Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Spiky anger, round peace: examining valence, arousal, and linguistic associations in emotion-eliciting concepts

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 1d

Positive emotions are bouba and negative emotions are kiki. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This research examines how valence, arousal, and linguistic co-occurrence patterns influence shape-emotion associations. Across three studies, we tested whether positive and negative words are asso...

www.tandfonline.com

2

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 3d

VCU is hiring two TT Assistant Profs in Psychology (Open area)! Please reach out to me if you have questions.

vcujobs.com/jobs/assista...

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology - VCU Main Campus, Virginia, United States

Benefits: All full-time university staff are eligible for VCU’s robust benefits package that includes comprehensive health benefits, paid annual and holiday leave granted up front, generous tuition be...

vcujobs.com

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 3d

A conceptual analysis of hundreds of participants' descriptions of humiliating experiences. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

An adversarial collaboration on the rigidity‐of‐the‐right, symmetry thesis, or rigidity‐of‐extremes: The answer depends on the question

1 2

Brent W. Roberts @bwroberts.bsky.social · 7d

Good scientific practices get in the way of a clean narrative. A clean narrative is everything.

1 9

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 9d

Adversarial collab shows conservatives are less likely to update their beliefs based on evidence than libs. Authors could not have gone more out of their way to express that these effect sizes are small, but I find them to still be of a meaningful size. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationaliz....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

3

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 9d

I love this paper so goddam much. In well-researched areas, we don't need new questionnaires. We need to take stock of what we have and refine it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment

2 8

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 11d

The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Moral judgment is central to both everyday life and cognitive science, but how can it be studied with quantitative precision? By far the most direct a…

Generalization of rejection and acceptance in social networks

3 11

Linda Skitka @lindaskitka.bsky.social · 15d

Nails it.

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 16d

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

3 11

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 15d

Gun-related murders are on the rise and this study implies that ***45%*** of the reason for this increase is greater depictions of gun violence in movies (but not TV, somehow). The analyses are inappropriate, the pseudo-causal inferences based on them are absurd, and this paper should be ignored.

1 1 2

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 15d

People don't just avoid those who reject others and approach those who accept others, but they also avoid and approach their friends, respectively. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Social environments present opportunities for connection and resources, but they also involve the risk of rejection. How do people learn which individ…

[129] P-curve works in practice, but would it work if you dropped a piano on it? - Data Colada

2

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 15d

"Presenting p-curve's performance for implausible edge case, without considering performance under likely cases, is like testing cars by dropping pianos on them .. if a car failed the piano test it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) influence car-buying decisions, b/c pianos are so unlikely to fall on cars"

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 15d

Uri's response to the JASA p-curve critique:

datacolada.org/129

P-curve is a statistical tool we developed about 15 years ago to help rule out selective reporting, be it p-hacking or file-drawering, as the sole explanation for a set of significant results. This po...

datacolada.org

1 2

Data Colada @datacolada.bsky.social · 16d

Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it?
datacolada.org/129

PIano being dropped on car in car testing facility

1 3 15

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19d

The classic Dot Probe is trash, but this new version shows some early signs of promise as a valid behavioral measure of attentional bias to threat. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Evidence of an exponential relationship between attentional bias to threat and anxiety using an original “eye-dot-probe” task - Motivation and Emotion

Over the past decade, the anxiety-related attentional bias to threat, widely investigated through the dot-probe task, has faced challenges. Although the dominant view assumes a static attentional bias...

link.springer.com

1 1

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 21d

AI recruiting AI participants to do AI-designed studies for AI-written manuscripts that are accepted to AI journals that produce AI content for AI views to make AI stats go up. They won't even notice when the academics die out. That's the dead ivory tower aliens are one day going to find.

Tyler, from the Internet @tylerfromtheinternet.com · Sep 9

AI HR hiring AI candidates to do AI jobs selling AI products which are advertised on AI channels producing AI content for AI views to make AI stats go up. They won't even notice when the humans die out. That's the dead world aliens are one day going to find.

2

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 25d

Interesting deep dive into why and how the phrase 'women and children' as victims elicits heightened moral outrage. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The moral pull of “women and children”

Victimized “women and children” are frequently featured in the media, yet the consequences of this phrase are far from clear. Across six experiments (…

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 28d

Expressions of outrage may undermine White people's motivations for reparative actions. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Tyler, from the Internet @tylerfromtheinternet.com · Sep 9

AI HR hiring AI candidates to do AI jobs selling AI products which are advertised on AI channels producing AI content for AI views to make AI stats go up. They won't even notice when the humans die out. That's the dead world aliens are one day going to find.

13 77 340

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Sep 8

Makes a lotta sense if you know about sadistic folks. The fact that there is a human on the other side of their harmful comment, who is likely being hurt by it, is the whole point! Reminding them of this just increases the motivational salience of the harmful act.

Whom to pity, whom to scold? Effects of empathetic and normative AI-assisted interventions on aggressive Reddit users with different activity profiles

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Sep 8

Attempts at reducing online aggression (ie, cruel Reddit comments) by increasing empathy (eg, "There is a human being on the other side who might be hurt by your words") tended to backfire. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

During a six-month experiment conducted on Reddit, we studied the impact of counter-speech interventions against personal attacks sent by 440 users re…

On Partial Versus Full Mediation and the Importance of Effect Sizes - Thomas Ledermann, Myriam Rudaz, Matthew S. Fritz, 2025

1 2 7

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Sep 5

Don't claim "full mediation". journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Theoretical models involving one or multiple intervening variables often posit whether a cause influences an outcome both directly and indirectly or only indire...

2 5 18

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Aug 27

Those are good goals. Super awesome ambitious goals. But if an additional goal of yours was to be a beast, then you accomplished that goal.

Three Sensitivity-Analysis Methods to Assess Unmeasured Pretreatment Confounding Bias in Experimental Mediation Analysis - Diana Alvarez-Bartolo, David P. MacKinnon, 2025

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Aug 27

400 is a beast pull. Nice fucking work man!

1 1

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Aug 25

We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. -Martin Amis

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Aug 21

To test mediation in an experiment, it's not enough to just randomly assign participants to X. Manipulating both X and M is ideal, but if you can't, this paper shows you how to perform sensitivity analyses that quantify how much confounders fucked up your model. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Statistical-mediation analysis is a widely used method in psychological research that helps understand the intermediate variables, known as mediators (M), by wh...

Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation - Nature Neuroscience

1 1

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · Aug 21

Counter to plasticity claims, cortical representations of limbs remain remarkably stable after amputation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Longitudinal neuroimaging of participants with planned arm amputations shows that the cortical body map remains stable after amputation, with no evidence of hand or face reorganization, thus challengi...

www.nature.com