Ideological diversity of media consumption predicts COVID-19 vaccination.

This study examines the relationship between respondents' vaccine hesitancy, reported media consumption patterns, ideological leanings, and trust in science. A large-scale survey conducted in the US in 2022 (N = 1,646) assessed self-reported COVID-19 vaccination, trust in science, and reported media consumption. Findings show that, regardless of personal ideology, individuals who consumed less conservative media and had a more ideologically diverse media diet were more likely to be fully vaccinated and boosted.

Macrogenetics reveals multifaceted influences of environmental variation on vertebrate population genetic diversity across the Americas.

The broad scale distribution of population-specific genetic diversity (GD ) across taxa remains understudied relative to species diversity gradients, despite its relevance for systematic conservation planning. We used nuclear DNA data collected from 3678 vertebrate populations across the Americas to assess the role of environmental and spatial variables in structuring the distribution of GD , a key component of adaptive potential in the face of environmental change. We specifically assessed non-linear trends for a metric of GD expected heterozygosity (H ), and found more evidence for spatial hotspots and cold spots in H rather than a strict pattern with latitude.

Structured reflection increases intentions to reduce other people's health risks during COVID-19.

People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, Yet their behavior often increases others' health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others' health risks.

Evaluating Benefits, Costs, and Social Value as Predictors of Gratitude.

Although much is known about cooperation, the internal decision rules that regulate motivations to initiate and maintain cooperative relationships have not been thoroughly explored. Here, we focus on how acts of benefit delivery and perceptions of social value inform gratitude, an emotion that promotes cooperation. We evaluated alternate information-processing models to determine which inputs and internal representations best account for the intensity with which people report experiencing gratitude.

Evaluating the efficacy of common humanity-enhanced exposure for socially anxious young adults.

Despite some evidence of the benefits of self-compassion training among socially anxious individuals, little is known about whether enhancing self-compassion prior to exposure therapy increases initial exposure engagement. Additionally, manipulations have relied on broad definitions of self-compassion, rendering it difficult to distinguish the impact of individual components. This study employed three experiential exercises designed to enhance one facet of self-compassion-common humanity.

Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for COVID-19 management policies across countries.

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries ( = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies.

When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media.

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats' and Republicans' polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory.

Flexible approaches for estimating partial eta squared in mixed-effects models with crossed random factors.

Mixed-effects models are frequently used in a variety of disciplines because they can appropriately specify multiple sources of variation. However, precisely because they distinguish between multiple sources of variation, it is difficult to specify a standardized effect size, such as η. Several approaches to this problem have been proposed, but most do not address models with crossed random factors, and none allows for the range of data and models that researchers typically test.

The sex premium in religiously motivated moral judgment.

Recent theorizing suggests that religious people's moral convictions are quite strategic (albeit unconsciously so), designed to make their worlds more amenable to their favored approaches to solving life's basic challenges. In a meta-analysis of 5 experiments and a preregistered replication, we find that religious identity places a on moral judgments, causing people to judge violations of conventional sexual morality as particularly objectionable. The sex premium is especially strong among highly religious people, and applies to both legal and illegal acts.

Hierarchical generalized additive models in ecology: an introduction with mgcv.

In this paper, we discuss an extension to two popular approaches to modeling complex structures in ecological data: the generalized additive model (GAM) and the hierarchical model (HGLM). The hierarchical GAM (HGAM), allows modeling of nonlinear functional relationships between covariates and outcomes where the shape of the function itself varies between different grouping levels. We describe the theoretical connection between HGAMs, HGLMs, and GAMs, explain how to model different assumptions about the degree of intergroup variability in functional response, and show how HGAMs can be readily fitted using existing GAM software, the package in R.

Experience with anonymous interactions reduces intuitive cooperation.

The Social Heuristics Hypothesis claims that cooperation is intuitive because it is positively reinforced in everyday life, where behaviour typically has reputational consequences. Consequently, participants will cooperate in anonymous laboratory settings unless they either reflect on the one-shot nature of the interaction or learn through experience with such settings that cooperation does not promote self-interest. Experiments reveal that cognitive-processing manipulations (which increase reliance on either intuition or deliberation) indeed affect cooperation, but may also introduce confounds.

Scale-dependent interactions between tree canopy cover and impervious surfaces reduce daytime urban heat during summer.

