Genome-Wide Linkage and Association Study of Childhood Gender Nonconformity in Males

Genome-Wide Linkage and Association Study of Childhood Gender Nonconformity in Males. Alan R. Sanders, Gary W. Beecham, Shengru Guo, Khytam Dawood, Gerulf Rieger, Ritesha S. Krishnappa, Alana B. Kolundzija, J. Michael Bailey & Eden R. Martin. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Sep 13 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-021-02146-x

Abstract: Male sexual orientation is influenced by environmental and complex genetic factors. Childhood gender nonconformity (CGN) is one of the strongest correlates of homosexuality with substantial familiality. We studied brothers in families with two or more homosexual brothers (409 concordant sibling pairs in 384 families, as well as their heterosexual brothers), who self-recalled their CGN. To map loci for CGN, we conducted a genome-wide linkage scan (GWLS) using SNP genotypes. The strongest linkage peaks, each with significant or suggestive two-point LOD scores and multipoint LOD score support, were on chromosomes 5q31 (maximum two-point LOD = 4.45), 6q12 (maximum two-point LOD = 3.64), 7q33 (maximum two-point LOD = 3.09), and 8q24 (maximum two-point LOD = 3.67), with the latter not overlapping with previously reported strongest linkage region for male sexual orientation on pericentromeric chromosome 8. Family-based association analyses were used to identify associated variants in the linkage regions, with a cluster of SNPs (minimum association p = 1.3 × 10–8) found at the 5q31 linkage peak. Genome-wide, clusters of multiple SNPs in the 10–6 to 10–8 p-value range were found at chromosomes 5p13, 5q31, 7q32, 8p22, and 10q23, highlighting glutamate-related genes. This is the first reported GWLS and genome-wide association study on CGN. Further increasing genetic knowledge about CGN and its relationships to male sexual orientation should help advance our understanding of the biology of these associated traits.

Discussion

In this first GWLS on CGN in males, we found genome-wide significant linkage with multipoint support for several linkage regions, most notably at chromosomes 5q31 and 8q24 (Fig. 2, Supplementary Table 1). The strongest multipoint linkage peaks for CGN (Fig. 2) did not align with the strongest such signals from earlier GWLS on male sexual orientation (Sanders et al., 2015). This was not unexpected since while CGN and sexual orientation are associated phenotypes, they are far from being the same and both are traits with complex genetics, and thus, one would not necessarily expect largely overlapping linkage or association patterns. We note that one of the top multipoint peaks from the GWLS (chromosome 5q31, Supplementary Fig. 2) also contains a cluster of 10 associated (10–6 < p < 10–8 p value) SNPs from the GWAS, 2 of which are genome-wide significant associations, thus with both linkage and association positional evidence. However, none of the genes in the immediate region of this cluster have obvious putative connections to CGN.

This initial GWAS report on CGN had some interesting findings as well. Compared to the previous GWAS on male sexual orientation on the same dataset (Sanders et al., 2017), the current CGN GWAS had substantially more regions with SNPs associated at a level of 10–6 < p < 10–8, including two loci (5q31, 10q23) breaching genome-wide significance (Fig. 3, Supplementary Table 2). Possible explanations include a potentially stronger genetic contribution for CGN (versus sexual orientation) and enhanced statistical power for a quantitative measure with CGN (versus a categorical approach for sexual orientation). A recent large association meta-analysis of same-sex sexual behavior found five genome-wide significant loci (Ganna et al., 2019); however, none of those loci overlap with the top GWLS or GWAS findings for CGN in the current study.

We found two loci (5q31, 10q23) with SNPs reaching genome-wide significance (p < 5 × 10–8) for association with CGN and detected several additional regions (Fig. 3, Supplementary Table 2) with promising findings (10–6 < p < 10–8 association p-values). These regions contain a number of genes of putative relevance to the trait, some of which we highlight next. At the 5p13 SNP cluster, the nearest gene is SLC1A3, a brain expressed glutamate transporter which has been implicated in some behavioral phenotypes, e.g., attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood disorders, cortico-limbic connectivity during affective regulation (Huang et al., 2019; Medina et al., 2016; Poletti et al., 2018; van Amen-Hellebrekers et al., 2016). The 10q23 SNP cluster overlaps with GRID1, which encodes a glutamate receptor channel subunit, and has also been implicated in various behavioral phenotypes (e.g., mood disorders; Fallin et al., 2005; Zhang et al., 2018) and when deleted in the mouse leads to changes in emotional and social behaviors (Yadav et al., 2012). The SNPs in the 7q32 cluster fall within (3’UTR, synonymous coding) and near LRRC4, which has been implicated in autism spectrum disorders (Du et al., 2020; Um et al., 2018). When deleted (Lrrc4−/−) in the mouse, N-Methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR, an ionotropic glutamate receptor)-dependent synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus was decreased, and these mice displayed mild social interaction deficits, increased self-grooming, and modest anxiety-like behaviors, which were reversed by pharmacological NMDAR activation (Um et al., 2018). Thus, three of the top associated SNP clusters involve glutamate-related genes which have separate evidence of relevance to other behavioral traits, some of which vary in prevalence by gender (e.g., mood disorder; (Sanders et al., 2010) and references therein) in the general population.

