Extraversion was positively associated with subsequent sickness absence when controlling for several covariates, including health, work factors and previous spells of sickness absence; neuroticism also showed positive associations with sick leave

Big five personality traits and physician-certified sickness absence. Gøril Kvamme Løset, Tilmann von Soest. European Journal of Personality, January 3, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070211065236

Abstract: Although several studies show that personality traits are associated with absenteeism, few large-scale studies have examined these relationships prospectively, integrating survey data and register data on sickness absence. This study examines whether personality is associated with sickness absence, and whether health factors, gender, age, type of occupation and job satisfaction moderate this relationship. We combine survey data assessing the Big Five personality traits from a large sample of Norwegian employees aged 18–62 years (N = 5017) with register data on physician-certified sickness absence up to four years after. Negative binomial regression analyses showed that extraversion was positively associated with subsequent sickness absence when controlling for several covariates, including health, work factors and previous spells of sickness absence. Neuroticism also showed significant positive associations with sick leave; however, the association diminished when accounting for previous spells of sickness absence. Moderator analyses demonstrated that age and type of occupation affected some of the associations between personality and sickness absence. The findings indicate that – in addition to general health promotion measures – specific interventions targeting individuals high in extraversion may be beneficial in reducing sick leave. How socio-demographic and work-related factors moderate the relationship between personality and sickness absence may be an interesting future research area.

Keywords: sickness absence, sick leave, personality, health, occupation

Discussion

The main purpose of this study was to examine whether personality is associated with physician-certified sickness absence. Overall, the results suggested that after controlling for a variety of relevant covariates and excluding respondents with prior spells of sick leave, high levels of extraversion were prospectively related to an increased risk of sick leave. Furthermore, neuroticism was positively associated with sick leave even with control for covariates; however, the association diminished when excluding participants with prior spells of sick leave. Two interaction effects showed further the complex relationships between personality, age and work factors, and sick leave.

The prospective associations between personality traits and sickness absence

Neuroticism was related to an increased risk of future sick leave, also when health, family and work factors were included in the analyses. These findings are in line with studies that found cross-sectional (Störmer & Fahr, 2013; Vlasveld et al., 2013) and longitudinal (Blekesaune, 2012; Raynik et al., 2020) associations between neuroticism and sick leave with control for health factors. However, new in our study is the finding that the prospective association between neuroticism and sickness absence diminished into insignificance when removing respondents that had sick leave in the interview year. This result may thus suggest that the neuroticism-sickness absence association does not necessarily originate in causal mechanisms where neuroticism influences sickness absence, but that associations may be explained by confounding or reverse causal directionality. Such a notion is in accordance with research showing that major negative life events, for example, the onset of chronic disease, and associated mental distress and deterioration in life quality predict lasting increases in neuroticism (Jeronimus et al., 2014; Jokela et al., 2014).

The positive relationship between extraversion and sick leave corresponds with previous studies on extraversion and absenteeism (Furnham & Bramwell, 2006; Judge et al., 1997), but conflicts with the results of Vlasveld et al. (2013), who found a negative effect of extraversion on both shorter and longer sick leave spells (>2 weeks). This latter study explains its findings in terms of extraverts possibly being less likely to deal with, for example, work stressors by means of avoidance coping through sick leave. In contrast, the positive associations between extraversion and absenteeism in other studies were suggested to originate from extraverts’ tendency to prioritise leisure and social obligations outside the work sphere, especially when work tasks are mundane (Furnham & Bramwell, 2006; Judge et al., 1997). This explanation, though, seems less intuitive for predicting longer term physician-certified sick leave. Possibly, the tendency of extraverts to take risks and seek excitement may increase the risk of long-term sick leave, as extraverts are more prone to substance use and accidents (Booth-Kewley et al., 1994; Terracciano et al., 2008). Alternatively, in line with the concept of presenteeism, individuals low in extraversion may be less likely to seek sick leave even when being ill. More specifically, by having a tendency to be reserved and inhibited, these people may prefer to continue with their normal work activity in order not to attract attention and have to disclose themselves to the doctor and colleagues. Also, people with low levels of extraversion may refrain from going to the doctor and approaching colleagues and superiors for sick leave because of lower levels of self-worth and social skills compared to extraverted people (Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006; Robins et al., 2001). The present study did not provide data that allowed to test for these potential mechanisms of the association between extraversion and risk of sick leave. Future longitudinal studies with a more comprehensive assessment of extraversion, including facets such as excitement seeking and assertiveness, may provide the opportunity to test such mechanisms by disentangling the effect of specific facets of extraversion on sick leave.

The lack of any main effect of conscientiousness in our study was surprising, given earlier findings that conscientiousness is negatively related to work absence and the well-documented health- and task-directed nature of conscientious individuals. Nevertheless, the other previous study on personality and register-based sickness absence also did not find an effect of conscientiousness (Blekesaune, 2012); neither did a study based on longitudinal survey data (Raynik et al., 2020). This could indicate that the potentially buffering effect of conscientiousness on work absence primarily appears for absenteeism and more short-term sick leave. In fact, conscientiousness has been positively linked to emotional exhaustion (Armon et al., 2012). Thus, although conscientious individuals are committed and motivated in their work, which would generally yield negative associations to work absence, these characteristics might entail aspects that over time could predispose them for longer absences due to burnout as well (Armon et al., 2012; Woods et al., 2013).

Less surprising, however, was the non-significant main effect of openness on sickness absence, as it is in accordance with most previous studies and thereby supports the notion that this personality dimension does not appear to be an overall decisive predictor for work absence. Still, a moderator effect of openness with age on sickness absence was found, indicating that openness increased the risk of sick leave for older employees compared to younger employees. Possibly, for younger employees, openness may promote adaptation to shifting work demands and integration in new workplaces which are of importance early in an occupational career. In contrast, high levels of openness may impede job performances and increase risk of sick leaves among older employees when extensive experience makes work less challenging and more monotonous.

