The Difficulty of Listening to Talkers With Masks: Meta-cognitive monitoring (the ability to adapt self-judgments to actual performance) worsens

Unmasking the Difficulty of Listening to Talkers With Masks: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Elena Giovanelli et al. i-Perception, March 10, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669521998393

Abstract: Interactions with talkers wearing face masks have become part of our daily routine since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an on-line experiment resembling a video conference, we examined the impact of face masks on speech comprehension. Typical-hearing listeners performed a speech-in-noise task while seeing talkers with visible lips, talkers wearing a surgical mask, or just the name of the talker displayed on screen. The target voice was masked by concurrent distracting talkers. We measured performance, confidence and listening effort scores, as well as meta-cognitive monitoring (the ability to adapt self-judgments to actual performance). Hiding the talkers behind a screen or concealing their lips via a face mask led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort. Moreover, meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker. These findings have implications on everyday communication for typical-hearing individuals and for hearing-impaired populations.

Keywords: speech processing, multisensory, speech in noise, facial masks, COVID-19

Discussion

In the present work, we mimicked a real multitalker video call to measure the impact of different visual conditions on speech comprehension in typical hearing participants. Results showed that hiding the talkers behind a black screen or concealing their lips via a face mask led to lower performance and lower listening confidence scores as well as increased listening effort. These differences between listening conditions suggest that the actual audio-visual benefit coming from vision relies on lip reading and demonstrate the impact of face masks on speech comprehension. Understanding a talker wearing a face mask in noise was, in our study, comparable to not seeing him or her at all. Importantly, these findings emerged in a context in which we disentangled the impact of visual information related to wearing a mask from the voice distortions generated by the mask. In this way, our results can be interpreted as the consequences of altering or removing visual information from lip movements in speech processing.

Our visual manipulation also impacted on the ability to successfully judge one’s own cognitive processes while engaged in a task, namely, meta-cognitive monitoring. Face masks reduced meta-cognitive monitoring abilities. In this condition, participants’ listening confidence about their performance was less consistent with their objective performance (e.g., they could be confident about their performance, when in fact their speech comprehension was poor, or vice versa). This result is in line with previous work concerning the effect of face masks on confidence in reading emotions (Carbon, 2020), which found lower confidence and accuracy scores in recognizing expressions displayed by faces wearing surgical masks. This result supports the idea that hiding the lower part of a face undermines the efficacy of a conversation not only linguistically but also from a nonverbal point of view. While this result merits further investigation, it may suggest that when interacting with people wearing a mask, we not only feel less confident about our listening experience overall, but we are also less capable of monitoring whether we understood the message correctly or not. In addition, the confusion they generate on emotional reading of face expressions could further contribute to lowering the efficacy of our everyday life communications, preventing us from reconstructing the emotional tone of a conversation, which could partially contribute to better speech comprehension. This novel result is particularly interesting because compensatory strategies (e.g., asking our conversational partner to speak slower or in a louder voice) are typically triggered by adequate meta-cognitive monitoring of the success of the communication exchange (Boldt & Gilbert, 2019).

In June 2020, the World Health Organization warned about the potential risks and harms of face masks on daily communications. As evidenced by this study, when a talker wears a face mask the listening effort increases, while performance and confidence in what we listen decrease (see also Coniam, 2005; Llamas et al., 2009; Saunders et al., 2020). This could potentially result in stress and misunderstandings during communications, and even lead to risky behaviors, such as pulling down face masks or reducing social distancing while trying to understand each other better. In this study, we intentionally focused on a population of young adults, native speakers of Italian (the language used in the experiment), who reported no hearing difficulties. This is because we reasoned that any effect observed in this sample could only be exacerbated in populations that experience difficulties with language and communication. These populations include hearing children developing their L1, for whom the observation of adults’ mouths can play a key role in an educational context (Spitzer, 2020); hearing children and adults learning a new language (L2); adults and aging people with normal hearing but sensitive to noisy contexts (Tremblay et al., 2015); and obviously all the populations with hearing loss or profound deafness. We believe it is a social priority to extend research on the effects of face masks on communication as well as other aspects of interpersonal perception (such as emotional processing or personal identity identification: Carbon, 2020) to all these populations.

The question arises them of how we can combine safe behavior and effective communication. One approach is to consider the introduction of transparent masks on a large scale. At the moment, they are only used in few medical settings (e.g., in the United Kingdom; Action on Hearing Loss, 2020), but they are gaining increasing attention among the hearing-impaired community (Taylor-Coleman, 2020). Even though this solution may seem the best way to reinstate lip reading into verbal communication, the current generation of transparent masks have several limitations. On the one hand, their materials impact greatly on the high frequencies of the human voice (Corey et al., 2020) affecting consonant perception (Divenyi et al., 2005; Roth et al., 2011). On the other hand, transparent masks are difficult to find because there is only a limited number of producers (Chodosh et al., 2020). Finally, in many countries, these devices are not approved by health authorities.

To conclude, our findings provide a clear example of the audio-visual nature of speech processing, and they emphasize the perceptual and meta-cognitive limitations that result from occluding the face of our conversational partner. From the methodological point of view, our study represents a successful attempt to investigate audio-visual communication using an on-line task and simulating an ordinary listening context, such as the video call with a limited number of talkers. Clearly, when conducting hearing research online, a number of criteria need to be relaxed. It would be important to replicate and extend these observations running similar experimental protocols in a more controlled laboratory context in which individual hearing thresholds are also measured (unlike here). Moreover, it would also be important to increase the number of trials per participant (that said, our linear mixed-effect model approach to the analysis implies that we worked on a dataset of 1728 measures overall). Future experiments should also consider using audio tracks recorded both with and without masks, in order to objectively estimate the actual transmission loss produced by the masks and directly compare the effects of those distortions on speech comprehension. It is clear that such a comparison should necessarily exploit professional audio tools and accurate measures, only obtainable in a laboratory context. Nonetheless, our results agree with a vast literature on the multisensory contributions to speech perception and already provide support to recent petitions that pressured the main video conferencing platforms to offer real-time speech-to-text captioning (Chodosh et al., 2020). Most importantly, our findings indicate that audio-visual communication should be pursued even in the case of the health constraints imposed by a world pandemic. This is necessary for everyone, but especially for those individuals for whom face masks could become a severe obstacle to social inclusion.

Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson

Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson (Sexual Personae, Yale Univ. Press, 1990, p 638-9)

Changed formatting, changed continuity, split whenever & wherever I liked:

• Dickinson’s nature has two faces, savage and serene.
• heaven is stasis, a permafrost of nonbeing.
• The bride poems are clever hoaxes that turn princesses into pumpkins, mere chunks of debris.
• Corpses drop into the grave with a thud. A frequent finale is a slow fade, the voice fumbling for words, as consciousness gutters out.
• The sadomasochistic poems are the tectonic, the slow brute contortions of the frigid mineral world. It is botany versus geology, spring destroyed by winter. 
•  Speaking of the widespread “horror of reptiles,” G. Wilson Knight claims we would prefer death by tiger to death by boa constrictor or octopus: “From such cold life we have risen, and the evolutionary thrust has a corresponding backward disgust. … And since we do not know what to make of tentacles mindlessly groping and distrust the clammy sea-moistures of the body, we fear especially our sex-organs with multiform inhibitions, seeing in them shameful serpentine and salty relations. And yet this fear is one with a sort of fascination."

 

Remembering everyday events typically takes less time than the actual duration of the retrieved episodes, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the temporal compression of events in episodic memory

Slices of the past: how events are temporally compressed in episodic memory. Arnaud D’Argembeau, Olivier Jeunehomme & David Stawarczyk. Memory, Mar 9 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2021.1896737

Rolf Degen's take: Similar to the "life review" near death, where the whole life flashes before the inner eye at a time-lapse pace, our everyday memories also contain a compressed version of events, with a "lossy compression" mode, like MP3

Abstract: Remembering everyday events typically takes less time than the actual duration of the retrieved episodes, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the temporal compression of events in episodic memory. Here, we review recent studies that have shed light on how this compression mechanism operates. The evidence suggests that the continuous flow of experience is not represented as such in episodic memory. Instead, the unfolding of events is recalled as a succession of moments or slices of past experience that includes temporal discontinuities—portions of past experience are omitted when remembering. Consequently, the rate of event compression is not constant but depends on the density of recalled segments of past experience.

KEYWORDS: Episodic memoryevent segmentationcompressiontimeautobiographical memory

Trying to make someone else happy leads to greater subjective well-being than trying to make oneself happy; trying to make others happy is more personally beneficial than when others try to make us happy

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself. Liudmila Titova & Kennon M. Sheldon. The Journal of Positive Psychology, Mar 8 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1897867

Abstract: Americans are guaranteed the right to ‘pursue happiness’ for themselves. But might they be better off if they pursued happiness for others? In five studies, we compared the two strategies, showing that, ironically, the second pursuit brings more personal happiness than the first. Retrospective study 1 (N = 123) and experimental studies 2 (N = 96) and 3 (N = 141) show that trying to make someone else happy leads to greater subjective well-being than trying to make oneself happy. In all three studies, relatedness need-satisfaction mediated the condition differences. Study 4 (N = 175) extended the findings by showing that trying to make others happy is more personally beneficial than when others try to make us happy. Study 5 (N = 198) found that feeding strangers’ parking meters produced the effect even though the participant did not interact with the targeted other.

KEYWORDS: Well-beinghappinessSDTrelatedness

Sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public, much more so than population-level results (57%), or 29% for the public’s bottom half

Kalmoe, N., & Johnson, M. (2021). Genes, Ideology, and Sophistication. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1-12, Mar 2021. doi:10.1017/XPS.2021.4

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1369339571469684738

Abstract: Twin studies function as natural experiments that reveal political ideology’s substantial genetic roots, but how does that comport with research showing a largely nonideological public? This study integrates two important literatures and tests whether political sophistication – itself heritable – provides an “enriched environment” for genetic predispositions to actualize in political attitudes. Estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public – much more so than population-level results (57%) – but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half. This heterogeneity is clearest in the Wilson–Patterson (W-P) index, with similar patterns for individual index items, an ideological constraint measure, and ideological identification. The results resolve tensions between two key fields by showing that political knowledge facilitates the expression of genetic predispositions in mass politics.

Discussion

We set out to test whether political knowledge provides an “enriched environment” for genetic expression in ideology, as research on mass belief systems suggests it might do. Our approach leveraged the natural experiment derived by comparing identical and fraternal twin pairs (same-sex, raised together), a method common in behavioral genetics. The results handsomely supported our expectations: High-knowledge twin pairs show extraordinarily high heritability across varieties of ideology, while the least knowledgeable half showed more meager genetic influence, with robust results across alternative specifications. We conclude that genetic predispositions toward ideological beliefs are highly contingent (though not wholly dependent) on political knowledge for their actualization, because knowledge provides ideal conditions for making those connections.

How well does this sample reflect the national population on traits linked to ideology and knowledge? Minnesota Twin Study respondents are older and more educated than the American public, on average, but they are similarly interested in politics and unconstrained in attitudes, like national samples (Arceneaux, Johnson, and Maes Reference Arceneaux, Johnson and Maes2012). Crucially, we found that sample knowledge levels are proportionate to general population surveys. That makes these tests a reasonable basis for inferring general population dynamics on ideological heritability and political sophistication.

More broadly, we recognize our tests as the first look and not the last word. In particular, the small Minnesota samples prevent more precise subsample tests, and public access is limited for data enabling further tests. We look forward to future studies replicating and extending our results.

