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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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- May 30, 2012
- 04:21 AM
- 288 views
Introducing "therapy genetics" - genes can predict whether therapy will help
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Psychotherapy, like other forms of treatment, doesn't work for everyone and there would be huge advantages to knowing in advance who's likely to benefit. In the case of drugs, there's a thriving research field - pharmacogenetics - looking at whether a person's genetic profile can predict their chances of responding to treatment. Can the same approach be applied to therapy? A team of researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London believes so.
In one of the first papers published on "therapy genetics", Kathryn Lester and her colleagues, including Thalia Eley, took swabs from hundreds of white children with anxiety, aged 6 to 13. The researchers were specifically interested in the genes the children had that code for Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) and Brain Derived-Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) - proteins involved in the survival and development of neurons. The children, some based in the UK and some in Australia, then underwent a CBT programme designed for helping anxious children. The key question was whether the children's genetic profile would be associated with how well they responded to the treatment.
There were no genetic associations with the children's immediate response to the treatment. However, at follow up (assessed at 3, 6 or 12 months), the children's particular NGF genotype was related to their therapeutic responsiveness. We each have two copies of the NGF gene, rs6330, which can come in two versions, known as the T allele or the C allele. Lester and her team found that among children with two copies of the T allele version, 76.7 per cent were free of their primary anxiety diagnosis at follow up, compared with 63.5 per cent of children with one C version and one T version, and just 53.2 per cent of children with two copies of the C allele. These associations held, even after controlling for other clinically relevant factors such as age, gender and geographical location.
Why should the children's particular form of NGF gene affect the way they respond to CBT? Definite answers will only come from more research, but Lester and her colleagues argued that the finding makes sense based on what we already know about NGF being involved in the growth of new neurons and in changing connections between existing neurones - known as "neuroplastic changes" in the scientific jargon. "Significant learning experiences of the kind undertaken during CBT may very well be underpinned by neuroplastic modifications in brain activity and function," they said.
This new result complements another recent paper published by the same research group, in which anxious children responded more successfully to CBT if they had a particular version of a gene involved in the activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Again, the association was found at follow-up rather than immediately after therapy.
Lester and her team said they believed the association they documented in this new research is "clinically meaningful", but that "clinically significant prediction by genetic markers is likely to be best achieved by combining multiple genetic markers (perhaps in combination with clinical predictors) into predictive indices or algorithms."
The research has some shortcomings. For example, without a no-treatment control group of anxious children, it's not possible to say for sure that NGF genotype is specifically associated with therapeutic responsiveness rather than an advantageous tendency to recover regardless of treatment. "These findings should be considered preliminary," the researchers said.
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Lester, K., Hudson, J., Tropeano, M., Creswell, C., Collier, D., Farmer, A., Lyneham, H., Rapee, R., and Eley, T. (2012). Neurotrophic gene polymorphisms and response to psychological therapy. Translational Psychiatry, 2 (5) DOI: 10.1038/tp.2012.33
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Lester, K., Hudson, J., Tropeano, M., Creswell, C., Collier, D., Farmer, A., Lyneham, H., Rapee, R., & Eley, T. (2012) Neurotrophic gene polymorphisms and response to psychological therapy. Translational Psychiatry, 2(5). DOI: 10.1038/tp.2012.33
- June 25, 2012
- 04:06 AM
- 285 views
We think more rationally in a foreign language
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
One of psychology's major contributions has been to document the myriad ways our thinking is sent haywire by a series of biases. Investigations into the ways and means to combat these biases have lagged behind, but that's starting to change. Now a team of researchers at the University of Chicago has reported that people are immune to two key biases when they think in their second, less familiar language.
The first half of the investigation involved well-established framing effects. Participants were told that 600,000 people were at risk from a deadly disease. They were then presented with the same decision framed differently. In one condition, they chose between a medicine (A) that would definitely save 200,000 lives versus another (B) that had a 33.3 per cent chance of saving 600,000 people and a 66.6 per cent chance of saving no one. In another condition, the participants chose between a medicine (A) that meant 400,000 people will die versus another (B) that had a 33.3 per cent chance that no one will die and 66.6 per cent that 600,000 will die.
The gamble in each condition is effectively the same, but numerous studies have shown that people are systematically influenced by the way the choice is framed. In the first condition, the gains of A are made salient, and people tend to prefer the certainty of that option. In the second condition, A's losses are made more salient and people prefer to take the risk of medicine B.
Boaz Keysar and his team showed that dozens of native English speakers showed the typical framing effect when they completed the task in English, but not when they completed the task in their second, classroom-learned language of Japanese. It was a similar story with native Korean speakers - they showed no framing effect when they completed the task in English. And it was the same again with native French speakers when they completed the task in their second language of English. A follow-up study added a third inferior option to the decision task and confirmed that participants weren't just choosing at random when taking part in their second language.
The second half of the investigation focused on loss aversion. We're typically affected emotionally twice as much by losses as we are affected positively by gains of equivalent size. So, presented with a series of bets on the toss of a coin, with the chance to win $1.50 or lose $1, people will tend to shy away from the bet even though the cold logic of probability theory suggests they'll win out in the long run. Keysar and his colleagues gave native English speakers $15 in cash to play 15 rounds of this game, with the chance to keep the balance of their wins and losses at the end. The key finding was that the players were far more willing to gamble when they played the game in their second language of Spanish.
The researchers aren't entirely sure why speaking in a less familiar tongue makes people more "rational", in the sense of not being affected by framing effects or loss aversion. But they think it may have to do with creating psychological distance, encouraging systematic rather than automatic thinking, and with reducing the emotional impact of decisions. This would certainly fit with past research that's shown the emotional impact of swear words, expressions of love and adverts is diminished when they're presented in a less familiar language.
The findings have important implications for international internet research - psychological measures could vary according to whether participants are answering in their mother tongue or in a second language learned later in life. More generally, the researchers said the findings could have ramifications for real life. "People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language rather than their native tongue might be less biased in their savings, investment, and retirement decisions, as a result of reduced myopic loss aversion," they concluded. "Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial."
