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Cutting-edge reports on the latest psychology research
Christian Jarrett
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- June 4, 2012
- 05:41 AM
- 229 views
The new science of "Phew!"
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
There's a childish prank I never tire of. As soon as we've left the house and the front-door has slammed shut, I pat down all my pockets and say nervously to my companion "Er, you've got the keys, right?". Then, just when their dismay at the prospect of being locked out has peaked, I say "Only joking!" and watch with pleasure as relief washes over them.
I say "relief", but what exactly is that emotion my companion has just experienced? As Kate Sweeny and Kathleen Vohs write in a new journal article, "Although relief is readily identified and frequently experienced, it is not understood well from the perspective of psychological science." Investigations into the emotion, they observe, "are sparse".
Now Sweeny and Vohs have attempted to make a start at mapping out this uncharted emotional territory. They began with a pilot study asking 91 people to provide a personal example of relief. Roughly half the group described a "near-miss" kind of relief - rather like fearing that you've locked yourself out and then realising that you haven't. The other half described a kind of "task-completion" relief, in which a negative experience had come to an end. A second pilot study with dozens of American and Dutch participants established similarly that half their relief experiences in the preceding week were of the "near-miss" category and half were of the "task completion" kind.
Next, in a study in which 114 more participants reflected on recent relief experiences, the researchers found that near-miss relief was associated with having more thoughts about how much worse things could have been and feeling more socially isolated (regardless of whether they were on their own or not). Sweeny and Vohs said this is consistent with past research showing how excessive rumination can be harmful to close relationships. Experience of task-completion relief, by contrast, was associated with more thoughts about how things could have been even better.
Lastly the researchers had a go at inducing relief. They invited 79 participants to a lab and told them they'd have to sing a song into an audio recorder. Half the participants were then told the recorder was broken, thus prompting them to experience near-miss relief. The other half of the participants did the singing, which it was presumed would be followed by the experience of task-completion relief. Quizzed afterwards, it was again found that near-miss relief, more than task-completion relief, was associated with feelings of social isolation and thoughts about how things could have been worse. The negative counterfactual thinking mediated the social isolation - that is, the more thoughts about how bad things could have been, the more socially isolated people felt.
What does all this tell us about what relief is for? "Experiencing near-miss relief could increase the likelihood that people will act to avert an unfavourable fate in the future" the Sweeny and Vohs said. "In contrast, task-completion relief allows people to focus on the positive emotional experience with minimal distraction from downward counterfactual thoughts. This process might reinforce satisfaction in the completion of a job well done ... and therefore increase the likelihood that people will repeat the unpleasant experience."
"Our aim is to bring the neglect of relief to an end," the researchers' concluded, "for it is an emotion that deserves study."
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Sweeny, K., and Vohs, K. (2012). On Near Misses and Completed Tasks: The Nature of Relief. Psychological Science, 23 (5), 464-468 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611434590
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Sweeny, K., & Vohs, K. (2012) On Near Misses and Completed Tasks: The Nature of Relief. Psychological Science, 23(5), 464-468. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611434590
- May 31, 2012
- 04:28 AM
- 270 views
Faces covered by a niqab are seen as less happy and expressing more shame
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The wearing of face veils (the niqab) by Muslim women has become a politically sensitive issue in recent years. The practice is banned in France and similar laws are planned, or already in place, in many other Western European countries including Belgium, The Netherlands and Austria. In the UK, in 2006 the then Government Minister Jack Straw caused controversy when he suggested that wearing the niqab interferes with face-to-face communication and he'd prefer it if the practice were dropped. Now for the first time psychologists have tested the effects of the niqab on the facial communication of emotion.
A team led by Agneta Fischer at the University of Amsterdam showed four short videos to 58 students. The silent videos showed a woman (one of three actresses) telling a story that was either emotionally neutral, happy, made her angry or made her feel shame. Crucially, some of the participants viewed videos in which the woman was wearing a niqab; others viewed a woman with horizontal black bars on the screen concealing the top of her head and her lower face; and others viewed a version in which the woman's head and face were uncovered (see picture). The participants' task was to rate the intensity of emotions expressed by the woman in each clip.
The niqab seemed to change the facial communication of emotion. Participants who viewed the woman wearing a niqab rated her expression of happiness as less intense than participants who viewed the other two videos. Moreover, participants who viewed videos of a woman with her face covered (be that with the niqab or the horizontal bars) rated her expression of shame as more intense, compared with participants who viewed a woman with an uncovered face. The perception of anger in the videos was unaffected by face covering, probably because anger is expressed principally via furrowing of the brow, which was visible regardless of face covering.
After viewing the video clips, the participants were asked about their attitudes toward the niqab. Those who'd seen clips showing a woman with a covered face (the niqab or the horizontal bars) expressed more negative attitudes toward the niqab, and this was mediated by the amount of negative emotion they perceived in the video clips. In other words, the researchers said, "we may conclude that the attempt to decode emotions in covered faces leads one to perceive more negative emotions, which in turn influences how one feels about covering one's face."
There is a weakness in the study methodology. The clips featuring the horizontal bars were created by using software to overlay the bars on the footage of the women filmed without their heads covered. The niqab videos, by contrast, were filmed separately with the women actually wearing the niqabs, so it's possible the actresses may have behaved differently whilst wearing the veils. However, this doesn't diminish the main point that both forms of face covering affected the communication of emotion.
Fischer and her colleagues concluded that the niqab may have the effect of exaggerating the perceived amount of negative emotion expressed by a wearer, whilst diminishing the perceived amount of positive emotion. "The present research thus supports some of the concerns that have been expressed in political debates concerning the negative effects of wearing niqabs in social settings," they said.
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Fischer, A., Gillebaart, M., Rotteveel, M., Becker, D., and Vliek, M. (2012). Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3 (3), 266-273 DOI: 10.1177/1948550611418534
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Fischer, A., Gillebaart, M., Rotteveel, M., Becker, D., & Vliek, M. (2011) Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(3), 266-273. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611418534
- May 30, 2012
- 04:21 AM
- 288 views
Introducing "therapy genetics" - genes can predict whether therapy will help
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Psychotherapy, like other forms of treatment, doesn't work for everyone and there would be huge advantages to knowing in advance who's likely to benefit. In the case of drugs, there's a thriving research field - pharmacogenetics - looking at whether a person's genetic profile can predict their chances of responding to treatment. Can the same approach be applied to therapy? A team of researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London believes so.
In one of the first papers published on "therapy genetics", Kathryn Lester and her colleagues, including Thalia Eley, took swabs from hundreds of white children with anxiety, aged 6 to 13. The researchers were specifically interested in the genes the children had that code for Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) and Brain Derived-Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) - proteins involved in the survival and development of neurons. The children, some based in the UK and some in Australia, then underwent a CBT programme designed for helping anxious children. The key question was whether the children's genetic profile would be associated with how well they responded to the treatment.
There were no genetic associations with the children's immediate response to the treatment. However, at follow up (assessed at 3, 6 or 12 months), the children's particular NGF genotype was related to their therapeutic responsiveness. We each have two copies of the NGF gene, rs6330, which can come in two versions, known as the T allele or the C allele. Lester and her team found that among children with two copies of the T allele version, 76.7 per cent were free of their primary anxiety diagnosis at follow up, compared with 63.5 per cent of children with one C version and one T version, and just 53.2 per cent of children with two copies of the C allele. These associations held, even after controlling for other clinically relevant factors such as age, gender and geographical location.