Philip Converse (Reference Converse2000) always said that ideological analysis must account for huge variance in the public’s political knowledge – and that doing otherwise risked concealing more than it revealed. The tests here show the value of extending Converse’s exhortation to estimates of genetic influence in belief systems. Low-knowledge citizens may inherit genetic ideological predispositions like their high-knowledge peers, but those orientations are weak without the knowledge necessary to determine concrete attitudes and broader structures. Political knowledge is a key binding element for that political development. Merging two important and related but isolated fields in this way adds insight into the origins of ideology and the conditions for genetic influence in politics.

Assessed 3 a priori defined cohorts of sexual minorities (born 1956–1963, b. 1974–1981, & b. 1990–1997): Psychological distress & suicide behavior were not improved, were worse for the younger than the older cohorts

Meyer IH, Russell ST, Hammack PL, Frost DM, Wilson BDM (2021) Minority stress, distress, and suicide attempts in three cohorts of sexual minority adults: A U.S. probability sample. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0246827. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246827

Abstract: During the past 50 years, there have been marked improvement in the social and legal environment of sexual minorities in the United States. Minority stress theory predicts that health of sexual minorities is predicated on the social environment. As the social environment improves, exposure to stress would decline and health outcomes would improve. We assessed how stress, identity, connectedness with the LGBT community, and psychological distress and suicide behavior varied across three distinct cohorts of sexual minority people in the United States. Using a national probability sample recruited in 2016 and 2017, we assessed three a priori defined cohorts of sexual minorities we labeled the pride (born 1956–1963), visibility (born 1974–1981), and equality (born 1990–1997) cohorts. We found significant and impressive cohort differences in coming out milestones, with members of the younger cohort coming out much earlier than members of the two older cohorts. But we found no signs that the improved social environment attenuated their exposure to minority stressors—both distal stressors, such as violence and discrimination, and proximal stressors, such as internalized homophobia and expectations of rejection. Psychological distress and suicide behavior also were not improved, and indeed were worse for the younger than the older cohorts. These findings suggest that changes in the social environment had limited impact on stress processes and mental health for sexual minority people. They speak to the endurance of cultural ideologies such as homophobia and heterosexism and accompanying rejection of and violence toward sexual minorities.

Discussion

We started this project with the hypothesis that younger cohorts of sexual minority people would fare better than their older peers, who grew up in a more hostile social and legal environment than that of the younger cohorts. We found a strong cohort impact on the age of same-sex attraction milestones: Each successive cohort had earlier sexual identity milestone experiences of identifying as a sexual minority person, first sexual experience, and coming out. This likely indicates both greater comfort in coming out and shifting social norms around sexuality and youth. On one hand, these trends suggest that the younger cohorts reached developmental milestones related to their sexuality earlier than older cohorts, which is generally understood to be positive for adjustment. On the other hand, identifying and coming out as a sexual minority can confer risk, including greater exposure to minority stressors and victimization [52].

Indeed, contrary to our hypothesis, we found little evidence that social and legal improvements during the past 50 years in the status of sexual minority people have altered the experiences of sexual minority people in terms of exposure to minority stressors and resultant adverse mental health outcomes. Most tellingly, younger sexual minority people did not have less psychological distress or fewer suicide attempts than older sexual minority people.

Regarding minority stress, we found that members of the younger cohort did not experience less minority stress than members of older cohorts. This was consistent across both distal minority stressors, which measure direct exposure to external conditions, such as antigay violence, and proximal stressors, which measure how homophobia is internalized and learned. Members of the younger cohort did experience fewer of the victimization experiences we studied. But the measure of lifetime exposure to victimization presents a challenge. By their nature, lifetime measures would show higher prevalence among older people simply because they have more years in their lifetime and therefore, more opportunities for experiencing victimization. It this context, it is notable that the younger sexual minority people experienced more extreme victimization in their shorter lifespan. More than 1 in 3 (37%) experienced being hit, beaten, physically attacked, or sexually assaulted; almost half (46%) had someone threaten them with violence; and almost 3 in 4 (72%) were verbally insulted or abused. In terms of proximal minority stressors—internalized homophobia and felt stigma—we found members of the younger cohort recorded as high or higher levels of stress relative to their older counterparts.

Consistent with findings on the experience of minority stressors, we found high scores of psychological distress in the younger cohort. Although some research has suggested that this may be a general trend for younger adults to have higher levels of depressive symptoms, there appears to be a U-shaped relationship in the general population, with younger and older people exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms measured by the same scale we used [53]. We found a clear disadvantage to the younger cohort that seems unique to sexual minority people. Research has also shown that no significant bias in reporting patterns to this scale could explain the pattern of our results [54]. We also found that 30% of members of the younger cohort had attempted suicide. This is an alarming figure that was even higher than the high proportions of lifetime suicide attempts reported by the middle and older cohorts. By comparison, the proportion of young people aged 18–24 in the general population who have attempted suicide has been less than 4% [55].

Our findings are clearly inconsistent with the hypothesis. We started our hypothesis from a theoretical perspective that suggests that as social conditions improve, exposure to minority stressors and mental health problems would decrease. Our hypothesis was optimistic, but we were not blind to evidence to the contrary. As Russell and Fish [56] have shown, disparities by sexual identity have not been declining, but instead increasing. Most foretelling has been findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about exposure to stress among youth in high schools. Reports have consistently indicated that sexual minority youth experience significantly more stressful experiences than heterosexual youth and suffer significantly greater adverse health outcomes, including suicide ideation and attempts [57–60]. Our findings, thus, are consistent with studies that showed that minority stress and health disparities based on sexual orientation have not dissipated [56,61–64], despite the significant social and legal gains of the last decades.

