Fluctuating asymmetry, a measure of small random deviations from perfect bodily symmetry, was previously considered an honest indicator of genetic quality, but this paper says it is not

Formal models for the study of the relationship between fluctuating asymmetry and fitness in humans. Arodi Farrera. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, July 21 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24588

Abstract

Objectives: To evaluate three of the main verbal models that have been proposed to explain the relationship between fluctuating asymmetry and fitness in humans: the “good genes,” the “good development,” and the “growth” hypotheses.

Materials and Methods: A formal model was generated for each verbal model following three steps. First, based on the literature, a theoretical causal model and the theoretical object of inquiry were outlined. Second, an empirical causal model and the targets of inference were defined using observational data of facial asymmetries and life-history traits related to fitness. Third, generalized linear models and causal inference were used as the estimation strategy.

Results: The results suggest that the theoretical and empirical assumptions of the “good genes” hypothesis should be reformulated. The results were compatible with most of the empirical assumptions of “the good development” hypothesis but suggest that further discussion of its theoretical assumptions is needed. The results were less informative about the “growth” hypothesis, both theoretically and empirically. There was a positive association between facial fluctuating asymmetry and the number of offspring that was not compatible with any of the empirical causal models evaluated.

Conclusions: Although the three hypotheses focus on different aspects of the link between asymmetry and fitness, their overlap opens the possibility of a unified theory on the subject. The results of this study make explicit which assumptions need to be updated and discussed, facilitating the advancement of this area of research. Overall, this study elucidates the potential benefit of using formal models for theory revision and development.

4 DISCUSSION

In this contribution, I evaluated three of the most common verbal models used to understand the relationship between FA and fitness in humans: the “good genes,” the “good development,” and the “growth” hypotheses. For this purpose, I generated formal models (i.e., estimands and causal frameworks) for each hypothesis and tested them in the particular case of facial asymmetries and reproductive success.

4.1 Theoretical assumptions

The present study shows that even if the approaches are different, some of the theoretical assumptions overlap across hypotheses (Figure 1), opening the opportunity for a unified formal model. Nonetheless, they show differences in two key assumptions. First, these hypotheses differ in whether they consider that FA reflects some cost to the individual, distinguishing between FA as a reliable signal of DS that reflects the quality of the individual (H1 and H2: symmetrical traits are costly) and as a reliable signal that requires no additional cost because it is tightly associated with some attribute of the individual (H3: allometric constraints that link body size and FA). This distinction has been discussed mainly in the framework of signaling theory (Barker et al., 2019), but in the context of human asymmetries and fitness, this discussion is currently problematic primarily because the way these concepts have been applied overlooks recent conceptual advances.

From the framework of signaling theory, attributes other than physiological information are recognized as signals (e.g., embodied capital or noetic attributes, Barker et al., 2019). A broader concept like this would allow for more comprehensive verbal models of the relationship between FA and fitness in humans, in which cultural practices such as the use of makeup (Killian et al., 2018), and social norms like standards of beauty (Kleisner et al., 2017) are also included in the interpretation and scope of the research. Signaling theory also recognizes that the way multiple signals are integrated with each other and with socioecological factors is an important source of information (Patricelli & Hebets, 2016). This would promote studying asymmetry along with other types of signals, as has been done during the last decade on topics such as mate choice (Jones & Jaeger, 2019; van Dogen et al., 2020) or the individual's health status (Foo et al., 2017; Mogilski & Welling, 2017). Addressing multiple signals as an integrated signaling phenotype or explaining how they are theoretically related to each other (e.g., Luoto et al., 2021) could improve and extend our understanding of the topic. Moreover, instead of being considered a static measurement (i.e., values computed at one point in time), individual asymmetries could be explored over different timescales. In the dynamic context of face-to-face interaction, for instance, asymmetric facial movement can be perceived as unattractive, regardless of the static asymmetry score of the individual (Hughes & Aung, 2018) because, for example, it conveys information about the sender's age (Kamachi et al., 2019). Taking into account that the causes and effects of asymmetry can be different in static and dynamic contexts could also clarify some of the contradictory evidence on the subject.

Another theoretical assumption in which the hypotheses evaluated differ is whether they highlight the role of developmental plasticity (i.e., phenotypic adjustments in response to the environment) on the expression of phenotypic variation and, particularly, on the production of asymmetric traits. Specifically, this assumption differentiates between research on FA variation that focuses on its genetic basis (H1: symmetry reflects good genes) and research that focuses on the development pathways that lead to such within-individual variation (H2 and H3: symmetry reflects the interplay between the organism and its circumstances). Although the former ignores the idea that has been present since the 1980s in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (Müller, 2007) that the influence of genotype on the phenotype is structured by developmental processes, the role of development in the latter is not entirely clear either. New verbal and formal models with a different set of theoretical assumptions are needed to get a better, refined representation of the role of development in the relationship between FA and fitness in humans.