Gene mapping challenges include those inherent to GWLS and GWAS of traits manifesting complex genetics such as CGN, as well as limitations in statistical power given the sample size. We discuss power limitations further in the supplementary text but note here that for traits manifesting complex genetics (such as CGN), contributory genetic variants generally have individually small effects, leading to challenges in generating replicable findings. Other limitations include the current study being on a predominantly European ancestry sample and only on males, using retrospective recall of CGN rather than prospective ratings, and not including a replication sample. Replication and extension efforts are somewhat hampered in that relevant survey questions are often not included in large biobank samples such as for CGN; however, there are more sexuality data-points becoming available in some instances (e.g., sexual orientation and gender identity questions in allofus.nih.gov). Additional and larger studies in the future should provide further insight into genetic contributions to CGN and also to its relationship with sexual orientation.

95 replications conducted in the context of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology... I found little evidence for an adjustment of citation patterns in response to the publication of these independent replication attempts

The Effect of Replications on Citation Patterns: Evidence From a Large-Scale Reproducibility Project. Felix Schafmeister. Psychological Science, September 17, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211005767

Abstract: Replication of existing research is often referred to as one of the cornerstones of modern science. In this study, I tested whether the publication of independent replication attempts affects the citation patterns of the original studies. Investigating 95 replications conducted in the context of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, I found little evidence for an adjustment of citation patterns in response to the publication of these independent replication attempts. This finding was robust to the choice of replication criterion, various model specifications, and the composition of the contrast group. I further present some suggestive evidence that shifts in the underlying composition of supporting and disputing citations have likely been small. I conclude with a review of the evidence in favor of the remaining explanations and discuss the potential consequences of these findings for the workings of the scientific process.

Keywords: scientific communication, statistical analysis, open data, preregistered

Discussion

The failure of my analyses to reject the null hypothesis that there was no effect of RP:P replications on yearly citation counts ran counter to my hypothesis that citation patterns should change as researchers adjust their beliefs about the validity of an existing research result. In the following, I outline a number of contending explanations for this null result and discuss the extent to which they are in line with the data.

First, a necessary condition for belief updating in response to replication attempts is researchers’ awareness of the replication results. Previous findings of Simkin and Roychowdhury (2005) suggest that a large number of citations are merely copied from existing reference lists and not actually read by the citing authors, making it likely that at least some researchers remain unaware of existing replications for the studies they cite.

Such inattention is likely exacerbated by the general difficulty of acquiring information about replication results. Unpublished replications are often difficult to find, but even if replication results are published, finding and evaluating them requires a substantial time investment from citing researchers. This concern carries particular weight in my setting because the RP:P was designed with the intention to draw conclusions about replicability on an aggregate level rather than to scrutinize individual research results. As a consequence, the outcomes of individual replication attempts were neither discussed in detail by the Open Science Collaboration (2015), nor were citations to the original studies included in their article, requiring researchers interested in the results of individual replication attempts to delve into the supplemental materials.

This factor substantially qualifies the external validity of my findings because other replication studies might discuss individual replication outcomes in more detail and are more easily picked up by search engines if they are similar in title and include direct references to the original study. This increased visibility has the potential to alter the citation impact of a replication attempt compared with the effects that I uncovered in the context of the RP:P; indeed, the case studies by Hardwicke et al. (2021) suggest that somewhat more marked effects might arise in other settings.

Second, even among researchers aware of the replication attempts, belief updating might have been limited. Although McDiarmid et al. (2021) show that researchers updated their beliefs about the strength of a research finding in reaction to replications conducted in a number of large-scale replication projects (not including the RP:P), it is unclear to what extent these findings can be extrapolated to my setting. In particular, the authors note the possibility that experimenter demand and observer effects could have resulted in inflated estimates of researchers’ true belief updating. Moreover, some authors of original studies that were replicated in the RP:P voiced concerns regarding the fidelity of the replication attempts (e.g., Bressan, 2019; Gilbert et al., 2016; and replies to the RP:P published on OSF by the original authors). Although Ebersole et al. (2020) show that the results of the RP:P replications were not sensitive to using peer-reviewed protocols, if citing researchers were nonetheless convinced that the replication attempts were not true to the original study, this might have weakened belief updating.

