All posts; Tags Include "Evolutionary Psychology"
- January 28, 2014
- 10:53 PM
- 531 views
Mindfulness and [Lawyers’] Improved Executive Control: Refined Affective Awareness and Acceptance of Thoughts and Emotions Helps Us Feel the “Pang” and Leads to Better Navigation of Our World
by Dan DeFoe in Psycholawlogy
Mindfulness practice, which involves present moment awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance of present emotions and thoughts, works. The authors of a recent psychological science commentary noted that the practice of mindfulness training seems to provide a number of benefits. Its popularity has increased in Western cultures for several decades. These things partly explain why psychological [...]The post Mindfulness and [Lawyers’] Improved Executive Control: Refined Affective Awareness........ Read more »
Teper, R., Segal, Z., & Inzlicht, M. (2013) Inside the mindful mind: How mindfulness enhances emotion regulation through improvements in executive control. Current Directions in Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0963721413495869
- January 10, 2014
- 11:45 PM
- 767 views
Cataloging a year of blogging: from behavior to society and mind
by Artem Kaznatcheev in Evolutionary Games Group
For psychologists, memory and learning are intimately intertwined. In fact, during the years of behaviorism in the early 20th century, the unobservable process of memory was completely replaced in the technical lexicon by learning (Miller, 2003). I want to take this post as an opportunity to remember the year that’s past, and the 83 articles […]... Read more »
Simpson, G.G. (1953) The Baldwin effect. Evolution, 7(2), 110-117. DOI: 10.2307/2405746
- December 26, 2013
- 11:41 PM
- 754 views
Life History Strategy and the Allure of the Dark Side: Evidence against a General Factor of Personality
by Scott McGreal in Eye on Psych
Claims about a "general factor of personality" imply that all socially desirable traits are positively correlated. On the contrary, a new study based on Life History Strategy suggests that slow and fast life history strategies respectively each combine a mixture of desirable and undesirable traits. This suggests that a generally desirable factor is illusory. ... Read more »
Sherman RA, Figueredo AJ, & Funder DC. (2013) The behavioral correlates of overall and distinctive life history strategy. Journal of personality and social psychology, 105(5), 873-88. PMID: 23915038
- November 26, 2013
- 08:00 AM
- 448 views
Hungry? Low Blood Sugar May Increase Support for Social Welfare
by amikulak in Daily Observations
Think “Hunger Games” and you’ll undoubtedly think of heroine Katniss Everdeen fighting against a totalitarian state in the blockbuster series of books and movies. Fortunately for us, those Hunger Games […]... Read more »
Aarøe, L., & Petersen, M.B. (2013) Hunger Games: Fluctuations in Blood Glucose Levels Influence Support for Social Welfare. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797613495244
- November 7, 2013
- 08:37 PM
- 476 views
Organizational Commitment, Job Satisfaction, and Caring Adaptations: In Terms of the Psychological Contract, A New Assessment Can Tell How Well Your Business [Law Firm] Measures Up
by Dan DeFoe in Psycholawlogy
In tough economic times, avoid institutional thinking and acting on short-turn restructuring and/or cost-cutting goals. Recent research about a new assessment suggests this message to firm leaders and chief executives. Instead, the message continues, leaders must think and act outside the box. This means psychologically and financially. A team of organizational researchers developed a [...]The post Organizational Commitment, Job Satisfaction, and Caring Adaptations: In Terms of the Psych........ Read more »
Grdinovac, J.A., & Yancey, G.B. (2012) How organizational adaptations to recession relate to organizational commitment. . The Psychologist-Manager Journal. DOI: 10.1080/10887156.2012.649089
- October 16, 2013
- 06:00 PM
- 700 views
Cooperation through useful delusions: quasi-magical thinking and subjective utility
by Artem Kaznatcheev in Evolutionary Games Group
Economists that take bounded rationality seriously treat their research like a chess game and follow the reductive approach: start with all the pieces — a fully rational agent — and kill/capture/remove pieces until the game ends, i.e. see what sort of restrictions can be placed on the agents to deviate from rationality and better reflect […]... Read more »
Masel, J. (2007) A Bayesian model of quasi-magical thinking can explain observed cooperation in the public good game. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 64(2), 216-231. DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2005.07.003
- October 6, 2013
- 05:30 AM
- 557 views
Baldwin effect and overcoming the rationality fetish
by Artem Kaznatcheev in Evolutionary Games Group
As I’ve mentioned previously, one of the amazing features of the internet is that you can take almost any idea and find a community obsessed with it. Thus, it isn’t surprising that there is a prominent subculture that fetishizes rationality and Bayesian learning. They tend to accumulate around forums with promising titles like OvercomingBias and […]... Read more »
