Apparently, not all of us can afford to follow our own inclinations.Early exposure to parental features shapes later sexual preferences in fish, birds, and mammals. Here I report that human males’ preferences for a conspicuous trait, colourful eyes, are affected by the eye colour of mothers. Female faces with light (blue or green) eyes were liked better by men whose mother had light eyes; the effect broke down in those who had felt rejected by her as children. These results, garnered on over one thousand men, complete those of a symmetrical study on one thousand women, painting a fuller picture of human sexual imprinting. Both men and women appear to have imprinted on their opposite-sex parents unless these were perceived as cold and unjustly punitive. Birds require strong attachment to sexually imprint—a constraint in place to reduce the perils of acquiring the wrong sort of information. Parents who form no bond with their offspring may fail to be recognised as appropriate parental imprinting objects. Consistent with human females being, as in most of the animal kingdom, the choosier sex, imprinted preferences were displayed by both sexes but translated into real-life partner choices solely in women— There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.1–G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant, 19012. Across a wide range of species, young animals form a template of what their future sexual partners ought to look like by “imprinting on” their father, their mother, or a random individual of their parents’ generation; or more precisely, on some trait carried by them. Such a trait turns into a signal that, at some future time, will indicate which potential mates are better than others. For example, females imprint on the odour and colour of their father in sticklebacks3; on those of their mother in cichlids4; and on the foreleg colour of the first adult male that, prematurely, courts them in wolf spiders5. Thus, all three imprinting modes are observed in nature. Why a particular one gets an edge over the others is an interesting point, that like many other interesting yet complex or counterintuitive points can be understood with the help of mathematical models6.The preference for certain mates over others can be learned early in life9 are built on the assumption that only females imprint. As they provide much greater parental investment than males do, females have evolved to be particularly selective when it comes to picking potential mates11. Rather than just waiting about, members of the nonchoosy sex will court the choosers and compete among themselves to be chosen. Models show that, on these grounds, the best strategy for females is that of imprinting on their fathers . Fathers have proven to be capable of surviving to reproductive age and be sexually successful—that is, they have won the competition with other males. By imprinting on a paternal feature, thus, daughters are likelier to end up picking a mate whose offspring will survive and be sexually successfully, too.For the excellent reason that females are normally the choosy sex, all such models9. As to female spiders, they may have no other option than imprinting on a chivalrous mature male (not right after hatching but as “teenagers”5) since they receive no care whatsoever from parents; the same goes for fruit flies12.This argument contrasts fathers with both mothers and random individuals. The latter have only the distinction of having survived to adulthood to show for themselves. Mothers have also successfully reproduced, true, but unlike fathers they have not triumphed in a peer competition . Females who use mothers or others as models for a partner, thus, are less likely to end up with a successful mate than are females who use fathers. Naturally, fathers are not always around, which goes a long way to explain why some species do imprint on mothers. Maternal imprinting might also be favoured in monogamous mating systems with a great deal of extrapair paternity—one reason being that daughters would often be imprinting on a social father who is not their biological father, and possibly has not reproduced at all13). This time around, it is mothers who have emerged from the struggle with other females to be chosen by a male. Yet the notion that sexes are either entirely choosy or entirely competitive has been challenged even in species with uniparental care (reviewed in14), and surely falls short of describing our own mating system. In humans, females are arguably the choosy sex (e.g.15) but also engage in considerable courting and competing, and males court and compete a great deal but do some rejecting too (e.g.16).When males are themselves the choosy sex, as in numerous species of fish, the imprint-on-the-winner logic can be transferred to them: sons ought to imprint on mothers (see17). However, this association could arise from having inherited the preferences of one’s same-sex parent18 just as well as from sexual imprinting on one’s opposite-sex parent. By marrying a black man, the daughter of a black father and a white mother may be repeating her mother’s choice because she has inherited her mother’s preferences for black men, not because she has imprinted on her black father. This objection also applies to the findings that women whose fathers have a hairy chest tend to have partners with a hairy chest, too19, and that the eye colours of partners and opposite-sex parents are more similar than expected by chance20. Two studies22 reported above-chance facial resemblances between people’s partner and opposite-sex parent, especially for individuals who had enjoyed a good relationship with that parent as children. Yet both studies asked neutral judges to rate the resemblance of four possible spouses of a person to that person’s parent, so the particular set of three nonspouses that happened to accompany the actual spouse would weigh heavily on the outcome. These results, in fact, have not been replicated24.In fact, some studies suggest that humans of both sexes tend to be paired with people who resemble their opposite-sex parent. Unfortunately, most such evidence is either open to alternative explanations or counterbalanced by failures to replicate. For example, about 60% of children of ethnically different parents marry, and re-marry, into their opposite-sex parent’s ethnic group  is not a false positive, simpler explanations than sexual imprinting are available, because neither self-resemblance nor mother-resemblance were either tested or controlled for. Thus, the women may have just preferred self-resemblant faces, with an effect of paternal relationship surfacing because fathers have a better rapport with children who resemble them more30—which would produce an apparent preference for good fathers’ faces. This account would predict not only that father-  resemblant male faces are liked better than other male faces, but that father-  resemblant female faces are liked even better relative to other female faces31; a test that cannot be done on these data, because participants only saw male faces. Alternatively, the effect could stem from transference—the automatic inclination to evaluate a stranger who resembles an important person in one’s life as as likeable or unlikeable as that person33. Men who resemble one’s father would be liked better than men who do not, but only if the daughter had had a good relationship with her father in the first place. Unlike sexual imprinting, transference may predict that male faces who resemble one’s likeable mother would be liked better too—again, a check that one cannot perform here, because resemblance to mothers was not measured.As to preferences for faces that resemble one’s parents in the context of mate choice, the literature only offers three studies. In a sample of 49 women, those whose self-assessed childhood relationship with their father was above the median preferred men’s faces that resembled him—in the proportion of certain features, such as nose height relative to face width, but not others, such as nose width relative to face width34, 24 men from an Indonesian village appeared to like a female face resembling their own mother less (rather than more) than other men did. In the second35, 96 participants failed to show a preference for faces of potential partners that had been manipulated to resemble either the participants themselves, their mother, or their father, relative to faces manipulated to resemble a stranger. Despite not being above chance, however, the preference for faces that resembled the opposite-sex parent was larger in participants who had experienced less rejection  from that parent during childhood.The remaining two studies both relied on facial images manipulated to resemble the participant or parent(s) but reached very different conclusions. In the first20 found correlations in eye colour between participants’ partners and opposite-sex parents . Yet eye colour is also a proxy for ethnicity and ancestry—both major drivers37 of positive assortative mating, that is, the tendency to choose mates similar to oneself. Thus, the mere inclination to marry into the ethnic group of one’s opposite-sex parent17—whether due to sexual imprinting or inherited preferences or cultural customs—would be enough to create such correlations even if nobody imprinted on eye colour or even cared about it. For example, if the daughters of black fathers and white mothers tended ever so slightly to marry black men, both father-partner and self-partner  similarities in eye colour would arise as indirect and meaningless consequences.Altogether, then, the evidence in favour of human sexual imprinting is inconclusive. One reason is likely to be the reliance on small samples—an obligate choice in studies where photographs of each participant and parent require to be measured or manipulated. Internet surveys permit larger samples, but can produce confounded data if information that may turn out to be relevant is not collected. As a case in point, one such survey run on an English-speaking sample of 394 men and 303 women of undetermined ethnic backgrounds38, would be ideal for both males and females to imprint on. We39 recently investigated eye colour preferences and choices on a sample of over one thousand women of the same ethnicity. Daughters of fathers with light (blue or green) eyes showed a stronger preference for light-eyed men than daughters of fathers with dark (brown or dark brown) eyes did. The effect was there in the absence of assortative mating for eye colour, hence it was not a byproduct of it; it was specific to fathers, mothers’ eye colour being irrelevant, hence it did not arise from mere familiarity; it was modulated by the quality of the early relationship between father and daughter, hence it was very unlikely to simply reflect inherited maternal preferences; it extended to both long- and short-term potential partners and to actual, real-life partners too, hence it was robust and ecologically relevant. After examining the tenability of alternative explanations, we concluded that these findings provide compelling evidence for paternal imprinting in human females.Still, eye colour is a feature that, being exceptionally salient and—unlike facial hair—not appreciably sex-linkedHere I report a perfectly symmetrical study, carried out with similar materials and the same procedure on a sample of over one thousand men. This study’s results, combined with those garnered on women and with a reassessment of earlier evidence, paint a fuller picture of sexual imprinting in humans.The study was conducted online. Participants were recruited mostly via advertisments posted on Italian universities’ online social networks and other social media. Most of the links redirected men who reported being homosexual, or bisexual but with a preference for male partners, to a separate study. Participants who failed to disclose their sexual orientation were excluded from the dataset. The final sample was composed of 1440 men . Of these, 734 reported having a partner. The experimental protocol was approved by the Psychological Research Ethics Committee of the University of Padova and data were collected in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was obtained from all participants.39 in their study on women, except that the stimuli were 10 colour photographs of attractive young