assessment of changes in performance on measures of purported sexually selected traits over time, as a function of changes in binge drinking frequency. Although also not an experimental design, this kind of approach would permit stronger inferences regarding the role of recent binge drinking frequency by accounting for any preexisting differences across participants in their baseline levels of performance. Findings from such a study would further advance understanding of the extent to which exposure to this very common neurocognitive stressor specifically impairs abilities that evolutionary theory posits to be critical for sexual selection success. Despite these caveats, our results are unique and speak to the utility of using sexual selection as a means to identify and study sex-specific vulnerabilities, not just those associated with binge drinking but with exposure to myriad other potential stressors and toxins. 

Behavioral gender differences are reinforced during the COVID-19 crisis

Behavioral gender differences are reinforced during the COVID-19 crisis. Tobias Reisch et al. arXiv Oct 8, 2020. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.10470.pdf

Abstract: Behavioral gender differences are known to exist for a wide range of human activities including the way people communicate, move, provision themselves, or organize leisure activities. Using mobile phone data from 1.2 million devices in Austria (15% of the population) across the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis, we quantify gender-specific patterns of communication intensity, mobility, and circadian rhythms. We show the resilience of behavioral patterns with respect to the shock imposed by a strict nation-wide lock-down that Austria experienced in the beginning of the crisis with severe implications on public and private life. We find drastic differences in gender-specific responses during the different phases of the pandemic. After the lock-down gender differences in mobility and communication patterns increased massively, while sleeping patterns and circadian rhythms tend to synchronize. In particular, women had fewer but longer phone calls than men during the lock-down. Mobility declined massively for both genders, however, women tend to restrict their movement stronger than men. Women showed a stronger tendency to avoid shopping centers and more men frequented recreational areas. After the lock-down, males returned back to normal quicker than women; young age-cohorts return much quicker. Differences are driven by the young and adolescent population. An age stratification highlights the role of retirement on behavioral differences. We find that the length of a day of men and women is reduced by one hour. We discuss the findings in the light of gender-specific coping strategies in response to stress and crisis.

Tightwads (those who rank themselves as tightwads, laptop users who sit long hours over a single cup of coffee, cab drivers who fail to turn on air-conditioning on a hot day) cheat more than other people to avoid spending money

Do tightwads cheat more? Evidence from three field experiments. Yossef Tobol, Erez Siniver, Gideon Yaniv. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 180, December 2020, Pages 148-158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.10.003

Highlights

• Three field studies are designed to explore a connection between tightwads and cheating.

• The 1st study views tightwads as mall shoppers who rank themselves as tightwads.

• The 2nd study views tightwads as laptop users who sit long hours over a single cup of coffee.

• The 3rd study views tightwads as cab drivers who fail to turn on air-conditioning on a hot day.

• All three studies find that tightwads cheat more than other people to avoid spending money.

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319877298355638275

Abstract: The paper reports the results of three field experiments designed to inquire whether tightwads, defined in the eco-psych literature as people who feel intense pain at the prospect of spending money, are more likely to cheat than other people in order to avoid paying. In the first experiment, passersby at a Tel-Aviv shopping mall were asked to answer a questionnaire that determined their pain of paying level. They were thereafter invited to perform an "inverse" version of the die-under-the-cup (DUTC) task that incentivized under-reporting of the actual die outcome to avoid paying money. In the second experiment, laptop users at Tel-Aviv coffee shops, who may unabashedly work long hours over a single cup of coffee, were offered to perform the inverse DUTC task upon leaving the shop and after recording the time and money they spent there. The third experiment was conducted with Jerusalem cab drivers, many of whom avoid turning on their air conditioning systems on hot summer days. The experiment involved riding both air-conditioned and non-air-conditioned cabs in Jerusalem and offering drivers, at the end of the ride, to perform the inverse DUTC task. In all three experiments, tightwaddism was found to have a statistically significant positive effect on cheating. The experimental findings are supported by a rational-choice model that predicts that cheating increases with the pain of spending money.

Key words: TightwadsPain of payingCheatingDie-under-the-cup task

Subjects in a Milgram experiment who were asked to shock the “learner” with high voltage straight away were more obedient than those who reached high voltage gradually, refuting the "foot-in-the-door" interpretation

Multiple Feet-in-the-Door and Obedience. Tomasz Grzyb & Dariusz Dolinsk. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Oct 22 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2020.1837134

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319854621452603393

Abstract: Gilbert’s hypothesis regarding the possible effect of the feet-in-the-door procedure on obedience to an authority figure in Milgram’s paradigm was tested in the course of two studies. Neither the first experiment, conducted in a laboratory (N = 80), which was a true copy of the model proposed by Milgram, nor the second study, conducted online (N = 485), validated Gilbert’s hypothesis. Actually, the results demonstrated the opposite–fewer of those subjects who were asked to shock the “learner” with high voltage straight away refused to follow the order than those who reached the same voltage level gradually. In Study 2, we also tested the hypothesis regarding the role of a postponement as a factor in decreasing one’s obedience.

