bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding and Using the Brief Implicit Association Test: Recommended Scoring Procedures
Authors: Nosek Brian A. , Bar-Anan Yoav , Sriram Natarajan , Axt Jordan , Greenwald Anthony G.
Published: July 2018

A brief version of the Implicit Association Test (BIAT) has been introduced. The present research identified analytical best practices for overall psychometric performance of the BIAT. In 7 studies and multiple replications, we investigated analytic practices with several evaluation criteria: sensitivity to detecting known effects and group differences, internal consistency, relations with implicit measures of the same topic, relations with explicit measures of the same topic and other criterion variables, and resistance to an extraneous influence of average response time. The data transformation algorithms D outperformed other approaches. This replicates and extends the strong prior performance of D compared to conventional analytic techniques. We conclude with recommended analytic practices for standard use of the BIAT.
Retract 0.005 and propose using JASP, instead
Authors: Perezgonzalez Jose D. , Frias-Navarro Dolores
Published: July 2018

Seeking to address the lack of research reproducibility, Benjamin et al. propose a pragmatic solution: use a stricter 0.005 standard for statistical significance when claiming evidence of new discoveries. Notwithstanding its potential impact, the proposal has motivated a large mass of authors to dispute it. In reality, a simpler and better suited alternative proposal exists, perhaps the only one the authors could be entitled to make from their Jeffresian perspective: Use JASP, the stand-alone, free-to-download, R-based statistical software with user-friendly GUI for learning more about your error statistics and your beliefs.
Changing interpretations of emotional expressions in working memory with aging
Authors: Mok Robert M , Hajonides van der Meulen Jasper Emanuel , Holmes Emily A , Nobre Anna C.
Published: July 2018

Working memory (WM) shows significant decline with age. It is interesting to note that some research has suggested age-related impairments can be reduced in tasks that involve emotion-laden stimuli. However, only a few studies have explored how WM for emotional material changes in aging. Here we developed a novel experimental task to compare and contrast how emotional material is represented in older versus younger adults. The task enabled us to separate overall WM accuracy from emotional biases in the content of affective representations in WM. We found that, in addition to overall decline in WM performance, older adults showed a systematic positivity bias in representing information in WM relative to younger adults (positivity effect). They remembered fearful faces as being less fearful than younger adults and interpreted ambiguous facial expressions more positively. The findings show that aging brings a type of positivity bias when picking up affective information for guiding future behaviour.
How fleeting is fame? Collective memory for popular music
Authors: Spivack Stephen , Philibotte Sara Jordan , Spilka Nathaniel Hugo , Passman Ian , Wallisch Pascal
Published: July 2018

In this paper, we investigated the collective memory for popular music. To assess how well number-one hits are recognized over time, we randomly selected top songs fromthe last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each selection, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized each song. We found three distinct phases in collective memory: a steep linear drop-off in recognition for the music from this millennium, a stable plateau from the 1960s to the 1990s, and a further but more gradual drop-off for music from the 1940s and 1950s.More than half of recognition variability between songs can be accounted for by exposure as measured by Spotify play counts. We conclude that in the musical realm, fame is fleeting - but perhaps not as fleeting as previously suggested.
Reciprocal associations between positive emotions and motivation in daily life: Network analyses in anhedonic individuals and healthy controls
Authors: van Roekel Eeske , Heininga Vera Ellen , Vrijen Charlotte , Snippe Evelien , Oldehinkel Albertine
Published: July 2018

© 2018, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and maynot exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or citewithout authors permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI:10.1037/emo0000424.
Development and preliminary validation of a Five Factor Model measure of Machiavellianism
Authors: Collison Katherine , Vize Colin , Miller Josh , Lynam Donald
Published: July 2018

Machiavellianism is characterized by planfulness, the ability to delay gratification, and interpersonal antagonism (i.e., manipulativeness and callousness). Although its theoretically positive relations with facets of conscientiousness should help distinguish Machiavellianism from psychopathy, current measurements of Machiavellianism are indistinguishable from those of psychopathy due mostly to their assessment of low conscientiousness. The goal of the present study was to create a measure of Machiavellianism that is more in line with theory using an expert-derived profile based on the thirty facets of the Five Factor Model (FFM) and then test the validity of that measure by comparing it to relevant constructs. Previously collected expert ratings of the prototypical Machiavellian individual on FFM facets yielded a profile of 13 facets including low agreeableness and high conscientiousness. Items were written to represent each facet, resulting in a 201-item Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI). Across two studies, with a total of 710 participants recruited via MTurk, the FFMI was reduced to its final 52-item form and was shown to relate as expected to measures of Big Five personality traits, current Machiavellianism measures, psychopathy, narcissism, ambition, and impulsivity. The FFMI is a promising alternative Machiavellianism measure.
Postural developments modulate children’s visual access to social information
Authors: Sanchez Alessandro , Long Bria , Kraus Allison M. , Frank Michael C.
Published: July 2018

