Youths Happier During Lockdown

Welcome back. Among the interesting studies published during my hiatus was one from researchers with Cambridge and Oxford universities. They found the self-reported mental health and wellbeing of 1 in 3 youths improved during England’s first COVID-19 lockdown. 

Self-reported change in mental wellbeing of 16,940 youths during England’s first COVID-19 lockdown (from link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-021-01934-z).

Improved? Wait. That’s not what I’ve been hearing and reading. Has the media overstated the issue? Here’s what the U.S. Surgeon General wrote on 7 December 2021:

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health challenges were the leading cause of disability and poor life outcomes in young people, with up to 1 in 5 children ages 3 to 17 in the U.S. having a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder…

The pandemic added to the pre-existing challenges that America’s youth faced…This Fall, a coalition of the nation’s leading experts in pediatric health declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

The UK study doesn’t detract from the crisis, it simply adds perspective: not every youth got worse. Determining why one-third fared better might provide insight for promoting youth mental health and wellbeing going forward.

Data for Analysis
The researchers used data from the OxWell Student Survey, a recurring, cross-sectional, self-report survey relating to mental health and wellbeing. The school-base survey of England’s students, aged 8 to 18, contains questions repeated in each iteration as well as new questions added in response to social and environmental events and emerging research.

For the current study, 16,940 students were surveyed June-July 2020 at the tail end of England’s first national lockdown. They answered questions about their experiences with the pandemic, school, home, lifestyle, relationships and more.

Examining the Data
The study was limited to a descriptive analysis of data, which is probably sufficient to highlight major differences without resorting to statistical testing. Descriptive analysis is also the simplest way for me to summarize key findings from the reported results.

Toward that end, I’ve prepared a table relating the youths’ self-reported changes during the lockdown to the number of those whose mental wellbeing got better, worse or remained the same. I’ve listed 14 items derived from a table the researchers reported with over 100 items. This is not to say the reported detail wasn’t significant; only that it’s well beyond the scope of what I needed to capture some core findings. I encourage you to review the paper to pursue the topic in greater depth. 

Relationships of selected variables with self-reported change in mental wellbeing of 16,940 youths during England’s first COVID-19 lockdown (modified from Table 2 of link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-021-01934-z).

Overall, the mental wellbeing of surveyed males and younger students tended to improve during the lockdown while surveyed females and older students tended to get worse.

The students whose mental wellbeing improved during the lockdown self-reported that they were able to get all the academic help they needed at home, managed school tasks better, were bullied a little less, had better relationships with friends and family, felt less left out and less lonely, and exercised as well as slept more.

Wrap Up
As the researchers point out, the survey showed that students who reported improved mental health and wellbeing were more likely than their peers to report improvement across the full range of school, relational and lifestyle factors.

The impact of lockdown was dependent on a number of factors, such as gender, pre-pandemic mental health, social relationships, school connectedness, online learning experience, family composition and family financial situation.

While the crisis is real, many students did indeed experience improved mental health and wellbeing. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of UK students during lockdown in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry journal: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-021-01934-z
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/944267
U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory: www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/12/07/us-surgeon-general-issues-advisory-on-youth-mental-health-crisis-further-exposed-by-covid-19-pandemic.html
Oxwell Student Survey and information for parents:
bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/12/e052717
www.psych.ox.ac.uk/research/schoolmentalhealth/parent-information-sheet-1

What’s Attractive To You?

Welcome back. This should stir your mind: What do people find attractive in a potential mate? Apparently, there’s ongoing debate in the field of evolutionary mate choice psychology regarding how similar or different male and female preferences are across age.

What’s in that person’s magnet that attracts you (graphic from leadg2.thecenterforsalesstrategy.com/blog/5-characteristics-of-a-landing-page-that-converts)?

A recently published study by a team of researchers affiliated with Australia’s Queensland University of Technology and University of New South Wales and Switzerland’s Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts joined that debate, investigating competing evolutionary theories.

The researchers used data from the national online Australian Sex Survey of 2016, analyzing the responses of 7,325 Australian participants, ages 18 to 65.

Rating Attraction Characteristics
Participant responses were to the same basic question asked about nine characteristics associated with attraction--age, attractiveness, physical build/features, intelligence, education, income, trust, openness and emotional connection: To what extent do you find a person’s [specific characteristic] influences how sexually attractive you find them? The responses were ratings from 0, not important, to 100, extremely important.

The researchers grouped the nine characteristics into three categories commonly associated with sexual attraction: aesthetics (age, attractiveness and physical build/features), resources (intelligence, education and income) and personality (trust, openness and emotional connection).

Nine characteristics and three categories of attraction (developed from journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151).

They found the pattern of responses regarding the nine characteristics were similar for both genders. The three personality characteristics, physical build and attractiveness were rated quite high in importance; age, intelligence and education were rated more evenly; and income was rated quite low.

But there were significant gender differences on the 100-point scale for many characteristics. Most notably, females rated age, education, intelligence, income, trust and emotional connection from 9 to 14 points higher in importance than did males.

Relative Importance of Characteristics
In addition to the absolute or raw ratings of the nine characteristics, the researchers also standardized the responses to gauge the relative importance of the nine characteristics for each participant. (Calculate the average value of the nine responses and the standard deviation, then subtract the value of each characteristic from this average and divide by the standard deviation.) The standardized values are essentially the importance of one characteristic relative to the average importance of all nine characteristics.

