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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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- December 20, 2010
- 04:55 AM
- 462 views
The benefits of thinking about your ancestors
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Previously, psychologists have shown that thinking about our own mortality - 'where we're going' - prompts us to shore up our cultural world view and engage in self-esteem boosting activities. Little researched until now, by contrast, are the psychological effects of thinking about where we came from - our ancestors.
Anecdotally, there's reason to believe that such thoughts are beneficial. Why else the public fascination with genealogy and programmes like the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? Now Peter Fischer and his colleagues at the Universities of Graz, Berlin and Munich have shown that thinking about our ancestors boosts our performance on intelligence tests - what they've dubbed 'the ancestor effect'.
'Normally, our ancestors managed to overcome a multitude of personal and society problems, such as severe illnesses, wars, loss of loved ones or severe economic declines,' the researchers said. 'So, when we think about them, we are reminded that humans who are genetically similar to us can successfully overcome a multitude of problems and adversities.'
An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.
Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers - what the researchers called having a 'promotion orientation'.
These benefits weren't displayed by students in control conditions that involved writing about themselves or about close friends. Moreover, the ancestor effect exerted its benefit even when students were asked to think about negative aspects of their ancestors.
'We showed that an easy reminder about our ancestors can significantly increase intellectual performance,' the researchers said. 'Hence, whenever people are in a situation where intellectual performance is extraordinarily important, for example in exams or job interviews, they have an easy technique to increase their success.'
Fischer and his colleagues emphasised their research is at an exploratory phase. Future work is needed to find out what other benefits thinking of ancestors might have, and also to uncover other possible mediating factors, which they speculated might have to do with 'processes of social identity, family cohesion, self-regulation or norm activation elicited by increased ancestor salience.'
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Fischer, P., Sauer, A., Vogrincic, C., and Weisweiler, S. (2010). The ancestor effect: Thinking about our genetic origin enhances intellectual performance. European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.778
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Fischer, P., Sauer, A., Vogrincic, C., & Weisweiler, S. (2010) The ancestor effect: Thinking about our genetic origin enhances intellectual performance. European Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.778
- April 2, 2010
- 03:06 AM
- 459 views
Milgram's personal archive reveals how he created the 'strongest obedience situation'
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Stanley Milgram's 1960s obedience to authority experiments, in which a majority of participants applied an apparently fatal electric shock to an innocent 'learner', are probably the most famous in psychology, and their findings still appall and intrigue to this day. Now, in a hunt for fresh clues as to why ordinary people were so ready to harm another, Nestar Russell, at Victoria University of Wellington, has reviewed Milgram's personal notes and project applications, which are housed at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.Milgram trained under Solomon Asch, author of the famous conformity experiments, and the obedience project was originally conceived as an extension of Asch's work. Milgram was going to see how the behaviour of a group of cooperating participants (actually confederates working for the researcher) influenced the naive participants' willingness to harm another. A condition in which single participants followed the experimenter's orders on their own was planned as a mere control condition.It was during Milgram's extensive pilot work that he discovered the remarkable willingness for participants to obey instructions, without the need for group coercion, thus changing the direction of his project. The focus shifted to lone participants and Milgram began a process of trial and error pilot work to identify the perfect conditions for inducing obedience - what he described as 'the strongest obedience situation'. Early on, Milgram recognised the need for an acceptable rationale for harming another and so he invented the cover story that the experiment was about using punishment to improve learning. To counter participants' reluctance to harm an innocent person, Milgram also devised several other 'strain resolving mechanisms'. This included replacing the final shock level label 'LETHAL' with the more ambiguous 'XXX'; removing a Nazi-sounding 'pledge to obey' from the experiment instructions; and creating physical distance between the participants and the innocent, to-be-electrocuted learner.In fact, this latter factor worked too well. When Milgram removed any sight or sound of the learner, 'virtually all' participants showed a willingness to inflict lethal harm. Milgram realised this near-total obedience was counter-productive and would prevent his paradigm from 'scaling obedient tendencies'. For his first official experiment he therefore settled on auditory feedback only, in the form of the learner banging on the wall in distress.Another 'strain resolving mechanism' that Milgram devised included increasing the number of levels on the shock generator. This allowed for exploitation of the 'foot in the door' persuasion effect whereby people are more likely to cooperate once they have already agreed to a less significant request - a kind of piecemeal compliance.Milgram was also careful about the actors he chose to play the part of experimenter and learner. Though both non-professionals, the man acting as learner was chosen because he was 'mild and submissive; not at all academic' and a 'perfect victim', whilst the man playing the experimenter was 'stern' and 'intellectual looking'. Finally, Milgram was careful to plan things so that the 'experimenter', whenever challenged, replied that he was responsible for anything that happens to the learner. Taken altogether, Russell's new analysis shows how Milgram used ad hoc trial and error pilot testing to hone his methodology and ensure his first official obedience experiment achieved such a high obedience rate (of 65 per cent). 'Knowing step-by-step how Milgram developed this result may better arm theorists interested in untangling this still enigmatic question of why so many participants inflicted every shock,' Russell said. _________________________________Charles, N. (2010). Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: Origins and early evolution. British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1348/014466610X492205 [Open Access]
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Charles, N. (2010) Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: Origins and early evolution. British Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1348/014466610X492205
- December 22, 2011
- 04:52 PM
- 441 views
How our collective memory of 1066 could be souring Anglo-French relations
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Anglo-Saxon troops confront the invaders
No doubt you've noticed that the Entente Cordiale has been looking a little strained lately. That's mostly due to contemporary European politics and economics. Isn't it? We can't blame 1066. Can we?
In fact, British attitudes towards the French today probably aren't helped by memories and myths surrounding the Norman Conquest. This may seem like an odd claim, but a timely and intriguing new study focuses on the Norman Conquest of Britain as an example of a "distant memory" that could be affecting contemporary attitudes towards the French specifically, and towards immigrants more generally. Where psychologists usually study short-term or autobiographical memory in individuals, this study is an academic investigation of our collective or cultural memory.
Siobhan Brownlie's data comes from two main sources: a search of Norman Conquest mentions in ten British newspapers between 2005 and 2008 (she found 807 relevant articles) and a survey of 2,179 members of the UK population.
Our collective memory of 1066 is salient - 79 per cent of survey participants said the conquest was important - but it is also distorted by mythology. For example, many of us identity with the pre-invasion "Anglo-Saxon" population (DNA research exposes the fallacy of this belief), yet paradoxically we also see the Norman invasion and Norman buildings as part of our collective British identity. Many of us (18 per cent in the survey) see the Norman invaders as French, yet Normandy at the time was an independent territory with a distinct identity.
Unlike recent trauma memories, which are overwhelmingly negative, Brownlie said the emotional quality of distant memories, even for violent events, is far more flexible and varied. Forty-nine per cent of those surveyed had a neutral attitude towards the Norman invasion. Newspaper coverage also demonstrated ambivalence. Sometimes the Conquest was portrayed negatively, alongside other violent dates; and right-wing papers implied we shouldn't lose control of immigration as we did in 1066. Yet other times, 1066 was portrayed proudly as a foundation date of British identity.
What about the impact on contemporary attitudes? Of those survey participants (6 per cent) who had a negative attitude towards the Norman Conquest, 25 per cent said this contributed to their negative feelings towards the French today. Brownlie acknowledged this seems to suggest that the influence of 1066-attitudes on contemporary views is a "marginal phenomenon". However, she argued that those raw stats expose only the extent to which the influence is consciously recognised.