The ability to process social information is a critical component of children’s early language and cognitive development. However, as children reach their first birthday, they begin to locomote themselves, dramatically affecting their visual ac- cess to this information. How do these postural and locomotor changes affect children’s access to the social information relevant for word-learning? Here, we explore this question by us- ing head-mounted cameras to record 36 infants’ (8-16 months of age) egocentric visual perspective and use computer vision algorithms to estimate the proportion of faces and hands in infants’ environments. We find that infants’ posture and orientation to their caregiver modulates their access to social information, confirming previous work that suggests motoric developments play a significant role in the emergence of children’s linguistic and social capacities. We suggest that the combined use of head-mounted cameras and the application of new computer vision techniques is a promising avenue for understanding the statistics of infants’ visual and linguistic experience.
Let's Look at the Big Picture: A System-Level Approach to Assessing Scholarly Merit
Authors: Pickett Cynthia
Published: July 2018

When judging scientific merit, the traditional method has been to use measures that assess the quality and/or quantity of an individual’s research program. In today’s academic world, a meritorious scholar is one who publishes high quality work that is frequently cited, who receives plentiful funding and scientific awards, and who is well regarded among his or her peers. In other words, merit is defined by how successful the scholar has been in terms of promoting his or her own career. In this commentary, I argue that there has been an overemphasis on measuring individual career outcomes and that we should be more concerned with the effect that scholars have on the scientific system in which they are embedded. Put simply, the question we should be asking is whether and to what extent a scholar has advanced the scientific discipline and moved the field forward collectively.
Combining language corpora with experimental and computational approaches for language acquisition research
Authors: Rowland Caroline F
Published: July 2018

AbstractHistorically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand-coding of children’s linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children’s language exposure has revolutionised the field. New techniques enable more precise measurements of children’s actual language input, and these corpora constrain computational and cognitive theories of language development, which can then generate predictions about learning behaviour. We describe several instances where corpus, computational, and experimental work have been productively combined to uncover the first language acquisition process and the richness of multimodal properties of the environment, highlighting how these methods can be extended to address related issues in second language research. Finally, we outline some of the difficulties that can be encountered when applying multi-method approaches and show how these difficulties can be obviated.
Differentiating scalar implicature from exclusion inferences in language acquisition
Authors: Sullivan Jess , Davidson Kathryn , Wade Shirlene , Barner David
Published: July 2018

When acquiring language, children must not only learn the meanings of words, but also how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn both the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier some and its pragmatically enriched meaning: ‘some but not all’. Some studies have shown that this “scalar implicature” that some implies ‘some but not all’ poses a challenge even to nine-year-olds, while others find success by age three. We asked whether reports of children’s early successes might be due to the computation of exclusion inferences (like contrast or mutual exclusivity) rather than an ability to compute scalar implicatures. We found that young children (N=214; ages 4;0-7;11) sometimes prefer to compute symmetrical exclusion inferences rather than asymmetric scalar inferences when interpreting quantifiers. This suggests that some apparent successes in computing scalar implicature can actually be explained by less sophisticated exclusion inferences.
Risk factors associated with election-related stress and anxiety before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election
Authors: Majumder Maimuna S. , Nguyen Colleen M. , Sacco Linda , Mahan Kush , Brownstein John S.
Published: July 2018