4.2 Empirical assumptions

This study also shows some similarities and differences between hypotheses when the results are compared with the expectations derived from the empirical assumptions. In the case of the “good genes” hypothesis, the corresponding empirical causal model expects that individuals with greater facial FA values have less reproductive success than individuals with less asymmetry. Moreover, it expects that part of the phenotypic variance of facial FA is explained by genetic variation. In contrast, I found that individuals with greater facial FA values have more offspring and a heritability close to zero (i.e., almost none or little facial FA variation is explained by genetic variation). The latter result is the first report of heritability of FA in the human face and is consistent with previous research showing very low or no heritability of other traits in humans and other species (Johnson et al., 2008; Leamy & Klingenberg, 2005). These results suggest that the empirical causal model for this hypothesis needs to be revised and refined.

The empirical causal model derived from the “good development” hypothesis posits that because FA is the result of poor health, no direct link should be found between facial FA and the number of offspring. In contrast, the results showed a positive effect of facial FA on the number of offspring. On the other hand, based on the intergenerational maternal effect (Wells, 2018), this empirical causal model assumes that the short stature of some individuals is the result of a suboptimal maternal niche and that individuals who develop under these conditions may favor quantity over quality of offspring, and vice versa. The results of this study were compatible with this assumption. Specifically, it was found that, regardless of asymmetry, individuals with poor health status (measured as adult height) had more children, an effect reported in some previous studies (e.g., Krzyzanowska et al., 2015), but not in others (e.g., Helle, 2008). The results were also compatible with the expected negative effect of height on facial FA in this hypothesis, an effect reported in previous studies (Kirchengast, 2019; Özener & Ertuğrul, 2011) using FA measurements of non-facial traits. In other words, these results are compatible with most of the assumptions derived from the empirical causal model for this hypothesis, except for the assumption of no direct link between facial FA and the number of offspring, which should be refined to include potential mechanisms that may explain the relationship between these variables.

The empirical assumptions of the “growth” hypothesis are unclear as to whether facial FA directly and/or indirectly influences the number of offspring, what would be the expected direction of this effect, or what mechanism would be responsible. Therefore, it is currently not possible to interpret the results obtained on this assumption. Nonetheless, this empirical causal model posits two additional assumptions. First, that body and face size are allometrically related in adults and that facial FA is a by-product of individual growth. In contrast to previous studies (e.g., Gateño et al., 2018; Mitteroecker et al., 2013), the results were compatible, with high uncertainty, with an effect close to zero. These results suggest that more discussion is needed on the empirical causal model derived for this hypothesis.

In all hypotheses, I found a positive association between facial FA and the number of offspring, which is not consistent with any of the three empirical causal models evaluated. This result suggests that additional explanatory variables should be formally included in these models to further understand and test this relationship. One candidate variable could be the age-dependent pattern of FA expression (e.g., Wilson & Manning, 1996). Since facial FA can be a by-product of soft tissue aging, older individuals may express higher values. Further, this link could be related to the number of offspring in two ways. First, in line with the “good development” hypothesis, since reproduction takes time and considerable metabolic demands, individuals who have reproduced more and are older may also be more asymmetric. Second, in line with the “growth” hypothesis, fully developed (older and bigger) and therefore more asymmetric individuals could be those who have also had more opportunities to reproduce. Datasets collected specifically for testing these verbal models and updated formal models are needed to confirm the role of aging or any other variable outside those proposed in this work.

There are at least two factors related to the estimation strategy that limit the interpretation of these results (section 4.2). One of them is the sample over which inferences were drawn. The dataset used in this study was not explicitly collected to answer the theoretical object of inquiry (i.e., the relationship between FA and fitness), and thus, the empirical causal models were designed after data collection, instead of before as required to warrant causal claims (Rohrer, 2018). Other potential factors are related to bias in the computation of FA values, which have been extensively reviewed elsewhere (Graham, 2021b; Graham et al., 2010), including the presence of other forms of asymmetry, measurement error, or mixtures of additive and multiplicative errors. These limitations suggest that these results (section 4.1) must be replicated using more rigorous estimation strategies and other databases that allow comparing the three hypotheses.

Future studies could further benefit from revising, in light of theory development, the statistical practice associated with FA. For instance, rethinking isolated FA values as a target of inquiry when evidence suggests that in some contexts it is common to find different forms of asymmetry together (e.g., human face: Farrera et al., 2015; Quinto-Sánchez et al., 2015). Formal models of descriptive explanations that instead address the dynamics that could give rise to patterns of asymmetric mixtures (e.g., Graham et al., 1993; Hallgrímsson, 1998) could shed new light on the topic or clarify existent evidence.

