missed the connection. Last train leaving cardiff is 22:05. eta 22:25. apparently being put on a taxi to crewe...
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What's the connection between trauma and horror/hauntings? This next speaker has some thoughts to share with us at Writing the Occult: Harbingers & Spirits on 12 December. Meet the very fabulous Mo Moshaty ⬇️
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#horror #academia #horrorscholar #horrorcritic #scholars #horrorcommunity #haunting #trauma #writers #writing #writingcommunity #creativetoots #creativity #ghosts #spirit #harbingers #occult #paranormal #supernatural
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From AP: The connection between Pete Hegseth and the push for private school choice https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dx-NjiKZs80?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon * VSN-GDPM c1996 #news #SupportIndependentMedia #vsn
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Update on the #homeassistant restore - everything worked almost perfectly. Three gotchas I found so far:
- The “restoring” page would just keep displaying, since after the restore, the service no longer responded to homeassistant.local. Luckily I saw my soundbar turn on, which is always a good indicator that HA rebooted.
- The backup seemingly did not contain the sound files I had uploaded, so my improvised temporary doorbell is borked until I upload a new sound file.
- The most interesting one: The zigbee devices did not reconnect initially, except for a single one, and the reason was interesting - I learned something new about Zigbee today.Apparently Zigbee has a frame counter, and the devices will remember the last frame counter they observed, and refuse messages with a lower count afterwards. The backup contained stale frame counters, since the machine died several hours after the last backup, hence, all devices were refusing messages from the coordinator. The solution was to power-cycle all mains-powered devices. The battery-powered devices came back automatically after that, except for two buttons which I had to re-pair manually. Credits to Claude for figuring this out based on the logs.
Other than that, quite happy with the “restore from backup” on Home Assistant for now. Now I only need to reconfigure my two wall tablets to point to the new local home assistant URL, as the RPi has a different hostname on my network now, and the wall tablets used the local alias of the old machine for the connection, as I did not want to route them via the internet ingress through Nabu Casa. But that’s not the fault of the backup, that’s just me configuring my stuff weird.
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And yes, the connection to the laptop is straight up HDMI, which opens up a world of possibilities
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So many have asked me this question and I love how they are making the connection between the word, meaning, and life. 🍂
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MCP gives Claude Code a second source of capabilities. Built-in tools are not the whole story: once a...#programming #claude #ai #agents #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Claude Code MCP Deep Dive (0): The Connection Lifecycle and Tool Exposure Map -
I’m curious how many people diagnosed with #MS and other autoimmune neurological conditions were actually poisoned with fluoroquinolones, powerful antibiotics with black box warnings. The medical information about these drugs does not mention that the damage, which include damage to nerves, muscles, tendons, the heart and central nervous system, can take years to show up, long after anyone remembers they took the drugs and long after it’s easy to say the drugs were the cause. The symptoms not only take years to show up but progress slowly so they are easily dismissed and when they can’t be dismissed are misdiagnosed. The medical literature does not mention any of this because there is a mentally that the effect of the drugs would show up right away, not years later so they never research the long term and just wait for reports of adverse effects which never come because the connection is never made since no one expects it or looks for it.
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DATE: October 21, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Intelligence predicts charitable giving and voting in massive Swedish study
URL: https://www.psypost.org/intelligence-predicts-charitable-giving-and-voting-in-massive-swedish-study/
People with higher cognitive abilities are more likely to engage in actions that benefit society, such as donating to charity, voting in elections, and buying environmentally friendly vehicles. These findings suggest that general intelligence plays a direct role in driving cooperative, socially minded actions. The research was published in The Economic Journal.
Humans are uniquely inclined to cooperate with strangers and contribute to public goods. Evolutionary biologists and economists often categorize these actions as prosocial behaviors. Finding a rational explanation for why humans evolved into such cooperative animals has long challenged researchers across multiple disciplines.
One proposed explanation centers on human intelligence. Some theorists suggest that cognitive ability improves logical reasoning and the capacity to understand the perspectives of others. These mental skills naturally foster ethical reasoning, which can ultimately lead to a sense of altruism.
Other researchers propose that intelligent individuals often achieve higher incomes and better social standing. This wealth could lower the personal financial cost of giving away money or time. Up until now, evidence linking intelligence to prosocial behavior has mostly come from brief laboratory games or surveys where people report their own habits.
