Personalized behavior management as a replacement for medications for pain control and mood regulation

A lack of personalized approaches in non-medication pain management has prevented these alternative forms of treatment from achieving the desired efficacy. One hundred and ten female patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) and 60 healthy women without chronic pain were assessed for severity of chronic or retrospective occasional pain, respectively, along with alexithymia, depression, anxiety, coping strategies, and personality traits. All analyses were conducted following a ‘resource matching’ hypothesis predicting that to be effective, a behavioral coping mechanism diverting or producing cognitive resources should correspond to particular mechanisms regulating pain severity in the patient. Moderated mediation analysis found that extraverts could effectively cope with chronic pain and avoid the use of medications for pain and mood management by lowering depressive symptoms through the use of distraction mechanism as a habitual (‘out-of-touch-with-reality’) behavior. However, introverts could effectively cope with chronic pain and avoid the use of medications by lowering catastrophizing through the use of distraction mechanism as a situational (‘in-touch-with-reality’) behavior. Thus, personalized behavior management techniques applied according to a mechanism of capturing or diverting the main individual ‘resource’ of the pain experience from its ‘feeding’ to supporting another activity may increase efficacy in the reduction of pain severity along with decreasing the need for pain relief and mood-stabilizing medications.

Probing the Hypersalience Hypothesis—An Adapted Judge-Advisor System Tested in Individuals With Psychotic-Like Experiences

Individuals with psychotic-like experiences and psychosis gather and use information differently than controls; in particular they seek and rely on less information or over-weight currently available information. A new paradigm, the judge-advisor system, has previously been used to investigate these processes. Results showed that psychosis-prone individuals tend to seek less advice but at the same time use the available advice more. Some theoretical models, like the hypersalience of evidence-matching hypothesis, predict that psychosis-prone individuals weight recently available information to a greater extent and thus provide an explanation for increased advice-weighting scores in psychosis-prone individuals. To test this model, we adapted the previously used judge-advisor system by letting participants receive consecutively multiple pieces of advice. To meet this aim, we recruited a large MTurk community sample (N = 1,396), which we split in a group with high levels of psychotic-like experiences (at least 2 SD above the mean, n = 80) and a group with low levels of psychotic-like experiences (maximum 0.5 SD above the mean, n = 1,107), using the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences' positive subscale. First, participants estimated five people's age based on photographs. Then, they received consecutive advice in the form of manipulated age estimates by allegedly previous participants, with outliers in some trials. After each advice, participants could adjust their estimate. This procedure allowed us to investigate how participants weighted each currently presented advice. In addition to being more confident in their final estimates and in line with our preregistered hypothesis, participants with more frequent psychotic-like experiences did weight currently available advice more than participants with less frequent psychotic-like experiences. This effect was especially pronounced in response to outliers, as fine-grained post-hoc analysis suggested. Result thus support models predicting an overcorrection in response to new incoming information and challenges an assumed general belief inflexibility in people with psychotic experiences.

Do the formative aspects of education really matter for educational assortative mating? Cues from a natural experiment (ACCEPTED in RSSM)

Individuals tend to partner with people of a similar educational level as themselves. According to the matching hypothesis, exposure to education leads to similarity in taste and values, causing educationally similar partners form unions. In this study, I ask if such formative content of education matters for educational homogamy, net of other forces. Evaluating this claim is often difficult because educational level also increases earnings prospects and because marriage markets are structured by educational level - aspects which also lead to educational homogamy. I approach this issue using a semi-experimental design that tentatively holds constant marriage markets and human capital related to education. Using a national reform, I compare the educational assortative mating of upper secondary vocational students who studied under a theoretical curriculum to that of vocational students not exposed to a theoretical curriculum. The reform provides variability in formative education. Yet, it induces no variation in competitive earnings and marriage markets, as students obtain comparable earnings within the same standard upper secondary track. Therefore, effects may be attributed to matching on the formative content of the added theoretical curriculum. Before and after adjusting for selection, I find no effect of an added theoretical curriculum on partnering. The results are discussed in terms of the ambiguity of formative education as an explanation for educational assortative mating.

Matching Instruction with Modality-Specific Learning Style: Effects on Immediate Recall and Working Memory Performance

A well-known hypothesis in education and amongst the general public is that matching instructional method with an individual’s modality-specific learning style improves learning and cognitive performance. Several critical reviews in the past decade, however, have shown that the hypothesis has not been properly evaluated with appropriate methodology. Furthermore, the association between learning style and other cognitive abilities such as working memory has not been examined. Thus, the aim of the current study was to examine the association between modality-specific learning style, immediate recall, and working memory performance. University students with visual or auditory learning styles were randomly assigned to one of two instructional methods and then given a multiple-choice recall test. In addition, the participants completed working memory tasks with visual or auditory presentation. The results failed to support the matching hypothesis or any association between modality-specific learning style and working memory.

