Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations.

People cooperate every day in ways that range from largescale contributions that mitigate climate change to simple actions such as leaving another individual with choice - known as social mindfulness. It is not yet clear whether and how these complex and more simple forms of cooperation relate. Prior work has found that countries with individuals who made more socially mindful choices were linked to a higher country environmental performance - a proxy for complex cooperation. Here we replicated this initial finding in 41 samples around the world, demonstrating the robustness of the association between social mindfulness and environmental performance, and substantially built on it to show this relationship extended to a wide range of complex cooperative indices, tied closely to many current societal issues. We found that greater social mindfulness expressed by an individual was related to living in countries with more social capital, more community participation and reduced prejudice towards immigrants. Our findings speak to the symbiotic relationship between simple and more complex forms of cooperation in societies.

The distorted body: The perception of the relative proportions of the body is preserved in Parkinson's disease.

Given humans' ubiquitous visual experience of their own body, one reasonable assumption is that one's perceptions of the lengths of their body parts should be accurate. However, recent research has shown that large systematic distortions of the length of body parts are present in healthy younger adults. These distortions appear to be linked to tactile sensitivity such that individuals overestimate the length of body parts of low tactile sensitivity to a greater extent than body parts of high tactile sensitivity. There are certain conditions featuring reduced tactile sensitivity, such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy older ageing. However, the effect of these circumstances on individuals' perceptions of the lengths of their body parts remains unknown. In this study, participants visually estimated the length of their body parts using their hand as a metric. We show that despite the reductions in tactile sensitivity, and potential alterations in the cortical presentation of body parts that may occur in PD and healthy older ageing, individuals with mild-moderate PD and older adults of comparable age experience body size distortions comparable to healthy younger controls. These findings demonstrate that the ability to perceive the length of one's body parts is well preserved in mild-moderate PD.

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations.

Happiness is a valuable experience, and societies want their citizens to be happy. Although this societal commitment seems laudable, overly emphasizing positivity (versus negativity) may create an unattainable emotion norm that ironically compromises individual well-being. In this multi-national study (40 countries; 7443 participants), we investigate how societal pressure to be happy and not sad predicts emotional, cognitive and clinical indicators of well-being around the world, and examine how these relations differ as a function of countries' national happiness levels (collected from the World Happiness Report). Although detrimental well-being associations manifest for an average country, the strength of these relations varies across countries. People's felt societal pressure to be happy and not sad is particularly linked to poor well-being in countries with a higher World Happiness Index. Although the cross-sectional nature of our work prohibits causal conclusions, our findings highlight the correlational link between social emotion valuation and individual well-being, and suggest that high national happiness levels may have downsides for some.

How far can I reach? The perception of upper body action capabilities in Parkinson's disease.

Successful interaction within the environment is contingent upon one's ability to accurately perceive the extent over which they can successfully perform actions, known as action boundaries. Healthy young adults are accurate in estimating their action boundaries and can flexibly update them to accommodate stable changes in their action capabilities. However, there are conditions in which motor abilities are subject to variability over time such as in Parkinson's disease (PD). PD impairs the ability to perform actions and can lead to variability in perceptual-motor experience, but the effect on the perceptions of their action boundaries remains unknown. This study investigated the influence of altered perceptual-motor experience during PD, on the perceptions of action boundaries for reaching, grasping, and aperture passing. Thirty participants with mild-to-moderate idiopathic PD and 26 healthy older adults provided estimates of their reaching, grasping, and aperture-passing ability. Participants' estimates were compared with their actual capabilities. There was no evidence that individuals with PD's perceptions were less accurate than those of healthy controls. Furthermore, there was some evidence for more conservative estimates than seen in young healthy adults in reaching (both groups) and aperture passing (PD group). This suggests that the ability to judge action capabilities is preserved in mild to moderate PD.

The influence of perceptual-motor variability on the perception of action boundaries for reaching.

Successful interactions within the environment are contingent upon the perceiver's ability to perceive the maximum extent over which they can perform actions, commonly referred to as action boundaries. Individuals are extremely calibrated to their action boundaries, and the perceptual system can quickly and flexibly recalibrate to changes in the size of action boundaries in the event of physiological and/or environmental changes. However, because even the most basic motor activities are subject to variability over time, the information upon which action boundaries are based must also be subject to variability. In this set of studies, we examined the effect of random and systematic variability in reaching experience on the perception of action boundaries for reaching using virtual reality. Participants were asked to estimate their reachability following experience reaching with either a long virtual arm, short virtual arm, or a virtual arm that varied in size. Overall, we found that individuals tended toward liberal estimates of their reachability; however, individuals can be influenced to be slightly more conservative after a higher percentage of short reaches. Consequently, when anticipating our reaching capability in the event of perceptual motor variability, individuals employ a liberal approach as it would result in the highest number of successful attempts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving Inferences About Null Effects With Bayes Factors and Equivalence Tests.

