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Reports on the latest psychology research plus psych gossip and comment. Brought to you by the British Psychological Society.
BPS Research Digest
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- January 12, 2012
- 05:42 AM
- 307 views
Your memory of events is distorted within seconds
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Your memory automatically fills in the blanks in unfolding events
Memory isn't etched in neural stone. It's a creative process, sketched in sand. In one of the most dramatic demonstrations of this yet, Brent Strickland and Frank Keil have shown how people's memory for a video clip was distorted within seconds, to form a coherent episode "package". They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses "sophisticated compression routines ... for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory."
Fifty-eight uni students watched three types of 30-second video clip, each featuring a person kicking, throwing, putting or hitting a ball or shuttlecock. All videos were silent. One type of video ended with the consequences of the athletic action implied in the clip - for example, a football flying off into the distance. Another type lacked that final scene and ended instead with an irrelevant shot, for example of a linesman jogging down the line. The final video type was scrambled, with events unfolding in a jumbled order. Crucially, regardless of the video type, sometimes the moment of contact - for example, the kicker actually striking the ball - was shown and sometimes it wasn't.
After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn't featured in the video they'd just watched. Here's the main finding. Participants who watched the video type that climaxed with the ball (or shuttlecock etc) flying off into the distance were prone to saying they'd seen the causal moment of contact in the video, even when that particular image had in fact been missing.
In other words, because seeing the ball fly off implied that the kicker (or other protagonist) had struck the ball, the participants tended to invent a memory for having seen that causal action happen, even when they hadn't. This memory distortion happened within seconds, sometimes as soon as a second after the relevant part of the video had been seen.
This memory invention didn't happen for the videos that had an irrelevant ending, or that were scrambled. So memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence (e.g. a ball flying off into the distance) that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. In this case, the participants appeared to have "filled in" the missing moment of contact from the video, thus creating a causally coherent episode package for their memories. A similar level of memory invention didn't occur for other missing screen shots that had nothing to do with the implied causal action in the clip.
A second study replicated these memory distortion effects with 58 more participants and with new contexts involving kicking, throwing and bowling.
The researchers said their findings have obvious implications for crime scene witnesses. Imagine a witness sees a man wielding a gun, and imagine seconds later they also see a person nearby falling from a gunshot wound - these new results show how easily the mind of the witness could invent a memory of having seen the moment the trigger was actually pulled. "In some circumstances," the researchers said, "conceptual packaging can induce the perceiver to insert unseen information in order to fulfil structural requirements. This was the case in the present study."
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Strickland, B., and Keil, F. (2011). Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121 (3), 409-415 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.007
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Strickland, B., & Keil, F. (2011) Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121(3), 409-415. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.007
- July 4, 2012
- 05:10 AM
- 307 views
Married couples are happier when they commute in the same direction
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
What we do with our bodies can trigger metaphorical associations in our minds, having knock-on effects for perceptions and attitudes. For example, holding a warm drink can lead us to judge a person's character more favourably, presumably through activation of warmth-related personality metaphors. Washing our hands can make us feel less guilty, via activation of thoughts to do with purity. Most demonstrations of this kind have looked at immediate effects. A new study claims that physical actions that activate metaphors can also have long-lasting psychological implications. Specifically, Xun Huang and her colleagues found that couples are happier with their marriage if they commute in the same direction to work, as though it activates the metaphorical sense that they are heading in the same direction.
Huang's team surveyed 280 married adults in the USA (average age 33), via an online questionnaire, and they surveyed 139 commuting adults in Hong Kong (average age 42), face-to-face via interviews in the street. Other participants who'd didn't commute, or had a partner who didn't commute, were excluded. The participants thought they were taking part in a survey about the living conditions of married couples. They answered questions about their own and their partner's journey to work and about their martial satisfaction and their happiness with their spouse.
For both the USA and Hong Kong sample, there was a significant correlation (.20 and .35 respectively, where 1 would be a perfect match) between travelling in the same direction as one's spouse and marital satisfaction. This was true even after controlling for a range of other factors including years married, gender, income and between-partner differences in commuting time. Importantly, the association held regardless of how frequently partners left for work at the same time, so it doesn't seem to be related to spending time together.
Huang and her colleagues recognised that many potential confounds were still unaccounted for. Perhaps couples who travel to work in a similar direction are more likely to meet up for a drink in the evening, for instance. To rule out such effects, a lab experiment was conducted in Hong Kong with 80 undergrads who were strangers to each other and thought the study was about the effects of exercise on product evaluations. The students were arranged into pairs and after a brief meeting they were sent off to exercise in different rooms. Crucially, some of them headed off in the same direction, although sometimes via different routes, whilst other pairs headed in different directions. Supporting the survey of married couples, the researchers found that student partners who headed off in the same direction, even by different routes, subsequently rated each other more positively.
The researchers said their results show that "similarity in the direction of goal directed behaviour [commuting to work or walking to an experiment] can activate a mental representation that includes more general concepts of goal-directed activity (i.e. the pursuit of goals more generally)."
Past research on the effects of grounded cognition, they noted, "has normally been restricted to consideration of immediate reactions to bodily sensations such as carrying a heavy weight ... our work shows that the influence of embodiment can be much more enduring."
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Xun (Irene) Huang, Ping Dong, Xianchi Dai, & Robert S. Wyer Jr. (2012). Going my way? The benefits of travelling in the same direction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.021
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Xun (Irene) Huang, Ping Dong, Xianchi Dai, & Robert S. Wyer Jr. (2012) Going my way? The benefits of travelling in the same direction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.021
- April 23, 2012
- 03:08 PM
- 306 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
- August 27, 2012
- 04:08 AM
- 303 views
Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Gaga is unusual in sounding uptempo yet fresh
Have you heard older generations lamenting the way pop songs don't sound like they used to? There's a sense that the hits from yesteryear had an innocence and feel-good quality that's missing from today's pop offerings. Now Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous.