Over the last several months, the effects of the 2016 US Presidential Election on the mental health and well being of Americans has become a topic of great interest to care-providers in the United States. Risk factors for election-related stress and anxiety have yet to be explored. To determine indicators associated with election-related stress and anxiety in the weeks preceding and following the 2016 US Presidential Election, two surveys – “pre-election” (October 20–21, 2016) and “post-election” (January 20–21, 2017) – were administered online via the Survey Monkey Audience panel platform. A total of 999 pre-election respondents (of 1025) and 1009 post-election respondents (of 1026) were retained after data cleaning. Multivariable linear regression analyses were then conducted in Orange on the pre- and post-election survey data sets. For both analyses, a summative election-related stress and anxiety index served as the outcome of interest. Compared to women, men scored an average of .610 (95%CI: .291, 929; p < .001) and .359 (95%CI: .089, .629; p = .009) points lower on the election-related stress and anxiety index – among pre-election and post-election survey respondents, respectively. Though insignificant among pre-election survey respondents, Democratic Party affiliation (.805 points; 95%CI: .466, 1.14; p < .001) and low household income (.83 points; 95%CI: .173, 1.49; p = .013) were associated with higher election-related stress and anxiety index scores among post-election survey respondents. Election-related effects on stress and anxiety are complex, and some segments of the American population appear to be more vulnerable than others. Though further study of additional risk factors is needed, those noted here may be utilized to better identify and provide care for Americans suffering from election-related stress and anxiety moving forward.
Towards a Brain-like Memory for Cognitive Robots. PhD Dissertation, University of Genova, Genova, Italy
Authors: Bhat Ajaz Ahmad
Published: July 2018

The most striking feature of any cognitive system is its ability to keep learning cumulatively and exploit its experiences prospectively to anticipate, reason and produce goal-oriented behaviors. At the core of this intriguing capability lies our memory. Every touch, sound, sight, taste triggers our memory, enabling us to remember and flexibly connect our past experiences, with the available present to the possible future. While emerging trends in neurosciences are rapidly enriching our understanding of the functional organization of memory in the brain, a prospective memory architecture is also a central design feature necessary if robots are to truly become commonplace assistants in numerous application domains (domestic, industrial, others) and in the complexity of the environments we inhabit and create (where neither everything can be known nor can everything be experienced). Hence, with the central premise that cognition is constructive manipulation of memory, this thesis proposes a novel brain guided perspective on the design of cognitive architectures for cumulatively developing systems. Set up in the context of several experiments from animal and infant cognition reenacted on the iCub humanoid, a principled framework for cumulative learning of actions, skills, affordances and cause-effect relations through multiple streams (imitation, exploration, linguistic inputs) is proposed. How such diverse experiences of the robot learnt in past are recalled based on present context, combined with explorative actions to learn something new, creatively connected to generate novel behaviors in the context of sought goals is demonstrated through several tasks. The proposed integrated machinery provides for a shared computational basis for recalling of the past and simulation of the future in line with the emerging trends from neuroscience (like the brain’s default mode network). A notable transition further is the porting of the framework developed on iCub humanoid to real world industrial settings in tasks like assembly and manufacturing (facilitating runtime reasoning and quick switchover to novel assembly tasks). In this sense, the proposed architecture brings together the fields of Robotics, Developmental Psychology, and Neuroscience to craft cognitive and adaptable End User Applications while at the same time provides insights into the functional organization of the brain. In parallel, it lays the foundation for a new generation of cognitive architectures that are domain agnostic (i.e. support open-ended learning), partially embodiment agnostic (i.e. are configurable to new robotic platforms), partially self-driven (i.e. can generate their own internal goals) and brain guided.
Social affiliation cues prime help-seeking intentions.
Authors: Rubin Mark
Published: July 2018

Over and Carpenter (2009) recently found that 18-month old infants who had been primed with a social affiliation cue were more likely to offer to help another person. The present research investigated whether similar affiliation cues affect intentions to seek help, rather than offer help. Undergraduate psychology students (N = 122) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they viewed a photograph of two people who were either holding hands (affiliation condition) or not holding hands (nonaffiliation condition). Participants then indicated their intention to ask other people for help when they worked on a university coursework assignment. Participants in the affiliation condition had significantly stronger intentions to seek help than participants in the nonaffiliation condition. These results are consistent with the idea that social affiliation cues activate a broad prosocial orientation that applies not only to others (i.e., help-giving) but also to the self (i.e., help-seeking). Future research should investigate the potential influence of attachment style on the relationship between affiliation cues, help-giving, and help-seeking.
Simple First: A Skeleton for an Evaluative Learning Model
Authors: Bar-Anan Yoav , Moran Tal
Published: July 2018

Simple first is our name for a set of hypotheses that we have found useful in our research on evaluative learning. The hypotheses are: (1) It is easier to encode and retrieve information that two concepts are linked than information about how they are linked; (2) It is easier to store and retrieve information than to make an inference based on that information; (3) When people encounter an object and memory activates valence that is mentally linked to that object, they consider the activation valid evidence that the activated valence characterizes the object. We demonstrate how these hypotheses generate useful assumptions about Evaluative Conditioning, and open paths for further research on evaluative learning and evaluation.
Scaling the slippery slope
Authors: Basehore Zachariah
Published: July 2018