Why should the children's particular form of NGF gene affect the way they respond to CBT? Definite answers will only come from more research, but Lester and her colleagues argued that the finding makes sense based on what we already know about NGF being involved in the growth of new neurons and in changing connections between existing neurones - known as "neuroplastic changes" in the scientific jargon. "Significant learning experiences of the kind undertaken during CBT may very well be underpinned by neuroplastic modifications in brain activity and function," they said.
This new result complements another recent paper published by the same research group, in which anxious children responded more successfully to CBT if they had a particular version of a gene involved in the activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Again, the association was found at follow-up rather than immediately after therapy.
Lester and her team said they believed the association they documented in this new research is "clinically meaningful", but that "clinically significant prediction by genetic markers is likely to be best achieved by combining multiple genetic markers (perhaps in combination with clinical predictors) into predictive indices or algorithms."
The research has some shortcomings. For example, without a no-treatment control group of anxious children, it's not possible to say for sure that NGF genotype is specifically associated with therapeutic responsiveness rather than an advantageous tendency to recover regardless of treatment. "These findings should be considered preliminary," the researchers said.
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Lester, K., Hudson, J., Tropeano, M., Creswell, C., Collier, D., Farmer, A., Lyneham, H., Rapee, R., and Eley, T. (2012). Neurotrophic gene polymorphisms and response to psychological therapy. Translational Psychiatry, 2 (5) DOI: 10.1038/tp.2012.33
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Lester, K., Hudson, J., Tropeano, M., Creswell, C., Collier, D., Farmer, A., Lyneham, H., Rapee, R., & Eley, T. (2012) Neurotrophic gene polymorphisms and response to psychological therapy. Translational Psychiatry, 2(5). DOI: 10.1038/tp.2012.33
- May 28, 2012
- 06:34 AM
- 298 views
What your Facebook picture says about your cultural background
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
What kind of profile picture do you have on Facebook? Is it a close-up shot of your lovely face with little background visible? Or is it zoomed out, so that you appear against a wider context? The answer, according to a new study by psychologists in the USA, likely depends in part on your cultural ancestry.
Chih-Mao Huang and Denise Park first analysed 200 Facebook profiles of users based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Taiwan University in Taipei. Half the users in Taiwan were actually US citizens, and half those in Illinois were Taiwanese. Regardless of their current location, there was a significant association between cultural background and style of Facebook picture. Facebook users originally hailing from Taiwan were more likely to have a zoomed-out picture in which they were seen against a background context. Users from the USA, by contrast, were more likely to have a close-up picture in which their face filled up more of the frame.
There was a trend for the students' to adapt to their adopted culture because current location was also associated with picture style (e.g. Taiwanese based in the USA had pictures more focused on their faces, as compared with Taiwanese based in Taiwan), but this effect wasn't statistically significant.
A second study was similar but involved 312 Facebook users at three American universities (University of California, San Diego; University of Texas at Austin; and University of California-Berkekely) and three Asian universities (Chinese University of Hong Kong; National University of Singapore; and National Taiwan University). These locations were selected to be comparable in terms of having a warm climate. Again, Facebook users in America tended to have a profile picture in which their face filled up more of the frame; Asian users, by contrast, showed more background context in their pictures. Americans were also less likely Asians to display other parts of their body, besides their face. And the Americans' smile intensity tended to be greater.
"We believe this may be the first demonstration that culture influences self-presentation on Facebook, the most popular worldwide online social network site," the researchers said.
The new findings complement an existing literature showing cultural associations with attentional and aesthetic habits. For example, a 2008 study (pdf) showed that portrait photographs taken by East Asians tended to show more background (and that participants from that culture preferred pictures of that style), whilst those taken by Westerners were more focused on the target's face (and Americans said they preferred that style). Similarly, eye-movement research has shown that Westerners looking at a scene tend to focus more on embedded central objects, whilst Chinese look more often at the background.
"Our findings further extend previous evidence of systematic cultural differences in the offline world to cyberspace, supporting the extended real-life hypothesis," the researchers said, "which suggests that individuals express and communicate their self-representation at online social network sites as a product of extended social cognitions and behaviours."
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Huang, C., and Park, D. (2012). Cultural influences on Facebook photographs. International Journal of Psychology, 1-10 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2011.649285
Previously on the Research Digest: Asian Americans and European Americans differ in how they see themselves in the world.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Huang, C., & Park, D. (2012) Cultural influences on Facebook photographs. International Journal of Psychology, 1-10. DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2011.649285
- May 24, 2012
- 06:40 AM
- 321 views
ADHD Summer Camp
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
For harassed doctors and stressed-out parents, it can be tempting to treat a challenging child with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) with pills and leave it at that. After all, early results from the one of the largest trials of its kind in the United States - the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA) - showed that behavioural outcomes were better for children given the psychostimulant Ritalin, than for those given psychological treatment. However, follow-up data over several years has shown that the advantages of drug treatment aren't sustained over the longer term. The position of the UK's independent health advisory body, NICE, is that drug treatments for ADHD should only ever be part of a broader treatment package, including psycho-educational sessions for parents (pdf). The hunt continues for the most effective treatment or mix of treatments.
It's in this context that a team of German psychologists, led by Wolf-Dieter Gerber at the University of Kiel, has published a new report looking at the benefits of combining drug treatment for ADHD with an intensive Summer Camp.
Eighteen children with an ADHD diagnosis (aged 9 to 17 years), all on medication, spent 12 days at one such camp, which included social skills training conducted in a playful manner, attention training and sports. Crucially, the camp also incorporated "response cost token-based behaviour training" - that is, the children earned or lost tokens according to whether they followed or broke the camp rules. They were encouraged to compare their token totals each evening and a winner was declared for each day following an "Olympics style" format. At the end of the camp, the tokens could be exchanged for prizes.
A control group of 19 age-matched children with ADHD, also on medication, didn't go to camp, but their parents received a one-and-a-half hour-long psycho-educational session in which they were taught, amongst other things, about using a token strategy in the home.
Six months later, the children from both groups were tested on a range of neuropsychological measures and their outcomes compared with their pre-intervention test performance.
The key finding is that only the Summer Camp kids showed a reduction in the variability of their reaction times. This is significant because highly sporadic reaction times are a hallmark of ADHD, indicative of reduced self control. Moreover, only the Summer Camp group showed significant improvements in selective and sustained attention and the capacity to integrate information. It's likely these cognitive changes were clinically significant. Only those children who received higher ratings from their teachers (in terms of improved impulsivity, hyperactivity and inattention) showed positive changes in the variability of their reaction time scores on the neuropsych tests.
"We believe this study has merit" the researchers said, "as the ADHD Summer Camp can be regarded as a novelty in ADHD treatment. We could find no comparable intervention programmes that included stringent ... [token reward and punishment] techniques."