The researchers analysed the tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor) of the most popular 1,010 pop songs identified using year-end lists published by Billboard magazine in the USA from 1965 to 2009. Tempo was determined using the beats per minute of a song, and where this was ambiguous the researchers used the rate at which you'd clap along. The mode of the song was identified from its tonic chord - the three notes played together at the outset, in either minor or major. Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that's fast in minor, or vice versa.
Schellenberg and von Scheve found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There's also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs. The findings complement an analysis of pop lyrics from 1980-2007, published last year, that found a drop over time in references to social interactions and positive emotions, but an increase in angry and anti-social words.
Why has pop music changed like this? Schellenberg and von Scheve can only speculate. They point to the rise of consumerism and individualism, which produces a demand for more choice; increasing cultural and societal ambiguity (such as the erosion of traditional gender roles); as well as the desire among pop consumers to demonstrate distinctiveness and sophistication in their taste.
Unambiguously happy songs like Abba's Waterloo sound, to today's ears, "naive and slightly juvenile", the researchers noted. And whilst modern songs in a similar style, such as Aqua's Barbie Girl, can still enjoy huge commercial success, they're usually seen as a guilty pleasure and savaged by critics.
Schellenberg and von Scheve think emotional ambiguity in a song is a way for modern acts to convey their seriousness and complexity. Lady Gaga is highlighted as rare in her ability to produce up-tempo major-mode recordings, such as Born This Way, that "sound fresh while recalling or quoting popular music from an earlier time."
Other findings to emerge from the analysis were a general lengthening of songs, and a greater prevalence of female acts."Our study sheds light on links between long-term cultural change on a macro social scale and emotional expression, perception, and responding, at least in relation to music," the researchers concluded. "As such the findings improve our understanding of the individual in relation to society, and how culture is shaped by the emotional needs and preferences of individuals."
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E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Christian von Scheve (2012). Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts DOI: 10.1037/a0028024
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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E. Glenn Schellenberg, & Christian von Scheve. (2012) Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. DOI: 10.1037/a0028024
- March 13, 2012
- 05:34 AM
- 302 views
Thinking about our hourly wage stops us from smelling the roses
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from being able to enjoy those moments when we're not working. That's the implication of new research by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House. Once we think about our time in monetary terms, they say, any time not working becomes lost revenue. This makes us impatient to get back to work and stops us from savouring the moment.
In an initial study, fifty-three students at a Canadian University answered questions about how much they expected to work and earn in their first year after graduating. Crucially, half of them answered a further question about how that would translate into an hourly wage. Next, the students were given ten minutes free time to browse the web. The key finding is that the students who hadn't thought about their hourly wage were happier after the web browsing than they were before - they'd obviously made the most of the chance to surf the internet. By contrast, the students who'd thought about their post-graduation hourly wage were no happier after the web browsing than they were before. "Their experience of this leisure period lost some of its hedonic value and failed to bring about any improvement in their happiness," the researchers said.
A second study tested if thinking about the monetary value of time has this adverse effect because it makes us impatient. This time hundreds of participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a site for recruiting people to work on problems at their computers). The participants listened to 86 seconds of "the Flower Duet" from the opera Lakmé after answering some work-related questions, which either did or didn't involve thinking about their hourly pay. After the music, the participants who'd previously worked out their hourly rate for the past year were less happy than other participants. What's more, this difference in happiness was entirely mediated by their impatience. The participants who'd worked out their hourly rate tended to agree with statements like "I was impatient for the music to end" and to disagree with statements like "I felt the music was a relaxing break".
If thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from savouring the moment, what if we're compensated for that time? A final study tested this idea. Again, some participants worked out their hourly wage before listening to a short piece of music. However, this time some of them were given a small additional participation fee for the time spent listening to the music. With this payment, the participants who'd thought about their hourly wage were able to appreciate the music just as much as the other participants who hadn't thought about their hourly pay.
The researchers said these new results show how modern working practices could affect the way we choose to spend our free time and how much we're able to enjoy it. In particular, with more people in part-time, flexi-time and freelance roles, time more than ever is likely to be perceived as having a monetary value. "Thinking about time in terms of money is poised to affect our ability to smell the proverbial roses," the researchers concluded.
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DeVoe, S., and House, J. (2012). Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (2), 466-474 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.11.012
Further reading: Being paid by the hour changes the way we think about time.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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DeVoe, S., & House, J. (2012) Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses?. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(2), 466-474. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.11.012
- November 15, 2012
- 04:46 AM
- 302 views
The jokes that toddlers make
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Few sounds can be as heart-warming as a chuckling toddler. Often they're laughing at a joke you or someone else has performed, but what about their own attempts at humour? To find out, Elena Hoicka and Nameera Akhtar filmed 47 parent-child pairs (just five involved dads) playing for ten minutes with various toys. The kids were English-speaking and aged between 2 and 3 years.
Coding of the videos revealed 7 forms of humour performed by the toddlers: using objects in an unconventional way (e.g. brushing a pot); deliberately mislabelling things (e.g. holding a cat but saying "here's a fish"); making deliberate category errors (e.g. making a pig go "moo"); breaching taboos (e.g. spitting and saying "that's disgusting"); performing funny bodily actions (e.g. falling back and putting their legs in the air); tickling and chasing; and playing peekaboo.
There were signs of maturing humour abilities. The three-year-olds more often made conceptual humour than the two-year-olds, and they showed a trend towards more label-based humour. Two-year-olds depended predominantly on object-based humour. Moreover, whereas the two-year-olds were just as likely to copy or riff off their parent's jokes as to make their own original attempts at humour, the three-year-olds most often came up with original jokes.