Finally, contradicting writings about the declining significance of the LGBT community and sexual minority identity for the young cohort of sexual minority people, we found as high a sense of centrality of sexual minority identity and sense of connection with the LGBT community [35,36]. This is an important finding because it suggests that the LGBT community is still an important locale for connecting with LGBT identities, values that denounce homophobia, and role models for healthy sexual minority lives. As has been shown with older cohorts of sexual minorities, these are important resilience factors that allow sexual minority people to grow and overcome homophobia [2,65–69]. Connection with the LGBT community is also important for health information and the public health of LGBT communities, because resources serving sexual minorities have been organized under the LGBT banner for decades [70]. Studies have shown, for example, that gay and bisexual men who were connected to LGBT health resources were more likely than those who were not to use preexposure prophylaxis as HIV prevention [40]. However, this should not obscure the many challenges facing LGBT community organizers to overcome intracommunity rejection across race, social class, and other attributes [71].

There are many reasons why our hypothesis was not supported, and it is beyond our scope to explore these. Our approach was to examine cohort-wide patterns of change. In that, we may have missed the impact on specific segments of the populations. For example, we do not know whether White sexual minority people fared differently than ethnic minorities or how gender impacted the patterns we studied. This was, of course, purposeful because our theory was that the entire cohort would be affected by historical changes (even if not in equal ways). Also, it is plausible that social conditions, looked at as broadly as we did, do not reveal many other influences on stress exposure and mental health outcomes. For example, even if the social environment improved overall, it may have not improved in all microenvironments. Furthermore, it is possible that even as the social environment improves, the lived experience of sexual minority people continues to be challenging [72]. For example, a gay or lesbian teenager may be more accepted now than their older cohort peers had been when they were teenagers, but they were still a minority in their high school, deprived of opportunities for developing intimate relations. Also, a “developmental collision” may occur as sexual minority identity disclosure at younger ages coincides with normative developmental processes associated with adolescence [56]. Although the larger social context may have improved in such a way that emboldens younger generations to be out, the normative developmental context of adolescence remains one in which conformity is prized. Compulsions to conform to gender and sexual norms that privilege heterosexuality may continue to characterize adolescence in the United States [73]. Future analysis could determine whether some segments of the population benefited more than others from the improved social conditions and how improved social conditions impact the lived experience of sexual minority people.

Study limitations

Our study was limited in several important ways that are relevant to drawing conclusions about cohort differences. First, our purpose was to provide an overview of the status of stress and health in three cohorts of sexual minority people at one point using cross-sectional data. Obviously, this one-time picture limits our ability to discuss historical differences and trajectories, but we interpret the results to suggest that they reflect the impact of historical changes in the status of sexual minority people in society. Our interpretation is based on theory and our a priori categorization of the three cohorts. Because we aimed to capture the impact of historical context, we erred by ignoring potential differences among members of any age cohort that could have affected variability in cohorts. We assessed differences among three cohorts of sexual minority people but not differences by gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, neighborhood context, etc. This is consistent with our hypothesis about cohort differences. Regardless of variability in each cohort, we tested the hypothesis that the younger cohort, as a whole, fared better than older cohorts because members of the young cohort, across all strata, enjoyed better social conditions than members of older cohorts.

Second, like all measures, our measures of stress, coping, and health were limited in that each measure has its limitations and represents only a portion of complex constructs. For example, we assessed depressive symptoms and suicide attempts as proxies for the construct of mental health. Nonetheless, we present a variety of stress measures that include victimization and everyday discrimination, internalized minority stressors (felt stigma and internalized homophobia), and generalized distress, which is associated with mental health and suicide attempts—a clear and serious outcome and significant gauge of sexual minority health. The two measures that represent resilience assessed connection with the community and centrality of identity—two important elements of coping with minority stress.

Third, cohort (and the historical periods of interest) and age were confounded. That is, there was no way to avoid the fact that respondents who came of age in more distant historical periods are also older than respondents who grew up in the context of recent and improved social conditions. Therefore, it is plausible that some differences that we observed resulted from developmental or age-related changes rather than the impact of the different historical social environments. For example, internalized homophobia typically is expected to decline with age, as a person comes to terms with their same-sex attraction and comes out [32]. Our finding that internalized homophobia was higher in the younger than older cohort is consistent with that theory and could reflect the younger developmental stage of the younger cohort members. On the other hand, if social conditions have improved so greatly, we could have expected that internalized homophobia—which denotes rejection of oneself because of one’s same-sex attraction and identity—would cease to be an issue for younger people altogether. That is definitely not the case. Our findings show that some younger people still struggle with self-acceptance. So, although we cannot say with certainty that there is no age effect, we certainly can say that internalized homophobia has not ended in young sexual minority people.

Childhood gender nonconformity & stability of self-reported sexual orientation: Girls reporting being lesbian were more likely to report changes in their sexual orientation than gay adolescent boys

Xu, Y., Norton, S., & Rahman, Q. (2021). Childhood gender nonconformity and the stability of self-reported sexual orientation from adolescence to young adulthood in a birth cohort. Developmental Psychology, Mar 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001164

Rolf Degen's take: Sexual orientation tended to emerge from childhood gender nonconformity and remained largely stable from adolescence to early adulthood

Abstract: This study quantified changes in self-reported sexual orientation from adolescence to early adulthood, and whether childhood gender nonconformity (GNC) predicted sexual orientation changes. Youth (2,678 boys and 3,359 girls; 96.09% ethnically White) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) were included. Self-reported sexual orientation was measured using sexual attraction (5-point scale) at ages 15.5, 21, and 23. GNC was measured via Preschool Activities Inventory at ages 2.5, 3.5, and 4.75 years. The prevalence of boys and girls who reported being gay/lesbian increased from 15.5 to 21 years old whereas the proportion of bisexuals was relatively stable for both sexes. Among boys, heterosexuality and being gay were equally stable and relatively more stable compared to bisexuality. Among girls, reporting being lesbian and bisexual were equally unstable and relatively less stable than heterosexuality. Girls reporting being lesbian were more likely to report changes in their sexual orientation than gay adolescent boys. The stability of being lesbian and bisexual among girls, and bisexuality among boys, increased over time. Overall, few people changed their self-reported sexual orientation between ages 21 and 23. GNC at 2.5 years, and changes in GNC from 2.5 to 4.75 years, predicted being lesbian/gay at 15.5, 21, and 23 years and changes from being heterosexual to lesbian/gay from 15.5 to 21 years in each sex. In conclusion, self-reported sexual orientation from adolescence to young adulthood is relatively stable in males compared to females, and childhood GNC is a predictor of any, albeit small, sexual orientation changes.