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Gerber, W., Gerber-von Müller, G., Andrasik, F., Niederberger, U., Siniatchkin, M., Kowalski, J., Petermann, U., and Petermann, F. (2012). The impact of a multimodal Summer Camp Training on neuropsychological functioning in children and adolescents with ADHD: An exploratory study. Child Neuropsychology, 18 (3), 242-255 DOI: 10.1080/09297049.2011.599115
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Gerber, W., Gerber-von Müller, G., Andrasik, F., Niederberger, U., Siniatchkin, M., Kowalski, J., Petermann, U., & Petermann, F. (2012) The impact of a multimodal Summer Camp Training on neuropsychological functioning in children and adolescents with ADHD: An exploratory study. Child Neuropsychology, 18(3), 242-255. DOI: 10.1080/09297049.2011.599115
- May 23, 2012
- 04:51 AM
- 317 views
Neuroscience still haunted by Phineas Gage
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
From Van Horn et al 2012
Seven years after his death, Phineas Gage's body was dug out of the ground and his skull passed to a doctor, John Harlow, who'd treated him in life. Although Gage's brain had long-since decayed, his skull remained intact and was of particular medical interest because in 1848, in an explosives accident, Gage had survived a three and a half foot long iron rod shooting straight into his face, through his brain, and out the top of his head. Although he died in 1860, Gage has lived on as one of psychology's foundation myths - a classic example of frontal brain damage affecting personality.
Traditional accounts have it that Gage was permanently changed by his injury, becoming a drunken, aggressive waster. But in recent years a reappraisal of Gage's activities during the remainder of his life suggests he underwent an impressive social recovery. For example, he worked as a stagecoach driver along a 100-mile route in Chile, a job that would have required significant psychosocial competence.
If we could ever find out exactly the brain damage that Gage suffered it would help inform the debates surrounding how much he did or didn't recover and provide intriguing insights about neurorehabilitation. That's what Harlow hoped to do back in the nineteenth century. From inspecting Gage's skull he concluded that the left frontal and middle lobes must have been destroyed and that the partial recovery made by Gage was likely due to compensation by the right hemisphere.
Housed in a museum together with the rod that made him famous, Gage's skull was then left untouched for nearly a hundred years. However, beginning in the 1980s, each new generation of scientists has used the technology of the day to make another attempt to recreate Gage's injury.
In 1982, using CT scans of the skull, Rick and Ken Tyler concluded that although the left side of the brain suffered the most damage, the right hemisphere was probably damaged too. In the nineties, Hanna Damasio and her colleagues performed a 3D reconstruction of Gage's injury and they too concluded the damage was bilateral (pdf). Another ten years went by and then another simulation. In the most sophisticated analysis to date, Peter Ratiu and his colleagues overlaid a 3D representation of a brain within a 3D reconstruction of Gage's skull and simulated the path of the iron rod (pdf). They concluded that the damage was only to the left, just as Harlow had said, which would make the new claims about Gage's recovery more explicable.
Now Gage's skull has been analysed yet again. A team of experts, led by John Van Horn, based at the University of California and Harvard Medical School, has used diffusion imaging data, together with anatomical MRI, to try to find out how Gage's injury affected the connective tissues of his brain. As they explain: "while many authors have focused on the gross damage done by the iron to Gage's frontal cortical grey matter, little consideration has been given to the degree of damage to and destruction of major connections between discretely affected regions and the rest of his brain."
Van Horn's team scanned the brains of 110 right-handed men (Gage was right-handed) of a similar age to Gage at the time of his injury (the range was 25 to 36; Gage was aged 25 when the rod entered his head). The scans used diffusion tensor imaging to map the connective white-matter tracts of the men's brains in intricate detail. Next, these scans were averaged and integrated with the 3D reconstruction of Gage's skull that was created by Ratiu's team back in 2004. The trajectory of the rod was simulated and an estimate was made of the damage the rod would have done to the connective tissues of Gage's brain, based on it resembling the average of the 110 healthy men's brains.
Is it reasonable to suppose that the connective networks of Gage's brain were akin to the averaged networks of 110 healthy men scanned in the twenty-first century? "Such a supposition may have its limitations and could be open to debate," the researchers conceded. "Nevertheless, ours represents the best current estimation as to the extent of brain damage likely to have occurred at the level of both cortex and white matter fiber pathways."
So what damage do they think Gage incurred? Van Horn's team think that 4 per cent of Gage's cortical grey matter was damaged in the left hemisphere and 11 per cent of his cortical white matter. Among the important connective bundles that were damaged, they said, are the uncinate fasciculus (which connects the frontal lobes with the limbic system), the cingulum bundle (connecting parts of the limbic system with each other), and the superior longitudinal fasciculus (long-distance fibres linking the front and back of the brain). Abnormalities in the uncinate fasciculus, they explained, have previously been associated with mental illness and related to cognitive deficits in traumatic brain injury. This spread of damage to Gage's white matter tracts would have affected not only the left frontal lobe, the researchers explained, but indirectly would have affected the functioning of the right hemisphere too.
The pattern of damage Gage suffered would be expected to have a profound effect, the researchers said, having "a considerable impact on executive as well as emotional functions," and "likely combined to give rise to the behavioural and cognitive symptomatology originally reported by Harlow." However, they stressed that it could have been a lot worse. A simulation of 500 random similarly-sized lesions showed the damage caused by the iron rod was below the average you'd expect by chance. Gage was lucky not to have been left blinded or dead.
The researchers concluded that "consideration of white matter damage and connectivity loss is ... an essential consideration when interpreting and discussing this famous case study and its role in the history of neuroscience." But how useful is this new analysis really? In particular, does it shed any light on the re-appraisal of the Gage myth that's emerged over the last decade or so, in which Gage is considered to have made an impressive psychosocial recovery?
This photo of Gage was discovered in 2009
The man responsible for much of this reassessment is the historian Malcolm Macmillan, the author of An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, and several subsequent articles. He told the Digest that the results were "very interesting" and that it was "particularly gratifying" that the new analysis had confirmed the earlier conclusions of Ratiu's team that Gage's damage was left frontal. However, Macmillan has some reservations - for example he pointed out the limitations in the method of averaging from multiple brains to estimate the structure of Gage's brain.
Moreover, whilst the inferred damaged to Gage's connective pathways might explain the changes to his behaviour in the first two to three years post-accident, Macmillan and his colleague Matthew Lena, "are most interested in what happened in the last five or six years of Phineas' life. If Lena and I are right about the post-accident Phineas gradually changing from the commonly portrayed impulsive and uninhibited person into one who made a reasonable 'social recovery,'" Macmillan said, "we need to know if and how changes in the tracts contributed. As I see it, and unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we will ever be able to reconstruct those long-term changes."
But there's always room for hope. Macmillan added: "From people who use tractography to map the changes in the connections following traumatic brain injury, I understand there is evidence that damaged tracts may re-establish their original connections or build alternative pathways as the brain recovers from oedema. In the short-term, some of the original functions may thus recover. It would be truly wonderful if were we able to confirm that possibility in Phineas' case."
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Van Horn, J., Irimia, A., Torgerson, C., Chambers, M., Kikinis, R., & Toga, A. (2012) Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage. PLoS ONE, 7(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037454
- May 21, 2012
- 01:54 PM
- 327 views
Total recall: The man who can remember every day of his life in detail
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
For most of us, it's tricky enough to remember what we were doing this time last week, let alone on some random day years ago. But for a blind 20-year-old man referred to by researchers as HK, every day of his life since the age of about eleven is recorded in his memory in detail. HK has a rare condition known as hypermnesia, like the opposite of amnesia, and his is only the second case ever documented in the scientific literature (the first, a woman known as AJ, was reported in 2006; pdf).
Brandon Ally and his team have completed comprehensive tests with HK and they've scanned his brain and compared its structure with 30 age-matched controls. They found that HK has normal intelligence, that he performs normally on standard desktop tests of short and long-term recall, and that he has normal verbal learning skills. It's specifically his autobiographical memory that's phenomenal.