There was also good evidence that the toddlers were being deliberately humorous and not just making mistakes. When engaged in a funny behaviour versus an unfunny act, they were four times as likely to look and laugh at their parent, twice as likely to laugh without looking, and three times as likely to smile and look. "Children only increased smiling in combination with looks to parents, indicating parents should share their humour," the researchers said.
An online survey of 113 British parents (9 dads) about their children's humour largely supported the observational data. The children in this sample included infants and so an extended timeline of humour-production was possible. Before one year, infants mainly produced humour through peekaboo; from one year they graduated onto chasing and tickling and funny body movements; from two years they started object-based, conceptual and taboo-based jokes; and from age three they started label-based jokes.
The researchers said their results showed: "toddlers produce novel and imitated humour, cue their humour, and produce a variety of humour types."
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Hoicka, E., and Akhtar, N. (2012). Early humour production. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (4), 586-603 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02075.x
--Further reading--
Little comedians.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Hoicka, E., & Akhtar, N. (2012) Early humour production. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(4), 586-603. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02075.x
- April 16, 2012
- 11:22 AM
- 301 views
People assume it's hillier up north
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Give people a choice of two cross-country routes to the same destination, one more northerly, the other more southerly, but both covering similar terrain, and they'll tend to favour the southerly route, and to anticipate it being quicker and easier going. According to a new study, this is true for people who've been tested from regions such as Southern New England in the USA, where the north is more mountainous, but it's true too for people who live in regions such as Sofia in Bulgaria, where the south is mountainous and the north is flat. Tad Brunyé and his colleagues think this spatial bias may have to do with our life-long association of north with up (with additional connotations of being uphill) and south as down - as is the convention on maps.
Brunyé's team tested this idea with a series of implicit association tasks. Student participants from Tufts University in Boston looked at pictures of landscapes and categorised them as either flat or mountainous. They also saw aerial shots of geographic areas and had to indicate whether a star on the picture was located north or south. The main finding here is that the participants were quicker to respond during experimental blocks when the same keyboard response key was used for answering "north" or "mountainous" (and another key was for answering "south" or "flat") compared to the contrasting situation where the same key was used for indicating "north" or "flat" (and another key was for "south" or "mountainous").
This finding suggests that the participants implicitly associated the concepts of "north" and "mountainous" in their minds. The same result was obtained when the images for north vs. south consisted of a large compass in the middle of the screen (with a large N in the centre denoting north or a large S denoting south). Although most Tufts students are from areas outside of Southern New England, where the university is based, the researchers also repeated the study with a student sample based in Ohio, where there are mountains to the south east. Again, despite living in an area where the south is more hilly, the same implicit association of north with hills and mountains was again exhibited by the students.
A final study measured participants' implicit associations and their more explicit associations. This latter task came in the form of a free association test - participants were given a word such as "north" or "south" and they had to write the first five words that came to mind (the researchers were interested to see if they'd mention words like "up" or "hilly"; past research has generally found that most people don't explicitly associate the north with a mountainous landscape). This study also involved the participants choosing between pairs of routes through similar terrain to the same destination - one more northerly, one more southerly. Once again the usual bias for southern routes was obtained (these were picked 62 per cent of the time); participants who showed a stronger implicit association of north with mountainous terrain, as revealed on the implicit association test, were more likely to pick the more southerly route.
"Given physical experiences associating upward mobility with relative difficulty, the north-south canonical axis becomes misperceived as indicative of physical effort," the researchers said. "Thus if participants misperceive northward areas as higher elevation (or 'uphill') then it logically follows that they would strategically avoid travelling through what they perceive as relatively demanding areas. Indeed, everyday colloquialisms such as heading down south or going up north may reflect how pervasive such associations are throughout cognition." The researchers added that their finding could have practical implications - for example, affecting driving behaviour within towns and cities and also over greater distances, which could be of interest to city planners and civil engineers.
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Tad T. Brunyé, Stephanie A. Gagnon, David Waller, et al (2012). Up north and down south: Implicit associations between topography and cardinal direction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : 10.1080/17470218.2012.663393
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Tad T. Brunyé, Stephanie A. Gagnon, David Waller, & et al. (2012) Up north and down south: Implicit associations between topography and cardinal direction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. info:/10.1080/17470218.2012.663393
- May 28, 2012
- 06:34 AM
- 300 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
- June 21, 2012
- 04:53 AM
- 300 views
The Alien awakened by a rubber hand
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
What happens if you administer a tactile illusion to a brain-damaged patient whose hand is out of their control? A team of researchers has done just that, figuring that illusions could offer new insights into complex neuropsychological disorders.
The patient in question was a 69-year-old lady whose left-sided stroke had left her with alien hand syndrome*. Most of the time her right hand was held in a clenched position that she couldn't open. Occasionally, accompanied by a mild electric sensation, it moved involuntarily, jerking, or even slapping her in the face.
Michael Schaefer and his colleagues at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg tested the lady on two sensorimotor illusions - the traditional rubber hand illusion and the lesser-known somatic rubber hand illusion. The first involved the patient placing one of her arms on the table-top, with the other underneath. A rubber arm was placed alongside her real arm on the table. The researcher then stroked the patient's hidden arm and the rubber arm in synchrony. When the illusion works it creates the sensation of feeling in the rubber arm, as if it's a part of the person's body. In fact the patient experienced no feeling in the rubber arm at all, regardless of whether it was her healthy arm or alien arm that was being stroked under the table. The rubber hand illusion doesn't work for everyone so this null finding is not particularly surprising.
