2013

Friday, December 6th, 2013: Personality and the Language of Social Media

  • Where: 7GS, S38, 5pm
  • Presenter: Zander Crook
  • Papers: Schwartz, H. A., Eichstaedt, J. C., Kern, M. L., Dziurzynski, L., Ramones, S. M., Agrawal, M., … & Ungar, L. H. (2013). Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach. PloS one, 8(9), e73791. pubmed, pdf.

Friday, November 29, 2013: Heritability of Depression in Generation Scotland

Friday, November 22, 2013: Should Presidents Be Grandiose Narcissists?

  • Where: 7GS, S38
  • Presenter: Nina Wirtz
  • Paper: Watts, A. L., Lilienfeld, S. O., Smith, S. F., Miller, J. D., Campbell, W. K., Waldman, I. D., … & Faschingbauer, T. J. (2013). The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiose Narcissism Implications for Successful and Unsuccessful Leadership Among US Presidents. Psychological science, doi. pdf.

Friday, November 15, 2013: Is it better to think in a foreign language?

  • Where:7GS, S38, 5 pm
  • Presenter: Jasmin Mahmoodi
  • Paper: Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S. L., & An, S. G. (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological science, 23(6), 661-668.
  • doi, pdf

Friday, November 8, 2013: Serial Intelligence and Personality in Rhesus Macaques

  • Where:7GS, S38, 5 pm
  • Presenter: Drew Altschul
  • Abstract: We examined relationships between serial cognition and personality in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Nine macaques were tested on a simultaneous chaining task to assess their individual cognitive abilities. They were also rated for personality traits and scored according to an existing six component structure previously derived from rhesus macaques. Associations were found between performance on the serial task and two macaque personality factors: Friendliness and Openness were positively correlated with three measures of accuracy. By applying regularized exploratory factor analysis, we also found consistent associations between accuracy and single factors within 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 factor structures.

Thursday, November 7, 2013 - 16:00 to 17:00: How Cognitive and Different Non-cognitive Characteristics Affect Labour Market Outcomes

  • Where: University of Edinburgh, Main Library, 1.11
  • Presenter: Robin Samuel, Department of the Social Sciences, University of Basel
  • Topic Page Wealth

Friday, November 1, 2013: The Nature and Nurture of Intelligence: The more Heritable, The more Culture Dependent

  • Where: DHT, 8.13
  • Presenter: Jason Major
  • Paper: Kan, K. J., Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., and van der Maas, H. L. J. (2013) On the Nature and Nurture of Intelligence and Specific Cognitive Abilities. Psychological Science doi pdf

Friday October 25th: How does education raise IQ? Evidence from the Lothian Birth Cohort studies

  • Presenter: Stuart Ritchie
  • Abstract: Several quasi-experimental studies now indicate that education has causal effects on IQ scores which endure into late life. This talk will describe two analyses of data from the Lothian Birth Cohorts which test the mechanism of these effects. The first tested whether longer educational durations were associated with improvements in elementary cognitive tasks such as reaction time and inspection time. The second tested whether the effects of education are better modelled as affecting the general factor of cognitive ability, or affecting specific IQ subtests.

Friday October 18th: Does being bad make you happy? (or was Hemingway right?)

  • Presenter: Iva Cukic
  • Paper: Ruedy, N. E., Moore, C., Gino, F. and Schweitzer, M. E. (2013). The cheater's high: The unexpected affective benefits of unethical behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105. 531-548. doi. PMID. pdf

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

— Ernest_Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

I was heady with happiness. Since I hadn't yet had my first taste of alcohol, I couldn’t compare the feeling to a champagne high, but it was the most delightful sensation I’d ever experienced.

— Frank_Abagnale, Catch_Me_If_You_Can_(1989_film)

Friday October 11: Not too little, but not too much: The perceived desirability of responses to personality items

  • Presenter: Jason Major
  • Paper: * Dunlop, P. D., Telford, A. D., & Morrison, D. L. (2012). Not too little, but not too much: The perceived desirability of responses to personality items. Journal of Research in Personality, 46(1), 8-18. doi. pdf

Friday October 4: Environments and Behavior: Order raises healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality. Chaos raised creativity

  • Presenter: Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates
  • Paper: * Vohs, K. D., Redden, J. P. and Rahinel, R. (2013). Physical order produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity. Psychological Science, 24. 1860-1867. doi. PMID. pdf
  • There's a critique here.
  • Cliff notes version from the New York Times

Friday September 27: True grit: Distinguishing effortful persistence from domain conscientiousness behaviorally and genetically.

  • Presenter: Timothy Bates
  • Data from two papers will be presented, outlining new ways to assess grit, and distinguishing grit from domain C at a genetic level, along with evidence for family environment in character-formation.