To find concrete answers, economists Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson analyzed a massive set of Swedish administrative records. They wanted to see if objective measures of intelligence predicted documented, real world prosocial behaviors. The researchers focused on three specific actions: charitable giving, voting, and the ownership of environmentally friendly cars.
The researchers first analyzed data from over 1.2 million Swedish men and about 3,000 Swedish women. All of these individuals took a standardized cognitive test during their military enlistment process between 1969 and 1997. This exam evaluated logical, verbal, spatial, and technical abilities on a nine point scale.
The researchers then matched these historical test scores with modern government records. They looked at tax registries from 2012 to 2015 to track charitable donations. Because Swedish charities automatically report donations to the government for tax purposes, the data minimizes biases related to a person’s financial literacy or their willingness to fill out tax forms.
To measure political participation, the researchers examined electoral rolls for the 2009 European Parliament election. By using validated voter turnout data, the team avoided the common problem of people lying about their voting habits in surveys. Finally, they consulted a national vehicle database to identify households that owned cars powered by electricity, ethanol, or natural gas.
Individuals with higher cognitive scores were much more likely to engage in all three prosocial behaviors. Men with the highest cognitive scores were more than five times as likely to donate to charity compared to men with the lowest scores. A one standard deviation increase in intelligence matched a 40 percent relative increase in the likelihood of charitable giving.
The same bump in test scores corresponded to a 31 percent increase in voting. It also matched a 14 percent increase in eco-friendly car ownership. The data from the female participants revealed very similar positive trends for voting and charity, showing that the effect was not limited to men.
When looking at specific types of intelligence, the researchers noticed that logical and verbal reasoning were the strongest predictors of prosocial action. These two traits are widely considered the best indicators of general fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to think abstractly and solve novel problems.
Observing a link in the general population does not prove that intelligence directly causes prosocial behavior. People with high cognitive scores often grow up in wealthy families or specific neighborhoods that might actively encourage civic duties. To account for these shared background variables, Elinder and Erixson conducted a second analysis using a large sample of 5,786 twin pairs.
Because twins typically share the same upbringing, home environment, and a large portion of their genetics, comparing siblings helps account for many confounding factors and better isolate the effect of intelligence. The researchers looked at twin pairs where one sibling scored higher on the enlistment cognitive test than the other. They also controlled for general personality traits evaluated during the military interviews, such as emotional stability and sociality.
The researchers found that the smarter twin was consistently more likely to vote and donate to charity. The associations decreased in size by about half compared to the massive population sample. A one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability among twins matched a 26 percent increase in charitable giving and a 13 percent increase in voting.
The link to eco-friendly car ownership also dropped to a 13 percent increase. This twin based approach indicates that unobserved family factors account for some of the population wide trend. However, those family factors do not entirely explain the connection between cognitive ability and prosocial habits.
Elinder and Erixson then ran a third analysis to test specific lifestyle variables that might bridge the gap between intelligence and behavior. A person’s intelligence influences their life trajectory, which could in turn dictate their civic engagement. The researchers factored in differences in education, total income, marriage status, the presence of children, and the municipality of residence.
Education explained a noticeable portion of the link between cognitive scores and civic habits. This aligns with the idea that schools help transmit prosocial values or develop a person’s ethical awareness. Individuals who spend more years in the educational system often learn to prioritize community well being.
Income did not act as a major mediator. Smarter individuals were not simply donating or buying eco-friendly cars just because they had more money to spare. When accounting for all these lifestyle variables, the direct mathematical link between intelligence and owning an eco-friendly car was not statistically significant.
However, the direct connection to voting and charitable giving held firm even after adjusting for education and income. The researchers interpreted this as evidence of a profound, direct tie between intelligence and certain types of cooperation. General intelligence appears to influence these behaviors independently of a person’s life circumstances.
Finally, the researchers looked at survey responses from a separate sample of about 600 men. These men had previously reported their own feelings of altruism on a numerical scale, along with their patience and risk preferences. The researchers matched these survey answers to the men’s military enlistment cognitive scores.
Individuals with higher cognitive abilities expressed a higher degree of personal altruism, with a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability associated with a 0.16 standard deviation increase in self-reported altruism. This self reported data is in line with the behavioral records found in the national registries. While the survey results cannot firmly distinguish between different mechanisms, they are consistent with the theory that cognitive ability influences prosocial behavior through ethical reasoning and altruism.
