The duration of daily activities has no impact on measures of overall wellbeing

It is widely assumed that the longer we spend in happier activities the happier we will be. In an intensive study of momentary happiness, we show that, in fact, longer time spent in happier activities does not lead to higher levels of reported happiness overall. This finding is replicated with different samples (student and diverse, multi-national panel), measures and methods of analysis. We explore different explanations for this seemingly paradoxical finding, providing fresh insight into the factors that do and do not affect the relationship between how happy we report feeling as a function of how long it lasts. This work calls into question the assumption that spending more time doing what we like will show up in making us happier, presenting a fundamental challenge to the validity of current tools used to measure happiness.

Depressive Symptoms Moderate the Association Between Lifetime Discrimination and Inhibition Among Older Adults

Discrimination has been identified as a potentially modifiable environmental stressor that reduces cognitive function. As the burden of discrimination can extend from early to late life, understanding its role in cognition in late life is critical. Further, understanding the potential moderating influence of depressive symptoms, which are common among older adults, on the linkage between discrimination and cognition, may provide further insight into the potential patterns of psychosocial stress and negative affect that may promote cognitive decline and dementia. Thus, we sought to examine whether depressive symptoms moderate linear relations of lifetime discrimination to cognitive function in the domains of visuospatial, verbal, and working memory, executive function, and psychomotor ability, adjusting for age, sex, race, and education. Participants were 165 older adults (34% male) with a mean age of 68.43y. Participants completed a health screening, a battery of cognitive tests, a psychosocial assessment, and cardiovascular testing relevant to the larger study. Linear regression results showed a significant interaction between lifetime discrimination and depressive symptoms (p<.05) related to the Stroop interference score, a measure of inhibition. A probe of the interaction showed that greater lifetime discrimination was associated with better inhibition among participants with fewer depressive symptoms. This paradoxical finding is consistent with scant research that shows exposure to discrimination may heighten performance, and is more common among individuals that have achieved more, both educationally and vocationally. Greater depressive symptomatology may reduce this paradoxical association. Future research should explore this question both longitudinally and in a larger sample.

A Normative Account of Confirmation Bias During Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning involves updating estimates of the value of states and actions on the basis of experience. Previous work has shown that in humans, reinforcement learning exhibits a confirmatory bias: when the value of a chosen option is being updated, estimates are revised more radically following positive than negative reward prediction errors, but the converse is observed when updating the unchosen option value estimate. Here, we simulate performance on a multi-arm bandit task to examine the consequences of a confirmatory bias for reward harvesting. We report a paradoxical finding: that confirmatory biases allow the agent to maximize reward relative to an unbiased updating rule. This principle holds over a wide range of experimental settings and is most influential when decisions are corrupted by noise. We show that this occurs because on average, confirmatory biases lead to overestimating the value of more valuable bandits and underestimating the value of less valuable bandits, rendering decisions overall more robust in the face of noise. Our results show how apparently suboptimal learning rules can in fact be reward maximizing if decisions are made with finite computational precision.

Is Perfectionism a Killer of Creative Thinking _pre-print

The standards that a person pursue in life can be set in a rigid or flexible way. The recent literature has emphasized a distinction between high and realistic standards of excellence, from high and unrealistic standards of perfection. In two studies, we investigated the role of striving toward excellence (i.e., excellencism) and striving toward perfection (i.e., perfectionism) in relation to divergent thinking, associative thinking, and openness to experience, general self-efficacy, and creative self-beliefs. In Study 1, 279 university students completed three divergent thinking items which called for creative uses of two common objects and original things which make noise. A measure of openness to experience was included. Results from multiple regression indicated that participants pursuing excellence tended to generate more answers and more original ones compared to those pursuing perfection. Openness to experience was positively associated to excellencism and negatively associated to perfectionism. In Study 2 (n = 401 university students), we replicated these findings and extended them to non-creative associative tasks requiring participants to generate chains of unrelated words. Additional individual differences measures included general self-efficacy, creative self-efficacy, and creative personal identity. The results suggested that excellencism was associated with better performance on divergent thinking and associative tasks, compared to perfectionism. Excellencism was positively associated with all four personality variables, whereas perfectionism was significantly and negatively associated with openness to experience only. Implications for the distinction between perfectionism and excellencism with respect to creative indicators are discussed. In addition, the paradoxical finding that perfection strivers had high creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity but lower openness to experience and poorer performance on objective indicators of creative abilities is discussed.

The welfare state criticism of the losers of modernization: How social experiences of resentment shape populist welfare critique

This article aims to explain the paradoxical finding that socio-economically vulnerable groups express more economic, moral and social criticism of the welfare state. As these groups generally benefit more from the welfare state and hold more egalitarian world views, their stronger criticism cannot be explained by the traditional frameworks of self-interest and ideology. As an alternative, we highlight the importance of social experiences of resentment as a source of discontent with welfare state performance. Our contribution argues that the dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populist critique that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. This welfare populism emerges from experiences of resentment related to the restructuring of group positions in the process of modernization. We differentiate between three types of discontent: economic status insecurity, group relative deprivation and social distrust. By applying structural equation modelling, we test whether resentful experiences mediate the relationship between the social structural position and welfare state criticism. Results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic, moral and social criticism. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment is indeed an important element for understanding the paradoxical relationship between social class and welfare state criticism.

