Thursday, November 5, 2020

Hippocampal Volume and Navigational Ability: The Map(ping) Is Not to Scale

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Weisberg, Steven M., and Arne Ekstrom. 2020. “Hippocampal Volume and Navigational Ability: The Map(ping) Is Not to Scale.” PsyArXiv. Novembe...

How the COVID‐19 pandemic has changed our lives: A study of psychological correlates across 59 countries

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How the COVID‐19 pandemic has changed our lives: A study of psychological correlates across 59 countries. Elisabet Alzueta  Paul Perrin  Fio...

Dreams: Deep neural networks face the issue of overfitting as they learn (performance on one data set increases but the network's performance fails to generalize); dreams can be the "noise injections" in the form of corrupted inputs

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The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization. Erik Hoel. arXiv.org, Sep 24 2020. arXiv:2007.09560 Abstract: Understanding o...

Women were more likely to baby talk to their dog and speak gently/whisper to their dog, while young adults were more likely to use collar correction/jerk the leash

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Owner Sex and Human–Canine Interactions at the Park. Shelly Volsche et al. Anthrozoös, Volume 33, 2020 - Issue 6, Pages 775-785. Nov 4 2020....

Women’s productivity responds more to wage increses and their turnover responds less to wage changes than men’s, which can lead to occupational pay gaps

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The Payoffs Of Higher Pay: Elasticities Of Productivity And Labor Supply With Respect To Wages. Natalia Emanuel · Emma Harrington (Job Marke...

Album and song sales have a remarkably short period of economic viability. Sales of whole albums approach zero by the end of their first year of release; individual tracks maintain meaningful sales volumes for longer

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Copyright and Economic Viability: Evidence from the Music Industry. Kristelia García  James Hicks  Justin McCrary. Journal of Empirical Lega...

Experiencing an object as pleasurable is a prerequisite for judging it to be beautiful; but to qualify as beautiful, an object must elicit especially high levels of pleasure & be matched to internal learned models of what counts as beautiful

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The nature of beauty: behavior, cognition, and neurobiology. Martin Skov  Marcos Nadal. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, November...

Denmark: Citizens' policy opinions changed immediately and substantially when their party switched its policy position—even when the new position went against citizens' previously held views

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How Political Parties Shape Public Opinion in the Real World. Rune Slothuus  Martin Bisgaard. American Journal of Political Science, Novembe...

Using Twitter decreases the level of depressive symptoms by 27%, which explains why social media usage in the US has grown steadily even though most studies find that more usage correlates with higher depressive symptoms

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Social Media Usage and the Level of Depressive Symptoms in the United States. Qin Jiang. October 30, 2020. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1...
Wednesday, November 4, 2020

The Fears of Being Infected by the COVID–19 Virus in Canada: A Look at Germophobes, Crowd-averse, Fearless and Other Population Segments

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Mata, Fernando. 2020. “The Fears of Being Infected by the COVID–19 Virus in Canada: A Look at Germophobes, Crowd-averse, Fearless and Other ...

Partisans are less altruistic, less trusting, & less likely to contribute to a mutually beneficial public good when paired with the other party's members, bordering on entrenched divisions commonly saw in conflict or post-conflict societies

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Tribalism in America: Behavioral Experiments on Affective Polarization in the Trump Era. Sam Whitt et al. Journal of Experimental Political ...
Tuesday, November 3, 2020

The effect of eyelash length on attractiveness: While eyelashes of an optimum ratio are considered more attractive, this preference is not solely a biologically adaptive phenomenon and is influenced by cultural norms

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Pazhoohi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2020). The effect of eyelash length on attractiveness: A previously uninvestigated indicator of beauty. E...

Participants most wished to avoid information about their partners’ prior sexual behavior or infidelity, as well as their partners’ prejudices; threats to the self and relationship may influence the decision to avoid information

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Avoiding information about one’s romantic partner. Maryam Hussain et al. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, November 3, 2020. htt...

Overnighting – staying overnight at someone else’s home or having them stay overnight at your place -- is widespread throughout the epidemic, over half American adults had at least one overnight

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Kelley, Jonathan, MDR Evans, and Sarah Kelley. 2020. “Let's Spend the Night Togheter: A Challenge for Medically Optimal Coronavirus Soci...

Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror

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Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror. Marc Malmdorf Andersen et al. Psychological Science, November 2, 2020. https://doi....

Most Democrats are very confident in a Biden win while most Republicans are very confident in a Trump win; also, respondents predict a fairly rosy economic scenario if their preferred candidate wins but a dire one otherwise

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Coibion, Olivier and Gorodnichenko, Yuriy and Weber, Michael, Political Polarization and Expected Economic Outcomes (October 27, 2020). Univ...

Secularism, even in small amounts, is associated with population stagnation or even decline, whereas highly religious countries have higher fertility rates that promote population growth

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Schnabel, Landon. 2016. “Secularism and Fertility Worldwide.” SocArXiv. July 19. doi:10.31235/osf.io/pvwpy Rolf Degen's take: https://tw...

The narcissistic wine consumer: How Social Attractiveness Associated with Wine Prompts Narcissists to Engage in Wine Consumption

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The narcissistic wine consumer: How Social Attractiveness Associated with Wine Prompts Narcissists to Engage in Wine Consumption. Renaud Lun...

Physical strength & attractiveness positively predicted Extraversion & specific facets; strength negatve predicted Emotionality & fearfulness

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Functional coordination of personality strategies with physical strength and attractiveness: A multi-sample investigation at the HEXACO face...
Monday, November 2, 2020

Physical attractiveness: Not all implicit biases are negative, some traits foster positive unfairness, advantaging some candidates over others; mask wearing is appropriate may play some role in mitigating attractiveness bias

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Guarding Against Implicit Bias: Attractiveness. Harrison L. Love, Richard B. Gunderman. Journal of the American College of Radiology, Octobe...