Tickling is common and experienced as largely pleasant across cultures and has clear anatomical hotspots (that are ticklish because they are rarely touched). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The punk kid in me is happy as hell about this interview I got to do on 'The Science Of Crowd Killing' with CREEM rock mag. www.creem.com/archive/arti...

People who used GLP-1 receptor agonist medications, compared to diet + exercise, to lose weight were judged more negatively by others. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The most often used measure of aggressive personality, the Buss-Perry Aggression Q, is based on items originally written so long ago that when I checked out the journal issue from the library, it still has a bookmark in it from the National Tuberculosis Association. Time for an update?

A mixed-methods approach to differentiating anger and rage, which are more alike than different. Rage seems to be a sub-type of anger, which is more characterized by "tunnel vision, loss of control, and aggression." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A topic I've really never thought deeply about until this cool paper came along, how we develop a vocal identity of the self. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

As someone who was initially enamored with evolutionary psych, then grew to broadly oppose it, and now have found many modern parts of it valuable again, this was such a welcome read. If I ever write a book on my scholarly area, I hope it's half this good.

Our inferences regarding the perceived relationships among others' personality traits tend to mirror the actual relationships those same traits exhibit in ourselves. osf.io/preprints/ps...

On average, parents seem to want more kids than they have, but having more kids than you wanted (~8% of parents) is linked to lower well-being. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Liberals don't see socially-powerful entities as victims, conservatives do. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Being rejected by potential friends versus dates hurts about the same. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Holding a hyperventilating robot while watching The Shining increases your heart rate. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Listening to music together increased friends' prefrontal synchrony. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Love the idiographic approach of this mixed-methods study on cardinal traits. Folks volunteered very socially-desirable ones. Curious how/if things would change if participants could be motivated to provide less presentable answers. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Fruit pies should only be served cold.

Analysis of mouse-tracking data reveals support for both dynamic competition and impulse inhibition accounts of self-control, thought inhibition is relatively rare. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

A neural signature for self-focused thinking. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

A helpful way to think about traits (a la Whole Trait Theory) is that they are within-person density distributions. This paper examined how these density distributions varied by different kinds of situations. A really nice way to quantify person-situation interactions. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Artificial selection on dogs has served to expand cortical regions and reduce subcortical/insular regions of the brain. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

Taxonomic Graph Analysis --- a new technique that does a bass-ackwards-esque hierarchical representation of scale items but also deals with independence violations + wording effects and estimates the robustness of the hierarchical structure. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Wife got me farmers market flowers on Father's Day, felt like a very lucky guy.

The continuing irrelevance of that tawdry group of self-serious hacks is a wellspring of schadenfreude that never runs dry.

No meta-analytic effect of tDCS cortical stimulation on aggression (k = 25, power = 33%). onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A nice tractographical study on my favorite stringy neural structure --- the caudolenticular gray matter bridge. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The data do not support 'the neural separability assumption' of emotions --- in which separate systems exist that generate or regulate emotions. Value-based and constructionist approaches fit better. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

I love this figure because spider haters and controls think spiders are unpleasant, but spider experts are like "no, they're great."

People who are scared of spiders overestimate their size (controls and "spider experts" do not). www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Anyone else getting AI-generated homework answers in their Google Scholar Alerts for new articles?