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David Chester

@davidchester.bsky.social
1.6K followers 428 following 717 posts

Associate Prof at VCU. Experimental psychologist. Aggression scientist. Dad. davidchester.weebly.com

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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
A nice replication of the rapid decay of sadistic pleasure and an extension by showing that external (i.e., monetary) rewards for aggression do nothing to enhance such sadistic pleasure, supporting it as a truly intrinsically motivated phenomenon. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
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Reposted by David Chester
Benjamin Douglas @bendouglas.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Not to self-promote but my lab has been developing a very basic tool to track mouse movements in surveys. Our paper is under review, but I’d be happy to share the tool with you (or anyone else who is interested)
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Reposted by David Chester
Whitney Ringwald @whitneyringwald.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I’m accepting applications for PhD students to join my lab in Fall 2027! Our work focuses on psychopathology, personality, classification and assessment, and using AI with intensive longitudinal methods to better understand mental health. See the lab site for more info: ringwaldlab.psych.umn.edu
ringwaldlab.psych.umn.edu
Welcome! | Ringwald Lab
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Laypeople don't tend to think 'dark' is an appropriate term for psychologists to use to refer to antagonistic traits. psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Check out our new study in which we observed that sadism is linked to relatively rapid habituation of the pleasure of watching others' suffering (i.e., schadenfreude). w/ Emily Pappalardo and led by @dmparton.bsky.social! osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Finding dark matter is gonna take a new tool. Fields that focus considerably on their methodology get to ask and answer more important questions than those that don't. www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
scientificamerican.com
What if we never find dark matter?
Could the hunt for the universe’s missing matter be the biggest wild goose chase in scientific history?
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Question from my personality class this morning: What trait or combination of traits best reflects a tendency towards 'being chaotic'?
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
We added an oral exam to our doctoral prelims and it wasn't just the right move pedagogically, it also turned into an extremely enjoyable chance to nerd out with colleagues and doctoral students. Should've done it years ago. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
chronicle.com
The Return of the Oral Exam
The defense against AI cheating is catching on as a better way to teach.
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Reposted by David Chester
Matt Wall @mattwall.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
First report on fMRI data from the absolute monster 11.7T Iseult MRI scanner at the NeuroSpin centre in France. Cool stuff. direct.mit.edu/imag/article...
direct.mit.edu
Human fMRI at 11.7T: Assessing Feasibility, Stability, and Reliability on the Iseult Scanner
Abstract. Ultra-high-field MRI promises major gains in BOLD sensitivity but introduces severe challenges such as RF field inhomogeneity, B0 field inhomogeneity, motion and vibration-induced field vari...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Whoa, interesting twist on the ol' growth mindset. Folks with more of a growth mindset evaluated others' repeated failures more negatively than folks with a more fixed mindset. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
"people who are ghosted underestimate how bad their conversation partners feel about ghosting them" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Be still my methodological heart, this study validated a set of experimental manipulations of romantic closeness motivation by showing they have a larger effect on the target construct and smaller effects on secondary constructs (i.e., the nomological shockwave)! tinyurl.com/4wujfcpa
tinyurl.com
Bridging Hearts: Developing and Validating... : Personal Relationships
This study aimed to validate experimental manipulations to increase state closeness motivation toward the romantic partner which are implemented in...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Today I learned that there is a Chimpanzee Triarchic (CHMP-Tri) psychopathy scale that's completed by staff informants who work with the chimpanzees. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Our family donated to a humane society in Appalachia in her name. Bless you Dolly.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
An interesting cross-cultural analysis of the prevalence and motivations underlying aggression between wives in polygynous marriages. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
The battle of the brides: Co-wife competition and aggression across 19 cultures
The dominant account of women's intrasexual competition holds that women prefer indirect over direct aggression, a prediction supported by experimenta…
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
*psst* .... hey .... there's no such thing as the "brain's fear network"
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
August NOFOs from NSF contain, essentially, no funding for social sciences. www.nsf.gov/news/foundat...