women’s, rather than men’s, faces. Photographs were digitally modified in PortraitPro, creating four versions of each face which differed only in eye colour. As in39, these were always shown in pairs ”, “green”, “grey”, blue”, and “other” (with the option to specify). Participants also reported how much they had felt rejected by each parent during childhood via three representative items of the short form of the EMBU Rejection Scale39. For correlational analyses, participants’ eye colours were coded from light to dark: 1 = blue, 2 = green, 3 = very light brown, 4 = brown, 5 = dark brown. For analyses on preferences for virtual partners with light (blue or green) vs dark (brown or dark brown) eyes, participants’ blue and green eyes were coded as “light” whilst brown and dark brown eyes were coded as “dark”.All data coding and selection choices were identical to those made by Bressan and DamianAnalyses involving parents and children excluded participants who reported having cohabited with the relevant parent for 1 year or less (on the grounds that they would have had little or no opportunity to imprint on the parent) and participants who did not provide cohabitation information. This led to exclusion of 28 men for analyses involving mothers and 21 for those involving fathers. However, the pattern of results was the same with and without these exclusions. Of the 1440 non-homosexual men that completed the study, 46 (3%) reported being bisexual and 25 (1.7%) were either not Italian or raised but not born in Italy. The pattern of results remained the same if the data of the former or latter participants were discarded from the analyses. Only results directly relevant to the topic of sexual imprinting are reported; the complete result set of the analyses described in this article can be found in the Supplementary Material (see Data Availability section).Men’s preference for light-eyed women was computed as the number of choices of light-eyed faces relative to the total number of choices. This index could range from 0 (light-eyed face is never chosen) to 1 (light-eyed face is chosen every time).F = 22.027, p < 0.0001; being unrelated to the issue of sexual imprinting, this large effect will be explored in the future and is not further discussed here. A repeated-measures ANOVA was carried out on these preferences, with a within-subject factor of relationship context  and between-subject factors of own and maternal eye colour . The preference for light eyes was stronger in men who had light eyes themselves, F = 4.211, p = 0.040, suggesting that men sexually imprint on their mothers. There was no evidence that this effect depended on whether women were regarded as partners for a one-night stand or a lasting relationship . Replacing maternal with paternal eye colour showed that the light eyes of fathers played no significant role in affecting men’s preferences—either on their own or in any interactions, all Fs < 1. These results mirror those found in women: light-eyed male faces looked more attractive to women whose father had light eyes, in both a short- and a long-term context39. This symmetry between the sexes also turned up in two separate multiple regressions on men and women’s overall preference for light eyes—with own, maternal, and paternal eye colour  as independent variables. In both sexes, the opposite-sex parent’s eye colour significantly predicted the preference for light eyes  whereas the same-sex parent’s eye color did not .More to the current point, the preference for light eyes was stronger in men whose mother had light eyes, 39. Here the very same analysis was run on men; this was identical to the repeated-measures ANOVA described above except that it was carried out only on the men in the bottom and top tertiles of maternal rejection, so as to include an additional between-subjects factor of maternal rejection .In women, the impact of paternal light eyes depended on how much daughters had felt rejected by their father during childhood, with no significant effect found in participants in the highest tertile of paternal rejectionF < 1, but mother’s eye colour did, F = 5.176, p = 0.023. Figure F < 1, whilst the light eyes of nonrejecting mothers did, F = 11.555, p = 0.001. This mimics the effect found in women . In both men and women, twin multiple regressions show that the opposite-sex-parent’s eye darkness separately predicts long-term and short-term preferences .Own eye colour did not interact with maternal rejection, id, F1, 64 = 5.176id, F1, 64 = 5.17642 of the two sexes, finally, I analysed the data for men (source: current study) and women (source: Bressan & Damian39) together. All individuals with light or dark eyes whose opposite-sex parent had light or dark eyes and who had cohabited with such parent longer than 1 year  were included in a repeated-measures ANOVA. The within-subject factor was relationship context, and the between-subject factors were sex, own eye colour, and opposite-sex-parent eye colour. Crucially, the effect of opposite-sex-parent eye colour, F = 14.073, p = 0.0002, did not interact with sex, F < 1. That is, there was no evidence that the overall strength of sexual imprinting on light eyes was different for men and women.To compare the “imprintabilities”X2(1) = 0.010, p = 0.919) and all four of them  = 12.301, p = 0.197, N = 526). This came as something of a surprise, given that, in women, fathers and partners did feature the same eye colour significantly more often than expected39.Imprinting on maternal eyes swayed men’s preferences but not their choice of a partner in real life. Participants’ partners and mothers did not have the same eye colour more often than expected by chance. This was true both across two eye-colour categories  as a between-subjects factor, together with own and paternal eye colour, to the repeated-measures ANOVA on women’s preferences for light eyes. Paternal eye colour, F = 8.747, p = 0.003, did not interact with participant’s attractiveness, F < 1. That is, the impact of paternal imprinting on preferences was not significantly different in women whose self-assessed attractiveness was above the median and below the median.Thus, an opposite-sex parent with light eyes increased men’s and women’s preferences for light eyes in similar ways, but these preferences showed up only in women’s, and not men’s, partner choices in real life. One explanation for this puzzling inequity could be that it is the females , and not the males, who have the final say over the pairings. To test this idea, I reasoned that the choosiest of the choosy might succeed in realising their own preferences best. Both theory and data indicate that it is the most attractive individuals who can afford to be choosiestbelow the median  = 6.609, p = 0.678, N = 226. In women whose self-assessed attractiveness was above the median  = 31.314, p = 0.0003, N = 251. In particular, the father-partner eye colour combinations blue/blue, green/green, and dark brown/dark brown all occurred significantly more than expected, whereas the combinations green/dark brown and dark brown/blue occurred significantly less than expected. Yet there was no trace of this effect in men’s data: none of the mother-partner same-colour combinations occurred significantly more often than expected, not even in the subsample of men whose self-assessed attractiveness was above the median .Next, I computed the distribution of observed and expected father-partner eye colour pairs in the same two subsamples. In women whose self-assessed attractiveness was 39, show that people who prefer an opposite-sex partner have sexually imprinted on their opposite-sex parent. From these data, human sexual imprinting emerges as equipped with three notable features—none of which, as far as I am aware, has been directly explored in other species. First, both females and males avoid imprinting on parents who appear cold and unjustly punitive. Second, both females and males use the same imprinting model when selecting social partners and extrapair mates . Third, actual mate choices are aligned with imprinted preferences only in attractive females.The results of this large study on men, together with those of the twin study on women44. Immelmann interpreted this observation as evidence that the determination of sexual preferences requires an “emotional attachment of exceptional strength”44, p. 7, as that which is established through parental care. Individuals with whom no such bond is formed fail to serve as imprinting objects even when they provide, as siblings do, “a certain amount of personal attachment, too”44, p. 6.Young zebra finches raised by Bengalese finches proceed to strongly imprint on them  even when surrounded by adults, and sharing the nest with siblings, of their own species44, then, I propose that, at some instinctive level, parents who fail to provide strong emotional attachment are not recognised as such.In natural conditions, the young’s “emotional attachment of exceptional strength” will be addressed to the caregiver and the caregiver will be the parent. Therefore, this constraint ensures that the individual who is enlisted as a template for future mates is indeed the parent. Clearly this minimises the risk of acquiring the wrong sort of information; as it would occur, for example, if the young were able to sexually imprint on an unrelated animal that just happened to hang around a lot, without ever interacting with the young themselves. Yet whilst parental care and “emotional attachment of exceptional strength” can scarcely be separated in birds, they can and sometimes will be in humans. The data presented here suggest that this disconnection abolishes the impact of parental features on imprinted preferences. This impact does prove robust to some variation in parental emotional competence as experienced by the child—parents do not need to be perfect; nonetheless, perception of the parent as often cold, unfair, or unjustly punitive appears to lead to a breakdown of sexual imprinting. Drawing on Immelmann’s intuitions45).Note that this safeguard helps individuals pick mates which, like the original prototype, will not only successfully reproduce but be suitable parents to common offspring. A good parent, guaranteed as such by mandatory direct experience, supplies an internalised model of an opposite-sex individual who is proficient at family relationships. The flexibility injected into imprinted preferences by personal experience (“to imprint or not to imprint: that is the question”) is one which genetically transferred ones incline to lack  can exert a veto on human sexual imprinting says little about whether the latter becomes completed by early infancy or gradually ossifies during childhood. Note however that, across both distant and tightly related species, the length of the period that permits sexual imprinting correlates closely with the duration of parental care46). One could even make a more general case that also applies to other socially monogamous creatures with biparental care, such as most species of birds, which practice sexual infidelity without deserting the social mate47. This logical argument holds for both humans and birds: if securing a mate with the physical traits of one’s parent furnishes some benefit to one’s offspring—as it must do to have evolved in the first place—imprinted preferences ought to cover both long- and short-term (including adulterous) partners, because offspring can be generated with either. This remains true whether such preferences serve to ensure fertile, sexy partners who will help produce sexy offspring, or partners genetically similar to oneself, who will help produce offspring that are well adapted to the local environment . I therefore expect birds, too, to display the same imprinted, parent-driven preferences in the choice of both life companions and extrapair mates. Some nonimprinted preferences could and should differ of course, consistent with the separate demands placed on life companions and extrapair mates. For example, the preference for resourcefulness in a mate will be more important in a lifelong partner than in an extrapair one, because it confers a larger benefit to offspring generated with the former than with the latter.Once they have become established, imprinted mate preferences extend to all potential sexual mates, in whichever context they are