Confronting stereotypic biases: Does internal versus external motivational framing matter?

We investigated whether confrontations of intergroup bias that had an external (e.g., emphasizing social norms) versus internal (e.g., emphasizing values) motivational framing differentially reduced subsequent stereotyping. Internally and externally framed confrontations reduced stereotyping equally compared to a control condition, both immediately (Experiments 1 and 2) and across a 2- to 3-day delay (Experiment 1). Only weak evidence was found for a “matching hypothesis” when participants own chronic internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice were assessed. Confrontation framing did not interact with chronic motivations to affect stereotyping in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, participants highly internally motivated to respond without bias reduced bias most with an internally framed confrontation, whereas participants who were not motivated for internal reasons reduced bias most with an externally framed confrontation. Finally, whereas both motivational framings reduced stereotyping, simply pointing bias out did not. Thus, providing some motivational framing is important for confrontation effectiveness.

Early hatching enhances survival despite beneficial phenotypic effects of late-season developmental environments

Seasonal shifts in environmental conditions provide predictable cues to which organisms can respond in adaptive ways. For example, seasonal changes in temperature can induce phenotypes at different times of the year that have season-specific fitness benefits. Here, we tested the hypothesis that embryo responses to seasonal changes in thermal environments are adaptively matched to the timing of reproduction (environmental-matching hypothesis). We collected eggs of the brown anole lizard ( Anolis sagrei ) from early and late seasons, and exposed them to early and late thermal regimes that mimic nest temperatures. After measuring offspring morphology and performance, we quantified their survival in the field. Females had higher fecundity, but produced smaller eggs, early in the season compared with late in the season. Late-season eggs exposed to late thermal regimes had relatively high survival, but early-season eggs exposed to early thermal regimes had similar survival rates to those exposed to mismatched conditions. Late-season nest temperatures and late-season eggs produced offspring that were relatively large and fast runners. However, despite phenotypic benefits of late-season conditions, early-season hatchlings had greater survival in the field. Our results do not fully support the environmental-matching hypothesis but suggest that selection favours seasonal shifts in reproductive investment of mothers (high early-season fecundity) over plastic responses of embryos to seasonal environmental changes.

Preprint of "The Impact of Mate Value in First and Subsequent Real-Life Romantic Encounters"

We provide a first systematic investigation of the most prominent hypotheses about the impact of mate value on interpersonal attraction in real-life early-stage romantic encounters. Using Response Surface Analysis, we simultaneously examined how (a) people’s perception of their own mate value, (b) their perception of a potential partner’s mate value, and (c) the interplay between the two mate values impact initial romantic attraction and selection as well as subsequent interpersonal outcomes after selection. Data came from the “Date me for Science” speed-dating study (n = 398), in which participants who mutually selected each other at the speed-dating event were followed up with 3 assessments in the 6 weeks after the event to assess subsequent outcomes. Participants’ romantic attraction, likelihood of selecting, and subsequent interpersonal outcomes with a dating partner almost exclusively depended on their perception of their dating partner’s mate value: the higher, the better. There was no evidence for the popular matching hypothesis, which states that people feel attracted to and select dating partners whom they perceive to have a mate value similar to their own. Implications of these findings for theory and research on the impact of mate value on romantic attraction and selection are discussed.

Positive sexual imprinting for human eye color

Human romantic partners tend to have similar physical traits1, but the mechanisms causing this homogamy are controversial. One potential explanation is direct matching to own characteristics2,3. Alternatively, studies showing similarity between parent and partner4,5 support positive sexual imprinting6,7, where individuals are more likely to choose mates with the physical characteristics of their other-sex parent. This interpretation has been strongly criticized because the same pattern could also be caused by sex-linked heritable preferences3, where similarity in appearance between an individual’s partner and their other-sex parent is caused by similarity in preferences between the individual and their same-sex parent. The relationships among own, parents’ and same-sex partner’s eye color provide an elegant test of these hypotheses, which each postulate a different best predictor of partner’s eye color. While the matching hypothesis predicts this will be own eye color, the sex-linked heritable preference hypothesis predicts this will be the other-sex parent’s eye color and the positive sexual imprinting hypothesis predicts this will be the partner-sex parent’s eye color. Here we show that partner eye color was best predicted by the partner-sex parent’s eye color. Our results provide clear evidence against matching and sex-linked heritable preference hypotheses, and support the positive sexual imprinting hypothesis of the relationship between own and partner’s eye color.