Our looming societal bereavement.

Some ramblings prompted by reading Andrew Sullivan't Weekly Dish piece "Dreaming of a Landslide" : 

As eager as I am to see Trump lose the presidential election, I realize I will have withdrawal symptoms - feel an emptiness from the loss of the constant entertainment provided by the media's obsessive focus on the attention grabbing orange clown's reality show. I will miss the horrified fascination I felt each time my prediction that 'surely it can't get any worse than this' was yet again proved wrong. 

One thing we can be very sure of is that a Biden presidency is going to be majorly boring in comparison. Extreme behaviors and political positions grab our attention, competent, sane, non-ideological problem solving does not. Polarization pays, driving the media quest for incendiary content that increases clicks What might rise as our new shiny object, our new circus? Schadenfreude over the tyrant's fall may suffice for awhile, but maybe people will finally fatigue from the divisiveness and decide to just get along with each other. 

Some rearranged clips illustrating conservative Andrew Sullivan's sentiments:

...a landslide is the only thing that can possibly, finally break the far right fever that has destroyed the GOP as a legitimate right-of-center political party, and turned it into a paranoid, media-driven, fact-free festival of fear and animus...A thumping defeat of the president, a serious shellacking, could help remove the tarnished toxicity of Trump from an agenda that, under younger leadership, could spawn a new, multicultural right-of-center majority...a reformist conservatism would seek to “level up” a society wracked by hyper-global capitalism...move toward defending the unskilled, protecting working families, guarding entitlements, resisting urban wokeness, checking free trade absolutism, restraining overseas intervention, and curtailing mass immigration.

Partisan polarization about voting by mail during the pandemic

From Lockhart et al., surveys illustrating another depressing feature of our times....

Are voters as polarized as political leaders when it comes to their preferences about how to cast their ballots in November 2020 and their policy positions on how elections should be run in light of the COVID-19 outbreak? Prior research has shown little party divide on voting by mail, with nearly equal percentages of voters in both parties choosing to vote this way where it is an option. Has a divide opened up this year in how voters aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties prefer to cast a ballot? We address these questions with two nationally diverse, online surveys fielded from April 8 to 10 and June 11 to 13, of 5,612 and 5,818 eligible voters, respectively, with an embedded experiment providing treated respondents with scientific projections about the COVID-19 outbreak. We find a nearly 10 percentage point difference between Democrats and Republicans in their preference for voting by mail in April, which had doubled in size to nearly 20 percentage points in June. This partisan gap is wider still for those exposed to scientific projections about the pandemic. We also find that support for national legislation requiring states to offer no-excuse absentee ballots has emerged as an increasingly polarized issue.

The mystery of American pain - a warning for the future

Case et al. (open source) make the fascinating observation that today's elderly report less pain than those in midlife and predict that tomorrow's elderly will be sicker than today's elderly, with serious implications for healthcare. 

Significance

The elderly in the United States report less pain than those in midlife—suggesting, perhaps, that once people move into old age, their morbidity will fall. Unfortunately, assessing pain by age at one point in time masks the fact that each successive birth cohort reports more pain at any given age than the cohorts that came before it. We cannot use the experience of the elderly today to project pain prevalence of the elderly tomorrow. Today’s elderly have experienced less pain throughout their lives than those in midlife today, who will be tomorrow’s elderly. If these patterns continue, pain prevalence will continue to increase for all adults; tomorrow’s elderly will be sicker than today’s elderly, with serious implications for healthcare.

Abstract

There is an expectation that, on average, pain will increase with age, through accumulated injury, physical wear and tear, and an increasing burden of disease. Consistent with that expectation, pain rises with age into old age in other wealthy countries. However, in America today, the elderly report less pain than those in midlife. This is the mystery of American pain. Using multiple datasets and definitions of pain, we show today’s midlife Americans have had more pain throughout adulthood than did today’s elderly. Disaggregating the cross-section of ages by year of birth and completion of a bachelor’s degree, we find, for those with less education, that each successive birth cohort has a higher prevalence of pain at each age—a result not found for those with a bachelor’s degree. Thus, the gap in pain between the more and less educated has widened in each successive birth cohort. The increase seen across birth cohorts cannot be explained by changes in occupation or levels of obesity for the less educated, but fits a more general pattern seen in the ongoing erosion of working-class life for those born after 1950. If these patterns continue, pain prevalence will continue to increase for all adults; importantly, tomorrow’s elderly will be sicker than today’s elderly, with potentially serious implications for healthcare.