Other potential explanations could lie in articles gaining additional citations by being cited in the context of replications rather than for their content or in the citation count not taking into account citation content. Regarding the first argument, if this factor were to play a large role, one would expect to find an increase in citation rates for successful and inconclusive replications. In particular, because inconclusive replications were largely considered failures by the main criterion, these replications were likely among the most controversial and thus should have received the largest number of citations through this channel, a hypothesis that is not borne out by the present results.

Further, the second concern suggests that even if one cannot detect changes in total citation counts, the composition of supporting and disputing citations might have shifted. The analyses above are unable to directly shed light on the importance of this explanation because I am missing a reliable measure of citation content. Recently, a large-scale source of citation content classifications has become available through the website scite.ai, which uses deep learning to determine whether a citation supports, disputes, or merely mentions an existing research result. However, at the time of writing, the service is still in its beta stage and has only limited coverage. Hence, rather than subjecting these noisy measures to a formal statistical analysis, I present some suggestive evidence on the role of this channel.

According to the scite.ai classifications, only a small minority of citations are disputing or supporting existing findings. In the 10 years between 2010 and 2019, the average article in the RP:P sample has been subject to merely 0.83 disputing and 4.39 supporting citations, and 46% of the sample was never disputed. Moreover, investigating the timing of citations, I found little evidence that the frequency of disputing citations has been affected by the replication results. When the main replication criterion was used, studies that were replicated successfully received on average 0.4 disputing citations between 2015 and 2019, compared with 0.66 in the 5 years prior to replication, and studies that were replicated unsuccessfully received on average 0.38 disputing citations between 2015 and 2019, compared with 0.32 in the 5 years prior to replication. These numbers suggest that even if the RP:P replications shifted citation content, the size of these effects would likely be small.

In conclusion, my analyses fail to support the hypothesis that citation patterns adjust in response to the release of replication results. Among the potential reasons underlying these findings, a lack of attention to and the limited communication of replication results stand out as particularly important. These factors therefore have the potential to slow down the self-corrective ability of the scientific process and addressing them could represent an important step in maximizing the impact of recent advances to improve the quality and reliability of academic research. I am hopeful that technological advances such as scite.ai, with their potential to greatly improve the accessibility of the body of knowledge, can help to alleviate these issues in the future.

Rolf Degen summarizing... Something in human nature makes it difficult for us to share unreservedly in the happiness of other people

On prospect theory, making choices for others, and the affective psychology of risk. Qingzhou Sun, Evan Polman, Huanren Zhang. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 96, September 2021, 104177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104177

Abstract: Previous research has generally shown that people’s decisions conform to the four-fold pattern of prospect theory; that is, people over-weight prospects with small probabilities and under-weight prospects with large probabilities. In terms of making risky decisions, the four-fold pattern unfolds accordingly: people make (1) risk-seeking choices among options that involve small-probable gains or large-probable losses; and (2) risk-averse choices among options that involve small-probable losses or large-probable gains. In three experiments and a summary quantitative model, we found that for interpersonal choices—decisions people make for others—the four-fold pattern attenuates and reverses in shape. We attributed this transformation to a unique signature in interpersonal decision makers’ emotions, which varied in mean, mode, and distribution from personal decision makers’. In all, our research offers new insights on prospect theory, interpersonal decision making, and the affective psychology of risk.

Keywords: Prospect theoryFour-fold patternSelf-other decision makingAffective psychology of riskDistributional effects

Genomic data from 1,785 ancient humans who lived in the last 45,000 y: Low rates of first cousin or closer unions & a marked decay in background parental relatedness co-occurring with or shortly after sedentary agriculture

Parental relatedness through time revealed by runs of homozygosity in ancient DNA. Harald Ringbauer, John Novembre & Matthias Steinrücken. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 5425. Sep 14 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25289-w

Abstract: Parental relatedness of present-day humans varies substantially across the globe, but little is known about the past. Here we analyze ancient DNA, leveraging that parental relatedness leaves genomic traces in the form of runs of homozygosity. We present an approach to identify such runs in low-coverage ancient DNA data aided by haplotype information from a modern phased reference panel. Simulation and experiments show that this method robustly detects runs of homozygosity longer than 4 centimorgan for ancient individuals with at least 0.3 × coverage. Analyzing genomic data from 1,785 ancient humans who lived in the last 45,000 years, we detect low rates of first cousin or closer unions across most ancient populations. Moreover, we find a marked decay in background parental relatedness co-occurring with or shortly after the advent of sedentary agriculture. We observe this signal, likely linked to increasing local population sizes, across several geographic transects worldwide.