The researchers assessed HK's autobiographical memory by choosing four dates from each year of his life since his first memory (that was from 1993 when he was aged three and half), making 80 dates in total. For each of these dates, they gathered at least three facts from HK's family, medical records and the historical records for his neighbourhood in Nashville. HK was then interviewed about each of these 80 dates - for example, he was asked "Can you tell me what happened during your day on January 2nd, 2001". His answers, often detailed, were transcribed and fact-checked.
HK's recollection of days from his life between the ages of 9 and 12 grew dramatically more accurate and detailed, reaching nearly 90 per cent accuracy for memories at age 11, rising to near perfect accuracy thereafter. For some dates, HK was quizzed again at a second session - the consistency of his answers was 100 per cent.
What's it like to have hypermnesia? HK told the researchers that his autobiographical memories are rich in sensory and emotional details and feel just as vivid regardless of whether they're from years ago or from yesterday. Ninety per cent of the time he experiences these memories in the first-person, compared with rates of approximately 66 per cent in the general population. HK said autobiographical memories frequently enter his consciousness, triggered by sights, sounds and emotions. Most days he wakes up thinking about what he's done on that day in previous years. Bad memories come to mind just as often as positive ones, but he is able to choose to focus more on the positive.
In terms of brain structure, overall HK's brain was smaller than average (likely related to his having been born prematurely at 27 weeks). By contrast, his right amygdala was larger, by about 20 per cent, than in the controls. He also has enhanced functional connectivity between his right amygdala and hippocampus and in other regions. The amygdala is a small subcortical structure and part of the limbic system, which is involved in emotional processing. The researchers think that HK's enlarged amygdala and its enhanced connectivity lends a deeper personal salience to his experiences than is normal, thus making them more memorable.
Ally and his team acknowledged that "unique case studies such as HK are not easily translated or generalisable to the normal population", and so should be interpreted with caution. That said, they argued their results provide further evidence for the role of the amygdala in autobiographical memory. "Further, perhaps the present findings can help help guide future regions of brain stimulation in memory-disordered populations, with the goal of improving memory function," they speculated. "Indeed, brain stimulation to deep, subcortical memory-related structures has shown very early promise in patients with Alzheimer's Disease."
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Ally, B., Hussey, E., and Donahue, M. (2012). A case of hyperthymesia: rethinking the role of the amygdala in autobiographical memory. Neurocase, 1-16 DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2011.654225
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Ally, B., Hussey, E., & Donahue, M. (2012) A case of hyperthymesia: rethinking the role of the amygdala in autobiographical memory. Neurocase, 1-16. DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2011.654225
- May 17, 2012
- 05:31 AM
- 330 views
Smile your way to a vegetable-loving child
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Maybe you've tried giving them names - Sally Sprout or Brian the Broccoli. Or perhaps you've made noises of gastronomic delight, "hmm, yummy!" Yet still your young child refuses to eat their greens. Maybe it's because of that slight, but all too visible, sneer on your face. After all, you're not wild about veggies either. Well, it's time for you to become a better actor. A new study suggests that young children are particularly sensitive to the emotional expressions of other eaters, and that these emotions are likely to affect their eating habits.
Laetitia Barthomeuf and her team presented 43 5-year-olds, 38 8-year-olds and 42 adults with photographs of two women eating various foods. As they ate, the women either looked happy, disgusted or just had a neutral expression. There were six different foods - three that the participants had earlier said they liked (chocolate, bread and cream cake) and three that they said they disliked (kidney, black pudding, cooked sausage with vegetables). Twenty-seven additional participants had been excluded earlier because their preferences didn't fit this pattern.
As they looked at each photo, the child and adult participants were asked to say how much, on a scale of 1 to 10, they desired to eat the food that the woman in the photo was eating. The take home finding - the children, especially the five-year-olds, were influenced much more by the facial expressions of the women, than were the adults.
If the woman in the photo had a look of disgust, this reduced the children's, and to a lesser extent, the adults', desire to eat foods that they liked. In contrast, if the woman had a look of pleasure on her face, this increased the children's, and to a lesser extent, the adults', desire to eat foods they didn't like (for five-year-olds only, it also increased their desire to eat foods they liked). Even a neutral facial expression in the eating women made a difference - increasing and decreasing the participants' desire for liked and disliked foods, respectively, especially in the children.
The researchers speculated that the influence of the women's facial expressions occurred because seeing their expressions led to simulations of those same emotions in the minds of the participants. They further suggested that this process is accentuated in younger children because of the immaturity of their prefrontal cortex.
The study has some obvious weaknesses, acknowledged by the researchers - they didn't measure actual eating behaviour, and the stimuli were photos, as opposed to a real-life dining situation. Nonetheless, they predicted the effects of other people's emotional expressions might be even larger in a more realistic situation and that the results therefore have important implications for the encouragement of children's healthy eating habits. "Adults may unconsciously influence children's food preferences via their facial expressions of pleasure or disgust," they said.
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Barthomeuf, L., Droit-Volet, S., and Rousset, S. (2012). How emotions expressed by adults’ faces affect the desire to eat liked and disliked foods in children compared to adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (2), 253-266 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02033.x
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Barthomeuf, L., Droit-Volet, S., & Rousset, S. (2012) How emotions expressed by adults’ faces affect the desire to eat liked and disliked foods in children compared to adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(2), 253-266. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02033.x
- May 16, 2012
- 04:02 AM
- 273 views
When are two heads better than one?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched invasion of Iraq ... all these historical calamities have in common that they've been blamed on dud group decision making. Bang heads together, it seems, and you dull people's minds. And yet there's the almost-magic "Wisdom of Crowds" effect - average people's verdicts together and you'll arrive at a more accurate answer than any one person would have achieved on their own. How to solve this paradox? A new series of intriguing studies by Asher Koriat provides part of the answer, highlighting the roles played by people's confidence and the type of problem they're tackling.
Across five studies Koriat tasked dozens of participants with answering a mix of forced-choice questions - some were to do with visual attention (e.g. which of two displays of patterns includes an odd-one-out?); others were general knowledge (e.g. which of two European cities has the larger population?); and there were visual judgement questions (e.g. which of two squiggly lines is longer?). The participants were asked to say how how confident they were in each of their answers.
For each round of questions, Koriat paired up the participants "virtually". That is, the partners in a pair didn't have anything to do with each other. But for each pair, Koriat followed the same rule, always taking the answer from the partner who was more confident.
Over a series of questions, Koriat found that always taking the answer from the most confident partner in a pair led to superior performance for that series (69.88 per cent correct on average in one study) compared with always taking the answer from whichever individual had the most impressive overall performance (67.82 per cent correct). In other words, the more confident of two heads working together nearly always outperformed the most proficient individual working on their own. In the first study using visual patterns, this was true for 18 of the 19 dyads. In further analysis, taking the most confident answer from a virtual group of three led to even more impressive performance.
The strategy even worked for people working alone if they were given two chances, a week apart, to provide answers to a series of questions, as well as rating their confidence. Always taking the more confident of their answers led to superior performance overall and was more effective than simply averaging their two answers (see earlier Digest item: Unleash the crowd within).
But here's the all-important caveat. This strategy of taking the answer of the most confident partner only worked for questions for which most people, "the crowd", tend to get the answer right. When the questions were tricky and wrong-footed most people, then the rule was reversed. Take the example of "Which city has the larger population - Zurich or Bern?". Most people get this question wrong - they think it's Bern because that's the capital city, but the correct answer is Zurich. For questions like this, the most effective strategy is actually to always take the answer of the dyad partner who is least confident (doing so beats the average score of the individual with the overall best performance).