Why it's easier to approach other people's problems with wisdom than one' s own

The Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Solomon’s Paradox: Impact of Mood and Self-Transcendence. Wentao Xu, Kaili Zhang and Fengyan Wang. Front. Psychol., July 22 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.901012

Abstract: Solomon’s paradox of wise reasoning, in which performance of wisdom differs when reasoning on an issue in one’s own life vs. another’s life, has been supported by robust evidence. However, the underlying psychological mechanism remains unclear. This asymmetry of wise reasoning may be explained by the different mindsets of self-transcendence when people reason about various conflicts (personal vs. others’), and mood should play a fundamental role. To explore this issue, three hundred ninety-nine participants were recruited to test a hypothesized model. The results supported the effect of Solomon’s paradox—that is, participants endorsed wise-reasoning strategies more strongly when resolving others’ social conflicts than their own. Further mediation analysis showed that the sequential mediation model was supported. Solomon’s paradox can be explained by the difference in positive affect and self-transcendence when reasoning about the two conflicts. This study directly verifies the mediating role of self-transcendence in Solomon’s paradox. At the same time, reasoning about personal affairs reduces individuals’ self-transcendence mindset, and positive affect can explain the differences. These results are helpful for understanding and effectively avoiding Solomon’s wisdom dilemma.

Discussion

Although Solomon’s paradox of wise reasoning has received much attention (Kross and Grossmann, 2012; Grossmann and Kross, 2014; Huynh et al., 2017), the psychological mechanisms involved are still not quite precise. The present study directly examined the role of mood and self-transcendence and found that participants showed significantly lower self-transcendence when reasoning about personal conflicts than about those of others, supporting H1. Self-transcendence mediated the relationship between conflict type and wise reasoning, supporting H2. Positive affect and self-transcendence played significant sequential mediating role between conflict type and wise reasoning, partly supporting H3. The main contribution of this study is that these findings go deeper into the multiple occurrence mechanism of Solomon’s paradox. Additionally, the mediating role of positive affect provides theoretical guidance to avoid Solomon’s dilemma through emotion management.

Solomon’s Paradox

Solomon’s paradox concerns the wisdom all people experience in life. Impaired wisdom performance in the face of personal life problems is a real problem that people should confront. Our results are consistent with previous findings that people not only use less wisdom-related cognitive strategies when coping with conflicts (Grossmann and Kross, 2014) but also do not recognize the effectiveness of wise reasoning strategies (Huynh et al., 2017). Unlike Huynh et al. (2017), who found significant differences only in some dimensions in terms of conflict types, our study found that Solomon’s paradox was represented on all subcomponents of wise reasoning, possibly because we adopted a between-subjects design (compared to Study 2) and obtained a larger sample size (compared to Study 1). Regarding the mechanisms involved, Grossmann (2017) explained this difference in terms of cognitive perspective when faced with different conflicts and provides indirect evidence with the moderating effect of self-decentering. In addition, Huynh et al. (2017) found that pursuit of virtue moderates Solomon’s paradox, suggesting that psychological factors may exist beyond perspective preference.

The Mediating Role of Self-Transcendence

While the relationship between wisdom and self-transcendence is undeniable, the positioning of self-transcendence in different wisdom theories varies widely. For example, Aldwin et al. (2020) viewed self-transcendence as the core of wisdom or even wisdom itself while Grossmann et al.’s (2020) contextually oriented generic model of wisdom had difficulty accommodating self-transcendence in a rounded way. When wisdom is viewed as a personality trait, we argue that self-transcendence should be included in its complex construct. In contrast, if wisdom is considered a contextual manifestation of wisdom reasoning, both trait- and state-level self-transcendence should be subsumed as influences.

Similar to Le’s (2010) study in which trait self-transcendence positively predicted wisdom personality, the present study found that simply thinking about one’s interpersonal conflict reduced self-transcendent mindset, which led to poor performance in wisdom reasoning, and that self-transcendence mediated the relationship between conflict type and wisdom reasoning. This not only creatively develops a new paradigm of self-transcendence manipulation but also directly explains the occurrence mechanism of Solomon’s paradox and expands the depth and breadth of research in both fields, which should be integrated at theoretical and empirical levels in the relationship between the two in the future.

The Mediating Role of Mood

Early theories of wisdom paid little attention to the importance of emotions with only Ardelt’s (2003) three-dimensional view of wisdom incorporating affect as a core dimension in the wisdom construct. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the relationship between emotions and emotion-related psychological characteristics and wisdom, such as Thomas et al.’s (2019) San Diego Wisdom Inventory, which includes emotion regulation as one of six dimensions, Schneider et al.’s (2021) finding that emotional intelligence positively predicts both trait- and state-level wisdom, and the MORE life experience model, which considers emotion regulation and empathy to be important resources of wisdom (Glück et al., 2019; Glück et al., 2013). A longitudinal follow-up study by Grossmann et al. (2019) found a positive correlation between wise reasoning and emotional diversity rather than intensity.

Our study supports the positive predictive role of positive affect and emotional intelligence on self-transcendence and wise reasoning, which suggests an essential link between wisdom and emotions and related abilities (Grossmann et al., 2019; Schneider et al., 2021); on the other hand, the mediating role of positive affect in Solomon’s paradox was found, which suggests the complexity of the underlying mechanisms, where essential positive affect suppression beyond the cognitive perspective and self-transcendent mindset can lead directly to impaired wise reasoning endorsement. These results point to a theoretical path to improving wisdom through emotion management.