Jiaolong Co. built a city by being a central contractor, which acquired planning rights by contract, & signed a series of tax sharing contracts with government, farmers, tenants, & businesses, reducing greatly the transaction costs

From 2016... The Contractual Nature of the City. Qian Lu. Man and the Economy Volume 3 Issue 1, 2016. DOI 10.1515/me-2016-0013

Abstract: Urbanization is a process in which separated and dispersed property rights become concentrated in a specific location. This process involves a large volume of contracts to redefine and rearrange various property rights, producing various and high transaction costs. Efficient urbanization implies the reduction of these costs. This paper studies how efficient urbanization reduces transaction costs in the real world, based on a series of contracts rather than the coercive power. Specifically, this paper shows that Jiaolong Co. built a city by being a central contractor, which acquired planning rights by contract, and signed a series of tax sharing contracts with government, farmers, tenants, and business enterprises. These contractual arrangements greatly reduced the transaction costs and promoted the development.

Keywords:urbanization, contractual structure, transaction costs

Excerpts:

Jiaolong is a city built and operated by a business corporation. This is rare in China because in most cases the local city government is in charge of urbanization. In almost all cities, government makes land and city planning, takes farmers’ land, builds city infrastructure, sells land to housing developers and manufacturers, operates police stations, hospitals, schools and universities. By holding the monopoly power of coercion, the government is able to pool together resources by fiat and hold transaction costs low.

The urbanization of Jiaolong is not based on coercive power, but by a series of contracts with Shuangliu government, firms, farmers, residents and other relevant parties. As the central contractor, Jiaolong Co. is able to simplify the contractual web and reduce coordination cost. The essential contracts are the investment contract with the county government to transfer planning rights, and a series of contracts with the government and firms to share tax. Tax sharing contracts define the income rights for Jiaolong so that Jiaolong could share the surplus of urban development and infrastructure construction. Sharing contracts also motivate Shuangliu government to provide public services including protection of property rights. A series of contracts transfer planning rights, land use rights, and income rights to Jiaolong Co., and thereby endogenize the externality of infrastructure building and urban development. From the perspective of institutional change, Jiaolong offers a case of contract-based rather than coercion-based urbanization, the latter being the typical approach in China.

Association between subjective inequality & less well-being, more depression, anxiety, stress, status anxiety, and less trust: Happened only in the US & in Canada, but not in England, Sweden, Japan, & South Africa

The Construct of Subjective Economic Inequality. Anita Schmalor, Steven J. Heine. Social Psychological and Personality Science, March 9, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550621996867

Abstract: Economic inequality has been associated with a host of social ills, but most research has focused on objective measures of inequality. We argue that economic inequality also has a subjective component, and understanding the effects of economic inequality will be deepened by considering the ways that people perceive inequality. In an American sample (N = 1,014), we find that some of the key variables that past research has found to correlate with objective inequality also correlate with a subjective measure of inequality. Across six countries (N = 683), we find that the relationship between subjective inequality and different psychological variables varies by country. Subjective inequality shows only modest correlations with objective inequality and varies by sociodemographic background.

Keywords: economic inequality, subjective inequality, culture, well-being

General Discussion

Despite the growing interest in the psychological effects of economic inequality, little is known about whether the subjective experience of inequality is associated with the same social and health problems as objective inequality. In this article, we argued that economic inequality consists of two constructs: objective and subjective inequality. Unlike objective inequality, subjective inequality exists at the individual level, which means that it is a construct that is well suited for investigations of its underlying psychology.

We tested whether subjective inequality predicts some of the same psychological outcomes as have been found with objective inequality. To do so, we created and validated the SIS that captures people’s global experience of economic inequality and their general unfairness beliefs about inequality. In an American sample, people who perceived more inequality reported less well-being, more depression, anxiety, stress, status anxiety, and less trust, replicating much past research that has used objective inequality (e.g., Delhey & Dragolov, 2014; Fan et al., 2011; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). We further tested whether we could replicate the findings of status anxiety and well-being across six countries. While subjective inequality was associated with more status anxiety in all countries, the relationship with well-being was more mixed. The negative association between subjective inequality and well-being only occurred in the United States and in Canada, but not in England, Sweden, Japan, and South Africa. These results suggest that culture may influence the psychological response to subjective inequality. Some research on the relationship between objective inequality and well-being has also found mixed results (e.g., Berg & Veenhoven, 2010). These inconsistent results could potentially be explained by the influence of cultural factors. Subjective inequality provides a means through which the moderating force of culture on the effects of inequality can be better understood.

Inequality is often conflated with unfairness beliefs (Starmans et al., 2017), and in both studies, subjective inequality was positively associated with the judgment of inequality as being generally unfair (rs = .58, .47, respectively). However, the relationship between subjective inequality and the various psychological variables held after controlling for the unfairness beliefs about inequality. This suggests that subjective inequality may have unique psychological effects over and above unfairness beliefs. However, our investigations were limited to predicting well-being and status anxiety, and it remains an open question whether unfairness beliefs matter for the relationship between subjective inequality and other psychological constructs.

Across both the United States and international sample, we found small correlations between subjective inequality and the Gini. These correlations suggest that subjective inequality could, at least in part, be influenced by the actual distribution of resources. However, they also suggest that these perceptions are largely independent of the objective level of inequality in one’s state or country. This then raises the question of where do perceptions of inequality come from?