For agreeableness, the lack of a main effect did not support our hypothesis of a negative association with sick leave. Yet, the moderator analyses suggested that agreeableness might have some bearing on sick leave in more intricate manners. The identified moderator effect of agreeableness with type of occupation lends some support to our assumption that personality may have differential associations with sickness absence when contrasting occupations that are not physically demanding with manual occupations. Perhaps, highly agreeable persons may be less willing to be absent from work in manual occupations because they perceive the additional burden on colleagues due to their own absence to be greater in physically strenuous occupations compared to non-manual occupations. This seemingly complex association between personality, type of occupation and sick leave, may be an interesting area for future research.

Strengths and limitations

The present study is the first to examine in a nationally representative sample the longitudinal relationship between personality and physician-certified longer term sick leave using register data on sickness absence. The use of a large, representative survey sample combined with highly reliable register-based data on sickness absence is a major strength. Using register data on sickness absence is advised because self-reported sick leave is prone to recall bias and social desirability (Thorsen et al., 2018). Moreover, several previous studies relied on cross-sectional survey data, thereby providing limited information about the temporal relationship between personality and sick leave, which further clouds causal inference.

However, the study also has limitations. First, the available register data on sickness absence only provided information about spells of sick leave that lasted more than 16 days. Shorter periods of sick leave, including both self- and physician-certified spells were not assessed, and the present study provides no information about how such spells are related to personality. Furthermore, data on sickness absence only provided information about the accumulated number of weeks of sickness absence within a calendar year for each of the four years (2008–2011). It was thus not possible to differentiate between several shorter term spells of sickness absence and one long-term spell within the year.

We used a short version of a widely applied personality measure. Yet, with four items measuring each trait, the breadth of coverage of this measure is limited, and thus this may also have limited its potential in predicting the outcome. With a more comprehensive instrument, we would be able to capture more nuances and assess narrow personality facets, which may provide more detailed information, in addition to broad traits in predicting sickness absence (Judge et al., 1997; Lounsbury et al., 2004). Personality facets or items tend to outperform the broader personality traits in predicting a wide range of behavioural outcomes (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001; Seebooth & Mõttus, 2018). However, studies show that the Big Five seems sufficient for predicting work-related behaviour (Judge et al., 1997; Woods et al., 2013). Still, discrepancies in findings between studies may be the result of different representations of items of personality traits used. Also, a more comprehensive measure of personality would provide more information about different mechanisms that can operate at lower trait levels and disentangle whether facet or item level associations with sickness absence go in different directions.

We chose a rather conservative level of significance with p < .01; however, we acknowledge that interaction effects would be considered not significant with a more strict correction for multiple comparisons when conducting moderation analyses. The two identified interaction effects should therefore be considered preliminary.

Finally, the generalisability of the study results may also be limited in other ways. Although the study sample was stratified to be nationally representative, the respondents were overall higher educated and healthier than the general population (Slagsvold et al., 2012), which could lead to somewhat biased study results. Nevertheless, the use of survey weights did not significantly change the results compared with unweighted analyses, thus indicating that such biases in the sample do not appear to be a major concern. The findings may further not be generalisable to other countries that have less generous sickness benefit schemes, a less inclusive working life, higher unemployment, or other labour market conditions that are different from the Norwegian context and that may affect the sickness absence rate.

Subjective well-being appears to be higher in rural than in urban communities, probably because of the strong association between unmet aspirations (which are higher in cities) and lower satisfaction with life

Unmet Aspirations and Urban Malaise. Tomas Hanell. Social Indicators Research, Jan 3 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-021-02864-8

Abstract: This article analyses the gap between human aspirations concerning self-enhancement and corresponding outcomes in ten western European countries. Utilizing individual data for 14,300 respondents from the European Social Survey, four self-enhancement gap metrics are created: (1) the Ambition gap; (2) the Success gap; (3) the Wealth gap; and (4) the Authority gap. The findings suggest that subjective well-being (SWB) appears to be higher in rural than in urban communities. One reason for lower SWB among urban residents relates to their higher aspirations in certain areas of life. However, urban areas are apparently able to meet the financial expectations of their inhabitants far better than rural areas are, whereas an unmet craving for, e.g., success in rural areas appears not to affect SWB at all. Overall, there is a strong association between unmet aspirations and lower satisfaction with life. The added value of this paper is that it goes beyond existing explanations of the reasons behind urban malaise in developed economies.

Discussion and Conclusion

In line with aspiration-level theory, this analysis has demonstrated that the better a person’s aspirations are fulfilled, the higher is his or her overall satisfaction with life. The analysis has also demonstrated that inhabitants of 32 major metropolitan regions in ten western European countries have substantially higher aspirations when it comes to self-enhancement than do their more rural counterparts. However, the level of fulfilment of these aspirations is also generally higher among these urban residents. The analysis has ultimately demonstrated that the discrepancy between aspirations and outcome affects overall assessments of subjectively reported SWB more strongly in highly urbanized areas than it does in less urbanized surroundings. The primary scientific contribution of this paper is thus that it indicates that such urban–rural differences should be added to currently dominant explanations for the phenomenon of urban malaise. In a theoreticized manner, Fig. 1 illustrates the relationship between an aspiration-outcome gap on the one hand and resulting urban–rural differences in SWB on the other.

Fig. 1 Differing rural and urban aspiration gaps and their impact on SWB,

Full size image

This simple analytic model however assumes that the outcome-aspiration-SWB vector would be linear. In reality, it appears plausible to assume that these gradients would be of a logarithmic nature adhering to the process of decreasing marginal utility. This issue thus calls for further research with emphasis on non-linear techniques.