Reflecting on these new results, Ralph Hertwig at the University of Basel said there were two important, tantalising questions for future research - is it possible to categorise problems somehow into those that tend to wrong-foot the crowd, and those that don't? Similarly, are there any cues that can be used to recognise in advance whether a problem is of the kind that the crowd gets right (in which case it's best to go with the most confident team member) or wrong (if so, go with the least confident member)?
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Koriat, A. (2012). When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why? Science, 336 (6079), 360-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549
Further reading: The much maligned group brainstorm can aid the combining of ideas.
Three-person groups best for problem-solving.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Koriat, A. (2012) When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why?. Science, 336(6079), 360-362. DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549
- May 14, 2012
- 07:33 AM
- 325 views
Skilled liars make great lie detectors
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Frank Abagnale Jr, the confidence trickster whose escapades inspired the hit film "Catch Me If You Can", later became a security consultant for the FBI. There's intuitive logic to the agency's recruitment strategy - if you want to catch con artists, who better to spot them than a master con artist. But does this logic apply at a more basic level? Do skilled liars really make skilled lie detectors?
Surprisingly, psychologists haven't investigated this idea before. Dozens of studies have shown that most people are very poor at detecting lies, and other research has shown that the propensity to lie is partly inherited, but no-one's looked to see if good liars make good lie spotters.
Now Gordon Wright and his colleagues have done just that, recruiting 51 participants (27 women; mean age 25) to take part in a competitive group task. None of them had met before. Arranged in groups of 5 or 6, the participants took turns to spend about 20 seconds telling the group their position on a social issue, such as whether smoking should be allowed in public places or whether they were in favour of reality TV. Their true opinions had been reported in private to the researchers earlier. On each round, cards handed to the participants told them which opinion to share with the group and whether to tell the truth or lie. The task of the rest of the group was to judge whether the speaker was lying or not. Fifty pounds was up for grabs for the best liar and the best lie spotter.
The key finding was that participants whose lies were harder to spot tended to do better at spotting whether other participants were lying (the correlation was -0.35, with an effect size of 0.7, which is usually considered large). "As far as we are aware," the researchers said, "this study is the first to provide evidence that the capacity to detect lies and the ability to deceive others are associated."
This result begs the question - what underlying psychological processes grant a person skill at lying and lie spotting? It wasn't IQ or emotional intelligence - the researchers tested for that, but they don't yet know much more. "It is clear," they said, "that identification of the precise nature of the proposed 'deception-general' ability is an important aim for deception research, and that further research should be devoted to this question."
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Wright, G., Berry, C., and Bird, G. (2012). “You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00087
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Wright, G., Berry, C., & Bird, G. (2012) “You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00087
- May 14, 2012
- 05:33 AM
- 493 views
Be careful when comforting struggling students
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Previous research tells us that students who see intelligence and ability as fixed will tend to give up when confronted by a difficult problem, whereas those who see intelligence as growable will persevere. But how do teachers' beliefs about ability affect the way they perceive and respond to their students' performance?
A new investigation led by Aneeta Rattan, together with Carol Dweck, the doyenne of this area, and Catherine Good, began by asking 41 undergrads about their beliefs regarding maths ability (e.g. did they agree that "You have a certain amount of math intelligence and you can't really do much to change it"?). Asked to imagine they were a maths teacher responding to a student's initial poor maths exam result, those undergrads who endorsed this fixed "entity" theory of maths ability tended to jump to conclusions - assuming that their student had struggled because he or she lacked maths ability.
A second study was similar but went further and showed that undergrad participants who believed ability is fixed were more likely to say that they'd comfort their student for his or her poor maths ability (e.g. they said they'd "explain that not everyone has maths talent"), and that they'd pursue strategies such as setting the student less maths homework.
A third study elevated the realism levels a little by recruiting postgrads who worked as teachers or research demonstrators in their university departments. The same findings emerged - participants who saw maths ability as fixed were more likely (than those who saw ability as malleable) to make premature, ability-based assumptions about the reasons why a student was struggling, and they were more likely to respond by comforting the student for their poor ability and by pursuing counter-productive teaching strategies, such as encouraging the student's withdrawal from the subject.
So, what's it like for a struggling student to receive this kind of treatment from their teacher? A final study with 54 students asked them to imagine they'd struggled at an initial maths test. Some of them then received comforting feedback ("I want to assure you that I know you're a talented student in general, it's just the case that not everyone is a maths person. I'm going to give you some easier tasks ... etc"); others received constructive strategy tips (e.g "I'm going to call on you more in class and I want you to work with a maths tutor"); and others received neutral, control feedback. The key finding here was that the students who received the comforting feedback felt their teacher had low expectations for them and felt less encouraged and optimistic about their future prospects in the subject.
Rattan and her colleagues said their findings pointed to some important real-world implications. University teachers who form fixed-ability judgements about their students and who provide comfort may be well-intentioned, but they risk derailing their students' chances before they've even had the opportunity to get going. "As upsetting as poor performance may be to a student," the researchers concluded, "receiving comfort that is oriented toward helping them to accept their presumed lack of ability (rather than comfort that is oriented toward helping them to improve) may be even more disturbing."
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Rattan, A., Good, C., and Dweck, C. (2012). “It's ok — Not everyone can be good at math”: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (3), 731-737 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.012
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Rattan, A., Good, C., & Dweck, C. (2012) “It's ok — Not everyone can be good at math”: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(3), 731-737. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.012
- May 10, 2012
- 04:59 AM
- 332 views
Feeling chilly? Indulge in some nostalgia
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Over recent years a body of research has accumulated showing the psychological benefits of nostalgia. For example, reminiscing about the past can combat loneliness and off-set the discomfort of thinking about death. Now a team led by Xinyue Zhou has shown that nostalgia brings physical comforts too, making us feel warmer and increasing our tolerance to cold.
The researchers began their investigation by having 19 people keep a diary of their nostalgia activities for 30 consecutive days. It turned out that the participants indulged in more nostalgic reverie on colder days.
Next, the psychologists recruited 90 undergrads in China and sat some of them in a cold room (20 degrees Celsius), some in a room at a comfortable temperature (24 degrees), and some in a hot room (28 degrees). The students were asked to say how nostalgic they felt for things like "music" and "friends they'd known". The finding here was that students sat in the colder room tended to be more nostalgic (students in the comfortable and hot rooms didn't differ from each other).
A third study was conducted online with Dutch participants and involved them listening to songs known to provoke nostalgic feelings. The students who said the music made them feel nostalgic also tended to say that the music made them feel physically warmer. A fourth study with Chinese students found that those who were being nostalgic perceived the room they were in to be warmer.
Finally, the researchers instructed 64 Chinese undergrads to think either about an ordinary event or a nostalgic event from their past, and then they had to hold their hand in an iced bucket of water for as long as they could stand it. You guessed it - those students who indulged in nostalgia managed to hold their hand in the water for longer. Crucially, the link between nostalgia and greater pain tolerance wasn't mediated by differences in general levels of positive or negative emotional feelings, which suggests the effect had something to do with nostalgia specifically, not just being in a better mood.