Things got more interesting when the researchers tested their patient with the somatic rubber hand illusion (see picture, above). This procedure involved the rubber arm being placed between the patient's two real arms on a table-top. This time, the patient was blindfolded and the researcher (wearing plastic surgical gloves) picked up one of the patient's hands and used it to tap the rubber hand. At the same time, and in synchrony, the researcher tapped the patient's other hand. This procedure creates the strong illusion for the participant that they are touching their own hand rather than the rubber hand - a feeling that the patient said she experienced.
But something surprising also happened when the researchers tried out this illusion. Within moments, the patient's alien hand leapt up off the table and was grabbed by her healthy hand. She said she felt an electric sensation in her alien hand prior to it rousing. The illusory experience seemed to have awakened her alien hand. This effect occurred every time the procedure was repeated. But crucially it only happened when it was the patient's healthy hand that was used to tap the rubber hand, whilst the patient's alien hand was simultaneously tapped by the researcher (and not when the illusion was done the other way around). The awakening effect also disappeared when the procedure was repeated with the patient's blindfold removed, which is known to destroy the illusion.
All this suggests that it wasn't touching the alien hand per se that roused it, but rather it was the experience of the body illusion. Schaefer and his colleagues think that their patient has a disconnect between the anterior supplementary motor area (SMA) at the front of her brain (involved in inhibitory control) and other brain regions involved in movement. They reckon this impaired motor integration somehow interacted with the illusory feelings of body ownership triggered by the rubber hand trick. Perhaps, they said, the illusion further weakened the SMA's already compromised control of the alien hand.
"Although our results should be confirmed by further studies, we believe that the examination of experimental-induced illusions in patients with disorders of self-embodiment is promising and might help us to develop treatments for these diseases in the future."
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Michael Schaefera, Hans-Jochen Heinzea, and Imke Galazkya (2012). Waking up the alien hand: rubber hand illusion interacts with alien hand syndrome. Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2012.667132
Further reading: Sergio Della Sala on the bizarre ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’ and what it tells us about free will (Psychologist magazine article).
Simulating anarchic hand syndrome in the lab (earlier Digest report).
*Some experts prefer the term anarchic hand syndrome for this patient's condition, reserving the term alien hand syndrome for a distinct but related condition in which the patient no longer believes the hand is theirs. For consistency I decided to use the terminology adopted by the authors of this paper.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Michael Schaefera, Hans-Jochen Heinzea, & Imke Galazkya. (2012) Waking up the alien hand: rubber hand illusion interacts with alien hand syndrome. Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition. DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2012.667132
- July 16, 2012
- 04:16 AM
- 300 views
Just good friends? Attraction to opposite-sex friends is common but burdensome
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
"Every platonic friend I got is some woman I was trying to ****, I made a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the friend zone. 'Oh no, I'm in the friend zone!'" Chris Rock.
They were virtually unheard of for most of human history, but today, in many cultures, friendships between men and women are common place. Still, that niggling doubt never seems to go away - is the relationship really entirely platonic?
A new study by April Bleske-Rechek and her colleagues has investigated cross-sex friendships between heterosexual men and women through the prism of evolutionary theory. From a survey of 88 pairs of college students in cross-sex friendships (averaging two years' duration), the researchers found that: men felt more attraction to their female friend than vice versa; that men overestimated how much their friend was attracted to them; and that men's desire to date their female friend was unaffected by whether they (the men) were in a romantic relationship with someone else, whereas females tended to report less desire to date their male friend, if they (the women) were already in a romantic relationship. Male attraction for a female friend was undimmed by the fact their friend had a partner. By contrast women tended to report less attraction for male friends who had partners.
The participants gave their answers after being reassured they'd be kept anonymous, and after agreeing publicly with their friend not to discuss the study afterwards (I bet they stuck to that!).
The pattern of results makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective on mating strategies, the researchers said, whereby men have more to gain from short-term sexual encounters, whereas women, who invest more in their offspring (in terms of gestation and child-birth), are more selective.
What about the way people deal with their sexual desires for opposite-sex friends? For a second study, over a hundred heterosexual young men and women (average age 19), and an older sample of 142 men and women (average age 37), answered questions about their cross-sex friendships, including listing the costs and benefits. Among the younger sample, 38 per cent were in a (non-marital) romantic relationship; around 90 per cent of the older sample were married.
Again, the researchers said the findings made sense in terms of evolutionary theory. The older sample, most of whom were immersed in a serious long-term relationship, reported less attraction to their opposite-sex friends than the younger sample did. However, this wasn't case for the older single people - they reported just as much attraction to their opposite-sex friends as the younger participants.
Overall, attraction to an opposite-sex friend was more often seen as a burden rather than a benefit of the friendship. Averaged across both samples, attraction was listed as a cost or complication by 32 per cent of participants - five times more often than it was listed as a benefit or enhancement. For young women, and men and women in the older sample, more attraction to their closest friend was associated with feeling less satisfied with their romantic partner.
Zooming in on gender differences, men more often than women, listed attraction to their female friends as a benefit of the friendship, and they were less likely than women to list it as a cost.
"Our findings offer preliminary support for the proposal that men's and women's experiences in cross-sex friendship reflect their evolved mating strategies," Bleske-Rechek and her team concluded. "Attraction between cross-sex friends is common, and it is perceived more often as a burden than as a benefit." Looking ahead, the researchers said it would be interesting to investigate attraction between homosexual same-sex friends, and whether it's seen by them as a burden or benefit of the friendship.
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Bleske-Rechek A.,, Somers, E., Micke, C., Erickson, L., Matteson, L., Stocco, C., Schumacher, B., and Ritchie, L. (2012). Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1177/0265407512443611
Further reading, from the New York Times: "A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?"