However, no significant differences between conditions were observed in any specific negative emotions. By comparison, Huynh et al.’s (2017) study also revealed quite low negative affect (M = 1.93, SD = 0.81, α = 0.91) and relatively higher positive affect (M = 3.26, SD = 0.80, α = 0.89). This may be an inherent defect of event reconstruction technology: After all, the conflicts recalled has passed.

Limitation and Theoretical Implication

The main limitation of this study was that the effect sizes of the main findings were relatively small. The effect size for Solomon’s paradox was ηp2 = 0.05–0.25 in Grossmann and Kross (2014) and ηp2 = 0.01–0.05 in Huynh (2017), and the effect size was ηp2 = 0.03 in our study. Overall, our results generally agree with those of Huynh (2017), but both are significantly smaller than the effect sizes derived by Grossmann and Kross (2014). One possible explanation is that Grossmann and Kross (2014) used three self-assessment questions and one objective scoring indicator to measure wise reasoning (Study 1: ηp2 = 0.25). The effect sizes decreased sharply when the number of questions was increased to just seven (Study 2: ηp2 = 0.12, Study 3: ηp2 = 0.05) whereas our study and Huynh (2017) used a 19/21-question situational wise reasoning scale; robust measures of standardized scales may have more difficulty capturing Solomon’s paradox. Furthermore, Grossmann and Kross (2014) examined the use of wise reasoning strategies. In contrast, both our study and Huynh (2017) measured the endorsement of wise reasoning strategies, and the subtle differences between the two may also explain the difference in effect sizes. However, this also suggests that the mere difference in endorsing wise reasoning strategies of ηp2 = 0.01–0.05 may translate into a ηp2 = 0.05–0.25 difference in wise reasoning. These findings provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive and behavioral robustness of Solomon’s paradox.

Furthermore, major information difference between what we know about personal conflicts and those of friends may be a confounder in Solomon’s paradox when event-reconstruction is used. Fictitious conflicts used in Grossmann and Kross (2014) provide almost the same amount of but quite thin information for both conditions of personal and others’ conflicts. The event-reconstruction technology makes up for the lack of information, but raised a new problem of potential asymmetry of information in both conditions. To a large extent, this asymmetry may be an important reason for Solomon’s paradox in daily lives. However, future research should take measures to separate and investigate or control this confounding variable for a deeper understanding of Solomon’s paradox. Another limitation is that ethnic backgrounds and native languages are not included in this study, which may impair the measurements.

More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it

COVIDisgust: Language processing through the lens of partisanship. Veranika Puhacheuskaya, Isabell Hubert Lyall, Juhani Järvikivi. PLoS, July 21, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271206

Abstract: Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word’s disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However, the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplaying it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust proneness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media’s stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.

General discussion

Our study tested the hypothesis that the media’s stance on the pandemic may elevate or reduce participants’ disgust, which would affect word ratings and word recognition latencies. We also predicted that such person-based factors as disgust proneness and political ideology will mediate the effect. A word rating (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision (Experiment 2) study found partial support for these hypotheses. In brief, the main findings were as follows:

• More liberal participants rated the stimuli as more disgusting after being exposed to the headlines downplaying the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants gave higher disgust ratings following the headlines emphasizing it.
• More liberal participants were more extreme with their ratings and gave a broader range of responses (rating disgusting words as more disgusting and negative words as more negative, as well as rating non-disgusting words as less disgusting and positive words as more positive) than their more conservative peers regardless of the condition.
• Disgusting and negative words had a facilitatory effect for more liberal participants (shorter RTs) and an inhibitory effect for more conservative participants (longer RTs).
• More disgust-prone individuals rated everything as more disgusting than low disgust-prone ones.
• In the severe condition, low disgust-prone participants rated all the stimuli as more disgusting and negative, whereas high disgust-prone participants only rated low to moderately disgusting words as more disgusting and negative.

Affective word ratings and political ideology

As expected, political orientation had a clear impact on word ratings. As we noted in the Introduction, the perception of the severity of the virus became an identity marker for both ends of the political spectrum. Given such drastic polarization, it is not surprising that the two types of the headlines produced the exact opposite effect on the participants depending on their political ideology. More liberal participants in our study were more disgusted by the headlines downplaying the severity of COVID-19 than those emphasizing it, rating everything as more disgusting afterwards. In contrast, more conservative participants assigned higher disgust ratings following the severe headlines. We offer two possible explanations for this result, one based on direct affective evaluation and the other on the disgust system response due to stimulus habituation. According to the first explanation, the stance on the virus from the political outgroup (downplaying headlines for the liberal participants and severe headlines for the conservative ones) evoked a strong emotional response, which translated into higher ratings on the disgust scale. However, in this case, one would also expect lower ratings on the valence scale depending on the headline, and this was not what we found. That leaves us the second possibility. As the liberal narrative revolves around the costs of not treating the virus seriously enough, they may have become habituated and desensitized to it. The take on the danger of COVID-19 may thus be perceived as the “default” by them and no longer alert their disgust system, whereas headlines contradicting this view might instantly elevate their disgust levels, signaling danger. The opposite, of course, should be true for more conservative participants. Note that one of our hypotheses was that more conservative participants will discard the severe headlines as alarmist, since previous research showed that conservatives have less trust in contradictory media and firmly believe that COVID-19 does not pose big health risks [55]. The current findings suggest that this was either not the case or, if it was the case, it did not stop their disgust system from ramping up. All in all, this is in line with mounting evidence that conservatives are more prone to disgust [49–51]. Even though previous studies found conservatives to be less concerned about the pandemic and less eager to engage in social distancing than liberals [55, 70], our results show that highlighting the danger of the virus still makes conservative participants give higher disgust ratings. Whether this translates into more adherence to safety protocols is a topic for further research.