Human aspirations are most likely policy amenable only to a very marginal degree. Fostering less ambition among urban inhabitants or migrants to cities by means of public campaigns, or nurturing more “rural” values in urban communities, appears to be an extremely implausible path of development. Amplified urban aspiration levels should thus probably be considered an inherent principle of nature guiding urban life. They could be viewed on a par with aspects such as age or gender, which have a strong impact on SWB, but are utterly difficult to directly address by public policy. Accordingly, it would probably be more feasible for public policy to try to pay attention to the outcome levels instead, thereby diminishing the gap. However, whereas public policy doubtlessly would be able to affect the wealth outcome of urban residents, it remains equally uncertain what it could do about the remaining three self-enhancement outcomes (ambition, success, authority). At the least, however, it would be important to acknowledge that although the city—travestying Glaeser (2011)—might make us richer, smarter, healthier, or even greener, it does not necessarily make us happier too and, apparently, not more satisfied with our lives either.

The issue of causality calls for attention. Based on the analysis herein, it is not possible to establish a clear causal direction between the level of aspiration fulfilment and urban environments. It may well be that cities act as magnets for persons with high aspirations in certain areas of life, thus aggravating the discrepancy. However, it may equally well be that the billboards, the neon lights, or the popular cultural image of cities in themselves are the cause of higher aspirations. Utilizing the vocabulary of Ballas and Tranmer (2012:p. 94), quality of life might be dependent not only on the contextual setting of the community, “something about the place”, but also on “the characteristics of its inhabitants”. As an indication of the latter—concentrating specifically on persons migrating from rural to urban areas—Cardoso et al. (2019), for example, argued that one reason for lower SWB among such migrants can be attributed to the effect that several cognitive biases exert on creating overoptimistic expectations concerning the outcome of their move.

However, some recent findings also support the notion that location has an impact on the SWB of its inhabitants. In the developed world, the prevailing neoliberal dogma based on preference fulfilment through consumption choices is more closely related to urban communities than more rural ones (Oliveira et al., 2019). Examining data for approximately a million European citizens across 27 nations and over three decades, Michel et al. (2019) found robust evidence of a negative correlation between the amount of advertising and the level of life satisfaction. Advertising creates a mental demand, which, according to the hedonic treadmill theory, in the long run is likely to remain unfulfilled.

Although there are few specific indications as to whether urban inhabitants are more exposed to advertising than rural ones, at least out-of-home advertising (i.e. printed or digital billboards) could be expected to be more of an urban concern. Also, online shopping still appears to be a predominantly urban phenomenon (Beckers et al., 2018; Farag et al., 2006), exposing urban residents more than their rural counterparts to digital advertising.

Recently, the well-established regulatory focus theory has also been used for establishing causality between settlement size and human behaviour. Stemming from psychology, the regulatory focus theory states that human goals are guided by two opposing motivating systems: promotion and prevention. Persons motivated by promotion goals focus on growth and accomplishment and tend to take risks. Persons motivated by prevention goals are risk aversive and focus on safety and security. Ross and Portugali (2018) applied this theory in a large vs. small city context and found that a large city affects a person’s behaviour so that it intensifies both motivating systems, depending on the individual’s personal regulatory focus. As they were, furthermore, able to demonstrate clear causality, i.e., that the size of the city affects the regulatory system and not the other way around, this might also constitute a tentative explanation for why urbanites have a tendency to aspire to more.

The issue of aggravated urban expectations would benefit from further interest from the scientific community. An examination of the degree of fulfilment of spheres of human aspirations other than mere self-enhancement, such as benevolence, security or conformity, might shed additional light on why rural residents tend to report higher SWB than do urban ones. In a technical sense, longitudinal analysis is needed so as to overcome the gap between present expectations and future outcome.

Perhaps even more importantly, there is a need to address inequality. The prevailing public policy discourse excessively stresses both the necessity and the societal benefits of urbanization (cf. Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Gleeson, 2014; Soininvaara, 2020). This discourse, however, generally departs from an aggregated point of view where average performances across different types of settlements are compared. This study also falls into that category. However, as pointed out above, the positional treadmill—where people tend to compare their lives against those of others in their vicinity—exerts a strong influence on SWB. Also, in terms of fulfilled aspirations, some people get what they desire, whereas others do not. Since socioeconomic differences in general tend to be larger in urban areas, it could also be expected that the amplitude of disparity among urban inhabitants in terms of aspirations and meeting them is much larger than is the case in rural surroundings. Hence, examining not only the levels of aspiration fulfilment across different types of settlements on average, but also considering intra-regional disparities of that very same nature, may additionally clarify reasons behind urban malaise.

Food over-purchase: Children apply pressure on their parents to impulse buy promoted products, have fussy eating behaviours, and frequently change preferences; their selective eating behaviours and preferences cause food over-provisioning

Food Waste in Households: Children as Quiet Powerhouses. Monika Kansal et al. Food Quality and Preference, January 3 2022, 104524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2021.104524

Highlights

• Children often hold significant power around what food is purchased and eaten.

• Eating habits of children can interfere with parents’ well-intentioned plans.

• Parents are conflicted with needing children to eat and their desire for healthy food.

• Supermarkets encourage impulse buying by targeting children with appealing promotions.

