Does Parental Separation Lower Genetic Influences on Children's School Performance?

Does Parental Separation Lower Genetic Influences on Children's School Performance? Tina Baier  Zachary Van Winkle. Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12730

Rolf Degen's take: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12730

Abstract

Objective: A behavioral genetics approach is used to test whether parental separation lowers the importance of genes for children's school performance.

Background: The Scarr–Rowe hypothesis, which states that the relative importance of genes on cognitive ability is higher for advantaged compared to disadvantaged children, has been expanded to educational outcomes. However, advantage/disadvantage is predominantly conceptualized as parental socioeconomic status and neglects other important factors. This study expands upon the literature to include family structure as an indicator for advantage/disadvantage.

Method: Data from TwinLife, a new population‐register‐based sample of twins and their families in Germany, and ACE variance decomposition models are used to estimate the heritability of cognitive ability (NPairs = 896), school grades (NPairs = 740), and academic self‐concept (NPairs = 949) separately for single‐parent and two‐parent households.

Results: Findings show that the relative importance of genes on children's cognitive ability and academic self‐concept is lower for children in single‐parent households compared to two‐parent households (32–47% and 23–50%, respectively), but differences are negligible for math grades (41–43%). ACE models adjusted for mothers' education and household income retrieve substantively similar results.

Conclusion: The quality of the family environment that is important for the realization of children's genetic potential is not just shaped by socioeconomic status, but also family structure.

Conclusion

In this study, we sought to ascertain (a) whether parental separation lowers children's chances to realize genetic dispositions relevant for school performance and (b) whether differences in heritability are driven by socioeconomic differences between two‐ and single‐parent households. We studied genetic influences on three different indicators of school performance – cognitive skills, math grades, and math academic self‐concept – that are important predictors for children's educational attainment. Drawing on previous findings that show that parental separation can have a negative impact on children's school performance and enhancement theories rooted in behavioral genetics, we expected genetic influence on school performance to be higher in two‐parent compared to single‐parent families (H1). Furthermore, if parental separation moderates the impact of genetic influences due mechanisms above and beyond socioeconomic differences between households, then genetic influences on school performance should be lower in one‐parent compared to two‐parent families even when adjusted for parental education and household income (H2).

Our results supported both hypotheses and provided a clear pattern for cognitive ability and math academic self‐concept. Genetic influences accounted for substantially more variance in children's school performance in two‐parent compared to one‐parent families. Furthermore, the higher genetic influence in two‐parent compared to one‐parent families is not attributable solely to educational or income differences between households, but likely driven by mechanisms related with family instability. Specifically, our findings support the notion that processes associated with parental separation, such as more distant parenting, reduced parental monitoring, and higher levels of stress among children, lower the quality of the family environment (e.g., Cooper et al., 2011; Hadfield et al., 2018; Lee & McLanahan, 2015). Compared to the tailored environments of two‐parent households, the environments of children in single‐parent households seem less able to enhance children's chances to realize their genetic potential. Our results for cognitive ability and math academic self‐concept therefore support the expectation that parental separation indeed represents a distinct set of environmental conditions that moderate the impact of genetic influences although further research is needed to adjudicate the mechanisms at work.

For math grades differences in the heritability between one‐ and two‐parent households were negligible. One possible explanation for our math grade findings could lie in the highly stratified and differentiated German school system, which makes it difficult to compare school grades across different school types. While we controlled for the school type, we are likely not able to completely capture differences with respect to grading. For example, it's more difficult to obtain the best grade in the most demanding school tracks (“Gymnasium”) compared to lower tracks (“Hauptschule” and “Realschule”). Future research on school grades should therefore choose a country with a comprehensive schooling system that facilitates comparability. In addition, grades are plagued by slightly higher missingness compared to our other indicators. Therefore, our findings on grades should also be replicated once larger data sets are available for Germany.

Our study highlights promising avenues to facilitate a better understanding of heritability differences in children's school performance by family structure. For example, further research is needed to examine whether the impact of parental separation differs by children's age, because children's vulnerability for negative life events may vary over their childhood. Children rely almost exclusively on familial resources during early childhood, whereas more proximal contexts, such as schools, teachers, or peers, become more influential as children grow older. In sum, to gain a better understanding on the link of parental separation and genetic influences, future research needs to study different outcomes, while accounting for the timing of parental separation as well as the duration of exposure to marital conflict.

In addition, future research should examine the diversity of single‐ and two‐parent households in greater detail. For example, we were not able to include step‐parent families in this study. However, research on family instability highlights that divorce is one of many transitions that may affect children negatively (Cavanagh & Fomby, 2019; Hadfield et al., 2018). Future research is needed, for example, to examine to what extent the presence of a step‐parent changes the quality of the family environment. An additional adult in the household may be able to help facilitate a rearing environment tailored to the needs of children and thereby help children express their genetic potential. In contrast, stress and conflict associated with remarriage and merging two households may further suppress the realization of children's innate abilities. More information on the socioeconomic well‐being of households than household income and mothers' education, such as occupation status, as well as indicators of family processes, such as custody arrangements and father involvement, are needed to capture all the latent constructs that should be considered.

In addition, our findings refer to Germany, often considered an ideal typical conservative welfare state that provides a relatively high level of social security. However, German labor market and family policy also actively incentivizes a male‐breadwinner female‐homemaker division of labor with low coverage of all‐day childcare and schooling. Differences in the realization of children's genetic potential by household composition may be larger in liberal societies, such as the United States, where women are at a considerably higher risk of poverty following divorce (Van Winkle & Struffolino, 2018). Compared to social democratic states where social systems secure divorced women's socioeconomic well‐being and facilitate labor market participation, such as Sweden, differences in the heritability may be lower. Future research should estimate the heritability of school‐related skills by household composition in other contexts to gain insight on the extent that institutional arrangements ameliorate or exacerbate the effects of parental separation.