One novel finding of our study is more extreme disgust and valence ratings by more liberal participants compared to their more conservative peers regardless of the condition. Disgusting and negative words were rated as more disgusting and more negative by more liberal participants, and the opposite was true for non-disgusting and positive words. We are not aware of any research examining whether political ideology correlates with ratings’ extremity. It is entirely possible that this broader range of ratings is additionally mediated by some other personality traits and this needs to be verified by future research.

Affective word ratings and disgust proneness

Disgust proneness affected word ratings over and above the effects of political ideology. Regardless of the headline type, more disgust-prone individuals rated all the stimuli as more disgusting and negative stimuli as more negative than less disgust-prone individuals. This demonstrates that disgust ratings can serve as a good proxy for participant’s disgust and adds to the growing body of evidence regarding the effects of disgust proneness on cognition in general and language processing in particular. [40, 41] found that disgust sensitivity was positively correlated with pupil dilation during the processing of stereotype-based clashing statements, suggesting that more disgust-prone individuals may experience greater arousal when interacting with stimuli that are disgusting either physically or morally. The results of the current study further indicate that even single word processing can be significantly affected by the participant’s disgust sensitivity. In addition, disgust proneness significantly interacted with the headline type. While low disgust-prone participants rated all the stimuli as more disgusting and negative when the threat of COVID-19 was highlighted (severe headlines), high disgust-prone participants only rated low and moderately disgusting words as more disgusting and positive words as more negative in the severe condition. As we addressed in the Discussion after Experiment 1, this may be due to the ceiling effect since ratings assigned by high-disgust prone participants to extremely valenced stimuli were very close to the top of the disgust scale and the bottom of the valence scale.

Political ideology vs disgust proneness in lexical access: The role of the pandemic

Our findings from the lexical decision experiment partially corroborated and extended the results for French by [46]. The authors found that disgusting words had a facilitatory effect for lexical recognition in less disgust-prone participants and an inhibiting effect in more disgust-prone participants. Our study, however, found that political ideology was more predictive of RTs than disgust sensitivity. Even though the general direction of the effect was the same (more liberal participants patterned like less disgust-prone ones), only political ideology significantly improved the model’s fit when both factors were examined together. Overall, disgusting and negative words had a facilitatory effect on word recognition for more liberal participants and an inhibitory effect for more conservative participants. To the best of our knowledge, the interaction between political ideology and lexical decision times has not yet been researched. One possible explanation for the dominant effect of political ideology in our study is a big political component pertinent to the ongoing pandemic from its very beginning. [55] suggested that political ideology was uniquely predictive of the participant’s COVID-19 behavior even when controlling for such variables as belief in science and COVID-related anxiety. Thus, it may be that political views have temporarily become a more salient marker of the behavioral immune system response than disgust sensitivity per se. This is, of course, a speculative idea that needs to be addressed by further research. One way to verify this would be to conduct the same study during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

Differential effects of traits and states on lexical access

We did not find an effect of dynamically changing disgust levels (induced by headlines) on lexical access. Even though the headlines successfully affected participants’ ratings in Experiment 1, they did not have an effect on RTs in Experiment 2—neither by themselves nor in interaction with person-based factors. Unlike headlines, however, political ideology was found predictive of word recognition latencies. Why would that be the case? Previous research has found political views to be just one manifestation of a cognitive and affective make-up and to have a robust correlation with threat perception [74]. It is thus not surprising that aligning with a particular political ideology may make disgust-related concepts in long-term memory more or less accessible (see [75] for converging findings with threat-related concepts). Thus, our results suggest a difference between fluctuating states (i.e., the participant’s emotional response to a particular set of headlines) and stable traits (i.e., aligning with more conservative or more liberal ideology) in affecting the ease of accessing disgusting and negative words. One alternative possibility to consider is that an exposure to COVID-related news may need to be longer to see an effect on lexical decision (we only showed a handful of headlines that the participants could switch through at their own pace). This could be tested by future research.

Limitations of present research

Our study had several limitations that need to be noted. First and foremost, we did not collect participants’ socioeconomic status, belief in science, self-perceived likelihood of contracting COVID-19, or COVID-19 related anxiety. Second, a convenience sample of university students produced a slightly skewed distribution of gender, age, and political ideology (most participants were young and more liberal females), which may have affected the results. That said, within the range of scores obtained in this experiment, the distribution was very close to normal.