Analysis of the relative importance of characteristics identified subtle and not-so subtle differences. For example:

Males regarded attractiveness and physical build as the most important aesthetic characteristics, rating them higher than all other characteristics. Females regarded age as the most important aesthetic characteristic and rated attractiveness and physical build somewhat above their average rating.

Both genders regarded income as the least important characteristic for sexual attraction, with no significant gender difference.

Females gave a higher absolute rating to openness than did males; however, males actually regarded the relative importance of openness slightly higher than did females.

The Effect of Respondents’ Age
The researchers conducted a series of statistical analyses (regression) to explore the effect of respondents’ age on preferences. For aesthetics, they found males had a consistently higher preference, though it decreased with age. The gender difference was opposite for resources and personality, with females exhibiting a stronger relative preference at most ages.

Gender differences in relative importance of aesthetic, resource and personality characteristics of attraction across age. Graph displays males (M) having higher regard as values above 0 and females (F) having higher regard as values below 0 (modified from journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151).

Example observations for individual characteristics were:
- females’ higher regard for age shows little change across age.
- males’ higher regard for physical build was maximum when younger than 30s, and for attractiveness, from mid-20s to low 50s.
- females’ higher regard for education was lowest from mid-20s to 40, while that for intelligence was maximum from mid-20s to mid-50s.
- males’ higher regard for openness and trust tended to increase with age, while females’ higher regard for emotional connection varied little with age.

Wrap Up
Should you wish to delve into the field evolutionary mate choice, the researchers note that many of the study results are consistent with theories of selection pressure and that they align with theories of parental investment, the gender similarities hypothesis and mutual mate choice.

They conclude that the broader discipline still contains considerable scope for further inquiry toward a unified theory, particularly when exploring gender differences across age.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of gender attraction across age in PLOS ONE journal: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/quot-bsb051721.php
Evolutionary psychology: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

Feel-Good Movies

Welcome back. I hope you feel like watching a movie.

Although I’m not a movie buff, I felt bad that, in 10 years of blogging, my only mention of movies was horror films (Pandemic Prep Horror Flicks). Then I came upon a study of feel-good films by two researchers affiliated with Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. At last, I had the opportunity to blog about movies that more viewers than my daughter, Rachel, might enjoy.

Watching a feel-good movie with popcorn (photo from www.groovypost.com/unplugged/chromecast-vs-roku/).

Characterizing Feel-Good Movies
The researchers note that, while feel-good films are widely dismissed as being sentimental and intellectually undemanding, audiences seek them out precisely because of their feel-good qualities. Viewers want to relax, to have their spirits lifted. These films don’t appear to be a genre in their own right, yet they’re more than just a vague category.

Surveying some 450 participants from Germany, Austria and the German-speaking regions of Belgium and Switzerland, the researchers gained insight into characteristics these films must have.

In addition to an element of humor and a happy ending, feel-good films can be identified by certain recurring plot patterns and characters. They often involve outsiders in search of love, who have to prove themselves against adverse circumstances, and who eventually find their role in the community. Romantic comedies (rom-coms), such as Love Actually, Pretty Woman, Amélie and The Intouchables, have a high potential for emotional uplift. 

Pretty Woman (1990) movie poster (from www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/).

Beyond romance and humor, feel-good films have moments of drama. The emotional trajectories involve serious conflicts and are profoundly moving, even if the plots are often developed within a fairy-tale setting.

The ideal feel-good film mixes all of these elements. Nevertheless, as you might surmise from the prevalence of rom-com feel-good films, viewer preferences vary greatly, especially by gender and age.

Best Feel-Good Movies
To examine the subject further, I did a quick search and found multiple lists of “the best” feel-good movies.

One, for example, from staff of Collider, an entertainment website, has 25 movies, five of which are animated (e.g., Frozen) and three of which came out at least 69 years ago (e.g., The Wizard of Oz). Consistent with the research study findings, the Collider raters advise that their selections aren’t just blithely cheerful, brain-dead pictures. They’re all terrific movies that carry an uplifting message that is earned, thoughtful, and will definitely leave you smiling as the credits roll.

Five months ago, Empire Online, the digital version of the world’s biggest movie magazine, offered 30 Feelgood Movies to Make You Smile. Only 4 of the 30 also appeared on Collider’s list of 25 (Amélie, Singing in the Rain, Sing Street, and The Princess Bride).

The editors of the online version of Glamour recently announced their 41 Best Feel-Good Movies to Keep Your Spirits Up. There were no animated movies and none older than 1964. Five on the Glamour list were also on Collider’s list (Bring It On, Clueless, Elf, Love Actually, and Ocean’s 11), and five others were also on the Empire Online list (Crazy Rich Asians, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Little Miss Sunshine, Love, Simon, and Pitch Perfect).

Wrap Up
I could sample more lists for comparison, but you get the idea. That the lists overlap so little is likely due to a handful of reasons. Mostly, I’d go with the researchers’ comment that viewer preferences for feel-good films vary greatly, especially by gender and age.