Smead, R. (2012) Game theoretic equilibria and the evolution of learning. Journal of Experimental , 3(24), 301-313. DOI: 10.1080/0952813X.2012.695444
- October 2, 2013
- 07:53 AM
- 529 views
Entering, Enjoying, and Exiting the “Age Queue” and the “SIC” Scale: A New Way to Measure [and Lawyers to Consider] Ageism’s Subtle and Overlooked Bias and Prejudice
by Dan DeFoe in Psycholawlogy
“Older people shouldn’t even try to act cool.” One of three factors in a new assessment which measures age-based prescriptive stereotypes includes this item. A different factor asks respondents to endorse this item “Doctors spend too much time treating sickly older people”. Leading age researchers recently argued that we must increase our understanding of [...]The post Entering, Enjoying, and Exiting the “Age Queue” and the “SIC” Scale: A New Way to Measure [and Lawyers t........ Read more »
North, M.S., & Fiske, S.T. (2013) A prescriptive intergenerational – tension ageism scale: Succession, identify, and consumption. Psychological Assessment. info:/10.1037/a0032367
- September 30, 2013
- 01:47 PM
- 650 views
Larks vs. Night-Owls: What Your Sleep Patterns Say About You
by Melissa Chernick in Science Storiented
Ugh, Monday morning really kicked my butt. Even my strong coffee failed to wake me up completely. Of course, I drag-ass most mornings, being almost useless before 10 a.m. On the flip side, I have always been wonderfully alert and productive after 7 p.m. A night owl I am, and this seems like a good topic for discussion. What determines your circadian rhythms and what does that mean for your personality?A circadian rhythm is an endogenous, near 24 hour cycle in the process of living organisms (pl........ Read more »
Sofia I. H. Godinho, et al. (2007) The After-Hours Mutant Reveals a Role for Fbxl3 in Determining Mammalian Circadian Period. Science, 316(5826), 897-900. DOI: 10.1126/science.1141138
Richard D. Roberts, & Patrick C. Kyllonen. (1999) Morningness±eveningness and intelligence: early to bed, early to rise will likely make you anything but wise!. Personality and Individual Differences, 1123-1133. DOI: 10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00054-9
Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, & Minna Lyons. (2013) Creatures of the night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad traits. Personality and Individual Differences, 538-541. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2013.05.001
- September 30, 2013
- 07:02 AM
- 504 views
Never trust a man with a wide face
by Doug Keene in The Jury Room
We’ve written twice before about wide-faced men, but we have something new! This time, it isn’t just those wide-faced men who are going to lie, cheat and be prejudiced. They are also going to make you behave selfishly just by interacting with them. Your selfish behavior is going to make others behave selfishly and the […]
Related posts:
“Wide-faced men are going to lie and cheat”
Wide-faced men are not just liars and cheaters, they’re prejudiced too!
I can tell from your face th........ Read more »
Haselhuhn MP, Wong EM, & Ormiston ME. (2013) Self-Fulfilling Prophecies as a Link between Men's Facial Width-to-Height Ratio and Behavior. PloS one, 8(8). PMID: 24015226
- September 28, 2013
- 09:01 AM
- 489 views
Marital Separation, Expressive Writing, and Meaning Making: Important Cautions to Lawyers & Clients About Keeping “Divorce Journals”
by Dan DeFoe in Psycholawlogy
Marital separation, which can include divorce, correlates with pain and suffering. Easily characterized as one of life’s most stressful experiences, marital separation puts people at risk for poor outcomes in their mental and physical health. Expressive writing, according to the authors of the study reported in this post, has a “strong record for improving [...]The post Marital Separation, Expressive Writing, and Meaning Making: Important Cautions to Lawyers & Clients About Keeping &........ Read more »
Sbarra, D.A., Boals, A., Mason, A.E., Larson, G.M., & Mehl, M.R. (2013) Expressive writing can impede emotional recovery following marital separation. Clinical Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/2167702612469801
- July 18, 2013
- 05:30 PM
- 500 views
Replicator dynamics of cooperation and deception
by Keven Poulin in Evolutionary Games Group
In my last post, I mentioned how conditional behavior usually implied a transfer of information from one agent to another, and that conditional cooperation was therefore vulnerable to exploitation through misrepresentation (deception). Little did I know that an analytic treatment of that point had been published a couple of months before. McNally & Jackson (2013), […]... Read more »
McNally L, & Jackson AL. (2013) Cooperation creates selection for tactical deception. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1762), 20130699. PMID: 23677345
- July 10, 2013
- 10:04 AM
- 432 views
Feminine Woman Is More Attractrive to Taken Man
by Anouk Vleugels in United Academics
Women’s facial features can determine length of relationship, researchers found. ... Read more »
Anthony C. Little et al. (2013) Men's strategic preferences for femininity in female faces. British Journal of Psychology . DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12043
- July 2, 2013
- 02:35 PM
- 702 views
The Boob-Resource Hypothesis: Why Is Bigger Better?