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Bleske-Rechek A.,, Somers, E., Micke, C., Erickson, L., Matteson, L., Stocco, C., Schumacher, B., & . (2012) Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. DOI: 10.1177/0265407512443611
- January 20, 2012
- 09:10 AM
- 298 views
When wives believe they do an unfair share of the housework, everyone loses
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
More women than ever go out to work and yet surveys in Western countries show that wives continue to take on the lion's share of domestic chores.
A new study has quizzed 389 couples in Austria, Germany and Switzerland to build up the most comprehensive picture yet of how this uneven distribution of domestic chores is associated with men's and women's marital satisfaction.
These were all dual-earning couples with young children, with both spouses working at least 15 hours per week. Eighty-nine per cent of the couples were married. The average professional work load for women was 30.2 hours per week; for men it was 48.6 hours. Consistent with past surveys, the women in this sample took on nearly two thirds of the domestic chores.
The researchers Gerold Mikula, Bernhard Riederer and Otto Bodi asked their participants several things: what share of the chores they took on; whether they thought that was fair; whether they felt the way the share had been decided was fair (so-called "procedural justice"); how much conflict they experienced in their relationship; and how happy they were with their relationship. They threw all these factors into a statistical pot and looked to see how they related to each other.
First, Mikula and co focused only on the direct associations between housework distribution and women's and men's answers. For women, it wasn't the precise share of housework they did that was correlated with their experience of conflict and satisfaction, but rather how fair they thought that share was. Women who thought the division of household chores was unfair tended to experience more relationship conflict and less marital satisfaction. Women's sense of whether the decision process for housework had been fair also had its own independent link with levels of conflict. So feeling that they did an unfair amount of housework was bad enough, but conflict was even more likely when women felt the unfair arrangement had been arrived at unfairly.
Men, by contrast, seemed largely detached from the way housework was shared. There was no direct correlation between the division of housework and their reports of fairness. And even men who said the arrangement was unfair didn't tend to report more relationship conflict or less satisfaction - no doubt because the unfair arrangement was usually in their favour. In fact, the only direct association of housework distribution with men's answers, was that the greater share their female partners took on, the more satisfied they tended to be.
But here's where the picture gets more complicated. The researchers also looked at associations between participants' answers and their partners' reported sense of justice and experience of conflict and satisfaction. This suggested that men suffered when their female partners believed the housework arrangements were unfair. In fact, the negative correlates for men (more conflict, less satisfaction) of having a female partner who sensed injustice in the division of housework, outweighed the satisfaction associated with having a female partner who did lots of housework.
"The results support the proposition that it is not the balance of the division of labour itself but rather the subjective sense of justice associated with the division that matters primarily to the relationship satisfaction of the persons concerned," the researchers concluded. "Spouses should exchange their personal views and preferences in open discussions to arrive at an agreement that considers the wishes of both parties ... "
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MIKULA, G., RIEDERER, B., and BODI, O. (2011). Perceived justice in the division of domestic labor: Actor and partner effects. Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01385.x
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MIKULA, G., RIEDERER, B., & BODI, O. (2011) Perceived justice in the division of domestic labor: Actor and partner effects. Personal Relationships. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01385.x
- March 21, 2012
- 05:00 AM
- 296 views
Children as young as four express liberal views about gender
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Children as young as four already show some awareness that gender roles are flexible and that individual preferences are an acceptable reason for not conforming to gender norms. That's according to a study with 72 four- to eight-year-olds in the United States, completed by Clare Conry-Murray at Pennsylvania State University and Elliot Turiel at University California, Berkeley. Their findings contrast with a bias in the existing literature towards showing how young children have fixed ideas about gender - for example, studies have shown that four- to five-year-olds believe a child raised entirely by opposite-sex parents would nonetheless display all the traits and preferences of their own biological sex.
For the new research, Conry-Murray and Turiel asked the children a number a questions about parents' and children's choices in relation to toys, classes and clothing. Children of all ages showed an awareness of gender norms. For instance, asked whether girls or boys usually babysit more, 90 per cent of the children said that girls tended to do this more often. Similarly, without any other contextual information, most of the children tended to say that parents should make gender-normed choices - for example, that they should give a toy truck to their son rather than their daughter.
The children's more flexible attitudes first became apparent with a question that asked whether it was okay for gender norms to be reversed in another country - for example, Would it be OK in another country for boys to babysit more? Overall, most children (79 per cent) said this is okay, although there was a tendency for older children to be more accepting of this idea (60-65 per cent of 4-year-olds said it was OK, but this was not high enough to show they were doing anything other than just answering the question randomly).
Another question raised the issue of individual preferences - for instance, the children were asked who should go to the babysitting class - the son or daughter - if, say, the son loves babysitting? This time the children of all ages were more likely to say that the son should do the babysitting, although those aged 6 years and upwards were more likely to give this kind of answer than the 4- and 5-year-olds.
Two final types of question related to rules in the USA and in another country. For instance, "Joey's parents decide to send him to babysitting class but they learn the school forbids boys from doing the class - is that rule OK or not OK?", "What about the same rule in another country?" Most of the children (76 per cent) said this rule was not OK, even in another country. However, once again there was an age effect, with older children being more likely to condemn the rule, and the youngest children providing a mix of answers suggesting they could have been guessing.
"Gender norms are not uniformly judged as inflexible even at the youngest ages represented in this study," the researchers said. Furthermore, from the older children's open-ended explanations for their answers (the younger children tended not to articulate reasons), it was also clear that most of them did not see adherence to gender norms as morally obligatory. "Insofar as the older children invoked moral obligations it was to reject the regulation of gender-related activities," the researchers said.