Abstract: This study reports parents’ perceptions about children’s influence on the generation of household food by collecting qualitative data from 15 focus groups of Australian householders from five culturally diverse communities. Key findings include food over-purchase to some extent results from children applying pressure on their parents to impulse buy supermarkets promoted products, fussy eating behaviours, and frequently changing preferences. Children’s selective eating behaviours and preferences also cause food over-preparation and over-provisioning by parents. This study also identified that campaigns promoting imperfect shaped fruit and vegetables tend to be less effective with children as they desire perfect shaped fresh produce. We also identified that migrant communities tend to face the added complication of balancing traditional food for adults with their children requesting Australian foods. Our research presents policy implications in identifying children as quiet powerhouses in Australian households and suggests the need for targeted interventions to change children’s food behaviour. Additionally, parents need to mirror these interventions in their households to reinforce desired changes in their children’s food behaviours. There is also an opportunity for supermarkets, local councils and government agencies to redesign their marketing campaigns to educate children and parents about reducing food waste.

Keywords: Household Food wasteChildrenparentsAustraliamulti-community perspective

IMF magazine publishing paper about a replacement for GDP or the HDI with a less arbitrary (they believe) personal well-being index

Authors in 2021 re-publishing their cherished table from 2014... Their proposal is to replace the very defective GDP index with a composite of the indicators below. From Measuring the Essence of the Good Life, by Daniel Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz, and Miles Kimball. F&D Magazine, Winter 2021. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/12/Measuring-Essence-Good-Life-Benjamin-Cooper-Heffetz-Kimball.htm

Excerpts:
 

Constructing the HDI

On its website, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) describes the HDI as “created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone.” But after those lofty words, the description turns to technical detail: “HDI is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable, and having a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.” 

The technical details determine how the UNDP puts into practice its lofty goal: which dimensions of well-being (or capabilities) the HDI tracks, what it leaves out, and what relative importance it gives to the things it does track. For example, according to the geometric mean used by the HDI, a percentage change in HDI is the equally weighted average of the percentage changes of its components.

The HDI is surely the best-known practical application of Sen’s capabilities approach. It provides a single, simple number that both summarizes the state of a country at a point in time and is easy to construct and explain.  

Getting to less arbitrary

Still, although it captures more dimensions of well-being than GDP does, the HDI is arbitrary in its choice of what to include and how to weight what it does cover. The goal of an enhanced well-being index is to include many more than three dimensions of well-being and to weight them based on the values of the people in the country. 

A major reason the HDI focuses on longevity, education, and income is that when the index was introduced in 1990, these important dimensions of a good life were among the few variables being widely measured across countries in a reasonably comparable way. Unavailability of data has similarly constrained the reach of other Beyond GDP initiatives—such as the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Better Life Index. But lack of current data should not constrain our vision of what a good index should look like.

Some Beyond GDP initiatives have gotten around these data constraints by using surveys, which can be conducted relatively cheaply around the world in real time. Indeed, real time is crucial to policymaking. For example, how the HDI performed during the pandemic is still unknown because, at the time of this writing, the latest numbers available are for 2019.

Some researchers have proposed using single-question survey measures of happiness or life satisfaction. However, research, including some of our own with Alex Rees-Jones of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that answers to these survey questions do not capture the full range of what people care about when they make choices. Partly to address this shortcoming, other Beyond GDP initiatives, such as those of the OECD and the UK Office of National Statistics, ask additional survey questions to measure dimensions of well-being other than happiness or life satisfaction. But multiple survey questions reintroduce the question of how to weight the dimensions of well-being relative to one another. 

Our research makes clear the importance including multiple components in a measure of national well-being and the importance of getting the weighting right. Those issues are at the core of our efforts to construct a theoretically sound well-being index. The weights we recommend are relative marginal utilities—traditionally defined as the additional satisfaction an individual realizes from one more unit of a good or service, but in this case from one more unit of an aspect of well-being. We propose to estimate marginal utilities based on stated preferences in specially designed surveys, described below. 

Some older results illustrate our approach, which we are still developing. In Benjamin, Heffetz, Kimball, and Szembrot (2014) we asked survey questions about 136 aspects of well-being—a list that aimed to comprehensively reflect all proposed aspects of well-being. (An actual index should comprise fewer aspects of well-being and avoid, or adjust for, conceptual overlaps.) The table shows estimated weights based on policy choices—described as “national policy questions that you and everyone else in your nation vote on.” Respondents chose between pairs of hypothetical policies, which involved trade-offs between aspects of well-being. Our statistical procedure inferred weights for the aspects of well-being based on respondents’ choices, so that an aspect of well-being is assigned higher weight if it has a bigger impact on the policy respondents preferred. Because of space constraints, the table illustrates the results using 18 of the 136 aspects of well-being: the three with the highest weights, other interesting aspects in the top 10, every aspect that seems closely related to HDI components, other aspects for which data are widely collected, and an aspect on the natural environment. We normalize the weight on the top aspect—freedom from corruption, injustice, and abuse of power—to 1.00.

Although many things could be said about the table, we limit ourselves to three points. 

Many of the top aspects are clearly capabilities in Sen’s sense, including the first one, which does not guarantee a good life, but helps make one possible.

A number of important aspects of well-being—with weights of at least 75 percent of the top aspect—are missing from many measures of national well-being, such as the HDI. 

The weights for many aspects of well-being that have received much attention are well below the weights for those at the top. For example, “people not feeling anxious”—one of four aspects collected in large samples of individuals by the UK Office of National Statistics—is weighted less than a quarter of the top aspect. For those relevant to the HDI, “people’s health” and “people’s financial security” have almost three-quarters the weight of the top aspect, but others—knowledge, skills, and access to information; understanding the world; long lives; and average income—have weights no higher than 54 percent of the top aspect. 

Sweden: Intellectual disability was substantially heritable with 93pct–98pct of the variance in liability attributed to genetic influences

Familial risk and heritability of intellectual disability: a population-based cohort study in Sweden. Paul Lichtenstein et al. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, December 18 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13560

Abstract

Background: Intellectual disability (ID) aggregates in families, but factors affecting individual risk and heritability estimates remain unknown.