Discussion

We developed a method for measuring ROH in low coverage ancient DNA. Our algorithm follows a long line of previous work utilizing HMMs to infer such segments10,40,41,42. A key methodological advantage here is to use hidden states that, within an ROH segment, copy from a reference panel of haplotypes to take advantage of haplotype information. This tool enabled us to screen aDNA data from 1785 individuals for ROH, an order of magnitude more ancient individuals than hitherto amenable for such analysis. We generated evidence for two key aspects of the human past: Identifying long ROH (>20 cM) provided insight into the past prevalence of close kin unions such as cousin matings, whereas short ROH (4–8 cM) revealed changing patterns of past background relatedness that reflect local population sizes.

We found that only 1 out of 1785 ancient individuals have long ROH typical for the offspring of first-degree relatives (e.g., brother–sister or parent–offspring). Historically, matings of first-degree relatives are only documented in royal families of ancient Egypt, Inca, and pre-contact Hawaii, where they were sporadic occurrences7. The only other example of an offspring of first-degree relatives found using aDNA to date is the recently reported case from an elite grave in Neolithic Ireland18. Our findings are in agreement that first-degree unions were generally rare in the human past.

Further, we find that only 54 out of 1785 ancient individuals (3.0%, CI: 2.3–3.9%) have long ROH typical for the offspring of first cousins (88%) and less commonly observed for second cousins (20%). Such long ROH can also arise as a consequence of small mating pools (e.g., 8% in randomly mating populations of size 500, which may explain the long ROH we observed on certain island populations). Therefore, the rate of long ROH is an upper bound for the rate of first-cousin unions. On the other hand, because of incomplete power, some long ROH may be missed in our empirical analysis; however, even if the method would fail to detect half of all ROH > 20 cM, well below the power that we observed in our simulations, we would still detect 60% of first cousins (see Table S5). We conclude that in our ancient sample substantially less than 10% of all parental unions occurred on the level of first cousins.

In two specific regions with high levels of long ROH in the present-day2, the dataset contained a sufficient number of ancient individuals to allow analyzing time transects. For both transects (the Levant and present-day Northwest Pakistan), we observe a substantial shift in the levels of long ROH. In contrast to the high abundance of long ROH typical of close kin unions in the present-day individuals, long ROH was uncommon in the ancient individuals, including up to the Middle Ages. Additional data from these regions and others with high levels of long ROH today, such as North Africa as well as Central, South, and West Asia2, will help resolve with more precision the origin and spread of these well-studied kinship-based mating systems43,44. Overall, our results show how an ROH-based method can be used to inform understanding of shifts in cultural marriage/mating practices.

As a second major finding, we observed that human background relatedness as measured by short ROH (4–8 cM) decreased markedly over time in many geographic transects, with a significant drop occurring during or shortly after the local “Neolithic Transition”, the transition from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement45,46,47. Assuming that early farmers had no increased individual mobility compared to foragers, which would agree with observations in present-day forager populations48, the substantial decrease of short ROH evidences markedly increasing local population sizes. This finding adds support to the long-held hypothesis of local population sizes increasing following the Neolithic transition45,46,47. Previous analysis of ancient genomes of foragers and early farmers already identified several lines of genomic evidence for farmers having larger population sizes than earlier hunter–gatherers, such as decreasing genome-wide diversity49,50, decreasing prevalence of ROH11,12,13,14,18 and decreasing coalescent rates estimated from high-coverage genomes27. Our analysis adds a refined level of geographic and temporal resolution by analyzing an order of magnitude of more individuals (1785 ancient humans) and by organizing those individuals into several densely sampled time transects in different geographic regions.

For individuals from early Eurasian Steppe pastoralist groups, we observe an intermediate level of short ROH. These early cultures (e.g., the Yamnaya) have drawn much attention in archeological and ancient DNA studies to date, as archeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence suggest they played an important role in the origin of Indo-European languages and of several populations expansions32,51,52,53,54. The elevated rate of short ROH we observed provides evidence that many matings occurred within and among small, related groups. An alternative interpretation for the abundance of short ROH could be that burial sites (Kurgans) represent a biased sample of societal classes with more short ROH than the general populace51. However, as short ROH probes parental ancestry up to several dozen generations into the past, this signal would require reproductive isolation between societal strata maintained over many generations. Therefore, it is likely that at least part of the signal is due to Steppe populations having comparably low population densities or experienced recent bottlenecks.