A beginning of an answer to this question comes from other correlates of subjective inequality. People who perceived more inequality tended to be of lower income and SES and were more liberal and less religious. This raises the question of whether these individual differences lead people to construe the world they live in differently or whether they literally live in different worlds. For example, people of lower income may live in poorer neighborhoods, have longer commutes, and have different jobs. However, it could also be that people of lower SES are motivated to perceive more inequality than their higher SES counterparts. There is still much that we do not know about what underlies subjective inequality, and the topic is ripe for future research.

We have focused on the broadest level of economic inequality (encompassing income and wealth inequality and inequality of opportunity), and we assessed subjective inequality in people’s state and country of residence. Future research may benefit from distinguishing between these different facets of economic inequality to assess whether they independently relate to different outcomes. Furthermore, although we replicate the main effects at both the state and country level (for some countries), it would be useful to explore whether the geographic area that subjective inequality captures affects the relationship with different psychological constructs.

While we targeted theoretically fundamental correlates of objective inequality, future research should widen the scope to investigate other variables that have been associated with objective inequality such as health outcomes, obesity, and violent behavior (e.g., Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). In addition, it would be useful to test which relationships hold across different cultures and which are specific to certain cultures. A key limitation of our findings is that they do not allow us to confidently speak about causality. While it is implausible that higher levels of depression, for example, lead to an increase in the Gini coefficient, it is certainly possible that higher levels of self-reported depression cause people to perceive more inequality because their outlook on the world is bleaker. Here is an example where objective and subjective components need to be considered in tandem in order to draw firmer conclusions.

Our studies are limited in their reliance on online samples which have various idiosyncratic characteristics (e.g., Arditte et al., 2016), and we cannot confidently generalize to other kinds of samples. It will be informative to see how subjective inequality relates to various psychological variables in other kinds of populations. While our results point to the moderating effects of culture, these data cannot speak to what cultural factors are driving these effects. Cultural differences in upward and downward comparisons, what counts as status, and the possibility of social mobility are a few examples of cultural variables that may moderate the effects of subjective inequality. The modest correlations between subjective inequality and the Gini indicate that our measure is tapping into something largely distinct from objective inequality; it is possible that other conceptualizations of subjective inequality may relate differently to objective inequality. With these limitations in mind, this article has attempted to begin a new line of research that focuses on the subjective component of economic inequality.

Deceptive up-pricing of low-price wine significantly influenced ratings for pleasantness, whereas deceptive down-pricing of high-price wine had no effect on pleasantness ratings

Price information influences the subjective experience of wine: A framed field experiment. Christoph Patrick et al. Food Quality and Preference, March 9 2021, 104223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2021.104223

Highlights

• First study manipulating wine prices using a framed field experiment.

• Blind intensity ratings differ for 3 wines of different price and expert rating.

• Blind pleasantness ratings do not differ for the same three wines.

• Pleasantness of the budget wine increased when presented with a fake higher price.

Abstract: Past experimental laboratory and correlational data from observational research has shown that knowledge of the price of wine influences the consumer’s subjective experience. However, there is limited prior research that has explicitly manipulated price information in a realistic wine tasting setting. A total of 140 participants tasted three different low-, mid- and high-priced wines with open, deceptive, or no price information and rated them for taste intensity and pleasantness. In our community sample, intensity of taste ratings for open, deceptive and blind price information reflected retail prices, thus more expensive wines were rated as more intense in taste. However, while pleasantness ratings did not differ for open and no price information, deceptive up-pricing of low-price wine significantly influenced ratings for pleasantness, whereas deceptive down-pricing of high-price wine had no effect on pleasantness ratings. Thus, pricing information differentially influences the consumer’s subjective experience of wine, with no effects on intensity of taste ratings and no effects on pleasantness ratings with correct or no price information, but increased pleasantness of low-price wine when provided with a deceptive higher price. Thus, in wine may lay the truth, but its subjective experience may also lie in the price.

Keywords: Wine perceptionprice informationconsumer experienceframed field experiment

Genetic factors had a regionally variable influence on brain organization, such that the heritability of network topography was greatest in prefrontal, precuneus, and posterior parietal cortex

Heritability of individualized cortical network topography. Kevin M. Anderson et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2, 2021 118 (9) e2016271118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016271118

Significance: The widespread use of population-average cortical parcellations has provided important insights into broad properties of human brain organization. However, the size, location, and spatial arrangement of regions comprising functional brain networks can vary substantially across individuals. Here, we demonstrate considerable heritability in both the size and spatial organization of individual-specific network topography across cortex. Genetic factors had a regionally variable influence on brain organization, such that heritability in network size, but not topography, was greater in unimodal relative to heteromodal cortices. These data suggest individual-specific network parcellations may provide an avenue to understand the genetic basis of variation in human cognition and behavior.

Abstract: Human cortex is patterned by a complex and interdigitated web of large-scale functional networks. Recent methodological breakthroughs reveal variation in the size, shape, and spatial topography of cortical networks across individuals. While spatial network organization emerges across development, is stable over time, and is predictive of behavior, it is not yet clear to what extent genetic factors underlie interindividual differences in network topography. Here, leveraging a nonlinear multidimensional estimation of heritability, we provide evidence that individual variability in the size and topographic organization of cortical networks are under genetic control. Using twin and family data from the Human Connectome Project (n = 1,023), we find increased variability and reduced heritability in the size of heteromodal association networks (h2: M = 0.34, SD = 0.070), relative to unimodal sensory/motor cortex (h2: M = 0.40, SD = 0.097). We then demonstrate that the spatial layout of cortical networks is influenced by genetics, using our multidimensional estimation of heritability (h2-multi; M = 0.14, SD = 0.015). However, topographic heritability did not differ between heteromodal and unimodal networks. Genetic factors had a regionally variable influence on brain organization, such that the heritability of network topography was greatest in prefrontal, precuneus, and posterior parietal cortex. Taken together, these data are consistent with relaxed genetic control of association cortices relative to primary sensory/motor regions and have implications for understanding population-level variability in brain functioning, guiding both individualized prediction and the interpretation of analyses that integrate genetics and neuroimaging.