by Melissa Chernick in Science Storiented
It has been quite a while since I've made an entry in to the "Groundbreaking science - men like boobs" category. In the past, I've made the following statement on this topic: "Men like big breasts, therefore women evolve larger breasts. It's an evolutionarily solid argument, assuming of course that male preference exerts any pressure on the evolution of female secondary sexual characteristics." Indeed, evidence is mounting that humans have a great propensity to rely on their perceptions of........ Read more »
Swami, Viren, & Tovée, Martin J. (2013) Resource Security Impacts Men’s Female Breast Size Preferences. PLoS ONE, 8(3). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057623
- June 11, 2013
- 08:24 AM
- 690 views
The Far-Fetched Infidelity Detection Hypothesis of Oral Sex
by Scott McGreal in Eye on Psych
A recent paper attempted to confirm the evolutionary hypothesis that interest in oral sex is related to sperm competition and functions to detect infidelity. The study results are inconclusive as there is a more obvious mundane explanation for the findings. ... Read more »
Pham, M., & Shackelford, T. (2013) Oral sex as infidelity-detection. Personality and Individual Differences, 54(6), 792-795. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.11.034
- June 6, 2013
- 07:16 AM
- 532 views
Did genes shape my mother tongue?
by Richard Kunert in Brain's Idea
Intuitively, one is inclined to answer with a resounding ‘no’. Of course not, had I been adopted by Thai parents, I would speak Thai. But I was not. My parents and my mother tongue are German. Still, there is a growing opinion that genes do nonetheless play a role. Before looking at this opinion, it […]... Read more »
Baronchelli A, Chater N, Pastor-Satorras R, & Christiansen MH. (2012) The biological origin of linguistic diversity. PloS one, 7(10). PMID: 23118922
Pagel M, Atkinson QD, & Meade A. (2007) Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history. Nature, 449(7163), 717-20. PMID: 17928860
Dediu D. (2011) Are languages really independent from genes? If not, what would a genetic bias affecting language diversity look like?. Human biology, 83(2), 279-96. PMID: 21615290
- May 18, 2013
- 02:00 AM
- 371 views
Ethnocentrism, religion, and austerity: a science poster for the humanities
by Thomas Shultz in Evolutionary Games Group
Artem Kaznatcheev and I presented a poster on May 4th at the University of British Columbia to a highly interdisciplinary conference on religion. The conference acronym is CERC, which translates as Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium. Most of the 60-some attendees are religion scholars and social scientists from North American and European universities. Many […]... Read more »
Kaznatcheev, Artem, & Shultz, Thomas R. (2011) Ethnocentrism maintains cooperation, but keeping one’s children close fuels it. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 3174-3179. info:/
- May 11, 2013
- 01:19 AM
- 304 views
Welcome To Introduction To Psychology
by Jesse Marczyk in Pop Psychology
In my last post, I mentioned a hypothetical relatively-average psychologist (caveat: the term doesn’t necessarily apply to any specific person, living or dead). I found him to be a bit strange, since he tended to come up with hypotheses that … Continue reading →... Read more »
Cornwell, R., Palmer, C., Guinther, P., & Davis. H. (2005) Introductory Psychology Texts as a View of Sociobiology/Evolutionary Psychology’s Role in Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology, 355-374. info:/
- May 9, 2013
- 09:57 AM
- 431 views
Taking memory research to Parliament
by Kamar Ameen-Ali in NC3Rs Blog
NC3Rs-funded PhD student Kamar Ameen-Ali, Department of Psychology, Durham University, takes us on a trip to the House of Commons SET for BRITAIN event, where she presented her research recently to MPs and VIPs.... Read more »
Ameen-Ali, K., Eacott, M., & Easton, A. (2012) A new behavioural apparatus to reduce animal numbers in multiple types of spontaneous object recognition paradigms in rats. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 211(1), 66-76. DOI: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2012.08.006
- April 29, 2013
- 07:02 AM
- 514 views
Look into my eyes…..
by Doug Keene in The Jury Room
How often have you read that “the eyes are the window to the soul”? What that means, say proponents, is that all you have to do to know how someone feels is to look into their eyes and you know all. New research would say that only holds true (at least if you are a [...]
Related posts:
We pray with closed eyes
The eyes of [not just] Texas are upon you…
“I can look into his eyes and just tell he is lying”
... Read more »
Schiffer B, Pawliczek C, Müller BW, Gizewski ER, & Walter H. (2013) Why don't men understand women? Altered neural networks for reading the language of male and female eyes. PloS one, 8(4). PMID: 23593185
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
Research Blogging is powered by SMG Technology.
To learn more, visit seedmediagroup.com.