Letters in 2018

A linguistic analysis of nearly 44,000 responses to the Washington University Sentence Completion Test elucidates the construct of ego development (personality development through adulthood) and identifies unique linguistic markers of each level of development.

Different parts of tools are often handled in different ways. This study presents a computational model explaining how humans build separate motor memories for different parts of the same objects.

Altenburger and Ugander identify ‘monophily’ or the overdispersion of attribute preferences in a social network and show that it can be used to predict otherwise hidden attribute information about an individual.

An analysis of more than 30,000 national polls from 351 general elections in 45 countries over the period between 1942 and 2017 shows that, contrary to popular belief, election polling misses have not become more prevalent.

Childhood abuse increases the risk of early mortality. Using data from the MIDUS study, the authors show that perceived social support received in adulthood can act as a buffer against the adverse effects of childhood abuse.

Short breaks in a stimulus stream are sufficient to create event boundaries during fear conditioning, which modulate the recognition rate for in-episode stimuli.

Galesic et al. show that election poll questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts, in addition to their own intentions, improve predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections.

Using fMRI data from healthy controls, the authors construct probabilistic maps of the multiple-demand and language-selective regions in the brain to classify patient lesions. They find that only multiple-demand-weighted lesion volumes predict deficits in fluid intelligence.

The authors exploit a 1972 policy that increased the minimum school leaving age to investigate the causal effects of staying in school on health. Using a large dataset, they find that remaining in school reduces the risk of diabetes and mortality.

The collective wisdom of crowds often provides better answers to problems than individual judgements. Here, a large experiment that split a crowd into many small deliberative groups produced better estimates than the average of all answers in the crowd.

Field experiments and network data show that the witchcraft label ‘zhu’ influences labour-sharing and intermarriage in a large network of southwest Chinese villages. Zhu is not an indicator of pro-sociality, but may function to spite or damage rivals.

Jebb et al. use data from the Gallup World Poll to show that happiness does not rise indefinitely with income: globally, income satiation occurs at US$95,000 for life evaluation and US$60,000 to US$75,000 for emotional well-being.