One limitation of our study lies in the CTD and its inability to account for gene–environmental correlations. Previous research shows that parental divorce itself is heritable, with estimates ranging from 0.13 to 0.50 (McGue & Lykken, 1992; Salvatore et al., 2018). If genetic influences that affect parental separation also affect children's school performance, for example, via problem or nonconfirmatory behavior in school, then the link between parental separation and children's school performance would be genetically confounded (e.g., Jaffee & Price, 2007). To date, several studies have investigated to what extent gene–environment correlations drive the impact of separation or divorce (see for an overview Amato, 2010). These studies have used adoption‐ or children of twin (CoT) designs. Previous research shows that negative influences on abnormal behavior are driven by environmental exposure, while evidence is mixed for internalizing problems and educational outcomes (e.g., D'Onofrio et al., 2005, 2006, 2007). Although O'Connor et al. (2000) provided evidence for gene–environment correlations for reading competencies, parental reports on children's achievement, and children's self‐reported attitudes about educational achievement, D'Onofrio et al. (2006) provided conflicting evidence for grade repetition and years of education. In light of the weak support for gene–environmental correlations, the current literature indicates that gene–environmental correlations are likely not the main driver of the association between parental separation and children's outcomes.

Another promising route for future research is to examine whether the negative impact of parental separation is driven by genetic nurturing (e.g., Dalton & Fletcher, 2017; Kong et al., 2018; Liu, 2018). Genetic nurturing describes how genetic influences that are not passed down to children still affect their outcomes. For example, it could be that specific genes that are associated with parental separation are also associated with specific parenting behaviors. Even if these genes are not transmitted they could still affect children as they lead to specific parenting behavior. Such research questions, however, can only be addressed using methodological approaches developed in molecular genetics.

In conclusion, our study has for the first time shown that genetic influences on certain indicators of children's school performance differ considerably in single‐ and two‐parent families. In addition, our findings indicate that parental separation is associated with processes that affect the realization of children's genetic potential above and beyond socioeconomic differences. Our study highlights an important but until now mainly neglected factor in the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage among children who experienced a parental separation and live in single‐parent households (Mclanahan, 2004; McLanahan & Percheski, 2008; Raley & Sweeney, 2020). Our study has implications for policies targeted at improving the educational disadvantages of children living in single‐parent households. For example, tailored learning environments within and outside of schools targeted at children living in single‐parent households could complement income transfers to ensure children's chances for the realization of their genetic potential. A shift from traditional structural characteristics to family structure is needed to enhance our current understanding on the mechanisms behind the gene–environment interplay leading to the reproduction of inequalities across generations.

Low contact frequency was associated with poor health & low survival rates; but increasing the frequency of social interactions beyond a moderate level was no longer associated with better health & longevity

Is More Always Better? Examining the Nonlinear Association of Social Contact Frequency With Physical Health and Longevity. Olga Stavrova, Dongning Ren. Social Psychological and Personality Science, October 5, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620961589

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1313369677662429186

Abstract: Frequent social contact has been associated with better health and longer life. It remains unclear though whether there is an optimal contact frequency, beyond which contact is no longer positively associated with health and longevity. The present research explored this question by examining nonlinear associations of social contact frequency with health and longevity. Study 1 (N ∼ 350,000) demonstrated that once the frequency of social contact reached a moderate level (monthly or weekly), its positive association with health flattened out. Study 2 (N ∼ 50,000) extended these findings to longitudinal and mortality data: Although low contact frequency was associated with poor health and low survival rates, increasing the frequency of social interactions beyond a moderate level (monthly or weekly) was no longer associated with better health and longevity and, in some cases, was even related to worse health and increased mortality risks.

Keywords: health, mortality, social contact frequency, nonlinear effects

Discussion

Study 1 provided first evidence of a nonlinear association between social contact frequency and physical health. It showed that increasing the frequency of social contacts from yearly to monthly is associated with significant health improvement. Yet increasing the frequency of social contacts beyond this point (e.g., from monthly to daily) is associated with very little additional benefits.

Study 2

Study 1 provided the initial demonstration of the nonlinear association between contact frequency and health. Yet its use of cross-sectional data does not provide any evidence for the suggested causal direction. Therefore, in Study 2, we tested the nonlinear effect of contact frequency on health using longitudinal data. Additionally, Study 2 examined whether the nonlinear pattern extends beyond self-rated physical health to mortality.

While offering a new understanding of the coevolution of genes, culture, and human behavior, niche‐construction models also invoke multivariate causality, which require multiple time series to resolve

Genes, culture, and the human niche: An overview. Michael J. O'Brien  R. Alexander Bentley. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, September 28 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21865

Abstract: The sharp distinction between biological traits and culturally based traits, which had long been standard in evolutionary approaches to behavior, was blurred in the early 1980s by mathematical models that allowed a co‐dependent evolution of genetic transmission and cultural information. Niche‐construction theory has since added another contrast to standard evolutionary theory, in that it views niche construction as a cause of evolutionary change rather than simply a product of selection. While offering a new understanding of the coevolution of genes, culture, and human behavior, niche‐construction models also invoke multivariate causality, which require multiple time series to resolve. The empirical challenge lies in obtaining time‐series data on causal pathways involved in the coevolution of genes, culture, and behavior. This is a significant issue in archeology, where time series are often sparse and causal behaviors are represented only by proxies in the material record.

Evolution provides a critical foundation for proposing why men’s neurobiological and hormonal systems (testosterone) would have the functional capacity to respond to certain forms of partnering and parenting

Gettler L.T. (2020) Exploring Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Fatherhood and Paternal Biology: Testosterone as an Exemplar. In: Fitzgerald H.E., von Klitzing K., Cabrera N.J., Scarano de Mendonça J., Skjøthaug T. (eds) Handbook of Fathers and Child Development. Springer, Oct 2 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51027-5_10

Abstract: Fathers’ roles vary greatly within and across cultures. Reflecting human biological plasticity, these diverse forms of fathering are expressed through psychobiological mechanisms. In this chapter, I focus on testosterone as one of the key and widely studied mechanisms relevant to the biology of fatherhood in humans and other species. I highlight the ways that evolutionary framing provides a critical foundation for proposing why men’s neurobiological and hormonal systems would have the functional capacity to respond to certain forms of partnering and parenting. I also review the importance of cultural variation in fatherhood and family life for studying the plausible range of possibilities for parental physiology in contemporary family systems.