encountered. Expecting otherwise might in fact be naive. In our species, long- and short-term partners can be told apart only in retrospect . For example, males raised by foster parents of another species may end up being paired with the foster species much more often than do females, impelling researchers to conclude that males become imprinted and females do not. It has later been argued51 that such asymmetries may arise instead from a more decisive role of one sex in pair formation, and hence to the “acquiescent” sex’s preferences becoming obscured.On the assumption that mate preferences convert directly into mate choices, claims have been made of the existence, across several bird species, of an “imprintable” and a “nonimprintable” sex ; that is, males are the “acquiescent” sex just as they happen to be in most other animal species.Our data provide two strong tests of this idea. First, imprinted preferences for light eyes were not significantly different in men and women. Yet women’s partners resembled fathers whilst men’s partners did not resemble mothers—meeting female but not male preferences. Of course, this may simply boil down to a difference in how the two sexes weigh the multiple criteria used in mate choice. For example, female zebra finches tend to be paired more often with mates with the “wrong” (nonimprinted) plumage than do males, but such mates turn out to be particularly good singers and wooers52, individuals set an “aspiration level” to decide whether or not a potential partner is good enough. The aspiration level reflects the individual’s self-assessed mate value. In some species mate value may simply parallel one’s age, and be straightforwardly “self-assessed” by the ticking of one’s biological clock53. In humans the process is likely to be more interesting, with an approximate mate value being figured out in the juvenile period—for example, by engaging in uncommitted flirting and recording expressions of interest and disinterest—and calibrated down the line52. The mating game is then played with “higher-quality” individuals steering clear of “lower-quality” ones, and “lower-quality” individuals adjusting their aspiration level to match their lower rank . The data presented in this article suggest that females’ self-assessed mate value changes their prospects of satisfying their sexually imprinted preferences for a certain trait, producing nonrandom mating relative to that trait. Attractive women were more likely to end up with men whose eyes had the same colour as the women’s fathers’.Second, imprinted preferences did not significantly differ between women whose self-assessed attractiveness was below the median and above the median. Yet the more attractive women turned out to be paired with partners who resembled fathers, in line with their own preferences, whilst the less attractive women’s preferences were apparently left unfulfilled. These findings fit well with the predictions of reasonably realistic models of mutual mate choice. In such models60). That finding and the current ones dovetail neatly in sustaining the idea that women with higher mate value are better placed to translate their mate preferences into choices. Every bit as remarkably, in the same study neither an association between preference for facial health and partner’s facial health, nor an effect of own attractiveness, were found for the male partners of the same women. The authors interpreted this sex disparity in terms of physical attractiveness not being a good measure of a man’s mate value—as opposed, for example, to earning potential. This stands to reason. Yet physically more attractive men have higher success in both short-term61 and long-term63 mating and produce more children63; even their sperm is of better quality64. Thus they do have higher mate value, which makes it surprising that they seem unable to get a long-term partner with their favourite traits more often than do less handsome men. In the light of the new data presented here, I propose that the lack of an impact of men’s preferences for facial health on their choice of a partner is actually due to romantic couples receiving the final imprimatur from women, not from men.The relationship between preference for facial health and partner’s facial health has been reported to be greater for more attractive women (attractiveness being estimated by independent observers15 and birds58). The implication is, instead, that a husband’s peculiarities—such as eye colour or facial health cues—will match the traits preferred by his attractive wife more often than a wife’s peculiarites will match those preferred by her attractive husband.This is not intended to imply that handsome males do not get females who are more attractive than average. Other things being equal they do, because attractive females (a) are bound to accept handsome males sooner than they accept plain males, and (b) are more interested in handsome males than other females are (shown in both humans53, showing that they are cranking down their aspiration level based on a reality check. And of course, in none of the experimental studies conducted so far does every bird51, fish4, spider5, and fruit fly12 that is expected to have developed an imprinted preference get a mate with the favourite trait. Generalising our data from humans to other species, rather than the other way around as is usually done, one ought to conclude that the fairest members of the choosier sex can afford to act on their imprinted preferences; those a little less fair are forced to relax their standards and selectivity; and the members of the opposite sex can only show off, court, and hope. The nonchoosers’ pick of whom to compete for must still be guided by their own imprinted preferences, yet such preferences will largely be overshadowed by those of the choosers.That not everyone pairs up with their first choice is painfully obvious in humans and would seem to be the case in other creatures, too. Female cockroaches, for example, become less choosy as they get older51—a testament to its being an extraordinarily popular, possibly quite ancient, mechanism for acquiring mate preferences. The findings discussed here suggest that humans are no exception. And also that, in our own species as in much of the rest of the animal kingdom, who ends up with whom is mostly determined by females.Sexual imprinting has been found wherever it has been looked for


This paper offers a review of research on demonstratives from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, we consider the role of demonstratives in current research on language universals, language evolution, language acquisition, multimodal communication, signed language, language and perception, language in interaction, spatial imagery, and discourse processing. Traditionally, demonstratives are analyzed as a particular class of spatial deictics. Yet, a number of recent studies have argued that space is largely irrelevant to deixis and that demonstratives are primarily used for social and interactive purposes. Synthesizing findings in the literature, we conclude that demonstratives are a very special class of linguistic items that are foundational to both spatial and social aspects of language and cognition. Like English, many other languages distinguish between nominal demonstratives functioning as pronouns or determiners and adverbial demonstratives functioning as spatial adverbs  as “this,” “that, close” and “that, far,” respectively, that can be used as pronouns (cf. 1a) or spatial adverbs (cf. 1b). However, there are no language internal criteria that would justify a categorical division between nominal and adverbial demonstratives in Acehnese Acehnese a.bek    neu = peugah   nyan   bak = lônI “Don’t tell me that.” Mauwake nomokowa     unowa      fan-e-mik,…2SG/PL.brother   many     here-PST-1/3PL“Many of your brothers are here, ….” : 266.In general, some languages use a single series of demonstratives across a wide range of contexts, but other languages have elaborate systems of demonstrative word classes cf. . Yet, whça, for instance, is distance-neutral. Recent research suggests that neutral demonstratives are cross-linguistically more common than previously assumed in the typological literature . Larger systems with four or more terms are rare (N = 12); but note that some languages have spatial demonstrative adverbs indicating elevation, direction or visibility . Several studies show that the development of demonstratives seems to be quite protracted, with adult-like uses emerging long after children start producing demonstratives . HoweverUsing data from reading sessions in which participants referred to animals in a picture book, The main piece of evidence for Clark’s hypothesis that demonstratives are among children’s first words comes from diary and observational research . SpecifiN = 10), Dutch (N = 3), Hebrew (N = 4), and Japanese (N = 3). We selected these children based on two criteria: age and the amount of data available for each child. All 20 children were younger than 25 months and their data include a minimum of 3400 words per child. The results of this study are summarized in Using data from the CHILDES database , we inveOverall, the data comprise 206,188 child words. Since most of these words were produced by children beyond the one-word stage, the data are not fully appropriate to examine the appearance of children’s very first words. Nevertheless, while one would need other types of data to determine the precise age when children begin to use demonstratives, the data strongly suggest that demonstratives are generally among children’s early words. As it turns out, there was at least one demonstrative in the first file of all 20 children regardless of their age. Even the youngest children, aged 10 to 17 months , used demonstratives from early on.The vast majority of children’s early demonstratives occur in one-word utterances, or less frequently, together with a noun. They are embedded in parent-child interactions in which the participants seek to focus the other person’s attention onto a referent in the surrounding situation. Here are some typical examples from the English data:(3)∗CHI: Kit(ty) kit(ty).Naomi (14 months)∗MOT: Okay, are you done with looking at the pictures?∗MOT: Are you going to give them to me?∗CHI: Dere [ = there].∗MOT: Okay you can give them to me.(4)∗CHI: Matthoo [ = Matthew].Laura (18 months)∗MOT: And Matthew.∗MOT: Where are they?∗CHI: There.∗MOT: There?(5)∗MOT: I don’t think so.Eve (18 months)∗MOT: Mr. Fraser has coffee.∗MOT: Mr. Fraser’s drinking coffee.∗CHI: That.∗MOT: What is that?(6)∗MOT: The ducks say what?Eve (18 months)∗CHI: That.∗MOT: What is that?∗CHI: That radio.∗MOT: What?(7)∗ADL: That’s very good.Eve (18 months)∗CHI: I did it.∗CHI: There.∗CHI: There Fraser.