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Roger Kirk, renowned for his many contributions to psychological research methods, passed away on December 30, 2023, in Waco, Texas, at the age of 93. Born in Indiana on February 23, 1930, Roger spent most of his childhood in Kentucky and Ohio. He developed an interest in the trombone as a teenager, so planned a musical career when he enrolled at The Ohio State University. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in music, however, he came to realize he was "just an average trombone player." Some vocational guidance led him to Ohio State's experimental psychology doctoral program, which he started in 1952. Roger summed up his substantial career change as follows: "God gives all of us talents, it just took me longer than most people to find mine." Roger's doctoral research focused on psychoacoustics, so after completing his dissertation in 1955, he took a job as a psychoacoustical engineer at the Baldwin Piano and Organ Company. Roger was an accomplished author and received a multitude of accolades during his career; including Baylor's highest teaching designation (Master Teacher, 1993) and highest scholarship designation (Distinguished Professor, 1995). Roger is survived by "the love of my life," Jane Abbott-Kirk, whom he married in 1983. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Culture, a pillar of the remarkable ecological success of humans, is increasingly recognized as a powerful force structuring nonhuman animal populations. A key gap between these two types of culture is quantitative evidence of symbolic markers-seemingly arbitrary traits that function as reliable indicators of cultural group membership to conspecifics. Using acoustic data collected from 23 Pacific Ocean locations, we provide quantitative evidence that certain sperm whale acoustic signals exhibit spatial patterns consistent with a symbolic marker function. Culture segments sperm whale populations into behaviorally distinct clans, which are defined based on dialects of stereotyped click patterns (codas). We classified 23,429 codas into types using contaminated mixture models and hierarchically clustered coda repertoires into seven clans based on similarities in coda usage; then we evaluated whether coda usage varied with geographic distance within clans or with spatial overlap between clans. Similarities in within-clan usage of both "identity codas" (coda types diagnostic of clan identity) and "nonidentity codas" (coda types used by multiple clans) decrease as space between repertoire recording locations increases. However, between-clan similarity in identity, but not nonidentity, coda usage decreases as clan spatial overlap increases. This matches expectations if sympatry is related to a measurable pressure to diversify to make cultural divisions sharper, thereby providing evidence that identity codas function as symbolic markers of clan identity. Our study provides quantitative evidence of arbitrary traits, resembling human ethnic markers, conveying cultural identity outside of humans, and highlights remarkable similarities in the distributions of human ethnolinguistic groups and sperm whale clans.

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are predicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosystems will respond to future disturbance regimes. Data were grouped by ecosystems (fresh water, salt water, terrestrial, and wetland) and response categories (biogeochemistry, hydrography, mobile biota, sedentary fauna, and vascular plants). We observed a repeated pattern of trade-offs between resistance and resilience across analyses. These patterns are likely the outcomes of evolutionary adaptation, they conform to disturbance theories, and they indicate that consistent rules may govern ecosystem susceptibility to tropical cyclones.

Black Americans who are perceived as more racially phenotypical-that is, who possess more physical traits that are closely associated with their race-are more often associated with racial stereotypes. These stereotypes, including assumptions about criminality, can influence how Black Americans are treated by the legal system. However, it is unclear whether other forms of racial stereotypicality, such as a person's way of speaking, also activate stereotypes about Black Americans. We investigated the links between speech stereotypicality and racial stereotypes (Experiment 1) and racial phenotype bias (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants listened to audio recordings of Black speakers and rated how stereotypical they found the speaker, the likely race and nationality of the speaker, and indicated which adjectives the average person would likely associate with this speaker. In Experiment 2, participants listened to recordings of weakly or strongly stereotypical Black American speakers and indicated which of two faces (either weakly or strongly phenotypical) was more likely to be the speaker's. We found that speakers whose voices were rated as more highly stereotypical for Black Americans were more likely to be associated with stereotypes about Black Americans (Experiment 1) and with more stereotypically Black faces (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that speech stereotypicality activates racial stereotypes as well as expectations about the stereotypicality of an individual's appearance. As a result, the activation of stereotypes based on speech may lead to bias in suspect descriptions or eyewitness identifications., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Kurinec and Weaver.)