Keywords: heritabilityindividualized parcellationresting-statefunction brain networksfunctional connectome

OkCupid data: Women are no longer waiting for someone to message them

One Year Later: How Covid-19 Changed Dating. OkCupid, Feb 26 2021. https://theblog.okcupid.com/one-year-later-how-covid-19-changed-dating-9c7f38cc98c0

OkCupid data shows how singles have adapted to dating during the pandemic

My two takes:

-  Women are no longer waiting for someone to message them

Perhaps the biggest trend in online dating that began during the pandemic is young women becoming more active and engaged on their dating apps. Recently, women under 30 on OkCupid sent 28.5% more first messages in January 2021 than they did the same time last year. Without the rush to meet up for a date in-person, women have felt more in control of their dating lives during the pandemic, and therefore have embraced being the one to reach out and set up virtual dates.

-  “Double-masking, social distancing and vaccinated” is the new “tall, dark, and handsome”

People in the United States who answer “Yes” to our matching question “Will you get the Covid-19 vaccine?” are receiving 20% more Likes and 12% more Matches. (Globally, those who said “Yes” are receiving 13% more Likes and 2.3% more Matches.) And daters are no longer only turning to friends and family for dating advice. They’re also listening to Dr. Fauci. About 20% of Gen Z and Millennial daters are already starting to wear two masks, like Fauci recommended, and those who are double-masking are having more conversations on OkCupid than those who aren’t. There was also a 185% increase in mentions of the word “mask” on OkCupid profiles over the past year, showing that taking precautions during the pandemic is a top priority for singles around the world.

OkCupid daters have been taking the pandemic very seriously. About 4 in 10 people would cancel a date with someone who didn’t want to take the COVID-19 vaccine and 215,000 people would cancel a date with someone who refused to social distance. So if you are not willing to put on a mask during a global pandemic, you’re likely not getting a message back.

A large proportion of voters live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment: Democrats & Republicans living in the same city are segregated by party

The measurement of partisan sorting for 180 million voters. Jacob R. Brown & Ryan D. Enos. Nature Human Behaviour, March 8 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01066-z

Abstract: Segregation across social groups is an enduring feature of nearly all human societies and is associated with numerous social maladies. In many countries, reports of growing geographic political polarization raise concerns about the stability of democratic governance. Here, using advances in spatial data computation, we measure individual partisan segregation by calculating the local residential segregation of every registered voter in the United States, creating a spatially weighted measure for more than 180 million individuals. With these data, we present evidence of extensive partisan segregation in the country. A large proportion of voters live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment. Such high levels of partisan isolation can be found across a range of places and densities and are distinct from racial and ethnic segregation. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans living in the same city, or even the same neighbourhood, are segregated by party.

For ordinary folk, especially the more educated population in the US, free will is a dynamic construct centred on the ability to choose following one’s goals & desires, whilst being uncoerced & reasonably free from constraints

Lam, Alison. 2021. “Folk Conceptions of Free Will: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis of Psychological Research.” Thesis Commons. March 4. doi:10.31237/osf.io/hezn6

Abstract: The existence of free will has been a subject of fierce academic debate for millennia, still the meaning of the term “free will” remains nebulous. In the past two decades, psychologists have made considerable progress in defining folk concepts of free will. However, this growing body of literature has yet to be reviewed systematically. This systematic review aimed to narratively synthesise primary psychological evidence on folk conceptions of free will, encompassing folk concepts, beliefs, intuitions, and attitudes about free will, to provide a definition grounded in laypeople’s perspective to guide future research. Database searches were conducted following a pre-registered search strategy. A total of 1,368 records were identified through database searching, and 16 additional records were identified through reference mining, author tracing, and contacting authors for unpublished manuscripts. After duplicate removal, ASReview, an open-source machine learning programme, was used to facilitate and optimise abstract screening. Finally, 57 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, and 18 articles were eligible for inclusion, comprised of 36 studies and 10,176 participants from regions including the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Turkey, and Germany. The results showed that for ordinary folk, especially the more educated population from the United States, free will is a dynamic construct centred on the ability to choose following one’s goals and desires, whilst being uncoerced and reasonably free from constraints. Results suggesting metaphysical considerations regarding consciousness, dualism, and determinism were inconclusive. The findings provided preliminary support for a psychological model of folk conception of free will. All data and coding are openly shared.

Brain Development and Physical Aggression: Regardless of gender, children’s physical aggressiveness peaks at 2-4 years of age but then starts diverging, as girls learn more quickly than boys to suppress such behaviors

Brain Development and Physical Aggression: How a Small Gender Difference Grows into a Violence Problem. Lise Eliot. Current Anthropology, Volume 62, Number S23, February 2021. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/711705

Abstract: Of the various behavioral differences between males and females, physical aggression is one of the largest. Regardless of gender, children’s physical aggressiveness peaks between two and four years of age but then starts diverging, as girls learn more quickly than boys to suppress such overt behaviors. By puberty there is a sizable gender difference in physical aggression and violence. Studies in rodents suggest that sex differences in aggression and rough-and-tumble play are mediated by the amygdala, whose volume in males is enhanced by prenatal testosterone. However, efforts to extend this model to humans have shown limited success. This paper takes a critical look at current assumptions about gender differences in aggression and their neural basis. Aggression and empathy are competing impulses that engage much of the same cortico-limbic circuitry and are highly sensitive to social factors and early adversity. Learning, or neuroplasticity, is both a primary cause and key intervention for minimizing male aggression and violence.