∗ADL: That’s a nice box of books.While the CHILDES transcripts do not provide (systematic) information about the context and use of gesture, it is clear from the data that children’s early demonstratives refer to objects and locations in their vicinity and that many of these early uses are accompanied by gesture (as indicated on the “action tier”), consistent with the findings of it), determiners  and interjections ; but with the exception of “mummy” and some proper names, there were hardly any nouns (or verbs) among the 20 most frequent words at this age, suggesting that demonstratives are the preferred means of linguistic reference in early child language.Moreover, if we look at the frequencies of individual words, we find a demonstrative at the top of the word frequency lists of 8 of the 20 children. Apart from demonstratives, children made extensive use of pronouns , but the Hebrew- and Japanese-speaking children used primarily proximal terms . There were also some medial demonstratives in the Japanese data , but distal demonstratives were rare in both Hebrew  and Japanese . Since children’s mothers used very similar proportions of proximal and distal terms, it seems reasonable to assume that children tend to use demonstratives that are frequent in the ambient language.More research is needed to investigate the acquisition of demonstratives and the alternation between proximal and distal terms in early child language. However, while our data are not sufficient to verify Clark’s claim that demonstratives are always among children’s first 50 words, they strongly suggest that children begin to produce demonstratives early and that demonstratives are among the most frequent words in early child language.One of the most conspicuous properties of demonstratives is that they are frequently accompanied by nonverbal means of deictic reference, notably by pointing and eye gaze . The mulFirst, linguistic field workers have developed particular elicitation tools to examine the interaction between demonstratives, pointing and gaze in different contexts. Of particular importance is the questionnaire developed by However, while multimodality may be a universal trait of demonstrative reference, there are interesting differences in the way demonstratives are combined with nonverbal strategies of deixis. For instance, while it is by no means uncommon for speakers of English to use (exophoric) demonstratives without a co-occurring gesture, reports of linguistic field workers suggest that there are languages in which certain types of demonstratives are generally accompanied by pointing or gaze. In Yélî Dnye, for example, proximal demonstratives seem to require a pointing gesture, or at least gaze, unless the referent is being manipulated : 32. OthSecond, the multimodal use of demonstratives has been examined with methods of conversational analysis e.g., . Using vFinally, there are a number of psycholinguistic studies that have examined the multimodal use of demonstratives with experimental methods e.g., . Most ofIn accordance with this finding, Signed language abounds with pointing gestures, but the status of pointing signs is controversial e.g., . Like deFollowing All researchers agree that pointing is of central significance to reference in signed language, but given that pointing is also commonly used as co-speech of spoken language, it is not immediately clear why pointing signs should be regarded as words rather than as genuine gestures . There iSome researchers claim that pointing signs are fundamentally distinct from pronouns or determiners  and emphAs it stands, the issue is unresolved see  and combWhat is more, some recent studies explain the particular status of pointing signs in signed language by grammaticalization . More prNicaraguan sign language emerged as a new language in the late 1970s when deaf children were brought together for the first time at school. Earlier, deaf people had very little contact with each other and signed only at home to communicate with hearing people around them. Comparing pointing signs of four “homesigners” with pointing signs of different cohorts of signers who used Nicaraguan sign language at school (starting at different stages of the emerging language), Coppola and Senghas found that homesigners’ pointing signs were almost exclusively used to indicate a place, whereas the pointing signs of the three cohorts who used Nicaraguan sign language at school also included abstract points functioning as determiners and personal pronouns which seem to have evolved from locative points by grammaticalization.Finally, while pointing signs share many properties with demonstratives in spoken language, it is unclear if the deictic points of signed language are marked for distance, like most demonstratives in spoken language, or if they are distance-neutral, like the deictic points of co-speech. The only study we know that has been explicitly concerned with the expression of distance in signed language is We now turn to the above-mentioned debate about the nature of deixis and demonstrative reference. Recall that there are two different views of deixis. Some researchers conceive of  deixis as an egocentric, body-oriented strategy to provide orientation in space e.g., ; but othIn what follows, we discuss studies from both sides of the debate. We begin with research supporting the egocentric, body-oriented view of spatial deixis and then turn to research that has emphasized the social and interactive functions of demonstratives.here  have pointed out, speakers’ choice between proximal and distal demonstratives is contingent on language users’ conceptualization of the speech situation rather than on physical properties of space. Consider, for instance, the following examples of the proximal demonstrative here cf. : 2410.(3)a. Here on my legb. Here in this roomc. Here in Londond. Here in Europec. Here on this planet.here refers to a small spot on speaker’s leg, but in all other examples, it refers to a much larger region, which generally includes the speaker but may also include the addressee. The distal term there is used in contrast to here. It can refer to any location as long as the location is not included in the region conceptualized as the origo. Thus, while here and there refer to locations in different distance to the speaker, the distance features of these terms are determined by interlocutors’ conceptualization of the speech situation rather than by objective properties of metrical space , ce e.g., .However, while the alternation between proximal and distal demonstratives cannot be defined in terms of physical space, a number of recent studies have argued that the encoding of distance in demonstratives is ultimately based on our bodily interaction with concrete objects in  space. These studies draw on research in neuropsychology indicating that objects in peripersonal space are processed in fundamentally different ways from objects in extrapersonal space e.g., . PeriperConsidering this distinction, Coventry and colleagues hypothesized that the universal contrast between proximal and distal demonstratives has its roots in the neuropsychological distinction between peripersonal and extrapersonal space . This hyHowever, while the alternation between proximal and distal demonstratives is very flexible, there is good reason to assume that demonstrative choice is ultimately grounded in the vision and action systems, i.e., in the distinction between peripersonal and extrapersonal space. In early research on this topic, peripersonal space was primarily defined in terms of the actor’s body, notably the actor’s perimeter of arm’s reach ; but morthis was usually confined to objects in arm’s reach, Coventry et al. showed that speakers extend the use of proximal demonstratives to referents at a greater distance if they can use a tool, e.g., a stick, in order to reach it (per se but the (in)ability to interact with an object that affects their choice of a particular deictic term.Building on these considerations, The results were replicated in several follow-up studies with speakers of other languages under somewhat different experimental conditions cf. . Other eTaken together, this research provides compelling evidence for an egocentric, body-oriented view of spatial deixis in which speakers’ choice of a demonstrative is (often) motivated by the possibility of interaction between referent and origo, which ordinarily correlates with distance. However, in addition to relative distance, there are various other factors that can influence demonstrative choice cf. .este, ese and aquel, that are often described in grammars as being parallel to the distinction between first, second and third person. On this view, este refers to an object near the speaker, ese indicates a referent near the hearer, and aquel specifies a referent far away from both speech participants , linguistic reference is never immediately determined by physical properties of the outside world—it is always contingent on the conceptualization of space , 2018. LWhat is more, while the speaker’s body is commonly interpreted as the origin of a deictic frame of reference, it must be emphasized that the origo, or deictic center, can be shifted from the speaker to another person.One of Bühler’s most important discoveries was that, while demonstratives are commonly used in perceptual space, they can also be used in spatial imagery. Bühler called this “Deixis am Phantasma” and analyzed several distinct cases : 121-140Deictic projections have been investigated in narratology and discourse analysis , but theAnother recent study that illustrates the importance of deictic projections for the analysis of demonstrative reference is to the left/right; in front of)—where it has been shown empirically that another person’s perspective is frequently used to assign direction when speaker and hearer are misaligned  left; see Deictic projections are crucial to the current debate about the nature of demonstrative reference because they show that even in an egocentric, body-oriented theory of deixis, demonstratives are not always grounded by the speaker. If the origo is shifted, the alternation between proximal and distal terms is determined by the target of the projection rather than the speaker’s body or location. Indeed, such an approach is consistent with evidence from other spatial terms—projective adpositions . There is little research on temporal demonstratives, but the extension from space to time is well-known from research on other types of expressions  space and also when objects appeared . They found that demonstratives were used according to whether the object was reachable or not, but there were no effects of time of object appearance/disappearance on demonstrative choice. One interpretation of these findings is that the spatial determinants of demonstrative use take precedence over non-spatial uses, consistent with conceptual metaphor theory  . Howeverr theory .Like time deixis, discourse deixis often involves demonstratives. Since language unfolds in time, discourse is commonly conceptualized as a continuous stream of linguistic elements. There is a close connection between time deixis and discourse deixis. Both are construed as a band of successive elements that is divided into distinct areas by a moving origo. However, while the origo of time deixis is determined by the moment of speaking, the origo of discourse deixis is determined by the location of a demonstrative in the unfolding discourse.As Bühler (1934: 390) put it:If discourse deictic expressions could speak, they “would speak more or less as follows: look ahead or back along the band of the present utterance. There something will be found that actually belongs here, where I am, so that it can be connected with what now follows. Or the other way around: what comes after me belongs there, it was only displaced from that position for relief.” [English translation from Goodwin 1990: 443]The discourse use of demonstratives has been investigated in a large number of studies using both corpus and experimental methods e.g., , 2019. TIn conclusion, in this article we have reviewed linguistic and psycholinguistic research on demonstratives from many different perspectives. There is widespread consensus in the literature that demonstratives constitute a unique class of expressions that are crucially distinct from other closed-class items: Demonstratives are likely to be universal and not derived from content words, they seem to be among the earliest and most frequent words in L1 acquisition, they are closely related to pointing, gaze and body posture, and they are of fundamental significance to the diachronic evolution of grammar.But why are demonstratives so special? What distinguishes them from adpositions, auxiliaries and other closed-class items. We suggest that demonstratives have a particular status in language because of their communicative function to create and to manipulate joint attention .Joint attention is a prerequisite for social interaction, language acquisition and language evolution , and it There is compelling evidence that demonstrative reference has its roots in our bodily experience with objects in space , 2014; bIt should be noted that it is often hard to compare results from studies that employ such a wide range of methodologies – from linguistic work in the field, often (by necessity) with small numbers of informants that makes generalization difficult, to controlled experimental studies with increased  power, but sampling linguistic behavior in more circumscribed situations. Nevertheless, it would seem that the factors that influence the conceptualization of a deictic frame of reference are many. Of particular importance is interlocutors’ common ground , but salThe manuscript was jointly written by HD and KC. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.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.