From a negative perspective, Brownlie sees echoes of the Norman conquest in British National Party literature. Where medieval chroniclers of the Conquest wrote about England becoming a "dwelling-place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood," the BNP literature says similarly: "The white working class has been abandoned, replaced, and displaced by a new ethnic electoral power base."
But memories of the Norman Conquest can also be invoked for positive symbolism. The monument at the British war cemetery in Bayeux says in Latin: "We who were conquered by William have liberated the homeland of the conqueror" (again we find the myths about our Anglo-Saxon roots and the Frenchness of the Normans, but this time in a positive message).
"Old enemies can become friends and allies," Brownlie writes. "This kind of message with specific reference to the Norman Conquest is found in friendly political speeches by French and British politicians and dignitaries ... ".
"In sum," Brownlie concludes, "from the BNP manifesto to the Second World War British cemetery in Bayeux, the study shows that memory of the distant past matters today, in profound and sometimes surprising ways."
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Brownlie, S. (2011). Does memory of the distant past matter? Remediating the Norman Conquest. Memory Studies DOI: 10.1177/1750698011426358
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Brownlie, S. (2011) Does memory of the distant past matter? Remediating the Norman Conquest. Memory Studies. DOI: 10.1177/1750698011426358
- September 27, 2010
- 04:52 AM
- 436 views
Power leads us to dehumanise others
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
'How can you not feel sorry about people who have died? I mean you would be inhuman if you didn't think that,' former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking to Andrew Marr on the BBC.Think how terrible you'd feel if a decision you made led to the death of another person. How then does a political leader cope with the burden of making decisions which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands? According to a new journal article, they cope through dehumanising those over whom they have power. By this account, dehumanising - seeing others as less than human - isn't always a bad thing. It serves a function, allowing leaders and certain professionals, such as doctors, to cope with the decisions they have to make.
Joris Lammers and Diederik Stapel had 102 student participants complete a measure of their sense of power (including items like 'to what degree does your opinion typically affect other people's opinions?'). Afterwards they were asked to read about a fictional, poor, South-American-sounding country called Aurelia and rate its inhabitants. Those who scored more highly on the power scale subsequently showed more evidence of dehumanising the inhabitants of Aurelia - for example, rating them as less civilised and more childish.
Next, the researchers primed some student participants to feel more powerful by having them write about an occasion when they had had power over an another person or persons. Those primed this way were subsequently more likely than controls (who wrote about a supermarket visit) to say they would back a plan to move Aurelians living in slums to an undeveloped part of their country, against their will if necessary. What's more, the participants primed to feel powerful were were more likely to show evidence of dehumanising the Aurelians when asked to rate them on factors like civility and childishness - an association largely mediated by their decision about the planned eviction.
In a final study, Lammers and Stapel had 50 student participants role-play the position of senior surgeon, junior surgeon or nurse before making a treatment decision about their fictional patient - a 56-year-old man with an abdominal growth. Those participants role-playing a more powerful position were more likely to opt for the painful but more effective of two treatment options. Moreover, the participants role-playing the senior surgeon role were more likely to show evidence of dehumanising the patient in a 'mechanistic' fashion - that is, rating him as more passive and less sensitive. The association between seniority of role and dehumanising was largely mediated by the decision to opt for the more painful treatment.
'By treating other people as objects or tools, the emotional consequences of the powerful people's actions are downplayed and become irrelevant,' the researchers said. 'Although this can lead people to abuse others, it may also facilitate the powerful in making tough decisions. ... Without dehumanising they would be overcome by the pain and suffering that result from their decisions.'
Lammeres and Stapel acknowledge, however, that the link between power and dehumanising wasn't entirely mediated by the making of tough decisions. 'We interpret this as evidence that power can also increase dehumanisation for reasons other than to justify decisions,' they said, before adding that more research is needed to explore what these other factors are.
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Lammers, J., and Stapel, D. (2010). Power increases dehumanization. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations DOI: 10.1177/1368430210370042
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Lammers, J., & Stapel, D. (2010) Power increases dehumanization. Group Processes . DOI: 10.1177/1368430210370042
- December 13, 2011
- 10:33 AM
- 436 views
Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
To focus on details or the whole? This is one of the major ways that people differ in their style of mental processing. Past research has shown that people on the autism spectrum tend to focus more on details. Other studies reveal cross-cultural differences. People from collectivist cultures like Japan show a bias for focusing more on the bigger picture, known as "global processing", whilst citizens in individualist cultures like Britain show a comparatively greater bias for detail or "local processing". Now a study, led by Serge Caparos at Goldsmiths, of a remote African society, makes the case that this cultural difference is caused, not so much by degrees of collectivism or individualism, but rather by exposure to varying levels of urbanisation.
Caparos and his team used two kinds of stimuli presented on-screen to measure processing bias. The first is known as the Ebbinghaus illusion, in which the perceived size of a central circle is affected by the relative size of the circles surrounding it. A circle surrounded by bigger circles will generally be perceived as smaller, especially by people with a bias towards more global processing.
The second stimuli involved large letters comprised of little letters or shapes. Participants had to make a similarity judgement - for example, they were presented with a large X made up of little x's and had to say whether it was more similar to a large circle made up of little x's or a large X made up of little squares. People with a bias towards global processing would be expected to say the two large X's are more similar.
To gauge the effect of urbanisation, the researchers tested dozens of people from the remote Himba society of Namibia, as well as dozens of undergrads from Japan and Britain. Crucially, some of the Himba lived traditionally in village huts and homesteads whereas others had moved to, and lived for several years in, Opuwo, the Himba's only permanent, urban settlement. Also, some of the traditional Himba had visited Opuwo, either once, twice or three times.
The Japanese were more sensitive to the Ebbinghaus illusion than the Brits (indicative of a greater global processing bias, consistent with past research); the Brits, in turn, were more sensitive to it than the traditional Himba. Critically, though, the urban Himba were just as sensitive to the illusion as the British. Visits to the town Opuwo made no difference to the performance of the traditional Himba on this task.
On the similarity judgement task, the Japanese and Brits showed the most global choices, more than both groups of Himba. However, the urban Himba made more global choices than the traditional Himba and, moreover, global choices were made more often by traditional Himba who'd visited the town than those who hadn't. Indeed, just two visits to Opuwo increased global choices by ten per cent.
Age and levels of schooling made no difference to any of these results and past research has confirmed that the Himba are unfazed by testing with a computer monitor.
The more established theory for cross-cultural differences in local/global processing bias would predict that the Himba should show even more of a global processing bias than the Japanese, given the highly collectivist nature of their society. Also, this social orientation account would predict that experience of more individualistic urban living should lead to more local processing bias, not the greater global processing that was observed.
"Our proposal," the researchers said, "is that exposure to the urban environment investigated here introduced visual clutter with consequent changes in global/local processing." Their claim tallies with past research showing the opposite effect - that exposing townies to natural environments increases their bias for details.
"Further research will need to determine the processes by which cluttered visual input and/or other aspects of the urban environment come to change perceptual foci of interest in the dramatic way observed here," the researchers concluded._________________________________
Caparos, S., Ahmed, L., Bremner, A., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K., & Davidoff, J. (2012). Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture Cognition, 122 (1), 80-85 DOI: ... Read more »
Caparos, S., Ahmed, L., Bremner, A., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K., & Davidoff, J. (2012) Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture. Cognition, 122(1), 80-85. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.08.013
- February 1, 2012
- 04:36 AM
- 436 views
When your hands are tied, your eyes are tied up too
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Our eyes and hands operate in wonderful balletic synchrony. When we reach for an object, our eyes jump first, grabbing our intended target visually. Something similar also happens when we watch another person reaching. Our eyes jump ahead to their intended target, as if we were making the same grasping movement ourselves.