Methods: A population-based family cohort study of 4,165,785 individuals born 1973–2013 in Sweden, including 37,787 ID individuals and their relatives. The relative risks (RR) of ID with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were obtained from stratified Cox proportional-hazards models. Relatives of ID individuals were compared to relatives of unaffected individuals. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate heritability.

Results: Relatives of ID individuals were at increased risk of ID compared to individuals with unaffected relatives. The RR of ID among relatives increased proportionally to the degree of genetic relatedness with ID probands; 256.70(95% CI 161.30–408.53) for monozygotic twins, 16.47(13.32–20.38) for parents, 14.88(12.19–18.16) for children, 7.04(4.67–10.61) for dizygotic twins, 8.38(7.97–8.83) for full siblings, 4.56(4.02–5.16) for maternal, 2.90(2.49–3.37) for paternal half-siblings, 3.03(2.61–3.50) for nephews/nieces, 2.84(2.45–3.29) for uncles/aunts, and 2.04(1.91–2.20) for cousins. Lower RRs were observed for siblings of probands with chromosomal abnormalities (RR 5.53, 4.74–6.46) and more severe ID (mild RR 9.15, 8.55–9.78, moderate RR 8.13, 7.28–9.08, severe RR 6.80, 5.74–8.07, and profound RR 5.88, 4.52–7.65). Male sex of relative and maternal line of relationship with proband was related to higher risk (RR 1.33, 1.25–1.41 for brothers vs. sisters and RR 1.49, 1.34–1.68 for maternal vs. paternal half-siblings). ID was substantially heritable with 0.95(95% CI 0.93–0.98) of the variance in liability attributed to genetic influences.

Conclusions: The risk estimates will benefit researchers, clinicians, families in understanding the risk of ID in the family and the whole population. The higher risk of ID related to male sex and maternal linage will be of value for planning and interpreting etiological studies in ID.

Discussion

Main findings

In this nationwide population-based study, we evaluated familial risk and heritability of ID. The sample of ID probands is 100 times bigger compared to the largest previous study on risk among siblings from British Columbia (Herbst & Baird, 1982). The use of several types of relatives allows evaluating the importance of genetic and environmental risk factors in the etiology of ID.

There are four main findings from our investigation. First, our 20-years risk and frequency of ID in full-siblings are comparable to old reports (Angeli & Kirman, 1975; Becker et al., 1977; Bundey & Carter, 1974; Bundey et al., 1989; Costeff & Weller, 1987; Durkin et al., 1976; Herbst & Baird, 1982; Laxova, Ridler, Bowen-Bravery, & Opitz, 1977; Turner et al., 1971; Turner & Partington, 2000). Now, we provide estimates with narrow confidence intervals also for halfsiblings and other relatives. Moreover, our study is first to report RR for ID comparing relatives of ID probands with relatives of unaffected individuals. High RR for monozygotic twins reflects ID characteristics with 0.9% prevalence and high heritability. Similar RR were reported for autism (Sandin et al., 2014), a disability with similar prevalence (1%–2%) and high (85%) heritability (Sandin et al., 2017).

Second, similar to the study by Bundey et al. (1989), we found no evidence for differences in familial risks related to comorbid medical conditions and adverse birth events, two probable biological mechanisms of ID. It is possible, that some of the birth complications traditionally considered as environmental risk factors reflect the response to genetic abnormalities in the fetus (Bolton et al., 1994; Simonoff, Bolton, & Rutter, 1996).

Third, our findings of an inverse relation between ID severity and the familial risk estimates are in accordance with older studies on siblings (Angeli & Kirman, 1975; Bundey & Carter, 1974; Durkin et al., 1976). We have observed a similar pattern of inheritance in second-degree relatives. A previous study by Reichenberg et al. (2016) showed a normal distribution of intellectual abilities among military conscripts who had siblings with severe ID. But those results are limited by the fact that individuals with medical diagnosis of ID are exempted from military assessment in Sweden and were not likely to be covered by the study. Our results showed a gradual risk decline in relation to level of intellectual impairment with shared etiological links across different levels of severity suggesting that the arbitrary cut-off for classifying ID severity into binary measure seems to be an oversimplification.

Forth, our data provide compelling evidence for the role of sex in familial risk of ID. In our study, we not only confirmed the higher risk for males compared to females in siblings of ID probands, but we also showed that similar sex differences were present in more distant relatives (Table S10). Higher prevalence of ID among males in comparison to females has been reported in population studies (Maulik et al., 2011) but studies in relatives produced ambiguous results, probably due to small sample size (Table S1). Our study confirms that, the sex differences observed in the general population are present in the relatives of ID probands, with males being more predisposed to ID. Matrilineallity was related to a higher risk in half-siblings and cousins of ID individuals in accordance with X-linked ID inheritance pattern.

Previous quantitative genetic methods focused on heritability of general (Kovas et al., 2013; Plomin & Deary, 2015) or low cognitive abilities within the normal range (Reichenberg et al., 2016). Heritability of ID as medical diagnosis has not been estimated before. The concordance in our study was as high as 73% for monozygotic, but relatively low of 9% for dizygotic twins. However, concordance is a measure on an absolute scale and depends on the disease prevalence in the population (Tenesa & Haley, 2013). With ID prevalence of 0.9%, genetic liability may be more accurately measured on a transformed scale by tetrachoric correlations where the liability for a disease is assumed to follow a standard normal distribution. The threshold on the liability distribution is estimated from the observed prevalence of the disease. Individuals are assumed to have a disease if they are above this threshold.