Our analysis is limited by several caveats. Importantly, skeletal remains accessible by archeological means often do not constitute a random cross-section of past populations. While levels of background relatedness are expected to be similar within a mixing population, rates of close kin unions can vary substantially because of social structure; e.g., elite dynasties may practice close kin unions despite them being uncommon in the general population. Another limitation is the incomplete sampling of the current aDNA record and that for much of the world, we necessarily make inferences from small numbers and sparse sampling. Future work analyzing the rapidly growing ancient DNA record will help to resolve additional details of social and cultural factors operating at finer scales (e.g., leveraging more precise timings of shifts and more subtle shifts in ROH patterns). In particular, future studies focusing on specific localized questions will increasingly combine archeological and genetic evidence16, in ways that will empower the use of the genetic evidence about the past provided by the methodology presented here.

In addition to denser sampling, there are several ways how our analysis can be improved upon by future work. Here we focused our analysis on long ROH (>20 cM) and short ROH (4–8 cM). While this dichotomy helped us to disentangle more clearly recent and distant parental relatedness, we expect that future work refining the downstream analysis of ROH will be able to extract more subtle signatures by looking across all ROH scales. Furthermore, we note that our application focused on a set of SNPs widely used for human ancient DNA (1240K SNPs). For whole-genome sequencing data (available for a subset of the data analyzed here), using all genome-wide variants would likely lower the requirements for coverage below the current limit of 400,000 of the 1240K SNPs covered at least once (corresponding to ca. 0.3× whole-genome sequencing coverage). Another improvement would be using a reference panel that includes ancient haplotypes. Currently, no long-range phased ancient haplotypes are available, but future work will likely produce such data.

One alternative approach to identify ROH in low coverage ancient genomes could be to use imputation followed by screening for stretches of homozygous markers using standard ROH detection methods. This was recently done for ancient individuals with >10× coverage18. Since imputation of genomes was reported to work well to a coverage similar to the low coverage cutoff used here [55,56ca. 0.5×] and most imputation methods are based on haplotype-copying methods related to the approach utilized here [the Li and Stephens model22, we expect any such approach to perform similar to ours, after appropriate testing and calibration, as conducted for our method. We chose to develop a method utilizing several key advantages of pseudo-haploid data, which is more widely available and requires fewer assumptions about genotype quality, making subsequent analysis less prone to batch effects introduced by various isolation, sequencing, and genotyping protocols.

Identifying ROH can also be a starting point for other powerful applications: ROH consists of only a single haplotype (the main signal of our method), which is therefore perfectly phased, a prerequisite for powerful methods relying on haplotype copying57 or tree reconstruction26,58. Moreover, long ROH could be used to estimate contamination and error rates, an important task in ancient DNA studies20. ROH lacks heterozygotes, allowing one to identify heterozygous reads within ROH that must originate from contamination or genotyping error, similar to estimating contamination from the hemizygous X chromosomes in males59. Another promising future direction is the development of a method to identify long shared sequence blocks in ancient DNA not only within (ROH), but also between individuals, called identity-by-descent (IBD). Calling IBD between individuals would substantially increase power for measuring background relatedness since signals from every pair of individuals could be used. Moreover, a geographic IBD block signal is highly informative about patterns of recent migration35,60,61,62. Extending our method to similarly use haplotype information from a phased reference panel when detecting IBD could enable such analyses in low coverage ancients individuals.

Finally, the analysis of ROH has additional implications beyond human demography and kinship-based mating systems. In many plants and animal species, ROH is more prevalent (due to different mating systems, small population sizes, or domestication), and the study of ROH may be particularly interesting for understanding early plant and animal breeding, as actively controlled mating among domesticates would be expected to alter ROH63. For aDNA from extinct or endangered species, ROH can shed light on the extinction and inbreeding processes, as is observed for example in aDNA from high-coverage Neanderthal individuals17,64,65,66, or modern DNA from Isle Royal wolves67. Finally, as ROH exposes rare deleterious recessive alleles68, the temporal dynamics of ROH are relevant for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of deleterious variants and health outcomes67,69,70,71. We hope that the core ideas of our approach will inspire the analysis of low-coverage data from a wide range of natural populations.

Women with large breasts were rated as more attractive, fertile, reproductively successful, likely to befriend, & threatening (& less likely to be introduced to a current partner)

Garza, R., Pazhoohi, F., & Byrd-Craven, J. (2021). Women’s perceptions of breast size, ptosis, and intermammary distance: Does breast morphology play a role in women’s intrasexual competition? Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Sep 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000273

Abstract: Women’s breasts are considered attractive and sexually appealing, perhaps due to their residual reproductive value. However, most research has focused on their intersexual selective display. The current study investigated women’s perceptions of women’s breasts when primed with an intrasexual competition prime. Across two studies, women (N = 467) were randomly assigned to a partner threat condition or control. They were asked to rate women’s breasts that had been manipulated for their size, ptosis (i.e., sagginess), and intermammary distance (i.e., cleavage). Women with large breasts were rated as more attractive, fertile, reproductively successful, likely to befriend, threatening, and they were rated as less likely to be introduced to a current partner. More importantly, these ratings were influenced by the interaction between breast size, intermammary distance, and ptosis. The findings contribute to how women’s breasts may be perceived from an intrasexual competitive perspective.