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Boaz Keysar,, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect, Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological Science DOI: 1177/0956797611432178
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Boaz Keysar,, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, & Sun Gyu An. (2012) The Foreign-Language Effect Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological Science. DOI: 1177/0956797611432178
- February 27, 2012
- 06:07 AM
- 284 views
What do kids know about wisdom?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
A wise person once said that intelligence is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put them in fruit salad. You might have a different idea about what constitutes wisdom. When adults are asked what wisdom is, their answers tend to fall into five recurring categories: a cognitive component based around intelligence; insight (the ability to find original solutions); a reflective attitude; concern for others; and real-world problem-solving skills.
But before now, no-one has investigated what children understand by wisdom and how this changes as they get older. Judith Glück and her colleagues have surveyed 461 children (aged six to ten years) at two schools in rural Austria. Ideas about wisdom are obviously prone to cultural variation, but these new findings provide us with some useful initial clues as to how children think about this slippery concept.
The children were asked a mixture of closed and open-ended questions. For example, they were asked to write a few lines on what a wise person is like and they also read a list of 23 adjectives, indicating which ones applied to a typical wise person.
Overall, just over 70 per cent of the kids said they knew the term "wisdom", rising from 43 per cent of the youngest to 92 per cent of the oldest year group. The majority of the children said they'd encountered the term in books, in conversations at home and in TV shows or films.
In contrast to adults, these children tended to focus mostly on the outward aspects of wisdom - especially cleverness (fluid intelligence, rather than concrete knowledge), and concern for others. There was an association with age here - all the children tended to mention the social aspect of wisdom, but a far greater proportion of the older than younger children mentioned the intelligent aspect. Older children were also more likely to link wisdom with older-age. Unfortunately the paper provides few examples of the kind of open-ended answers given by the children, despite the teasing title of the article.
More internal or abstract aspects of wisdom were apparently rarely mentioned by the children, including: having a reflective attitude, solving problems with original insight; having real-world problem-solving skills; and perspective taking. "Presumably such aspects are not yet part of the spontaneous 'psychological repertoire' of children at this age," the researchers said.
Unsurprisingly, given that it prompted them, the children's understanding of wisdom was more precocious when using the adjective list, with the children tending to tick items like "pensive" and "sensitive", as well as terms like "friendly" and "clever", which they'd mentioned in their open-ended answers.
Asked to name a wise person, the children were extremely generous, most often mentioning a grand-parent or a parent. Religious figures or figures from the media were rarely mentioned. The children showed a gender bias in their nominations, with boys being more likely to name male figures and girls being more likely to name females. Boys were also more likely to identify wise people as "astute" and girls to identify them as "beautiful" - perhaps a consequence of gender-stereotypes in the kind of media they were exposed to.
"We conclude from our findings that a basic understanding of the concept of wisdom is developed in and even before the elementary school years," the researchers said. "However, especially the more complex aspects of the concept get much more differentiated in subsequent development."
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Glück, J., Bischof, B., and Siebenhüner, L. (2012). “Knows what is good and bad”, “Can teach you things”, “Does lots of crosswords”: Children's knowledge about wisdom. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-18 DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2011.631376
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Glück, J., Bischof, B., & Siebenhüner, L. (2012) “Knows what is good and bad”, “Can teach you things”, “Does lots of crosswords”: Children's knowledge about wisdom. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-18. DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2011.631376
- October 15, 2012
- 04:07 AM
- 284 views
Who gets aggressive at the late-night bar and why?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The exhaustive analysis in Steven Pinker's latest book shows that we are living in the most peaceable age for thousands of years. To anyone who spends time in late-night bars, this might come as a surprise. In these temples to hedonism, spilled drinks and unwelcome gropes all too often provoke violent brawls.
Kathryn Graham and her colleagues trained 148 observers and sent them out to 118 bars in early-hours Toronto where they recorded 1,057 instances of aggression from 1,334 visits. Where the majority of psychology research on aggression is based on laboratory simulations (often involving participants zapping each other with loud noise or spiking each other's food with chilli sauce), Graham's team collected real-life observational data to find out who gets aggressive and why.
The researchers followed the Theory of Coercive Actions, according to which aggressive acts have one or more motives: compliance (getting someone to do something, or stop doing something); grievance; social identity (to prove one's status and power); and thrill-seeking.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority (77.5 per cent) of aggressive acts were instigated by men. Men more than women were driven to aggression by identity and thrill-seeking motives; by contrast female aggression was more often motivated by compliance and grievance. This often had a defensive intent, as a reaction against unwanted sexual advances.
As well as being particularly severe, aggression that was ignited by patrons who felt threats to their identity was also particularly likely to escalate, "because," the researchers said, "their strong identity motivation reflects a situation where the person is already invested in winning or besting the other person." Aggressive acts motivated by grievance were also likely to escalate, because of people feeling their actions were justified.
The researchers found that greater intoxication led to more serious aggression in women, but not men - perhaps because the latter were emboldened enough already. Younger men and bigger men also tended to engage in more serious aggressive acts, replicating past research showing than larger, intoxicated men are more likely to get aggressive than their smaller counterparts.
Graham and her colleagues said their findings could help contribute to preventative policies in late-night bars. For example, given the incendiary role of identity motives in aggressive incidents, efforts could be made to challenge traditional cultural norms that say masculine identity is about power and strength. Because of the escalating effect of grievance motives, security staff could be trained to diffuse situations early - for example, by replacing spilled drinks free of charge. And because so much female aggression was provoked by sexual harassment, the researchers advised establishments to create at atmosphere that discourages "invasive and aggressive sexual overtures whilst still maintaining an exciting venue where young people can explore their sexuality and meet potential partners."
These recommendations sound well-intentioned and supported by the new evidence, but are they really achievable? What do you think?
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Kathryn Graham, Sharon Bernards, D. Wayne Osgood, Michael Parks, Antonia Abbey, Richard B. Felson, Robert F. Saltz, and Samantha Wells (2012). Apparent motives for aggression in the social context of the bar. Psychology of Violence DOI: 10.1037/a0029677
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Kathryn Graham, Sharon Bernards, D. Wayne Osgood, Michael Parks, Antonia Abbey, Richard B. Felson, Robert F. Saltz, & Samantha Wells. (2012) Apparent motives for aggression in the social context of the bar. Psychology of Violence. DOI: 10.1037/a0029677
- July 9, 2012
- 03:56 AM
- 283 views
Does your heart rate hold the secret to getting in “the zone”?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
An awkward, incomprehensible problem has you ripping your hair out. Too easy a task, on the other hand, and you’re drawing dust-patterns on the desk out of boredom. To work long, hard and well on a project, what’s needed is a level of challenge that pushes you to the edge of your abilities, but not too far beyond. Such a test provokes a mental state that positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow”, known more colloquially as being in the zone.
