The Psychological Science Accelerator's COVID-19 rapid-response dataset.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data.

A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration.

Following theories of emotional embodiment, the facial feedback hypothesis suggests that individuals' subjective experiences of emotion are influenced by their facial expressions. However, evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We thus formed a global adversarial collaboration and carried out a preregistered, multicentre study designed to specify and test the conditions that should most reliably produce facial feedback effects. Data from n = 3,878 participants spanning 19 countries indicated that a facial mimicry and voluntary facial action task could both amplify and initiate feelings of happiness. However, evidence of facial feedback effects was less conclusive when facial feedback was manipulated unobtrusively via a pen-in-mouth task.

Transforming faces to mimic natural kin: A comparison of different paradigms.

The ability to detect phenotypic similarity or kinship in third-parties' faces is not perfect, but better than chance. Still, some humans are better than others at this task. Yet researchers in kinship detection have difficulties in building up large and diverse datasets of high-quality pictures of related persons. The current experiments tested a novel method for circumventing this difficulty by using morphing techniques in order to generate a wide array of stimuli derived from a limited number of individual pictures. Six experiments tested various stimuli (standard protocol, mirrored face, other-sex face, other-ethnicity face, other-expression face and antiface). Our benchmarks are the similarity or kinship scores achieved by participants when faced with pictures of real siblings. We show that all stimuli, except the antiface, elicit detection scores similar to those elicited by real pictures of actual siblings. In addition, by exploring different experiment parameters (simultaneous or sequential task, kinship or similarity task) and some individual characteristics, these experiments provide a better understanding of kinship detection in third parties. The validation of our new method will allow widening the range of available stimuli to the research community, and even to develop new ecologically relevant experimental protocols that are hardly or not feasible with veridical images.

Holding a real object during encoding helps the learning of foreign vocabulary.

This study aims at assessing and comparing two different methods for learning new vocabulary words in a foreign language. Learning vocabulary with images as non-verbal aids was compared to learning vocabulary with real objects. The Rwandan children who participated in this study learnt French as a third language. They took part in training sessions to learn different French words either seeing the corresponding image or holding the corresponding object. The training program was implemented in a Rwandan primary school with children of different ages (from five to 10 years old). The results showed that the words associated to objects that were held by the children during learning were better memorized than the words associated with images. The global memory performance was lower for the youngest children; however, learning with objects proved to be superior over learning with images for all ages. Taken together, the findings underscore that learning vocabulary with real objects is particularly efficient and support the idea that the embodied theory of language is a key element to effectively master a foreign language.

Women's preferences for men's facial masculinity are strongest under favorable ecological conditions.

The strength of sexual selection on secondary sexual traits varies depending on prevailing economic and ecological conditions. In humans, cross-cultural evidence suggests women's preferences for men's testosterone dependent masculine facial traits are stronger under conditions where health is compromised, male mortality rates are higher and economic development is higher. Here we use a sample of 4483 exclusively heterosexual women from 34 countries and employ mixed effects modelling to test how social, ecological and economic variables predict women's facial masculinity preferences. We report women's preferences for more masculine looking men are stronger in countries with higher sociosexuality and where national health indices and human development indices are higher, while no associations were found between preferences and indices of intra-sexual competition. Our results show that women's preferences for masculine faces are stronger under conditions where offspring survival is higher and economic conditions are more favorable.

Differential effects of makeup on perceived age.

Makeup accentuates three youth-related visual features - skin homogeneity, facial contrast, and facial feature size. By manipulating these visual features, makeup should make faces appear younger. We tested this hypothesis in an experiment in which participants estimated the age of carefully controlled photographs of faces with and without makeup. We found that 40- and especially 50-year-old women did appear significantly younger when wearing makeup. Contrary to our hypothesis, 30-year-old women looked no different in age with or without makeup, while 20-year-old women looked older with makeup. Two further studies replicated these results, finding that makeup made middle-aged women look younger, but made young women look older. Seeking to better understand why makeup makes young women look older, we ran a final study and found evidence that people associate makeup use with adulthood. By activating associations with adulthood, makeup may provide an upward bias on age estimations of women who are not clearly adult. We propose that makeup affects social perceptions through bottom-up routes, by modifying visual cues such as facial contrast, facial feature size, and skin homogeneity, and also through top-down routes, by activating social representations and norms associated with makeup use.

Evidence That the Hormonal Contraceptive Pill Is Associated With Cosmetic Habits.