By the way, Pretty Woman, which is frequently on television, was not on any list I saw, but School of Rock, When Harry Met Sally, and one of my favorites, Babe, were. Thanks for stopping by.

 Babe (1995) movie poster (from www.imdb.com/title/tt0112431/).

 

P.S.
Study of feel-good films in Projections journal: www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/projections/15/1/proj150104.xml
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/m-laa043021.php
Example lists of best feel-good movies:
collider.com/best-feel-good-movies/
www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-feelgood-movies/
www.glamour.com/gallery/best-feel-good-movies
www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/g33500002/best-feel-good-movies/
www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/tv-movies/g25726999/best-happy-feel-good-movies/ [2019]
parade.com/972242/alexandra-hurtado/feel-good-movies-to-stream/

Women’s Sports Uncovered

Welcome back. Did you catch any of the March Madness games? The women’s tournament? With all the hoopla focused on the men’s tournament, you’ll probably be surprised that a tally of Twitter and Instagram counts found 8 of the 10 most-followed players on the final eight teams were women.

Coach Tara VanDerveer cuts down the net after Stanford beat Arizona for the 2021 women's national title (AP photo by Morry Gash from chroniclet.com/photo-single/155963/?mode=team).

The fans must have been excited to see those players in action. The women’s tournament was televised, even if there was relatively little on televised sports news and highlights shows. Unfortunately, the lack of coverage is nothing new; women’s sports are usually ignored. At least that’s what Purdue and the University of Southern California researchers have documented every 5 years from 1989 to 2019.

Data Collection and Analysis
For their 2019 effort, the researchers followed the same methodology they applied in assessing the quantity and quality of men's and women's sports news coverage since 1989. They sampled and analyzed three 2-week blocs of televised news in March, July and November on NBC, CBS and ABC Los Angeles affiliates and on the ESPN SportsCenter program. When available, the continuous running ticker at the bottom of the television screen was included. As a first, they also added online daily sports newsletters and official NBC, CBS and ESPN Twitter accounts.

Men’s vs. Women’s Sports Coverage
The enormous gap between men’s and women’s sports coverage in 2019 appeared in every way.

Airtime
Less than 6% of airtime was devoted to women’s sports (i.e., about 94% to men’s sports). Most of women’s sports coverage was in July, when the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup and U.S. women were competing in the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Airtime in March and November was only 1.7% and 0.7%, respectively.

The proportion of airtime devoted to women’s sports on three network affiliates’ sport news and on ESPN’s SportsCenter, 1989–2019 (from journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21674795211003524).

Women’s sports fared better in online newsletters (8.7%) and Twitter (10.2%); however, most was due to espnW, which ended its weekly newsletter following the July 2019 data collection period.

Lead Stories
Like all news shows, sports open with the most important or engaging story of the day. Of the 251 broadcasts analyzed in 2019, five led with a women’s sports story; all five were on the U.S. Women’s soccer team winning the World Cup. Of the 93 online newsletters analyzed, eight led with a story about women’s sports.

Men’s “Big Three”
In their 2009 analysis, the researchers reported that sports coverage was becoming less diverse; 68% of the airtime was devoted to what they labeled men’s Big Three--college and professional basketball, baseball and football. That rose to 75% in 2019, with the remaining 25% shared by other men’s sports, gender-neutral topics and women’s sports.

Televised news and highlights, online newsletters and social media sports coverage, by gender (excludes espnW), 2019 (from journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21674795211003524).

Never Too Early or Too Much
Since moving to Wisconsin, I’ve been amused by TV network affiliates’ year-round coverage of the Green Bay Packers whether important or trivial.

The researchers point out that the dominance of men’s Big Three sports on TV news and highlights programs is amplified by in-season as well as off-season reporting. In 2019, men’s professional basketball had nearly as much off-season as in-season coverage, while women’s professional basketball was covered only in-season. Worse, even in-season, women’s sports stories may be superseded by off-season men’s sports stories.

Notably, the community and charitable contributions of men athletes and teams were frequently featured in news and highlights shows, but women athletes’ contributions, including their social justice activism, seldom made it into women’s sports stories.

Wrap Up
Women’s sports coverage hasn’t changed in quantity for 30-years, yet there have been striking changes in the ways they’re reported. In the 1990s, women athletes were routinely trivialized, insulted and humorously sexualized. By the 2000s, sports news viewed women athletes less offensively, instead underlining their roles as wives, girlfriends or mothers. In 2014, women’s sports was being delivered in a boring, inflection-free manner.

I began and end with March Madness. The researchers found that, in 2019, their local network affiliates and ESPN’s SportsCenter devoted no more than 5% of their combined coverage to the women’s tournament, the online newsletter articles and tweets about 11%. Go girls!

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Most-followed players on men’s and women’s elite eight teams: www.axios.com/ncaa-basketball-social-media-followings-a98b2f21-e907-4276-b860-32565654d64a.html
Study of women’s televised sports, 1989-2019, in Communication & Sport journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21674795211003524
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/uosc-nmk032221.php

Women Skipping STEM

Welcome back. If you don’t mind terribly, I’d like to expand a bit on my last blog post, The More Brilliant Gender. That post reviewed a study that demonstrated how people implicitly conceive of brilliance and genius as male more than female traits despite the lack of any gender difference in intellectual ability.