An intriguing area of study that’s only emerged over the last few years concerns the physiological correlates of flow. If we could find out what’s going on in the body during mental flow, it would make it easier and less intrusive to measure when people are in such a state (at the moment, researchers have to nudge someone absorbed in an activity to ask them how it feels, with the risk of spoiling their flow, or they have to ask them about the experience afterwards). Even more exciting, discovering the physiological correlates of flow could lead to new bodily means by which to help ourselves achieve the zen-like state.
A promising candidate is heart rate coherence - when the rhythm of the heart attains a smooth, sine-like waveform over time. Like flow, it too has been linked with positive emotions and superior performance, including more focused attention and speeded reaction times.
Brenda Mansfield and Roger Couture at Laurentian University in Canada and their co-workers have looked directly for the first time at the relationship between coherence and flow. They invited dozens of undergrads to undertake three different tasks: answering a batch of learning style and happiness questionnaires; playing a bio-feedback game in which a hot-air balloon on a screen rises and falls in line with heart-rate coherence; and completing a Playstation 3 game, inspired by Csíkszentmihályi’s theory, which is designed to trigger a flow state in players as they guide an aquatic creature through an underwater world.
The researchers monitored the participants’ heart-rate coherence through all three tasks via a device attached to the earlobe, and the participants also completed a measure of their state of flow after each task (example items included “Things just seemed to be happening automatically”). The study’s key question was whether coherence and flow would fluctuate in tandem, indicating that the former is the physiological marker of the latter.
Unfortunately, and to put it bluntly, the results were a mass of contradictions. On the questionnaire task (which triggered a surprising amount of flow), heart-rate coherence tended to be lower in students who reported more flow – a negative correlation. During the coherence-inducing hot-air balloon task, flow and coherence did correlate with each other positively, but overall flow was low, perhaps because the students found the task too frustrating. Finally, the Playstation flow game succeeded in inducing flow as you’d expect, but there was no correlation between flow and coherence.
The researchers admitted their results were “puzzling” and they said more research was needed. “We discovered that coherence and flow, however mutually beneficial to optimal experience, can occur and/or be induced independently of one another,” they wrote. “Our results provide evidence of a dissociation between the concepts, as we can turn them on separately.”
Perhaps it was overly optimistic to hope that the psychological construct of flow would map neatly onto the physiological state known as coherence. Life is often more complicated than this. Assuming that flow itself is a unitary concept, which is far from established, it’s more likely that it is associated with a number of different kinds of physiological state. But this is a new field of study, and Mansfield’s team carried out an important first test.
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Brenda E. Mansfield, Bruce E. Oddson, Josee Turcotte, and Roger T. Couture (2012). A possible physiological correlate for mental flow. The Journal of Positive Psychology DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2012.691982
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Brenda E. Mansfield, Bruce E. Oddson, Josee Turcotte, & Roger T. Couture. (2012) A possible physiological correlate for mental flow. The Journal of Positive Psychology. DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2012.691982
- August 9, 2012
- 04:50 AM
- 280 views
Encourage students into science by targeting their parents
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Whereas most previous research has focused on ways to make school science lessons more engaging and inclusive, Judith Marackiewicz and her colleagues took a different approach and sent two glossy brochures and a web-site password to the parents of 81 boys and girls (aged approximately 16) at 108 schools in the Wisconsin area. The first brochure "Making Connections: Helping Your Teen Find Value in School" was delivered when the school pupils were in their 10th grade (aged about 16 years), and the second about six months later.
The researchers were guided by psychological theory that says students are motivated by a mix of factors: their expectations about how well they'll do, how much they think they'll enjoy a subject, and how useful they think it will be to them. The brochures and website particularly targeted the last factor. The materials contained information educating parents about the usefulness of maths and science to their children's careers, and advising them on ways to discuss this with their children. This included ways to personalise the discussion of the subjects, as well showcasing the relevance of the subjects to real-life activities, such as video games and driving.
The intervention had a powerful effect. Compared to 100 students in a control group, the children of targeted parents reported at follow-up that they'd had more discussions with their parents about the value of science and maths courses, and crucially, they also opted to take more of these subjects at high-school (this averaged out as the equivalent of an extra semester of maths or science during the final two years of school). Mothers in the intervention group also reported being more aware of the value of maths and science to their children's careers.
Time and again past research has shown that one of the strongest predictors of children's choice of science and maths is their parents' level of education. This was replicated in the current study, and impressively enough, the influence of the intervention was the same size as this oft-studied parental factor. Targeting parents may be particularly shrewd, the researchers said, since they have a privileged insight into their children's personalities and histories, and are therefore uniquely placed to help them realise the advantages to studying maths, science, technology and and/or engineering (STEM).
"Parents are an untapped resource for promoting STEM motivation," Marackiewicz and her team concluded, "and the results of our study demonstrate that a modest intervention aimed at parents can produce significant changes in their children's academic choices."
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Harackiewicz JM, Rozek CS, Hulleman CS, and Hyde JS (2012). Helping Parents to Motivate Adolescents in Mathematics and Science: An Experimental Test of a Utility-Value Intervention. Psychological science PMID: 22760887
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Harackiewicz JM, Rozek CS, Hulleman CS, & Hyde JS. (2012) Helping Parents to Motivate Adolescents in Mathematics and Science: An Experimental Test of a Utility-Value Intervention. Psychological science. PMID: 22760887
- July 31, 2012
- 04:53 AM
- 279 views
Using yuk! and "unnaturalness" to teach children new morals
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Some morals - such as it being wrong to hurt others - children learn because they see the distress a particular behaviour causes others, or the harm it can bring upon themselves. But other immoral behaviours don't necessarily have obvious victims. These relate to so-called purity-based morals, such as taboo sexual relations, sacrilegious acts or inappropriate eating behaviours. How do kids learn that these things are wrong, especially if they've never actually encountered them?
A new study shows that children are primed to recognise the immorality of certain behaviours by feelings of disgust and beliefs about unnaturalness, especially when these factors are combined. Joshua Rottman and Deborah Kelemen at Boston University manipulated these factors to provoke 7-year-olds into judging novel behaviours by alien characters as immoral.