Abstract MP43: Paradoxical Response to Antibodies in Periodontal Microbes in Subjects With Intracranial Atherosclerotic Stenosis

Introduction: Previously we have shown that periodontal disease and systemic inflammation are related to intracranial atherosclerosis (ICAS) in Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities study (ARIC). In this study we evaluated the relationship between serum antibodies against periodontal pathogens and ICAS. Methods: In this ongoing, prospective, longitudinal community-based cohort study, participants were assessed for antibodies to periodontal organisms including Porphyrmonas gingivalis (PG), Prevotella intermedia (PI), Prevotella nigrescens (PN), Bacteriodes forsythensis (BF), Treponema denticola (TD), Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans (AA), Campylobacter rectus (CR), Eikenella corrodens (EC), Fusobacterium nucleatum (FN), Peptostreptococcus micros (PM), Selenomonas noxia (SN), Capnocytophaga ochracea (CO), Veillonella parvula (VP), Streptococcus sanguinis (SS), Streptococcus intermedius (SI), Streptococcus oralis (SO), Actinomycosis viscosis (AV) and Helicobacter pylori (HP). These participants underwent 3D time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) to evaluate ICAS. Log mean antibody (IgG), CRP and IL-6 levels were compared using t-test between groups with and without ≥50% ICAS. Results: In this ARIC cohort, 1066 participants were assessed by MRA for ICAS. Serum CRP and IL-6 data were available for all and IgG levels were available for 772 participants. The log mean IgG level was significantly lower for patients with ≥50% ICAS versus patients with <50% ICAS in four organisms: PN (1.69 vs 1.80, p= 0.03 ), BF (1.30 vs 1.38, p=0.05 ), CO (1.23 vs 1.33, p= 0.04 ), FN (0.87 vs 1.01, p=0.02 ). The log mean IgG was also lower for CR, EC, SN, VP, SI, SO and AV though not significant. Log mean CRP was higher in the ≥50% ICAS group versus the <50% ICAS group (0.58 vs. 0.47, p < 0.001 ). Log mean IL-6 levels were also higher but not significant (0. 17 vs. 0.11, p= 0.07 ). Conclusion: Higher levels of systemic inflammatory markers (CRP, IL-6) are associated with significant ICAS, but we report a significantly lower level of IgG antibodies to specific periodontal pathogens (PN, BF, CO and FN) in patients with ≥50% ICAS. This paradoxical finding may represent the effect of systemic inflammation and oxidative stress on IgG levels to periodontal bacteria.

Individual Differences at Work

There is a great deal of research on whether personality, ability, and motivation correlate with behavior in the workplace. This is of great importance to all managers who know the benefits of able, engaged, and motivated staff compared to staff who are alienated and disenchanted. The research is an area of applied psychology that is at the interface of work, personality, and social psychology. Predominantly, the research aims to identify measurable characteristics (i.e., personality traits) of an individual that are systematically related to work output and to explain the mechanism and process involved. Research on the relationship among personality and organizational level, promotion level, and salary, all of which are related, is difficult because in order to validate the findings, it is important to get representative and comprehensive measures of work output, which few organizations can provide. The results suggest that personality plays an important part in all the outcomes and that three traits are consistently implicated. The higher people score on trait Conscientiousness and Extraversion and the lower they score on trait Neuroticism, the better they do at work. Similarly, intelligence plays an important role, particularly in more complex jobs. Recent literature has looked at management derailment and failure, with the idea that studying failure can illuminate success, as well as prevent a number of systematic selection errors. This approach is based on “dark-side” traits and the paradoxical finding that some subclinical personality disorders correlate with management success.

Income Inequality and Socio-economic Segregation in the City of Johannesburg

This chapter analyses income inequality and socio-economic segregation in South Africa’s most populous city, Johannesburg. The end of apartheid’s segregation in 1991 has been followed by both continuity and change of urban spatial patterns. There is a considerable literature on the transformation of inner-city areas from white to black, and of the steady diffusion of black middle-class residents into once ‘white’ suburbs. There has been less analysis on the nature and pace of socio-economic mixing. Four key findings from this chapter are as follows. First, dissimilarity indices show that bottom occupation categories and the unemployed are highly segregated from top occupation categories, but that the degree of segregation has decreased slightly between the censuses of 2001 and 2011. Second, the data quantifies the way in which Johannesburg’s large population of unemployed people are more segregated from top occupations than any of the other employment categories, although unemployed people are less segregated from bottom occupations. Third, over the same period, residents employed in bottom occupations are less likely to be represented in affluent former white suburbs. This seemingly paradoxical finding is likely to have resulted from fewer affluent households accommodating their domestic workers on their properties. Fourth, although most post-apartheid public housing projects have not disrupted patterns of socio-economic segregation, some important exceptions do show the enormous capacity of public housing to transform the spatial structure of the city.

A normative account of confirmatory biases during reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning involves updating estimates of the value of states and actions on the basis of experience. Previous work has shown that in humans, reinforcement learning exhibits a confirmatory bias: when updating the value of a chosen option, estimates are revised more radically following positive than negative reward prediction errors, but the converse is observed when updating the unchosen option value estimate. Here, we simulate performance on a multi-arm bandit task to examine the consequences of a confirmatory bias for reward harvesting. We report a paradoxical finding: that confirmatory biases allow the agent to maximise reward relative to an unbiased updating rule. This principle holds over a wide range of experimental settings and is most influential when decisions are corrupted by noise. We show that this occurs because on average, confirmatory biases overestimate the value of more valuable bandits, and underestimate the value of less valuable bandits, rendering decisions overall more robust in the face of noise. Our results show how apparently suboptimal learning policies can in fact be reward-maximising if decisions are made with finite computational precision.