Hormonal contraception is known to cause subtle but widespread behavioral changes. Here, we investigated whether changes in cosmetic habits are associated with use of the hormonal contraceptive pill. We photographed a sample of women (N = 36) who self-reported whether or not they use the contraceptive pill, as well as their cosmetic habits. A separate sample of participants (N = 143) rated how much makeup these target women appeared to be wearing. We found that women not using the contraceptive pill (i.e., naturally cycling women) reported spending more time applying cosmetics for an outing than did women who use the contraceptive pill. We also found that the faces of these naturally cycling women were rated as wearing more cosmetics than the faces of the women using the contraceptive pill. Thus, we found clear associations between contraceptive pill use and makeup use. This provides evidence consistent with the possibility that cosmetic habits, and grooming behaviors more generally, are affected by hormonal contraception.

Average ovarian hormone levels, rather than daily values and their fluctuations, are related to facial preferences among women.

Hormones are of crucial importance for human behavior. Cyclical changes of ovarian hormones throughout women's menstrual cycle are suggested to underlie fluctuation in masculinity preference for both faces and bodies. In this study we tested this hypothesis based on daily measurements of estradiol and progesterone throughout menstrual cycle, and multiple measurements of women's preference towards masculinity of faces and bodies of men. We expected that due to a large variation among daily hormonal levels we would not observe a direct effect of daily hormone levels, but rather that average levels of ovarian hormones throughout the cycle (a reliable marker of a probability of conception) would better predict women's preferences. We found a negative relationship between average progesterone levels and facial masculinity preference, but only among women who were in long-term relationships. There was no relationship between facial masculinity preference and either of the estradiol or progesterone daily levels. Similarly, only average levels of hormones were significantly related to facial symmetry preference. For women who were in relationships estradiol was positively related to symmetry preference, while for single women this relationship was opposite. For body masculinity preference there were no significant relationships with neither averaged nor daily hormonal levels. Taken together, our results further suggest that overall cycle levels of ovarian hormones (averaged for a cycle) are better predictors of facial masculinity and symmetry preference than daily levels assessed during preferences' tests. Importantly, including information about relationship status in the investigations of hormonal bases of preferences is crucial.

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology through a Distributed Collaborative Network.

Concerns have been growing about the veracity of psychological research. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions, or attempt to replicate prior research, in large, diverse samples. The PSA's mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time-limited), efficient (in terms of re-using structures and principles for different projects), decentralized, diverse (in terms of participants and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside of the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance our understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematically examining its generalizability.

Fitness Costs Predict Emotional, Moral, and Attitudinal Inbreeding Aversion.

In terms of sexual intercourse, the very last people we think about are our kin. Imagining inbreeding intercourse, whether it involves our closest kin or not, induces aversion in most people who invoke inbreeding depression problems or cultural considerations. Research has focused on the disgust felt when facing inbreeding intercourse between close kin but little is known about other responses. In this study, we considered the influence of fitness costs on aversive reactions by including disgust and emotional reaction as well as moral judgment and attitudes toward inbreeding: higher costs should induce a stronger aversive reaction. The fitness costs were manipulated by two factors: (i) the degree of the participants' involvement in the story (themselves, a sib or an unknown individual), and (ii) the degree of relatedness between the two inbreeding people (brother/sister, uncle-aunt/niece-nephew, cousin). To test this hypothesis, 140 women read and assessed different inbreeding stories varying in the fitness costs incurred. Findings showed that the higher the fitness costs were, the greater the aversive reaction was in an overall way. First, our results fitted with previous studies that tested the influence of fitness costs on disgust. Second, and more interestingly, findings went further by examining overall aversion, showing that fitness costs could influence emotions felt as well as attitudes and behaviors toward inbreeding people. The higher the fitness costs were, the less inbreeding people were perceived as moral and the more they were considered as a nuisance. However, results regarding avoidance were more nuanced.

Imprinting and flexibility in human face cognition.

Faces are an important cue to multiple physiological and psychological traits. Human preferences for exaggerated sex typicality (masculinity or femininity) in faces depend on multiple factors and show high inter-subject variability. To gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying facial femininity preferences in men, we tested the interactive effect of family structure (birth order, sibling sex-ratio and number of siblings) and parenthood status on these preferences. Based on a group of 1304 heterosexual men, we have found that preference for feminine faces was not only influenced by sibling age and sex, but also that fatherhood modulated this preference. Men with sisters had a weaker preference for femininity than men with brothers, highlighting a possible effect of a negative imprinting-like mechanism. What is more, fatherhood increased strongly the preference for facial femininity. Finally, for fathers with younger sisters only, the more the age difference increased between them, the more femininity preference increased. Overall our findings bring new insight into how early-acquired experience at the individual level may determine face preference in adulthood, and what is more, how these preferences are flexible and potentially dependent on parenthood status in adult men.