Despite overall global declines, mangroves are expanding into and within many subtropical wetlands, leading to heterogeneous cover of marsh-mangrove coastal vegetation communities near the poleward edge of mangroves' ranges. Coastal wetlands are globally important carbon sinks, yet the effects of shifts in mangrove cover on organic-carbon (OC) storage remains uncertain. We experimentally maintained black mangrove (Avicennia germinans) or marsh vegetation in patches (n = 1,120, 3 × 3 m) along a gradient in mangrove cover (0-100%) within coastal wetland plots (n = 10, 24 × 42 m) and measured changes in OC stocks and fluxes. Within patches, above and belowground biomass (OC) was 1,630% and 61% greater for mangroves than for recolonized marshes, and soil OC was 30% greater beneath mangrove than marsh vegetation. At the plot scale, above and belowground biomass increased linearly with mangrove cover but soil OC was highly variable and unrelated to mangrove cover. Root ingrowth was not different in mangrove or marsh patches, nor did it change with mangrove cover. After 11 months, surface OC accretion was negatively related to plot-scale mangrove cover following a high-wrack deposition period. However, after 22 months, accretion was 54% higher in mangrove patches, and there was no relationship to plot-scale mangrove cover. Marsh (Batis maritima) leaf and root litter had 1,000% and 35% faster breakdown rates (k) than mangrove (A. germinans) leaf and root litter. Soil temperatures beneath mangroves were 1.4°C lower, decreasing aboveground k of fast- (cellulose) and slow-decomposing (wood) standard substrates. Wood k in shallow soil (0-15 cm) was higher in mangrove than marsh patches, but vegetation identity did not impact k in deeper soil (15-30 cm). We found that mangrove cover enhanced OC storage by increasing biomass, creating more recalcitrant organic matter and reducing k on the soil surface by altering microclimate, despite increasing wood k belowground and decreasing allochthonous OC subsidies. Our results illustrate the importance of mangroves in maintaining coastal OC storage, but also indicate that the impacts of vegetation change on OC storage may vary based on ecosystem conditions, organic-matter sources, and the relative spatiotemporal scales of mangrove vegetation change., (© 2019 by the Ecological Society of America.)

Global changes, such as increased temperatures and elevated CO2, are driving shifts in plant species distribution and dominance, like woody plant encroachment into grasslands. Local factors within these ecotones can influence the rate of regime shifts. Woody encroachment is occurring worldwide, though there has been limited research within coastal systems, where mangrove (woody shrub/tree) stands are expanding into salt marsh areas. Because coastal systems are exposed to various degrees of nutrient input, we investigated how nutrient enrichment may locally impact mangrove stand expansion and salt marsh displacement over time. We fertilized naturally co-occurring Avicennia germinans (black mangrove) and Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass) stands in Port Aransas, TX, an area experiencing mangrove encroachment within the Northern Gulf of Mexico mangrove-marsh ecotone. After four growing seasons (2010-2013) of continuous fertilization, Avicennia was more positively influenced by nutrient enrichment than Spartina. Most notably, fertilized plots had a higher density of taller (> 0.5 m) mangroves and mangrove maximum height was 46% taller than in control plots. Fertilization may promote an increase in mangrove stand expansion within the mangrove-marsh ecotone by shifting Avicennia height distribution. Avicennia individuals, which reach certain species-specific height thresholds, have reduced negative neighbor effects and have higher resilience to freezing temperatures, which may increase mangrove competitive advantage over marsh grass. Therefore, we propose that nutrient enrichment, which augments mangrove height, could act locally as a positive feedback to mangrove encroachment, by reducing mangrove growth suppression factors, thereby accelerating the rates of increased mangrove coverage and subsequent marsh displacement. Areas within the mangrove-marsh ecotone with high anthropogenic nutrient input may be at increased risk of a regime shift from grass to woody dominated ecosystems.