For over a half-century, psychologists, educators, and researchers have criticized the common misusesof statistics in the social sciences. Here, I summarize some of the various objections to the blind use ofp-values and propose simple adjustments to 1) ameliorate the weaknesses inherent in current statisticalpractice, and 2) to paint a more complete picture of a study’s results.
Categorization training changes the visual representation of face identity
Authors: Soto Fabian
Published: July 2018

Previous research suggests that learning to categorize faces along a new dimension changes the perceptual representation of that dimension, but little is known about how the representation of specific face identities changes after such category learning. Here, we trained participants to categorize faces that varied along two morphing dimensions. One dimension was relevant to the categorization task and the other was irrelevant. We used classification images to estimate the internal templates used to identify the two faces at the extremes of the relevant dimension, both before and after training, and at two different levels of the irrelevant dimension. Categorization training changed the internal templates used for face identification, even though identification and categorization tasks impose different demands on the observers. After categorization training, the internal templates became more invariant across changes in the irrelevant dimension. These results suggest that the representation of face identity can be modified by categorization experience.
Rapid extraction of emotion regularities from complex scenes in the human brain
Authors: Schettino Antonio , Gundlach Christopher , Müller Matthias M.
Published: July 2018

Adaptive behavior requires the rapid extraction of behaviorally relevant information in the environment, with particular emphasis on emotional cues. However, the speed of emotional feature extraction from complex visual environments is largely undetermined. Here we use objective electrophysiological recordings in combination with frequency tagging to demonstrate that the extraction of emotional information from neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant naturalistic scenes can be completed at a presentation speed of 167 ms (i.e., 6 Hz) under high perceptual load. Emotional compared to neutral pictures evoked enhanced electrophysiological responses with distinct topographical activation patterns originating from different neural sources. Cortical facilitation in early visual cortex was also more pronounced for scenes with pleasant compared to unpleasant or neutral content, suggesting a positivity offset mechanism dominating under conditions of rapid scene processing. These results significantly advance our knowledge of complex scene processing in demonstrating rapid integrative content identification, particularly for emotional cues relevant for adaptive behavior in complex environments.
The perception of emotion in artificial agents
Authors: Hortensius Ruud , Hekele Felix , Cross Emily S.
Published: July 2018

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents.
Multisensory integration: Inverse effectiveness and noisy signals
Authors: Holmes Nicholas Paul
Published: July 2018

This brief commentary criticises the use of flawed statistical methods in the paper by Kayser and colleagues (2010), published in Current Biology. The commentary was not accepted for publication, despite broad agreement that the statistical methods were indeed flawed. Reviews and responses are included with the main text.
Complexity Reduction in the Negotiation of New Lexical Conventions
Authors: Schueller William , Loreto Vittorio , Oudeyer Pierre-Yves
Published: July 2018

In the process of collectively inventing new words for new con-cepts in a population, conflicts can quickly become numerous,in the form of synonymy and homonymy. Remembering all ofthem could cost too much memory, and remembering too fewmay slow down the overall process. Is there an efficient be-havior that could help balance the two? The Naming Game isa multi-agent computational model for the emergence of lan-guage, focusing on the negotiation of new lexical conventions,where a common lexicon self-organizes but going through aphase of high complexity. Previous work has been done onthe control of complexity growth in this particular model, byallowing agents to actively choose what they talk about. How-ever, those strategies were relying on ad hoc heuristics highlydependent on fine-tuning of parameters. We define here a newprincipled measure and a new strategy, based on the beliefsof each agent on the global state of the population. The mea-sure does not rely on heavy computation, and is cognitivelyplausible. The new strategy yields an efficient control of com-plexity growth, along with a faster agreement process. Also,we show that short-term memory is enough to build relevantbeliefs about the global lexicon.
The Gravitational Pull of Expressing Passion: When and How Expressing Passion Elicits Status Conferral and Support from Others
Authors: Jachimowicz Jon , To Christopher , Agasi Shira , Côté Stéphane , Galinsky Adam
Published: July 2018