Keywords: Biological plasticity Testosterone Evolutional perspectives on fathering Parental investment theory Cooperative breeding 

Individuals who perceived their competitors to be of high mate-value were more supportive of traditional gender roles and, only for men, more opposed to promiscuity and sexual liberalism

Does the Quality of Mating Competitors Affect Socio-Political Attitudes? An Experimental Test. Francesca R. Luberti, Khandis R. Blake & Robert C. Brooks. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, September 30 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-020-00151-3

Abstract

Objectives: Individual differences in socio-political attitudes can reflect mating interests, and attitudes can also shift in response to mating market cues, including mating competitor quality. In four experiments, we tested whether competitors’ attractiveness (Experiments 1F&1M) and income (Experiments 2F&2M) would influence socio-political attitudes (participants’ self-reported attitudes towards promiscuity and sexual liberalism, traditional gender roles, and the minimum wage and healthcare).

Methods: We collected data from American participants online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (total N = 787). In all experiments, each participant was randomly assigned to one of four experimental treatments in a between-subjects design (three levels of mating competitor quality and a control group), and to one of five stimuli within each treatment.

Results: Overall, the experimental treatments largely did not predict participants’ socio-political attitudes. The fifteen unique experimental stimuli, however, did significantly affect participants’ perception of their competitors’ quality. That perception, in turn, affected some socio-political attitudes. Namely, individuals who perceived their competitors to be of high mate-value were more supportive of traditional gender roles and, only for men in Experiment 2M, more opposed to promiscuity and sexual liberalism than individuals who perceived competitors to be of low mate-value. These results only applied to sexually unrestricted, but not restricted, women. Perceived mating competition did not affect attitudes towards the minimum wage and healthcare.

Conclusions: Experimental cues of mating competition shifted participants’ perceptions of their competitors’ mating quality and these perceptions in turn shifted some socio-political attitudes. We interpret these results considering broader arguments about plasticity in socio-political attitudes.

It sounds like food: Phonotaxis of a diurnal lizard -- There is a complex interaction between the Balearic lizard, Podarcis lilfordi and the dead horse arum, Helicodiceros muscivorus

Pérez-Cembranos A and Pérez-Mellado V. (2020). It sounds like food: Phonotaxis of a diurnal lizard. Behavioural Processes 179:104217. DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2020.104217

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1313339840319160322

Highlights

• There is a complex interaction between the Balearic lizard, Podarcis lilfordi and the dead horse arum, Helicodiceros muscivorus.

• The dead horse arum attracts flies to be pollinated.

• Flies are trapped inside floral chambers during several hours.

• Lizards are able to enter inside floral chambers to capture flies.

• A natural experiment using trapped flies was done in Aire. Lizards were attracted by the sound of trapped flies.

• This is the first known case of phonotaxis towards prey for a diurnal lizard.

Abstract: Foraging diurnal lizards are well known for their use of visual and chemical cues to detect prey. We already showed that the Balearic lizard is able to detect prey using visual and chemical cues, even from airborne odors. In this study we carried out a field experiment to test if lizards can detect prey using acoustic cues. Our results show that Podarcis lilfordi is able to detect flies trapped inside opaque cups, only using acoustic cues. To our knowledge, this is the first known case of phonotaxis of a diurnal lizard. Thus, P. lilfordi can detect, from far away, current pollinators trapped inside floral chambers of the dead horse arum, Helicodiceros muscivorus. This is another behavioral trait displayed by the Balearic lizard during its complex interaction with the dead horse arum.

Popular version: The Lizard and the Rotting Meat Lily. Mary Bates. Psychology Today, Oct 5 2020. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animal-minds/202010/the-lizard-and-the-rotting-meat-lily

Are there dedicated female neurons for saying no to sex? In the sophisticated fly Drosophila, there are.

Neuroscience: The Female Art of Saying No. Anne C.von Philipsborn. Current Biology, Volume 30, Issue 19, October 5 2020, Pages R1080-R1083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.023

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1313135084627783682

Refers to: Ovipositor Extrusion Promotes the Transition from Courtship to Copulation and Signals Female Acceptance in Drosophila melanogaster. Cecilia Mezzera, Margarida Brotas, Miguel Gaspar, Hania J. Pavlou, Stephen F. Goodwin, Maria Luísa Vasconcelos. Current Biology, Volume 30, Issue 19, October 5 2020, Pages 3736-3748.e5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960982220311775

Summary: Females communicate sexual receptivity in various ways. Drosophila signal that they are mated and ovulating, and resistive to mating again, by extruding their egg-laying organ (ovipositor). Connectome-aided circuit analysis reveals how this break up message is computed and differs from an acceptance response in virgins.

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Are there dedicated female neurons for saying no to sex? In the sophisticated fly Drosophila, there are.

From the Mezzera paper:

Summary: Communication between male and female fruit flies during courtship is essential for successful mating, but, as with many other species, it is the female who decides whether to mate. Here, we show a novel role for ovipositor extrusion in promoting male copulation attempts in virgin and mated females and signaling acceptance in virgins. We first show that ovipositor extrusion is only displayed by sexually mature females, exclusively during courtship and in response to the male song. We identified a pair of descending neurons that controls ovipositor extrusion in mated females. Genetic silencing of the descending neurons shows that ovipositor extrusion stimulates the male to attempt copulation. A detailed behavioral analysis revealed that during courtship, the male repeatedly licks the female genitalia, independently of ovipositor extrusion, and that licking an extruded ovipositor prompts a copulation attempt. However, if the ovipositor is not subsequently retracted, copulation is prevented, as it happens with mated females. In this study, we reveal a dual function of the ovipositor: while its extrusion is necessary for initiating copulation by the male, its retraction signals female acceptance. We thus uncover the significance of the communication between male and female that initiates the transition from courtship to copulation.