"This is the first experimental investigation of a clear-cut case of moral acquisition," Rottman and Kelemen said, "one involving morally naive subjects ... and entirely novel and superficially amoral situations."
Sixty-four 7-year-olds were introduced to the faraway planet "Glinhondo" and its alien occupants. The children were then split into four groups and shown pictures of 12 different scenarios, each accompanied by a short spoken description. The scenarios involved several aliens engaging in behaviours directed at their own bodies (e.g. covering their heads with sticks) or at the environment (e.g. sprinkling blue water into a big puddle). After seeing each scenario, the kids had to say whether the depicted behaviour was "wrong" or if it was "OK".
Children in the "disgust" condition viewed the pictures in a room sprayed with the stinky but harmless joke-shop product "Liquid ASS", and the description of the scenarios also highlighted that the alien behaviours were disgusting. Children in the "unnatural" condition viewed the scenarios in a fresh room, but they saw pictures in which only a minority of aliens performed the behaviours and the description highlighted that what they were doing was "unnatural". Kids in a third group experienced a combination of the disgust and unnaturalness - the room stank and it was a minority of aliens performing the behaviour, which was described as unnatural. Finally, some of the kids formed a control group - the room was fresh, all the aliens performed the behaviours and the description merely said that what they were doing was boring.
Children in the combined disgust and unnaturalness condition judged 65 per cent of alien behaviours as "wrong", compared with just 19 per cent of behaviours judged that way by the control group. "This demonstrates that moral acquisition can occur rapidly and in the absence of direct experience with moralised behaviour," the researchers said. "This also speaks against the idea that the primary mechanism guiding moral acquisition is children's active reasoning about harmful or unjust consequences."
The children in the disgust-only or the unnatural-only conditions also judged more alien behaviours as wrong, compared with kids in the control condition, but in both cases they tended to answer "wrong" about half the time, so there's a possibility they were just alternating their answers at random.
The findings show how visceral feelings of disgust combine with intellectual thoughts about what's "natural" to invoke in children a sense of moral wrongness. Another finding was that environmentally directed actions were more often judged as wrong than self-directed actions. "Ultimately, the degree of plasticity inherent within a young child’s moral repertoire is a crucial area of future exploration, and one that is currently under explored," Rottman and Kelemen concluded. "The implications of such research will be substantial, promising to answer fundamental questions about the horizons of our moral nature."
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Rottman J, and Kelemen D (2012). Aliens behaving badly: Children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals. Cognition, 124 (3), 356-60 PMID: 22743053
Note: image provided courtesy of Josh Rottman.
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Rottman J, & Kelemen D. (2012) Aliens behaving badly: Children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals. Cognition, 124(3), 356-60. PMID: 22743053
- May 16, 2012
- 04:02 AM
- 274 views
When are two heads better than one?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched invasion of Iraq ... all these historical calamities have in common that they've been blamed on dud group decision making. Bang heads together, it seems, and you dull people's minds. And yet there's the almost-magic "Wisdom of Crowds" effect - average people's verdicts together and you'll arrive at a more accurate answer than any one person would have achieved on their own. How to solve this paradox? A new series of intriguing studies by Asher Koriat provides part of the answer, highlighting the roles played by people's confidence and the type of problem they're tackling.
Across five studies Koriat tasked dozens of participants with answering a mix of forced-choice questions - some were to do with visual attention (e.g. which of two displays of patterns includes an odd-one-out?); others were general knowledge (e.g. which of two European cities has the larger population?); and there were visual judgement questions (e.g. which of two squiggly lines is longer?). The participants were asked to say how how confident they were in each of their answers.
For each round of questions, Koriat paired up the participants "virtually". That is, the partners in a pair didn't have anything to do with each other. But for each pair, Koriat followed the same rule, always taking the answer from the partner who was more confident.
Over a series of questions, Koriat found that always taking the answer from the most confident partner in a pair led to superior performance for that series (69.88 per cent correct on average in one study) compared with always taking the answer from whichever individual had the most impressive overall performance (67.82 per cent correct). In other words, the more confident of two heads working together nearly always outperformed the most proficient individual working on their own. In the first study using visual patterns, this was true for 18 of the 19 dyads. In further analysis, taking the most confident answer from a virtual group of three led to even more impressive performance.
The strategy even worked for people working alone if they were given two chances, a week apart, to provide answers to a series of questions, as well as rating their confidence. Always taking the more confident of their answers led to superior performance overall and was more effective than simply averaging their two answers (see earlier Digest item: Unleash the crowd within).
But here's the all-important caveat. This strategy of taking the answer of the most confident partner only worked for questions for which most people, "the crowd", tend to get the answer right. When the questions were tricky and wrong-footed most people, then the rule was reversed. Take the example of "Which city has the larger population - Zurich or Bern?". Most people get this question wrong - they think it's Bern because that's the capital city, but the correct answer is Zurich. For questions like this, the most effective strategy is actually to always take the answer of the dyad partner who is least confident (doing so beats the average score of the individual with the overall best performance).
Reflecting on these new results, Ralph Hertwig at the University of Basel said there were two important, tantalising questions for future research - is it possible to categorise problems somehow into those that tend to wrong-foot the crowd, and those that don't? Similarly, are there any cues that can be used to recognise in advance whether a problem is of the kind that the crowd gets right (in which case it's best to go with the most confident team member) or wrong (if so, go with the least confident member)?
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Koriat, A. (2012). When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why? Science, 336 (6079), 360-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549
Further reading: The much maligned group brainstorm can aid the combining of ideas.
Three-person groups best for problem-solving.
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Koriat, A. (2012) When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why?. Science, 336(6079), 360-362. DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549
- July 30, 2012
- 04:08 AM
- 274 views
Beat anger by imagining you're a fly on the wall
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Anger is "the elephant in the room in mental health" according to The Mental Health Foundation. In a survey they conducted in 2008, a third of respondents said they knew someone with an anger problem. Anger is often made worse by misguided folk wisdom that says it's a good idea to reflect on your feelings and vent them. In fact, past research has shown that ruminating and venting anger make it worse.
A new study tests the idea that anger can be dissipated by mentally distancing oneself from the situation - as if viewing proceedings from the perspective of a fly on the wall. There's evidence that this is beneficial, but before now this was derived from studies that merely asked people to imagine frustrating scenarios. Now Dominik Mischkowski and his colleagues have ramped up the realism levels, deliberately winding up their participants in the lab.