Participants were generally dismissive of general rules that prioritize more socially beneficial individuals, such as doctors instead of unemployed people but were more supportive of decisions to save a single more beneficial person

Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, and Andreas Mogensen. 2020. “Should You Save the More Useful? the Effect of Generality on Moral Judgments About Rescue and Indirect Effects.” PsyArXiv. October 23. doi:10.31234/osf.io/cynxq

Rolf Degen's take: 

Abstract: Across eight experiments (N = 2,310), we studied whether people would prioritize rescuing individuals who may be thought to contribute more to society. We found that participants were generally dismissive of general rules that prioritize more socially beneficial individuals, such as doctors instead of unemployed people. By contrast, participants were more supportive of one-off decisions to save the life of a more socially beneficial individual, even when such cases were the same as those covered by the rule. This generality effect occurred robustly even when controlling for various factors. It occurred when the decision-maker was the same in both cases, when the pairs of people differing in the extent of their indirect social utility was varied, when the scenarios were varied, when the participant samples came from different countries, and when the general rule only covered cases that are exactly the same as the situation described in the one-off condition. The effect occurred even when the general rule was introduced via a concrete precedent case. Participants’ tendency to be more supportive of the one-off proposal than the general rule was significantly reduced when they evaluated the two proposals jointly as opposed to separately. Finally, the effect also occurred in sacrificial moral dilemmas, suggesting it is a more general phenomenon in certain moral contexts. We discuss possible explanations of the effect, including concerns about negative consequences of the rule and a deontological aversion against making difficult trade-off decisions unless they are absolutely necessary.

People tend spontaneously to think about the evidence that supports their beliefs, which leads them to judge their beliefs as outside their control, but they apparently fail to generalize this sense of constraint to others

Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G. P. (2020). People judge others to have more voluntary control over beliefs than they themselves do. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(5), 999–1029. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000198

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319660071383597056

Abstract: People think other individuals have considerable control over what they believe. However, no work to date has investigated how people judge their own belief control, nor whether such judgments diverge from their judgments of others. We addressed this gap in 7 studies and found that people judge others to be more able to voluntarily change what they believe than they themselves are. This occurs when people judge others who disagree with them (Study 1) as well as others who agree with them (Studies 2–5, 7), and it occurs when people judge strangers (Studies 1, 2, 4, and 5) as well as close others (Studies 3 and 7). It appears not to be explained by impression management or self-enhancement motives (Study 3). Rather, there is a discrepancy between the evidentiary constraints on belief change that people access via introspection, and their default assumptions about the ease of voluntary belief revision. That is, people tend spontaneously to think about the evidence that supports their beliefs, which leads them to judge their beliefs as outside their control. But they apparently fail to generalize this sense of constraint to others, and similarly fail to incorporate it into their generic model of beliefs (Studies 4–7). We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of ideology-based conflict, actor–observer biases, naïve realism, and ongoing debates regarding people’s actual capacity to voluntarily change what they believe. 

Watson and Rayner’s (1920) attempt to condition a fear of furry animals and objects in an 11-month-old infant is one of the most widely cited studies in psychology (the Little Albert study)

Powell, R. A., & Schmaltz, R. M. (2020). Did Little Albert actually acquire a conditioned fear of furry animals? What the film evidence tells us. History of Psychology, OCt 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000176

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319655372257447937

Abstract: Watson and Rayner’s (1920) attempt to condition a fear of furry animals and objects in an 11-month-old infant is one of the most widely cited studies in psychology. Known as the Little Albert study, it is typically presented as evidence for the role of classical conditioning in fear development. Some critics, however, have noted deficiencies in the study that suggest that little or no fear conditioning actually occurred. These criticisms were primarily based on the published reports of the study. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of Watson’s (1923) film record of the study to determine the extent to which it provides evidence of conditioning. Our findings concur with the view that Watson and Rayner’s conditioning procedure was largely ineffective, and that the relatively weak signs of distress that Albert does display in the film can be readily accounted for by such factors as sensitization and maturational influences. We suggest that the tendency for viewers to perceive the film as a valid demonstration of fear conditioning is likely the result of expectancy effects as well as, in some cases, an ongoing mistrust of behaviorism as dehumanizing and manipulative. Our analysis also revealed certain anomalies in the film which indicate that Watson engaged in some “literary license” when editing it, most likely with a view toward using the film mainly as a promotional device to attract financial support for his research program.