Age related cognitive decline and the gut microbiome

Haridy summarizes experiments by D'Amato et al. showing that fecal transplants from old mice to young mice result in the younger animals displaying learning and memory impairments. It would be interesting to expand this work to check whether transferring fecal transplants from young to older mice improved their learning and memory, as is the case with blood transfers from younger to older mice. Here are the background and results sections of the open source research paper. 

Background

The gut-brain axis and the intestinal microbiota are emerging as key players in health and disease. Shifts in intestinal microbiota composition affect a variety of systems; however, evidence of their direct impact on cognitive functions is still lacking. We tested whether faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) from aged donor mice into young adult recipients altered the hippocampus, an area of the central nervous system (CNS) known to be affected by the ageing process and related functions.

Results

Young adult mice were transplanted with the microbiota from either aged or age-matched donor mice. Following transplantation, characterization of the microbiotas and metabolomics profiles along with a battery of cognitive and behavioural tests were performed. Label-free quantitative proteomics was employed to monitor protein expression in the hippocampus of the recipients. We report that FMT from aged donors led to impaired spatial learning and memory in young adult recipients, whereas anxiety, explorative behaviour and locomotor activity remained unaffected. This was paralleled by altered expression of proteins involved in synaptic plasticity and neurotransmission in the hippocampus. Also, a strong reduction of bacteria associated with short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) production (Lachnospiraceae, Faecalibaculum, and Ruminococcaceae) and disorders of the CNS (Prevotellaceae and Ruminococcaceae) was observed. Finally, the detrimental effect of FMT from aged donors on the CNS was confirmed by the observation that microglia cells of the hippocampus fimbria, acquired an ageing-like phenotype; on the contrary, gut permeability and levels of systemic and local (hippocampus) cytokines were not affected.

Bodybuilding supplement promotes healthy aging and extends life span

...at least in mice. I pass on clips from this piece by by Jocelyn Kaiser:

A dietary supplement bodybuilders use to bulk up may have a more sweeping health benefit: Staving off the ravages of old age. Mice given the substance—alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG)—were healthier as they aged, and females lived longer than mice not on the supplement.

AKG is part of the metabolic cycle that our cells use to make energy from food...The molecule grabbed attention as a possible antiaging treatment in 2014, when researchers reported AKG could extend life span by more than 50% in tiny Caenorhabditis elegans worms... In the new study, Gordon Lithgow and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and colleagues turned to mammals. They gave groups of 18-month-old mice (about age 55 in human years) the equivalent of 2% of their daily chow as AKG until they died, or for up to 21 months. AKG levels in blood gradually drop with age, and the scientists’ aim was to restore levels to those seen in young animals.

Some differences jumped out within a few months: “They looked much blacker, shinier, and younger” than control mice, says Azar Asadi Shahmirzadi, a postdoc at the Buck Institute who did the experiments as a graduate student. In addition, the AKG-fed mice scored an average of more than 40% better on tests of “frailty,” as measured by 31 physiological attributes including hair color, hearing, walking gait, and grip strength. And female mice lived a median of 8% to 20% longer after AKG treatment began than control mice, the group reports today in Cell Metabolism...The AKG-eating mice did not perform better on tests of heart function or treadmill endurance, however, and the tests did not include cognitive performance.

Probing the mechanism for these improvements, the researchers found that female mice receiving AKG produced higher levels of a molecule that tamps down on inflammation. Chronic inflammation can spur many diseases of aging such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and dementia.

Kennedy, now also at the National University of Singapore, plans to test AKG in human volunteers soon. Looking at a group of people between the ages of 45 and 65, his group will see whether the molecule improves aging-related biomarkers such as inflammation, arterial hardening, and a type of chemical signature on DNA associated with aging. The company Ponce de Leon Health, where Kennedy serves as chief scientific officer (and Gordon and other paper authors have stock), is running a similar study at Indiana University.

Ponce de Leon Health already sells a formulation of AKG called Rejuvant that it says can “slow the aging process.” Kennedy defends these claims. “We are upfront about the data that we have and do not yet have on the website,” he says. And Brown-Borg notes the Buck Institute team isn’t the first group of aging-focused researchers to start a company to develop an antiaging treatment, an idea she hopes will eventually pan out in clinical trials

Facing major changes that are a predictable and integral part of life.