Rerouting the Neurodevelopment of Male Violence

This proposed trajectory for the incubation of violence accords with our understanding of brain development and neuroplasticity. Given the potency of early experience, it is likely that an initial biologic tilt, compounded by social factors and environmental stressors, leads to a divergence in neural circuitry and increased risk for violence among the minority of highly aggressive boys. Research on the neurobiology of aggression and violence has uncovered various neural correlates but no clear-cut sex difference in the limbic circuitry that underlies such behaviors. Again, the hub of this circuit is the amygdala, which integrates a wide range of sensory and contextual signals to detect emotion and drive motivated behavior through both autonomic and cortical outputs. The amygdala is about 10% larger in adult men compared to women, but this difference is proportional to overall brain volume and disappears when analyses correct for individual differences in brain or body size (Marwha, Halari, and Eliot 2017). Similarly, boys’ amygdala volume is about 7% larger than girls’ in infancy, but this is proportional to their larger head and brain size at birth. Another developmental difference is that the amygdala reaches its peak volume about 1.5 years later in boys compared to girls at the end of the prepubertal period (Uematsu et al. 2012), which also parallels the sex difference in bodily growth that peaks one to two years earlier in girls.

In principle, males’ larger absolute amygdala volume could contribute to the gender difference in physical aggression and violence. However, studies of adult humans have actually detected an inverse correlation between aggression and amygdala volume (Rosell and Siever 2015). That is, the amygdala is reliably reduced in volume in association with aggression in both sexes—contrary to the findings in rats. The amygdala, in turn, is controlled by the orbital prefrontal cortex (PFC), a largely inhibitory connection that appears weaker in individuals who tend toward high levels of anger expression. Like most of the frontal lobe, the orbital PFC matures quite slowly, so only gradually gains potency at suppressing anger and aggression as children grow.

Early research suggested that women have a proportionately larger orbitofrontal cortex than men (Gur et al. 2002), which was believed to underlie their stronger emotional regulation. However, more recent research using very large samples has failed to confirm this; if anything, the medial orbitofrontal cortex is slightly larger in men, and there is no sex difference in volume of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (Potvin, Dieumegarde, and Duchesne 2017, 2018; Ritchie et al. 2018). Furthermore, studies of infants from zero to two years of age have failed to detect sex differences at the level of brain structure or connectivity in the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and their associated circuits, suggesting that any such male-female brain differences emerge later in development, coincident with the period of gender socialization and segregation across childhood and adolescence (Geng et al. 2017; Gilmore, Knickmeyer, and Gao 2018).

Other research has focused on neurochemical differences among highly aggressive individuals, which include reduced serotonin levels and greater prevalence of the short-allele form of the serotonin uptake transporter (the 5-HT transporter-linked polymorphic region, or 5-HTTLPR), which results in less efficient serotonin reuptake from the synapse (Rosell and Siever 2015). Importantly, research on both the 5-HTTLPR and the serotonin catabolic enzyme, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), has identified relationships between low-activity alleles and aggressive or antisocial behavior, but only through interaction with adverse childhood experience (maltreatment). In the case of MAOA, this interaction between short allele (lower serotonin degradation) and maltreatment predicted antisocial behavior in males but trended the opposite way in females, suggesting an early-seeded sex difference in the impact of adversity on the development of antisocial behavior (Byrd and Manuck 2014).

These are just some of the neuroanatomical and neurochemical pathways that participate in violent behavior and are being shaped during the developmental period that normally sees a suppression in overt aggression. Given the high rate of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) among incarcerated juveniles (Baglivio et al. 2014) and the many links between such adversity and neurobiological dysfunction, it is clear that violence can be one result of neuroplasticity gone awry—a failure to develop the inhibition that increasingly holds aggression in check as children grow. The impact of ACEs on risk-taking, mental health, and violence has become a particular focus of public health efforts, with the goal of identifying and evaluating strategies to counteract their threat to healthy limbic system development (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US 2016).

It is clear that such interventions must begin very early, if not a full generation in advance. Antisocial violence is transmitted intergenerationally, and by the time an abused child becomes a parent it is often too late for their own children to escape its shadow. Nonetheless, some interventions are beginning to show promise. Evaluating these is complex, especially when the outcome of interest, violent aggression, is relatively rare and not apparent until decades later. But a few strategies have proven beneficial for reducing child abuse and improving long-term behavior outcomes, mostly involving parent support and education about child development and positive discipline (Tremblay, Vitaro, and Côté 2018).

One program out of Dublin that has been heavily researched is called Preparing for Life. It works with parents from pregnancy through the first four to five years of life using a combination of home visiting, infant massage, and positive parenting education. A large, randomized trial of Preparing for Life (Côté et al. 2018) found benefits of treatment to children’s cognitive development and externalizing behaviors, a common precursor to aggression and violence. Another intervention conducted in the United States, the Nurse-Family Partnership, has been found to reduce child abuse (Chen and Chan 2016) and improve cognitive outcomes, especially for boys (Heckman et al. 2017). Additionally, high-quality preschool has been found to lower the incidence of crime among both boys and girls (García, Heckman, and Ziff 2019). Such interventions cannot end at preschool but must continue when children enroll in elementary and high school. In Canada, a two-year project was developed for seven- to nine-year-olds that included home-based parent training and school-based pairings of at-risk boys with a handful of carefully chosen, prosocial peers. Long-term benefits of this program included a reduction in delinquency and criminal records by age 24, although the intervention did not impact violent crime rates (Tremblay, Vitaro, and Côté 2018).

I conclude with another promising program: a low-cost, holistic intervention developed in Canada and known as Roots of Empathy. At the heart of this program is a human infant, recruited with his or her parent to join an elementary school classroom once per month and serve as the emotional “teacher.” Students cluster around a large blanket and watch as the infant’s abilities and personality unfold month by month. The curriculum is centered on attachment and the importance of a caring, trusted nurturer for every human to grow and thrive physically and emotionally. Most importantly, the children in the class—boys and girls alike—develop a genuine bond and protective affection for their infant teacher. Rigorous assessments of Roots of Empathy have found several benefits in reducing bullying and aggression and increasing empathy and prosocial behaviors within classrooms. Importantly, the benefits are equally great for boys as girls, contrary to teachers’ initial expectations (Connolly et al. 2018).