As cities warm and the need for climate adaptation strategies increases, a more detailed understanding of the cooling effects of land cover across a continuum of spatial scales will be necessary to guide management decisions. We asked how tree canopy cover and impervious surface cover interact to influence daytime and nighttime summer air temperature, and how effects vary with the spatial scale at which land-cover data are analyzed (10-, 30-, 60-, and 90-m radii). A bicycle-mounted measurement system was used to sample air temperature every 5 m along 10 transects (∼7 km length, sampled 3-12 times each) spanning a range of impervious and tree canopy cover (0-100%, each) in a midsized city in the Upper Midwest United States.

Visual preferences for direct-gaze faces in infant macaques (Macaca mulatta) with limited face exposure.

From birth, human and nonhuman primates attend more to faces with direct gaze compared with averted gaze, and previous studies report that attention to the eyes is linked to the emergence of later social skills. Here, we explored whether early experiences influence attraction to eye contact in infant macaques by examining their attention to face pairs varying in their gaze direction across the first 13 weeks of life. Infants raised by human caretakers had limited conspecific interactions (nursery-reared; N = 16) and were compared to infants raised in rich social environments (mother-reared; N = 20).

Re-examination of Oostenbroek et al. (2016): evidence for neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion.

The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered.

Signatures of the collapse and incipient recovery of an overexploited marine ecosystem.

The Northwest Atlantic cod stocks collapsed in the early 1990s and have yet to recover, despite the subsequent establishment of a continuing fishing moratorium. Efforts to understand the collapse and lack of recovery have so far focused mainly on the dynamics of commercially harvested species. Here, we use data from a 33-year scientific trawl survey to determine to which degree the signatures of the collapse and recovery of the cod are apparent in the spatial and temporal dynamics of the broader groundfish community.

Testing the arousal hypothesis of neonatal imitation in infant rhesus macaques.

Neonatal imitation is the matching of (often facial) gestures by newborn infants. Some studies suggest that performance of facial gestures is due to general arousal, which may produce false positives on neonatal imitation assessments. Here we examine whether arousal is linked to facial gesturing in newborn infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Nonhierarchical Dispersal Promotes Stability and Resilience in a Tritrophic Metacommunity.

Community interactions (e.g., predation, competition) can be characterized by two factors: their strengths and how they are structured between and within species.

Reassessing intertemporal choice: human decision-making is more optimal in a foraging task than in a self-control task.

Many contemporary concerns (e.g., addiction, failure to save) can be viewed as intertemporal choice problems in which the consequences of choices are realized at different times.

Conciliatory gestures promote forgiveness and reduce anger in humans.

Conflict is an inevitable component of social life, and natural selection has exerted strong effects on many organisms to facilitate victory in conflict and to deter conspecifics from imposing harms upon them. Like many species, humans likely possess cognitive systems whose function is to motivate revenge as a means of deterring individuals who have harmed them from harming them again in the future. However, many social relationships often retain value even after conflicts have occurred between interactants, so natural selection has very likely also endowed humans with cognitive systems whose function is to motivate reconciliation with transgressors whom they perceive as valuable and nonthreatening, notwithstanding their harmful prior actions.

Life history, code of honor, and emotional responses to inequality in an economic game.

The code of honor, which is characterized by a preoccupation with reputation and willingness to take retaliatory action, has been used extensively to explain individual and cultural differences in peoples' tendencies to behave aggressively. However, research on the relationship between the code of honor and emotional responses to social interactions has been limited in scope, focusing primarily on anger in response to insults and reputational threats. Here we broaden this scope by examining the relationship between code of honor and emotional reactions in response to an unfair economic exchange that resulted in unequal monetary earnings among 3 laboratory participants.

Variation in oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphisms is associated with emotional and behavioral reactions to betrayal.

Variations in the gene that encodes the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) have been associated with many aspects of social cognition as well as several prosocial behaviors. However, potential associations of OXTR variants with reactions to betrayals of trust while cooperating for mutual benefit have not yet been explored. We examined how variations in 10 single-nucleotide polymorphisms on OXTR were associated with behavior and emotional reactions after a betrayal of trust in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game.

Do humans really punish altruistically? A closer look.

Some researchers have proposed that natural selection has given rise in humans to one or more adaptations for altruistically punishing on behalf of other individuals who have been treated unfairly, even when the punisher has no chance of benefiting via reciprocity or benefits to kin. However, empirical support for the altruistic punishment hypothesis depends on results from experiments that are vulnerable to potentially important experimental artefacts. Here, we searched for evidence of altruistic punishment in an experiment that precluded these artefacts.