One other concern needs to be addressed. Since our headlines reported on the pandemic, it is important to make sure that word recognition latencies were not affected by the presence of words directly related to the pandemic and to disease in general. As no lists of pandemic-related words exist, it is difficult to estimate how many words in the final dataset satisfied this criterion. Using our best judgment, we counted 6 out of 99 words that were disease-related, with the disgust indexes given in brackets: “unhealthy” (-0.7), “germ” (0.9), “sickening” (1.24), “deadly” (0.8), “parasite” (1.5), “disease” (1). Three of those words occurred in the severe headlines in full (“sickening”, “disease”, “deadly”) and one in part (“bloodthirsty”–“blood”). As one can see, the words were relatively dispersed on the disgust scale. To make sure the results of Experiment 2 were not contaminated by this overlap, we reran the models without these four words. While disgust proneness was no longer significant, political ideology remained significant. This, once again, testifies to the stability of the effect of political ideology.

All in all, our studies found that not only do headlines about the pandemic affect the participants’ disgust levels but that they also interact with a range of person-based factors, namely how prone the participant is to disgust and what political ideology they align with.

We routinely miss important information that is right in front of our eyes because our brains generate predictive models of the world that can overshadow what's out there

Normal blindness: when we Look But Fail To See. Jeremy M. Wolfe, Anna Kosovicheva, Benjamin Wolfe. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 21 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.006

Highlights

Looked But Failed to See (LBFTS) errors occur when observers fail to notice a clearly visible item, and occur across a wide range of tasks and settings, from driving and medical image perception to laboratory visual search tasks.

We outline a new, unified account of LBFTS errors, arguing that processes that serve us well under most circumstances are guaranteed to produce a steady stream of LBFTS errors under some circumstances.

LBFTS can be thought of as a form of ‘normal blindness’. It is obviously far less severe than clinical blindness but it is so universal that its costs are substantial at a societal level.

Abstract: Humans routinely miss important information that is ‘right in front of our eyes’, from overlooking typos in a paper to failing to see a cyclist in an intersection. Recent studies on these ‘Looked But Failed To See’ (LBFTS) errors point to a common mechanism underlying these failures, whether the missed item was an unexpected gorilla, the clearly defined target of a visual search, or that simple typo. We argue that normal blindness is the by-product of the limited-capacity prediction engine that is our visual system. The processes that evolved to allow us to move through the world with ease are virtually guaranteed to cause us to miss some significant stimuli, especially in important tasks like driving and medical image perception.

Keywords: inattentional blindnessvisual searchfunctional visual fieldattentioneye movements

Boys/men are more isolated than girls/women through most of the life course; gap is much greater for the never married & those with disrupted relationship histories; levels of social isolation steadily increase from adolescence for both men/women

Gender and Social Isolation across the Life Course. Debra Umberson, Zhiyong Lin, Hyungmin Cha. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, July 20, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465221109634

Abstract: Social isolation has robust adverse effects on health, well-being, dementia risk, and longevity. Although most studies suggest similar effects of isolation on the health of men and women, there has been much less attention to gendered patterns of social isolation over the life course—despite decades of research suggesting gender differences in social ties. We build on theoretical frames of constrained choice and gender-as-relational to argue that gender differences in isolation are apparent but depend on timing in the life course and marital/partnership history. Results indicate that boys/men are more isolated than girls/women through most of the life course, and this gender difference is much greater for the never married and those with disrupted relationship histories. Strikingly, levels of social isolation steadily increase from adolescence through later life for both men and women.

Keywords: aging, gender, life course, relationships, social isolation

Thriving at work & work-life balance: Those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size

Why Microsoft Measures Employee Thriving, Not Engagement. Dawn Klinghoffer and Elizabeth McCune. Harvard Business Review Home. June 24, 2022. https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement

Summary.   As the pandemic continues and many people work hybrid schedules, people analytics researchers at Microsoft realized they needed to move from measuring employee engagement to measuring employee thriving. Defined as “to be energized and...more

One thing is clear: None of us are the same people today as we were prior to 2020. So, as our employees change, the ways we can best empower them need to evolve, too.

At Microsoft, where we work on the People Analytics team, that means learning what the data can tell us about how our employees aspire to live their lives meaningfully. In particular, we landed on a new way of measuring thriving, at both work and outside of it, that goes beyond engagement only.

In this article, we share how and why we came to this measurement — and how your own company can learn from our experiences.

Why Thriving Is the New North Star

Prior to this year, we conducted one lengthy, annual survey that tracked employee engagement. It often took months to digest and plan actions around. Yet, we consistently encountered challenges in building a shared definition of engagement across the company. And often, despite employee engagement scores that would seem to indicate that things were going well, it became clear that employees were struggling when we dived deeper into the responses. To us, this was a reflection that we hadn’t yet set a high enough bar for the employee experience, and it motivated us to do better in measuring what matters.

So, we started asking employees for feedback through a shorter yet more focused survey every six months, for which we partnered with employee success platform Glint. This new approach is helping us stay closer to employees’ feedback and take clearer and more immediate action in response.