Prior research attributes the positive effects of passion on professional success to intrapersonal characteristics. We propose that interpersonal processes are also critical because observers confer status on and support those who express passion. These interpersonal benefits of expressing passion are, however, contingent on several factors related to the expresser, perceiver, and context. Six studies, including entrepreneurial pitches from Dragons’ Den and two pre-registered experiments, establish three key findings. First, observers conferred status onto and increased their support for individuals who express passion; importantly, expressing passion affected how admired—but not how accepted—someone was. Second, these effects were weaker when passion was expressed in an inappropriate manner/context, and when observers disagreed with the target of expresser’s passion. Third, in competitive contexts, expressing passion became threatening and decreased the support people received from others. These results demonstrate that passion’s effects travel, in part, through the gravitational pull exerted by expressing passion.
Knowledge is power: prior knowledge aids memory formation for both congruent and incongruent events, but in different ways.
Authors: Greve Andrea , Cooper Elisa , Tibon Roni , Henson Richard
Published: July 2018

Events that conform to our expectations, i.e, are congruent with our world knowledge or schemas, are better remembered than unrelated events. Yet events that conflict with schemas can also be remembered better. We examined this apparent paradox in four experiments, in which schemas were established by training ordinal relationships between randomly-paired objects, while episodic memory was tested for the number of objects on each trial. Better memory was found for both congruent and incongruent trials, relative to unrelated trials, producing memory performance that was a “U-shaped” function of congruency. Furthermore, the incongruency advantage, but not congruency advantage, emerged even if the information probed by the memory test was irrelevant to the schema, while the congruency advantage, but not incongruency advantage, also emerged after initial encoding. Schemas therefore augment episodic memory in multiple ways, depending on the match between novel and existing information.
Do facial first impressions reflect a shared social reality?
Authors: Sutherland Clare , Rhodes Gillian , Burton Nichola , Young Andrew
Published: July 2018

Influential facial impression models have repeatedly shown that trustworthiness, youthful-attractiveness and dominance dimensions subserve a wide variety of first impressions formed from strangers’ faces, suggestive of a shared social reality. However, these models are built from impressions aggregated across observers. Critically, recent work has now shown that inter-observer agreement in facial impressions is less than perfect, raising the important question of whether these dimensional models are meaningful at the individual-observer level. We addressed this question using a novel case series approach, building individual models of facial impressions for different observers. Strikingly, three dimensions of trustworthiness, youthful/attractiveness and competence/dominance appeared across the majority of individual observer models, demonstrating that the dimensional approach is indeed meaningful at the individual level. Nonetheless, we also found striking differences in the stability of the competence/dominance dimension across observers. Taken together, results suggest that individual differences in impressions arise in the context of a largely common structure that supports a shared social reality.
When Does HARKing Hurt? Identifying When Different Types of Undisclosed Post Hoc Hypothesizing Harm Scientific Progress
Authors: Rubin Mark
Published: July 2018

Hypothesizing after the results are known, or HARKing, occurs when researchers check their research results and then add or remove hypotheses on the basis of those results without acknowledging this process in their research report (Kerr, 1998). In the present article, I discuss three forms of HARKing: (1) using current results to construct post hoc hypotheses that are then reported as if they were a priori hypotheses; (2) retrieving hypotheses from a post hoc literature search and reporting them as a priori hypotheses; and (3) failing to report a priori hypotheses that are unsupported by the current results. These three types of HARKing are often characterized as being bad for science and a potential cause of the current replication crisis. In the present article, I use insights from the philosophy of science to present a more nuanced view. Specifically, I identify the conditions under which each of these three types of HARKing is most and least likely to be bad for science. I conclude with a brief discussion about the ethics of each type of HARKing.
Spearman’s g Found in 31 Non-Western Nations: Strong Evidence that g is a Universal Phenomenon
Authors: Warne Russell T. , Burningham Cassidy
Published: July 2018

Spearman’s g is the name for the shared variance across a set of intercorrelating cognitive tasks. For some—but not all—theorists, g is defined as general intelligence. While g is robustly observed in Western populations, it is questionable whether g is manifested in cognitive data from other cultural groups. To test whether g is a cross-cultural phenomenon, we searched for correlation matrices or data files containing cognitive variables collected from individuals in non-Western, non-industrialized nations. We subjected these data to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using promax rotation and two modern methods of selecting the number of factors. Samples that produced more than one factor were then subjected to a second-order EFA using the same procedures and a Schmid-Leiman solution. Across 97 samples from 31 countries totaling 50,103 individuals, we found that a single factor emerged unambiguously from 71 samples (73.2%) and that 23 of the remaining 26 samples (88.5%) produced a single second-order factor. The first factor in the initial EFA explained an average of 45.9% of observed variable variance (SD = 13.0%), which is similar to what is seen in Western samples. One sample that produced multiple second-order factors only did so with one method of selecting the number of factors in the initial EFA; the alternate method of selecting the number of factors produced a single higher-order factor. Factor extraction in a higher-order EFA was not possible in two samples. These results show that g appears in many cultures and is likely a universal phenomenon in humans.
Gamifying a Simulation: Null Effects of a Game Goal, Choice, Points and Praise
Authors: Brom Cyril , Stárková Tereza , Bromová Edita , Dechterenko Filip
Published: July 2018