Ninety-four undergrads signed up for what they thought was an investigation into the effects of music on problem solving and creativity. They listened to some intense classical music and attempted to solve a series of anagrams against the clock. Part of the procedure involved them reading back the correct answer to the researchers over an intercom. This is where the wind up began - the experimenter repeatedly said that they weren't speaking loudly enough. After the twelfth anagram he went as far as saying "Look this is the third time I have to say this! Can't you follow directions? Speak louder!"
Immediately after the wind up, the participants were told a second experiment (on the effects of music on feelings) required that they reflect on the previous anagram task - either seeing the situation unfold again through their own eyes, or as if they were watching the situation from a distance, "as if it were happening to the distant to you all over again." A third of the participants acted as controls and were told to reflect on the anagram task without any specific instructions. Afterwards, all the participants rated their anger levels. The key finding was that the participants in the distancing condition reported feeling less angry and having fewer aggressive thoughts compared with participants in the self-immersion and control conditions.
A second study was similar but this time a new set of participants were given the chance to actually vent their anger. After the wind up and the reflection phase (from a distance vs. immersed in their own perspective) the participants were invited to take part in a competitive anagram task with a partner located in another room. Part of this involved the chance to blast their opponent with loud noise when he/she got answers wrong - taken as a sign of aggressive behaviour. The important result here - participants who reflected on the initial, frustrating anagram task as if from the perspective of a fly on the wall showed less aggression compared with the other participants.
Mischkowski and his team said their findings showed "how people can neutralize aggression while focusing on their emotions and the situation at hand—by adopting a self-distanced perspective." They added that this is important given that distraction is often not possible in real life situations, for example when it's necessary to carry on interacting with the provocateur.
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Dominik Mischkowskia, Ethan Kross, and Brad J. Bushmana (2012). Flies on the wall are less aggressive: Self-distancing “in the heat of the moment” reduces aggressive thoughts, angry feelings and aggressive behaviour. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.012
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Dominik Mischkowskia, Ethan Kross, & Brad J. Bushmana. (2012) Flies on the wall are less aggressive: Self-distancing “in the heat of the moment” reduces aggressive thoughts, angry feelings and aggressive behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.012
- September 19, 2012
- 03:51 AM
- 273 views
Does sleeping face-down induce more sexual dreams?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
It's a common experience for us to incorporate sounds we hear while we're sleeping into the narrative of our dreams. The real car alarm outside becomes a police siren in our exciting chase through dreamland. Given the way activities and sensations from the real world permeate our dreams, the author of a new study, Calvin Kai-Ching Yu at Hong Kong Shue Yan University, has investigated whether the simple fact of our sleeping position can also affect the kinds of dreams we're likely to have.
Yu surveyed 670 people (average age 19) - including 227 men and 443 women - about the content of their dreams, their dream intensity, their usual sleeping position (face up, face down, or lying on their side), and their personality.
Yu's main finding is that sleeping more often in a prone (face down) position is associated with a higher prevalence of experiencing particular dream themes, including: being locked up; dreaming about hand tools; sexual experiences; being smothered and unable to breath; swimming; and being nude. Although sleeping more often in a prone position was related to personality factors (negatively associated with conscientiousness and correlated with neuroticism), this didn't fully explain the link between sleep position and dream content. Of the 476 participants who reported having a dominant sleep position, only 5 per cent were habitual prone sleepers.
Yu thinks a prone sleeping position triggers particular kinds of dream content because of the way that the pressure on the body, including the genitals, and difficulty breathing, is converted into dream experiences. Sometimes this is done in a symbolic way, he argues, (hence the dreams about hand tools). Yu endorses a Freudian view of dreams, suggesting they protect sleep "by quenching the internal needs or eliminating the cues that alert the sleeping ego to the existence of the outer world."
In contrast to the associations between prone sleeping position and dream content, the frequency of sleeping in a supine (face up) or lateral position was almost entirely unrelated to the prevalence of different dream themes.
A major criticism of this research is the fact that participants were relied on to accurately recall their sleeping position and their dream content, a shortcoming that Yu acknowledged. The lack of any comparison between genders also seemed an unfortunate omission.
"This study provides the evidence that dream experiences, and in particular dream content, can be influenced by body posture during sleep," Yu concluded. His findings add to past research showing that right-sided sleepers had more positive dreams and fewer nightmares than left-sided sleepers.
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C K-C Yu (2012). The effect of sleep position on dream experiences. Dreaming DOI: 10.1037/a0029255
--Further reading-- Paraplegics walk in their dreams.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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C K-C Yu. (2012) The effect of sleep position on dream experiences. Dreaming. DOI: 10.1037/a0029255
- May 31, 2012
- 04:28 AM
- 270 views
Faces covered by a niqab are seen as less happy and expressing more shame
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The wearing of face veils (the niqab) by Muslim women has become a politically sensitive issue in recent years. The practice is banned in France and similar laws are planned, or already in place, in many other Western European countries including Belgium, The Netherlands and Austria. In the UK, in 2006 the then Government Minister Jack Straw caused controversy when he suggested that wearing the niqab interferes with face-to-face communication and he'd prefer it if the practice were dropped. Now for the first time psychologists have tested the effects of the niqab on the facial communication of emotion.
A team led by Agneta Fischer at the University of Amsterdam showed four short videos to 58 students. The silent videos showed a woman (one of three actresses) telling a story that was either emotionally neutral, happy, made her angry or made her feel shame. Crucially, some of the participants viewed videos in which the woman was wearing a niqab; others viewed a woman with horizontal black bars on the screen concealing the top of her head and her lower face; and others viewed a version in which the woman's head and face were uncovered (see picture). The participants' task was to rate the intensity of emotions expressed by the woman in each clip.
The niqab seemed to change the facial communication of emotion. Participants who viewed the woman wearing a niqab rated her expression of happiness as less intense than participants who viewed the other two videos. Moreover, participants who viewed videos of a woman with her face covered (be that with the niqab or the horizontal bars) rated her expression of shame as more intense, compared with participants who viewed a woman with an uncovered face. The perception of anger in the videos was unaffected by face covering, probably because anger is expressed principally via furrowing of the brow, which was visible regardless of face covering.