Cross-cultural variation in men's preference for sexual dimorphism in women's faces.

Both attractiveness judgements and mate preferences vary considerably cross-culturally. We investigated whether men's preference for femininity in women's faces varies between 28 countries with diverse health conditions by analysing responses of 1972 heterosexual participants. Although men in all countries preferred feminized over masculinized female faces, we found substantial differences between countries in the magnitude of men's preferences. Using an average femininity preference for each country, we found men's facial femininity preferences correlated positively with the health of the nation, which explained 50.4% of the variation among countries. The weakest preferences for femininity were found in Nepal and strongest in Japan. As high femininity in women is associated with lower success in competition for resources and lower dominance, it is possible that in harsher environments, men prefer cues to resource holding potential over high fecundity.

Lexical references to sensory modalities in verbal descriptions of people and objects by congenitally blind, late blind and sighted adults.

BACKGROUND: Some previous studies have revealed that while congenitally blind people have a tendency to refer to visual attributes ('verbalism'), references to auditory and tactile attributes are scarcer. However, this statement may be challenged by current theories claiming that cognition is linked to the perceptions and actions from which it derives. Verbal productions by the blind could therefore differ from those of the sighted because of their specific perceptual experience. The relative weight of each sense in oral descriptions was compared in three groups with different visual experience Congenitally blind (CB), late blind (LB) and blindfolded sighted (BS) adults. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants were asked to give an oral description of their mother and their father, and of four familiar manually-explored objects. The number of visual references obtained when describing people was relatively high, and was the same in the CB and BS groups ("verbalism" in the CB). While references to touch were scarce in all groups, the CB referred to audition more frequently than the LB and the BS groups. There were, by contrast, no differences between groups in descriptions of objects, and references to touch dominated the other modalities. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: The relative weight of each modality varies according to the cognitive processes involved in each task. Long term memory, internal representations and information acquired through social communication, are at work in the People task, seem to favour visual references in both the blind and the sighted, whereas the congenitally blind also refer often to audition. By contrast, the perceptual encoding and working memory at work in the Objects task enhance sensory references to touch in a similar way in all groups. These results attenuate the impact of verbalism in blindness, and support (albeit moderately) the idea that the perceptual experience of the congenitally blind is to some extent reflected in their cognition.

Development of children's ability to detect kinship through facial resemblance.

Facial features appear to be a prominent kinship cue for ascribing relatedness among human individuals. Although there is evidence that adults can detect kinship in unrelated and unfamiliar individual's faces, it remains to be seen whether people already possess the ability when they are young. To further understand the development of this skill, we explored children's ability to detect parent-offspring resemblance in unrelated and unfamiliar faces. To this end, we tested approximately 140 children, aged 5-11, in two photo-matching tasks. We used a procedure that asked them to match one neonate's face to one of three adults' faces (Task 1), or to match one adult's face to one of three neonate's faces (Task 2). Our findings reveal asymmetrical performance, depending on the tasks assigned (performance of Task 2 is stronger than for Task 1), and on the sex of individuals who made up the parent-offspring pair (male parents are better matched with neonates than female parents, and boys are better matched than girls). The picture that emerges from our study is, on one hand, that the ability to detect kinship is already present at the age of five but continues to improve as one gets older, and on the other, that perception of parent-offspring facial resemblance varies according to the appraisers' characteristics.

Is it a he or a she? Behavioral and computational approaches to sex categorization.

Can people categorize the sex of neonate faces? Our experiment tested the sex categorization of neonate faces by adult participants. We used a set of 120 Caucasian faces (adults and 4-day-old neonates) that were presented just once to a large sample of participants. A computational model of low-level visual processing, based on Gabor filters, was used to explore the relation between spatial-frequency information and sex categorization. The results showed that participants were able to categorize the sex of the faces, but were less accurate with neonate (d' = 0.36, ß = -.97) than with adult (d' = 3.02, ß = -.93) faces. Moreover, faces were more frequently categorized as boys' than girls' faces. The computational model suggests that specific spatial-frequency channels carry most of the useful information for the categorization task. Overall, the findings reveal that subtle differences in neonate facial structure were enough to allow the sex categorization of neonate faces, although accuracy was low in both adults and the computational model of low-level visual processing.

Firstborns' disadvantage in kinship detection.