Discussion

The transition from courtship to copulation is a critical moment for the reproductive success of animals. The exact steps leading to this transition in any species remain largely uncharacterized [41]. In our work, we showed that in fruit flies, male licking and female ovipositor extrusion are involved in this transition (schema in Figure 5G). An important feature of this interaction is that the female mating status determines whether this transition is complete. We observed that virgin females retract the ovipositor upon a male’s attempt, thus allowing copulation, whereas mated females do not, thus blocking copulation.

Virgin and mated females use a variation of the same behavior to stimulate and prevent copulation, respectively. This variation requires different descending neurons probably acting on common circuits. This could be a versatile and economic strategy to mediate opposite responses when the same individual uses one or the other variation depending on the circumstances.

Why would a mated female signal the male to attempt copulation while blocking intromission? In circumstances that we have not addressed in this study, mated females re-mate. For a few hours after mating, and given the appropriate context, mated females will eject the sperm and re-mate in an attempt to increase fecundity and offspring genetic diversity [25, 42]. In this case, prompting the male to attempt copulation makes sense, as it could lead to copulation. An additional role for full ovipositor extrusion in mated females, which we have not explored here, may be in announcing the female’s current pheromonal composition. Ovipositor extrusion would be an efficient way of exposing the anti-aphrodisiac pheromones 3-O-acetyl-1,3-dihydroxyoctacosa-11,19-diene [24] present in the tip of the ovipositor and cis-vaccenyl acetate, mostly in the reproductive system [25, 43], which, together with 7-tricosene [23] present in the cuticle, indicate to an approaching male that the female has mated, and, depending on the combination and intensity of the chemical cues, the male may or may not initiate courtship.

In this work, we identified a pair of descending neurons that control full ovipositor extrusion. Full ovipositor extrusion can be induced in the virgin female by DNp13 activation, but activity in these neurons is not necessary for ovipositor extrusion in virgins. Although full and partial ovipositor extrusions do not have a sharp distinction, ovipositor extrusion is commanded by different neurons and controlled differently in virgin and mated flies. It remains to be elucidated which are the descending neurons controlling virgin ovipositor extrusion and how they interact with DNp13 to control similar behavior in females in different mating states.

Our work shows that, during the interaction between the sexes, the female responds to the male courtship song with ovipositor extrusion. However, it is apparent in the videos that song does not always lead to ovipositor extrusion. This response pattern suggests that ovipositor extrusion is not a reflexive reaction to courtship song, but rather arises from a temporal or multimodal integration. Further experiments are required to elucidate the nature of this association. How does the male verify that the song was heard? Our results indicate that the male is sampling the female genitalia with the proboscis throughout courtship. Presumably, licking is intended to probe the chemical landscape of the female genitalia, which is likely to change when the ovipositor is extruded; in this way, the male could sense when the female is responding to the song. We show that licking of the ovipositor elicits a copulation attempt. In line with early suggestions that compounds are released during ovipositor extrusion to stimulate the male [11], we speculate that a chemical compound is presented with the ovipositor by the female and sensed by taste neurons on the male proboscis. A gustatory signal, yet unidentified and common to virgin and mated females, would stimulate the male to attempt copulation. Having established that licking an extruded ovipositor is the starting point for the male to attempt copulation allows us to use the same starting point to study how the transition from courtship to copulation is processed in the male brain.

In conclusion, our work highlights how both sexes contribute to continuous communication during courtship that culminates in copulation attempt gated by the female ovipositor extrusion. Moreover, our findings open new avenues of study of the neuronal regulation of behaviors that lead to the transition from courtship to copulation and how this transition regulates neuronal activity.

Contrary to the common impression, the U.S. public is largely uninformed rather than misinformed of a wide range of factual claims verified by journalists

The Value of Not Knowing: Partisan Cue-Taking and Belief Updating of the Uninformed, the Ambiguous, and the Misinformed. Jianing Li, Michael W Wagner. Journal of Communication, Volume 70, Issue 5, October 2020, Pages 646–669, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa022

Abstract: The problem of a misinformed citizenry is often used to motivate research on misinformation and its corrections. However, researchers know little about how differences in informedness affect how well corrective information helps individuals develop knowledge about current events. We introduce a Differential Informedness Model that distinguishes between three types of individuals, that is, the uninformed, the ambiguous, and the misinformed, and establish their differences with two experiments incorporating multiple partisan cues and issues. Contrary to the common impression, the U.S. public is largely uninformed rather than misinformed of a wide range of factual claims verified by journalists. Importantly, we find that the success of belief updating after exposure to corrective information (via a fact-checking article) is dependent on the presence, the certainty, and the accuracy of one’s prior belief. Uninformed individuals are more likely to update their beliefs than misinformed individuals after exposure to corrective information. Interestingly, the ambiguous individuals, regardless of whether their uncertain guesses were correct, do not differ from uninformed individuals with respect to belief updating.

Discussion

Sociotechnical changes in the communication environment and the concomitant concerns over the quality and content of information people consume have urged scholars to carefully theorize how persuasion takes place (Holbert, Garrett, & Gleason, 2010). Knowledge, a foundational factor in persuasion theories, is important for considering how people elaborate on and react to new information (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In this paper, we conceptualized differential types of informedness and tested how individuals with different states of informedness take up partisan cues and update beliefs about what is true.

First, and contrary to the impression that many citizens are misinformed, the majority of our respondents are uninformed of a wide range of claims important enough to be verified by journalists. Only a small group of respondents hold confident, inaccurate beliefs. This builds on work by Pasek et al. (2015) by distinguishing between the uninformed, who admit that they “don’t know,” the ambiguous, who take a guess with varying degrees of accuracy, and the misinformed, who hold steadfast false beliefs. In the current environment where concerns over misinformation often lead to heightened attention to belief accuracy, our findings highlight the necessity to bridge between work on political ignorance and misperception and the benefit of leveraging belief accuracy, belief presence and belief certainty to better assess public informedness.