I pass on clips from another of Arthur Brooks' biweekly articles on "How to Build a Life." Its discussion of major life changes begins with the obvious  major life transition that is being forced upon most of us by the COVID -19 pandemic.

We have been awakening to the reality that the coronavirus pandemic is not a temporary affliction, but an involuntary transition from one way of life to another. Our jobs and personal lives are shifting and, in many cases, will never fully return to “normal.” ...You may never go back to work like before. Dating may never be the same. Your alma mater might go broke and disappear. Will you hug your friends or even shake hands as much as you used to? Perhaps not.

...Even when a transition is completely voluntary, it can be the source of intense suffering, because it involves adapting to new surroundings and changing your self-conception.

If we understand transitions properly, however, we can curb our natural tendency to fight against them—a futile battle, given their inevitability. Indeed, with a shift in mindset, we can make transitions into a source of meaning and transcendence.

Psychologists call the state of being in transition “liminality - you are neither in the state you left nor completely in your new state, at least not mentally. This provokes something of an identity crisis - it raises the question “Who am I?” - which can be emotionally destabilizing.

After interviewing hundreds of people about their life transitions, author Bruce Feiler found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.

...here’s the good news: Even difficult, unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time... research  shows that we tend to see past events—even unwanted ones—as net positives over time. Though our brains have a tendency to focus on negative emotions in the present, over the years unpleasant feelings fade more than pleasant feelings do, a phenomenon known as “fading affect bias.”

One of the things we learn by not resisting challenging transitions is how to cope with subsequent life changes - a sense of meaning gained through change makes the rest of life seem more stable.

Difficult periods can also stimulate innovation and ingenuity. A large amount of literature  talks about “post-traumatic growth,” in which people derive long-term benefits from painful experiences, including more appreciation for life, richer relationships, greater resilience, and deeper spirituality. Another manifestation of this growth, according to some newer scholarship, is heightened creativity.

Life changes are painful, but inevitable. And as hard as they may be, we only make things harder—and risk squandering the benefits and lessons they can bring—when we work against them instead of with them...those who benefit the most from painful periods are those who spend time experiencing and processing them. The right strategy is to accept transitions as an integral part of life, and lean into them.

Tipsy microglia binge on synapses - another reason to cut down on the booze

Socodato et al. find that binge-level alcohol intake (about five drinks for an average person) over 10 consecutive days enhances Src-to–tumor necrosis factor (TNF) signaling in prefrontal cortex microglia, which boosts their engulfment capacity and leads to aberrant synaptic pruning, culminating in synapse loss and anxiety-like behavior. Overall, their data suggest that aberrant synaptic pruning by microglia might play an important role in the synaptic transmission deficits elicited by alcohol abuse. Their abstract:

Alcohol abuse adversely affects the lives of millions of people worldwide. Deficits in synaptic transmission and in microglial function are commonly found in human alcohol abusers and in animal models of alcohol intoxication. Here, we found that a protocol simulating chronic binge drinking in male mice resulted in aberrant synaptic pruning and substantial loss of excitatory synapses in the prefrontal cortex, which resulted in increased anxiety-like behavior. Mechanistically, alcohol intake increased the engulfment capacity of microglia in a manner dependent on the kinase Src, the subsequent activation of the transcription factor NF-κB, and the consequent production of the proinflammatory cytokine TNF. Pharmacological blockade of Src activation or of TNF production in microglia, genetic ablation of Tnf, or conditional ablation of microglia attenuated aberrant synaptic pruning, thereby preventing the neuronal and behavioral effects of the alcohol. Our data suggest that aberrant pruning of excitatory synapses by microglia may disrupt synaptic transmission in response to alcohol abuse.

Acetaminophen increases risk taking

From Keaveney et al.:

Acetaminophen (Tylenol), an analgesic and antipyretic available over-the-counter and used in over 600 medicines, is one of the most consumed drugs in the USA. Recent research has suggested that acetaminophen’s effects extend to the blunting of negative as well as positive affect. Because affect is a determinant of risk perception and risk taking, we tested the hypothesis that acute acetaminophen consumption (1000 mg) could influence these important judgments and decisions. In three double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, healthy young adults completed a laboratory measure of risk taking (Balloon Analog Risk Task) and in Studies 1 and 2 completed self-report measures of risk perception. Across all studies (total n = 545), acetaminophen increased risk-taking behavior. On the more affectively stimulating risk perception measure used in Study 2, acetaminophen reduced self-reported perceived risk and this reduction statistically mediated increased risk-taking behavior. These results indicate that acetaminophen can increase risk taking, which may be due to reductions in risk perceptions, particularly those that are highly affect laden.