Gender Differences & the 5 Facets of Conspiracy Theory: Women score higher in all of them (government malfeasance, malevolent global conspiracies, extraterrestrial cover-up, personal well-being, & information control)

Gender Differences and the Five Facets of Conspiracy Theory. Gary Popoli, Angel Longus. International Journal of Psychological Studies Archives Vol. 13, No. 3. Jul 2021. https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijps/article/view/0/45859

Abstract: Although research examining conspiracy theory beliefs has been examined, there is conflicting literature on the relationship between gender and conspiracy thinking. Before this study, little research has been conducted on the differences between males and females in each of the five facets of conspiracy theory. This study was designed to investigate differences in gender as they pertain to government malfeasance (GM), malevolent global conspiracies (MG), extraterrestrial cover-up (ET), personal well-being (PW), and control of information (CI). It was hypothesized that there are statistically significant differences between females and males when it comes to conspiracy theory beliefs for each of the five facets. Archival data from 2016 containing responses to the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale was analyzed. Results supported the main hypothesis of this investigation that significant differences do, in fact, exist between females and males in all five facets of conspiracy theory: government malfeasance, malevolent global conspiracies, extraterrestrial cover-up, personal well-being, and control of information. In addition, this study revealed that females score higher than males in all facets. In general, a computed total conspiracy belief score demonstrated that females (M = 45.10, SD = 15.07) were significantly higher than males (M = 42.13, SD = 15.90). Nevertheless, some recent research has reported that women were significantly less likely than men to engage in ‘conspiratorial thinking’ and endorse a conspiracy about the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. These findings may be suggesting a change in direction for gender differences and a need for further research. 

Having a child: You go through all the things you do when you fall in love. You find yourself infatuated. You want to tell everyone about your new love. You can’t wait to be with that person. And you feel like, no matter how many things are going wrong, someone loves you.

The kid option. Alice Dreger. 2009. https://alicedreger.com/child

I often say, honestly, if the woman I was before I had a child could see the woman I am now, there is no way she would have a kid. That woman was so intense about her work, so used to having her schedule at her control, so used to napping, eating, watching a movie, and having sex whenever she felt like it, she would be horrified to see herself as me.

Me, I get the start and the end of each work day lopped off by the school bus. I get sick all the time from the latest germ to hit our elementary school. (And living in an international academic community, we get a lot of well-traveled germs.) I spend my weekends waiting for my son to finish eating his bagel so we can move on with our day. And then we move on to trainspotting out in the cold for several hours. I even (gasp) go to soccer practice—though I do bring something interesting to read, and I drive a little Honda Fit, or the Saturn SL from grad school (a ’95, with a glove compartment held closed by string), not a minivan. (I am way too sexy for a minivan.)

For intellectuals, having a child can be especially challenging. This is particularly true of the time when your children are babies. Babies don’t hold very good conversations. They don’t make good arguments or cite their sources. And children make you dumber, at least in the short term, because not only is it hard to keep up in your discipline when you lose so much time to family needs, it’s also hard to think straight when you are perpetually sleep-deprived.

When I was breast-feeding, I was sure that the ancients were right about the humours, especially about brains and breast-milk both being made of the same stuff (phlegm). Because the more I fed my son, the dumber I got, and the smarter he got. It really seemed like my brain was draining out my nipples into him.

One colleague of mine was considering having a child, and she asked me what it is like. I decided simply to explain the time loss, for starters. I asked her to pull up her calendar so I could show her. She did. “Now,” I said, “cross off one-third of what you currently have scheduled.” Then I suggested she imagine three days a week doing her remaining work while being very low on sleep. After that, I randomly chose three weeks from her calendar, and told her those would be weeks in which her imaginary child was too sick for her to really get any work done.

And then I explained that, from the moment she had a wanted child, she would be worrying about its mortality, no matter how rational she was, no matter how healthy and sensible her child was.