Considering our Differential Informedness Model along with theories on information shortcuts (Popkin, 1991) and belief updating (Kunda, 1990) yields several important implications. Notably, the conceptual distinctions between types of political informedness are substantively meaningful in belief updating. Individuals engage in different levels of motivated reasoning depending on their prior informedness. In the immigration condition, the misinformed individuals held on to false beliefs even after reading the fact-checking article, while the uninformed and the ambiguous individuals were less likely to choose the incorrect answer. Interestingly, the ambiguous individuals, regardless of whether their uncertain guess was correct or not, did not differ from uninformed individuals with respect to belief updates. This gives hope that although the persuasive effects of fact-checks might be hindered by confident misperceptions, it is still useful to the much larger group of citizens who are uninformed or ambiguous of the facts. Of course, it is likely that these same citizens are less likely to participate in democratic politics, muting the persuasive effects of fact-checks on attitudes and behaviors.

Further, integrating the Differential Informedness Model with theories about the effects of information shortcuts on decision-making (Popkin, 1991), we find that what people believe is also influenced by who is doing the talking. Labeling the three U.S. political figures, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Chuck Schumer, as the source of a claim of fact influenced people’s factual beliefs to different extents. Unsurprisingly, Trump was the strongest cue of the three, resulting in a decreased number of “Don’t know” answers, an increased number of certain answers, and more partisan-congruent truthfulness evaluation. The McConnell cue resulted in increased partisan-congruent evaluation, while the Schumer cue leads to increased number of certain answers. These findings confirm that the influence of partisan cues on factual beliefs is not particular to a single partisan politician, although prominence in political discourse, or indeed, the elite in question’s partisanship itself, may influence the size of the effect.

Our findings also lay plain the likelihood that context will play important roles in conclusions about persuasive effects. With the divisive yet ubiquitous immigration issue, fact-checking helps the uninformed more than the misinformed, highlighting its role in accurate belief formation beyond belief debiasing (Graves & Amazeen, 2019). For marijuana legalization, fact-checking generally helps everyone. Is this due to fundamental differences in the nature of the issues, or is it because the immigration claim is rated false while the marijuana claim is rated true? Our study implies that the misinformed may have a harder time believing something they thought was true is actually false than the other way around (Wintersieck, 2017).

Taken together, our work points to fruitful directions in theorizing a more generalized process (Figure 3) of how prior states of differential informedness, interacting with message features, can trigger distinct types of processing motivations and ultimately produce pro- or anti-democratic changes as well as persistence regarding various persuasion outcomes. Our proposed framework suggests directions to theorize about message features—including but not limited to information shortcuts and issue contexts—such as argument strength, message frames, etc., to consider the role of differential informedness when estimating persuasive effects. Further, building on work that highlights outcomes beyond message-congruent response changing (Miller, 2002), our work suggests that individuals may engage in accurate belief formation or hold on to persistent ones. Future research should explore if backfire, or reinforcement of responses, depends upon differential informedness (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010; Wood & Porter, 2019) and consider attitudinal and behavior outcomes beyond belief responses (Thorson, 2016).

Figure 3

A simple model of informedness, message features, motivation, and persuasive outcomes.

What can journalists learn from our analysis? Fact-checking stands as an attractive remedy for the public to navigate a complicated media ecosystem rife with misinformation and a focus on the horse race (Amazeen, 2015). However, we offered a nuanced account of the ability of fact-checking to help citizens learn about the truth. Of course, reporters do not control their audiences’ prior states of informedness; but taking caution with partisan cues when presenting facts can facilitate more accurate beliefs. Fact-checkers might consider focusing on the evidence regarding the veracity of the claims they check and give less attention to who made the claim. A downside of this approach is that the partisan source is usually a key element of what makes the factual claim newsworthy and perhaps the most crucial factor in the size of the audience the fact-check earns. Finally, given that the majority of the public is uninformed rather than misinformed, journalists might consider focusing on presenting verifiable facts rather than repeating a false claim, which may lead audience to erroneously remember it as true (Peter & Koch, 2016).

While we analyzed beliefs about claims of fact for 60 claims across two studies, we only provided fact-check reporting on two of the claims. More work on representative samples across countries is necessary before meaningful generalizations about belief updating based upon informedness is possible. Of course, we randomly assigned the politicians we used in our studies to the claims we selected for analysis. In the political information ecology, these claims are not random nor is the attention they receive from fact-checkers. The nature of the political environment will also likely impact our findings on partisan cues and belief updating. People tend to adopt partisan frames, regardless of quality, when the environment is polarized, while non-polarized environments tend to encourage individuals to seek the best argument before adopting a position on an issue (Druckman, Peterson, & Slothuus, 2013). Future research should replicate our findings with considerations of contextual or ecological variances.

We have made the case that it is important to differentiate among types of informedness to assess the quality of citizens’ knowledge and persuade them to believe what is verifiably true. Persuasive effects of corrective information can be strong for those who are aware of their own ignorance but may fail when individuals do not know the biases they carry that cause unearned certainty about their beliefs. We examined 60 factual claims, partisan cues regarding three political elites, and two-issue contexts for a granularity of data that has allowed us to advance knowledge on an important question in political communication. Our framework on differential informedness is applicable to other subject areas such as health and science where knowledge measurement is increasingly crucial and useful in theorizing a general process of the interplay of informedness, message features, and motivations on persuasive outcomes.

Adolescents with stronger religiosity earn better grades, are less truant in secondary school, and complete more years of higher education, [but] conservative Protestants are among the least educated religious groups

Religion and Academic Achievement: A Research Review Spanning Secondary School and Higher Education. Ilana M. Horwitz. Review of Religious Research, Oct 4 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13644-020-00433-y