In an intriguing new study, Ettore Ambrosini and his team tested whether these anticipatory, vicarious eye movements still occur if our hands are tied up, literally. The researchers reasoned that watching another person's reaching movement triggers the same motor programme in our own brain and it's this programme that guides our anticipatory eye movements. But if our hands are tied, they predicted, the motor programme will stall and the eye movements won't occur so much.
Fifteen participants had their eye movements recorded whilst they watched short videos of a man reaching for one of two tomatoes. Sometimes the man clenched his fist and merely touched one of the tomatoes. This fist hand-shape doesn't provide much predictive information about the kind of movement that's being planned and so participants weren't expected to show much anticipatory gaze behaviour.
In other videos, the man either made a precise, preparatory grasping shape with his fingers, as if he were going to pick up the small tomato, which is what he then did; or he made a whole-hand grasp shape, as if he were reaching for the larger tomato, which is what he went on to do. These two hand-shapes provide clues as to the reaching movement that's underway and were expected to trigger more vicarious, anticipatory eye movements in the participants.
So what actually happened? The man's hand-shapes had just the effect that the researchers predicted. When he formed a precision-shape with his fingers, or a whole-hand grabbing shape, the participants tended to glance ahead towards his intended target, more often and sooner than they did when the man formed a fist. Crucially - and this is the intriguing result - this proactive, vicarious looking behaviour was significantly diminished when the participants had their hands tied behind their backs compared with when their hands were loose in front of them. Having their hands tied seemed to somehow tie up their eyes too.
"... having tied or somehow constrained hands does not allow one to take full advantage of specific motor cues, if any, to grab [with the eyes] the target of the observed action," the researchers said. "This suggests that actions of others are processed most efficiently when we are specifically able to perform the same actions."
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Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., and Costantini, M. (2011). Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance DOI: 10.1037/a0026570
Further reading: Armchair experts have their limits.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., & Costantini, M. (2011) Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. DOI: 10.1037/a0026570
- November 29, 2011
- 04:26 AM
- 429 views
How to make the ceiling of your room seem higher
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
If you've ever witnessed would-be buyers looking around a house, you'll have noticed their observations about each room are usually limited to: "hmm, it's a good size" or "hmm, it's rather small". Little wonder then that home-improvers are so often fixated on making their rooms appear as spacious as possible. Design lore will tell them that to do so, they should paint their ceilings as light as possible, and in particular make the ceiling lighter than the walls. This contrast between ceilings and walls, so the advice goes, will increase the perceived room height. Does it really?
The answer, until recently, would have remained elusive. Interior design and architecture are strangely disconnected from psychology research. But a new study by Daniel Oberfeld and his team has defied this tradition. Across two experiments they had 32 participants don 3-D glasses and use a sliding scale to judge the ceiling height of dozens of virtual rooms. The rooms were empty and the colours were in shades of grey so that only lightness was varied. In particular, the ceiling, walls and floor were varied to be either low, medium or high in lightness. The depth (6m) and width (4.5m) of the rooms were fixed, whilst the actual ceiling height varied between 2.9 to 3.1m.
Increasing the lightness of the ceiling did increase its perceived height, so that aspect of design lore was supported. However, contrary to the traditional advice, the rooms also appeared higher when the walls were lighter. Moreover, the effect of ceiling lightness and wall lightness was additive. So the contrast effect endorsed by traditional design lore was refuted. Floor lightness made no difference to estimates of ceiling height, so it can't be overall room lightness that's crucial, but only the combination of wall and ceiling lightness.
Oberfeld and his colleagues said that practical guidelines for increasing perceived room height should be modified in light of their findings. "A rule of thumb consistent with our data," they wrote, "would be: 'If you intend to make the room appear higher, paint both the ceiling and the walls in a light colour. You are free to choose the colour of the floor because it has no effect on the perceived height."
From a theoretical perspective the new results are somewhat puzzling. Traditional research in psychophysics has shown that brighter objects usually appear closer. If people judge the height of a room by estimating the distance between their eyes and the ceiling, you'd think a lighter ceiling would appear lower. The present results suggest people must use some other means to judge ceiling height. Another possibility is that people look at the angles in the corner of the room, where the walls meet the ceiling. Perhaps increased lightness alters the angles via a geometric illusion to make the room seem taller. No, that isn't it either: Oberfeld's team said ceiling and wall lightness should have opposite effects on those crucial angles, which is inconsistent with the finding that both led to an increase in perceived height.
So, thanks to this research, we now know how to make our rooms seem higher, but we don't yet know why the technique works!
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Oberfeld, D., Hecht, H., and Gamer, M. (2011). Surface lightness influences perceived room height. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63 (10), 1999-2011 DOI: 10.1080/17470211003646161
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Oberfeld, D., Hecht, H., & Gamer, M. (2010) Surface lightness influences perceived room height. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(10), 1999-2011. DOI: 10.1080/17470211003646161
- December 15, 2011
- 04:51 AM
- 425 views
Inverse zombies studied using anaesthesia
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Hospital medicine takes a pretty crude approach to consciousness. You're considered mentally AWOL if you don't respond to simple commands or physical prodding. But studies of post-operative patients have found that many of them recall having dreamt during anaesthesia. And in some disturbing cases they've even felt pain or heard the surgeons talking. This suggests that it's possible to be outwardly dead to the world, but conscious inside (locked-in patients and imaging studies of brain-injured patients in a persistent vegetative state also imply the same thing). Researchers have nicknamed people in this state "inverse zombies" - a play on the standard philosophical zombie concept, in which a person may appear to be outwardly conscious, but is in fact, dead inside.
A problem with much of the research into "inverse zombies" is that it's been conducted opportunistically in hospitals. The experimental set-up is messy, the patients have a variety of health complications, and they've often been given a cocktail of anaesthetic drugs. These studies have found rates of awareness during anaesthesia at around 0.023 to 1 per cent and rates of anaesthesia dreaming at rates of 6 to 53 per cent.
Now Valdas Noreika and his collaborators have performed a carefully controlled lab study of subjective (or "phenomenal") consciousness during anaesthesia, with the help of 40 healthy male university students. These brave souls were given progressively higher doses of one of four different anaesthetic drugs: dexmedetomidine; propofol (the drug that tragically killed Michael Jackson, who was using it as a sleeping aid); sevoflurane; and xenon. Dexmedetomidine and propofol are given intravenously; the other two are inhaled.
After the doping had begun, the researchers gave the participants the verbal command "Open your eyes!" at five minute intervals. Once a participant stopped responding they were considered to be unconscious in the traditional medical sense and the dose was gradually lowered until they responded again. Throughout, the researchers recorded the surface electrical activity from the front of the participants' brains using a "Bispectral Index Monitor (BIS)" - a form of electroencephalography (EEG), which provided an objective measure of the depth of sedation.
The induction phase - from the last response to "Open your eyes!" to the loss of responsiveness - lasted typically from around 5 to 10 minutes; the period of sedation or loss of responsiveness itself lasted around 10 minutes; this was followed by a 2 minute recovery phase and then 5 minutes of EEG scanning. At this point, the participants were interviewed about their subjective experiences during the time they were knocked out.
The key finding is that dreams or sensations were experienced during nearly 60 per cent of the anaesthesia sessions. These ranged from perceptual sensations (including "quick visual experiences"; out-of-body sensations; an altered sense of time); dream-like experiences (had a fragmentary dream about "a trip in Eastern Europe" said one participant); vision-based dreams related to the lab situation ("one of the nurses got suspended from her work"); and dreams with auditory content based on the lab situation ("a friend's roommate ... sitting next to me here in the lab, telling me we have to go to the city"). Sometimes these experiences were accompanied by negative emotions ("a bit anxious"); other times positive ("felt extraordinarily good"). The type of experiences didn't vary with the particular anaesthetic given.