The severest depressive symptoms lower the probability of voting by 0.05–0.25 points, an effect that is exceeded only by education and age; negatively affect most strongly affect physically demanding acts

Democracy and Depression: A Cross-National Study of Depressive Symptoms and Nonparticipation. CLAUDIA LANDWEHR (a1) and CHRISTOPHER OJEDA. American Political Science Review, October 19 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000830

Abstract: Depression is the most common mental health disorder. It has consequences not only on individuals but also on social and political levels. We argue that depressive symptoms impair political participation by reducing the motivation and physical energy of sufferers. We test our hypotheses by conducting regression analyses of four nationally representative cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys that collectively span many democracies. Our results are threefold. First, we find that the severest depressive symptoms lower the probability of voting by 0.05–0.25 points, an effect that is exceeded only by education and age. Second, we show that depressive symptoms negatively affect political interest and internal efficacy, thereby confirming that they diminish political motivation. Third, we find that depressive symptoms most strongly affect physically demanding acts, thereby confirming that they reduce the physical energy required for participation. We conclude by urging scholars to take depressive symptoms seriously in the study of political behavior.

Believing in Neuromyths Makes Neither a Bad Nor Good Student‐Teacher: The Relationship between Neuromyths and Academic Achievement in Teacher Education

Believing in Neuromyths Makes Neither a Bad Nor Good Student‐Teacher: The Relationship between Neuromyths and Academic Achievement in Teacher Education. Georg Krammer  Stephan E. Vogel  Roland H. Grabner. Mind, Brain, and Education, October 23 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12266

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319554214780174336

Abstract: Neuromyths have been discussed to detrimentally affect educational practice, but the evidence for this assumption is still very scarce. We investigated whether 255 student‐teacher' beliefs in neuromyths are related to their academic achievement (overall grade point averages and first‐year practical courses). Believing or rejecting neuromyths that make no direct assumptions about learners' educability was not related to academic achievement. Believing in neuromyths that explicitly deny the educability of learners was only marginally related to academic achievement. We conclude that self‐reported beliefs in neuromyths do not differentiate between high‐ and low‐achieving initial teacher education students.

Check also Neuromyths are prevalent and independent of the knowledge of the human brain at the beginning of teacher education. Georg Krammer, Stephan E. Vogel, Tugba Yardimci, Roland H. Grabner. Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung, Apr 8 2019. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/05/neuromyths-are-prevalent-and.html

Retrograde amnesia: Would patients accept to go to a new home home if they were falsely told it was their home? Or accept affection from people to whom they were introduced as close relatives but were actors?

Cubelli R, Beschin N, Della Sala S, Retrograde amnesia: A Selective Deficit Of Explicit Autobiographical Memory. CORTEX, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.10.003

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319526944925487104

In patients with retrograde amnesia (RA), declarative memory is severely impaired for events that occurred prior to onset of the disorder. Implicit memory might be preserved (Kopelman, 2002), but it is usually tested with priming or procedural learning tasks (Kopelman and Kapur, 2001) that reveal sparing of memory for anterograde events. That is, these tasks assess memory for episodes which happened after the onset of RA. As such, they are appropriate to investigate implicit memory in anterograde amnesia (Schacter, 2019), not in RA.

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LZ acknowledged his lack of empathy towards his wife and his lack of paternal feelings towards his children, aged 15, 13 and 9. Yet he eagerly accepted that they were his family and behaved accordingly. This is a common trait of several RA patients. Researchers and clinicians accept this as a fact. Yet, to other observers this is astounding. Would RA patients eagerly accept to go home, if shown a completely different house, and were falsely told it was their home? Would they accept affection from people to whom they were introduced as close relatives but who were played by actors? Obviously, these thought experiments would be highly unethical...

RA does not entail loss of previously acquired skills, including syntax, and semantic knowledge, including lexicons, nor it is characterized by overt change in habits or emotions. True RA cases should present not only with preserved procedural memory but also with spared access to the entire gamut of implicit memories, quite independently of their verbal reporting. RA patients should not face overt feelings of estrangement when returning home or when mingling with relatives and friends. Therefore, the lack of access to the vast array of implicit memories, procedural, semantic or behavioural, would suggest malingering (e.g., Kurth, 1983; Zago et al. 2004).

In non-scientific parlance, RA is often depicted as sparing procedural memories (Della Sala and Brazzelli, 1998; Baxendale S. BMJ. 2004 Dec 18; 329(7480): 1480–1483). Rarely though other aspects of implicit memory, as above defined, are contemplated. A telling exception is portrayed in Figure 2 taken from a comic crime story of a RA patient who does not recognize his fiancée, yet feels for her and finds solace in her company (see Fig.2).

Prices drop on average 20% for units that become haunted (houses so declared because of a murder, suicide, or other unnatural death), 10% for units on the same floor, 7% for units in the same block, & 1% for units in the same estate

Bhattacharya, Utpal and Huang, Daisy J. and Nielsen, Kasper Meisner, Spillovers in Prices: The Curious Case of Haunted Houses (August 24, 2020). Review of Finance, 2020, SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3679828

Abstract: Exploiting the unique institutional setting of Hong Kong’s real estate market, we uncover a curious ripple effect of haunted houses on the prices of nearby houses. Prices drop on average 20% for units that become haunted, 10% for units on the same floor, 7% for units in the same block, and 1% for units in the same estate. Our study makes two contributions. First, we provide an estimate of a large negative spillover on prices caused by a quality shock. Second, we find that the demand shock rather than the fire sale supply shock explains most of the spillover.