Despite increased interest in gamification approaches, there is a dearth of comparative studies shedding light on the applicability of these approaches in educational contexts. This explorative study, with experimental design, sought to explore the net effects of an added game goal, increased freedom of choice, points, virtual currency and praise (all combined) on several affective-motivational variables, subjective evaluation and the learning outcomes of university learners studying a complex process from a two-hour-long computerized simulation. Learning using the simulation’s version with the mentioned elements (n = 31) had no significant effect on initial interest, induced positive affect, flow, learning involvement, enjoyment, perceived learning, retention test scores and transfer test scores in comparison to the two control conditions (n = 33, 34). The gamified simulation was perceived to be significantly easier than the non-gamified versions (d = 0.74, 0.42). Of the game elements used in this study, participants perceived most positively a clear, game-like goal. The findings are consistent with Self-Determination Theory, Cognitive-Affective Theory of Learning from Media, and Cognitive Load Theory. They also support the emerging notion that caution should be taken when applying gamification approaches in educational contexts.
Mere membership
Authors: Dunham Yarrow
Published: July 2018

Human social groups are central to social organization and pervasively impact interpersonal interactions. While immensely varied, all social groups can also be considered specific instantiations of a common and abstract ingroup-outgroup structure. How much of the power of human social groups stems from learned variation versus abstract commonality? I review evidence demonstrating that from early in development a wide range of intergroup phenomena, most prominently many ingroup biases, follow solely from simple membership in an abstract social collective. Such effects cannot be attributed to rich social learning and so: a) constrain theories seeking to explain or intervene on ingroup bias, and b) provide reason to think that our species is powerfully predisposed towards ingroup favoritism from early in development.
Concurrent and longitudinal dyadic polynomial regression analyses of Big Five traits and relationship satisfaction: Does similarity matter?
Authors: Weidmann Rebekka , Schönbrodt Felix D. , Ledermann Thomas , Grob Alexander
Published: July 2018

Being with a well-matched partner seems essential for a happy relationship. However, past research on personality similarity in couples has reported inconsistent findings. The current study employs a dyadic polynomial regression approach to take into account linear and curvilinear associations between similarity and satisfaction. The concurrent results based on data of 237 couples suggest that beyond actor effects for neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and partner effects for agreeableness, similarity plays a negligible role for relationship satisfaction. Longitudinally, two similarity effects emerged. First, if partners reported dissimilar neuroticism levels, male partner reported lower relationship satisfaction. Second, if both partners reported modest levels in openness, female partners reported higher relationship satisfaction. Implications for couples are discussed.
Equivalence Testing for Psychological Research: A Tutorial
Authors: Lakens Daniel , Scheel Anne M. , Isager Peder Mortvedt
Published: July 2018

Psychologists must be able to test both for the presence of an effect and for the absence of an effect. In addition to testing against zero, researchers can use the Two One-Sided Tests (TOST) procedure to test for equivalence and reject the presence of a smallest effect size of interest (SESOI). TOST can be used to determine if an observed effect is surprisingly small, given that a true effect at least as large as the SESOI exists. We explain a range of approaches to determine the SESOI in psychological science, and provide detailed examples of how equivalence tests should be performed and reported. Equivalence tests are an important extension of statistical tools psychologists currently use, and enable researchers to falsify predictions about the presence, and declare the absence, of meaningful effects.
Social cognition or social class and culture? On the interpretation of differences in social cognitive performance
Authors: Dodell-Feder David , Ressler Kerry J. , Germine Laura
Published: July 2018