While the twin analysis helps control for many background factors, the findings do not guarantee a strict cause and effect relationship in every scenario. The study relies heavily on data from Swedish men born between 1951 and 1979. The exact percentages might vary across different cultures, age groups, or time periods.
Additionally, the research defines prosocial behavior through three specific financial and political actions. People with lower cognitive scores might be equally cooperative in ways that do not show up in tax or vehicle registries, such as volunteering or helping neighbors physically. Future research will need to explore how other cognitive functions, like empathy and the ability to read emotions, interact with general intelligence to shape human cooperation.
The study, “An inquiry into the relationship between intelligence and prosocial behaviour: Evidence from Swedish population registers,” was authored by Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/intelligence-predicts-charitable-giving-and-voting-in-massive-swedish-study/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #IntelligenceAndProsocial #CognitiveAbility #CharitableGiving #VotingBehavior #EcoFriendlyCars #SwedenStudy #TwinStudy #EducationAndCivicDuty #ProsocialBehavior #EthicalReasoning
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DATE: October 20, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: College students who use more cannabis are less willing to share it, and less likely to use it with friends
College students who use cannabis more frequently tend to be less willing to share a hypothetical supply of the drug and less likely to say they almost always use it with other people, according to a new study published in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. The findings suggest that heavier cannabis use tends to go hand in hand with valuing the drug more and consuming it in less social settings. If the pattern holds in clinical samples, a simple sharing task might eventually help flag people at risk of developing problematic use.
Over the past decade, cannabis consumption among young adults in the United States has climbed alongside the expansion of state-level recreational legalization. Between 2013 and 2023, the proportion of young adults aged 19 to 30 who reported using cannabis within the past month rose from 18.3 percent to 28.7 percent. Diagnoses of cannabis use disorder, a condition in which a person is unable to stop using the drug despite it causing health or social problems, have also grown, prompting psychologists to search for behavioral markers that distinguish casual recreational consumption from problematic use.
“Perhaps some people are aware of this, but with increasing cannabis legalization in the United States there has been a parallel increase in cannabis use disorder (CUD) diagnosis,” study lead author Paul Romanowich, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Operant Choice Lab at Gonzaga University, told PsyPost. “That is, cannabis legalization does come at a real cost for society. Earlier and more efficacious treatments for CUD are necessary to deal with this increase in CUD.”
To understand what drives substance use, behavioral economists often examine how people make trade-offs when evaluating rewards. A common method is temporal discounting, which measures how much a person’s valuation of a reward drops when they have to wait for it. People who heavily use alcohol, nicotine, or illicit drugs typically show steep temporal discounting, meaning they strongly favor smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones.
When it comes to cannabis, however, the connection between usage frequency and impatience for delayed rewards has proven weak and inconsistent across prior studies. Because waiting for rewards does not reliably track cannabis habits, scientists have turned their attention to social discounting. Social discounting measures how a person’s generosity changes depending on their emotional closeness to someone else.
In a standard social discounting task, people are generally willing to share resources with a close friend or family member, but they become increasingly likely to keep the resource for themselves as the recipient becomes a more distant acquaintance. Previous research on cigarette smokers and methamphetamine users has shown that substance use is associated with a faster drop-off in generosity as social distance grows, aligning with one prominent argument that addiction can be understood as a series of increasingly self-focused choices.
Prior neuroscience research has also examined how cannabis relates to social processing and interpersonal experiences in other ways. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2019 found that men with cannabis dependence showed blunted brain reward activity and reported less pleasantness in response to interpersonal touch. Looking at emotional comprehension, research covered by PsyPost in 2024 indicated that regular cannabis users scored higher on tests of understanding others’ emotions than non-users.
Rather than looking at emotional empathy or neural responses to touch, Romanowich and his colleagues at Gonzaga University wanted to see how economic sharing of cannabis itself relates to real-world consumption habits. In a 2024 study, Romanowich and his team had modified a social discounting task by asking people how much hypothetical cannabis they would share with others, finding that current users shared less than people who had never used the drug. Because that earlier work did not measure how often the current users actually consumed cannabis or whether they used it around other people, the researchers designed the new study to test whether heavier use among current consumers is tied to both less willingness to share and less time spent using the drug in social groups.