Further, severe ID is often linked to distinct genetic etiology caused by de novo mutations rather than polygenic traits associated with mild ID. In our study, tetrachoric correlations calculated separately for all ID levels and after exclusion of individuals with severe ID resulted in almost identical estimates, suggesting a low contribution of those phenotypes in ID heritability at the population level.

Heritability of ID was estimated to be 95%, considerably higher than 66%–86% reported for cognitive abilities in adulthood (Haworth et al., 2010; Panizzon et al., 2014). Those findings further highlighting importance of familial factors in diagnostics and etiological studies on ID. For future studies on the heritability of ID It is important to consider ‘maternal-effects in etiology’, previously described in quantitative genetic studies on general cognitive abilities (Devlin, Daniels, & Roeder, 1997). Substantially higher RR and 20-years risk estimates for maternal compared with paternal half-siblings were found in our study, suggesting that maternal factors may play an essential role also in clinically diagnosed ID.

Strengths and limitations

This study has several strengths, including the sample size, nationwide coverage, and access to both health and educational records. The ID prevalence of 0.9% in our study is close to 1% provided by the meta-analysis (Maulik et al., 2011). Swedish pediatric healthcare is publically funded with universal access to both primary and nonprimary healthcare (Wettergren, Blennow, Hjern, Soder, & Ludvigsson, 2016). A large number of relatives of ID probands allowed us to provide precise estimates of familial risk for several types of kinship. The RRs in this article are the first estimated for ID using a reference from the general population. We do however acknowledge some limitations. First, our study focused only on Swedish born individuals, not including immigrants. Second, despite the universal access to health care we cannot eliminate the possibility that socially disadvantaged groups such as individuals with substance misuse, experiencing homelessness or involved with justice system, could be less likely to seek psychiatric care and ID can remain underdiagnosed. Also, differences in behavioral manifestation and comorbid disorders between females and males with ID may diminish the likelihood of diagnosing ID in females.

Third, data retrieved from registers are subject to left-censoring with missing data prior to data collection. In our study, the actual time point for ID diagnosis might be earlier then the first record of ID diagnosis. For example, HURPID provides information on the date of graduation from upper secondary schools for pupils with ID (typically after the age of 18 year), not the genuine date of ID diagnosis. Similarly, the precise date of diagnosis is not available for ID individuals diagnosed in outpatient care prior to 2001, when those data has been included in NPR. Those factors can lead to either over-or underestimation of familial risk. Some bias towards higher risk estimates may be present due to assortative mating described for cognitive abilities (Plomin & Deary, 2015).

Conclusions and clinical implications

The findings are of value for planning and interpreting etiological studies in ID. This study provided strong evidence on the familial etiology of ID, mostly related to genetic factors. Precise and up-to-date risk estimates provided by this study will benefit clinicians and families in understanding the risk of ID in the family and the whole population. The significant familial loading in ID suggests that the vulnerabilities of family members should be taken into account in intervention programs in ID.

Gender differences in fresh vegetable intake from 1979 to 2017 in low sex-inequality Finland: The magnitude of the gap between genders doubled across the study period

Kähäri, A. (2021), "Gender differences in fresh vegetable intake from 1979 to 2017 in Finland", British Food Journal, Dec 28 2021. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-09-2021-1004

Abstract

Purpose: Previous research has shown that in contemporary societies, women have a healthier dietary intake than men. However, no research has examined how this gender gap develops over the long term. The present study examined how gender differences in fresh vegetable intake frequency have evolved from 1979 to 2017 in Finland and whether differences are affected by age or educational level.

Design/methodology/approach: The data were derived from annually repeated, nationally representative “Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population” and “Regional Health and Well-being (RHW)” surveys on the health habits of the Finnish population. The dataset is a time series of repeated cross-sectional surveys. In total, the data sample comprised 161,996 Finns aged 20–64 years. Descriptive methods and logistic regression were used for the analysis.

Findings: During 1979–2017, the prevalence of daily vegetable intake increased from 12 to 35% among men and from 18 to 56% among women. Thus, the magnitude of the gap between genders doubled across the study period. The increased vegetable intake was partly explained by the changing education and age structures of society. Potential explanations and avenues for future research are also discussed. Policy implications depend on whether the findings are interpreted as a case of health differences or health inequality.

Originality/value: This study used a long time series to analyse how gender differences in vegetable intake have evolved in a Nordic welfare state context. It showed that the gap in fresh vegetable intake between men and women has widened.

There exist fundamental geometrical principles that result from the inherent interplay between movement and organisms’ internal representation of space: Animals spontaneously reduce the world into a series of sequential binary decisions

The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives. Vivek H. Sridhare et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 14, 2021 118 (50) e2102157118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102157118

Significance: Almost all animals must make decisions on the move. Here, employing an approach that integrates theory and high-throughput experiments (using state-of-the-art virtual reality), we reveal that there exist fundamental geometrical principles that result from the inherent interplay between movement and organisms’ internal representation of space. Specifically, we find that animals spontaneously reduce the world into a series of sequential binary decisions, a response that facilitates effective decision-making and is robust both to the number of options available and to context, such as whether options are static (e.g., refuges) or mobile (e.g., other animals). We present evidence that these same principles, hitherto overlooked, apply across scales of biological organization, from individual to collective decision-making.

Abstract: Choosing among spatially distributed options is a central challenge for animals, from deciding among alternative potential food sources or refuges to choosing with whom to associate. Using an integrated theoretical and experimental approach (employing immersive virtual reality), we consider the interplay between movement and vectorial integration during decision-making regarding two, or more, options in space. In computational models of this process, we reveal the occurrence of spontaneous and abrupt “critical” transitions (associated with specific geometrical relationships) whereby organisms spontaneously switch from averaging vectorial information among, to suddenly excluding one among, the remaining options. This bifurcation process repeats until only one option—the one ultimately selected—remains. Thus, we predict that the brain repeatedly breaks multichoice decisions into a series of binary decisions in space–time. Experiments with fruit flies, desert locusts, and larval zebrafish reveal that they exhibit these same bifurcations, demonstrating that across taxa and ecological contexts, there exist fundamental geometric principles that are essential to explain how, and why, animals move the way they do.