Keywords: fire sales, negative spillovers, haunted houses

JEL Classification: D62, H23, R21, R31

VI. Discussion and Alternative Specifications

There are a few issues to address. First, how valid is our definition of a haunted house? We define a haunted house in our paper as a house where an unnatural death occurred. According to this definition, a unit will not be considered haunted if the unnatural death occurred outside the unit. We now test this proposition by doing a placebo test. The treatment sample of 1,032 unnatural deaths is from our baseline specification in Column 1 of Table 4. The placebo sample (coded in similar fashion as the treatment sample) are 235 unnatural deaths that occur outside the residence of the deceased. We obtain information on these deaths from the Coroner’s Court as they do not feature on the real estate websites tracking haunted houses. The placebo sample consist of 183 deaths in traffic accidents, 23 accidental deaths during medical procedures, and 29 accidental deaths due to drowning while swimming in the ocean. We estimate Equation (1) using a joint specification for the treatment sample and for the placebo sample. Column (1) of Table 9 gives the coefficients of the treatment sample. The signs and magnitudes of the θ coefficients are similar to the signs and magnitudes of the θ coefficients in column (1) of Table 4. Thus, adding the indicators for the placebo effects to Equation (1) do not affect the estimated spillover effects. Column (2) of Table 9 gives the coefficients of the placebo sample. The θ coefficients are either insignificant or positive and significant. We take the placebo test one step further by excluding murder cases from the treatment group. As a result, the sample size declines with about 44,000 transactions in estates affected by murder. This insures that we compare the effect on prices of deaths due to accidents and suicides that occur at home (treatment group) to deaths due to accidents and suicides that occur outside the residence of the deceased. We find slightly smaller treatment effects and no placebo effects in Columns 3 and 4, respectively. Collectively, Table 9 tells us that when the owner of a unit dies unnaturally outside the unit, there is no discount on the unit’s price and no spillover effect on nearby houses. This is consistent with our conclusion that a house becomes haunted and is discounted only when there is an unnatural death in the house. Second, can the effects of idiosyncratic shocks be persistent? Yes. Unnatural deaths in a home cause a house to be declared haunted, and unnatural deaths in a home are, by definition, home-specific and unpredictable. This leads to a sudden drop of perceived quality. We find that house price recovery is slow, which implies that our idiosyncratic shock to perceived quality has persistent effects. This is different from the typical fire sales shock where effects on prices tend to be transient. Third, one might challenge whether it is rational for owners of neighboring units to sell at a discount. They could postpone sales until prices recover. We cannot address this concern directly because we do not have data on the amount of time that a unit has been on the market. So we address this concern with the following argument. As seen in Table 5, house price recovery is slow. Given this, it would seem that there is no point postponing sales until prices recover. So liquidity should not change much before and after the event for neighbors. Figures 6 and 7 show that it does not.

