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This article aims to make an original contribution to the discussion of the dynamics of social status expression in Finland. Drawing upon fieldwork in Oulu and Kokkola, it will examine how a sample of Finnish people express and play for social status through the objects with which they decorate their homes. It suggests that Finnish social stratification may be undergoing a shift away from correlation with formal education towards identification with broader consumption patterns, especially amongst the young. However, it will also highlight social status-based differences in terms of both forms of expression and touch on how these reflect the evolution of Finnish social stratification and culture more broadly. Keywords: Finland, social status, home, decoration

A number of very eminent and highly creative individuals are often claimed to have been born prematurely, and the idea that widely recognised scientific geniuses such as Newton, Kepler, and Darwin were preterm has become a cultural meme through the popular press, and through popular and academic science books. This potentially raises very important questions, related to the nature and origin of creativity and innovation, as it has been suggested that prematurity and genius may be linked. Here, we review suggested links between prematurity and genius, in terms of psychological traits associated with genius, and compare the percentage of top geniuses in Murray’s Human Accomplishment who are claimed to have been born prematurely to that of Western populations in general. Although a significant number of those in Murray’s sample have been asserted to be preterm, we found that none of them could be said with certainty to have been so, refuting the hypothesis that there is a clear connection between prematurity and scientific genius.

Introduction Gender dysphoria (GD) is associated with several psychiatric conditions, but the causal links are not known. We note that some of these conditions are associated with physiological masculinisation. Methods Here, we explore this association through a series of systematic reviews, using Google Scholar, on original studies that test the relationship between GD and at least one correlate of androgens, namely autism spectrum disorder, left-handedness, 2D:4D ratio, being male and male heterosexuality. Results Individuals with GD tend to exhibit scores that reflect heightened levels of androgens and masculinity compared with non-GD individuals. We further show that these same androgen indices are also associated with other identity disorders (or dysphoriae). Conclusions Autism is associated with masculinisation, and we argue that GD may reflect autism spectrum disorder traits that indirectly lead to anxiety and to one questioning one’s sense of self. We note that this is consistent with Blanchard’s transsexualism typology, which successfully integrates a wide range of empirical findings.

Performances on tests of creativity have been found to be in decline in the USA. Here, we explore scores on divergent thinking tests in private schools in Khartoum State in Sudan by comparing a 2005 and a 2018 administration of the Torrance Standardized Circles test to 8- to 12-year-olds of both sexes. We find a decline across the period in all three dimensions of the test (Fluency, Flexibility and Originality), as well as in the overall index of divergent thinking. In line with much previous research, females consistently outperform males. Examining previous studies that report Negative Flynn Effects on IQ in Arab countries, we conclude that our results most likely reflect highly localized and exclusively environmental causes, and caution against assuming that the same processes that underlie Negative Flynn Effects in the West, whether on IQ or any trait correlated with it, also underlie it in the Arab World.

Schizophrenia is correlated with religious delusions but, heretofore, the relationship between schizophrenia prevalence and religiosity has not been explored at the national level. Examining this relationship, we find that national level schizophrenia prevalence is correlated with national level religiosity and strongly negatively correlated with national level atheism across 125 countries. When controlling for cognitive performance and economic development in multiple regression analyses, the proportion of the variance explained was 2.9% (p p

Many groups differ in their mean intelligence score. Spearman’s hypothesis states that the differences are a function of cognitive complexity. There tend to be large differences on subtests of high cognitive complexity and small differences on subtests of low cognitive complexity. Spearman’s hypothesis has been supported by a large number of studies. Can Spearman’s hypothesis be generalized to regions of a country, where these regions differ in mean intelligence? We utilized data from 86 different cognitive tests from all 47 Japanese prefectures and correlated the g loadings of 86 subtests with standardized differences on the same subtests. Spearman’s hypothesis was clearly supported: the biggest differences between the regions were on the tests that were of the greatest complexity, meaning that Spearman’s hypothesis may be generalizable from groups to regions. In Japan, g loadings offer a better explanation of group differences in intelligence than cultural differences. Future research should explore whether Spearman’s hypothesis is also supported for differences between regions of other countries.

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between religiousness and IQ. It is in the region of − 0.2, according to meta-analyses. The reasons for this relationship are, however, unknown. It has been suggested that higher intelligence leads to greater attraction to science, or that it helps to override evolved cognitive dispositions such as for religiousness. Either way, such explanations assume that the religion–IQ nexus is on general intelligence (g), rather than some subset of specialized cognitive abilities. In other words, they assume it is a Jensen effect. Two large datasets comparing groups with different levels of religiousness show that their IQ differences are not on g and must, therefore, be attributed to specialized abilities. An analysis of the specialized abilities on which the religious and non-religious groups differ reveals no clear pattern. We cautiously suggest that this may be explicable in terms of autism spectrum disorder traits among people with high IQ scores, because such traits are negatively associated with religiousness.