Noreika and his team say these findings are important because they highlight the inadequacy of the standard medical definition of loss of consciousness (i.e. a loss of responsiveness), which is used in many anaesthesia-based studies into the neural correlates of consciousness. This standard definition, they argue, fails to take into account the frequent persistence of phenomenal consciousness in the absence of responsiveness. "Arguably, if one aims to explore the neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness, it would be fruitful to contrast the neural activity during dreaming anaesthesia vs. the neural activity during dreamless anaesthesia," they said.
The study is vulnerable to some obvious criticisms. The depth of sedation was shallower than is typically used in surgery, so the results may not generalise to higher doses of anaesthesia. Also, the participants were forewarned that they would be interviewed about any experiences they had whilst unconscious, which could have led them to come up with the kind of answers that they felt the researchers were after. Defending the validity of their results, Noreika's team pointed out that subjective reports of experience were more frequent when the objective BIS measure indicated shallower sedation - just as you'd expect if the experiences were real. "The results confirm that subjective experience may occur during clinically defined unresponsiveness," the researchers said.
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Noreika, V., Jylhänkangas, L., Móró, L., Valli, K., Kaskinoro, K., Aantaa, R., Scheinin, H., and Revonsuo, A. (2011). Consciousness lost and found: Subjective experiences in an unresponsive state. Brain and Cognition, 77 (3), 327-334 DOI: ... Read more »
Noreika, V., Jylhänkangas, L., Móró, L., Valli, K., Kaskinoro, K., Aantaa, R., Scheinin, H., & Revonsuo, A. (2011) Consciousness lost and found: Subjective experiences in an unresponsive state. Brain and Cognition, 77(3), 327-334. DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.09.002
- January 12, 2012
- 05:45 AM
- 424 views
Trainees in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy underestimate their therapeutic skills
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
For psychotherapists, the research literature can sometimes make for uncomfortable reading. Yes, most people benefit from therapy, but other findings are less welcome, such as that therapeutic outcomes are unrelated to therapist experience, and that therapists tend to overestimate their skills.
A new study of trainee cognitive behavioural therapists bucks this trend. Freda McManus and a her team have found that several dozen trainee CBT therapists tended to underestimate, not overestimate, how good they were at conducting CBT therapy.
Finding out how accurate therapists are at judging their own skills is important because quality control in therapy often relies on therapists seeking out extra help and supervision when they think they need it.
The new data come from 26 trainees enrolled on the Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and 38 trainees enrolled on the MSc in Advanced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - both courses are at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre. The Diploma and MSc students submitted two to six video recordings of therapy sessions they'd conducted. They watched these tapes themselves and rated their own performances. These self ratings were then compared against ratings provided by expert supervisors on the training courses.
Overall the trainees tended to underestimate their skills as compared with ratings provided by their supervisors. Splitting the trainees into two groups - more and less competent - it was the more competent trainees who tended to underestimate themselves. The less competent trainees' self ratings didn't differ from the ratings they received from supervisors.
"These results are encouraging in suggesting that CBT therapists may be less susceptible to over-estimation of their competence than has been previously reported," the researchers said, "which is likely to have benefits for the delivery of CBT interventions in routine clinical practice."
Why would trainees be underestimating their skills? One explanation lies in a concept known as "defensive pessimism" - a way for high performers to ensure they still receive support and remain motivated to improve their standards. Potentially this is a good thing for clients, but the trainees could suffer in terms of job satisfaction and morale.
There are some question marks over the new findings. For example, the rating scale that was used to assess CBT performance (the Cognitive Therapy Scale) is known to be rather unreliable. Also, it's possible that the supervisors' ratings were lenient so as not to demoralise their students. A strength of the study is that the participants were not self-selected - they were all obliged to submit their therapy recordings. By contrast, an earlier study that reported over-confidence in CBT therapists was a highly selective sample obtained by inviting participation. It's possible that sample may have been biased towards particularly over-confident therapists.
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McManus, F., Rakovshik, S., Kennerley, H., Fennell, M., & Westbrook, D. (2011). An investigation of the accuracy of therapists’ self-assessment of cognitive-behaviour therapy skills. British Journal of Clinical Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.2011.02028.x
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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McManus, F., Rakovshik, S., Kennerley, H., Fennell, M., & Westbrook, D. (2011) An investigation of the accuracy of therapists’ self-assessment of cognitive-behaviour therapy skills. British Journal of Clinical Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.2011.02028.x
- March 5, 2012
- 07:38 AM
- 420 views
Robot prejudice
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Armin or Arman
The human tendency to form groups can turn ugly when we derogate non-members and start seeing them as somehow lesser people. A new study by Friederike Eyssel and Dieta Kuchenbrandt shows how readily this instinct for prejudice extends to our perception of robots.
Seventy-eight German students volunteered for what they thought was a chance to help the researchers optimise a social robot prototype. Shown identical pictures of the robot, half the students were told the machine was called Armin (a typical German first name) and that it had been developed in Germany. The other students were told the robot was called Arman (a typical Turkish name; Turks are the largest minority group in Germany) and that it had been developed at a Turkish university.
The students evaluating the supposedly German-built robot Armin, rated it as warmer, of superior design, as having more of a mind, said they felt psychologically closer to it, and expressed more of a willingness to live with it, as compared with the students who evaluated the supposedly Turkish-built Arman. So not only did the German students show a basic preferential bias toward the robot that had a German name and provenance, they also saw it as more human. This fits with previous research showing how readily we are able to perceive out-group members, such as the homeless, as less than human.
"We demonstrated that social categorisation processes generalise to non-human agents," the researchers said. "Even small changes at a seemingly superficial level ... sufficed to bias both the mental models of the robots, and subsequent evaluations. Our results document how deeply ingrained heuristic modes of thinking about others seem to be - may they be human or even non-human."
It's a shame that the researchers didn't include a separate, standard measure of the prejudice of their participants towards Turkish people. Would people without any measurable prejudice still have exhibited these biases towards the German robot? Another important omission: there was no assessment in the paper of whether the participants were fans of the Terminator film franchise - surely Arnie fans the world over would have had a soft spot for Armin over Arman.
Eyssel and Kuchenbrandt said their findings have practical implications. Sooner or later, they predicted, robots will enter our homes. "If one and the same product shall be marketed in different countries, it might be valuable to provide the robot with a brand name that signifies in-group membership," they said.
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Eyssel, F., and Kuchenbrandt, D. (2011). Social categorization of social robots: Anthropomorphism as a function of robot group membership. British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02082.x
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Eyssel, F., & Kuchenbrandt, D. (2011) Social categorization of social robots: Anthropomorphism as a function of robot group membership. British Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02082.x
- January 30, 2012
- 04:00 AM
- 413 views
Psychology ignored and depression neglected in the media's coverage of mental health research
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Research into some mental disorders receives disproportionate media coverage at the expense of other disorders. That's according to the first systematic study of the way the UK mass media covers mental illness. And in a wake-up call to psychology and its advocates, the analysis found that mental health research stories were biased towards neurobiological aspects of mental illness. They tended to be accompanied by commentary from medical charities, and to neglect psychosocial angles and opinion.
George Szmukler at the Institute of Psychiatry and his colleagues focused on coverage of mental disorders research on the BBC news website from 1999 to 2008, and in New Scientist magazine news and features from Aug 2008 to April 2010. This led to the identification of 1015 relevant stories on the BBC (102 per year) and 133 stories from New Scientist (76 per year).