Fourth, how can discounts of 20% be sustained in equilibrium? The answer is straightforward. The belief in Feng Shui is quite strong among Chinese, and the population in Hong Kong is about 94% Chinese. Caucasians make up at most 5% of the population in any district, implying that most buyers have a large disutility for haunted houses. The few prospective buyers that do not themselves get disutility for haunted houses will, however, care about the resale value of their houses, and the resale value is expected to be low because many future buyers would dislike haunted houses. Fifth, a potential concern with the specification in equation (1) is that haunted houses are located in different areas than houses that are unaffected. If the demand for houses and/or the supply of houses in these locations are different, time-varying location effects might drive the results. For instance, a suicide might reveal economic hardship in the neighbourhood, or a murder might reveal crime in the neighbourhood. If the house price growth is slower in these districts, this effect might confound the estimated spillover effects in prices. We address the concern that our results are driven by slower price growth in affected districts by introducing high-dimensional fixed-effects to control for time-variant location effects. Table 10 reports the results, when we change the estimation (1) to 𝑦௜௧ ൌ 𝛼௜ ൅ 𝛽௝௧ ൅ 𝛾′𝑋௜௧ ൅ 𝜃′𝐻௜௧வ௞ ൅ 𝜖௜௧, (7) Here 𝛼௜ captures unit fixed effects, 𝛽௝௧ captures location-time fixed effects, 𝑋௜௧ is a vector of unit characteristics that change over time, and 𝐻௜௧வ௞ is a vector of indicators due to an unnatural death occurring before year t. Table 10 reports results. Column (1) shows the results from the baseline specification in Column (1) of Table 4. We note that although the coefficients in Columns (2) to (5) are slightly smaller than in Column (1), the results are qualitatively similar when we include locationtime fixed effects, both at the territory and district level. We conclude that our results are unaffected when we include high-dimensional fixed-effects that effectively controls for the development in house prices at different locations over time. These high-dimensional fixed effects also addresses potential concerns about pre-trends in house prices due to geographic location, because the spillover effects in Table 10 are estimated using variation in house prices within a location at a given time. Sixth, and finally, how relevant are our research findings for other parts of the world? We address this question in four ways. First, we find anecdotal evidence of a 25 percent discount on haunted houses in Australia, United Kingdom, and United States in a sample of 101 newspaper articles from Australia, United Kingdom and United States. For example, New York Times (Nov 24, 2016) interviewed Randall Bell, an economist who has consulted on the appraisals of notorious properties, like the homes of O. J. Simpson and Jon Benet Ramsey. According to Bell, the stigma can result in 25 percent lower prices. In comparison, we find that affected units in Hong Kong decline by 19 percent following an unnatural death. Second, we note that the U.S. legal system, as in Hong Kong, makes it illegal for a seller to hide the fact that the property being sold has a reputation of being haunted.19 Third, it is possible for prospective buyers in the U.S. to check whether anyone has died at a given address using web-based services like the website, www.diedinhouse.com. Fourth, Hong Kong is not an outlier in terms of suicide rates. The annual suicide rate in Hong Kong during our sample period is 14 per 100,000 people and is fairly stable over time. The corresponding numbers in Australia, China, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States are 13, 11, 23, 8 and 13, respectively. The annual homicide rate in Hong Kong during our sample period is a very low 0.6 per 100,000 people and is fairly stable over time. The corresponding numbers in Australia, China, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States are 1.3, 1.3, 0.4, 1.3 and 5.3, respectively. We therefore conclude that house price discounts due to unnatural deaths are relevant outside of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, this may be due to Feng Shui, but in other parts of the world, the reason would be more universal: few like to buy a house where a recent unnatural death occurred.

 

Eating unhealthy food in the absence of a stressor did not alleviate anxiety; & after a stressor, it did not relieve emotional or physiological stress

The Effect of Unhealthy Food and Liking on Stress Reactivity. Naomi McKay et al. Physiology & Behavior, October 22 2020, 113216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2020.113216

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319198625491202048

Highlights

• Eating unhealthy food in the absence of a stressor did not alleviate anxiety

• Unhealthy food after a stressor did not relieve emotional or physiological stress

• Liking an activity, with or without food, suppressed anxiety and α-amylase

• Results indicate that liking an activity is more anxiolytic than nutritional value

Abstract: In many individuals, stress appears to stimulate an increase in energy intake as well as a shift in food choice toward unhealthy food items or “comfort foods”. Eating during stress is widely assumed to have anxiolytic properties, but there is little empirical support for this. The current two studies examined if either an unhealthy food item or a healthy food item could reduce stress reactivity and extended previous findings by examining whether participant liking contributes to any potential stress reduction. In the first experiment, participants rated baseline anxiety, were assigned to eat no food, carrots, or a candy bar, rated their anxiety a second time, and reported their liking of the assigned condition. The second experiment followed a similar procedure, except participants underwent a stressor before being asked to eat a food item. In addition, physiological measures of stress (salivary cortisol and α-amylase, and cardiovascular measures) were recorded. In both experiments, there was no effect of food on any measure of emotional or physiological stress. In contrast, participants who highly liked their condition exhibited a suppression of anxiety in both experiments and showed enhanced post-stress recovery of α-amylase. The anxiolytic effects of liking were not dependent on whether participants engaged in the healthy, unhealthy, or no food condition, which indicates that the self-perceived liking of a post-stress activity affects stress recovery more than the nutritional value. This has potential implications in how the population thinks about which activities to engage in to stimulate stress recovery.

Keywords: Stress eatingstress recoveryfood intakefood likingcomfort food

However, a conjunction analysis failed to reveal any common brain regions for the beauty of visual art and faces

Seeking the “Beauty Center” in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art. Hu Chuan-Peng, Yi Huang, Simon B. Eickhoff, Kaiping Peng & Jie Sui. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. October 21 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13415-020-00827-z

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319150891807768576

Abstract: During the past two decades, cognitive neuroscientists have sought to elucidate the common neural basis of the experience of beauty. Still, empirical evidence for such common neural basis of different forms of beauty is not conclusive. To address this question, we performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on the existing neuroimaging studies of beauty appreciation of faces and visual art by nonexpert adults (49 studies, 982 participants, meta-data are available at https://osf.io/s9xds/). We observed that perceiving these two forms of beauty activated distinct brain regions: While the beauty of faces convergently activated the left ventral striatum, the beauty of visual art convergently activated the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). However, a conjunction analysis failed to reveal any common brain regions for the beauty of visual art and faces. The implications of these results are discussed.