The issue isn’t really which gender is more brilliant but that women are underrepresented in fields perceived to require high-level intellectual ability, such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The concern is that the male-brilliance stereotype might (i) arise from observing the distribution of women and men in these fields, (ii) cause those working in the fields to perceive women as unsuited and (iii) undermine women's inclination to pursue careers in the fields.

Highlighting the last, a recently published study by researchers affiliated with Cornell, Tel Aviv and Johns Hopkins universities traced women’s underrepresentation in STEM fields to gender differences that emerge in high school.

Educational Longitudinal Surveys
The source of data for the analysis was the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, in which the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics monitored a nationally representative sample of young people from 10th-grade (high school sophomores) in 2002 through 2012.

The data included base-year questionnaire surveys in 2002 and follow-up surveys in 2004, 2006 and 2012. Schools provided high school transcripts in 2005, and additional information was collected from other sources, such as the American Council on Education (General Educational Development test data) and SAT/ACT (entrance exam scores).

Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 base-year to third follow-up school and student response rates, 2002-13 (Table A-1 from nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014363.pdf).

Approximately 10 years after their 10th-grade year, 19% were working for pay and taking postsecondary courses, 63% were working for pay only, 5% were taking postsecondary courses only and 13% were neither working for pay nor taking postsecondary courses. Education-wise, 33% had earned bachelor’s degrees or higher, 9% associate’s degrees, 10% undergraduate certificates, 32% postsecondary attendance but no credential, 13% high school diplomas or equivalent and 3% hadn’t graduated high school.

Women’s Underrepresentation in STEM
The researchers found that, of the college entrants who graduated high school in 2004, men were more than twice as likely as women to complete bachelor's degrees in STEM fields, including premed, and men were more likely to persist in STEM/biomedical after entering these majors by their sophomore year in college.

Seeking possible reasons for the gender and persistence gaps in STEM, the researchers showed gender differences in high school academic achievement, math test scores, advanced math and science courses, self-assessed math ability and attitudes toward family and work were only minor factors. 

What stood out from the surveys were the responses to one question in the 2002 baseline survey, repeated in 2004--Where did they see themselves at age 30.

Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 survey question asked in base year and first follow-up regarding occupational plans (from nces.ed.gov/surveys/els2002/questionnaires.asp).

The gender gaps in STEM outcomes were strongly associated with gender differences in high school students' occupational plans. Among high school senior boys, 26% planned to enter STEM or biomedical occupations, compared with 13% of girls, while 15% of girls planned to enter nursing or similar health occupations compared with 4% of boys.

Wrap Up
The study results suggest that efforts to reduce gender differences in STEM outcomes need to begin early in students' educational careers. The researchers judge that achieving the objective will be difficult in the face of the underrepresentation of women in STEM, which influences young women's beliefs about the types of occupations where they will be welcome and rewarded fairly. But there’s lots that can be done. 

Brownie and Girl Scout Troop students conducting hands-on experiments at Johns Hopkins University’s Montgomery County Campus (from mcc.jhu.edu/news/girl-scout-troops-learn-science-at-jhu).

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Status of women in STEM from World Economic Forum: www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/stem-gender-inequality-researchers-bias/
Education Longitudinal Study of 2002: nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014363.pdf
Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 questionnaires: nces.ed.gov/surveys/els2002/questionnaires.asp
Study of gender differences in STEM in Sociology of Education journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038040720928484
Article on study from Cornell Chronicle: news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/07/gender-gaps-stem-college-majors-emerge-high-school

The More Brilliant Gender

Welcome back. Here’s today’s survey question: Which gender is more brilliant? Hmm…Will your answer differ if you respond publicly or privately?

A toast to brilliant men and women
(from imgflip.com/i/wu987).

The gender-brilliance stereotype favors men, and it stands apart from other gender stereotypes related to intellect. One can think men and women are equally intelligent on average but also think men are more likely than women to be brilliant. Accurately measuring the stereotype is a challenge given that people are often reluctant to admit stereotypes.

A recently published study by researchers affiliated with Denver, Harvard and New York universities set out to extend prior work on the gender-brilliance stereotype using implicit rather than explicit measures. Do people implicitly associate brilliance with men more than with women?

Testing Implicit Gender-Brilliance Associations
The researchers employed the Implicit Association Test, a computer-based measure that requires users to rapidly categorize two target concepts (e.g., men, women) with an attribute (e.g., genius). Because easier pairings (faster responses) are interpreted as more strongly associated in memory than difficult pairings (slower responses), the test scores are thought to reflect implicit attitudes that people may be unwilling to reveal publicly. (A typical procedure involves a series of tasks, which are described in several references, see P.S.).

In all, the researchers tested implicit gender-brilliance associations in five experiments with a total of 3,618 participants from different regions of the U.S. and seven regions of the world. Although the focus was implicit associations, they also collected data on explicit gender-brilliance associations for comparison in a subset of the experiments.

Experimental Design
One experiment tested whether 818 participants (520 women), recruited from Mechanical Turk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and New York University, associate the trait genius with the category male more than the category female using photographs of White men and women. The male-genius association was pervasive across all participants, in men and women and in each of the three source groups.