With data collected from a directed social trading network, this paper investigates how social interaction affects the disposition effect. We constantly observe a negative association between them: After being exposed to social interaction, a trader’s odds ratio to sell a paper gain stock decreases by 9% to 10%, depending on different model settings. We then test the mechanisms of social interaction by decomposing it into three channels: learning intensity (willingness to learn), learning quality (information advantage through learning), and public scrutinization (exposure of trading outcome to others). We find that all three channels contribute to a smaller disposition effect. Specifically, our findings support the claim that public scrutinization promotes self-consciousness and reduces disposition effect. Also, our results extend previous studies on investors’ information advantage by suggesting that it could also help to mitigate the disposition effect through the reduction of uncertainty. Overall, this paper suggests a positive role of social trading platforms in helping investors make better decisions. The disposition effect is usually considered as an investment mistake: It describes the behavioral bias that investors sell wining assets too quickly while holding on to losers for too long . TraditiThe lack of empirical studies on the interplay of social interaction and the disposition effect could be partially attributed to the limitations of data: For such a study, researchers need to collect both trading records and social network data for the same group of investors, but traditional data sources such as social media , 6 or brA social trading platform is an online platform that allows investors to make investment decisions by observing or even directly copying others’ trading records. It has two primary user groups: the signal providers who publish trading signals by showing their transaction records, and the signal followers who determine whether to leverage the incoming signals . In a seA stream of studies that use social trading platform data to investigate the disposition effect have emerged, where they attribute the disposition effect to factors like peer pressure , 10, socSeveral shortcomings in extant literature may explain the disagreeing conclusions. First, the social network structure in some studies is undirected, where two traders must both give consent before they could establish a connection (like Facebook). In such an undirected  network, it is challenging to distinguish effect from peers and effect from oneself but is later reflected on the peers. This situation is identified as the “reflection problem” , 17 becaSecond, some researches use signal providers’ transaction data, resulting in a biased representation of real-world retail investors. Unlike signal followers, whose primary goal is investment return, signal providers usually have additional monetary incentives to attract followers . They maThird, most studies test the effect of social learning by splitting the data into two periods: the period without social interaction (the control group) and the period with social interaction (the treatment group). While it is an effective and clear approach, it cannot reveal the different channels through which social interaction takes effect, because the only change between the two groups is the presence of social interaction. To have a deeper understanding of the social mechanism, we need to identify its channels.Xueqiu.com , China’s largest social trading platform, and develop new measures of the social interaction channels. Unlike the undirected network in some studies [To solve the above problems, we collect data from  studies , 18, theMore importantly, although traders on Xueqiu can publish their signals and copy from others’ signals as in a typical social trading platform, they cannot get monetary rewards by attracting followers. Xueqiu works more like a mutual help club, where club members share investment ideas by publishing their transactions for others’ reference. Because of the lack of monetary incentives for attracting followers, traders on Xueqiu are less biased and may represent the real-world retail investors better .We investigate the effects of social interaction using two methods. First, following , we spliHowever, such a discrete splitting approach treats social interaction as a whole, hence cannot reveal the channels through which social interaction affects the disposition effect. How to measure social interaction continuously and also show its channels? To this end, we introduce three variables: learning intensity, learning quality, and public scrutinization, each representing one channel that has been identified in the literature. Public scrutinization, essentially the number of followers, measures the influence of the peers. Previous studies –15 have Taken together, our results have three important implications in the stream of literature on social interaction, disposition effect, and social trading platforms. First, whether social interaction increases or reduces the disposition effect does not have an agreement in literature. This disagreement is partially due to the limitation of data. By collecting transaction records and social interaction from a directed network, this paper mitigates the reflection problem and supports the conclusion that social interaction reduces the disposition effect , 14.Furthermore, this paper proposes a new method to decompose the effect of social interaction into three channels: learning intensity (willingness to learn), learning quality (information advantage through learning), and public scrutinization (exposure of trading outcome to others). Extant literature does not distinguish these channels and treats social interaction as a whole. By breaking down the social mechanism into these channels, we can better test theories that lead to the same direction of change. We show that all three channels help to reduce the disposition effect.Third, this paper contributes to the stream of literature on social trading networks. Social trading networks are innovative and valuable data source that can simultaneously provide data about inter-personal interaction and trading records. Previous research topics that utilize social trading network data include the studies of interplay of social learning and trust , 20, 21,The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section “Data” describes the data and descriptive statistics. Section “Methods” presents the two approaches that we use to examine the effects of social learning. Section “Results and discussion” presents the empirical results of how social learning influences the disposition effect. Section “Conclusion” concludes this paper.Here we introduce Xueqiu’s social trading system and how it differs from other social trading platforms. Like all social trading platforms, Xueqiu allows its users to publish their trades and follow/copy from each other. The core concept of Xueqiu’s social trading system is the portfolio. A portfolio is like an independent fund: Its transactions are recorded, and its return is calculated and published by the platform. Portfolios can be followed without the creator’s consent. Once followed, the latest trades made to the portfolio will be pushed to the follower’s desktop or mobile devices.A trader can create two types of portfolios: the virtual and the real (money). A virtual portfolio does not involve any real-money transaction and is mainly used to test or demonstrate investment strategies. By contrast, a real portfolio, is directly linked to the trader’s brokerage account and reflects the trader’s actual gain or loss. One could create as many as 20 virtual portfolios, but only one real portfolio is allowed.Virtual and real portfolios have different accessibility. Virtual portfolios are public, meaning anyone can see its trading history and follow it. Real portfolios, however, work as an exclusive mutual help club: By becoming a real portfolio creator, a trader must agree to share her brokerage account transactions with other real portfolio creators, but in return, the trader is granted access to other real portfolios’ transaction history. For those traders who only create virtual portfolios, real portfolios are invisible to them. This mutual help club design differs from other social trading platforms, where publishing transaction records and attracting followers could earn monetary rewards.In summary, the benefit of becoming a real portfolio creator is knowing what others are trading, while the cost is that the trader’s own transactions are also subject to scrutinization by others. We collect two groups of data from Xueqiu: the transaction data and the social network data. For transaction data, we collect all stock trades made by real portfolio owners from June 2016 to March 2018. As explained above, real portfolio owners can see others’ real portfolios. Therefore, we registered as a real portfolio owner and crawled the transaction history webpages of other real portfolio owners. There are 601,087 trades executed by 4,802 traders. Because one trader can only create one real portfolio, the number of traders also equals the number of real portfolios. We clean the collected data by two criteria. First, invalid transaction records, such as trade with negative trading volume, are removed. Second, portfolios with empty records or were active less than one day are further removed. This filtering procedure reduces the data