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Conry-Murray, C., and Turiel, E. (2012). Jimmy’s Baby Doll and Jenny’s Truck: Young Children’s Reasoning About Gender Norms. Child Development, 83 (1), 146-158 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01696.x
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Conry-Murray, C., & Turiel, E. (2012) Jimmy’s Baby Doll and Jenny’s Truck: Young Children’s Reasoning About Gender Norms. Child Development, 83(1), 146-158. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01696.x
- May 2, 2012
- 04:24 AM
- 296 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
- January 27, 2012
- 01:13 PM
- 295 views
The life-long curse of an unpopular name
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Receiving an unpopular name can have lifelong consequences, according to new research
Making assumptions about someone based on their name is ridiculous. A few attention-seeking celebrities aside, most of us were given our names, rather than choosing them, so why should they be any indicator of the kind of person we are? And yet a new European study claims that people with unfashionable first names suffer from prejudice, with life-long implications for their self-esteem and well-being.
Jochen Gebauer and his team used data collected from the German eDarling dating website. With the consent of hundreds of registered users, they looked to see how people with unfashionable first names were treated.
In the first study, the researchers identified hundreds of users of the dating site who had names that had been rated positively (e.g. Alexander) or negatively (e.g. Kevin) by 500 teachers as part of a different project. The eDarling website sends emails to users suggesting contacts in the form of a person's name, age and region. Users specify their preferences for age and region, so a suggested contact's name is the only information daters can really use in choosing whether to purse a contact. The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin).
An obvious criticism is that this online dating is an artificial situation - perhaps in real life we use other information to overcome any potential prejudice we might have against unpopular names. However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What's more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site - as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they'd suffered in life.
A further two studies replicated these results with a wider range of names and different methods of measuring name popularity. For example, the final study simply used name frequency as a measure of popularity. This again showed that people with less popular names experienced more rejection in online dating and had lower self-esteem and other adverse outcomes. This was the case even if their name had once been popular. So it's not the case that the negative correlates of having an unpopular name can be traced back somehow to having had the kind of parents who choose unpopular names.
These new results echo earlier research in the USA that found racial prejudice could affect the way people are treated based on their name. Identical CVs were dramatically more likely to attract job interviews if they were attributed to a person with a White-sounding name than if they were attributed to a person with an African-American sounding name. However race prejudice wasn't the cause of the harmful correlates of unpopular names in the current study - nearly all the names were White-sounding. Aside from racial prejudice, what causes names to acquire negative connotations is for another research paper. No doubt the names of celebrities, fictional characters and other high profile people play a role.
"Seemingly benign factors, such as first names, add up in real life, gaining considerable collective power in predicting feeling, thought, and behaviour," the researchers said. "The results also highlight the self-presentational value of first names and underscore the importance for parents to choose positively valenced first names for their children."
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Gebauer, J., Leary, M., and Neberich, W. (2011). Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431644
Further reading from The Psychologist: The name game: We all have one, and it might determine our fate in a number of intriguing and bizarre ways. Nicholas Christenfeld and Britta Larsen investigate.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Gebauer, J., Leary, M., & Neberich, W. (2011) Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431644
- July 26, 2012
- 05:01 AM
- 295 views
Repression redux? It is possible to deliberately forget details from our past
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Can we wipe material from our memories at will? Evidence that we can would provide some support for Freud's idea of repression, although for him it was mainly a non-conscious process. Such evidence could also stir up the debate about so-called "recovered memories" of long-forgotten abuse. On a positive note, if it could be shown that we can deliberately forget memories, then this might have useful therapeutic implications for helping people with unwanted memories.
Before now, most research on the topic has followed what's known as a "think / no-think" paradigm, in which participants deliberately suppress their memory for certain words. They're shown a cue word and they deliberately don't think about the word it was previously paired with. This research has shown that people go on to have poorer memories for target words that they've deliberately suppressed. At least one study showed that this was especially the case for negatively valenced material; another found the opposite. These studies have provided a proof-of-principle, but deliberately forgetting a few words in a lab has little immediate relevance to real life.
Enter Saima Noreen and Malcolm MacLeod at the University of St Andrews, two researchers who have extended this line of research into the realm of autobiographical memory. They wanted to know if people could be trained forget, not word pairs, but actual memories from their lives.
Across two studies the researchers used words like "barbecue" to prompt dozens of never-been-depressed students to recall real episodes (shorter than a day) from their lives and to describe them in as much detail as possible in one minute. These episodes were then paired with the initial prompt word and another cue word of the participants' choosing (for example, I'm making this up, but "barbecue/uncle" might have been paired with the memory of the time that the participant's uncle dropped his beer on the barbecue and ruined all the food). This reminiscence procedure was followed 24 times. Afterwards, the researchers made sure, through further testing and rehearsal, that every student had a good memory for all 24 word pairs and their associated autobiographical memories.
Next came the "think / no think" training phase - the students were presented with 16 of the word pairs from earlier, and for some of them they had to describe once again the relevant autobiographical memory in detail for 60 seconds; for others they had to deliberately not think of the relevant memory for four seconds. This procedure was repeated 16 times for each word pair and memory (the remaining 8 pairs and their memories were not part of this process and acted as baseline material).
Finally came the crucial recall phase. The participants were presented with all 24 of the word pairs and this time, for every pair, they had to describe in as much detail as possible the relevant autobiographical memories that went with them. Here's the key finding - the students' memories of the autobiographical memories they suppressed earlier in the "think / no think" phase were less detailed than their baseline autobiographical memories (the ones that were neither thought about or suppressed in that earlier phase). Note, the gist of the previously suppressed memories was unaffected, but they had about 11 per cent less detail on average. In the first variation of this study, this loss of detail was particularly striking for more negative autobiographical memories, but in a follow-up study, the emotional tone of the memories made no difference.