All of us are racists in our early infancy.

Listening to a Sam Harris 'Making Sense' podcast interview of prolific black author John McWhorter - who describes 'The New Religion of Anti-Racism' - puts me in awe of how advanced and detailed arguments over race have become, with many brilliant people writing. This gives me pause with respect to adding any comments of my own to the cacophony. 

But...in much of the writing - on critical race theory for example - there seems to be almost exclusive emphasis on social constructionist approaches. Culture, history, politics are the main determinants. To point out that our social brains are genetically predisposed during their development to make us infant racists, performing us versus them distinctions even before one year of age, is to risk being labeled as racist, or some other flavor of politically incorrect. 

So... just to make the point again... humans are born, and their brains are wired, with a predisposition to form 'us and them' distinctions, particularly with regard to facial characteristics or skin color, that on average distinguish different ethnic or racial groups. If you enter 'faces', 'race', or 'infants' in the search box in the left column on this page, you will find hundreds of relevant posts noting research from 2006 onward. As a small sample: 

-An 'other race effect' emerges by 6 months of age, fully present at 9 months, in which infants discriminate faces within their own racial group better than within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese). 

- Orphan human infants raised with exposure to only same-race faces (European or Asian) have heightened amygdala fear responses to out-group faces than those raised with exposure to same- and other-race faces. Later age of adoption is associated with greater biases to race. 

-In group favoritism and expectations are observed in 17 month old infants. 

-The facial recognition area of our brains immediately collects information about race and sex as well, showing patterns of activation that are different for black and white faces, and for female and male faces. Meaning is attached to those identifications later in visual processing.

-Deindividuation of outgroup faces occurs at the earliest stages of visual perception.

-Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons.

-Studies on people of varying race, religion, and age and find, that after ranking their own race, religion, or age most favorably, people rank remaining categories in the same hierarchy, suggesting that rules of social evaluation are pervasively embedded in culture and mind.

We need to be clear that the nudging to be little racists by our genes and culture during infancy does not imply that this is what we should be (the naturalistic fallacy). It does give us a more clear understanding of how the biological deck is stacked against us as we try to modify our adult behaviors, which can never be as hard-wired as those learned much earlier. 

What to Do When the Future Feels Hopeless

In one of his biweekly 'How to bluild a life' essays Arthur Brooks offers advice on antidotes to feeling of helplessness in the face of the current pandemic. Some clips:

While there’s little we can do to change the harsh realities of the pandemic, we can change the mindset we use to face them. By doing two things, we can improve our ability to cope with this situation, as well as with negativity and feelings of powerlessness in the future.

1. Channel your inner lawyer.

Pessimism generally distorts reality. Seligman and others recommend that pessimists combat their tendency to expect the worst by employing what they call a disputing technique—verbalizing the negative assumptions we are making about the future, and disputing them with realistic facts.

The other day I found myself darkly musing that I would likely never go back in person; that this would be my new normal, forever. This pessimism, fueled by news stories I’ve read with titles like “Will the Coronavirus Forever Alter the College Experience?,” is completely unwarranted in my school’s case. So I disputed it with the facts. We are, in fact, creating hybrid classes, and planning for an in-person future. There’s a good chance I’ll be back in the classroom within the next year. My odd work situation is tedious, but temporary...Most likely, your future is also brighter than what you may think at your darkest moments, so dispute your pessimism not with mindless optimism, but with facts. Build a solid case for something other than the worst-case scenario, and argue it to yourself like a lawyer.

2. Turn constraints into decisions.

...start an examination of every problem by listing the apparent limitations on your freedom, and instead of taking them as given, consider how you can change them...For example, in the case of the coronavirus lockdowns, the complaint about work I most often hear is that with the inability to work in a normal way, productivity is ruined...The answer is to change the definition of productivity...you might use this period to reset your definition of productivity. True, many aspects of many jobs have been made more difficult by the pandemic. But other parts of a truly productive life are begging for your attention. You can set goals for exercise, work on acquiring new skills, spend quality time with loved ones, or learn to tame your monkey mind in meditation. This is the sort of productivity that will reward you in the long run and can help you establish a healthier, happier equilibrium when the pandemic is over...the healthiest way to look at the pandemic—or any difficult period in our lives—is as an opportunity for improvement and personal growth, without pushing away the negative emotions that are a natural by-product of hard times. As we confront pessimism in the context of COVID-19, we will start to see and manage it more generally in our lives.