Keywords: ring attractormovement ecologynavigationcollective behaviorembodied choice

      Model Features That Determine Network Behavior

There are key features that are essential to produce the bifurcation patterns observed in our data (i.e., for any decision-making system to break multichoice decisions to a series of binary decisions).

• 1) Feedback processes that provide the system directional persistence and drive such bifurcations are crucial to exhibit the observed spatiotemporal dynamics. In the neural system, this is present in the form of local excitation and long-range/global inhibition (7, 18, 19). However, as shown in our model of collective animal behavior below, we expect that similar dynamics will be observed if the necessary feedbacks are also incorporated into other models of decision-making, such as to PDF sum–based models, for example (20).

• 2) Observing similar decision dynamics requires a recursive (embodied) interplay between neural dynamics and motion in continuous space. Here, the animal’s geometrical relationship with the targets changes as it moves through physical space. Since neural interactions depend on this changing relationship, space provides a continuous variable by which the individual traverses the time-varying landscape of neural firing rates.

These essential features, along with the observed animal trajectories in the two-choice context, are reminiscent of collective decision-making in animal groups [models (41⇓⇓⇓–45), fish schools (46), bird flocks (47), and baboon troops (26)]. Below, we consider an established model of collective decision-making (41) to draw links between these two scales of biological organization—decision-making in the brain and decision-making in animal groups.

Why It Is Hard to Be Happy with What We Have... Habituation to positive changes in lifestyle and constant comparisons leave us unhappy even in the best of conditions. Why?

Dubey, Rachit, Tom Griffiths, and Peter Dayan. 2021. “Why It Is Hard to Be Happy with What We Have: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective.” PsyArXiv. December 31. doi:10.31234/osf.io/8jd2x

Abstract: The pursuit of happiness is not easy. Habituation to positive changes in lifestyle and constant comparisons leave us unhappy even in the best of conditions. Given their disruptive impact, it remains a puzzle why habituation and comparisons have come to be a part of cognition in the first place. Here, we present computational evidence that suggests that these features might play an important role in promoting adaptive behavior. Using the framework of reinforcement learning, we explore the benefit of employing a reward function that, in addition to the reward provided by the underlying task, also depends on prior expectations and relative comparisons. We find that while agents equipped with this reward function are less "happy", they learn faster and significantly outperform standard reward-based agents in a wide range of environments. The fact that these features provide considerable adaptive benefits might explain why we have the propensity to keep wanting more, even if it contributes to depression, materialism, and overconsumption.

Discussion

Sensibly or not, people often find it hard to remain happy with what they have. One enjoys a newly bought car for a time, but over time it brings fewer positive feelings and one eventually begins dreaming of the next rewarding thing to pursue. As a consequence, we keep getting lured by the promise of unfathomable future happiness whilst hardly enjoying the riches of the present. Here, we have presented a series of simulations that suggest that these seemingly maladaptive “flaws” might perhaps play an important role in promoting adaptive behavior. Using the idea of reward design, we explored the value of adaptive expectations and relative comparisons as a useful reward signal and found that across a wide range of environments, these features help an agent learn faster and be more robust to changes in the environment. Thus, even though comparisons to the past and future often induce unhappiness, they might still motivate one to strive to escape the unpleasant or (even worse) mundane present.

While relative comparisons were generally advantageous, we also found that they can be quite harmful in certain settings. For instance, in an environment with many similar options, comparisons resulted in constant dissatisfaction without any improvement in performance (Exp 2a). Thus, one lesson that can be taken from our results is that when presented with many similar choices, a decision-maker is better off curtailing comparisons and making decisions without relying on them. This also accords with the view that given the explosion of choices in modern times, learning to accept good enough will increase satisfaction and simplify decision-making35, 67. However, this leaves an open question about how a decision-maker can come to manage and curtail comparisons in the first place. Future research should investigate possible mechanisms via which an agent can set and learn its own aspiration level, which can then provide insights on how to design interventions to reduce comparisons. A promising direction in this vein could be studying how aspiration levels might be shaped via a functional relationship between a model-free and model-based system68, 69. For instance, a model-based system might alter the aspiration level of the model-free system based on fluctuations in the environment. This in turn could also be helpful to understand what leads someone to develop unreasonably high aspirations70–72 .

We observed that an agent’s internal happiness was not necessarily reflective about their performance in the environment and both being ‘too happy’ and ‘too unhappy’ led to unwanted outcomes. Agents with unreasonably high aspiration levels developed sub-optimal behavior and were also very ‘unhappy’ in their lifetimes (due to unmet aspirations). Similarly, agents that had a very low aspiration level also performed poorly as they were prone to getting stuck at a local minimum. However, these agents, despite accumulating very low objective rewards, were ‘very happy’ in their lifetimes. Together, these findings provide computational support to a growing body of research which documents the “dark side” of being too happy and are consistent with early philosophical ideas that extreme levels of any emotion, including happiness, can be undesirable73–75. Further, our finding that ‘moderately unhappy’ agents obtain the highest objective rewards can be loosely compared to the finding that people who experience slightly 21/31 lower levels of happiness are more successful in terms of income and education level compared to people with the highest levels of happiness76 .