The ability to assess genetic ties is critical to defining one's own family and, in a broader context, to understanding relationships in groups of strangers. To recognize younger siblings as such, human firstborns can rely on the perinatal association of the mother with her new baby. Later-borns, who cannot rely on such an association, will by necessity actuate alternate strategies, such as recognition of facial clues set aside by firstborns. The effects of such differential early experiences deserve consideration; the development of matching abilities may be used throughout an individual's lifetime to detect other kinship types outside the family. In simple cognitive tasks based on matching face pictures, later-borns surpassed firstborns in detecting kinship among strangers; this pattern was found in populations of different ages and in two countries. This birth-order effect contrasts with the traditional cognitive advantage of firstborns. Inclusive fitness theory explains how early life history promotes specific strategies that can, in turn, permanently enhance human performance in certain domains.

Perceptual factors affecting the ability to assess facial resemblance between parents and newborns in humans.

People undeniably pay attention to faces, and facial resemblance may act as a kinship cue. However, previous studies have shown that the ability to detect kinship through facial resemblance is limited, and it has been suggested that this may be due to several types of perceptual factors. To further understand the processes that underpin kinship judgment, it is important to investigate which perceptual factors predict the probability of parent-child pairs being detected as related. To this end, we performed two experiments. In the first, we evaluated the ability of human observers to match newborns with one of their parents. In the second, we explored three perceptual factors that may have influenced kinship detection (gender discrimination, facial attractiveness, and perceptual similarity). Results showed that the participants were able to match newborns with one of their parents, even though the task was perceived as difficult. Moreover, our study goes further than previous findings, showing that the perceptual factors investigated may significantly contribute to kinship detection.

Human ability to detect kinship in strangers' faces: effects of the degree of relatedness.

The resemblance between human faces has been shown to be a possible cue in recognizing the relatedness between parents and children, and more recently, between siblings. However, the general inclusive fitness theory proposes that kin-selective behaviours are also relevant to more distant relatives, which requires the detection of larger kinship bonds. We conducted an experiment to explore the use of facial clues by 'strangers', i.e. evaluators from a different family, to associate humans of varying degrees of relatedness. We hypothesized that the visual capacity to detect relatedness should be weaker with lower degrees of relatedness. We showed that human adults are capable of (although not very efficient at) assessing the relatedness of unrelated individuals from photographs and that visible facial cues vary according to the degree of relatedness. This sensitivity exists even for kin pair members that are more than a generation apart and have never lived together. Collectively, our findings are in agreement with emerging knowledge on the role played by facial resemblance as a kinship cue. But we have progressed further to show how the capacity to distinguish between related and non-related pairs applies to situations relevant to indirect fitness.

Individual experience alone can generate lasting division of labor in ants.

Division of labor, the specialization of workers on different tasks, largely contributes to the ecological success of social insects [1, 2]. Morphological, genotypic, and age variations among workers, as well as their social interactions, all shape division of labor [1-12]. In addition, individual experience has been suggested to influence workers in their decision to execute a task [13-18], but its potential impact on the organization of insect societies has yet to be demonstrated [19, 20]. Here we show that, all else being equal, ant workers engaged in distinct functions in accordance with their previous experience. When individuals were experimentally led to discover prey at each of their foraging attempts, they showed a high propensity for food exploration. Conversely, foraging activity progressively decreased for individuals who always failed in the same situation. One month later, workers that previously found prey kept on exploring for food, whereas those who always failed specialized in brood care. It thus appears that individual experience can strongly channel the behavioral ontogeny of ants to generate a lasting division of labor. This self-organized task-attribution system, based on an individual learning process, is particularly robust and might play an important role in colony efficiency.

Fish perform spatial pattern recognition and abstraction by exclusive use of active electrolocation.

The field generated by the electric organ of weakly electric fish varies with the electrical properties of nearby objects. Correspondingly, current fluxes in this field differentially stimulate the electroreceptors in the fish's skin. Thus, resistors are to conductors and insulators as gray is to black and white in optics. Additionally, the capacitances of plants and insect larvae contrast with those of water or stones, giving effects comparable to "coloration". Receptors arrayed over a large area of the skin act like a retina upon which the discharge projects "electric images". By further central processing, the fish also discriminate between objects according to their composition, size, or distance, a procedure termed "electrolocation", analogous to echolocation in bats. Here we demonstrate that G. petersii and S. macrurus can also recognize 3D orientations and configurations and extract and generalize spatial features solely with their electrical sense. We presented fish with virtual electrical "objects" formed from electrodes set flush in the inner surface of a Y maze with various patterns of external connectivity. With reward and aversion training, the fish could recognize similar electrode configurations and extract a feature, e.g., a vertical connectivity, present in various novel configurations. Previously, shape recognition has only been shown in electrolocating fish when they are in full mechanical contact with solid objects.