Researchers often conclude an effect is absent when a null-hypothesis significance test yields a nonsignificant p value. However, it is neither logically nor statistically correct to conclude an effect is absent when a hypothesis test is not significant. We present two methods to evaluate the presence or absence of effects: Equivalence testing (based on frequentist statistics) and Bayes factors (based on Bayesian statistics). In four examples from the gerontology literature, we illustrate different ways to specify alternative models that can be used to reject the presence of a meaningful or predicted effect in hypothesis tests. We provide detailed explanations of how to calculate, report, and interpret Bayes factors and equivalence tests. We also discuss how to design informative studies that can provide support for a null model or for the absence of a meaningful effect. The conceptual differences between Bayes factors and equivalence tests are discussed, and we also note when and why they might lead to similar or different inferences in practice. It is important that researchers are able to falsify predictions or can quantify the support for predicted null effects. Bayes factors and equivalence tests provide useful statistical tools to improve inferences about null effects.

Four reasons to prefer Bayesian analyses over significance testing.

Inference using significance testing and Bayes factors is compared and contrasted in five case studies based on real research. The first study illustrates that the methods will often agree, both in motivating researchers to conclude that H1 is supported better than H0, and the other way round, that H0 is better supported than H1. The next four, however, show that the methods will also often disagree. In these cases, the aim of the paper will be to motivate the sensible evidential conclusion, and then see which approach matches those intuitions. Specifically, it is shown that a high-powered non-significant result is consistent with no evidence for H0 over H1 worth mentioning, which a Bayes factor can show, and, conversely, that a low-powered non-significant result is consistent with substantial evidence for H0 over H1, again indicated by Bayesian analyses. The fourth study illustrates that a high-powered significant result may not amount to any evidence for H1 over H0, matching the Bayesian conclusion. Finally, the fifth study illustrates that different theories can be evidentially supported to different degrees by the same data; a fact that P-values cannot reflect but Bayes factors can. It is argued that appropriate conclusions match the Bayesian inferences, but not those based on significance testing, where they disagree.

'Imagined guilt' vs 'recollected guilt': implications for fMRI.

Guilt is thought to maintain social harmony by motivating reparation. This study compared two methodologies commonly used to identify the neural correlates of guilt. The first, imagined guilt, requires participants to read hypothetical scenarios and then imagine themselves as the protagonist. The second, recollected guilt, requires participants to reflect on times they personally experienced guilt. In the fMRI scanner, participants were presented with guilt/neutral memories and guilt/neutral hypothetical scenarios. Contrasts confirmed a priori predictions that guilt memories, relative to guilt scenarios, were associated with significantly greater activity in regions associated with affect [anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), Caudate, Insula, orbital frontal cortex (OFC)] and social cognition [temporal pole (TP), precuneus). Similarly, results indicated that guilt memories, relative to neutral memories, were also associated with greater activity in affective (ACC, amygdala, Insula, OFC) and social cognition (mPFC, TP, precuneus, temporo-parietal junction) regions. There were no significant differences between guilt hypothetical scenarios and neutral hypothetical scenarios in either affective or social cognition regions. The importance of distinguishing between different guilt inductions inside the scanner is discussed. We offer explanations of our results and discuss ideas for future research.

Denying humanness to others: a newly discovered mechanism by which violent video games increase aggressive behavior.

Past research has provided abundant evidence that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior. So far, these effects have been explained mainly as the result of priming existing knowledge structures. The research reported here examined the role of denying humanness to other people in accounting for the effect that playing a violent video game has on aggressive behavior. In two experiments, we found that playing violent video games increased dehumanization, which in turn evoked aggressive behavior. Thus, it appears that video-game-induced aggressive behavior is triggered when victimizers perceive the victim to be less human.

Proprioceptive drift without illusions of ownership for rotated hands in the "rubber hand illusion" paradigm.

The rubber hand illusion is one reliable way to experimentally manipulate the experience of body ownership. However, debate continues about the necessary and sufficient conditions eliciting the illusion. We measured proprioceptive drift and the subjective experience (via questionnaire) while manipulating two variables that have been suggested to affect the intensity of the illusion. First, the rubber hand was positioned either in a posturally congruent position, or rotated by 180°. Second, either the anatomically same rubber hand was used, or an anatomically incongruent one. We found in two independent experiments that a rubber hand rotated by 180° leads to increased proprioceptive drift during synchronous visuo-tactile stroking, although it does not lead to feelings of ownership (as measured by questionnaire). This dissociation between drift and ownership suggests that proprioceptive drift is not necessarily a valid proxy for the illusion when using hands rotated by 180°.