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1312982215496740865

Abstract: Profound socio-economic disparities that exist among American religious groups are largely driven by the quantity and quality of education they receive. Furthermore, given the U.S. schooling system is rooted in Protestant ideals, it is possible that students with Protestant commitments have an academic advantage. This article synthesizes literature on how adolescents’ religious commitment and background are associated with their short- and long-term academic outcomes. A literature search identified 42 relevant studies published in 1990-present. These studies were reviewed to identify: (1) the mechanisms through which religion affects educational outcomes—moral, social, and cultural; (2) the main operationalized measures of religion—religious tradition and individual religiosity; and (3) the most frequent academic outcomes studied—secondary school grades, truancy, test scores, educational aspirations, and educational attainment. Of the 42 studies, 95% were based exclusively on quantitative survey data, 95% examined only religiosity or religious tradition, and 66% focused on educational attainment. There were three major findings. First, research has advanced from correlational studies to methodologically rigorous designs suggesting religion can play a causal role in academic success. Second, research reveals a religiosity-religious tradition paradox: Adolescents with stronger religiosity earn better grades, are less truant in secondary school, and complete more years of higher education. A large proportion of highly religious adolescents are likely to be conservative Protestants, but the research on religious tradition suggests that conservative Protestants are among the least educated religious groups. Third, it is unclear if religious adolescents only fare better on academic outcomes that reward their personality, such as grades, or whether they also perform better on more objective measures, such as standardized tests. This systematic review reveals a paradoxical “effect” of academic achievement and religiosity versus-religious tradition. The overall results indicate the need to: (a) identify the interaction between religious tradition and religiosity, (b) distinguish between subjective versus objective academic outcomes; (c) examine heterogeneity among non-religious adolescents; (d) study the interplay between institutional schooling and institutional religion; (e) investigate the religion/cultural match between teachers and students; (f) pursue qualitative research to better understand mechanisms; and (g) expand research about non-Christians.

“And the Male Is Not like the Female”: Sunni Islam and Gender Nonconformity

“And the Male Is Not like the Female”: Sunni Islam and Gender Nonconformity (Part I). Mobeen Vaid. Muslim Matters, Jul 24. https://muslimmatters.org/2017/07/24/and-the-male-is-not-like-the-female-sunni-islam-and-gender-nonconformity/

VI. Conclusions Concerning Gender Nonconformity in Sunni Islam

On the basis of the above discussion, we can make a number of normative assertions concerning Sunni Islam’s position on gender nonconformity:

⦁ Gender is of two discrete types: male and female.

⦁ Gender is normatively presumed on the basis of unambiguous biological constitution.

⦁ In the event of physiological ambiguities, either on account of hermaphroditism or genital agenesis, the Sharīʿa provides methods by which gender can be established. Should these methods fail, a minority of scholars permit the ambiguous individual to make a non-revocable gender selection, after which he or she is treated in accord with the gender chosen, while the majority continue regarding the individual as “ambiguous” (mushkil) and consider marriage impermissible for such a person.

⦁ Mannish behavior (for women) and effeminate behavior (for men) are impermissible if taken on deliberately. If, however, effeminate behavior manifests in a male dispositionally (khilqatan)—hence lying outside of his conscious control—then those (unelected) mannerisms are not deemed sinful. The effeminate male (mukhannath) is required, by some jurists, to attenuate to the extent possible those traits—such as gait, voice, and other mannerisms—that may be liable to correction through conscious habituation.

⦁ If male effeminacy is paired with an absence of sexual desire for women, then the effeminate male is permitted to remain in the private company of marriageable non-maḥram women (ajnabiyyāt) according to the majority of scholars. This permission is contingent on the effeminate male upholding the confidentiality of the women in question, not divulging the specifics of their physique to unrelated men.

⦁ Aside from the specific permission to enter into the company of non-maḥram women, a constitutionally effeminate male (al-mukhannath al-khilqī) is regarded and treated as a man in all other respects, subject to the same Sharīʿa rulings that would apply to any other male. Accordingly, he may lead prayer, testify and bear witness as a man, and marry a woman if he so desires. Conversely, he is required to refrain from liwāṭ (sodomy) and other forbidden sexual acts, even if his lack of desire for women is accompanied by a persistent inclination towards men.

⦁ It is categorically impermissible for either a male or a female to dress in a manner that conclusively imitates the opposite sex. If men and women in a given culture dress in ways that are indistinguishable, then men must at least abstain from veiling and from covering in other ways that are specific to women.

In light of the normative Islamic categories, prescriptions, and proscriptions examined above, Part II of this study will consider contemporary discourses surrounding the issue of gender identity (in comparison to biological sex), gender roles, and transgenderism with a focus on the multifarious ways in which modern discourses surrounding these topics can or cannot be accommodated given the legal, ethical, and moral boundaries established by the Sharīʿa.

Latent genetic traits explain a nontrivial amount of variance in two news use motives (surveillance & entertainment), as well as frequency of consumption across news sources, mainly ideological ones (Fox News & CNN)

Exploring Genetic Contributions to News Use Motives and Frequency of News Consumption: A Study of Identical and Fraternal Twins. Chance York & Paul Haridakis. Mass Communication and Society, May 27 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2020.1759096

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1312702086736470022

Abstract: Prior research conducted within the Uses and Gratifications paradigm has considered the contribution of numerous background social and psychological characteristics to motives for media use and media consumption patterns. In this study, we explore the extent to which far more fundamental characteristics—genes—explain, in part, motives to use news media and frequency of news use. Utilizing original data collected on identical and fraternal twins (n = 334), we find that latent genetic traits explain a nontrivial amount of variance in two unique news use motives, surveillance and entertainment, as well as frequency of consumption across multiple news sources. Genetic traits were particularly influential in explaining the frequency of using sources commonly characterized as ideological, such as Fox News and CNN.

Sexual orientation change therapies: Not efficacious in altering sexual orientation, & are associated with more depression, relationship dysfunction, and increased homonegativity

A systematic review of the efficacy, harmful effects, and ethical issues related to sexual orientation change efforts. Amy Przeworski  Emily Peterson  Alexandra Piedra. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, October 1 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12377

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1312446997442379777

Abstract: Sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are practices intended to eliminate same‐sex attraction. We systematically review the literature on the efficacy of SOCE and discuss ways in which SOCE violate ethical guidelines for working with LGBQ clients. Existing literature indicates that SOCE are not efficacious in altering sexual orientation. Studies concluding otherwise often contain methodological limitations, such as biased recruitment or a retrospective design, that weaken the validity or prevent the generalizability of results. Many studies report negative outcomes associated with SOCE, such as depression, relationship dysfunction, and increased homonegativity. SOCE‐oriented therapies also violate the American Psychological Association's (APA) ethical guidelines for working with LGBQ populations. In contrast, affirming therapies are efficacious, consistent with APA guidelines, and are associated with positive outcomes for LGBQ clients.

