A new study shows that when people in wealthy English-speaking countries are asked what moral values they value most, their answers change depending on the time of year. The difference isn’t huge, or else people would have noticed it before, but it is big and has been surprisingly stable over many years. This may affect people’s decisions when it comes time to vote.

Drawing on the work of More’s contemporary Whittington, Robert Bolt called Sir Thomas More “A Man for All Seasons.” Bolt was talking about how More stayed true to his values even as the political climate changed around him. The implication was that this didn’t happen very often, but “seasons” was used as a metaphor, and no one thought that it might have something to do with the actual seasons of the year.

But researchers from the University of British Columbia checked and found that for many of us, the season does change what we think.

For decades, social scientists have asked people how important values like loyalty and kindness are to them in order to figure out how they act.

For his study, UBC doctoral student Ian Hohm used data from yourmorals.org to look at whether people’s views on these values change with the seasons. He discovered that they do, but in some strange ways.

Values that are important to traditional conservatism include purity, loyalty, and respect for authority. These values often go together and are called “binding values,” so it makes sense that they rise and fall together every year.

It’s strange that this trio isn’t most valued in the summer or winter, but in the spring and fall. It’s seen as less important in the summer and winter. The effect was much stronger than what was needed to pass statistical significance tests. It stayed strong even when older and wealthier people were taken into account because they were more likely to respond in the spring and summer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fairness and compassion, which liberals and progressives frequently emphasize, changed less over the course of the year. When they did, the pattern was less clearly tied to the seasons. So, in terms of relative power, they were more important in the summer and winter.

Holm said in a statement, “People’s support for moral values that help groups stick together and follow the rules is stronger in the spring and fall than it is in the summer and winter.” “Because morals are such an important part of how people decide what to do and how to judge others, we believe that this discovery could only be the beginning of many more effects that will happen in the future.”

In the past, this means that the fact that US elections had to happen at the beginning of November may have given conservatives a small boost. No one knows if American history would be very different if it were held in the summer or the winter. It’s also impossible for this poll to say if this advantage has been lost since some people who call themselves “conservatives” have shown open disrespect for science.

In places where the prime minister or president picks the election date, the results might be even more interesting to them. When the authors looked at other English-speaking countries, like Australia and Canada, they saw the same pattern. But in the UK, support for values that people have to follow dropped sharply in the summer and reached its highest point in the winter. But in all of these cases, the sample size was less than a tenth of what is available for the US. This means that these results should be taken with more care.

When there is a big difference between summer and winter, it makes sense that people’s values will change more with the seasons than when there aren’t many seasons. There was a lot more variation in Canada than in Australia. However, the authors didn’t look at the variation in the US by state to see if, say, Alaskan values vary more than Floridian values.

For this pattern to make more sense, winter and summer should be opposites instead of close matches. However, the mood of the seasons did give the authors a big clue. A follow-up study that used the same methods found that Americans are more stressed in the spring and fall. Professor Mark Schaller, the senior author, said, “This link suggests that people who are more anxious may look for comfort in the group norms and traditions that are upheld by binding values.” Schaller just put out a paper about how seasons affect other parts of our minds.

The information was gathered once a week for ten years, and it always showed the same pattern. This means that it probably wasn’t too skewed by events that happened during a certain season. But then again, anniversaries like September 11 might be a long-term factor that has nothing to do with the weather, and the authors think Christmas might have some effect as well.

They also say that these trends might not just have an effect on elections. Criminal convictions show a lack of respect for authority, and it should be looked into further to see if judges give harsher punishments during certain times of the year because of this. The authors use the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how morals affect how we handle crises. Knowing that loyalty and respect for authority are higher some days than others could change who public health campaigns are aimed at.

The study is written up in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Teens’ mental health problems have been linked to sexting in the past, but a new study calls this idea into question. It says that trying to stop teens from sexting might not help prevent mental health problems after all.

Most people who have been through the teen years remember how important and difficult they were. As a person hits puberty, their body changes from that of a child to that of an adult. This happens along with many other health and mental changes. During this time, our social relationships, especially those with our peers, tend to become more important to us. This can spark romantic and sexual interest.

The rise of technology has brought about more changes and pressures that teens have to deal with. Smartphones and other digital media are now popular places to meet new people and try new sexual experiences. This can lead to things like “sexting,” which is a general term for sending, receiving, and forwarding sexually explicit messages and pictures online. Since then, the number of teens who sext has gone up and down, but in the last few years, it has stayed the same.