“We were motivated to replicate and extend our previous study showing that college students share increasingly less hypothetical cannabis as social distance increases and that experience with cannabis (none, past, or current) changes how much hypothetical cannabis is shared,” Romanowich explained. “In that study we didn’t quantify current cannabis use (e.g., how many days have you used cannabis in the past month) or who they typically used cannabis with. Thus, we wanted to replicate this effect with current cannabis users and test whether the social environment changed with increased cannabis use.”
The researchers recruited undergraduate students enrolled in general psychology courses at a small private university in the Pacific Northwest between the spring of 2024 and the spring of 2025. While 100 students initially completed the online survey and reported using cannabis both in their lifetime and within the past 30 days, data from 11 participants were excluded because their answers on the sharing task followed an erratic, inconsistent pattern. For example, if a student said they would give 50 percent of their cannabis to their closest friend, but 75 percent to their second-closest friend, their data was removed for lacking consistency.
This filtering left a final sample of 89 college students with an average age of about 19. Sixty-five percent of the participants identified as female, and 74 percent identified as White. Nearly all of the students, 96 percent, reported drinking alcohol.
Participants first completed the cannabis social discounting task on their personal devices. They were asked to imagine a list of 100 people numbered by closeness, where number 1 was their dearest friend or relative and number 100 was a mere acquaintance. Across seven separate questions corresponding to person number 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100, students slid a marker on a scale from 0 percent to 100 percent to indicate what proportion of a hypothetical amount of cannabis they would share with that specific person rather than keep for themselves.
To convert these seven answers into a single score for each student, the researchers calculated a metric known as the area under the curve. This value ranges from 0 to 1, where higher numbers indicate that a person shared a larger percentage of cannabis across the various social distances, and lower numbers indicate less sharing overall.
Next, the students completed the Cannabis Engagement Assessment, a 30-item questionnaire detailing their usage habits over the past 30 days. The survey asked how many days they had used three distinct categories of products: dried cannabis such as flower or bud, concentrates like oil or resin, and edibles such as gummies or baked goods. It also asked whether they typically consumed cannabis alone or with other people, how they obtained it, and whether they had ever tried to cut back.
To compare lighter and heavier users within the sample, the researchers summed the number of days each student used dried cannabis, concentrates, and edibles over the past month. Across all participants, total usage ranged from 1 to 60 product-days, with a median of 4 days. The researchers split the sample at this midpoint, comparing the 46 students with 4 or fewer combined product-days in the past month against the 43 students with more than 4. Because this cutoff is quite low, the heavier-use group still includes many fairly occasional users.
Across the entire group of 89 students, more frequent cannabis use was moderately correlated with lower sharing scores on the hypothetical task, showing a correlation of negative 0.30. When comparing the two subgroups directly, students above the median of 4 product-days shared a smaller proportion of hypothetical cannabis than those at or below the median. Specifically, the heavier-use group had an average sharing score of 0.46 on the 0-to-1 scale, compared to an average score of 0.57 for the lighter-use group. The difference between groups was medium in size by conventional standards, similar to the gap seen between current users and never-users in the team’s earlier study.
A similar pattern emerged regarding the social environment in which students actually consumed the drug, with usage frequency showing an even stronger negative correlation of negative 0.40 with social use than with sharing scores. Overall, 82 percent of the students reported that they used cannabis always or almost always with other people, consistent with the idea that college cannabis use is largely a group activity. However, as usage frequency climbed, fewer students said they almost always used cannabis with others, with the drop becoming most noticeable around 10 total product-days of use in a month.
Among students at or below the median of 4 product-days, 93 percent (43 out of 46 students) said they used cannabis always or almost always with other people. Among students above the median, that figure dropped to 70 percent (30 out of 43 students). In addition, 61 percent of the lighter users reported getting their cannabis from whatever their friends happened to have on hand, compared to just 35 percent of the heavier users.
“Individuals that use more cannabis also tend to share less cannabis with people they both do and don’t know well,” Romanowich noted. “In addition, individuals that use more cannabis also tend to use cannabis less frequently with other people. That is, what was once social cannabis use becomes solitary cannabis use as cannabis use increases.”