Friday September 20: Meet the Primates:Research Visit to Kyoto University 2013

  • Presenter: Vanessa Wilson
  • I will give a short presentation on a visit I took to meet with primate researchers at Kyoto University this summer. I will talk a bit about some of the cognitive research being conducted with chimpanzees at the Japanese facilities, as well the purpose and research outcomes of the trip.

Friday September 06: What is extraversion for?

  • Presenter: Rene Mottus
  • McCabe, K. O. and Fleeson, W. (2012). What is extraversion for? Integrating trait and motivational perspectives and identifying the purpose of extraversion. Psychological Science, 23. 1498-1505. doi. PMID. pdf

Friday August 30: Planning meeting for the 2013 semester

  • Presenter: Everyone

Friday May 10: Edinburgh Genetics meeting E-ACTG 10 May

  • The Royal Society of Edinburgh on George Street
  • website
  • Kenneth Baillie: Genome-wide signals for disease association
  • Camillo Berenos: Body size
  • Frank Chan: Response of Complex traits to selection
  • Sarah Harris: Methylation and IQ
  • David Hume: Promoting the genome
  • Augustine Kong: Haplotype sharing and time to common ancestor for distinguishing rare variants and disease susceptibility
  • Albert Tenesa: GWAS for colorectal cancer
  • Veronique Vitart: GWAS for circulating urate

Friday May 3: Belief and ability: A closer look at the predictive power of motivation constructs on school achievement in a Chinese sample

Friday April 26: Alex Wood: Well-being: The Person in Context

Friday April 12: BSPID Annual Meeting

Friday April 5: Bonobo personality

Friday March 29: What's the point of learning to read?

Friday March 22: What can we learn from Facebook 'likes'?

  • Presenter: Vanessa Wilson
  • References Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (pdf)

Friday March 15: Racial discrimination in criminal justice

  • Presenter: Milan Valášek
  • References Beaver, K. M., DeLisi, M., Wright, J. P., Boutwell, B. B., Barnes, J. C., & Vaughn, M. G. (2013). No evidence of racial discrimination in criminal justice processing: Results from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Personality and Individual Differences.

Monday 11th March, 2.30pm in S38: "Why do things change and what changes first?"

Abstract I should like to talk about two things: The first is the relationship of cognitive decline in old age to general health, rather than to the simple passage of years. The second is about what indices of mental abilities (e.g. intelligence, frontal and executive functions, memory, information processing speed) are the most sensitive markers of general cognitive change, and how, if at all, do changes in each of them drive changes in the others?

Friday March 1: Intelligence and the brain

  • Presenter: Jason Major
  • References Kievit, R. A., van Rooijen, H., Wicherts, J. M., Waldorp, L. J., Kan, K. J., Scholte, H. S., & Borsboom, D. (2012). Intelligence and the brain: A model-based approach. Cognitive Neuroscience, 3(2), 89-97. (pdf)

Friday Feb 22: Third annual meeting of the Edinburgh Alliance for Complex Trait Genetics

Friday Feb 15: Personality and Autonomic Nervous System

  • Presenter: Iva Čukić, Tim Bates
  • References Koelsch, S., Enge, J., & Jentschke, S. (2012). Cardiac Signatures of Personality. PloS one, 7(2), e31441., pdf

Friday Feb 8th: Socioeconomic Status, Heritability and Cognitive Growth from age 2 to 16 years

Children from disadvantaged socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds are known to perform on average worse in IQ tests than their high SES peers. It is less clear how SES affects growth trajectories in intelligence over time. Here, latent growth curve models tested the effect of SES on individual differences in the mean IQ and the rate and direction of change in IQ, assessed 9 times between the ages of 2 and 16 years, in 7239 twin pairs from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS). Higher SES predicted greater mean IQ at age 2, and greater linear growth in IQ from age 2 to age 16, accounting for 1% and 5% of the variance of mean IQ and slope. Over 14 years, low SES twins declined on average by 3 IQ points, while high SES twins gained on average 2 IQ points. Despite these average differences between the two groups, the heritability was similar in low and high SES twins for mean IQ (27% and 24%, respectively) and for slope (41% and 32%).

Friday Feb 1: Is the five factor model universal: Information from Tsimane culture

  • Presenter: Iva Čukić
  • References
    • Gurven, M., von Rueden, C., Massenkoff, M., Kaplan, H. and Lero Vie, M. (2012). How Universal Is the Big Five? Testing the Five-Factor Model of Personality Variation Among Forager-Farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. J Pers Soc Psychol doi. PMID, pdf, Press
    • Costa and McCrae on 5 FM as a human universal (Citation classic)

Friday January 25 : The personality differentiation by intelligence hypothesis

  • Presenter: Aja Louise Murray, Tom Booth
  • References McLarnon, M. J., & Carswell, J. J. (2012). The personality differentiation by intelligence hypothesis: A measurement invariance investigation. Personality and Individual Differences. pdf
page revision: 2, last edited: 25 Feb 2015 21:29
Edit Tags History Files Print Site tools + Options