nsf.gov
August 2026 Notices of Funding Opportunity for Foundational Research
Learn about new NSF funding opportunities prioritizing foundational research across the sciences and engineering.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
AggreScale, part of the ManyScale project of @datingdecisions.bsky.social, is now live! It's the place to go for aggression scales and we hope to update it and grow it in the days to come. Huge thanks to Emily Pappalardo and James Marchment! www.manyscale.org/aggression/
manyscale.org
AggreScale
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Reposted by David Chester
ProPublica @propublica.org · 17/08/2026
The same climate experts whose model overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage have repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground. ➡️ Read our full story w/ @drilledmedia.bsky.social: propub.li/4gdTCBc
Two line charts are depicted. At the top, the line chart is labeled "Carbon Capture Capacity." The y-axis is "megatons" and the x-axis is years (2010-2040). More than a dozen blue lines show a steady increase from the left edge of the chart to the right edge of the chart. Some of the blue lines exceed 4,000 megatons between years 2030 and 2040. The blue lines are labeled "Projections". A maroon line is at around 0 megatons from 2010 to 2025. The maroon line is labeled "Actual carbon storage". 

The second chart is labeled "Solar Power". The y-axis is "terawatt-hour" and the x-axis is years (2010-2040). Dozens of blue lines increase from around 0 on the left side of the chart, showing moderate growth from 2010 to 2040. The blue lines are labeled "Projections". A maroon line starts at 0 in 2010 and rises sharply to over 2,000 in 2024. The maroon line is obviously increasing much faster than the blue lines. The maroon line is labeled "Actual solar electricity production."
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Tickling is common and experienced as largely pleasant across cultures and has clear anatomical hotspots (that are ticklish because they are rarely touched). www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The punk kid in me is happy as hell about this interview I got to do on 'The Science Of Crowd Killing' with CREEM rock mag. www.creem.com/archive/arti...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Antagonistic people tend to use AI to cheat more than those with lower amounts of antagonistic traits. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
A really nice history of how and why the normal distribution (and later, least squares estimation) rose to prominence in the sciences, and how its assumptions present an overly smooth, unimodal, and symmetrical view of human data. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Do non-human animals use names for each other? It's not clear unless we're talking dolphins, who pretty clearly use names. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
cell.com
Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria
In recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this w...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Expiscate (verb) --- to find out by careful investigation. From ex- (out) + piscari (to fish).
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
TIL that the term 'bellwether' originates from the bell-wearing castrated male sheep (i.e., wethers) that led the flock and let shepherds know where it was and was going.
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Reposted by David Chester
rom comrade @savasavasava.myatproto.social · 18/07/2026
seeing academics and colleagues I respect and/or know openly and happily talk about their chatgpt and claude use feels so awful and disheartening. I’m not going to do the calling out thing because what’s the fucking point
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
A nice set of R functions that determine planned sample size for two-group and paired-sample designs of multi-trial tasks. Nicely incorporates power, precision, and reliability. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Helping others for selfish reasons is judged more harshly than not helping at all. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Replication and extension of Carlson and Zaki (2018): Do lay theories of altruism apply equally to all actors?
Observers rely on perceived motives when evaluating prosocial behavior. Carlson and Zaki (2018) demonstrate that helping typically earns actors altrui…
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Meta-analytic latent correlations between psychopathy and sadism: ρ = 0.94-0.98. assets.cureus.com/uploads/revi...