After viewing the video clips, the participants were asked about their attitudes toward the niqab. Those who'd seen clips showing a woman with a covered face (the niqab or the horizontal bars) expressed more negative attitudes toward the niqab, and this was mediated by the amount of negative emotion they perceived in the video clips. In other words, the researchers said, "we may conclude that the attempt to decode emotions in covered faces leads one to perceive more negative emotions, which in turn influences how one feels about covering one's face."
There is a weakness in the study methodology. The clips featuring the horizontal bars were created by using software to overlay the bars on the footage of the women filmed without their heads covered. The niqab videos, by contrast, were filmed separately with the women actually wearing the niqabs, so it's possible the actresses may have behaved differently whilst wearing the veils. However, this doesn't diminish the main point that both forms of face covering affected the communication of emotion.
Fischer and her colleagues concluded that the niqab may have the effect of exaggerating the perceived amount of negative emotion expressed by a wearer, whilst diminishing the perceived amount of positive emotion. "The present research thus supports some of the concerns that have been expressed in political debates concerning the negative effects of wearing niqabs in social settings," they said.
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Fischer, A., Gillebaart, M., Rotteveel, M., Becker, D., and Vliek, M. (2012). Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3 (3), 266-273 DOI: 10.1177/1948550611418534
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Fischer, A., Gillebaart, M., Rotteveel, M., Becker, D., & Vliek, M. (2011) Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(3), 266-273. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611418534
- August 2, 2012
- 04:45 AM
- 267 views
Music we like can be more distracting than music we don't
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Music by Infernal: enjoyable but distracting
Many of us like to listen to music while we work. It's become a ritual, alongside the coffee in our favourite mug. Previous research suggests this is probably no bad thing. In lab studies, people who listen to music they like, generally perform better at mental tasks afterwards, an effect that's been attributed to boosts in mood and arousal.
But what about the effect of background music that plays on during a task - more akin what we do in real life? This is actually less studied. The traditional mood-arousal literature would predict it to be beneficial too, especially if the music is to the listener's taste.
However, there's another line of research, known as the "Irrelevant Sound Effect", that's all about the way background sounds can interfere with our short-term memory for ordered lists, which would be a bad thing for many work-related tasks. These studies show that the distraction is greater when the sound is more acoustically varied - just like your typical pop song. Based on this, Nick Perham and Martinne Sykora made a counter-intuitive prediction - background music that you like will be more detrimental to working memory than unappealing music, so long as the liked music has more acoustical variation than the disliked music.
Twenty-five undergrads completed several serial recall tasks. They were presented with strings of eight consonants and had to repeat them back from memory in the correct order. Performance was best in the quiet condition, but the key finding was that particiants' performance was worse when they completed the memory task with a song they liked playing over headphones (Infernal's "From Paris to Berlin"), compared with a song they disliked (songs such as "Acid Bath" from the grind core metal band Repulsion). In case you're wondering, participants who liked Repulsion were excluded from the study.
The fast-tempo "extreme guitar-based" music of Repulsion, the researchers explained, is like "a cacophony of sound, in which the segmentation of each individual sound from the next is difficult to identify". This means it has less acoustic variation from one moment to the next, which helps explain why, even though disliked, it had a less detrimental effect on serial recall than Infernal's pop song.
Perham and Sykora said their findings were "seemingly incompatible with the mood and arousal literature, but are consistent with the changing-state explanation of the Irrelevant Sound Effect."
A further intriguing detail from the study is the participants' lack of insight into the degree of distraction associated with each type of music. Asked to judge their own performance, they determined correctly that their memory was more accurate in the quiet condition, but they didn't realise that their performance was poorest whilst listening to the music they liked.
So, the next time you're bothered by someone else's bad music, console yourself that the noise could be less harmful to your work performance than your own choice would be!
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Nick Perham and Martinne Sykora (2012). Disliked Music can be Better for Performance than Liked Music. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2826
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Nick Perham, & Martinne Sykora. (2012) Disliked Music can be Better for Performance than Liked Music. Applied Cognitive Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/acp.2826
- July 2, 2012
- 04:20 AM
- 265 views
"Beauty in the eyes of the beer holder" - people who think they're drunk, think they're hot
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The beer-goggle effect is well-documented - the way that being drunk makes everyone look wonderfully attractive. A new study asks whether the goggles work backwards. Does being drunk affect how we judge our own appeal?
Laurent Bègue and her team asked 19 patrons at a French bar to rate their own attractiveness and to puff into a breathalyser. The two measures correlated - the participants who were more drunk tended to rate themselves as more attractive. But maybe that was nothing to do with the effect of alcohol. Perhaps better-looking people like getting more drunk?
To find out, Bègue and her colleagues conducted a balanced placebo test with 86 Frenchmen. Half drank the equivalent of five to six shots of vodka, and in this group, half were told truthfully the minty lemon drink was alcoholic, whilst the other half were told it was a new, non-alcoholic beverage that tasted like alcohol. The remaining men drank an alcohol-free version of the minty, lemon drink - half of them were told it was alcoholic (alcohol was sprayed on the glass to make this more believable) and half were told truthfully that it was not. After a short break to allow the alcohol to work its effects, they all recorded an advertising message for the fictional beverage company that they'd been told had produced the drink. Right after, they then watched back the film they'd made and rated their own attractiveness.
The take-home finding - participants who thought they were drunk rated themselves as more attractive, regardless of whether they'd really had any alcohol or not. In other words, it's not the chemical content of alcohol that makes us think we're attractive, it's merely the belief that we're drunk that inflates our self-perceived appeal.
Maybe people who thought they were drunk really were more attractive than those who thought they were sober? A panel of 22 university students also watched the videos and rated the attractiveness of the men. Their was no evidence in their ratings to suggest the participants who thought they were drunk were more attractive, so the inflated self-perceived appeal of these men was illusory.
Why should thinking we're drunk have this effect? The researchers believe it must have to do with implicit beliefs people hold about alcohol. If people associate alcohol and attractiveness in their minds, then thinking they've had alcohol could make thoughts about their own attractiveness more accessible. This would fit with past research showing that people tended to rate media characters who drink as more attractive.
Coincidentally, another study has just been published that asked a group of 100 young men to answer questions about how they think a typical young man's personality is affected by being drunk. They then said how they thought being drunk affected their own personality. There was a lot of agreement about the effect of being drunk on a typical young man - reduced conscientiousness, increased neuroticism, elevated extraversion, reduced openness and reduced agreeableness. When the young men then said how alcohol changed their own personalities, they again highlighted reduced conscientiousness, increased neuroticism and extraversion, but they thought their own agreeableness was unchanged and that they were actually more open to experience when intoxicated.