Negativity Bias in Motive Attribution: We once again found that participants expected protagonists to be more likely than they were themselves to pursue courses of action that they considered morally bad

The Worst-Motive Fallacy: A Negativity Bias in Motive Attribution. Joel Walmsley, Cathal O’Madagain. Psychological Science, October 21, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620954492

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319146646610022401

Abstract: In this article, we describe a hitherto undocumented fallacy—in the sense of a mistake in reasoning—constituted by a negativity bias in the way that people attribute motives to others. We call this the “worst-motive fallacy,” and we conducted two experiments to investigate it. In Experiment 1 (N = 323), participants expected protagonists in a variety of fictional vignettes to pursue courses of action that satisfy the protagonists’ worst motive, and furthermore, participants significantly expected the protagonist to pursue a worse course of action than they would prefer themselves. Experiment 2 (N = 967) was a preregistered attempted replication of Experiment 1, including a bigger range of vignettes; the first effect was not replicated for the new vignettes tested but was for the original set. Also, we once again found that participants expected protagonists to be more likely than they were themselves to pursue courses of action that they considered morally bad. We discuss the worst-motive fallacy’s relation to other well-known biases as well as its possible evolutionary origins and its ethical (and meta-ethical) consequences.

Keywords: cognitive bias, motives, attribution, meta-ethics, experimental philosophy, moral intuitions, moral judgment, open data, open materials, preregistered

General Discussion

The results of our experiments suggest that the tendency against which Hanlon’s razor warns is, in fact, a real tendency in our judgments of other people’s motives. Across a range of contexts, we found evidence that people were inclined to expect that agents are motivated primarily by the worst of the reasons that they have for a given action and that people expect others to be motivated by worse reasons than they are motivated by themselves. Although we were unable to replicate this effect for a broader range of vignettes than we considered in Experiment 1 (the first four from Experiment 1 plus an additional eight), it was replicated for the original vignettes when these were analyzed separately. Additionally, it is clear that there was a difference in the new vignettes, which could explain this failure: Participants rated the good motives as more extreme than the bad motives in the new vignettes. This difference may have counteracted any tendency to be biased to expect the agent to act primarily on the worse motive. We also found that in all cases, participants expected the agents in the story to be more likely to act on the motives that they found more extreme, as we suspected we might when we set up our study. And finally, the second effect we reported, in which participants expected other people to be more likely to pursue actions that they consider bad than they would prefer to do themselves, was replicated for all of the vignettes in Experiment 2.

The worst-motive fallacy fits naturally within the family of general negativity biases mentioned in the Background section, because it suggests, in effect, that we are also negatively biased in our moral evaluation of other people’s motives. Plausibly, we consider the worst reasons for actions to be the main motives because of our more general tendency to place greater focus on negative stimuli rather than positive, coupled with a more pronounced tendency to evaluate other people’s characters more negatively than we do our own.

We think that the worst-motive fallacy may arise because of the adaptive advantages that are gained from paying more attention to negative rather than positive aspects of other people’s behavior, the wisdom of which is recommended by another common folk aphorism⁵: “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.” A cognitive bias may be selected for when the errors in which it results are less costly than erring in the opposite direction (Haselton & Nettle, 2006). In general, the evolutionary story goes, it is more advantageous to pay attention to negative aspects of our environment and thereby avoid harm, even if that means failing to notice positive aspects and thereby missing good opportunities. In the context of the worst-motive fallacy, although being overly suspicious of other people’s motives may incur the cost of failing to take up cooperative opportunities, the cost of naively entering cooperative partnerships with malicious actors may be higher. It will therefore be more advantageous to err on the side of falsely believing that other people have bad motives than to risk falsely believing that they have good motives.

Given the evolutionary account proposed here, several follow-up studies using similar methods could be conducted to explore the boundary conditions of the effect we have identified. For example, one might expect to find an in-group/out-group effect that leads to more benign interpretations of other people’s motives when they are relatives or when more is known about the protagonist’s history, prior behavior, or decision-making context. If we are generally predisposed to treat other people with suspicion, then it seems plausible that this would extend to an increased negativity bias when it comes to out-group attribution of motives. Such an effect would likely manifest along depressingly familiar prejudicial lines of gender, race, nationality, class, and so on.

Conclusion

What about those philosophical theories, considered at the outset, that appeal to an agent’s motives in the assessment of the morality of actions? The present study suggests that we should be cautious about appealing to our assessment of other people’s motives to judge the morality of their actions. The negativity bias we have uncovered casts doubt on the practicalities of any meta-ethical theory that recommends that our moral evaluation of other people’s actions should be rooted in our assessment of their motives. Similarly, the robust effect of extremeness (i.e., the fact that people are more likely to attribute a motive when it is further away from morally neutral in either direction) gives us a further reason to be wary. Given two competing motives that we have reason to believe an agent has in mind, it seems we are likely to consider not only the bad motive to be the main motive but also the more morally extreme motive to be the main motive. Although such meta-ethical theories could still be correct that, objectively, actors’ motives play an essential role in the goodness of their actions, they should nonetheless carry a user warning, as it were, that our subjective assessment of those motives may be far less reliable than is generally supposed.