static.klipy.com
Spiderman Twinsies Pointing Meme
ALT: Spiderman Twinsies Pointing Meme
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
"We found remarkable stability of personality variance for all traits, indicating that, at the population level, people neither get more different nor more alike across the lifespan." Except that neuroticism gets more variable in teens and ext gets less variable as adults age. osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
People who used GLP-1 receptor agonist medications, compared to diet + exercise, to lose weight were judged more negatively by others. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
This prediction misses the draw of the in-class experience. In-person lectures and activities are more engaging and students want those experiences. I only teach in-person and I fill all my 230 seats without issue even though there is an online asynch alternative and one of my classes is at 9:30am.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Interesting approach to account for item content overlap between predictors and outcomes. These authors removed individual items from trait scores (i.e., from the predictors) that had high correlations with the outcome, and then re-ran the correlations. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
The dispositional basis of deviance: A multivariate approach to crime and other deviant acts - Isabel Thielmann, Yngwie Asbjørn Nielsen, Jean-Louis van Gelder, 2026
Why some people engage in criminal and other forms of deviant behavior, whereas others do not, has long been a question of interest in the social and behavioral...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Just like our lab has found with aggression, situational ambiguity is the best experimental setting to capture individual differences in affective reactivity. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
010
David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Cross-sectional research on the Big Five "can likely use short measures without consequence, whereas longitudinal studies likely need longer measures to reliably detect effects." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Poor sleep predicts greater antagonism on the following day. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
We should leave hypothetical vignettes out of antagonism research. Psychopathic folks were less willing to admit when they were wrong in a hypothetical situation but the effect disappeared in daily reports of whether they actually admitted when they were wrong. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
The European Journal of Personality may be my new favorite journal to read. Every issue is, without fail, chock full of some of the most interesting papers I've read in a while.
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Firearm restrictions reduce violent crime in the localities in which they are enacted, a beneficial effect that can also trickle into neighboring countries. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Reposted by David Chester
Mikey Pasek @mikeypasek.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Do you conduct social/political psych research with non-probablity online samples (e.g., prolific, connect)? This new paper by Michael Stagnaro and colleagues is a must read! Will be adding this to my grad methods syllabus. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Representativeness and response validity across nine opt-in online samples - Nature Human Behaviour
Stagnaro et al. compare nine opt-in participant samples on measures of response validity, representativeness and professionalism. They find substantial variation across samples and offer guidance for ...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
The most often used measure of aggressive personality, the Buss-Perry Aggression Q, is based on items originally written so long ago that when I checked out the journal issue from the library, it still has a bookmark in it from the National Tuberculosis Association. Time for an update?
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
A mixed-methods approach to differentiating anger and rage, which are more alike than different. Rage seems to be a sub-type of anger, which is more characterized by "tunnel vision, loss of control, and aggression." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
There's no meaningful evidence that gender-affirming testosterone therapy increases anger or aggression. Despite this, unsubstantiated warnings that such therapy may elicit “increased feelings of anger or aggression” often remain in healthcare materials. www.jahonline.org/article/S105...
jahonline.org
Testosterone Therapy and Anger? Further Evidence Against an Assumed Correlation
Associations between the presence of testosterone and behavior change have existed in the scientific literature since at least the 1940s when female rats given exogenous testosterone were found to exh...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
A topic I've really never thought deeply about until this cool paper came along, how we develop a vocal identity of the self. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Cyberaggression serves, in part, to facilitate optimal distinctiveness. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
pnas.org
Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media | PNAS
Most people believe that social media discourse is negative and divisive. Here we show how this negativity can evolve even when users are not motiv...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Showing remarkable restraint, Sternberg managed to only cite himself 22 times in this new paper. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
110
David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Symbols of the U.S. flag have become increasingly seen as indicators of support for 47. guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1...
guilfordjournals.com
Who “Owns” the Stars and Stripes and Why Does It Matter? Effects of the American Flag on Impressions of Prejudice, Intolerance, and Aggressiveness | Social Cognition
Prior work finds that symbol-person pairings influence impressions of individuals. We hypothesized that flying the American flag could signal conservativism and Trump support, consequently affecting i...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
We want to be friends with people we admire, but in this study of 10-14 year-olds, "few (3.1–13.4%) desired friends became reciprocated friends" over the course of a school year. :( journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
journals.sagepub.com
The Friends They Have and the Friends They Want: Why Friendship Aspirations Usually Fail - Lucinda Sherrod, Molly Selover, Gilly Kahn, Goda Kaniušonytė, Brett Laursen, 2026
Desired friends represent aspirational relationships. But are they realistic? Two longitudinal studies were conducted, each with two waves of data within a sing...
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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
I love a good construct-mapping paper, in this case the construct of something being 'vintage', which reflects "three dimensions: moderate age, iconicity, and scarcity." academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...
academic.oup.com
Defining and Understanding Vintage
Abstract. Trendsetters and cutting-edge brands constantly seek new styles and fresh designs that set them apart from previous trends. However, in recent de
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