A similar experiment, which used photographs of Black men and women, also found a strong and widely prevalent implicit stereotype associating men with genius across participants, among women and men and in each of the three sources groups.

Explicit association testing in these experiments found the participants did not endorse a gender-brilliance stereotype favoring men and even associated “super smart" with women more than with men. Whether they were unaware of holding the stereotype or unwilling to report it, they did report that others--not they themselves--think of brilliance and genius as male qualities.

Other experiments with 103 10-year old children (52 boys; from Urbana-Champaign, Ill., or New York City) and 514 participants from 78 countries (360 men) had comparable results. Both the children and the international participants showed evidence of a moderate-to-strong implicit stereotype associating men with genius across participants and with all segments.

Wrap Up
The study demonstrated that people implicitly conceive of brilliance and genius as male more than female traits. Why? The stereotype favoring men has no basis in actual intellectual ability.

At least some people reach beyond the gender-brilliance
stereotype (from www.azquotes.com/quote/864006).

The researchers suggest that a likely source of the gender stereotype are inferences drawn from observing the current and historic distribution of women and men across careers.

Women are underrepresented in fields perceived to require high-level intellectual ability, including many in science and technology as well as in social sciences and humanities. The stereotype may lead those working in these fields to perceive women as unsuited, or it might undermine women's inclination to pursue careers in the fields. The stereotype would thus be an artifact of the structural factors that have historically constrained women's intellectual pursuits.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of gender-brilliance stereotype in Jour. of Experimental Social Psychology: doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104020
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-07/nyu-mml062920.php
Example articles on Implicit Association Test:
implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test

What Sways Social Status?

Welcome back. Tell me. How do you rate your social status, your reputation? No, wait. This is better. What criteria would you consider if you were rating someone’s social status? Would you use different criteria for men and women?

An international team, led by researchers with the University of Texas at Austin, investigated the criteria people in different countries would use to rate social status. The study provides the first systematic measure of potentially universal and gender-differentiated behaviors and traits by which individuals are accorded high or low status by their peers.

Study Background
The study was not aimed at justifying the number of social media followers. Rather, as the researchers discuss, its significance begins with social status being a central feature of our highly social species. Relevant resources, including food, territory, mating opportunities, alliances and group-provided health care, flow to those high in status and trickle slowly to those low in status.

Some serious social status--ancient Egypt
(from www.thinglink.com/scene/885586337846001665).

Most  of us would be content to just learn key status criteria, but the lead researchers, being evolutionary psychologists, set out to test hypotheses drawn from evolutionary meta-theory. They hypothesize that (a) men’s and women’s status criteria will depend equally on skills and characteristics that increased their relational value equally throughout our evolutionary history and (b) there will be gender differences in status criteria where ancestral relational value differed between the sexes.

I refer you to the paper (see P.S.) should you wish to pursue their hypotheses further. I’ll stick to the criteria themselves.

Surveying Social Status Criteria
The researchers surveyed 2,751 people (average age 23; 1,487 female) from 14 countries across 5 continents.

Social-status criteria survey sample by country
(from doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206).

A total of 240 status-affecting actions, characteristics and events were generated through a mix of nomination and expert input. American undergraduate students nominated items, which were culled to 175. Other items were added over time in consultation with anthropologists and psychologists who had specific knowledge of the cultures surveyed.

Survey respondents rated the full list of items available at the time of data collection. With required translations, they were provided an explanatory prompt, then asked to rate (from +4 to -4) the likely effect of each item on a person’s status and reputation in the eyes of the individual’s peer group. Each respondent rated the items twice, once for the impact on men and once for the impact on women.

Status-Impacting Criteria
Of the 240 items rated, 123 were judged to increase and 117 to decrease a person’s status. The most status-increasing criteria were being a trusted group member, being intelligent and getting accepted at a prestigious university. The most status-decreasing criteria were being known as a thief, being unclean and being stupid. 

The most status-affecting criteria and mean ratings for men and women combined across all countries (from doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206).

Many criteria did not differ by gender and appear to have similar effects across the countries sampled. Three candidates for universal status criteria are those associated with general value to the group and to individuals within the group, value to one’s kin, and physical health.

Traits of acting masculine (e.g., assertive, forceful, willing to take risks) and feminine (e.g., affectionate, sympathetic, understanding) showed the largest gender-differentiated status consequences. Leadership qualities appear more central to men’s than women’s status, while domestic skills, attractiveness and aspects of women’s sexual strategy (e.g., chastity/purity) appear more central to women’s status.

Sexual promiscuity lowers the status of both genders, albeit more for women than for men. Nevertheless, items that address simply finding a long-term mate tend to be equally beneficial to the status of both men and women.

Wrap Up
Although the study is the first to examine specific criteria by which humans evaluate and accord status cross-nationally, the researchers have been able to highlight criteria central to both men and women as well as those that are gender-differentiated. Their theoretical modeling suggests that status criteria reflect a complex mixture of evolutionary, environmental and cultural forces.

Perhaps you can draw insight to examine your own social status, though I’m confident there’s little room for improvement. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Social-status criteria study in Jour. of Personality and Social Psychology: doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/uota-bat060220.php

Funny Words

Can single words
really be funny?

Welcome back. As words go, do you find upchuck funny? How about wriggly or puffball? Maybe I’m an old grump, but I have a hard time thinking any single word is even the slightest bit humorous.