There are some problems with sexting, even though it’s a normal part of modern life. People may share sexual images without permission or be forced to make them, and they may make sexual discrimination worse. On the other hand, some worry that sexting may be linked to more teens having mental health issues. But most of the research that has been done so far has been cross-sectional, which means it only shows what was going on at one point in time. They don’t take into account the fact that people who sext and people who don’t may already be different.

This is where a new study comes in. Norway researchers looked at long-term panel data to see if high scores on sexting are really linked to depression and behavior issues, and if so, how does poor mental health affect changes in sexting over time?

They got the information from MyLife, a long-term study that looks at the health and growth of Norwegian teens. The researchers studied a group of 3,000 teenagers (ages 15 to 19) who participated in at least one of three tests between 2019 and 2021. At each time point, the researchers used standard questionnaires to look at sexting, depression symptoms, and behavior.

Three questions based on the Pennsylvania Youth Risk Behavior Study were used to measure sexting. People were asked how often they shared or sent sexual photos or videos, and the answers ranged from “never” to “every day or almost every day.” A nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire that was tailored to teens was used to measure depression symptoms. The questions covered things like low mood, sleep problems, and lack of energy. Questions about stealing, bullying, and breaking things were used to measure behavior problems.

The study found that the percentage of teens who sext changed over time. At the first point in time, 30.5% of girls said they did it, 36.7% said they did it at the second, and 33.7% said they did it at the third. In contrast, 33.1% of boys said they sexted at the first point, 29.9% said they did it at the second, and 21.6% said they did it at the third. At the same time, it looked like girls had more signs of depression than boys did, and boys had more behavior problems than girls.

A random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) was then used on the results.

The authors of the paper say, “This method separates differences between individuals (between-person effects) from the effects of changes around the individual’s average level (within-person effects).”.

In practice, this means that the team could look into whether changes in one variable can predict changes in other variables over time in the same person. The results showed that there were no significant effects on depression symptoms in each person. This was true for both boys and girls.

The team writes, “High sexting scores compared to a person’s average at one time point don’t seem to be linked to depression symptoms being higher than the person’s average at the next time point.”

An interesting finding was that girls who had behavior problems at one point were also more likely to sext later on. This suggests that behavior problems may cause more sexting than the other way around. It was found that “there were no significant associations between conduct problems and sexting for boys.”

“The analyses give us new information that can help us figure out how sexting and mental health affect teens in a complicated way.” “We found no evidence to support sexting as a cause of mental health getting worse over time,” the team said.

The study does have some flaws, though. First, the questionnaires didn’t tell the difference between consenting and non-consensual sexting. Non-consensual sexting could have different effects on mental health than consenting sexting. Another problem was that teens couldn’t take part until their parents gave their permission. Because of how sensitive the survey was, this may have caused bias in the answers.

The results are still interesting, though.

The team said, “This longitudinal study adds to previous cross-sectional research on sexting among teens by showing that these sexual behaviors are not indicative of the onset of depressive symptoms or behavior issues.” “Our data show that teens who sext more often have worse mental health, but the results do not show that sexting causes more depression and behavior problems over time.”

“One important thing our results show is that efforts to stop teens from sexting probably won’t help keep them from getting mental health problems.”

They say that instead of focusing on programs that try to stop teens from sexting, more should be done to teach them about how important it is to get sexual consent and respect someone’s privacy when they do this.

You can read the paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

 

Japan had 1,035 rules about the use of floppy disks, which are very small storage devices that can only hold a few megabytes of data at most. They are no longer used by the Japanese government; they are now only used in one rule, which is about recycling cars.

The Digital Minister, Taro Kono, is in charge of this project. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that the use of paper forms and old technology was slowing down the rollout of digital identification and contact-tracing apps. Set up in 2021, the Digital Agency’s job is to get old technology like fax machines and floppy disks out of government use.

In a statement released Wednesday, Kono told Reuters, “We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!”

Sony, the last company to make floppy disks, stopped making them in 2011. Japan should understand how important it is to use this technology, but the country is not the only one that does this. In their systems, many public groups, governments, universities, and scientific experiments still use old technology, even if the rest of the world has moved on.

A lot of universities have stories about costly tests being run on OSs that haven’t been updated in ten years. But let’s stick to floppy disks for now. There are two big examples outside of Japan. The Boeing 747-400 fleet of British Airways used floppy disks for its avionics software until they were taken out of service in 2020. Not only that, but the US military stopped controlling its nuclear weapons with floppy disks in 2019.

The device is thought to keep selling for a few more years, even though it’s been left behind almost everywhere. And even after a long time, it will still stand for the save button. That makes it a “skeuomorph” in the virtual world, which means it has the look of a real object that is no longer being used.