Based on their findings, Zhou and her colleagues suggested that nostalgia serves a homeostatic function, allowing the mind to return to previously enjoyed states, including states of bodily comfort. Anecdotally, Zhou's team said this fits with reports from concentration camp survivors, that they coped with starvation by recalling delicious meals from the past. This homeostatic account is also complemented by neuroimaging evidence showing that the same brain region - the anterior insular cortex - is involved in representing the physiological condition of the body and in emotional awareness.
If nostalgia plays this kind of "as-if" function, allowing us to travel mentally to preferable states, it raises an interesting evolutionary question about motivation - the adaptive benefit of this homeostatic function is obvious, but taken too far, could it drift into complacence or submission?
The researchers called for more research to see if nostalgia can combat other forms of physical discomfort, besides low temperature. Such findings "may further establish nostalgia as a remarkable adaptation built on the human capacities to think temporally and self-reflectively," they said, "an adaptation that provides an exquisite mechanism to anchor the organism in prior felicitous states."
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Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Chen, X., and Vingerhoets, A. (2012). Heartwarming Memories: Nostalgia Maintains Physiological Comfort. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0027236
Related Digest items: Feeling lonely, have a bath.
A warm room makes people feel socially closer.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Chen, X., & Vingerhoets, A. (2012) Heartwarming Memories: Nostalgia Maintains Physiological Comfort. Emotion. DOI: 10.1037/a0027236
- May 8, 2012
- 04:42 AM
- 335 views
Young male drivers are more vulnerable than older men to sleepiness
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
One might imagine the vigour of youth would allow young men to shrug off the effects of a lack of sleep. In fact, a new study on driving performance documents that young men are particularly vulnerable to the effects of sleepiness, far more than older men.
Ashleigh Filtness and his colleagues recruited 20 healthy young men (average age 23) and 20 healthy older men (average age 67) to complete two early afternoon driving challenges in a full-size simulator. One of the monotonous two-hour drives was completed after a normal night's sleep, as confirmed by a wrist actimeter that records nocturnal movement. The other two-hour drive was performed after a previous night's sleep of just five hours. The participants weren't allowed to consume alcohol for 36 hours before either test.
The researchers were mainly interested in lane drifts, in which all four wheels of the car left the lane the driver was supposed to be in. As you'd expect, these increased in the later stages of both the drives. Both groups of men also drifted more on the drive that followed less sleep. But the key finding was that the young men were affected far more drastically by a lack of sleep. For instance, in the last 30 minutes of the drive that followed a five-hour sleep, the young men averaged just over six lane drifts compared with fewer than two by the older men. This difference was also reflected in other measures - the younger men reported feeling more sleepy after a lack of sleep than the older men and this was confirmed by their brainwave recordings.
The new findings are consistent with previous night time studies in simulators and on the road that showed young male and female participants struggled more than older participants to maintain safe driving performance. They also help make sense of road accident data that show sleep-related incidents predominantly involve young male drivers.
However there are some complications in interpreting the new research. For example, it's likely the older drivers had more driving experience. Are they less vulnerable to sleepiness or simply better drivers? The researchers state only that both groups were experienced, with all participants having driven for over two years, more than three hours per week. Another complication acknowledged by the researchers is that young men typically sleep for longer than older men. This means the five-hour sleep limit condition was a greater departure from routine for the younger men.
A problem not mentioned in the paper is the potential influence of "stereotype threat" - whereby a fear of fulfilling stereotypes can undermine the performance of stereotyped groups. A researcher was present in the driving simulator room and it's possible the young men were aware of the negative attitudes commonly felt towards young male drivers and were affected as a result. A final weakness is the use of a simulator - the participants would have known any errors were inconsequential.
"The greater vulnerability of [young men] ... to sleep restriction potentially puts them at a greater driving risk under these circumstances, and may help further explain the relatively high proportion of young men being responsible for serious sleep related road collisions," the researchers said.
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Filtness, A., Reyner, L., and Horne, J. (2012). Driver sleepiness—Comparisons between young and older men during a monotonous afternoon simulated drive. Biological Psychology, 89 (3), 580-583 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.01.002
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Filtness, A., Reyner, L., & Horne, J. (2012) Driver sleepiness—Comparisons between young and older men during a monotonous afternoon simulated drive. Biological Psychology, 89(3), 580-583. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.01.002
- May 3, 2012
- 03:32 PM
- 364 views
Strong reassurances about vaccines can backfire
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Unwarranted public anxiety about vaccinations can have deadly consequences. Unfortunately, the challenge of communicating health risks is full of psychological complexity. A new German study brings this home, showing how messages that deny vaccination health risks in unequivocal terms can backfire, actually increasing concern among parents.
Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse recruited 115 participants online (mean age 34; 34 per cent were male; 43 per cent had one or more children). The participants were asked to imagine they were a parent of an 8-month-old and to read an account of a fictitious illness Phyxolitis pulmonis. They were further told that their paediatrician had advised vaccinating their child against this condition. Next, the participants were presented with anti-vaccine statements that they'd ostensibly found on the internet (e.g. "Multiple vaccines overwhelm the infant's immune system"). Finally, they read statements of reassurance about the vaccine, which claimed any risks were low - half the participants read weak versions (e.g. "There is only sporadic evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system") and half read strong versions of these statements (e.g. "there is no evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system").
The key finding here was that participants who read the strong statements of reassurance actually reported greater perceptions of risk afterwards, and lower intentions to vaccinate their child. This effect was heightened among participants who had a preference for complementary medicine. Results didn't vary according to whether participants were a parent in real life or not.
A second study with a further 119 participants was similar but this time the source of the reassuring statements was varied, either being from a pharmaceutical company (untrusted) or from a government health department (a trusted source). Again, strong statements of reassurance backfired, increasing risk perception and reducing vaccination intentions, but only if those statements came from an untrusted source. Again, this paradoxical effect was stronger among participants who favoured complementary medicine.
This study can't reveal why the paradoxical effect occurs. However, one possibility proposed by Betsch and Sachse is that an extreme statement of no risk is more attention-grabbing, which only serves to highlight the possibility that risk is an issue. Another potential explanation is that people look for ways to combat claims they disagree with, and if those claims are stated more strongly then that encourages people to marshal even stronger counter-claims of their own.
The results have obvious implications for real-life risk communication. "Especially when organisations lack complete knowledge about how much trust the public puts in them, optimal risk negation is likely to profit from moderate rather than extreme formulations," the researchers said.
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Betsch, C., and Sachse, K. (2012). Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived Vaccination Risks. Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0027387
Previously on the Research Digest:
How to promote the MMR vaccine.
The psychological barriers facing MMR promotion campaigns.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Betsch, C., & Sachse, K. (2012) Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived Vaccination Risks. Health Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0027387
- May 2, 2012
- 04:24 AM
- 291 views
Who are you protecting when you praise a dud performance?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Most of us have done it - told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.
Some participants were told they'd be providing the feedback face-to-face, others were told their feedback would be provided anonymously, and a third group were told their ratings of the essay would not be fed back to the writer. Additionally, the participants answered questions about their own self-esteem and they were given information about the writer's self-esteem, which was presented as either low, medium or high.
The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we're judging. If people's motives were selfless then arguably the feedback provided should have been just as positive regardless of how it was delivered. In fact, students in the face-to-face condition provided the most positive feedback, but only if they had low self-esteem (specifically low self-liking, as opposed to low feelings of self competence). "If one accepts that people with relatively low self-esteem are expected to place greater emphasis on wanting to be perceived as likeable or attractive to others, then this lends support for the self-protection motive," said the researchers, led by Carla Jeffries. By contrast, undergrad participants with high self-esteem gave the same kind of feedback regardless of whether it was delivered anonymously, face-to-face, or not at all.
