Data from the Human Penguin Project, a cross-national dataset testing social thermoregulation principles

Abstract

In the Human Penguin Project (N = 1755), 15 research groups from 12 countries collected body temperature, demographic variables, social network indices, seven widely-used psychological scales and two newly developed questionnaires (the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) and the Kama Muta Frequency Scale (KAMF)). They were collected to investigate the relationship between environmental factors (e.g., geographical, climate etc.) and human behaviors, which is a long-standing inquiry in the scientific community. More specifically, the present project was designed to test principles surrounding the idea of social thermoregulation, which posits that that social networks help people to regulate their core body temperature. The results showed that all scales in the current project have sufficient to good psychometrical properties. Unlike previous crowdsourced projects, this dataset includes not only the cleaned raw data but also all the validation of questionnaires in 9 different languages, thus providing a valuable resource for psychological scientists who are interested in cross-national, environment-human interaction studies.

WITHDRAWN: Improving the Measurement of Alexithymia in Autistic Adults: A Psychometric Investigation and Refinement of the Twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale

“…Participants reporting professional diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder were recruited from the Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge (SPARK) cohort, a U.S.-based online community that allows autistic individuals and their families to participate in autism research studies (85). In order to compare TAS scores and item responses between autistic and non-autistic individuals, we combined the SPARK sample with open data from the Human Penguin Project (86,87), a large multinational survey study investigating the relationships between core body temperature, social network structure, and a number of other variables (including alexithymia measured using the TAS) in adults from the general population. The addition of a control group provides a substantial amount of additional information, allowing us to assess I-DIF across diagnostic groups, assess the psychometric properties of any newlycreated TAS short forms in the general population, and generate normative scores for these short forms based on the distribution of TAS scores in this sample.…”

“…Human Penguin Project (General Population) Sample Data from a general population control sample was derived from an open dataset generated from the Human Penguin Project (HPP) (86,87), a multinational survey study designed to test the theory of social thermoregulation (90). Because the full details of this sample have been reported elsewhere (86,87), we provide only a brief overview, focusing primarily on the participants whose data were utilized in the current study.…”

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Improving the measurement of alexithymia in autistic adults: a psychometric investigation and refinement of the twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale

“…Participants reporting professional diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder were recruited from the Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge (SPARK) cohort, a USbased online community that allows autistic individuals and their families to participate in autism research studies [88]. In order to compare TAS scores and item responses between autistic and non-autistic individuals, we combined the SPARK sample with open data from the Human Penguin Project [89,90], a large multinational survey study investigating the relationships between core body temperature, social network structure, and a number of other variables (including alexithymia measured using the TAS) in adults from the general population. The addition of a control group provides a substantial amount of additional information, allowing us to assess I-DIF across diagnostic groups, assess the psychometric properties of any newly created TAS short forms in the general population, and generate normative scores for these short forms based on the distribution of TAS scores in this sample.…”

“…Data from a general population control sample were derived from an open dataset generated from the Human Penguin Project (HPP) [89,90], a multinational survey study designed to test the theory of social thermoregulation [93]. Because the full details of this sample have been reported elsewhere [89,90], we provide only a brief overview, focusing primarily on the participants whose data were utilized in the current study.…”

“…Data from a general population control sample were derived from an open dataset generated from the Human Penguin Project (HPP) [89,90], a multinational survey study designed to test the theory of social thermoregulation [93]. Because the full details of this sample have been reported elsewhere [89,90], we provide only a brief overview, focusing primarily on the participants whose data were utilized in the current study. The HPP sample was collected in two separate studies in 2015-2016: one online pilot study (N = 232) that recruited participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and the similar crowdsourcing platform Prolific Academic [94,95] and a larger cross-national study (12 countries, total N = 1523) that recruited subjects from 15 separate university-based research groups.…”