"We have presented clear and novel evidence that systematic forgetting effects can emerge for autobiographical memories by training people to not think about them," the researchers said.
A few further details are worth noting - the participants were surveyed at the end of the studies about whether they'd deliberately withheld details from memories that they'd earlier been asked to suppress, in case they'd feigned forgetting to please the researchers. They said they hadn't, lending further support to the idea that real forgetting had taken place. Moreover, those participants who showed a stronger forgetting effect overall, also tended to be slower at recalling memories that had been suppressed, but which they nonetheless managed to remember in detail later. This is indicative of a partial inhibition of the memories, and lends further support to the central claim of the study.
Important issues for future research to address concern the longevity of the forgetting effect, and the consequences of repeated suppression training. From an applied perspective, Noreen and MacLeod said "an interesting possibility [is that] the kind of forgetting demonstrated in the current study may play a role in bringing about forgiveness and reconciliation through subtle changes in memory that may ultimately lead to changes in associated emotions."
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Noreen S, and Macleod MD (2012). It's All in the Detail: Intentional Forgetting of Autobiographical Memories Using the Autobiographical Think/No-Think Task. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition PMID: 22686849
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Noreen S, & Macleod MD. (2012) It's All in the Detail: Intentional Forgetting of Autobiographical Memories Using the Autobiographical Think/No-Think Task. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition. PMID: 22686849
- August 30, 2012
- 04:03 AM
- 295 views
How happiness campaigns could end up making us sadder
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Founded in 2010, the Action for Happiness movement states: "What we want for our society is as much happiness as is possible and, above all, as little misery". These aims are well-intentioned, but a new study shows public campaigns like this could have an ironic effect, actually making sad people feel sadder.
Brock Bastian and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of Australian and Japanese students and found that those people who believed more strongly that society expects us to try to be happy, also tended to evaluate their own negative emotions more negatively. In other words, believing that there's a cultural expectation to strive for happiness is associated with feeling sad about being sad. In turn, people who felt this societal expectation more keenly, also reported experiencing negative emotions more often and having poorer wellbeing (a fall-out that was mediated by these participants being more critical of their own negative emotions). Comparing across cultures, the overall pattern of results was present but weaker in Japan, where negative emotions are generally better tolerated.
These initial findings provided only a snapshot. To get a better sense of the causality of societal expectations, Bastian and his team conducted two further studies in which Australian participants were first primed with carefully prepared newspaper articles, and then prompted to feel negative emotion by reminiscing in writing about a negative event from their lives.
Reading a news article about research that claimed sadness is infectious or that sad people are disliked led participants to experience more negative emotion after they'd reminisced about a bad event in their past. It's as if a reminder of society's intolerance to negative emotion aggravated participants' own negative feelings. By contrast, reading an article that said sad people are accepted and liked, led participants to experience less negative emotion after the reminiscence exercise.
Results from the control condition in this study were particularly revealing. In this case participants were primed with a mundane article about fertiliser. They experienced just as much negative emotion after the reminiscence exercise as participants who'd read the article about sad people being disliked. This suggests the reminder about society's intolerance of negative emotions was unnecessary for aggravating the experience of sadness. "Social pressures appear to be highly normative and particularly so within Western cultures," the researchers said.
Bastian and his colleagues said their findings show how our beliefs about society's intolerance of negative emotions has downstream effects, changing how we experience our own emotions, "ironically aggravating those same emotions that are deemed to be socially undesirable or unacceptable."
"Attempts to promote the value of feeling good over the value of feeling bad by emphasising social norms for these emotions may therefore have the effect of making people feel bad more often," the researchers concluded.
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Bastian B, Kuppens P, Hornsey MJ, Park J, Koval P, and Uchida Y (2012). Feeling bad about being sad: the role of social expectancies in amplifying negative mood. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 12 (1), 69-80 PMID: 21787076
-Further reading- Other people may experience more misery than you realise.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Bastian B, Kuppens P, Hornsey MJ, Park J, Koval P, & Uchida Y. (2012) Feeling bad about being sad: the role of social expectancies in amplifying negative mood. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 12(1), 69-80. PMID: 21787076
- October 4, 2012
- 04:03 AM
- 292 views
Why do humans walk in circles?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
It's a trusted plot device of many a thriller. The lost protagonists stagger for hours through creepy forest only to end up back where they started. In fact the idea that humans walk in circles is no urban myth. This was confirmed by Jan Souman and colleagues in a 2009 study, in which participants walked for hours at night in a German forest and the Tunisian Sahara. But the question the remains - why?
Souman's team rejected past theories, including the idea that people have one leg that's stronger or longer than the other. If that were true you'd expect people to systematically veer off in the same direction, but their participants varied in their circling direction.
Now a team in France has made a bold attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. Emma Bestaven and her colleagues hired out a huge indoor exhibition space in Bordeaux (90m x 150m) and blindfolded their participants, thus ensuring that there was no way any environmental sounds or bumps on the ground could interfere with the results.
Another innovation was that the researchers used EMG to monitor the participants' muscle activity in their legs whilst they walked; they had them stand on a force plate to check how their balance was distributed; and they assessed their subjective sense of the vertical, via their placement of a vertical bar.
Given six attempts to walk in a straight line, the fifteen blindfolded participants (7 women) in fact frequently veered off in one direction or the other, just as expected based on past research. Half the time they deviated off to the left, 39 per cent of the time to the right, and the remainder of the walks they managed to go straight. Six of the participants always veered in the same direction, the others mixed it up. There was no evidence of participants getting straighter with each attempt, but a faster walking speed was associated with a straighter trajectory.