to 4,732 traders/portfolios with 541,774 trades, of which 211,315 are buy trades. Short selling is not allowed.t if it is unsold and the closing price of that day is lower (higher) than its average cost. Similarly, if a stock is sold and the selling price is lower (higher) than the average cost, we denote it as a realized loss .The transaction data is used to determine the gain/loss status of a trader’s position, which will be used in computing the disposition effect. We track each trader’s stock-level position and recompute its average cost by the end of the trading day. A stock position is denoted as a paper loss (gain) at day The second group of data collected from Xueqiu is the social network (the followings and followers) of the 4,732 real portfolio owners. In this paper, we use two approaches to test the effects of social interaction on the disposition effect. Borrowing from , 13, we t0 but did not follow any portfolio until t1. The pre-follow stage is defined as the period from t0 to t1; the post-follow stage is defined as the same-length period after she began to follow, that is, t2 is defined so that t2−t1 = t1−t0. Period combing both the pre-follow and the post-follow stages (t0 to t2) is named the “two-stage” phase. We further require a trader must be present in both stages; otherwise, she will be removed from the sample. The equal length of the two stages helps to reduce the impact of different sample sizes. tn is the day when the user made her last trade in our sample, and we refer to the period from t0 to tn as the “full sample.”We observe that a new user usually makes a few trades before starting to follow others’ portfolios. This enables a comparison of trading outcomes under different social interaction settings: the trades made before the first following is less likely to be influenced by peers, while the trades made after are more exposed to social interaction , 13. TheWhile the above approach is clear to show the impact of social interaction, it treats social interaction as a whole and cannot distinguish different channels of it. Can we measure the channels of social interaction continuously without splitting the sample? To this end, we propose three variables: learning intensity, learning quality, and public scrutinization. Each variable represents a channel of social interaction.learning intensity. Eq , we first compute the centrality score for each of her followings at day t, centralitynjt. These scores tell if the trader is learning from the important ones. We then average these scores to produce a single metric, learning quality, as in Eq  as a proxy for passive public scrutiny. Intuitively, a larger number of followers indicates one’s trading records are exposed to more people, which results in stronger public scrutinization . Eq 3)  3) definAccording to the definition of the disposition effect, a trader’s disposition effect will increase if her holding period of a gaining position decreases (sell too soon), or her holding period of a losing position increases (hold for too long). In To clearly display the net effect, we plot estimates of a Kaplan–Meier survival function , 24, 29 Though hij(t) measures the hazard rate for stock j being sold by investor i at day t under the influences of factors specified in the right-hand side of the model. h0(t) is the baseline hazard, corresponding to the hazard value with all factor influences being zero. gainijt is a binary indicator that equals one if stock i is sold at a gain by trader j at day t, and zero if sold at a loss. A positive coefficient of gain suggests the presence of the disposition effect: It means a stock is more likely to be sold if it is a paper gain. Therefore, the change in the disposition effect between the pre- and the post-follow stages could be revealed by comparing the change in the coefficients of gain.Eq  shows thpost-follow, which equals one if a trade is made in the post-follow stage. Eq  higher than that at a loss, while the gap falls to 42.6% (e0.355−1) in the post follow stage. Column 3 confirms this, where the interaction term between gain and post-follow shows that the disposition effect has been reduced by 9.06% (e−0.095−1) in the post-follow stage.saleijt equals one if stock i is sold by investor j at day t, and zero if not sold. The independent variable gainijt is a binary indicator for whether stock i is sold at a gain by trader j at day t.As a robustness check, we use Logistic regression to re-estimate the above equations. We first propose Eq , where tj separately in both the pre- and the post-follow periods. This will give us one βj (the estimate of the disposition effect) for every trader. We show the distribution of βj in βj is slightly right skewed, indicating the presence of disposition effect. Second, we find that in the post-follow stage, the magnitude of βj is reduced: It is more concentrated around zero and less likely to appear in the tails. This pattern is most obvious in the right tail, meaning the magnitude reduction in positive βjs is stronger than that of negative βjs. Since a positive βj is equivalent to the presence of disposition effect, To give an intuitive illustration of the change in the disposition effect, we estimate Eq  for everpost-follow, where it equals one if a trade is made in the post-follow stage. The coefficient of the interaction term between gain and post-follow, β3, measures the disposition effect change resulting from social learning. αi, αj and αt are added to capture the stock, trader and holding period level fixed effects. We also control for the market performance and investors’ trading experience by adding three control variables: momentum (a zero-cost portfolio that is long previous 12-month winners and short previous 12-month loser) [controls in Eq (Eq  extends h loser) , active ls in Eq .post-follow. We find the disposition effect has decreased from 0.903 in the pre-follow stage to 0.738 in the post-follow stage. Column 3 pools the two stages together and uses post-follow to indicate them. Again, the negative coefficient of gain×post-follow (β3) supports a reduced disposition effect: If a stock is at a gain, the odds ratio for its being sold is reduced by 10% (e−0.106−1) after social learning. In Column 4–7, we strengthen the results by adding three control variables  to control for the market performance and the investor experience. Columns 8 and 9 use the full sample for robustness purposes; that is, we include all trades before and after social interaction without requiring the length of these two periods being equal , we identified three channels:  into Eq , resulti into Eq . Here a learning intensity, learning quality, and public scrutinization are calculated on a daily basis, it allows us to measure the social interaction continuously without the need to split the sample into the pre- and the post-follow periods. Therefore, we estimate Eq . This finding supports the claim that public exposure results in more self-consciousness and less disposition effect [n effect , 14. Thilearning intensity and the disposition effect: For one percentage increase in the number of followings, one’s odds ratio to sell a paper-gain stock decreases by 6.2% . To explain this finding, first recall that a high learning intensity means a trader is observing a large pool of portfolios. This pool could facilitate decision making in several ways. [al ways.  demonstral ways.  also suglearning quality could help to reduce the disposition effect, as indicated by the significantly negative coefficient of gain×learning quality. Since learning quality represents one’s information advantage acquired through the network, it extends the finding of [We also find that nding of  that infWhy would information advantage have an impact on the disposition effect? The literature on decision making under uncertainty provides us with some insight. Under uncertainty, firms would delay exiting unprofitable projects because they expect the situation will turn better in the future , 33. SimXueqiu.com, China’s largest social trading platform, because its directed network largely reduces the “reflection problem.” By splitting the sample into periods before and after the exposure to social interaction, we first show that social interaction helps to decrease the disposition effect. We then investigate the social mechanism by decomposing social interaction into three channels: learning intensity (willingness to learn), learning quality (information advantage through learning), and public scrutinization (exposure of trading outcome to others). We find that all these three channels help to reduce the disposition effect. This is in line with the literature stream that social interactions help investors acquire information advantage and reduce behavioral bias [In this study, we investigate the role of social interaction in reducing investors’ disposition effect. We use a novel data source, the social trading platform, which allows us to collect both investors’ transaction records and social network data. Specifically, we collected data from ral bias –39. Our There is room for further research to understand better the relationship between social interaction, behavior bias, and asset pricing. For example, whether the decrease of behavior bias  leads to a higher realized return remains a question. Also, while focusing on retail investors, this study does not investigate social interaction’s implication on the overall market. We expect to address these questions in the future.