We also sought to define a new, higher bar that went beyond engagement only, drawing inspiration from many sources. One was what Our Chief People Officer, Kathleen Hogan, calls “The 5 P’s.” Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy, it breaks down employee fulfillment into five key, successive components: pay, perks, people, pride, and purpose. In a time that has prompted many to reflect on the role of work and career in their lives, it felt critical to recalibrate our listening systems to measure our progress towards that end goal — a sense of purpose. We were also inspired by Ross School of Business’s Gretchen Spreitzer and colleagues’ research on thriving as the antidote to languishing. As we moved beyond employee engagement, we decided to focus on our own version of employee thriving.

At Microsoft, we define thriving as “to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work.” This is the new core aspiration we have for our employees, one that challenges us to push ourselves every day so every employee can feel they’re pursuing that sense of purpose. Our focus on thriving isn’t just about recovering from the impact of the pandemic or matching pre-Covid employee sentiment scores. It’s about coming out the other side and doing even better.

What It Looks Like to Thrive

When our first employee survey data came back earlier this year, we began benchmarking our thriving for the first time. We looked at not just how many people reported they were thriving, but calculated company-wide averages based on responses from a five-point scale — if an employee selected “strongly disagree,” that translated to an individual score of zero, and “strongly agree” would be the equivalent of a 100. This ensured our insights took into account all positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

After analyzing the results, we found that thriving averaged a 77 across the company — a number we see as strong, but one we can still work on. When we broke down thriving into its three components, we saw that meaningful work (79) and empowerment (79) both scored higher among employees than energized (73).

To understand the employee experiences behind the numbers, we dove into the open-ended survey responses. Three key themes stood out.

Culture matters.

What we saw was that employees who were thriving and not thriving were both talking about culture, but in vastly different ways.

Thriving employees talked about a collaborative environment and teamwork with colleagues, an inclusive culture with autonomy and flexibility, and well-being support. These comments reference examples such as being able to have honest, non-judgmental conversations on difficult topics, with a focus on finding solutions.

Employees who weren’t thriving talked about experiencing siloes, bureaucracy, and a lack of collaboration. In these comments we hear a lack of agency and a sense for being a cog in a machine. In other words, the opposite of being empowered and energized to do meaningful work.

Thriving takes a village.

Diving deeper into the numbers, it’s clear that everyone has a role to play. At Microsoft, we’ve long studied importance of managers, and we know their role has been more crucial than ever as they helped their teams navigate through uncertainty. It’s heartening to see our managers shine during such a difficult time. “My manager treats me with dignity and respect” scored a 93, meaning almost every employee selected “strongly agree” — but this also means we still need to ensure that’s the experience for every single employee. We also saw high scores in confidence in manager’s effectiveness (87) and managers’ support for careers (85), showing strong sentiment that managers are helping their teams succeed at the company.

While we see these scores as strengths, they’re strengths we want to keep building to ensure a positive lived experience for all employees.

Thriving and work-life balance are not the same thing.

As we think about how to support thriving, it’s important to distinguish it from work-life balance. While thriving is focused on being energized and empowered to do meaningful work in your role, work-life balance reflects employees’ personal lives, too. Employees rated their satisfaction with work-life balance as a 71, and while it’s encouraging to see work-life balance improving, it hasn’t fully recovered yet to pre-Covid levels. And there are times when thriving and work-life balance can move in different directions.

For example, an early-in-career employee who feels underutilized in their role may have great work-life balance from a perspective of hours and workload, but not feel energized while they’re at work or inspired by the meaning and impact of what they’re working on. On the other hand, there are times when people can thrive and feel so fulfilled by the hard work it takes to make progress on a big project that they can make a short-term tradeoff on work-life balance.

We know that work-life balance may ebb and flow, but wanted to learn from employees who both rated their work-life balance highly and said they were thriving in that work-focused portion of their life. So, we compared the 56% of our employees who said they were thriving and reported higher work-life balance to the 16% who were thriving but had lower work-life balance scores.

By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size. This reinforces what we know from earlier work-life balance research and network size analysis, which showed us that increased collaboration does have a negative impact on employees’ perception of work-life balance. It also confirms that collaboration is not inherently bad — for many employees, those times of close teamwork and striving toward a common goal can fuel thriving. However, it is important to be mindful of how intense collaboration can impact work-life balance, and leaders and employees alike should guard against that intensity becoming 24/7.

Challenges for Thriving on the Road Ahead

As more and more companies look closely at how they listen to and help their employees, it’s important to spend time understanding what your north star is — and to make sure it’s connected to the outcomes you are trying to drive as an organization. This new era of hybrid work won’t work for employees if you’re not listening — or if what you’re listening for doesn’t evolve along with them and how they do their jobs. There isn’t a singular one-size-fits-all solution out there, but paying close attention to how your employees thrive is one path forward.

We know this is just the beginning of our journey to understand this in our own organization. Looking holistically at the written responses from those who weren’t thriving offers more clues about where else we can improve for our employees. For example, while employees scored “I feel included in my team” highly at 86, by far the most common thread among those who were not thriving was a feeling of exclusion — from a lack of collaboration to feeling left out of decisions to struggling with politics and bureaucracy. We’ll continue to focus on ensuring inclusion is felt as part of our culture across all teams and orgs.