So, not only do people who think they're drunk find themselves more attractive, people (well, young men) also think that, whereas you are less agreeable when you're drunk, their own personality when drunk remains as likeable and friendly as ever!
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Uusberg, Andero, Mõttus, René, Kreegipuu, Kairi, and Allik, Jüri (2012). Beliefs about the effects of alcohol on the personality of oneself and others Journal of Individual Differences DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000084
Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah (2012). ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. British Journal of Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02114.x
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Uusberg, Andero, Mõttus, René, Kreegipuu, Kairi, & Allik, Jüri. (2012) Beliefs about the effects of alcohol on the personality of oneself and others. Journal of Individual Differences. DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000084
Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, & Medhi Ourabah. (2012) ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. British Journal of Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02114.x
- October 23, 2012
- 06:26 AM
- 265 views
Why do children hide by covering their eyes?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
A cute mistake that young children make is to think that they can hide themselves by covering or closing their eyes. Why do they make this error? A research team led by James Russell at the University of Cambridge has used a process of elimination to find out.
Testing children aged around three to four years, the researchers first asked them whether they could be seen if they were wearing an eye mask, and whether the researcher could see another adult, if that adult was wearing an eye mask. Nearly all the children felt that they were hidden when they were wearing the mask, and most thought the adult wearing a mask was hidden too.
Next, Russell and his colleagues established whether children think it's the fact that a person's eyes are hidden from other people's view that renders them invisible, or if they think it's being blinded that makes you invisible. To test this, a new group of young kids were quizzed about their ability to be seen when they were wearing goggles that were completely blacked out, meaning they couldn't see and their eyes were hidden, versus when they were wearing a different pair that were covered in mirrored film, meaning they could see, but other people couldn't see their eyes.
This test didn't go quite to plan because out of the 37 participating children, only 7 were able to grasp the idea that they could see out, but people couldn't see their eyes. Of these 7, all bar one thought they were invisible regardless of which goggles they were wearing. In other words, the children's feelings of invisibility seem to come from the fact that their eyes are hidden, rather than from the fact that they can't see.
Now things get a little complicated. In both studies so far, when the children thought they were invisible by virtue of their eyes being covered, they nonetheless agreed that their head and their body were visible. They seemed to be making a distinction between their "self" that was hidden, and their body, which was still visible. Taken together with the fact that it was the concealment of the eyes that seemed to be the crucial factor for feeling hidden, the researchers wondered if their invisibility beliefs were based around the idea that there must be eye contact between two people - a meeting of gazes - for them to see each other (or at least, to see their "selves").
This idea received support in a further study in which more children were asked if they could be seen if a researcher looked directly at them whilst they (the child) averted their gaze; or, contrarily, if the researcher with gaze averted was visible whilst the child looked directly at him or her. Many of the children felt they were hidden so long as they didn't meet the gaze of the researcher; and they said the researcher was hidden if his or her gaze was averted whilst the child looked on.
"... it would seem that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet," the researchers said.
Other explanations were ruled out with some puppet studies. For instance, the majority of a new group of children agreed it was reasonable for a puppet to hide by covering its eyes, which rules out the argument that children only hide this way because they are caught up in the heat of the moment.
The revelation that most young children think people can only see each other when their eyes meet raises some interesting question for future research. For example, children with autism are known to engage in less sharing of attention with other people (following another person's gaze), so perhaps they will be less concerned with the role of mutual gaze in working out who is visible. Another interesting avenue could be to explore the invisibility beliefs of children born blind.
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Russell, J., Gee, B., and Bullard, C. (2012). Why Do Young Children Hide by Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and the Developing Concept of Self. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13 (4), 550-576 DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2011.594826
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Russell, J., Gee, B., & Bullard, C. (2012) Why Do Young Children Hide by Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and the Developing Concept of Self. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13(4), 550-576. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2011.594826
- August 6, 2012
- 04:28 AM
- 264 views
What your walk says about you ... is wrong
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
We garner a surprising amount of accurate information from the briefest glimpses of other people - their faces, voices and clothes. That much we know from past research. But what about the way they walk? Does a swagger betray an ego? A new study shows that in judging a person's personality from their gait, you and I (and others) are likely to agree with each other. And yet our judgments would be wrong.
John Thoresen and his colleagues created their stimuli for the study by asking 26 young people to walk naturally between two locations eight meters apart. The volunteers wore reflective markers on their joints so that the researchers could create simple point-light videos of their gait. In the videos, all visual detail is removed except for the movement of 13 main body joints.
Twenty-four participants then viewed the video clips and, instructed to "go with their gut", they rated the personalities of the different walkers. There was high consistency between the ratings of the participants - they agreed with each other. But they were wrong. At least they were wrong based on a comparison of their ratings with the walkers' scores on a personality questionnaire.
The researchers analysed the point-light videos to try to identify what cues the participants had used to make their judgments. This led to the identification of two main factors - one was related to an expansive, loose walking style, which participants tended to interpret as a sign of adventurousness, extraversion, trustworthiness and warmth; the other was a slow, relaxed style, which the participants interpreted as a sign of low neuroticism. Although linked with these observer perceptions, the two walking styles were not in fact associated with walkers' actual personalities (based on the questionnaires they completed).
In further experiments, the researchers used this information to doctor the point-light videos, to see if they could provoke particular personality judgements in a new set of viewing participants. This worked after exaggerating the first "expansive" cue (triggering stronger judgments of adventurousness, extraversion, trustworthiness and warmth), but not for the other cue, perhaps because the manipulations in this case led to unnatural looking walks. Thoresen's team also looked for other assumptions that might have mediated participants' judgements of personality from gait. Key here were emotion, masculinity and attractiveness - the two walking cues affected judgments of these factors, and in turn this influenced participants' inferences about personality.
The researchers said their findings could have practical relevance for the creators of computer avatars and cartoon characters. Another tantalising possibility is that people might be able to learn to walk a certain way to create a particular impression on others. However, Thoresen and his team urged caution about this: "it is not certain that minimal cues identified here can be taught or that such instructions may be effective," they said. "We also do not know whether people use bodily motion as cues for personality when information such as facial expressions, clothing or verbal behaviour is available."