Here’s the thing: A study placed those words on the list of the 10 funniest words in the English language.

‘Twould be best if I begin with an earlier study that covered the same ground and generated the pool of words from which the more recent study chose its winners.

Surveying Word Humor
A 2017 study by psychology researchers from the UK’s University of Warwick set out to enhance the resources available for understanding cognitive, developmental and applied aspects of humor.

They selected 7,775 words common to previously collected word norms on valence, arousal, dominance, acquisition, lexical decision and frequency. From those, they randomly selected a final pool of 5,000 words. 

Some people might smile
at some words.

Using an online crowdsourcing platform and participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the researchers obtained humor ratings (1-not funny to 5-most funny) of 200 words, chosen randomly for each participant from the 5,000-word pool.

They also obtained each participant’s humor ratings of 11 calibrator words, rated previously in a pilot study with 150 participants, and each participant’s age, gender, language, country growing up and education.

Crowdsource Ratings
For the final dataset, 821 participants rated 4,997 words. The average number of ratings for each word was 33; the minimum number was 15. All participants also rated the 11 calibrator words. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 78 (mean 35), most were female (58%), 70% had a bachelor’s degree or higher and only about 1% lacked at least a high school degree.
 
Among the words judged funniest were booty, nitwit, waddle, bebop and twerp. Ratings differed significantly by gender (men liked sexual words; women liked giggle, beast and circus). Younger and older people generally found the same words funny, yet there were differences. People age 32 and younger thought words like goatee, joint and gangster were funniest, while those older than 32 preferred squint, jingle and burlesque.

Alleviating my guilt about being a grump, the authors’ statistical analyses showed people view words as humorous to a varying extent, with a skew towards seeing the majority of words as humorless…

Modeling Word Humor
The recent study by researchers from Canada’s University of Alberta took a more in-depth look. Rather than rank words based on peoples’ personal choices, they sought to understand what makes certain words funny.

Working with the same pool of 4,997 words, they analyzed the semantic (meaning), phonological (sound patterns), orthographic (writing conventions) and frequency factors that play a role in judging humor.

Through modeling, they determined that there are two main kinds of predictors of word humor--those related to the word’s form and those related to the word’s meaning.

Some people might even
laugh at some words.

They were able to demonstrate that words are judged funnier if they are less common and have an improbable orthographic or phonological structure. They also described and quantified the semantic attributes that are judged funny. The semantic predictors measure how related each word is to different emotions as well as to six categories of funny words: sex, bodily functions, insults, swear words, partying and animals.

Their 10 funniest words were: upchuck, bubby, boff, wriggly, yaps, giggle, cooch, guffaw, puffball and jiggly.

Wrap Up
I should add that the University of Alberta researchers found the semantic attributes are partly compatible with the superiority theory of humor. That sent me searching for theories of humor.

It turns out the three primary theories of humor are:
-Superiority theory relates to others’ misfortune, mistakes or stupidity because of detachment (e.g., falling down stairs),
-Incongruity theory relates to things that don’t normally go together, and
-Relief theory relates to releasing tension during emotional moments.

Although new to me, those three theories weren’t recently conceived. The superiority theory, for example, traces to Plato or Aristotle. I wonder if they thought single words could be funny.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
2017 study of word humor in Behavior Research Methods journal:
link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-017-0930-6
University of Warwick news release on study:
warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/booty_booby_and/
2018 study of word humor in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General: psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxge0000467
Articles on study:
www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/funny-words-humor-06659.html
globalnews.ca/news/4703599/university-of-alberta-funniest-words-study/
Theories of Humor:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor
hermes.webster.edu/mercukat/threetheories.html
science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/formula-for-funny1.htm

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.

Startup Funding Gender Gap

Congratulations! Your business is doing great! You tapped savings, family and friends to get started. You worked hard, recovered from early mistakes and found your market. Now, it’s time to go big, really big; you’re ready to go after venture capital. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. You’re a woman.

The hands for startup funding
sure look like those of men
(from corporatemonks.com/).

Welcome back. Let’s start in Europe. Sweden ranks at the top of the European Union’s Gender Equality Index, yet female-owned businesses, which account for one-third of Swedish businesses, receive only 7% of government venture capital.

A study by researchers affiliated with Sweden’s Luleå University of Technology and Halmstad University and Finland’s Hanken School of Economics documented how gender bias entered into the assessment of venture capital applications.

Venture Capitalist Stereotypical Notions
The study used interview data to first examine how 11 venture capitalists from two government organizations used notions of gender in assessing applications from 126 entrepreneurs (72 male, 54 female).

The researchers identified four gender-stereotypical notions:
-Women are cautious and risk-averse; men are ambitious and risk-taking.
-Women are reluctant to grow their businesses; men are willing to do so.
-Women do not have resources to engage in high growth; men do.
-Women’s ventures underperform; men’s ventures perform well.

To test these notions against fact, they statistically analyzed relevant performance indicators and accounting information for each of the 126 ventures. They found no significant difference between ventures led by men or women in any of the four identified areas: risk-taking, growth, growth resources or underperformance. In short, the perceived gender differences affecting funding decisions are myths.

