Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Backfire effect (when a correction leads to an individual increasing their belief in the very misconception the correction is aiming to rectify): Paper suggests the effects are not a robust empirical phenomenon

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Searching for the Backfire Effect: Measurement and Design Considerations. BrionySwire-Thompson, Joseph DeGutis, David Lazer. Journal of Appl...

The impacts of COVID-19 lockdown on sexuality: Decrease in libido, partnered activity

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The impacts of COVID-19 lockdown on sexuality. Sébastien Landry, Martin Chartogne, Alexandra Landry. Sexologies, September 2 2020, https://d...

The intergenerational transmission of parent’s overweight differs by children’s sex and is statistically different for fathers & mothers; the effect is stronger among white children and children of older parents

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Is the intergenerational transmission of overweight ‘gender assortative’? JoanCosta-Font, Mireia Jofre-Bonet. Economics & Human Biology,...

U.S.: With marijuana legalization, monthly sales of high calorie food increased by 3.2 percent when measured by sales and 4.5 percent when measured by volume

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Recreational Marijuana Laws and Junk Food Consumption. Michele Baggio, Alberto Chong. Economics & Human Biology, September 1 2020, 10092...

We hypothesize that the effectivity of sirens as warning signals has been enhanced by natural sensory predisposition of humans to get alerted by howling of wolves; wolves reply to technical sirens with howling too

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Wolf Howling and Emergency Sirens: A Hypothesis of Natural and Technical Convergence of Aposematic Signals. Diana Kořanová, Lucie Němcová, R...

Intelligence has been declared as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for creativity, which was subsequently translated into the so-called threshold hypothesis (after some point, intelligence is not related to creativity)

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Weiss, Selina, Diana Steger, Ulrich Schroeders, and Oliver Wilhelm. 2020. “Creativity and Intelligence: An Investigation of the Threshold Hy...

People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work

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People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work. Cameron An...

Less sexual functioning problems with frequent pornography use, more functioning problems with problematic pornography use

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Are sexual functioning problems associated with frequent pornography use and/or problematic pornography use? Results from a large community ...

Pleasant sleep paralysis was found to be a fairly common experience (23%); episodes were emotionally complex, with pleasant episodes often involving some admixture of fear

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Could sleep paralysis be pleasant? Monika Kliková  Brian A. Sharpless  Jitka Bušková. Journal of Sleep Research, August 31 2020. https://doi...
Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Being more happy (more positive affect) was associated with heavy alcohol use

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Daily associations between affect and alcohol use among adults: The importance of affective arousal. Dusti R. Jones et al. Addictive Behavio...

Men’s decision to augment their masculinity via full beardedness occurs under conditions characterised by stronger inter-sexual and intra-sexual selection (competition)

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Cross-Cultural Variation in Men’s Beardedness. Barnaby J. W. Dixson & Anthony J. Lee. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology (2020). Sep...

The belief that “my side” sees the world objectively while the “other side” sees it through the lens of its biases (the “objectivity illusion”), was strong & persistent among Trump and Clinton supporters before the election

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The objectivity illusion and voter polarization in the 2016 presidential election. Michael C. Schwalbe, Geoffrey L. Cohen, and Lee D. Ross. ...

Liking for foods high in salt and fat is associated with a lower diet quality but liking for foods high in sugar is not

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Liking for foods high in salt and fat is associated with a lower diet quality but liking for foods high in sugar is not – Results from the P...

Rolf Degen summarizing... A majority of laypersons mistakenly believe that people can be trained to become highly accurate judges of truth and deception ("truth wizards")

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The psychology of confessions: A comparison of expert and lay opinions. Fabiana Alceste  Timothy J. Luke  Allison D. Redlich  Johanna Hellgr...

Testosterone administration increases the audience effect & further buttress the social status hypothesis (which posits that testosterone promotes status-seeking behaviour in a context-dependent manner)

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Exogenous testosterone increases the audience effect in healthy males: Evidence for the social status hypothesis. Yin Wu et al. Proceedings ...

Women show pre-copulatory mating preferences for human leucocyte antigen-dissimilar men; a possibility is that the ultimate mating bias towards HLA-dissimilar partners could occur after copulation, at the gamete level

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Post-copulatory genetic matchmaking: HLA-dependent effects of cervical mucus on human sperm function. Annalaura Jokiniemi, Martina Magris, J...