The approach of Szmukler and co was to compare rates of coverage for various mental disorders against the disease burden of those disorders as measured by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Disease burden is calculated based on years of life lost due to dying early, and years of life affected by disability and loss of full health.
Providing some background context, the researchers said the UK disease burden of mental disorders is 60 per cent greater than cancer, yet in the period studied the BBC had half as many news stories on mental disorder research as compared with cancer research (in defence of the BBC, cancer is the subject of more research than mental disorders). By contrast, New Scientist had 2.5 times as many mental disorder research stories as cancer research stories.
Comparing coverage of research into various mental disorders, both the BBC and New Scientist tended to neglect depression, which is the mental disorder with the greatest disease burden by far. The BBC also tended to neglect alcoholism, whilst focusing more on drug addiction. It also focused disproportionately more than other conditions on Alzheimer's Disease and sleep disorders.
There was also a bias in the type of research that received BBC and New Scientist attention. Seventy-five per cent of the BBC's coverage was on biological research; New Scientist showed a similar trend. "Both sources rarely reported on psychological interventions," the researchers said: on the BBC it was one per cent of stories; for New Scientist it was 1.5 per cent. The dominant approach of both outlets was to present mental disorders as neurobiological in origin. The researchers don't know what proportion of research into mental health disorders is actually psychological, but they said "it is unlikely that talking treatments, in particular, would be so poorly represented."
Most stories on the BBC were accompanied by quotes from commentators intended to provide some context, including from 973 named individuals. There was a bias towards medical commentary. The six most frequently quoted commentators included three from the Alzheimer's Society, two from the Alzheimer's Research Trust and one from SANE. Szmukler and his team said that there was a need for organisations like the Mental Health Research Network to examine ways "in which commentators can be made more readily available across the whole spectrum of mental health research."
The researchers concluded that it was important to study the way the mass media covers mental health research because the media can influence the public's perception of disorders and their perception of the value of different types of research. In turn, this can affect funding decisions by government. In this respect, it is worrying that psychological research into mental disorders was found to have received so little coverage. On a positive note, the overall quality of the analysed news stories was found to be high and to have a neutral or sympathetic tone.
"Studies of media reporting of research, such as this one, can provide ideas as to how the research community, together with its funders and other supporters, can enhance the range and quality of media coverage," the researchers said.
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Lewison, G., Roe, P., Wentworth, A., and Szmukler, G. (2011). The reporting of mental disorders research in British media. Psychological Medicine, 42 (02), 435-441 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001012
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Lewison, G., Roe, P., Wentworth, A., & Szmukler, G. (2011) The reporting of mental disorders research in British media. Psychological Medicine, 42(02), 435-441. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001012
- February 15, 2012
- 05:26 AM
- 413 views
Mental health problems worsen after cosmetic surgery
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Are people who opt for medically unnecessary, cosmetic surgery psychologically vulnerable? Does having such surgery bring them psychological relief?
These are tricky questions. There's actually evidence of increased mental health problems among people who've undergone cosmetic surgery. But whether that's a harmful side-effect of the surgery, or a hangover from pre-operative problems, it's difficult to say.
Randomly controlled trials would help, but of course that's not possible in this situation for ethical reasons. What's needed is a large-scale prospective study that follows thousands of people up over many years. Hopefully a sub-set will opt for cosmetic surgery during that time and then it should be possible to look for any psychological vulnerabilities preceding the surgery and any changes post-surgery.
That's exactly what a team of Norwegian researchers have done. Tilmann von Soest and his colleagues began in 1992 with a sample of over 12,000 school students aged 12 to 19 years, and then surveyed them periodically for several years. Attrition of the sample left 2,890 participants at the final survey in 2005 (many participants were lost early in the study, in 1994, because they changed schools). By 2005, 106 of the participants had had at least one cosmetic surgery procedure. This included 78 women - that's 4.9 per cent of women in the sample; and 28 men - 2.2 per cent of the men in the sample.
Because of the lack of men, the researchers focused only on the women. The majority of their operations were for breast augmentation (26.8 per cent) or reduction (19.5 per cent), with other procedures including liposuctions, ear and nose modifications.
There was strong evidence that women with psychological problems were more likely to opt for surgery. The female participants who went on to have cosmetic surgery were more likely to have a history of poorer mental health, including more depression and anxiety, more illicit drug use, self-harm and suicide attempts. Unsurprisingly, the women who had breast surgery more often had a history of less satisfaction with that part of their body (although general appearance satisfaction wasn't related to undertaking surgery). By contrast, sociodemographic factors were not related to who had surgery and who didn't.
Did the surgeon's scalpel benefit the psychological health of these women? With one specific exception, it seems the answer is a categorical "no". Breast surgery was associated with increased satisfaction with that part of the body, but having cosmetic surgery of any kind was associated with increases in anxiety and depression, eating disorders, more alcohol use and more suicide attempts. Surgery didn't boost general appearance satisfaction.
The study isn't without its shortcomings, as the authors acknowledge. For instance, the apparent adverse effects of cosmetic surgery may not be specific to cosmetic procedures but could apply to having surgery of any kind. The study also relied on participants reporting their own mental health.
This study provides "no evidence that cosmetic surgery should be used to alleviate mental health problems in women dissatisfied with their appearance," the researchers concluded. "Nor do the results support the notion that cosmetic operations in exceptional cases should be covered by the public health-care system due to a potential psychotherapeutic effect for the patient."
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von Soest, T., Kvalem, I., and Wichstrøm, L. (2012). Predictors of cosmetic surgery and its effects on psychological factors and mental health: a population-based follow-up study among Norwegian females. Psychological Medicine, 42 (03), 617-626 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001267
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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von Soest, T., Kvalem, I., & Wichstrøm, L. (2011) Predictors of cosmetic surgery and its effects on psychological factors and mental health: a population-based follow-up study among Norwegian females. Psychological Medicine, 42(03), 617-626. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001267
- June 13, 2012
- 03:48 AM
- 412 views
Body-sensitive people are tuned into their heart and their stomach
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
We know from past research that some people are better than others at being able to detect their own heartbeat. There's lots of research on that topic, partly because it's so easy to compare people's estimates of their heartbeats against the true reading. But is this a characteristic that generalises? Are people who are accurate at detecting their cardiac activity also in-tune with their other internal bodily functions?
Before now, just one study from the early 80s had looked for and found an association between cardiac awareness and gastric awareness. But that study relied on an uncomfortable sounding procedure in which participants had to swallow a balloon. That necessarily ruled out a lot of potential participants who wouldn't have wanted to do such a thing, and the internal gastric sensations that the remaining participants detected were artificially induced.
Now Beate Herbert and her colleagues have used a more natural test of gastric awareness. Forty-nine healthy women fasted for four hours before arriving at the lab where they were instructed to drink water until they felt full. The container they drank from was opaque and re-filled after each swig, so that there was no way for the women to judge visually how much they'd drunk. The participants also completed a test of their heartbeat awareness. For both tasks, medical equipment in the form of electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrogastrogram (EGG) provided objective measures of heart and stomach activity.
The key finding is that women who were more accurate in detecting their own heartbeats also tended to stop drinking earlier, as if they were more sensitive to internal feelings of fullness. The EGG provided objective confirmation that they experienced less gastric activity than the other participants before stopping drinking, so it wasn't the case that their stomachs were actually more full or issuing more powerful signals. Rather the heartbeat sensitive women seemed to be particularly sensitive to signals arising from their stomachs. There were no links between either cardio or gastric awareness and anxiety.