Many past theories for why humans walk in circles were ruled out - walking deviation was unrelated to hand, eye or leg dominance. The recordings of muscle activity drew a blank. But there was one clue. The participants' "centre of pressure" score obtained when they stood on the force plate, which reflects their postural balance, was correlated with how much they deviated from a straight line when they walked. In turn, this "centre of pressure" score was correlated with participants' subjective sense of a straight vertical line.
Taken together, Bestaven's team said this suggests that our propensity to walk in circles is related in some way to slight irregularities in the vestibular system. Located in inner ear, the vestibular system guides our balance and minor disturbances here could skew our sense of the direction of "straight ahead" just enough to make us go around in circles.
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Emma Bestaven, Etienne Guillaud, and Jean-René Cazalets (2012). Is “Circling” Behavior in Humans Related to Postural Asymmetry? PLoS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043861
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Emma Bestaven, Etienne Guillaud, & Jean-René Cazalets. (2012) Is “Circling” Behavior in Humans Related to Postural Asymmetry?. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043861
- April 30, 2012
- 06:28 AM
- 291 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
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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 12, 2012
- 04:00 AM
- 290 views
Dead plants encourage belief in global warming
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
In 2006, the Conservative party in the UK unveiled its new logo - a scribbled sketch of a healthy-looking oak tree. The image was intended in part to communicate the party's renewed dedication to environmental causes. A new study by French psychologist Nicolas Guéguen suggests that if the Conservatives want to help change people's attitudes towards the environment, they should consider adapting their logo to one of a dying tree. Why? Guéguen has shown that the presence of dead plants strengthens people's beliefs in global warming.
In the first of two studies, Guéguen had 60 participants fill out a questionnaire about current affairs, including four questions about global warming, such as: "It seems to me that the temperature is warmer now than in previous years." Crucially, half the participants filled out the questionnaire in a room in the presence of a 150cm tall ficus tree with luscious green leaves; the other participants in a room in the company of a dead ficus tree. The finding: participants in the dead tree condition expressed far stronger beliefs in global warming than the participants in the other group, whilst their answers to the remaining questions were no different.
In a follow-up study, Guéguen introduced a no-tree condition, to make sure that it's not the case that the presence of a healthy plant weakens beliefs about global warming. He also featured a condition with three dead or healthy plants - a ficus, a bonsai and a dracaena. The presence of healthy plants made no difference to global warming beliefs versus the no-plant control condition. Once again, however, the presence of a dead plant strengthened beliefs in global warming, and more dead plants meant even stronger such beliefs. No students in either study guessed the aims of the research.
Guéguen speculated that the sight of dead plants probably triggered in participants' minds concepts associated with global warming, such as heat and drought, without them being consciously aware of this effect. The new findings chime with earlier research showing how incidental circumstances influence people's belief in climate change - for example, people are more likely to say they believe in climate change on warmer days. A weakness of the study is that there's no mention of whether the female experimenter who dealt with the participants was blind to the aims of the research - might she have affected their results through her own behaviour?
Notwithstanding that issue, the study has obvious practical implications. Guéguen suggested that in public toilets, for example, the presence of plants without foliage could encourage less water consumption when washing one's hands (though that might harm hygiene initiatives!). More generally, Guéguen advised, "people who want to heighten public awareness on the topic [of global warming] could profitably use photographs or videos of dead plants, or plants without foliage, thus increasing the effectiveness of public awareness campaigns."
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Guéguen, N. (2012). Dead indoor plants strengthen belief in global warming. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 32 (2), 173-177 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2011.12.002
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Guéguen, N. (2012) Dead indoor plants strengthen belief in global warming. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 32(2), 173-177. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2011.12.002
- April 2, 2012
- 04:00 AM
- 290 views
Think less and become more conservative
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The less time or mental effort a person puts into thinking about an issue, the more likely they are to espouse a politically conservative perspective. That's according to a new study by Scott Eidelman and his team, who stress that their point is "not that conservatives rely on low effort thought" but that "low effort thinking promotes political conservatism".
Across four studies, the researchers examined the effects on political attitudes of four different ways of reducing mental effort. This included: surveying drinkers at varying degrees of intoxication at a local bar; allocating some participants to a dual-task condition where they had to keep track of auditory tones at the same time as registering their political attitudes; allocating some participants to a time-pressured situation, in which they had to rate their agreement with different political statements at fast as possible; and finally, giving some participants the simple instruction to respond to political statements without thinking too hard.
The results were consistent across the studies - being more drunk, being distracted by a secondary task, answering under time pressure and answering without thinking, all led participants to agree more strongly with politically conservative beliefs, such as "A first consideration of any society is the protection of property rights" and "Production and trade should be free of government interference." Agreement with liberal beliefs were either reduced or unaffected by the measures. The researchers checked and the effects they observed were not due to differences in the complexity of the statements used to measure political conservatism and liberalism, nor were they due to changes in mood or frustration associated with the interventions.
The finding that reduced mental effort encourages more conservative beliefs fits with prior research suggesting that attributions of personal responsibility (versus recognising the influence of situational factors), acceptance of hierarchy and preference for the status quo - all of which may be considered hallmarks of conservative belief - come naturally and automatically to most people, at least in western societies.
"Our findings suggest that conservative ways of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural," the researchers concluded. "Motivational factors are crucial determinants of ideology, aiding or correcting initial responses depending on one's goals, beliefs, and values. Our perspective suggests that these initial and uncorrected responses lean conservative."
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Eidelman, S., Crandall, C., Goodman, J., and Blanchar, J. (2012). Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Eidelman, S., Crandall, C., Goodman, J., & Blanchar, J. (2012) Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
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