Vaccinium species, and Rubus chamaemorus), sap-yielding Betula and acidic Rumex. While throughout the lifetime of the interviewees the list of used plants did not change considerably, the ways in which they are processed and stored underwent several stages in function of centrally available goods, people’s welfare, technical progress, and ideas about the harm and benefit of various products and technological processes. Differences in the food use of wild plants among different ethnic groups living in the region were on the individual level, while all groups exhibited high variability in the methods of preparation of most used berries. The sustainability of berry use over time has both ecological and economical factors.While the current consumption of wild food plants in the taiga of the American continent is a relatively well-researched phenomenon, the European taiga area is heavily underrepresented in the scientific literature. The region is important due to its distinctive ecological conditions with restricted seasonal availability of wild plants. During an ethnobotanical field study conducted in 2018–2019, 73 people from ten settlements in the Republic of Karelia were interviewed. In addition, we conducted historical data analysis and ethnographical source analysis. The most widely consumed wild food plants are forest berries (three  Different ethnic and linguistic groups sharing the same territory do not always use the same wild edibles in similar ways ,2,3. WhiPinus was added to flour for making bread. The other bread substitute consisted of a group of wetland plants; a tradition definitely borrowed by Russian peasants from the aboriginal Finno-Ugric population around the 13th century   .In the 1940s, in the southern part of the region—the Karelian Isthmus and Northern Ladoga—was depopulated and repopulated twice. Finns abandoned their homes on two occasions, and both times their houses were occupied by Soviet migrants, who first appeared in these lands in 1940, after the USSR annexed the territory from Finland. But a year later, in the summer of 1941, Finland, supported by German troops, regained the territory, and thus the Soviet residents were hastily evacuated. A significant portion of the former Finnish population returned to the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga region, yet they were again forced to leave their homes in 1944 due to the advance of Soviet troops. A resettlement campaign was then again launched in the USSR, which included the return of evacuated immigrants of 1940, as well as many new people arriving from regions badly damaged during WWII. As a result, by the 1950s, several ethnic groups were living together in a relatively small area: Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Chuvashs, Tatars, Mordovians, Ingrian Finns and others ,26. By 2The Karelian language belongs to the Baltic-Finnish branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. Throughout the territory, the Karelian language is divided into three main dialects—Karelian Proper, Livvi, and Ludic—as well as smaller dialects within each. Karelian Proper is widespread in the central and northern parts of the republic, in the territory of present-day Kaleval’skii, Loukhskii, Belomorskii, Kemskii, Medvezh’egorskii, Muezerskii and Suoiarvskii districts. The Karelian Proper dialect is also spoken in the regions of Tver’ and Leningrad. The Livvi dialect is widespread on the northeast coast of Lake Ladoga (southern regions of Karelia). Ludic Karelians traditionally live in a number of villages and towns in the southeastern part of the Republic of Karelia in Olonetskii, Priazhinskii and Kondopozhskii regions. The Ludic dialect is an intermediate link between the Livvik dialect and the Veps language . From thIn the Republic of Karelia, Karelian is an autochthonous language, based on the Latin alphabet, which does not have the status of an official language; and the number of speakers has been steadily declining. According to official census data, in 2002 there were 65,651 Karelians, which amounted to 9.2% of the population, which dropped to 45,570, or 7.4%, in 2010 (see Karelia (http://tv-karelia.ru/?id=14648). There are also two weekly newspapers, Vienan Karjala [Belomorsk Karelia] (in Karelian Proper), and Oma Mua [Own Land] (in Livvik). In these media outlets, “children are seen as the future of the Karelian language. Therefore, great importance is given to education, and implicitly also to politicians and state officials who decide on the sharing of resources” ” . Of course, the fact that the berry is poisonous was recognized by the adults and communicated to the children. Nevertheless, they tasted it to make sure that the berry was indeed poisonous and to discard it in future. The childhood practice of tasting wild plants, even those that are not edible, is not unique to Karelia. It has also been documented in Estonia . They brought this fashion, cabbage to us; I remember that one came from Molotov region [Perm region in 1940–1957]; our old man got married there. And he brought his wife here from Molotov region. And she was the first to plant cabbages in our village. She even baked bread, she placed it on cabbage leaves—and into the oven” . Another Russian woman born in 1941 recounted: “Salads appeared, [when] my elder sister married a Ukrainian. They then started living in Petrozavodsk. And gradually it came to us, too. These salads. Tomatoes, cucumbers, all that; people passed [knowledge] to each other”. The methods of processing and storing products have changed as well. So, drying berries, soaking them in water, and storing them in the shed in winter time have given way to storage in freezers, even in villages. Access to sugar in unlimited quantities led to the mass production of jams, which subsequently declined due to the belief in the impact of sugar on the incidence of diabetes: “People did not make jam, because sugar was needed. After all, why was it crushed—there wasn’t as much sugar as now. Sugar is a harmful product. People began to live well, so there is a lot of diabetes” . Homemade pickling, popular in the 1980s–1990s, became limited due to the fear of botulism. Juice cookers and meat grinders with special nozzles are used for making home-made juices and pitted jams, and blenders to make smoothies: “We like making green cocktails and smoothies. It’s 70% of any greens, and the rest consists of berries, fruits, vegetables—whatever you want to put in it. Then into a blender, add water, mix, add honey or sugar—and drink” . kissel requires starch, which was previously made by country dwellers themselves from their own potatoes: “For us in Karelian village, kissel was boiled with potato starch. To eat with a spoon. Starch was self-made. Digging potatoes was over, the biggest was chosen—ugly, one may say. Washed well. I remember; it was not peeled, but grated, rinsed with water several times, the water poured away, there was such a white mass. Dried it, and got potato starch” . Now starch is bought in the store, but complaints have been raised about its quality. The same applies to the traditional dish “cowberry with tolokno”, which is even included in the menu of local restaurants .Urbanization affected the production of traditional dishes. For example, cooking taurants . In the Alnus incana for fish smoking, like the smoking itself, seems to be a novelty in this region, practiced by newcomers: “No. Maybe; people smoked after us, but at that time it wasn’t used. The easiest methods were salting, boiling and a kind of preservation—cooked for a long-long time, with seasonings—and into jars” .Smoking appeared, according to different informants, about 20 to 40 years ago, but it did not become a method of fish or meat preservation and storage for a long time; it was rather perceived as a way of pleasantly spending free time: “My parents never smoked fish. We mostly salted it” . Elderly people even said that they didn’t know how to do it: “My son smokes, we don’t, we cannot… And earlier, in Syssoila, I don’t remember smoking” . Those who now do it, describe it as a non-serious pastime: “Fish wasn’t smoked. No, Karelians didn’t smoke. It is only now that I’m messing around with smoking” . Using ivan-chaj  has infIt is interesting how one of our informants strongly denied the use of roots and tree bark by Karelians: “I don’t remember my friends or anyone digging something up, no. I say, people were not hungry… maybe there was shortage, of course, as I recall now, but not to that extent. Karelians did not eat bark—I’m sure of that for some reason. They would salt fish, kill some game in the forest, put snares when they had no rifles—but bark… They write everywhere: “Karelians ate bark”—that’s not true! They [lived] not bad at all… and my husband, he was such a hunter that… we lived in Severodvinsk, and we were never without game” . It is obvious that for the current population using the bark of trees  is viewed not as a usual and neutral practice, but rather as an unfortunate necessity during war time or an offensive assumption. Only one person mentioned the cambium of some tree (she did not remember which one) as her father’s childhood snack: “Dad said, in childhood, they always took a wire, made an incision, removed the bark, and between the wood and the bark there was such a soft white layer, it was the most delicious thing in their childhood” .Rubus arcticus, Filipendula ulmaria, Plantago, and Elymus repens , while for Russians they include Juniperus communis, Origanum vulgare, Barbarea vulgare, Thymus subarcticus and Atriplex sp. For the Other group distinctive plant is Rumex confertus, being a childhood snack. The only two food categories not shared by all three groups are “additives to strong alcohol” and “food additives”. The use of strong alcoholic drinks as well as that of condiments are not characteristic of the local culture and have been introduced by newcomers.Differences in plant use between the different groups appear minimal . The maiWhile there is a little difference on the taxa and food levels, we can observe some more pronounced differences on the level of acceptance of recently learned uses. For example, the highest number of new DURs was reported by Russians, who at the same time reported about 40% of uses learned in adulthood and the lowest proportion of uses abandoned in childhood . Eriophorum vaginatum as a snack in childhood), others are more likely borrowed from the popular literature: for example, the use of Alchemilla vulgaris and Polygonum aviculare in salads was acquired in the 2000s. The same can be said about the use of flowers of Filipendula ulmaria in recreational teas, and the leaves and aerial parts of Achillea millefolium, Plantago, and Atriplex in salads. One informant mentioned eating the leaves of Plantago and various parts of Elymus repens in childhood as a snack.Quite a number of distinctive plant uses come from Kalevala as a result of the remoteness of the region and the cultural and ecological peculiarities of the region related to its isolation. While the use of some plants can be easily explained by characteristics of the habitat  which grows in those lands in great abundance and which, as it is known from the experiments conducted, found fit for food”  one must take—one simply can’t live without it—a barrel of soaked cloudberries; without cloudberries scurvy will lead to death” [V. ulginosum] were dried, and then, as well as cranberries, used for medicinal purposes  Well, anyway phytoaspirin remains. This fragrance” ; “Raspberry contains natural aspirin” . Other berries were also named as a means to treat various illnesses: “[And high temperature?] Cranberries” ; “Earlier, I remember, my grandmother always crushed cowberries for us. When we had sore throat. And now I make juice for my grandchildren. When there is already a patch there in the throat, tonsillitis, and this acidity—it kills all the germs. I warm it and pour into their mouths. To coat. And then they don’t eat anything for a while. And it goes away very fast” . After various cold ailments, the second most common problem mentioned was intestinal disorders: “Dried bilberries—for diarrhea. Dries it on the stove” . The same attitude was transferred to cultural plants cultivated in gardens: “Aronia, chokeberry. It also lowers blood pressure, but it increases blood