OK, that’s what happens in Sweden, not the U.S. Wrong. A 2017 article in Fortune magazine reported that, of the billions venture capitalists invested in 2016, only about 2% went to women. That doesn’t appear to have changed much in 2017 (see figure).

Yearly venture capital funding ($ billions) for U.S. startups founded by men, women and both men and women, 2006-2017 (from fortune.com/2018/01/31/female-founders-venture-capital-2017/).

Male vs. Female Investors
Would male and female venture capitalists make different funding decisions? Maybe.

Research collaborators from the California Institute of Technology and University of California, San Diego, studied angel investors--individuals who invest their personal funds in a business; venture capitalists invest other people’s money.

Their analysis of a proprietary dataset from AngelList, a U.S. website for startups, angel investors and job-seekers, found male investors expressed less interest in female-led startups than in similar male-led startups. In contrast, the same female-led startups were more successful than male-led startups with female investors. The results did not appear to be driven by differences in startup quality, sector focus or risk.

So, adding female investors might help balance the gender funding gap, but there’s a long way to go. The Wall Street Journal highlighted a 2017 analysis of 71 top venture-capital firms that found less than 10% of their investment-team members were women.

Amateur vs. Professional Investors
An interesting sidelight to professional investing in startups is crowdfunding, where many small amounts of money are raised from a large number of amateur investors.

PwC in collaboration with The Crowdfunding Center analyzed 2015 and 2016 data from nine of the largest crowdfunding global platforms. They found that, although men sought startup crowdfunding more than women, women were more successful at reaching their funding target across a wide range of sectors, geography and cultures.

For example, considering total global campaign activity, men initiated about 2.5 times the number of startup campaigns as women, yet 22% of women-led campaigns were successfully funded compared to 17% of men-led campaigns. Data for the U.S. showed men initiated 2.3 times the number campaigns as women, yet 4% more women-led campaigns were successfully funded.

Total global crowdfunding activity in 2015 and 2016 for male- and female-led startups (from www.pwc.com/gx/en/about/diversity/womenunbound.html).

After finding similar results in their analysis of 416 projects from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, researchers from Louisiana State, Indiana and Suffolk universities conducted an experiment with 73 amateur investors to get a sense of why women were more successful than men. Female entrepreneurs were seen as more trustworthy, trustworthiness fostered funders’ backing and the funders’ implicit gender bias strengthened those effects.

Wrap Up
Getting back to professional investors, I’ll close with one bright note: Founders for Change. This is a loose, growing coalition of over 900 founders and chief executives who are improving diversity and inclusion within their companies and pressuring the venture capital industry to diversify.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of Swedish venture capitalists’ gender bias in Journal of Business Venturing Insights: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352673417300938
Article on Swedish study in Harvard Business Review: hbr.org/2018/03/vc-stereotypes-about-men-and-women-arent-supported-by-performance-data
Fortune magazine article on venture capital funding gender gap: fortune.com/2017/03/13/female-founders-venture-capital/
Study of angel investors’ gender bias on Social Science Research Network website: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2953011
Wall Street Journal article on venture capital firm diversity: graphics.wsj.com/table/VCLEDER0410
PwC and The Crowdfunding Center report, Women unbound: www.pwc.com/gx/en/about/diversity/womenunbound.html
Study of crowdfunders’ trust in women in Journal of Business Venturing: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0883902616302798
Article on crowdfunder trust study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180510101310.htm
Founders for Change: www.foundersforchange.org
New York Times article on Founders for Change: www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/technology/founders-for-change-tech-diversity.html
Example articles on finding angel and venture funding:
articles.bplans.com/5-essentials-for-angel-investment/
articles.bplans.com/10-tips-finding-venture-funding/

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.

Creativity Affects Attractiveness

Welcome back. You may recall my reporting that, when I exchanged my 10-year Virginia driver’s license for Wisconsin’s, the Dairy State figured I wouldn’t last more than three years (Settling In Part 2). Well, I’m still here, so I had to renew my driver’s license.
 

Warren the toddler.

Had my mother seen my new license photo, she would have laughed and said I looked like death warmed over. I was quite handsome in photos through my toddler years; ever since, I’ve looked acceptable, at best. Photogenic, I’m not, though because of my abundant charisma, I’m occasionally saved by a talented photographer.

This of course made me wonder about dating apps like Tinder or OkCupid, where one’s photo is vital. But then I found something on the topic that was much more interesting to wonder about. A recent study from Scotland’s Abertay University examined whether creativity could compensate for lack of photographic attractiveness.

Experiments to Rate Attractiveness
The researcher conducted three experiments which involved rating the overall attractiveness of people whose faces appeared in photos paired with creative work attributed to them.

First Experiment: From a publicly available database of face photos independently rated for attractiveness, the researcher selected 16 photos--4 attractive and 4 less-attractive of each gender, all Caucasian with neutral expressions, no adornments and gazing directly forward.
 

Separately, 38 participants (19 female), average age 28, each spent up to 5 minutes writing a short story about what was happening in the painting The Lovers by René Magritte, 1928. 

The Lovers, oil painting by René Magritte,
1928; Australia’s National Portrait Gallery.

A panel of judges (average age 27) rated each story for several traits related to creativity, and a composite measure of creativity was calculated. From these, 4 creative and 4 less-creative stories by each gender were selected.