Obesity and compensatory consumption: Evidence from jewelry shopping

Obesity and compensatory consumption: Evidence from jewelry shopping. Didem Kurt. Psychology & Marketing, September 16 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21578

Abstract: This article examines the link between obesity and compensatory consumption in the context of jewelry shopping. Study 1 finds that participants with higher body mass indices are willing to pay more for a jewelry item. Study 2 generalizes this finding by documenting that jewelry store sales are higher in places with greater obesity rates. Using Google Trends data, Study 3 shows that the search interest for jewelry stores increases with the obesity rate and that this relationship is mediated by people's dissatisfaction with their current weight as revealed by their search activity. Finally, supporting the self-discrepancy account, Study 4 shows that the use of self-related and discrepancy words together in jewelry-related tweets is more pronounced in places with greater obesity rates. These findings collectively help enhance the field's understanding of the consumption behavior of people who are part of a large stigmatized group.

Rolf Degen summarizing... People believe that they understand complicated things better when they are sure that other people understand them

From 2020... How others drive our sense of understanding of policies. Nathaniel Rabb, John J Han, Steven A Sloman. Behavioural Public Policy, Volume 5 Special Issue 4, September 4 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/abs/how-others-drive-our-sense-of-understanding-of-policies/3AC030D64B59647AE1F0DA2321E67B0A

Abstract: Five experiments are reported to compare models of attitude formation about hot-button policy issues like climate change. In broad strokes, the deficit model states that incorrect opinions are a result of a lack of information, while the cultural cognition model states that opinions are formed to maximize congruence with the group that one affiliates with. The community of knowledge hypothesis takes an integrative position. It states that opinions are based on perceived knowledge, but that perceptions are partly determined by the knowledge that sits in the heads of others in the community. We use the fact that people's sense of understanding is affected by knowledge of others’ understanding to arbitrate among these views in the domain of public policy. In all experiments (N = 1767), we find that the contagious sense of understanding is nonpartisan and robust to experimental manipulations intended to eliminate it. While ideology clearly affects people's attitudes, sense of understanding does as well, but level of actual knowledge does not. And the extent to which people overestimate their own knowledge partly determines the extremity of their position. The pattern of results is most consistent with the community of knowledge hypothesis. Implications for climate policy are considered.

Both genders show increase in consumption behaviors & substance use, but women revealed decrease in consumption of wine during pandemic; men showed more TV hours per day; women stand out in the use of mobile phone per day

Health risk behaviors before and during COVID-19 and gender differences. Cátia Branquinho, Teresa Paiva, Fábio Guedes, Tânia Gaspar, Gina Tomé, Margarida Gaspar de Matos. Journal of Community Psychology, September 13 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22705

Abstract: Changes in routines and habits, fear of contamination from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus, and economic crisis have resulted in significant impacts upon individuals' lives, health, and risk behaviors. The present study aims to analyze health risk behaviors and gender differences of Portuguese adults before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative analysis using SPSS v. 26 software presents the evaluation of 5746 responses (M = 48.5 years, SD = 14.3), of which 67.7% were female. t Test was used to study differences in means before and during the pandemic and analysis of variance test to analyze gender differences. In the comparative study before and during the pandemic showed a decrease in the number of meals per day, physical activity and perception of sleep quality; an increase in tobacco use, beer consumption, and media use (TV, mobile phone, social networks, and online games). Gender differences study demonstrated that the number of meals per day suffered a decrease from pre to pandemic in women, while increasing in men, becoming prominent in the second moment under study. Both genders had an increase in consumption behaviors and substance use, but women revealed a decrease in the consumption of wine during the pandemic, while men revealed more consumption behaviors in the variables under study. The use of media also changed, with men showing a higher level in TV hours per day, social networks and online games before the pandemic and in TV hours per day and games/online during the pandemic. Women stand out in the use of mobile phone per day during the pandemic. Daily physical activity decreased during the pandemic, as did sleep quality. Males revealed a higher practice of physical activity at both periods, as well as sleep quality. Based on the results presented, it is expected that considerations and actions in the scope of public health policies and health prevention and promotion, will be rethought and adapted to the specificities of each gender.

4 CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

The present study was developed to compare gender differences in health risk behaviors before and during the pandemic scenario.

In general, health behaviors such as the number of meals per day, physical activity practice, declined during the pandemic, as did the perception of sleep quality; while tobacco, beer consumption, and media use (TV, mobile phone, social networks, and online games) increased. In the same sample, shorter sleep duration, poorer nutrition, decline in physical activity, greater media use, and more negative attitudes and behaviors during the pandemic were found to be positively associated with poor sleep and awakening quality (Paiva et al., 2021). Also in a literature review conducted by Stockwell et al. (2021), a decrease in physical activity and increase in sedentary behaviors is highlighted.