The ability to understand others’ mental states carries profound consequences for our mental and physical health. Difficulty with mental state understanding (MSU) may predispose individuals towards social isolation, loneliness, and psychiatric illness, making efforts at validly and reliably assessing MSU of utmost importance. However, inspection of some of the more widely used tasks to assess MSU (e.g., the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task; RMET) reveals potential assessment issues, namely, an ostensible reliance upon a participant’s vocabulary/intelligence and the use of culturally-biased stimuli, among other issues. Here, using data from a sample of over 40,000 international, English-speaking participants, we evaluate the impact of demographic and sociocultural factors on several social cognitive tasks and one non-social cognitive task in order to assess whether the effect of participant characteristics is robust and reliable across social cognitive abilities or a function of task-specific characteristics, such as the use of uncommon vocabulary and/or ethnically homogenous stimuli. We find a pattern of results suggesting that social cognitive tasks may be biased against the less educated and those participants whose race/ethnicity differs from the task’s stimuli; an effect potentiated in the RMET. Together, these data suggest that certain MSU tasks may be tapping social class and culture as much as it is social cognition.
Topology and Geometry in Machine Learning for Logistic Regression
Authors: Farrelly Colleen Molloy
Published: July 2018

Logistic regression plays an important role in medical research, and several machine learning extensions exist for this framework, including least angle regression (LARS) and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), which yield models with interpretable regression coefficients. Many machine learning algorithms have benefitted in the past few years from the inclusion of geometric and topological information, including manifold learning, shape-matching, and supervised learning extensions of generalized linear regression. This study demonstrates gains from the inclusion of differential geometric information in LARS models and of homotopy search in LASSO models above that of elastic net regression, a state-of-the-art penalized regression algorithm. Results hold across both simulated data and two real datasets, one predicting alcoholism risk and one predicting tumor malignancy. These algorithms also perform competitively with classification algorithms such as random forest and boosted regression, suggesting that machine learning methods which incorporate topological/geometric information about the underlying data may be useful on binary classification datasets within medical research. In addition, other hybrid techniques may outperform existing methods and provide more accurate models to understand disease. More work is needed to develop effective, efficient algorithms that explore the topology or geometry of data space and provide interpretable models.
Being a beast machine: The origins of selfhood in control-oriented interoceptive inference
Authors: Seth Anil
Published: July 2018

Throughout his career Andy Clark has shaped how scientists and philosophers think about the role of representation in action, perception, and cognition. In the latest iteration of this debate he has foregrounded the influential perspective of ‘predictive processing’, which sees perception as a process of action-oriented ‘best guessing’ (inference) about the causes of noisy and ambiguous sensory signals, and which involves the brain inducing ‘generative’ models of how hidden causes mediate the effects of actions on sensory signals. Here, I will develop this position in the context of interoception (the sense of the body from within) and physiological regulation. A key idea here, which recalls 20th century cybernetic theory, is that interoceptive inference is targeted towards maintaining physiological homeostasis rather than inducing complete and accurate internal models of an external state-of-affairs. I explore how this perspective helps connect control-oriented interoceptive inference to phenomenological properties of embodied selfhood and subjectivity. The upshot echoes (or perhaps subverts) a classic philosophical trope of the Enlightenment philosopher Julien La Mettrie: to find the origins of our conscious selves in our nature as beast machines.
A gradual effects model for single-case designs
Authors: Swan Daniel M. , Pustejovsky James E
Published: July 2018

Single-case designs are a class of repeated measures experiments used to evaluate the effects of interventions for specialized populations, such as individuals with low-incidence disabilities. There has been growing interest in systematic reviews and syntheses of evidence from single-case designs, but there remains a need to further develop appropriate statistical models and effect sizes for data from the designs. We propose a novel model for single-case data that exhibit non-linear time trends created by an intervention that produces gradual effects, which build up and dissipate over time. The model expresses a structural relationship between a pattern of treatment assignment and an outcome variable, making it appropriate for both treatment reversal and multiple baseline designs. It is formulated as a generalized linear model so that it can be applied to outcomes measured as frequency counts or proportions, both of which are commonly used in single-case research, while providing readily interpretable effect size estimates such as logresponse ratios or log odds ratios. We demonstrate the gradual effects model by applying it to data from a single-case study and examine the performance of proposed estimation methods in a Monte Carlo simulation of frequency count data.
The trouble with quantifiers: Exploring children’s deficits in scalar implicature
Authors: Frank Michael C.
Published: July 2018