viscosity” ; and “I like to harvest viburnum for cough” . It seems that habitual consumption in some cases is thought to have prophylaxis properties: “We should eat berries [bilberries], just fresh berries, they said, for vision” .To understand the importance of berries to the people of Karelia, it is important to consider, in parallel, their use as medicine: “Again, for the whole o death” , . Inhabitants of Karelia use nine additional plants, not present in [Atriplex patula, Achillea millefolium, Betula spp., Stellaria media, Trifolium sp., Plantago spp., Elymus repens, Polygonum aviculare, and Alchemilla vulgaris. Still, all of them apart from Stellaria were mentioned only once, and in most cases by the same woman who quite actively uses wild edible and medicinal plants. Among the recommended beverage plants, 14 of 19 are used, which includes berries, leaves, and roots, primarily for making kissel and mors, but also for making tea and coffee substitutes. Crataegus chlorocarpa, Hypericum spp., and Betula spp.  are also used. Aromatic and spicy plants are not numerous in Karelia, yet still less than half of these are used (three out of seven). Only one of our informants used Barbarea vulgaris and Achillea millefolium, which are not mentioned in the book.It is possible to compare the situation today with the officially proposed list of edible plants of Karelia  Figure . Fruit-yesent in , includiAs we can observe, today all kinds of fruit plants named in the book are used, while salad plants, beverage plants, and spices are underused. It is difficult to judge from only one book, but it appears that here we witness the same tendency toward the maximum use of berries while greens and spices are neglected.In , four grzagotkontora). By handing over berries, mushrooms, herbs, and bark, people could get not only money but also the right to buy certain goods that were in short supply: “Well, there were procurement offices. There we handed them over—and there were goods. And even imported ones. Finnish goods. Tea, coffee... First of all, berries. Cowberries, bilberries, cloudberries. Blueberries were taken, but they were very few” . Practically everyone was involved in the business: “Handed over berries, mushrooms, cowberries. Everything was in shortage—clothes, food. One could buy clothes with coupons. We bought imported Finnish clothes. Previously, berries were expensive; it was possible to hand over a lot. <...> I lived in a forest village, and the whole village worked in a timber industry enterprise. And everyone handed them over” . The sum of money received for forest products could be rather impressive: “Then real goods, not Chinese fakes, were sold. Japanese electronics, cars. We bought our first car in the procurement office. Had to harvest 500 kg of berries” . The need to collect a large quantity of berries could result in over-harvesting, especially while using special devices for the easy picking of many berries at once (Rus. kombain) which was prohibited; however, we saw wooden analogues of such devices made about 100–150 years ago in a local museum . One more way to profit from forest products is to be hired as a berry receiving inspector; this seasonal job is advertised every year . In recent years the state offices have been replaced by private harvesters, ery year .‘Iagoda Karelii’ mentioned by the respondent is the first company in Russia to completely process forest berries, from cleaning and sorting to producing fillings, jams, and confitures . RecentlAs farmers in a risky agricultural zone, the inhabitants of Karelia developed their own type of minimalism, different from, for example, the minimalism of Northern nomads . For cen


COVID-19 or ‘Coronavirus’ has become a global pandemic since its initial report in Wuhan, China, on November 17, 2020. It is highly infectious and poses significant health risks for those in vulnerable populations. This article aims to provide perspective into an Irish experience, through the eyes of a practicing psychiatric nurse, who has recently graduated medical school and intends to work as an intern doctor. The Coronavirus pandemic is a historical event that will have widespread effects on several generations to come. The fear of COVID-19 infection and transmission is shared universally around the globe. Although our knowledge of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving, we still have many unanswered questions. We know it now as a mutation of the SARS coronavirus, last seen in 2003, spread via respiratory droplets with initial zoonotic transmission from bats/pangolins, originating in Wuhan, China. In this article, I will provide an Irish perspective of COVID-19 from a practicing psychiatric nurse, who has just recently graduated final year medicine and intends to join the frontline of COVID-19 care as an intern doctor.The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Ireland was reported on February 29, 2020. Since then, its incidence rapidly increased daily. One hundred and seventy-six days since its initial presentation in Wuhan , at the time of writing , there are 22,760 confirmed cases in Ireland, with 1,446 deaths.COVID-19 has a mortality rate 10 times that of influenza virus, and although this is lower than its SARS counterpart, it is more infectious, largely due to its mild/asymptomatic presentation. Risk factors for mortality are age >70 years, chronic lung/cardiac conditions (including asthma), diabetes, and a compromised immune system. Those in congregated residential settings, such as nursing homes or direct-provision centers, are also at a higher risk.At the start of the corona virus outbreak, and a few short months away from qualifying as a doctor, my inability to confidently answer questions asked by family or friends as to the likelihood of spread to Ireland, the lethality, and the virulence left me in a state of heightened personal and professional anxiety. My realization that I would soon be at the frontline further sharpened my focus.one confirmed case in Ireland, but no deaths – and to the swine flu pandemic (2009) – with 3000 cases and 20 deaths. This underestimation of risk was seen worldwide and likely contributed to its spread by a laxity on protective measures by individuals and/or governments.Initially, I underestimated its potential to spread; I compared it to the SARS epidemic (2002–2003) – which had The Irish government, while often criticised for the inadequacy of resources and leadership of our health services, should be acknowledged for its early and definitive response to managing this crisis. It splits this response into ‘three phases’ – containment, delay, and mitigation.Although there is a lot of focus on the hospital management of COVID-19, with daily updates on the number of hospitalizations, those requiring ICU beds, interventions needed, etc., the larger fight against this virus occurs outside of hospitals. Some public health measures have been implemented effectively – imposing a ‘lockdown’ and encouraging 2 m social distancing – while other measures lacked clarity – creating confusion about social benefits and appropriate use of personal protective equipment (masks/gloves/goggles). The public have adapted well to new restrictions, standing 2 m apart in grocery stores and reducing non-essential travel, along with well-intentioned but misguided behaviors, such as homemade face masks and holding their breath for 30 seconds as a ‘self-test’. There has been a clear buy in from people. This became even more pronounced as the recommended quarantine, advised on March 12th, became a ‘lockdown’ on March 29th. Whether this will withstand the extended period remains to be seen. On May 1st, a 5-stage ‘roadmap’ to easing of restrictions was presented by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar; it is hoped this will provide direction to the public to ensure that they continue to adhere to restrictions, while paving a return to a functioning society and economy.versus the containment elsewhere in the country, as well as higher rates of mortality in these areas, have been described as ‘a national emergency’ , heighted anxiety, or depressive/asocial symptoms, along with non-adherence to medication and treatment reviews. Reduced contact with family and friends and reduced communal activities due to social distancing might have further exacerbated their functioning.While anxiety is certainly heightened among the residents and more of my nursing time was spent alleviating these fears, the questions and reaction within the group were much the same as in the general population. For the most part, the residents have been open to guidance, reassured by answers, accepting of social distancing and other restrictions, engaging in regular handwashing, cough etiquette, and keeping their distance from each other and staff. There has been a clear reduction in the interpersonal difficulties between each other. My assumption of deterioration in their mental health has not been substantiated, making me consider similarities with the seminal work of Emile Durkheim in ‘Le Suicide’  provides the ability to cope. Frankl, having lived through the holocaust, saw and shared the collective purpose created by the Jewish prisoners, which allowed them to cope through cruelties of Nazi Concentration Camps Frankl, . AlthougThe most challenging aspect of this pandemic from my perspective has been a lack of resources and staffing coupled with the uncertainty of working in unchartered territory. Throughout this crisis, there has been a reduction in staff numbers due to illness or annual leave. Some, with personal vulnerability such as chronic respiratory diseases, older age, or being primary carers for family members, such that the risk to themselves or their dependants was unacceptable, requested special leave. This challenge has been seen nationwide, with a public plea by the HSE  to ‘Be oThe collective anxiety about this pandemic has placed COVID-19 as a frequent differential diagnosis for many symptoms, especially respiratory or infectious. The ‘skeleton staff’ that remained needed to coordinate rapidly developed guidelines for care management in residential settings. Many staff members were not clinically trained and were given urgent education in areas such as personal protective equipment, medication administration, and monitoring of vital signs. Due to its infectious nature, staff deployed to the ‘COVID Corridor’ were often unavailable for routine or urgent duties elsewhere.The other half of my life is as a medical student, newly graduated and eager to apply my knowledge and ‘do my part’ in fighting this pandemic. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on my final year, I went from expecting 9 weeks of clinical teaching, intern shadowing, and self-directed learning to 4 weeks of uncertainty and self-confinement, cancellation of formal exams, earlier start date, and reduced preference possibilities for intern posts. Personal goals shifted from maximizing my final grade to remembering ‘The 5 Ws of post-surgical fever’, sourcing accommodation linked to intern posting and hoping to obtain my preferential intern placements.; it can feel overwhelming. I expect to dread ‘on-calls’ and overtime and the risk of infection. I worry for my family and friends, some being ‘high-risk’ by virtue of age and illness. I also worry for my friends and colleagues, 25% of infections in Ireland have been in healthcare workers (Health Protection Surveillance Centre, Commencing the internship is a daunting task at any time, commencing life as a fully fledged doctor. My cohort of classmates will be faced with caring for a disease that so many of us know so little about, the ‘COVID Experts’ having only months of clinical experience with this virus. Like many, I am scared about the unknown that I will be facing – a new job, a new city, a new virusAlongside my personal fears, I am eager to fulfill what I perceive as my national duty for my country. This pandemic has shown me that healthcare should and has transcended all borders and barriers – the international collaboration and sharing of knowledge and equipment have inspired me. The collective responses among clinicians, scientists, and industry are great examples of teamwork, reinforcing Helen Keller’s words in the face of adversity ‘Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much’.