Sadness is a common symptom in the general population; it is an intermediate state on a continuum from well-being to major depressive disorder

Sadness and the continuum from well-being to depressive disorder: a replication study in a representative US population sample. Sarah Tebeka et al. Journal of Psychiatric Research, October 3 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.10.004

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1312441652489809920

Abstract

Objective: Sadness is a common symptom in the general population. We tested the hypothesis that sadness is an intermediate state on a continuum from well-being to major depressive disorder (MDD).

Methods: Using data from The National Epidemiologic Study of Alcohol and Related Conditions III (NESARC-III), a large and representative US population sample, we assessed the prevalence of sadness, its sociodemographic and clinical correlates, using three non-overlapping groups: (i) non-depressed sad participants, (ii) non-sad non-depressed participants and (iii) depressed participants. We estimated sensitivity and specificity of sadness.

Results: Sadness was frequent in the general population 34.3%), and present in almost all participants with MDD (99.6%). Sad (N=4,593) and MDD participants (N=4,593) and 7,889 respectively) shared common sociodemographic characteristics. Compared to controls, sad and MDD participants presented more psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, substance use, psychotic, eating and personality disorders. Sadness was an intermediate state, sad individuals reporting more psychiatric disorders than controls, but less than participants with MDD. Sadness demonstrated a very high sensitivity (99.6 %), with a good specificity (83.8%) for MDD.

Limitations: The NESARC assessed sadness over lifetime, which may involve memorization bias.

Conclusion: Our study confirms the existence of a depressive continuum. Sadness is frequent in general population, and shares correlates with MDD. We have also shown a continuum where sadness is an intermediate state between well-being and psychiatric disorders. With high sensitivity and specificity, sadness appears as a clear MDD prodrome and at-risk state, and may be a symptom of a transdiagnostic distress process.

Key words: Anxiety/Anxiety disordersBipolar disorderDepressionEating disordersEpidemiologySubstance Use Disorders

Rats & mice show comparable levels of emotional contagion, & an equivalent contagion response to familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics

Towards a unified theory of emotional contagion in rodents—A meta-analysis. Julen Hernandez-Lallement, Paula Gómez-Sotres, Maria Carrillo. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, October 3 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.09.010

Highlights

• Rats and mice show comparable levels of emotional contagion, however, only mice strain-specific differences in emotional contagion response.

• Rats and mice show an equivalent contagion response to familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics.

• Prior experience with an emotional inducing stimulus significantly increases fear contagion response in rats but not in mice.

• Social testing condition influences the level of contagion: animals tested alone show reduced contagion compared to animals tested in a group.

Abstract: Here we leverage 80 years of emotional contagion research in rodents and perform the first meta-analysis on this topic. Using 457 effect sizes, we show that, while both rats and mice are capable of emotional contagion, there are differences in how various factors modulate empathy in these species: 1) only mice show strain-specific differences in emotional contagion response; 2) although rats and mice have equivalent contagion response to familiar and unfamiliar individuals, our results show that familiarity length is negatively correlated with level of contagion in rats only; 3) prior experience with emotional stimuli almost doubles fear contagion response in rats while no changes are detected in pre-exposed mice; 4) both mice and rats tested alone show comparable reduced contagion compared to animals tested in a group; 5) emotional contagion is reduced in animals from both species missing one sensory modality compared to situations where all sensory modalities are recruited during emotional contagion. Lastly, we report similar patterns of brain activation during emotional contagion in rats and mice.

Keywords: Emotional contagionMeta-analysisRodentsEmpathy

4. Conclusion and limitations

4.1. Updating current models of emotional contagion

While a high number of reviews attempting to summarize the literature on emotional contagion in rodents were published in recent years (Keysers and Gazzola, 2016; Meyza et al., 2016; Keum and Shin, 2016; Sivaselvachandran et al., 2016; Mogil, 2012; Lukas and de Jong, 2016; Keum and Shin, 2019), one article in particular went one step further and proposed a classification of experimental approaches used in the field (Panksepp and Panksepp, 2013a). This classification distinguished a variety of phenomenon such as contagion, social analgesia, social buffering, social priming, behavioral matching and social transfer. In the current meta-analysis, we updated and simplified this classification based on our revised inclusion criteria for studies measuring emotional contagion: ‘a study measuring a behavioral response associated with (indirectly -in absence of- and directly -in presence of others-) the emotional cues of other individuals’. This means that all the phenomena mentioned above, per our definition, fall under the emotional contagion umbrella. One illustrative example is the case of social buffering, where a distressed animal shows reduced fear when paired with a neutral non-distressed conspecific. In these cases, we considered the observed phenomenon as emotional contagion from an animal in a neutral emotional state to one in a fearful state. This approach allowed us to unify different paradigms, and seemingly diverse approaches on rodent empathy into a single model. Our classification had additional key differences with the classification proposed by Panskepp & Panksepp (Panksepp and Panksepp, 2013a): 1) contagion can occur without the direct presence of an individual (e.g., through a cotton boll soaked with urine of a fearful animal); 2) emotional contagion paradigms consist of three phases: pre-exposure, emotional transfer and measure of emotional contagion; 3) the term emotional transfer refers to the point in time in which the emotional state from one individual is contaged to another (measurement time could happen during or after emotional transfer); 4) measurements of emotional contagion had to recruit an emotional observable response; if they failed to do so (such as memory effects), they were not considered direct measurements of emotional contagion but rather secondary processes related to emotional contagion. All the studies included in the current meta-analysis fall under this classification.