Cultural Intelligence (CI) refers to the motivation and ability to understand and deal with cultural differences. As such, it is assumed to play a role in the effectiveness of social contact and communication between people from different cultures. Given its relevance to international relations, it is imperative to test which individual and group factors are associated with CI. Therefore, in the present study we examine cross-cultural and gender differences in CI. In one of their classes at their university, students ( N = 829) from Egypt and Saudi Arabia completed a multidimensional measure of CI. The results showed an interesting pattern of interactions between country and gender, which indicated that Egyptian men did not significantly differ from co-national women, but Saudi men scored significantly lower than women. We suggest that the different patterns of results in the two countries may partly arise from different levels of exposure to different cultures and partly from subtle differences in the constitution of the samples. Knowledge of individual and group differences in cultural intelligence may potentially contribute to explaining differential levels of success in individuals or countries in dealing with cultural differences.

Meta-analyses have found a negative relationship between religiousness and IQ of around r = −0.2, including in samples of elderly Westerners. However, there have been few attempts to directly test the existence of the religion-IQ nexus in non-Western societies. We administered a cognitive test to a representative sample of elderly South Koreans who were also surveyed about their religion and tested whether elderly nonreligious people had higher mean IQ scores than elderly religious people. Using a broad cognitive test battery, we computed mean IQ scores of n = 589 non-religious, n = 494 Protestants, n = 520 Catholics, n = 347 Buddhists, and n = 17 Confucianists. Elderly South Koreans who claimed to have ‘no religion’ had lower mean IQs than religious Koreans. This finding is not consistent with previous findings from meta-analyses. We argue that it is explicable in terms of differences in how the concept of religion is understood when comparing Western and Northeast Asian societies. Many of the ‘non-religious’ category would be adherents to Korean folk religion, something expected to be associated with lower mean IQ.

The relationship between the general factor of intelligence (g) and handedness is investigated using a combined sample of 23511 respondents from three large databases: the NLSY’79 (US), NLSY’97 (US) and NCDS (UK). Dextrals – those who use their right hands were found to be 1.22 IQ points higher than sinistrals (left handers) after controlling for sex and age and correcting for sources of measurement error. To see if the association between IQ and handedness was strongest on the abilities that were the best measures of g, the method of correlated vectors was used to test for moderation. Across the three studies, g was found to very weakly negatively moderate the association between ability measure and handedness (ρ = −.023, K = 3, N = 23511), however in the NLSY’79, the coding speed subtest was an outlier in terms of the strength of its association with handedness. Its removal yielded indications of positive moderation in this dataset, which when aggregated boosted the overall vector correlation value to .539 (K = 3, N = 23511), suggesting that g might be an important moderator of this relationship. Secondary analysis of secular trend data on the changing percentage of sinistrals in Western populations indicates that overall, sinistrality has increased, entailing a g decline of .106 points over 150 years (.006 points per decade). The secular increase in sinistrality is consistent with other data indicating long-term declines in developmental stability and may stem from some combination of increasing mutation load and environmental stress in Western populations.

This article aims to make an original contribution to the discussion of the dynamics of social class in Finland. Drawing upon fi eldwork in Oulu, Kokkola, and Helsinki, it argues that, although such issues as "work" and "language" remain salient to Finnish emic social strati- fi cation, class discourse is increasingly refl ecting a consumerist environment in which social boundaries are drawn and recognized through various forms of consumption. The article argues that Finnish class discourse parallels a shift in many Western European countries whereby pro- duction becomes less signifi cant to identity— and creating the social "other"—than consump- tion. Through examination of a number of social stereotypes representing latent class boundar- ies this paper looks at the diverse ways in which, as in other Western cultures, consumption practices serve to organize Finnish social stratifi cation. The specifi c ways in which Finnish developments differ from cultures that have previously been analyzed in depth (such as those of Britain and the USA) are also examined and concerted future research into Finnish latent class terms is recommended.

Revolutionary advances of the natural sciences will transform our understanding of the human past. This case study supports that thesis by connecting new data arising from the last decade's scientific work in palaeoclimatology with the history of the Carolingian empire. For medievalists, it may open the door to a potent new set of insights into the total past of European civilization. For climate scientists, this study clarifies an opportunity to observe the impact on human society of scientifically established proxy measures of climatic anomalies and shows that the human evidence for the first millennium of our era is much richer than scientists generally assume. Food production was the foundation of the medieval economy, the generation and distribution of wealth. In the early-medieval world of limited storage and interregional transport, severe climatic anomalies, among other factors, could disrupt food production and supply. Particularly if they caused famines, such disruptions have long attracted historians concerned with demography (mortal ity), politics (rebellions), and, most recently, culture or mentality.1 Direct cor relation between severe climatic anomalies and historical events is often obvious, even if the details prove to be complex. For instance, in the reign of Pippin III, the severe winter of 763-64 provoked famine, and that surely explains the sus pension of the major effort by the king to conquer Aquitaine the following sum mer.2 This paper explores palaeoclimate data recovered from the Greenland Ice