Our results also speak to a literature in economics that explores the types of evolutionary pressures that could have produced habituation and relative consumption77–80. Similar to our work, these studies model happiness using the metaphorical principal-agent framework, where the principal (evolution) wishes the agent to be maximally fit and has the ability to choose the utility function of the agent to her best advantage. One such study shows that when an agent has limited ability to make fine distinctions (i.e., it cannot tell apart two values that are within a small distance from each other) and when it has a limited range of utility levels (i.e., it has a bound on the minimum and maximum level of happiness it can experience), then evolution would favor a utility function that is adaptive and depends on relative comparisons78.In our view, the primary contribution of these studies is showing how cognitive limitations could have favored a happiness function that depends on prior expectations and relative comparisons, and our work complements these studies by suggesting that, regardless of the agent’s constraints, this function could have also been favored because of the learning advantages it confers.

Closely related to our research is recent work that posits a role for mood in learning81–84. In these proposals, mood is formalized as the moving average of reward prediction errors (and more recently, an estimate of the Advantage function84), and is considered to represent environmental momentum. Momentum indicates whether an environment is improving or worsening and can be an important variable for adaptive behavior. Our results augment these studies by showing how (myopic) reward prediction errors (in the form of prior expectations) are a valuable aid to relative comparisons and accelerate learning in a wide variety of environments. Studying the interaction of mood with prior expectations and relative comparisons is an important question for future work.

One observation in the context of mood is that the sorts of adaptive relativities for learning that we have discussed can lead to instabilities in evaluation - modeling aspects of dynamic diseases, such as bipolar disorder81. Certainly, the subjective values of states that are taught by the subjective reward functions can vary greatly from their objective values, which is problematic if, for instance, the parameters of the subjective reward function change over time. More generally, it would be worth exploring whether dysfunctions such as anhedonic depression85–87 partly arise because of problems with subjective rather than objective components of reward sensitivity. The same issues might be more broadly relevant, given the chain of reasoning that leads from disturbed average rates of reward88 to altered motivation in depression89, potentially negative symptoms in schizophrenia90, and indeed transdiagonistically across a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions91. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to point out the careful distinctions made between hedonic and motivational aspects of rewards, as between ’liking’ and ’wanting’52, 53, that we have blurred.

Our work has several limitations which should be addressed in order to draw more concrete parallels between our simulation-based results and psychological research on happiness. For one, we assumed that the agent designer directly provided the reward function to the agent and the agent had no say in what reward function it received. This simplification meant that we were not able to study how an agent might develop biased expectations or aspirations as well as study the consequences of an agent being able to control its own happiness. A productive avenue for future research could be studying reward design using the meta-learning framework, such that an agent learns to choose the parameters of its happiness function in response to the environment it faces92, 93. Relatedly, we also did not investigate in detail the potential interaction of discounting with prior expectations and relative comparisons (since we kept a fixed value for the discount factor in our experiments). Studying this further would be an important question for the future. 22/31 Another limitation of our work is that we did not consider how aspirations can be influenced by social comparisons. Future research could address this by conducting multi-agent simulations wherein agents also compare themselves to other agents in the environment. This could also help understand how relative comparisons might interact with other components of happiness such as guilt and jealousy. Future work should also consider how the components of happiness we have considered here might interact with other affective states such as anxiety94 and boredom95. Lastly, while our choice of environments was driven in part due to their popularity within the RL community, it is not completely clear how much our results will generalize to more real-world situations and therefore, caution must be exercised when generalizing our simulation results.

We conclude by providing some perspective on the problem of overconsumption, an extremely pressing issue that severely threatens future generations. Constant habituation to modern luxuries and ever-rising aspirations are leading us to consume Earth’s natural resources at an alarming rate and resulting in rapid deterioration of our planet96–100. Paradoxically, people in modern societies are hardly more satisfied than previous generations101–104, yet we keep becoming caught in the rat race of consumption and continuing the modern obsession of growth at all costs105–109. One implication of our results is that given how advantageous habituation and relative comparisons are in promoting adaptive behavior, it could be possible that these features might be very deeply entrenched in our minds. Thus, any steps to reduce overconsumption will also need serious considerations on how to tackle these biases of the human mind and will require the expertise of scientists from multiple disciplines. For better or worse, we are prone to becoming trapped in a cycle of never-ending wants and desires, and it is more urgent than ever to develop concrete policies and large-scale interventions to reduce habituation and comparisons.

US Economists: Increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution; another area of consensus is concern with climate change

Consensus among economists 2020 – A sharpening of the picture. Doris Geide-Stevenson and Alvaro La Parra Perez. Weber State Univ, December 2021. https://t.co/NdkWtZOUQH

Abstract: Based on an extensive survey of the members of the American Economic Association this paper compares consensus among economists on a number of economic propositions over four decades. The main result is an increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution. Economists now embrace the role of fiscal policy in a way not obvious in previous surveys and are largely supportive of government policies that mitigate income inequality. Another area of consensus is concern with climate change and the use of appropriate policy tools to address climate change.

Airbnb: Within the same neighborhood, hosts from minority groups charge 3.2 percent less for comparable listings

Laouénan, Morgane, and Roland Rathelot. 2022. "Can Information Reduce Ethnic Discrimination? Evidence from Airbnb." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 14 (1): 107-32. Dec 2021. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20190188

Abstract: We use data from Airbnb to identify the mechanisms underlying discrimination against ethnic minority hosts. Within the same neighborhood, hosts from minority groups charge 3.2 percent less for comparable listings. Since ratings provide guests with increasingly rich information about a listing's quality, we can measure the contribution of statistical discrimination, building upon Altonji and Pierret (2001). We find that statistical discrimination can account for the whole ethnic price gap: ethnic gaps would disappear if all unobservables were revealed. Also, three-quarters (2.5 points) of the initial ethnic gap can be attributed to inaccurate beliefs of potential guests about hosts' average group quality.