These are matters for future investigation beyond the scope of this article. Our present focus has been to formally identify this unnoticed fallacy and to demonstrate for the first time that there is a tendency for people actually to commit it. Of course, the reader might suspect that our main motive in writing the present article was something else again: to publish in a top-ranking, peer-reviewed journal for the purposes of fame, glory, and career advancement. We suggest, however, that to suppose this would be to commit a fallacy, whose cause is a demonstrably commonplace cognitive bias.

Envy of the Rich Is One Reason That Americans Favor Reducing Income Inequality, Specially Among Republicans

Evans, MDR, and Jonathan Kelley. 2020. “Envy of the Rich Is One Reason That Americans Favor Reducing Income Inequality.” SocArXiv. October 22. doi:10.31235/osf.io/bazvm

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1319134528019968000

Abstract

Research question: Why do some Americans evaluate income inequality as too high whereas others do not? Does envy of the rich (the desire to "chop the top"), matter to these evaluations, even above and beyond other well-known influences? We explore this issue by extending a standard model of social-structural and political influences on inequality aversion/ desire to reduce income inequality to include self-reported income envy (and including perceived self-interest as a control variable).

Key findings: (1) Envy of the rich has a moderately strong relationship with seeing the current income distribution as too unequal: The total effect of envy on inequality aversion is positive and moderately strong. (2) This effect persists unchanged after taking family political and stratification background, demographics, and current social class/stratification position into account. (3) It persists when we also control perceived economic self-interest in inequality reduction. (4) Part of the effect is indirect through political party preference, but the direct effect of envy remains moderately important even when party is taken into account (5) The effect is strong among Republicans, but absent among Democrats.

Data and methods: Data are from the International Social Science Survey Round 20, USA 2016-2017, a representative US national sample (N=1,778 in the main wave and 2496 in two developmental waves). Methods include descriptive statistics; CFA for scale construction; OLS and multilevel regression analysis; and SEM to check causal issues.

Theoretical implications: Attitude towards income inequality, also called inequality aversion or norm on income inequality, is the offspring of many parents; envy is one of the generative influences, in addition to structural and political roots of public opinion and policy-relevant attitudes. Support for redistribution, therefore, encompasses not only a desire for social cohesion through mechanical solidarity based on equality of condition, not only a self-interested desire to reap some of the redistributed riches, not only a fixed political commitment to this goal, but also an envy component, specifically among people on the right of politics.

Reward devaluation theory (RDT) posits that some depressed individuals avoid positivity due to its previous association with adverse or disappointing outcomes

Negative affect interference and fear of happiness are independently associated with depressive symptoms. D. Gage Jordan  Amanda C. Collins  Matthew G. Dunaway  Jenna Kilgore  E. Samuel Winer. Journal of Clinical Psychology, October 20 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.23066

Abstract

Objectives: Reward devaluation theory (RDT) posits that some depressed individuals avoid positivity due to its previous association with negative outcomes. Behavioral indicators of avoidance of reward support RDT, but self‐report indicators have yet to be examined discriminantly. Two candidate self‐report measures were examined in relation to depression: negative affect interference (NAI), or the experience of negative affect in response to positivity, and fear of happiness, a fear of prospective happiness.

Method: Participants completed measures assessing NAI, fear of happiness scale, and depression online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk at three time points (N = 375). Multilevel modeling examined the relationship between NAI, fear of happiness, and depressive symptoms longitudinally.

Results: NAI and fear of happiness were both positively associated with depressive symptoms. They both uniquely predicted depressive symptoms when included within the same model.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that different conceptualizations of positivity avoidance are uniquely associated with depressive symptoms.

Fear of Happiness

A phenomenon relevant to negative affect interference that has been studied in relation to depressive symptoms specifically is fear of happiness (Gilbert et al., 2012, 2014; Joshanloo et al., 2013). As noted above, positive emotions, such as safeness, joy, and happiness, may not necessarily be experienced as pleasurable in clinical populations, but rather as frightening (Şar et al., 2019). Positive emotions may be associated with previous, negative experiences and have resulted in disappointment or adverse outcomes, thus the prospect of experiencing happiness itself may result in negative emotions (Joshanloo & Weijers, 2014). The experience of negative emotions may be more intense than positive emotion, which may result in individuals being aversive of positive emotions (Baumeister et al., 2001). Moreover, individuals may have a “taboo” on happiness as they believe that bad things happen when one is happy or that happiness never lasts (Arieti & Bemporad, 1980). The repeated disappointment of positivity and association with previous, negative experiences over time may lead one to be aversive of happiness and therefore have reduced hope. Thus, the diminished levels of hope related to positive experiences may result in one developing or maintaining depressive symptoms (Bloore et al., 2020). In sum, some individuals hold negative views about positive emotions and may thus actively avoid experiencing them due to their association with negativity.