4.2. Limitations

While we strived to reduce the number of arbitrary decisions that needed to be made (by devising a clear methodology and procedures in the decision process), inevitably, we did encounter difficult choices at different stages of the process. In particular, for each study, we were confronted with interpreting whether the reported data was a direct measure of emotional contagion, or rather a secondary process triggered by emotional contagion. The lack of clear definitions and unity in the field made it challenging in deciding which data was indeed relevant for this meta-analysis. In order to guide our decisions, we elaborated a framework through which each study was pipelined to take a decision on whether the effect size reflected emotional contagion-related data. For instance, research performed on social transmission of taste aversion can be arguably included in the emotional contagion field, since, typically in these paradigms, one animal undergoes an aversive emotion (taste), which is thereafter transmitted to a naïve conspecific through interactions. However, these publications were not included in this meta-analysis due to the fact that the aversive emotion experienced by the demonstrator was often not measured and quantified, nor was the actual transfer of emotion. Similar issues were encountered in studies where emotional contagion was used as a tool, rather than a measure, to study how observing the distress of others affected cognitive abilities later in time, such as memory and learning (Nowak et al., 2013; Ito et al., 2015a). Albeit these are important effects of emotional contagion in other neural processes and behaviors, they are not a direct measurement of emotional contagion, and as such were excluded from the main analysis.

However, we find it important to emphasize the caveats of our approach by pointing out other missing aspects of the emotional contagion literature. For instance, the filters used in this study failed to capture articles on mother-pup interaction and the emotional transfer inherent to such social systems (Moriceau and Sullivan, 2006; Barr et al., 2009). Future meta-analytic work on this topic could increase their search filter range to include such studies and encompass even more variability in rodent emotional contagion.

It should also be noted that our filters might have failed to include articles where similar processes were studied but other wording was used. It is notable that rodent emotional contagion is a controversial topic (Balter, 2011) and several studies have framed their results in terms of stress-related processes instead of emotional contagion (Breitfeld et al., 2015; Zalaquett and Thiessen, 1991; Mackay-Sim and Laing, 1981). While we believe that the high number of effect sizes and studies included in this meta-analysis already allow for careful conclusions to be drawn, future endeavors should carefully increase the granularity of their filters to encompass studies that investigated similar processes under a different framework.

Another limitation of our work is the low number of effect sizes present in some distributions. For instance, the low number of effect sizes reported in females makes it difficult to conclude on the results reported here, that is, that sex does not modulate emotional contagion. Similar parsimony should be used when interpreting effect sizes reported in different strains. For instance, the differences reported between CD-1 and CF-1 mice, two very close strains, are quite surprising. One likely explanation for this (and other) differences might lie in the experimental paradigm used, which differed between strains. These discrepant results suggest that additional, more granular variables should be added to future meta-analysis. For instance, an attempt at classifying experimental paradigms to identify contexts and situations where emotional contagion might be more salient would allow to associate differences in effect sizes to experimental manipulations rather than to species, strains or other parameters.

This meta-analysis revealed that, although, emotional contagion can occur in response to both positive and negative emotions, as already noted by (Panksepp and Panksepp, 2013c), to date nearly all studies investigating emotional contagion in rodents use negative stimuli to trigger emotional transfer, which could be due to the fact that in rodent empathy research negative reinforcers are traditionally used. This observation stresses the need to use positive reinforcers to study the other side of rodent empathy, as already performed in some studies (Willuhn et al., 2014b; Kashtelyan et al., 2014b; Lichtenberg et al., 2018), and more generally in the field of prosocial behavior (Lichtenberg et al., 2018; Márquez et al., 2015; Hernandez-Lallement et al., 2016b, 2020). A promising avenue would lie in studies that directly compare the effects of positive and negative reinforcers, although we acknowledge that developing comparable positive and negative stimulus is a challenge given the higher saliency and reinforcing power of negative stimuli. On the other hand, it is important to consider the possibility, that the under reporting of studies using positive stimuli could be due to lack of effect of this type of stimuli and bias to report null effects.

A final limitation that we encountered was the incomplete reporting of information, namely, the methods section. We noticed that some variables more likely to not be properly reported such as age and number of days that observers and demonstrators were related to each other, with 13 % and 21 % of overall missing values per category respectively. In addition, our quantitative analysis suggested that randomization, blinding and sample size calculations are seldom reported (and/or done) in studies in the field, which overall reduces the results quality.

4.3. Conclusion

Overall, this is the first meta-analysis and systematic review conducted to date on the field of rodent emotional contagion. In this meta-analysis we develop an umbrella definition of emotional contagion that covers a large rage of studies investigating this response. We also developed a classification model that allowed us to unify a range of existing paradigms used to investigate emotional contagion. Within this model we identified key parameters that have a modulatory effect on emotional contagion and that can be used for optimizing the design of future studies in the field. However, we underscore that many differences reported here should be taken cautiously since the lack of effect sizes and major differences in experimental paradigms could still account for effects we report in this meta-analysis. We also identify a range of brain regions that can be used as targets for further to further our understanding of the neural mechanisms of emotional contagion. Lastly, this meta-analysis also identifies gaps in knowledge and potential research areas of interest.

Italy: War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism

War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism: An Empirical Exploration. Daron Acemoglu, Giuseppe De Feo, Giacomo De Luca, Gianluca Russo. NBER Working Paper No. 27854, September 2020. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27854

Abstract: The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in many countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and the subsequent emergence of Fascism in Italy. We first develop a source of variation in Socialist support across Italian municipalities in the 1919 election based on war casualties from the area. We show that these casualties are unrelated to a battery of political, economic and social variables before the war and had a major impact on Socialist support (partly because the Socialists were the main anti-war political movement). Our main result is that this boost to Socialist support (that is “exogenous” to the prior political leaning of the municipality) led to greater local Fascist activity as measured by local party branches and Fascist political violence (squadrismo), and to significantly larger vote share of the Fascist Party in the 1924 election. We document that the increase in the vote share of the Fascist Party was not at the expense of the Socialist Party and instead came from right-wing parties, thus supporting our interpretation that center-right and right-wing voters coalesced around the Fascist Party because of the “red scare”. We also show that the veterans did not consistently support the Fascist Party and there is no evidence for greater nationalist sentiment in areas with more casualties. We provide evidence that landowner associations and greater presence of local elites played an important role in the rise of Fascism. Finally, we find greater likelihood of Jewish deportations in 1943-45 and lower vote share for Christian Democrats after World War II in areas with greater early Fascist activity.