Herbert and her team concluded: "'Interoceptive awareness' as assessed by heartbeat perception seems to represent a better ability to focus, to perceive and to process internal bodily information across visceral modalities, such as gastric signals, with cardiac and gastric signals both representing bodily cues that show perceivable activity changes during situations of everyday life."
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Herbert, B., Muth, E., Pollatos, O., and Herbert, C. (2012). Interoception across Modalities: On the Relationship between Cardiac Awareness and the Sensitivity for Gastric Functions. PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036646
Previously on the Digest: People who are more aware of their own heart-beat have superior time perception skills.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Herbert, B., Muth, E., Pollatos, O., & Herbert, C. (2012) Interoception across Modalities: On the Relationship between Cardiac Awareness and the Sensitivity for Gastric Functions. PLoS ONE, 7(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036646
- December 9, 2011
- 03:30 AM
- 406 views
What your choice of best ever footballer says about human memory
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Cruijff - the best ever player?
Ask a friend to name the best ever footballer and they're likely to pick someone who was mid-career when they (your friend) was aged around 17. That's according to a new investigation into the "reminiscence bump". This term describes the fact that when you ask people to name the most memorable events in their lives, they tend to refer to things that happened to them in their teens and early twenties. Recently it's been shown that a similar effect occurs when you ask people to name their favourite music, books and films, with them tending to pick out content from their youth. Now David Rubin and his colleagues have extended this line of research to people's judgement of the best footballers of all time.
Six hundred and nineteen people (aged 16 to 80) took part in the study online, conducted in Dutch and hosted on the website of the University of Amsterdam. Participants were presented with the names of 190 all-time leading football players and asked to name their judgement of the five best players of all time. They could either select from the list or choose their own.
The researchers calculated the mid-career point of the 172 players named by the participants and compared this against the participants' age at that time. Participants overwhelming tended to name players whose career mid-point coincided with participants' teens and early twenties. The modal age (i.e. the most common) of the participants at their chosen players' mid-career was 17 years. The researchers said this was the most appropriate statistic to use because the average (22 years) and median (20 years) stats are more susceptible to the bias to name currently active players.
Another way of reporting the results is to say that participants recalled more players who were mid-career in the second decade of the participants' lives than ones who were mid-career in the participants' third decade. And they named more players from the period in which they were aged 11 to 30 than from the period in which they were aged 1 to 10 or aged 31 to 40.
Focusing on the most frequently chosen players, Johan Cruijff was most often selected by participants who were aged 9 to 18 when he was at his career midpoint; Pelé was most often selected by participants who were aged between 12 and 21 years when he was mid-career. Incidentally, currently active players who made the list of twenty most frequently chosen players were: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and David Beckham (go Becks!). Only the youngest cohort (born between 1986 to 1995) chose more players who were mid-career in 2000s than players who were mid-career in the 90s.
"The results of this study are another example of the robustness of the reminiscence bump phenomenon," the researchers said.
Several theories have been put forward to explain the reminiscence bump, including that our memories are more efficient in our teens and twenties. Others think it's because more novel things happen to us at that time of life, such as our first kiss or first job, causing them to get lodged in memory. Rubin and his team say their findings are inconsistent with this "cognitive account", as it's known, because children typically start to play and follow football between the ages of 5 and 15, so if the cognitive account were true you'd think they'd pick players who were mid-career at that time.
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Janssen, S., Rubin, D., and Conway, M. (2011). The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.606372
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Janssen, S., Rubin, D., & Conway, M. (2011) The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona?. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-14. DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.606372
- November 22, 2011
- 05:44 AM
- 403 views
The "multiple reflection error" - yet another way that we misunderstand mirrors
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
On her trolley! Janine, the mannequin
Considering the ubiquity of mirrors in everyday life, it's amazing how confused we are about them. For example, many of us are oblivious to the small size of our heads as they appear reflected in the mirror. A new study by Rebecca Lawson has provided a compelling demonstration of the "multiple reflection error" - yet another striking way that we misunderstand mirrors.
Imagine you're at the entrance to a narrow corridor and further down, several feet away, hanging on the right-hand wall, there are three rectangular mirrors (30cm x 45cm) at head height. At what point, as you proceed down the corridor, do you think you'll be able to see your face in the mirrors?
The correct answer is that your face will only be visible in each mirror when you are passing directly opposite. At no point will your face be visible in more than one mirror.
Lawson first tested people's understanding of this idea by having them stand at one end of a corridor and say in which of four positions in the corridor a mannequin "Janine" (moved about on a trolley) would be able to see herself in each of the three mirrors. Only two of the four positions in question were actually directly opposite one of the mirrors. So, of the 12 possible position/mirror combinations, the answer "yes, Janine can see her face" should only have been given twice. In fact, the 18 Liverpool University students answered yes an average of 6.1 times, grossly overestimating how often the mannequin could see herself in the mirrors. The errors weren't randomly distributed, they tended to be made when the mannequin was located near to the mirrors, but not directly opposite them.
The same errors were made when a single, larger mirror was divided up into three using duct tape (to ensure that participants realised the mirror surfaces were all flat against the wall and not angled like a dressing-table mirror), and also when the original three mirrors were arranged on the wall vertically, rather than horizontally.
Perhaps, Lawson reasoned, the participants were performing so poorly because it was confusing assuming the perspective of a mannequin. And also, perhaps because they were asked about each position and each mirror one at a time, so that they didn't realise the full implications of what they were saying: that the mannequin could see her face in multiple mirrors from a single position, and in the same mirror from different positions (an optical impossibility in the situation as described).
To avoid these issues, Lawson created another set-up in which more participants (prospective students and their parents) were shown a photograph of a person sat facing five mirrors arranged on the wall in the shape of a cross, with the central mirror at head height. The participants were given a piece of paper with five rectangles on it arranged in a cross shape, and they had to draw crudely what the person in the photo would be able to see of themselves in each mirror. Once again, there was a striking overestimation of where the person would be able to see reflections of their own head and face (participants should have indicated that the person's head/face would only be visible to them in the central mirror).
Finally, more participants actually sat in front of this set up of five mirrors in a cross shape. Half of them had just the central mirror uncovered then re-covered before they used the pencil and paper to indicate what they'd see in all the mirrors (the remaining mirrors were covered throughout). The other half of the participants had all the mirrors uncovered first, then re-covered before they gave their answers with the paper and pencil. In the first case, 58 per cent of the participants made multiple reflection errors - again, overestimating where they'd be able to see themselves in the mirrors. In the latter case, with the chance to experience the entire mirror set up, 24 per cent made such errors.
"This multiple reflection error is particularly surprising," Lawson said "because it directly contradicts our everyday experience that mirrors reflect a single coherent scene."
So why do people misunderstand mirrors in this way? Lawson said there are probably multiple reasons. One participant described her naive belief that whenever you turn your eyes towards a mirror, wherever it is, you will see yourself reflected in it - "mirrors look back at you," she said. No doubt this belief was held implicitly by many of the other participants.
"Almost nobody will have a clear, thought-through and self-consistent theory of optics which they use to guide their predictions," Lawson said. "Most people probably use a set of underspecified beliefs and heuristics, some of which are incompatible, leading them to make unsophisticated, noisy and inaccurate predictions. People rarely think explicitly about optics and what determines what they can see in a mirror or a window - or indeed, what they can see directly."
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Lawson, R. (2012). Mirrors, mirrors on the wall…the ubiquitous multiple reflection error. Cognition, 122 (1), 1-11 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.001
Further reading:
Link to Mirrors and the mind (Psychologist magazine article).