There was further evidence of a self-serving motive. Students with low self-esteem who were told their ratings would not be fed back to the writer tended to give particularly critical ratings - it's as if judging the essay harshly made them feel better about themselves. "A particularly harsh assessment creates a downward social comparison and, in turn, a gain for one's self-esteem," the researchers said.
The results did throw up some modest evidence of altruistic motives. Ratings by low self-esteem students were more generous in the anonymous condition versus the undelivered feedback condition. Seeing as their identity would be concealed in both cases, this suggests they gave inflated feedback in the anonymous condition purely to protect the feelings of the writer. However, this empathy only went so far - none of the participants moderated the tone of their feedback in line with the writer's self-esteem scores.
Jeffries and her team said their findings could have implications for organisations. For example, bolstering people's self-esteem prior to their rating another person's performance could help them to be more honest. "The data ... speak to the importance of developing cultures that encourage frank and fearless feedback giving and non-defensive feedback receiving," the researchers said. "Strong and positive feedback cultures might help overcome some of the fears of feedback-givers, and reduce the tendency for feedback to be adjusted as a function of who is watching."
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Jeffries, C., and Hornsey, M. (2012). Withholding negative feedback: Is it about protecting the self or protecting others? British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02098.x
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Jeffries, C., & Hornsey, M. (2012) Withholding negative feedback: Is it about protecting the self or protecting others?. British Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02098.x
- April 30, 2012
- 06:28 AM
- 290 views
People prefer the middle option
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item jumps up and down and calls out to you "Pick me, pick me!" Well, not literally, but in a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what's called the "Centre Stage effect" - our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.
Paul Rodway and his colleagues showed 100 participants (65 women) a questionnaire consisting of 17 questions, wherein each question featured five different pictures of the same item or type of item (e.g. five scenic views or five border terriers). Each set of five pictures was arranged in a horizontal row and the task for participants, depending on the question, was either to pick their most preferred or least preferred item. When picking out their favourite, the participants showed a clear preference for the central items; by contrast, no position bias was found when selecting their least favoured items.
The size of the preferential bias for central items was statistically significant but relatively modest in percentage terms. Central items were selected approximately 23 per cent of the time compared with the 20 per cent you'd expect if choices were random. The selection rate for items in other locations averaged below 20 per cent.
A second study was similar to the first, but this time each array of five items was arranged vertically - once again there was a bias for the central item. A final study used real objects - five pairs of identical white socks - pinned in a vertical array on a large piece of cardboard. Again, participants were asked to pick out their preferred option and again they showed a bias for the middle choice. Additionally, they showed a bias against picking the lower two options. The fact that the Centre Stage effect occurred for vertical arrays argues against explanations for the effect related to the brain's hemispheres biasing attention either to the left or right. Perhaps the cause has to do with cultural beliefs linking importance or prestige with being centrally located.
Rodway's team pondered the real-world implications of their findings. '"If item location influences preference during the millions of purchasing choices that occur every day, it will be exerting a substantial influence on consumer behaviour," they said. "Moreover, choices from a range of options are made in many other contexts (e.g. legal and occupational), and it remains to be investigated whether the central preference remains with other formats and whether it extends to other types of decision."
The new findings build on previous research showing that observers tended to overestimate the performance of quiz show contestants located in central positions, and tended to favour job candidates located centrally in a photograph.
Complicating matters, other research that's looked at items presented in a sequence or one at a time, has found that people show a bias towards items located in extreme positions in the sequence. For example, Wandi de Bruin in a 2005 study found that ice-skating competitors and Eurovision singers tended to receive higher scores if they performed later. On the other hand, if a choice array is perceived as a continuum - as in a questionnaire rating scale - there's evidence for a left-ward bias, perhaps caused by the dominance of the right hemisphere, which directs attention to the left-hand side of space.
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Rodway, P., Schepman, A., and Lambert, J. (2012). Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26 (2), 215-222 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1812
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Rodway, P., Schepman, A., & Lambert, J. (2012) Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26(2), 215-222. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1812
- April 26, 2012
- 03:58 AM
- 371 views
Secrets leave us physically encumbered
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
We talk metaphorically of secrets as great weights that must be carried through life like a heavy burden. Consistent with the ever-growing literature on embodied cognition, a new study shows how secrets affect perception and action, as if their keepers are encumbered, literally.
A first study used participants recruited online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk website. Those asked to write a recollection about a big secret rated a hill, depicted head-on, as being steeper than participants who wrote about a trivial secret. This matches previous research (pdf) showing that people who are physically encumbered tend to rate hills as steeper. By contrast, the big secret vs. small secret groups didn't differ on other measures, such as their rating of the sturdiness of a table.
Next, 36 undergrads threw a small beanbag at a target located just over two and a half meters away. Those who'd been asked to recall a meaningful secret threw their beanbag further, on average, than those asked to recall a trivial secret. It's as if they perceived the target to be further away, consistent with prior research showing that people who are physically encumbered tend to overestimate spatial distances.
In a penultimate study, forty participants who'd recently been unfaithful to their partners were recruited via Amazon. Those who said the secret of their infidelity was a burden (it bothered them, affected them and they thought about it a lot) tended to rate physical tasks, such as carrying shopping upstairs, as requiring more physical effort and energy than those who were unburdened by their infidelity. Ratings of non-physical tasks, by contrast, did not vary between the groups.
Finally, keeping a significant secret (in this case not revealing one's homosexuality whilst being video-interviewed) led gay male participants to be less likely to agree to help the researchers move some books; keeping a trivial secret (concealing one's extraversion) had no such effect.
Michael Slepian and his colleagues said their findings showed how carrying a secret leads to the experience of being weighed down. They don't think the findings can be explained by the mental effort of keeping a secret - for example, past research has shown that cognitive load prompts people to underestimate, not overestimate, physical distances. The researchers warned about the health implications of their findings. "We suggest that concealment ... leads to greater physical burden and perhaps eventually physical overexertion, exhaustion, and stress," they said.
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Slepian, M., Masicampo, E., Toosi, N., and Ambady, N. (2012). The Physical Burdens of Secrecy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0027598
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Slepian, M., Masicampo, E., Toosi, N., & Ambady, N. (2012) The Physical Burdens of Secrecy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. DOI: 10.1037/a0027598
- April 25, 2012
- 04:38 AM
- 209 views
Psychologists create non-believed memories in the laboratory
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Most of the time our autobiographical memories and beliefs match up - we remember last week's journey to a conference and believe that journey really took place. Other times, we believe an event happened - we know we travelled to that conference - but our memory for the event eludes us, perhaps because the trip was so boring or because we drank too much wine.
Recently, psychologists have begun to examine the rarer reverse scenario, in which we have what feels like a memory for an event, but we know (or believe) that the event never happened - we recall the conference journey but know we couldn't have made it. A recent survey (pdf) of over 1,500 undergrads found that nearly a quarter reported having a non-believed memory of this kind. Now Andrew Clark and his colleagues have gone further - for the first time actually provoking non-believed memories in the lab.
Twenty participants were invited to a psychology lab for what they thought was a study into mimicry. Each participant was filmed as they sat opposite and mimicked the actions of a researcher, including clapping their hands, rubbing the table, and clicking their fingers. Each time, the participant would watch passively and then mimic. Altogether 26 different actions were mimicked by each participant.