Kitty see, kitty do: cat imitates human

I am immediately going to start trying this with my abyssinians! Cats have been notoriously hard to study, and this study reinforces, for example, that cats 0 unlike dogs - are likely to show their true abilities only if their owner is present.   See the description by David Grimm. 

Perceptions of family social status correlate with health and life chances

A fascinating British twin study from Rivenbark et al:

Children from lower-income households are at increased risk for poor health, educational failure, and behavioral problems. This social gradient is one of the most reproduced findings in health and social science. How people view their position in social hierarchies also signals poor health. However, when adolescents’ views of their social position begin to independently relate to well-being is currently unknown. A cotwin design was leveraged to test whether adolescents with identical family backgrounds, but who viewed their family’s social status as higher than their same-aged and sex sibling, experienced better well-being in early and late adolescence. Participants were members of the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, a representative cohort of British twins (n = 2,232) followed across the first 2 decades of life. By late adolescence, perceptions of subjective family social status (SFSS) robustly correlated with multiple indicators of health and well-being, including depression; anxiety; conduct problems; marijuana use; optimism; not in education, employment, or training (NEET) status; and crime. Findings held controlling for objective socioeconomic status both statistically and by cotwin design after accounting for measures of childhood intelligence (IQ), negative affect, and prior mental health risk and when self-report, informant report, and administrative data were used. Little support was found for the biological embedding of adolescents’ perceptions of familial social status as indexed by inflammatory biomarkers or cognitive tests in late adolescence or for SFSS in early adolescence as a robust correlate of well-being or predictor of future problems. Future experimental studies are required to test whether altering adolescents’ subjective social status will lead to improved well-being and social mobility.

Genes and environments, development and time

 A special section of the Sept. 22 issue of PNAS offers a series of free online artices on biological embedding across timescales.  Here is the abstract of the introductory article by Boyce et al.:

A now substantial body of science implicates a dynamic interplay between genetic and environmental variation in the development of individual differences in behavior and health. Such outcomes are affected by molecular, often epigenetic, processes involving gene–environment (G–E) interplay that can influence gene expression. Early environments with exposures to poverty, chronic adversities, and acutely stressful events have been linked to maladaptive development and compromised health and behavior. Genetic differences can impart either enhanced or blunted susceptibility to the effects of such pathogenic environments. However, largely missing from present discourse regarding G–E interplay is the role of time, a “third factor” guiding the emergence of complex developmental endpoints across different scales of time. Trajectories of development increasingly appear best accounted for by a complex, dynamic interchange among the highly linked elements of genes, contexts, and time at multiple scales, including neurobiological (minutes to milliseconds), genomic (hours to minutes), developmental (years and months), and evolutionary (centuries and millennia) time. This special issue of PNAS thus explores time and timing among G–E transactions: The importance of timing and timescales in plasticity and critical periods of brain development; epigenetics and the molecular underpinnings of biologically embedded experience; the encoding of experience across time and biological levels of organization; and gene-regulatory networks in behavior and development and their linkages to neuronal networks. Taken together, the collection of papers offers perspectives on how G–E interplay operates contingently within and against a backdrop of time and timescales.

Inflammaging - Another reason seniors don't want to catch COVID-19

I imagine myself to have a very robust immune system because I very seldom catch a flu or cold, take Vitamins C and D, exercise, am not overweight, ran around barefoot when I was 3-4 years old, eating dirt and pill bugs outside the family house I have now moved back into 75 years later. This optimistic view is tempered quite a bit by information in Greenwoods's recent article describing how the aging immune system begins to shift into a heightened state of alert, dialing up inflammation and running out of certain immune cells. This is because the body's first line of defense against virus infiltration, that normally also cleans up damaged cells, misfolded proteins and other detritus in the body - even in the absence of an infection - begins to be overwhelmed by increasing amount of waste, and slides into a constant state of alert and inflammation. And...