Link to New York Times article on the psychology of mirrors.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest. Thanks to Rebecca Lawson for providing images of her experiment.
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Lawson, R. (2012) Mirrors, mirrors on the wall…the ubiquitous multiple reflection error. Cognition, 122(1), 1-11. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.001
- December 5, 2011
- 03:30 AM
- 402 views
The brain basis of "unrealistic optimism"
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Life is a little like going for a walk in the rain. Sooner or later you're going to get wet - be that in the form of bad health, unrequited love or job redundancy. It's remarkable that we ever venture out. We do so sheltered under the umbrella of "unrealistic optimism". Depressed people aside, the rest of us underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us and overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes. Asked to imagine positive scenarios, we do so with greater vividness and more immediacy than when asked to picture negative occurrences - our images of those are hazy and distant.
Now Tali Sharot (author of the forthcoming book The Optimism Bias) and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. Sharot had participants estimate their likelihood of experiencing 80 adverse life events from developing Alzheimer's to being robbed. After they gave each estimate, the participants were given the correct average probability for a person in their socio-economic circumstances. In a subsequent testing session, participants had a second chance to forecast their risk of experiencing the same 80 misfortunes. Throughout this process, Sharot scanned the activity of the participants' brains.
One key finding is that the participants showed a bias in the way that they updated their estimates, being much more likely to revise an original estimate that was overly pessimistic than to revise an original estimate that was unduly optimistic (79 per cent of participants showed this pattern). The researchers checked and this difference wasn't to do with the positive feedback being remembered better, but purely to do with it being taken account of more than negative feedback.
There were some intriguing neural insights. Discovering that an initial estimate was unduly pessimistic was associated with increased activity across the frontal lobes, in left inferior frontal gyrus, left and right medial frontal cortex/superior frontal gyrus, and also in the right cerebellum - and this increased activity correlated with the participants' subsequent updating of their estimate in the second round of predictions. By contrast, discovering that they'd been overly optimistic was associated with reduced activity in the inferior frontal gyrus extending into precentral gyrus and insula, and again this activity change was related to the likelihood that the participants would revise their estimate in the second round of predictions.
The researchers also compared the brain activity between the most and least optimistic participants. High scorers in trait optimism showed less of the activity drop in inferior frontal gyrus when they discovered they'd been overly optimistic. That is, their brains seemed to ignore information educating them about the depressing reality of their chances of experiencing adversity later in life. In contrast, the brains of the high and low optimists responded to desirable feedback (in which they learned they'd been unduly pessimistic) in exactly the same way.
"Our findings offer a mechanistic account of how unrealistic optimism persists in the face of challenging information," said Sharot and her team. "We found that optimism was related to diminished coding of undesirable information about the future in a region of the frontal cortex (right inferior frontal gyrus) that has been identified as being sensitive to negative estimation errors."
The researchers also reflected on the wider implications of their research. They said that unrealistic optimism likely evolved to enhance exploratory behaviour and has the benefit of reducing stress and anxiety. However, they said that this rosy view comes at a cost. "For example," they said, "unrealistic assessment of financial risk is widely seen as a contributing factor in the 2008 global economic collapse."
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Sharot, T., Korn, C., and Dolan, R. (2011). How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality. Nature Neuroscience, 14 (11), 1475-1479 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2949
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Sharot, T., Korn, C., & Dolan, R. (2011) How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality. Nature Neuroscience, 14(11), 1475-1479. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2949
- March 15, 2012
- 06:21 AM
- 402 views
How killing begets more killing (of bugs)
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
"At first killing was obligatory; afterward we got used to it. We became naturally cruel. We no longer needed encouragement or fines to kill, or even orders or advice." Jean-Baptise Murangira, a killer from Rwanda.
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that killing escalates - that the more a person kills, the easier they find it to kill again. Andy Martens and Spee Kosloff have investigated this idea experimentally using a bug killing paradigm. Undergrad participants took part in what they thought was a study looking at the ways that exterminators deal with bugs. In fact no bugs were hurt during this research and participants were debriefed "sensitively" at the end. Three participants dropped out after reading the consent form and a further three were omitted from analysis because they suspected they weren't really killing the bugs.
The fifty remaining participants (29 women) were each left in a room alone and given 12 seconds to feed as many of the 21 available woodlice as they wanted, one at a time, into an extermination machine - an adapted coffee grinder with a funnel for inserting the bugs. The woodlice had been warmed briefly with a hair dryer so that they were moving about, thereby ensuring that participants knew they were alive. After the first 12-second phase, the researcher returned to the room briefly to tell the participants that they had a further 12 seconds to repeat the exercise anew. The key test was whether the participants would kill more bugs on the second round.
Crucially, half of the participants had been told that the whole thing was merely a simulation - no bugs would die in either round because the funnel was blocked. These participants inserted the same number of bugs on the second round as they did on the first round (approximately 5.5 bugs on average). By contrast, the other participants who'd been told that the killing was real tended to insert more bugs into the exterminator during the second round (5.4 bugs on average vs. 4.6 on average during the first round).
Martens and Kosloff said this provides evidence that killing escalates. The fact that the escalation was only observed for the participants who thought they were killing shows that the effect wasn't merely due to practice. Earlier research similarly showed that participants instructed to kill more bugs in an initial phase (vs. those told to kill fewer) tended to kill more bugs voluntarily in a second phase - but only if they believed the killing was real.
Why should killing escalate in this way? Martens and Kosloff's theory is that it probably has to do with the justification of earlier actions and with desensitisation. Killing may particularly provoke these reactions in killers because unlike other unethical acts, it isn't possible to undo an earlier killing and amends can't be made to the killed. Other possible factors that lead to escalation could include increased arousal and feelings of power and excitement.
"The impetus of this work was not to develop an understanding of bug-killing per se, but to aid an understanding of situations in which people kill other people," the researchers said. "Perhaps [results like these] can inform the generation of questions necessary for developing a well-rounded understanding of real-world consequences of killing and violence."
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Martens, A., and Kosloff, S. (2012). Evidence that Killing Escalates Within-Subjects in a Bug-Killing Paradigm. Aggressive Behavior DOI: 10.1002/ab.21412
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Martens, A., & Kosloff, S. (2011) Evidence that Killing Escalates Within-Subjects in a Bug-Killing Paradigm. Aggressive Behavior. DOI: 10.1002/ab.21412
- January 23, 2012
- 05:05 AM
- 400 views
Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
We wore ankle-length blue coats at my school, in the Tudor-style. When it rained, the wool of the coat gave off a pungent smell, rather like wet dog. Now when I encounter a similar scent, it propels me back in time to my school days. This effect is called the "Proustian phenomenon". The name comes from Proust's description in Remembrance of Things Past of how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine biscuit transported him back in time to his childhood.
Smells do have this uncanny, evocative power, don't they? It's because of the relative proximity of the olfactory bulb (which processes smells) and the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in memory and emotions. Right?
Not so fast. In fact very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt.
Marieke Toffolo and her collaborators invited 70 female student participants to watch a disturbing 12-minute film featuring road traffic accidents, surgery and reports on the Rwandan genocide. Whilst the students watched the film, the smell of Cassis, a neutral berry-like odour, was sprayed into the room; coloured lights were projected onto the back wall; and inoffensive background music was played over speakers (no mention was made to the students of these cues; pilot work established that they were equally noticeable, pleasant and arousing). The researchers chose to focus only on female participants to keep things simple, because it's known that there are sex differences in olfactory perception.