Ultimately, every score, whether high or low, gives us a baseline to keep listening, learning, improving, and adapting to new changes that still undoubtedly lie ahead. As we enter the hybrid work era, we’re excited to keep studying the numbers even more deeply to understand how thriving can be unlocked across different work locations, professions, and ways of working.

Dawn Klinghoffer is the head of people analytics at Microsoft. Elizabeth McCune is the director of employee listening systems and culture measurement at Microsoft.

Autistic people outperform neurotypicals in a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Autistic people outperform neurotypicals in a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes. Liam Cross, Andrea Piovesan, Gray Atherton. Autism Research, July 20 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2782

Abstract: Prior research suggests that while autistic people may demonstrate poorer facial emotion recognition when stimuli are human, these differences lessen when stimuli are anthropomorphic. To investigate this further, this work explores emotion recognition in autistic and neurotypical adults (n = 196). Groups were compared on a standard and a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Results indicated that autistic individuals were not significantly different from neurotypicals on the standard version. However, autistic people outperformed neurotypicals on the cartoon version. The implications for these findings regarding emotion recognition deficits and the social motivation account of autism are discussed and support the view of socio-cognitive differences rather than deficits in this population.

Lay Summary: The Reading the Mind in the Eyes test and a cartoon version were tested on autistic and neurotypical adults. Autistic adults were not significantly different on the original test compared to neurotypicals, but they outperformed neurotypical adults on the cartoon version.

DISCUSSION

Results showed that autistic people did not perform significantly worse on the RME than NTs. While this was not as hypothesized, it may be that the high proportion of female participants boosted ASC performance. Previous work, for instance, has shown that autistic females do not perform differently to NT females (Holt et al., 2014) and that there is a female advantage in the RME (Kirkland et al., 2013). Additionally, this may be explained by adding definitions to the RME to remove variance associated with vocabulary differences. In line with our predictions, individuals with ASC outperformed NTs on the cartoon version of the task. These results suggest that autistic individuals may lack a human-specific specialization in this domain seen in NTs. For instance, NTs performed better on the RME than the C-RME, while this was not the case for autistic individuals, whose performance on the two versions did not significantly differ. This is the first study to find that autistic people outperform NTs on the RME.1 Our results suggest that NT people have more difficulty than autistic people when the agent being evaluated is anthropomorphic. Our findings also suggest that autistic people are perhaps not experiencing the same processing deficits as NTs when taking the C-RME. Why might this be?

We speculated that this could be driven by either a reduced motivation for actual human agents or an increased motivation to evaluate cartoon agents. The descriptive statistics in the present study suggest that the interaction seen in the present study was likely driven not by autistic individuals over performing on the C-RME but by NTs underperforming on the C-RME. Additionally, descriptive statistics relating to the measure of difficulty suggested that the autistic individuals found both tasks more difficult than NTs on average. However, this difference was not significant at the 0.05 level.

If NTs were to be used as a ‘benchmark’ for FER development, it would appear that there is a specialization for the human in typical development. As a result, anthropomorphic FER is more difficult for NTs. Considering that autistic people do not see a reduced performance on such measures, they may not experience the same specialized interest or aptitude for human FER. Interestingly, this does not lead to the deterioration of anthropomorphic FER. Specifically, autistic performance was not lower across both conditions, and it did not follow the same pattern as NTs. As such, it may be that autistic people also have an enhanced ability to perform anthropomorphic FER. This ability may develop through protracted engagement with anthropomorphic agents, as is suggested through research on restricted interests. The enhanced development of anthropomorphic FER in autistic people would contrast with research suggesting that FER deficits only increase as autistic people age (Lozier et al., 2014). Instead, perhaps autistic people, and those with high autistic traits, continue to develop anthropomorphic FER and ToM which allows them to eventually surpass NTs. This continued development may explain why studies on very young autistic children show impaired performance in both human and nonhuman face recognition (Chawarska & Volkmar, 2007), while studies on older autistic children, adolescents and adults show an intact or even relatively enhanced ability for nonhuman performance (for a review, see Atherton & Cross, 2018).

Autism research is rife with studies showing that autistic people enjoy engaging with the nonhuman and may be doing so increasingly throughout development, whether it be through animation (Holmgaard et al., 2013), contact with pets (Atherton et al., 2022), animal-assisted therapy (O'Haire, 2013), or even embodying the nonhuman during online game-play (Stendal & Balandin, 2015) (for a review, see Atherton & Cross, 2018). This type of engagement may allow autistic people to develop social expertise and derive social pleasure in ways that do not rely on human specialization, which may function as an extension of how autistic people begin to see themselves as more than human (Davidson & Smith, 2009). Future research should look to better understand autistic people's motivations for interacting with anthropomorphic agents. Cross et al. (2019) and Carter et al. (2016) suggest that using anthropomorphic agents in therapeutic contexts may also improve social understanding and connection. Including such agents in virtual settings and observing changes in responsiveness would be a valuable avenue for future research.