“We were not surprised that cannabis value increased with increased self-reported cannabis use – that was predicted from our previous study and many other behavioral economic cannabis studies,” Romanowich added. “However, it was somewhat surprising that there was also a strong effect for whom those individuals with increased cannabis use reported using cannabis with. We hypothesized this may be the case but didn’t think the effect would be as significant as it was. More generally, we were also surprised that there is not much empirical research on how an individual’s social environment may be related to increased cannabis use.”
The questionnaire also pointed to several differences in consumption methods and habits between the two groups. Students above the median were more likely to have used high-potency cannabis concentrates in the past month, at 60 percent compared to 37 percent of those below the median, and they took an average of 1.77 concentrate hits per day compared to 0.39 hits among lighter users. Heavier users were also more likely to know the specific strain of dried cannabis they used (45 percent versus 23 percent) and its tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, percentage (29 percent versus 7 percent), though less than half of the students in either group knew these details.
In addition, 63 percent of students above the median reported having tried to reduce or cut down on their cannabis consumption, compared to 26 percent of those below the median. Heavier cannabis users were also more likely to report using e-cigarettes, at 23 percent versus 7 percent of lighter users.
These findings align with behavioral economic principles suggesting that as a person uses a substance more frequently, they place a higher personal value on the commodity and become less willing to part with it. Just as people who are willing to pay higher financial prices for cannabis tend to consume more of it, students who are less willing to give away hypothetical cannabis to friends and acquaintances tend to be heavier users who are less likely to consume the drug consistently in social settings.
“The practical significance of the effects is that we empirically demonstrated two ways that increased cannabis use is related to their social environment,” Romanowich said. “First, college students with increased cannabis use also tend to value that commodity more, as evidenced by significantly less cannabis shared with others. Second, students with increased cannabis use also tend to isolate themselves from other individuals when using cannabis.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Because the study captured correlational data at a single point in time, it cannot establish whether frequent cannabis use causes people to become less generous with the drug, or if people who already prefer to keep resources to themselves are more inclined to use cannabis frequently and outside of group settings. The analyses were also not preregistered. The sample was relatively small and consisted largely of White, female college students in a state where recreational cannabis has been legal for over a decade, even though 88 percent of the students were under the legal purchasing age of 21.
In addition, only four participants in the entire sample reported ever seeking treatment for their cannabis habits, meaning the study primarily reflects differences between occasional and regular recreational users rather than people diagnosed with severe cannabis use disorder. All consumption data relied on student self-reports rather than biological urine or saliva tests, and the researchers did not measure mental health conditions like depression, which has been linked to reduced sharing in prior research on smokers.
“First, we don’t know whether the results will generalize to clinical populations, especially individuals at risk for or diagnosed with cannabis use disorder (CUD),” Romanowich cautioned. “Generalizing these results to a clinically relevant population may be important to show that the same relationship exists regardless of the amount of cannabis use. However, there may also be a floor effect whereby individuals diagnosed with CUD never share and/or use cannabis socially.”
The design of the sharing task itself also leaves room for refinement in future work. The survey did not specify an exact gram amount of cannabis to be shared, and it asked students to imagine sharing with seven people on their closeness list without knowing whether those specific friends or acquaintances actually use cannabis. If a student’s closest relative disapproves of cannabis, the student might choose to share 0 percent out of respect rather than selfishness, a factor future studies could address by asking how much time participants spend with other cannabis users.
Future research could also test whether combining social discounting tasks with traditional temporal discounting and price-sensitivity questionnaires improves clinicians’ ability to predict who will transition from casual social use to cannabis use disorder. By tracking diverse populations over time and incorporating clinical diagnostic tools, scientists can better determine whether a reluctance to share cannabis serves as an early warning sign of problematic use.
“Second, we don’t know whether these two social environment measures (cannabis sharing and social use) are predictive for current cannabis users who later develop CUD, independent of other measures,” Romanowich explained. “Showing whether this is the case will help to identify cannabis users at risk for developing CUD earlier for intervention, which should increase treatment efficacy.”
“There is still much we don’t know about who transitions from recreational cannabis use to CUD,” he concluded. “Adding an empirically based social environment level to this research is important to capture the lived experience of cannabis users.”
The study, “Increasing Cannabis Use Is Associated With Increased Social Discount Rates and Decreased Self-Reported Social Use in College Students,” was authored by Paul Romanowich, Celia Connor-Smith, Kendyl Eugenio, and Presley Nelson.
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