Gender differences are clear: Women have, both prior and during the pandemic, a higher number of meals per day when compared with men, but this number decreased in women and increased in men during COVID-19. Although negative impacts on diet are highlighted (Martínez-de-Quel et al., 2021; Ramalho et al., 2021; Rodgers et al., 2020), Janssen et al. (2021) reveal different changes in lifestyles and diet during the pandemic. The authors report that the number of meals per day can increase or decrease depending on the person, and be related to restrictions, frequency of shopping, perceived risk of disease, decreased financial capacity, and sociodemographic factors.

Smoking behavior (number of cigarettes per day), intensified during the pandemic, being higher in men in the prepandemic. The consumption of beer per day also showed an increase during the pandemic in both genders, as well as the number of glasses of wine per day in men (decreasing in women). Satre et al. (2020) and Weerakoon et al. (2021) reveal similar results.

Media use increased from prepandemic to pandemic in both genders, especially in males in the prepandemic (hours TV per day, social networks and online games) and postpandemic (hours TV per day and games/online). Women use more the mobile phone per day during the pandemic. A study also developed in Europe and during the current scenario, presents that males are more prone to gambling, while women tend to spend more time on social networks (Lemenager et al., 2020).

The number of hours of daily physical activity decreased during the pandemic scenario (Park et al., 2021) as did the quality of sleep. In both a higher mean in males stands out. Despite the worse perception of prepandemic sleep quality, the literature has reported that the worries and uncertainties of this period have a greater impact on female sleep (Liu et al., 2020; Pinto et al., 2020; Sinha et al., 2020; Voitsidis et al., 2020). As women often report their sleep quality as less positive, and it is not known whether this is a reality or a perception, it is also true that they report and live with a lower perception of well-being (de Matos, 2019).

4.1 Strengths and limitations

As regards limitations, and due to the constraints associated with the pandemic scenario, the present study was conducted exclusively online to reach a larger number of participants and decrease the exposure of the team and participants to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Although efforts have been made to have an equitable gender distribution, this was not achieved, but other studies developed in the country show this common reality.

In contrast to the identified limitations, the present study reveals several strengths. The first, the total number of responses obtained, which allows us to increase the validity of its conclusions. The second, the diversity of the sample. Lastly, to our knowledge, this is the first study conducted in the country that includes such a complete diversity of themes in studying the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the involvement of a multidisciplinary team in its design and analysis.

Experiences during the epidemic and reproductive motivation yielded the results which are incongruent with life history theory—adverse experiences during the state of emergency were negatively related to the reproductive motivation

Mededovic, Janko (2021). Reproductive motivation in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic: Is there evidence for accelerated life history dynamics? Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Sep 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000270

Abstract: One of the key life history assumptions is that mortality rates are positively associated with fast life history dynamics. Since the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated mortality rates throughout the world, we tested this assumption using reproductive motivation (desired number of children and desired age of first reproduction) as a key output measure using a repeated cross-sectional design. We assessed reproductive motivation in Serbian young adults before the pandemic started (N = 362), during the pandemic-caused state of emergency (the peak of the epidemic's first wave: N = 389) and after the state of emergency (i.e., after the first wave: N = 430). Furthermore, in the third time-point we measured experiences during the state of emergency and additional measures of reproductive motivation (reasons for and against parenthood). Subsamples were matched by sex, education, and the sampling procedure. We found the between-group differences which are congruent with life history theory: the desired age of first reproduction was lowest after the state of emergency compared to the 2 previous time-points. However, there were no differences in the desired number of children. Furthermore, the analysis of the links between experiences during the epidemic and reproductive motivation yielded the results which are incongruent with life history theory—adverse experiences during the state of emergency were negatively related to the reproductive motivation. Since the findings were only partially in accordance with life history theory, we discuss possible reasons which may explain the heterogeneity of results.

When dating, men without children (or those who wanted children) rated age as more important & selected a preferred age range that incorporated younger women; women’s age preferences showed little association with having/wanting children

Kramer, R. S. S., & Jones, A. L. (2021). Wanting or having children predicts age preferences in online dating. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Sep 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000274

Abstract: When dating, women seek men slightly older than themselves while men typically prefer younger women. Such patterns reflect differences in parental investment and age-related fertility, which are both concerned with maximizing reproductive outcomes. Using large samples of online daters, we considered whether having or wanting children was associated with the perceived importance of age as a matching criterion when dating (Study 1; N = 119,361), as well as how these two factors related to the preferred age of a match (Study 2; N = 486,382). Men without children (or those who wanted children) rated age as more important than those with children (or those who did not want children), and also selected a preferred age range that incorporated younger women. In contrast, women’s preferences showed little association with having or wanting children. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that age preferences may depend on factors in addition to those previously investigated, and that the relationships with the number of current children and the desire to have children are consistent with evolutionary predictions.