No Evidence That Siblings’ Gender Affects Personality Across Nine Countries
Thomas Dudek, Anne Ardila Brenøe, Jan Feld, and Julia M. Rohrer
Psychological Science
Does growing up with a sister instead of a brother affect personality? Dudek and colleagues provide a comprehensive analysis of how siblings’ genders affect adult personalities, using data from 85,887 people in 12 large representative surveys covering nine countries (United States, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, China, and Indonesia). They investigated the personality traits of risk tolerance, trust, patience, locus of control, and the Big Five (i.e., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). The results suggested that the gender of the next younger or older siblings had no effect on personality.
Luiza A. Santos, Jan G. Voelkel, Robb Willer, and Jamil Zaki
Psychological Science
Belief in cross-partisan empathy—understanding those with whom one disagrees politically—impacts the believers’ attitudes and behaviors as well as the attitudes of those they communicate with, this research suggests. Santos and colleagues used surveys, social-network analysis, preregistered experiments, and natural-language processing to examine the effects of this belief. Believing that cross-partisan empathy is useful appeared to be associated with less partisan division and more politically diverse friendships. Moreover, when prompted to believe that empathy is a political resource instead of a weakness, people became less emotionally polarized and communicated in ways that decreased partisan animosity and polarization.
The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement
Hannes Rosenbusch, Anthony M. Evans, and Marcel Zeelenberg
Psychological Science
Why are some jokes funnier than others? It might depend on the audience, this research suggests. Across five studies with varied stimuli and audiences (website visitors, students, users of Mechanical Turk and Prolific), Rosenbusch and colleagues found that perceivers’ characteristics outweigh stimulus characteristics in accounting for variance in funniness ratings. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high likelihood of explaining and predicting humor appreciation (in this case, how funny something is considered). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics in predicting level of amusement.
The Golden Age Is Behind Us: How the Status Quo Impacts the Evaluation of Technology
Adam H. Smiley and Matthew Fisher
Psychological Science
Independent of the actual risks posed by technology, people have more positive attitudes toward technologies invented before their earliest memories, this research suggests. Smiley and Fisher manipulated the reported age of an unfamiliar technology and found that people evaluated it more favorably when it was described as originating before their birth. Moreover, participants’ age at the time of invention predicted their attitudes toward real-world technologies, and their differing preferences for states of the world remaining consistent (i.e., their status quo bias) moderated their evaluations of technology. These results help shed light on why cycles of concern over new technologies continually repeat.
The Moral Significance of Aesthetics in Nature Imagery
Eunsoo Kim, Julia Lee Cunningham, and Anocha Aribarg
Psychological Science
Kim and colleagues trained a neural network to identify image-specific attributes that improve the perceived aesthetics of nature images (i.e., the physical beauty of nature). Using Instagram data from National Geographic, the network identified those attributes as higher saturation levels, higher image clarity, lower contrast or variation in brightness, and the focal object’s centeredness. Image aesthetics, in turn, predicted engagement with the Instagram posts. In another study, they found the cause of the aesthetics effect, on both engagement and moral concern, was the self-transcendent emotions (awe and inspiration) and purity associated with an image. Moreover, these effects appeared to be stronger for individuals who placed higher importance on beauty. These results highlight the potential of nature’s beauty to invigorate global conservation efforts.
Maureen Zalewski, Sihong Liu, Megan Gunnar, Liliana J. Lengua, and Philip A Fisher
Clinical Psychological Science
Zalewski and colleagues sought to identify parental mental-health trajectories predicted by pre-COVID-19 cumulative risk and COVID-19-specific risk factors. From April to November 2020, they tested a sample of 3,085 parents across the United States with one or more children age 5 or younger. Results indicated that the pre–COVID-19 cumulative risk as well as the COVID-19-specific risks of financial strain, decreased employment, and increased family conflict were salient risk factors predicting poor mental-health trajectories. These findings have public-health implications because prolonged exposure to mental-health symptoms in parents constitutes a risk factor for child development.
Devin Guthrie
Perspectives on Psychological Science
There is little literature that scientifically addresses people’s apocalyptic fears about the climate crisis, despite an urgent need, according to this article. Guthrie synthesizes research on existential psychology, , grief, and end-of-life care to present a perspective on how people can become psychologically resilient to the climate crisis. Establishing that death anxiety underlies eco-anxiety, the author demonstrates that preparing psychologically for eco-apocalypse therefore requires cultivating death acceptance. Guthrie also illustrates how people might live rich and meaningful lives despite awareness of their inevitable end.
Andrew W. Manigault et al.
Psychological Science
Could psychosocial resilience related to psychosocial resources (e.g., social support) mitigate the effects of stress on inflammation-associated depressive symptoms? In a longitudinal study of women with breast cancer (N = 187), Manigault and colleagues measured cancer-related stress and psychosocial resources—social support, optimism, positive affect, mastery, self-esteem, and mindfulness—after diagnosis. They also measured depressive symptoms and inflammation for 2 years starting after diagnosis. Women who reported having more psychosocial resources said these resources mitigated associations between stress and depressive symptoms and between stress and inflammation-related depressive symptoms. These results highlight the importance of psychosocial resources in managing stress and inflammation-associated depressive symptoms.
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