One of the prominent, by now seminal, paradigms in the research tradition of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) is the free-choice paradigm developed by Brehm (1956) to measure choice-induced preference change. Some 50 years after Brehm introduced the paradigm, Chen and Risen (2010) published an influential critique arguing that what the paradigm measures is not necessarily a choice-induced preference change, but possibly an artifact of the choice revealing existing preferences. They showed that once the artifact is experimentally controlled for, there is either no or very little evidence for choice-induced preference change. Given the prominence of the paradigm, this critique meant that much of what we thought we knew about the psychological process of cognitive dissonance might not be true. Following the critique, research using the paradigm applied various corrections to overcome the artifact. The present research examined whether choice truly changes preferences, or rather merely reflects them. We conducted a meta-analysis on 43 studies (N = 2,191), all using an artifact-free free-choice paradigm. Using different meta-analytical methods, and conceptually different analyses, including a Bayesian one, we found an overall effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.40, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.32, 0.49]. Furthermore, we found no evidence for publication bias as an alternative explanation for the choice-induced preference change effect. These results support the existence of true preference change created by choice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Israeli politicians strongly support inter-urban rail investment and network development connecting peripheral localities, while transport experts voice criticism and oppose many of the planned investments. This study focuses on the lacuna in transportation scholarship regarding elected officials' expectations from rail investment in peripheral areas and its potential to reduce spatial disparities, stressing that there is little research effort to reveal the reasoning of politicians when promoting transport investment and the extent to which some of the political considerations may reflect an authentic representation of public sentiments. First, an explorative qualitative study was conducted, using multiple data sets, including 12 in-depth interviews with elected officials and transport decision makers, newspaper articles, and professional documents. Analysis identified four main themes with conflicting perspectives between transport experts and politicians: Marginal vis-a-vis revolutionary effects; daily vis-a-vis less frequent activities; transport link vis-a-vis emotional link and social justice vis-a-vis social commitment. These themes reflect the tension between the discourse of accessibility led by experts and the implied discourse of mobility by politicians. The second stage was based on a large scale survey of 2008 respondents from peripheral and central localities in Israel, aimed at revealing public beliefs and preferences regarding rail investment in peripheral localities. Results showed that differences of opinion between experts and politicians do not stem only from political bias or irrelevant interests but reflect experts' inability to consider benefits that are appreciated by both politicians and the general public. The study also draws attention to different approaches to the goals of transportation systems. While the dominant voice in scholarly discourse considers accessibility gains as the main goal of transport policy, both elected politicians and residents from peripheral localities also appreciate mobility gains.

In recent decades, the experience of non-governmental politically motivated violence became a central element of global memory culture. Motivated by several shocking attacks at the beginning of the new millennium, this commemorative culture evolved in a memory ecology, which was significantly shaped by the prosperity of global Holocaust memory. Therefore, public commemoration of politically motivated violence intersects different discursive elements, leading to multidirectional forms of memory. Based on interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article examines public memorials commemorating two notable cases of neo-Nazi xenophobic attacks in Germany as discursive spheres referring to the confrontation with the country’s unique past and its impact on Germany’s contemporary self-image challenged by right-wing extremism. We argue that various commemorative actors in the field adopted and appropriated Second World War and Holocaust-related iconography and terminology to shape these memory sites as instruments linking current Germany to the period of National Socialism.

Understanding the tradeoffs faced by organisms is a major goal of evolutionary biology. One of the main approaches for identifying these tradeoffs is Pareto task inference (ParTI). Two recent papers claim that results obtained in ParTI studies are spurious due to phylogenetic dependence (Mikami T, Iwasaki W. 2021. The flipping t-ratio test: phylogenetically informed assessment of the Pareto theory for phenotypic evolution. Methods Ecol Evol. 12(4):696–706) or hypothetical p-hacking and population-structure concerns (Sun M, Zhang J. 2021. Rampant false detection of adaptive phenotypic optimization by ParTI-based Pareto front inference. Mol Biol Evol. 38(4):1653–1664). Here, we show that these claims are baseless. We present a new method to control for phylogenetic dependence, called SibSwap, and show that published ParTI inference is robust to phylogenetic dependence. We show how researchers avoided p-hacking by testing for the robustness of preprocessing choices. We also provide new methods to control for population structure and detail the experimental tests of ParTI in systems ranging from ammonites to cancer gene expression. The methods presented here may help to improve future ParTI studies.

Countertransference may reflect the patients’ diagnosis and can be used to better understand patients’ inner worlds and core conflictual relationship themes (CCRTs). Thus, the changing emotions of therapists can serve as a marker of treatment processes. This exploratory study aims to identify how the interaction between patients’ CCRT patterns and their respective therapists’ emotions associate with working alliance postsession and patient symptoms. The data analysis is based on 17 subjects who received supportive−expressive therapy. Therapists’ emotional reactions were assessed using the Feeling Word Checklist. The Working Alliance Inventory—Short Revised and the Outcome Questionnaire were completed at each session. The relationship between the patients’ CCRTs and (a) the therapists’ emotional profile, (b) therapists’ rated working alliance, and (c) patient symptoms was analyzed using mixed models. Results show that patients’ CCRT moderated the correlation between therapists’ feeling engaged and time. In addition, patients’ CCRTs and therapists’ emotions together was associated with therapists’ rated working alliance and patient symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

The rise in the number of genotyped ancient individuals provides an opportunity to estimate population admixture models for many populations. However, in models describing modern populations as mixtures of ancient ones, it is typically difficult to estimate the model mixing coefficients and to evaluate its fit to the data.We present LINADMIX, designed to tackle this problem by solving a constrained linear model when both the ancient and the modern genotypes are represented in a low-dimensional space. LINADMIX estimates the mixing coefficients and their standard errors, and computes a P-value for testing the model fit to the data. We quantified the performance of LINADMIX using an extensive set of simulated studies. We show that LINADMIX can accurately estimate admixture coefficients, and is robust to factors such as population size, genetic drift, proportion of missing data and various types of model misspecification.LINADMIX is available as a python code at https://github.com/swidler/linadmix.Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The main challenge in the study of schizophrenia is its high heterogeneity. While it is generally accepted that there exist several biological mechanisms that may define distinct schizophrenia subtypes, they have not been identified yet. We performed comprehensive gene expression analysis to search for molecular signals that differentiate schizophrenia patients from healthy controls and examined whether an identified signal was concentrated in a subgroup of the patients.Transcriptome sequencing of 14 superior temporal gyrus (STG) samples of subjects with schizophrenia and 15 matched controls from the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI) was performed. Differential expression and pathway enrichment analysis results were compared to an independent cohort. Replicability was tested on 6 additional independent datasets.The 2 STG cohorts showed high replicability. Pathway enrichment analysis of the down-regulated genes pointed to proteasome-related pathways. Meta-analysis of differential expression identified down-regulation of 12 of 39 proteasome subunit genes in schizophrenia. The signal of proteasome subunits down-regulation was replicated in 6 additional datasets (overall 8 cohorts with 267 schizophrenia and 266 control samples, from 5 brain regions). The signal was concentrated in a subgroup of patients with schizophrenia.We detected global down-regulation of proteasome subunits in a subgroup of patients with schizophrenia. We hypothesize that the down-regulation of proteasome subunits leads to proteasome dysfunction that causes accumulation of ubiquitinated proteins, which has been recently detected in a subgroup of schizophrenia patients. Thus, down-regulation of proteasome subunits might define a biological subtype of schizophrenia.