At the same time, elderly cells in tissues throughout the body are thought to change with age, releasing inflammatory substances of their own...even perfectly healthy 65-year-olds usually have higher levels of immune proteins, like cytokines, involved in inflammation than younger people do. This heightened state of chronic inflammation, sometimes called “inflammaging,” is linked to frailty — older adults with higher levels of it may be more fragile and less mobile...fighting off pathogens becomes more complicated: All of this baseline inflammatory chaos in an aging body makes it harder for the messages sent out by the innate immune system to reach their targets...there’s the added danger that the innate immune system may overreact...the aging immune system might be linked to reports of severe Covid-19 culminating in a cytokine storm, a reaction that causes high numbers of immune messengers to flood the body and can lead to organ failure...This inflammation may also be part of why vaccines, whose effectiveness relies on a robust reaction from the immune system, don’t work as well in older people — an effect that’s likely to extend to Covid-19 vaccines.

Several days after the innate immune response begins, the body begins a second wave of attacks against the viral invader. This adaptive immune system response is more targeted than the first, methodically destroying cells infected by this specific virus...in older bodies, the adaptive response not only takes longer to get into gear, it arrives to find a scene of inflammatory pandemonium...These delays mean that the pathogen has already made many copies of itself by the time the adaptive immune system gets to work and gains a foothold that might not have been available in a younger person. Additionally, older people have fewer fresh T cells, important players in the adaptive response that are trained to hunt down cells infected with a specific pathogen.

Since it became clear that the virus sometimes provokes an out-of-control immune response, researchers have been testing whether reducing inflammation might help. Drugs that tamp down the levels of cytokines, like those used for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, have not shown success in fighting the virus. What’s more, chloroquine, which can help inhibit the aging of cells, caused increased mortality in Covid-19 clinical trials.

But the steroid dexamethasone, a potent anti-inflammatory, has been shown to reduce deaths from the virus. It resulted in one-third fewer deaths in people on ventilators and one-fifth fewer deaths in those on oxygen, according to a study published in June. (The drug may be ineffective, or even harmful, for patients in the early stages of the disease, however.)

The 2020 Ig Nobel Prizes - research on knives made of feces.

A piece in Science Magazine gives the highlights of this year's Ig Noble prize s published in the Annals of Improbable Research. If the award for research showing that knives can not be made from feces (despite a previous account of an Inuit man doing so) turns you on, you might also enjoy this Poop Mystery Story in the New Yorker Magazine.

Brain circuits signaling the absence of emotion in body language

Sokolov et al. show that modulation of the reciprocal effective connectivity between the amygdala and insula during processing of neutral and emotional body language predicts people’s ability to recognize neutral body language, suggesting that their interplay may be important not only for the processing of emotions but also, for inferring the absence of emotional content in body language. Their abstract:

Adaptive social behavior and mental well-being depend on not only recognizing emotional expressions but also, inferring the absence of emotion. While the neurobiology underwriting the perception of emotions is well studied, the mechanisms for detecting a lack of emotional content in social signals remain largely unknown. Here, using cutting-edge analyses of effective brain connectivity, we uncover the brain networks differentiating neutral and emotional body language. The data indicate greater activation of the right amygdala and midline cerebellar vermis to nonemotional as opposed to emotional body language. Most important, the effective connectivity between the amygdala and insula predicts people’s ability to recognize the absence of emotion. These conclusions extend substantially current concepts of emotion perception by suggesting engagement of limbic effective connectivity in recognizing the lack of emotion in body language reading. Furthermore, the outcome may advance the understanding of overly emotional interpretation of social signals in depression or schizophrenia by providing the missing link between body language reading and limbic pathways. The study thus opens an avenue for multidisciplinary research on social cognition and the underlying cerebrocerebellar networks, ranging from animal models to patients with neuropsychiatric conditions.

Another Big History - why the West is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic)

Alas, I usually end up reading reviews of books rather than the books themselves. Here I want to pass on clips from Shulevitz's review in The Atlantic: of Joseph Henrich's theory-of-everything type book: "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Henrich directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

Consider this the latest addition to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe. Big History asks Big Questions and offers quasi-monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks. Cooperation. What explains differences and inequalities among civilizations? Diamond asks. Environment, which is to say, geography, climate, flora and fauna. Henrich also wants to explain variation among societies, in particular to account for the Western, prosperous kind.