The clever bit came two days later when the participants were shown clips taken from the earlier footage. These clips showed them sitting passively, watching the researcher perform 12 different actions. In each case, the participant now had to say whether they remembered performing each action, and how strong their belief was that they'd performed each action. Crucially, two of the clips had been doctored - footage of the watching participant had been superimposed over a separate video of the researcher performing two actions that were never part of the original mimicry sessions. Because the participants had earlier mimicked all the actions that they'd witnessed, the doctored footage gave the strong impression that they must have mimicked those two new actions even though they hadn't. This set-up provided a powerful means of inducing false memories - 68 per cent of the participants' memory ratings for the fake actions suggested they "remembered" performing the actions. Their belief that they'd performed these actions was similar in strength to their memories.
Four hours later, the participants returned for a final session in which they were told about the trickery. They were then asked again to provide "memory" and "belief" ratings for the different actions. The take-home finding is that for 25 per cent of the fake actions, the participants now reported significantly stronger memory scores than belief scores - in other words, their (false) memory of having performed the fake actions persisted even though they often no longer believed they'd performed the actions.
Clark and his team said that their findings raised ethical questions about memory research: "To the extent that debriefing might not always completely 'undo' the effects of suggestive manipulation, we might question the ethics of inducing false memories in experimental participants. Is it ethical for participants to leave research labs with remnants of non-believed false memory content in the forefront of their minds?"
A question for future research on non-believed memories is whether belief is needed for the initial formation of the memories, even if that belief later falls away. "Or, alternatively," the researchers said, "can memories form completely in the absence of belief?".
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Clark, A., Nash, R., Fincham, G., and Mazzoni, G. (2012). Creating Non-Believed Memories for Recent Autobiographical Events. PLoS ONE, 7 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032998
Further reading: Charles Fernyhough's blog post on non-believed memories: "Remembering events that never happened."
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Clark, A., Nash, R., Fincham, G., & Mazzoni, G. (2012) Creating Non-Believed Memories for Recent Autobiographical Events. PLoS ONE, 7(3). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032998
- April 23, 2012
- 03:08 PM
- 304 views
Do psychology findings replicate outside the lab?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Most psychology research takes place under laboratory conditions allowing tight control over the exact interventions and procedures participants are exposed to. That makes for neater science but leaves the discipline vulnerable to claims that the results aren't relevant to real life where things are far messier. Now Gregory Mitchell at the University of Virginia has tested this very issue by poring over the literature looking for previously published meta-analyses that compared findings in the lab to the same issue addressed in a field experiment. His searches, which built on a similar 1999 study (pdf), led him to 82 meta-analyses from the last three decades, comprising 217 lab vs. field study comparisons.
Overall, Mitchell found that lab findings usually replicate in the real world (r = .71, where 1 would be a perfect match), but the devil is in the detail: some sub-disciplines in psychology fared much better than others; the size of the effects often differed greatly between lab and real world; and in a worrying number of cases, the real world results were actually in the opposite direction to the lab findings.
"Many small effects from the laboratory will turn out to be unreliable," Mitchell concluded, "and a surprising number of laboratory findings may turn out to be affirmatively misleading about the nature of relations among variables outside the laboratory."
Breaking the results down by sub-discipline, findings replicated from the lab most often in Industrial-Organisational Psychology (based on 72 comparisons) and least often in Developmental Psychology, where the three comparisons showed the average field result was actually in the opposite direction to the lab findings. The massive discrepancy in number of comparisons in these sub-disciplines makes it difficult and unfair to draw any definitive conclusions from this particular contrast. However, Social psychology had a similar number of comparisons (80) to Industrial Organisational Psych, yet produced a far lower replication rate (r = .53 vs. r = .89). Mitchell said further research is needed to find out why this might be.
There were also important differences in replication rates (from lab to field study) within different psychology sub-disciplines. For example, Industrial Organisational Psychology studies of performance evaluations translated less well from the lab compared with other topics of study in that discipline. Across subfields, lab studies of gender differences were particularly unlikely to translate to the real world. "We should recognise those domains of research that produce externally valid research," Mitchell said, "and we should learn from those domains to improve the generalisability of laboratory research in other domains."
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Mitchell, G. (2012). Revisiting Truth or Triviality: The External Validity of Research in the Psychological Laboratory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (2), 109-117 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611432343
Further reading: Gregory Mitchell contributed to The Psychologist's current opinion special on replication in psychology (free access).
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Mitchell, G. (2012) Revisiting Truth or Triviality: The External Validity of Research in the Psychological Laboratory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(2), 109-117. DOI: 10.1177/1745691611432343
- April 18, 2012
- 04:00 AM
- 351 views
Toddlers don't take the risk of entrapment seriously
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Infants can't tell us what they can and can't perceive in the world so psychologists make assumptions about this based on their behaviour. A new study by John Franchak and Karen Adolph at New York University exposes the limits of this approach, demonstrating that how babies choose to behave isn't based only on their perceptual abilities but also on their assessment of risk.
Thirty-two 17-month-old infants were allocated to one of two conditions - they either had to judge whether they could fit through a narrow gap (of varying widths) between two surfaces, or they had to judge whether they could fit though a narrow gap (of varying widths) between the edge of a table and a wall. Both conditions took place atop a table but the risk in the first case was getting stuck, whereas the risk in the second case was falling off the edge.
The toddlers in the first, "entrapment" condition frequently misjudged the situation and found themselves stuck on over 80 per cent of trials (this error rate showed no signs of diminishing over time). By contrast, toddlers in the "falling condition" were shrewder judges and only fell off on just 21 per cent of trials (don't worry, no babies were hurt in this research). This was the case even though one might imagine that the gap between two wall-like surfaces was easier to judge, from a perceptual point of view, than a gap between a wall and a drop, and despite the fact that infants in both conditions exhibited similar approach behaviours - lining their bodies up in advance and feeling the gaps with their hands.
Franchak and Adolph point out that if developmental psychologists relied on the "entrapment" condition, they would wrongly conclude that infants of this age have yet to develop the sensory and motor sophistication to judge gap size in relation to their own body size. In fact the results from the "falling" condition show that toddlers are capable of judging the relative size of a gap versus their own body. The discrepancy in performance between the two conditions is presumably because babies aren't that bothered about the risk of getting stuck - so they're fairly reckless about trying to squeeze through a too-small gap - but they are bothered about the risk of falling, so they take their size estimations along precipices far more seriously.
As an aside, the infants' histories of getting stuck or not in real life (for example, the researchers noted that one boy had previously managed to get his head stuck in a training potty) bore no relation to their performance in the task.
The researchers said their findings had theoretical implications - challenging previous assumptions made by other psychologists that the tendency for infants to get stuck in gaps meant they had poor body knowledge. The new results also have practical implications. "Falling and entrapment are two of the leading causes of accidental injury in infants," the researchers said. "The results suggest that even though experienced walking infants can perceive risks of falling and entrapment accurately, they may discount the potential danger of entrapment. Their willingness to squeeze themselves into possibly small openings may contribute to the prevalence of entrapment injuries."
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Franchak, J., and Adolph, K. (2012). What Infants Know and What They Do: Perceiving Possibilities for Walking Through Openings. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0027530
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Franchak, J., & Adolph, K. (2012) What Infants Know and What They Do: Perceiving Possibilities for Walking Through Openings. Developmental Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0027530
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