The 16 photos and 16 stories were paired to arrive at 2 attractive, creative; 2 attractive, less-creative; 2 less-attractive, creative; and 2 less-attractive, less-creative for each gender.

Finally, 89 participants (68 female), average age 23, rated the paired photos and stories for overall attractiveness, without seeing or being provided information about the painting.

Second Experiment: Sixteen lists of six uses for everyday objects (half creative, half less-creative) were prepared, judged and combined in a manner similar to that for the stories.

As in the first experiment, the lists were paired with the photos for rating of overall attractiveness by 104 participants (55 female), average age approximately 25.

Third Experiment: The last experiment was identical to the first, except the 16 photos were selected from a different database. The paired photos and stories were rated for overall attractiveness by 97 participants (mostly male), average age 24.

Experiment Results
The results suggest creativity benefits males more than females when it comes to judging attractiveness.

In the first experiment, creative males were judged more attractive than less-creative males. For females, however, facial attractiveness ruled to the extent that attractive, less-creative women were preferred over less-attractive, creative women. Moreover, creativity did not enhance the overall attractiveness of females with attractive faces.

In the second experiment, creativity had a more substantial effect on the overall attractiveness of males with less-attractive faces than it did for males with attractive faces. For females, facial attractiveness again had a more substantial effect on overall attractiveness than did creativity. Less-creative, attractive females and creative, attractive females were equivalent in overall attractiveness.

It was only in the final experiment that creativity strengthened the overall attractiveness of both men and women with less-attractive faces.

Wrap Up
While the effects of creativity when judging attractiveness may be clearer for men than for women, one may never get beyond visual cues. Nevertheless, another recent study argues that a more balanced approach--one that integrates visual, auditory (voice) and olfactory (scent) effects--will provide stronger evidence regarding the complex factors underlying human attractiveness. 

What do you think? Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study on effect of creativity on attractiveness in Royal Society Open Science journal: rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/4/160955
Article on creativity study on Live Science website: www.livescience.com/58759-creativity-attractiveness.html
Study on multimodal beauty in Frontiers in Psychology journal: journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00778/full
Article on multimodal beauty study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170518083047.htm

Genders Gaze Differently

“See, there’s a difference” is
also “There’s a difference in
how we see.” (Graphic from
multiple websites)

Welcome back. In case you were wondering, men and women are different. OK, you probably knew that. But I bet you didn’t know that the difference extends to how men and women gaze at faces. That’s what investigators from the UK’s University College London, Queen Mary University of London and University of Nottingham found recently.

This all began when earlier research showed that everyone has their own eye-scanning pattern when gazing at faces. Who cares? Well, gaze-based models have significance for fields varying from computer vision to clinical psychology. Since the face is central to social interactions, quantifying the nature of face processing is critical to understanding and diagnosing disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Face-Gazing Study Design
To learn that eye-scanning patterns vary with gender, the investigators collected data on 405 visitors to the Science Museum of London. These test participants included 203 males, 202 females, ages 18 to 69 (average 31), of 58 nationalities. Testing of each participant took about 15 minutes and involved three phases.

First, the participants completed a 10-item questionnaire that provided a measure of their personality traits.

Second, an eye-tracking device monitored the participants as they looked at computer-hosted video clips of the face of an actor. The actor gazed briefly toward the bottom of the display, then forward directly at the participant, and finally back toward the bottom of the display. In all, each participant viewed 40 videos, 35 of which varied only in the length of time the actor spent gazing forward at the participant. After each of the 40 videos, the participant indicated via a mouse button if the length of time the actor gazed forward felt uncomfortably short or uncomfortably long for a real interaction.

Third, the participants completed another questionnaire, rating the attractiveness, threat, dominance and trustworthiness of the actor in the video. (The actor viewed by each participant was one of eight chosen randomly. The eight actors were Caucasian, ages 20 to 40, split evenly by gender.)

Study Results
To characterize gender differences in gaze behavior, the investigators grouped the data as male watching male (119 cases), male watching female (84), female watching male (106) and female watching female (96).

As you might expect, the results showed that males watching females showed the largest increase in eye pupil diameter. But the analysis also showed: female observers made shorter fixations and larger rapid eye movements between fixation points (saccades); female gazing was more scattered or exploratory than that of males; females watching females were biased toward looking at the actors’ left eye; and males and females were both more likely to gaze at the eyes of an actor of the opposite gender than of the same gender.

Images depict where representative males (left) and females (right) gazed at actors’ faces, with lighter color indicating more intense focus. Note that females explored faces more than males did and that females watching females have the strongest left-eye bias. (Figure from paper, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.)

Wrap Up
The study demonstrated that gender is a key variable influencing gaze patterns during face exploration. Despite employing the largest, most diverse eye-tracking database, the study had too many limiting factors to establish that gender is the key variable in all cases (e.g., the use of video clips, having only Caucasian actors, and having the actors keep their head still and maintain a neutral facial expression without speaking).

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting study and one more reminder--in case you forget--there is a difference between women and men. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Face exploration study published in Journal of Vision: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2587793
Article on study on MedicalXPress website:
medicalxpress.com/news/2016-11-eyes-women-men-differently.html