A week later the students were called back and asked to write down as many memories about the film as they could. As they did so, either the smell, the lights or the music were presented again. The students also answered questions about the quality of their memories. The main finding is that students exposed again to the smell of Cassis rated their memories of the film as more detailed, unpleasant and arousing (but no more transporting or vivid) than students re-exposed to the music. However, the students re-exposed to the odour rated their memories no differently from students re-exposed to the lights. In other words, smell appeared to be more evocative than music, but no more evocative than lights.
"It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odours are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers," the researchers said. "Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odour is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odours."
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Toffolo, M., Smeets, M., and van den Hout, M. (2012). Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories. Cognition and Emotion, 26 (1), 83-92 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2011.555475
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Toffolo, M., Smeets, M., & van den Hout, M. (2012) Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories. Cognition , 26(1), 83-92. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2011.555475
- December 15, 2011
- 05:17 AM
- 399 views
Mention of the word "loving" doubles charitable donations
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
"Love begets love." Proverb
French researchers say that adding the text "donating=loving" to a charitable collection box almost doubled the amount of money they raised.
Nicolas Guéguen and Lubomir Lamy placed opaque collection boxes in 14 bakeries in Brittany for two weeks. All the boxes featured the following text in French: "Women students in business trying to organise a humanitarian action in Togo. We are relying on your support", together with a picture of a young African woman with an infant in her arms. Some boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: "DONATING=LOVING"; others had the text "DONATING=HELPING"; whilst others had no further text below the slot. Different box types were placed in different bakeries on different days and the amount of money collected each day was recorded.
The text on the donation boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in boxes with the "donating=loving" text, as compared with the "donating=helping" boxes and the boxes with no additional text (€1.04 per day vs. €0.62 and €0.54; the effect size was d=2.09). "Given the high effect-size ... we can conclude that evoking love is a powerful technique to enhance people's altruistic behaviour," the researchers said. In contrast, the difference in the amount of money left in "donating=helping" boxes and boxes without additional text was not statistically significant.
Guéguen and Lamy think that the word "loving" acts as a prime, activating related concepts such as compassion, support and solidarity, and thereby encourages behaviour consistent with those ideas. Such an explanation would fit the wider literature showing how our motivations and attitudes can be influenced by words and objects without us realising it. For example, one previous study showed how exposure to ageing-related words like "retired" led participants to walk away more slowly after an experiment. Other research found a poster of a pair of eyes on a wall led to greater use of an honesty box in a university canteen. Previous research by Guéguen and Lamy has further shown how asking a male passerby for directions to "Saint Valentine Street" as opposed to "Saint Martin Street" makes them subsequently more likely to help a nearby woman who's had her phone stolen, presumably because of the automatic activation of romance-related concepts.
Why should the text "donating=helping" not have had a similar beneficial effect on giving behaviour? Guéguen and Lamy think this might be due to a compensatory counter-reaction against words that are perceived as too much like a command. Indeed, in French, the verb "donner" to donate is also used to order someone to do something. However, why this reactance should have happened with "donating=helping" and not with "donating=loving" isn't entirely clear. Another reason for the impotence of the word "helping", the researchers said, is its redundancy - it was really just repeating the plea for support in the main text.
The measure of giving was crude, which is a weakness of the study. We don't know if the "donating=loving" text led more people to donate, or to more generous giving among those people who donated.
"Despite the shortcomings of our study, the results will no doubt be of interest to those involved in philanthropic planning and support assessment in the aresas of corporate giving, nonprofit organisations, charitable foundations, and grants," the researchers said. "Conducted in a field setting, the experiment demonstrates how a simple, low-cost intervention can increase charitable giving."
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Guéguen, N., and Lamy, L. (2011). The effect of the word “love” on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting. Social Influence, 6 (4), 249-258 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2011.627771
Previously on the Research Digest: How Michael Jackson's Heal The World really could help heal the world.
Other Digest posts related to altruism.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Guéguen, N., & Lamy, L. (2011) The effect of the word “love” on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting. Social Influence, 6(4), 249-258. DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2011.627771
- December 2, 2011
- 05:54 AM
- 393 views
The taste for competition peaks at age 50
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
No wonder parents' races at school sports days are such fraught affairs. A new study finds that far from us mellowing as we age, our inclination for competition increases through life, peaking around the age of 50.
Prior to their data collection, Ulrich Mayr and his colleagues had several reasons for expecting that preference to compete would peak in youth and fade thereafter. They cited reductions in testosterone with age; the documented shift with age to a more prosocial orientation (older people give more money to charity); an age-related shift to a mastery (rather than comparison) approach to skills; and age-related falls in confidence, perhaps based on actual cognitive declines with age.
The researchers set up a stall at a shopping mall and invited volunteers to solve mental arithmetic equations (e.g. "true or false: 7 + 2 + 3 - 6 = 5") as quickly as possible in return for points. Points were exchanged for modest cash prizes. The 543 participants (aged 25 to 75), in private booths, completed one round lasting 30-seconds in which they earned more points the more equations they solved. They then completed a second "competitive" round, in which they only earned points for solving more equations than a randomly chosen rival. Participants didn't get feedback on their performance until the experiment was over. Finally - and this was the crucial round - the participants could choose for the final round whether to play solo (known as "piece-rate"), like they had in the first round, or whether to compete once again against another randomly chosen participant. Afterwards participants estimated how well they thought they'd done, as a measure of their confidence.
There were some clear gender effects, consistent with past research. Women were far less likely than men to opt for the competitive version in the final round (correction: 36 per cent vs. 56 per cent). And there were clear age effects across both genders: the taste for competition against others increased with age, levelling off at about the age of 50. For example, nearly 70 per cent of men aged 45 to 54 opted to compete versus just over 50 per cent of men aged 25 to 34.
What lies behind the gender effects? Men and women performed equally well at the task under piece-rate conditions, but the women's performance did drop slightly in the competitive version. Women were also less confident than men. Women's confidence, unlike men's, was also related to their choice of whether to compete or not (men chose to compete without consideration of their likelihood of winning!). However, none of these factors was sizeable enough to explain the size of the gender difference in choice to compete.
What about the effects of age on preference for competition? There was no difference in actual performance with age. Changes in confidence also couldn't explain the age-related change. A potential explanation comes from a recent meta-analysis, which found that the trait of "social dominance" increases with age until the 50s. Said Mayr and his team: "Successfully engaging in competitions is critical for establishing social dominance and therefore it is plausible to assume that with such an increased interest in social dominance comes an increased 'taste for competition."
One important caveat needs to be mentioned. Because this was a cross-sectional study, it's possible that it's not age that's related to competitiveness but rather the era that the participants grew up in - or something else to do with their particular generation. To get around this problem, participants would need to be followed up throughout their lives, to see if their taste for competition changes as they age. However, the researchers can't see any reason why the fifty-somethings' upbringing should have led them to be more competitive than the 30-somethings. Yes, Baby Boomers are known for their competitiveness but 30-year-olds grew up in a prolonged economic downturn that might have increased their competitive tendencies.
What about you - have you found that your taste for competition has altered as you've aged? Or looking at your friends and family, do these results fit with your own experiences of their competitiveness? Please use comments to let us know.
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Mayr, U., Wozniak, D., Davidson, C., Kuhns, D., and Harbaugh, W. (2011). Competitiveness across the life span: The feisty fifties. Psychology and Aging DOI: 10.1037/a0025655
NB. Percentages for men and women's preferences were quoted incorrectly before but have now been corrected.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Mayr, U., Wozniak, D., Davidson, C., Kuhns, D., & Harbaugh, W. (2011) Competitiveness across the life span: The feisty fifties. Psychology and Aging. DOI: 10.1037/a0025655
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