Examining Negative Affect Interference and Fear of Happiness Through the Lens of RDT

The most basic evidence as to why individuals may avoid and devalue positive emotions and happiness comes from meta-analyses of the dot-probe task (Winer & Salem, 2016). As noted briefly above, these meta-analyses demonstrate that depressed individuals discriminantly avoid positive information in comparison to neutral information on the dot-probe task, and that this pattern is the opposite of the approach-related reward biases that individuals without symptoms of psychopathology demonstrate (Pool et al., 2016). The main tenet of RDT posits that individuals avoid positive emotions because they are frightened of, disgusted by, or disturbed by previous experiences where positive expectations such as hopefulness resulted in ultimate disappointment. However, behavioral indicators, such as an attentional bias against positivelyvalenced stimuli, may not capture all features of this specific devaluative process outlined by RDT. As such, the constructs of negative affect interference and fear of happiness are highly relevant to advancing understanding of these phenomenological components of RDT. For example, consider the role negative affect interference may play for someone who is depressed. The depressed individual may attempt to upregulate their positive affect by engaging in physical/sensory pleasures (e.g., walking on the beach). When attempting to engage in such activities, however, this individual may concurrently experience guilt, self-criticalness, or even shame as a result (e.g., “what’s the point of even trying?”). As negative affect interferes with attempts to engage in pleasurable activities, the likelihood of engaging in similar activities in the future diminishes. The negative affect interference construct, then, may provide insight regarding a possible devaluative process associated with depression, in line with the main tenet of RDT; in other words, that positivity comes to serve as a marker for negative feelings. A similar process can take place as one comes to fear happiness. As noted previously, a happiness-averse individual would hold negative views about positivity as a result of prior experiences (e.g., where initial hope or excitement ultimately led to disappointment). In sum, RDT suggests that experiences that are potentially index by negative affect interference and fear of happiness are causing or maintaining symptoms of depression, such as anhedonia. However, these constructs have yet to be evaluated together in a single study. The concepts of negative affect interference and fear of happiness thus are not only related to depressive symptoms, but when viewed through the lens of RDT, would be most likely to evidence avoidance; however, to our knowledge, there is no work that has examined these constructs together and whether they are independently related to depressive symptoms. Therefore, the present study sought to examine whether these potential routes of avoidance of positivity are independently associated with depressive symptoms when entered into the same model. To accomplish this, we assessed these variables at three separate time points spanning the course of approximately nine months, investigating the extent to which these means of restricting positive affect (i.e., fear of happiness and negative affect interference), relate to depressive symptoms in a longitudinal sample. We hypothesized that both negative affect interference and fear of happiness would be significantly associated with depressive symptoms, replicating previous findings (DePierro et al., 2018; Gilbert et al., 2012, 2014). Additionally, as an exploratory analysis, we examined the extent to which fear of happiness and negative affect interference were associated with depressive symptoms when entered as independent variables into a linear mixed (multilevel) model to further evaluate their capacity to predict depressive symptoms independently. Further, given these constructs were measured at various time points, we were also able to examine the trajectories of these variables, determining the extent to which they were stable over the course of the study. 

Lastly, we included the other subscales of the HDIS, positive emotionality (PE) and hedonic deficits (HD), to further assess whether fear of happiness and negative affect interference would discriminate from constructs that are viewed as similar but different in important ways by RDT. More specifically, PE reflects a frequency of experienced positive affect, whereas HD specifically refers to a general inability to experience positive feelings (Frewen, Dean, et al., 2012). Anhedonic experiences likely share a great deal of overlap with fear of happiness and negative affect interference; indeed, fearing a prospective positive event may appear as avolition due to the individual actively avoiding the event. However, understanding the unique predictability of fear of happiness and negative affect interference compared to general anhedonic symptoms could provide evidence that may ultimately inform future treatments or conceptualizations of depression. For example, hallmark treatments for depression have often focused on reducing negative affect and/or assuming the depressed patient suffers from an inability to experience positive affect (Beck & Bredemeier, 2016). Further, current nosology also simply emphasizes a “markedly diminished interest” in activities (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), possibly conflating distinct experiences that can result in this loss of interest (Winer et al., 2019). Understanding the processes associated with fearing and actively avoiding positivity and showing that these experiences are unique from mere reduced positive affect or an inability to experience positivity would allow for a more nuanced understanding of how depressive symptoms develop, as well as possibly inform novel interventions that target these fears or avoidance. Thus, we wished to examine if fear of happiness and NAI would discriminate from PE and HD, which do not index phenomena that are as precisely theoretically relevant to avoidance of positivity as stipulated by RDT. Moreover, we also wished to examine whether the fear of happiness and NAI were similar enough that only one would be predictive of depressive symptoms, or if one or both explained enough unique variance to be independently predictive.