One culture... is different from the others, and that’s modern WEIRD (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) culture. Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.”...Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions...The Catholic Church changed all that. As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its “Marriage and Family Program,..it meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest.. ..Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself...Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy...The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe...Loosened from their roots, people gathered in cities. There they developed “impersonal prosociality”—that is, they bonded with other city folk. They wrote city charters and formed professional guilds. Sometimes they elected leaders, the first inklings of representative democracy.

Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

Henrich’s most consequential—and startling—claim is that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people possess opposing cognitive styles. They think differently. Standing apart from the community, primed to break wholes into parts and classify them, Westerners are more analytical. People from kinship-intensive cultures, by comparison, tend to think more holistically.

Henrich is more persuasive when applying his theory of cumulative culture to the evolution of ideas. Democracy, the rule of law, and human rights “didn’t start with fancy intellectuals, philosophers, or theologians,” Henrich writes. “Instead, the ideas formed slowly, piece by piece, as regular Joes with more individualistic psychologies—be they monks, merchants, or artisans—began to form competing voluntary associations” and learned how to govern them. Toppling the accomplishments of Western civilization off their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monuments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an effect of culture, including us.

Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy

Bartels does a survey (open source) that provides numbers and graphs on what is obvious from current news sources - the frailty of public commitment to democratic norms in the contemporary United States illustrated by the survey responses of 1,151 Republican identifiers and Republican-leaning Independents* interviewed in January 2020:  

Significance

Growing partisan polarization and democratic “backsliding” in various parts of the world have raised concerns about the attachment of ordinary Americans to democratic institutions and procedures. I find that substantial numbers of Republicans endorse statements contemplating violations of key democratic norms, including respect for the law and for the outcomes of elections and eschewing the use of force in pursuit of political ends. The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The strong tendency of ethnocentric Republicans to countenance violence and lawlessness, even prospectively and hypothetically, underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

Abstract

Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

Disagreeable people are not more likely than agreeable people to obtain power in an organization.

An interesting study from Anderson et al.:

Does being disagreeable—that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways—help people attain power? This question has long captivated philosophers, scholars, and laypeople alike, and yet prior empirical findings have been inconclusive. In the current research, we conducted two preregistered prospective longitudinal studies in which we measured participants’ disagreeableness prior to entering the labor market and then assessed the power they attained in the context of their work organization ∼14 y later when their professional careers had unfolded. Both studies found disagreeable individuals did not attain higher power as opposed to extraverted individuals who did gain higher power in their organizations. Furthermore, the null relationship between disagreeableness and power was not moderated by individual differences, such as gender or ethnicity, or by contextual variables, such as organizational culture. What can account for this null relationship? A close examination of behavior patterns in the workplace found that disagreeable individuals engaged in two distinct patterns of behavior that offset each other’s effects on power attainment: They engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, which positively predicted attaining higher power, but also engaged in less communal and generous behavior, which predicted attaining less power. These two effects, when combined, appeared to cancel each other out and led to a null correlation between disagreeableness and power.

"Us" versus "Them" in 17 month old infants.

Jin and Baillargeon make observations that suggest an early origin of the 'us and them' perspective being taken to extremes in our current polarized political climate:

Significance

We examined whether one mechanism contributing to ingroup favoritism might be an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments, 17-mo-old infants first watched third-party interactions among unfamiliar adults identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one adult needed help, and another adult either did or did not provide it. Infants expected help to be provided when the two adults belonged to the same group, but held no expectation when the adults belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups. Infants thus already possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support, and this finding sheds light on one of the mechanisms underlying ingroup favoritism in human interactions.

Abstract

One pervasive facet of human interactions is the tendency to favor ingroups over outgroups. Remarkably, this tendency has been observed even when individuals are assigned to minimal groups based on arbitrary markers. Why is mere categorization into a minimal group sufficient to elicit some degree of ingroup favoritism? We consider several accounts that have been proposed in answer to this question and then test one particular account, which holds that ingroup favoritism reflects in part an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments with 17-mo-old infants, unfamiliar women were first identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one woman needed instrumental assistance to achieve her goal, and another woman either provided the necessary assistance (help event) or chose not to do so (ignore event). When the two women belonged to the same group, infants looked significantly longer if shown the ignore as opposed to the help event; when the two women belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups, however, infants looked equally at the two events. Together, these results indicate that infants view helping as expected among individuals from the same group, but as optional otherwise. As such, the results demonstrate that from an early age, an abstract expectation of ingroup support contributes to ingroup favoritism in human interactions.