Adults routinely use the context of utterances to infer a meaning beyond the literal semantics of their words (e.g., inferring from “She ate some of the cookies” that she ate some, but not all). Contrasting children’s (N = 209) comprehension of scalar implicatures using quantifiers with contextually-derived ad-hoc implicatures revealed that four– to five–year-olds reliably computed ad-hoc, but not scalar, implicatures (Experiment 1). Unexpectedly, performance with “some” and “none” was correlated (Experiments 1 and 2). An individual differences study revealed a correlation between quantifier knowledge and implicature success (Experiment 3); a control study ruled out other factors (Experiment 4). These findings suggest some failures with scalar implicatures may be rooted in a lack of semantic knowledge rather than general pragmatic or processing demands.
Assessment of Fluctuation Between Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism: Development and Initial Validation of the FLUX Scales
Authors: Oltmanns Joshua R. , Widiger Thomas A.
Published: July 2018

There is a growing interest in the distinction between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, along with a hypothesis of a fluctuation between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism within individuals. There are several well-validated measures of both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, but research has generally found that they are relatively distinct in their relations with their nomological networks. Further, the existing measures of narcissism do not actually assess for a possible fluctuation. The present study developed three scales of narcissistic fluctuation: Fluctuation between Indifference and Anger, Grandiosity and Shame, and Assertiveness and Insecurity. Consistent with expectations, the FLUX scales correlated with both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, displayed convergent and discriminant validity with factor derived-narcissism scales and the five-factor model, and correlated at moderate-to-large effect sizes with measures of affective lability. The three FLUX scales were also reduced to one unidimensional nine-item scale of narcissistic fluctuation (the g-FLUX) that retained the correlational properties for the more specific scales and had incremental validity over the Five-Factor Narcissism Inventory and Pathological Narcissism Inventory grandiose and vulnerable scales in accounting for affective lability. Results from the present study suggest that the FLUX scales may provide an informative assessment of a fluctuation between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism.
Duration of wheel-running reinforcement: Effects on reinforcement value and motivation in free-feeding and food-deprived rats.
Authors: Belke Terry , Pierce W. David , Cathart Ian E. A.
Published: July 2018

Ten (pair housed) female Long-Evans rats were exposed to 5 s, 30 s, and 90 s wheel-running reinforcement durations on a response-initiated variable interval 20 s schedule as food deprivation was manipulated. On free feeding, never-deprived rats showed low wheel running and lever-pressing rates with long postreinforcement pauses (PRPs) for the 5-s reinforcement duration. Subsequently, when food deprived (Deprived 1), rats showed no effect of reinforcement duration on all measures. Under a second deprived condition (Deprived 2) with the rats maintained in single cages, there was no effect of housing (single vs. paired). When data from both deprivation assessments (Deprived 1 and Deprived 2) were combined, rats showed lower wheel running and overall lever-pressing rates with longer pauses on the 90-s duration compared to 30 s and 5 s bouts of wheel activity. The pattern of results challenges a reinforcement value interpretation, but is consistent with shifts in the motivational basis of wheel running. On free feeding, never-deprived rats were intrinsically motivated to run on wheels and operant lever-pressing was maintained at moderate rates by the automatic reinforcement of wheel running, except at the short reinforcement duration (5 s). When food deprived, motivation became food-related and rats showed high rates of lever pressing even at the shortest duration. The weak effects under initial deprivation (Deprived 1) raise questions about equivalence between wheel-running reinforcement duration and reinforcement magnitude using food reinforcement.
Capturing the stories of our lives: Examining the collection of life narrative data
Authors: Guo Jen , Weston Sara J , Condon David M
Published: July 2018

Objective: Do different methods for collecting life narratives – the integrated, autobiographical construction of the past and imagined future – produce similar lexical features and relationships to personality traits? The present study compares accounts from an in-person and online sample on measures of word categories, narrative themes and their relationships with Big Five traits.Method: The first sample (N = 157, mean age = 53.7, 64% female, 55% White, and 43% Black) consisted of narratives gathered in-person and the second (N = 256, mean age = 30.6, 61% female, 70% White, 30% non-White) contained type-written responses to the same prompts from an independent online sample. Participants’ responses to the narrative prompts were coded for thematic redemption and contamination.Results: Tests revealed significant differences between samples in 25 of 63 LIWC word categories. Online participants’ narratives also had higher odds of thematic redemption (but not contamination) above and beyond word count, type of narrative scene, participant demographics, and Big Five traits. Lastly, comparisons revealed no significant differences across the samples’ relationships between personality traits and narrative themes.Conclusion: This research supports conditional assimilation of correlational findings from different narrative methodologies and proposes methodological considerations for future research involving life narratives.