Introduction: Genetic studies of malocclusion etiology have identified 4 deleterious mutations in genes DUSP6,ARHGAP21, FGF23, and ADAMTS1 in familial Class III cases. Although these variants may have large impacts on Class III phenotypic expression, their low frequency (<1%) makes them unlikely to explain most malocclusions. Thus, much of the genetic variation underlying the dentofacial phenotypic variation associated with malocclusion remains unknown. In this study, we evaluated associations between common genetic variations in craniofacial candidate genes and 3-dimensional dentoalveolar phenotypes in patients with malocclusion., Methods: Pretreatment dental casts or cone-beam computed tomographic images from 300 healthy subjects were digitized with 48 landmarks. The 3-dimensional coordinate data were submitted to a geometric morphometric approach along with principal component analysis to generate continuous phenotypes including symmetric and asymmetric components of dentoalveolar shape variation, fluctuating asymmetry, and size. The subjects were genotyped for 222 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in 82 genes/loci, and phenotpye-genotype associations were tested via multivariate linear regression., Results: Principal component analysis of symmetric variation identified 4 components that explained 68% of the total variance and depicted anteroposterior, vertical, and transverse dentoalveolar discrepancies. Suggestive associations (P < 0.05) were identified with PITX2, SNAI3, 11q22.2-q22.3, 4p16.1, ISL1, and FGF8. Principal component analysis for asymmetric variations identified 4 components that explained 51% of the total variations and captured left-to-right discrepancies resulting in midline deviations, unilateral crossbites, and ectopic eruptions. Suggestive associations were found with TBX1AJUBA, SNAI3SATB2, TP63, and 1p22.1. Fluctuating asymmetry was associated with BMP3 and LATS1. Associations for SATB2 and BMP3 with asymmetric variations remained significant after the Bonferroni correction (P <0.00022). Suggestive associations were found for centroid size, a proxy for dentoalveolar size variation with 4p16.1 and SNAI1., Conclusions: Specific genetic pathways associated with 3-dimensional dentoalveolar phenotypic variation in malocclusions were identified., (Copyright © 2016 American Association of Orthodontists. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objective: More than 80% of autoimmune disease predominantly affects females, but the mechanism for this female bias is poorly understood. We suspected that an X chromosome dose effect accounts for this, and we undertook this study to test our hypothesis that trisomy X (47,XXX; occurring in ∼1 in 1,000 live female births) would be increased in patients with female-predominant diseases (systemic lupus erythematosus [SLE], primary Sjögren's syndrome [SS], primary biliary cirrhosis, and rheumatoid arthritis [RA]) compared to patients with diseases without female predominance (sarcoidosis) and compared to controls., Methods: All subjects in this study were female. We identified subjects with 47,XXX using aggregate data from single-nucleotide polymorphism arrays, and, when possible, we confirmed the presence of 47,XXX using fluorescence in situ hybridization or quantitative polymerase chain reaction., Results: We found 47,XXX in 7 of 2,826 SLE patients and in 3 of 1,033 SS patients, but in only 2 of 7,074 controls (odds ratio in the SLE and primary SS groups 8.78 [95% confidence interval 1.67-86.79], P = 0.003 and odds ratio 10.29 [95% confidence interval 1.18-123.47], P = 0.02, respectively). One in 404 women with SLE and 1 in 344 women with SS had 47,XXX. There was an excess of 47,XXX among SLE and SS patients., Conclusion: The estimated prevalence of SLE and SS in women with 47,XXX was ∼2.5 and ∼2.9 times higher, respectively, than that in women with 46,XX and ∼25 and ∼41 times higher, respectively, than that in men with 46,XY. No statistically significant increase of 47,XXX was observed in other female-biased diseases (primary biliary cirrhosis or RA), supporting the idea of multiple pathways to sex bias in autoimmunity., (© 2016, American College of Rheumatology.)

Hypnotizability influences the development of false memories. In Experiment 1, participants heard a positive or negative suggestion regarding hypnosis and then listened to 8 Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm lists in a hypnotic state. Neither hypnosis nor prehypnotic suggestion affected memory. Highly hypnotizable participants were more accurate in recall and recognition. In Experiment 2, suggestions were delivered in the form of feedback. Participants heard a positive or negative suggestion about their performance prior to either the encoding or retrieval of 8 DRM lists. Neither accurate nor false memories were affected by the suggestion. Highly hypnotizable individuals recognized fewer critical lures if they received a negative suggestion about their performance. These results highlight the unusual role of hypnotizability in the creation of false memories.

Hypnotizability is a multifaceted construct that may relate to multiple aspects of personality and beliefs. This study sought to address 4 known correlates of hypnotizability to aid in its understanding. Eighty undergraduates completed the Magical Ideation Scale (MIS), the Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ), the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale (ASGS), and the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) and then were administered the Creative Imagination Scale (CIS). All 5 scales were significantly correlated. Participants higher in hypnotizability scored higher on the CEQ and the MIS. The findings demonstrate the influence of fantasy proneness and magical thinking on hypnotizability and support the theory that hypnotizability is a complex interaction of multiple traits.