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Thoresen JC, Vuong QC, and Atkinson AP (2012). First impressions: Gait cues drive reliable trait judgements. Cognition, 124 (3), 261-71 PMID: 22717166
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Thoresen JC, Vuong QC, & Atkinson AP. (2012) First impressions: Gait cues drive reliable trait judgements. Cognition, 124(3), 261-71. PMID: 22717166
- June 6, 2012
- 03:55 AM
- 263 views
You can't resist the pull of another person's gaze
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
At just the moment the magician swaps the position of two cards in her left hand, she looks across deliberately and misleadingly to her right hand and your attention follows. You can't help it. You see where she's looking and your attention is sent automatically in the same direction. Magicians have known this power for centuries and now psychologists are confirming and measuring the effect under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. More surprising, perhaps, is their finding that the directing effect of arrows is also impossible to resist.
Giovanni Galfano and his colleagues in Italy instructed dozens of participants to look out for a small target that would appear on-screen, each trial, either on the left-hand side or the right-hand side. When it appeared, the participants' task was to press the space-bar key on a keyboard as quickly as possible.
To make things even easier, a word,"left" or "right" (in Italian), appeared in the middle of the screen giving the participants advance warning, with 100 per cent accuracy, as to which side the target would appear. In another run of trials, there was no need for advance warning from a directional word because the target always appeared on the same side.
The only complicating factor in this arrangement - but it's a crucial one - is that after the directional word had gone (on those trials where there was one), and before the target had appeared, a cartoon face popped up in the middle of the screen, looking either in the direction of where the target would appear, or the opposite direction. In other versions of the experiment, rather than a face, an arrow appeared, pointing either towards the side where the target would appear, or towards the opposite side.
The participants were told explicitly to ignore these faces and arrows. But they couldn't. When the cartoon face was looking in the opposite direction to the side the target appeared on, participants were significantly slower to spot the target and press the space key. And it was the same with arrows that pointed in the wrong direction. It's as if the faces and arrows had irresistibly grabbed the participants' attention and sent it momentarily in the wrong direction.
The slowing effect of the gaze and arrows was only a few milliseconds, but it was statistically significant. "The finding that the information conveyed by distractors interfered with the task indicates that orienting of attention mediated by both gaze and arrows resists suppression and can be defined as strongly automatic," the researchers said.
Galfano's team added that the processes underlying the pulling power of gaze and arrows are not necessarily the same. The pull of another's gaze is apparent in the looking behaviour of new-born babies aged just two days, suggestive of an innate mechanism. The power of arrows, by contrast, is obviously based on learned symbolism.
The researchers conceded that different results may have emerged in a more complicated environment more akin to the real world, something they plan to investigate in the future. Related to this, it's been shown that the social identity of a gazer influences the attention-grabbing power of their gaze. A study published last year found that right-wing participants were more affected by the gaze direction of Silvio Berlusconi than were left-wing participants.
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Galfano, G., Dalmaso, M., Marzoli, D., Pavan, G., Coricelli, C., and Castelli, L. (2012). Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-16 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.663765
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Galfano, G., Dalmaso, M., Marzoli, D., Pavan, G., Coricelli, C., & Castelli, L. (2012) Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-16. DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.663765
- October 11, 2012
- 04:25 AM
- 261 views
People make more moral decisions when they think their heart is racing
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Why did the proverbial Good Samaritan cross the road to help the injured stranger? Perhaps he listened to his heart. Not in the poetic sense, but literally. A new study by Jun Gu and his colleagues has highlighted the way cardiac feedback influences people's moral decisions. When students were fed false feedback, leading them to think their heart was racing, they were more likely to volunteer for a good cause and less likely to lie to gain more money.
Eighty-six undergrads arrived at a psychology lab and were asked if they could quickly test out some heart-recording equipment that was needed for a separate study. A wrist monitor was attached to a headset though which false normal (60 beats per minute) or fast (96 beats per minute) heartbeat sounds were played. While the students test-drove the equipment, they were asked to read a recruitment letter, seeking their time for another study into the negative consequences of homophobic discrimination. Forty per cent of students who heard their heart beating fast agreed to volunteer their time, as compared with 17 per cent of students who heard their heart beating at a normal speed.
A second study with 65 more students was similar, but this time as the students tested the heart-monitoring equipment, they played a quick money-sharing game. They simply had to decide whether to instruct their partner, located in another room, to pick option A (which was actually more lucrative for the participant him or herself) or option B (more lucrative for the partner). Participants who heard their heart beating fast were less likely to lie and tell their partner that he or she would be better off choosing option A (31 per cent of them did so, compared with 58 per cent of participants who heard their heart beat at normal speed). A handful of participants were suspicious about the false heart feedback so they were excluded from the analysis, though the general pattern of results was the same with their data included or omitted.
Gu and his colleagues think that a fast heart beat is interpreted by people as a sign they are stressed and that they should adhere to moral conventions as a way to escape that stress. The new finding is consistent with Antonio Damasio's influential Somatic Marker hypothesis, which is based on the idea that bodily feedback guides our decisions, often at a non-conscious level. For example, people playing a card game sweat more when picking from the wrong, costly pile, even before they've realised at a conscious level that it's the wrong choice. The new research also complements recent research showing how bodily perceptions can influence the moral conscience. In one study, participants were less likely to volunteer their time after being given the chance to wash their hands - as if the process of physical cleansing left them feeling less need to compensate for past transgressions.
Cardiac feedback doesn't affect everyone in the same way. In further experiments, Gu and his colleagues demonstrated that the moral decision-making of people who are more mindful (for example, they agreed with statements like: "I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them") was unaffected by the false cardiac feedback. The researchers also found that telling participants that the financial game was a "decision-making" task led to immunity from the false heart feedback, relative to being told the game was an "intuitive task".
This last result is particularly intriguing since we usually assume that thinking more deliberatively helps rein in the wild horses of our emotions, allowing us to behave more morally. The finding of Gu's team suggests that in some circumstances at least, thinking more deliberately can undermine the influence of the heart, actually making it less likely that we'll make a more moral decision.
"The current research reveals that perceived physiological experiences play an important role in influencing moral behaviours," the researchers said. "Listening to your heart may indeed shape ethical behaviours."
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Gu J, Zhong CB, and Page-Gould E (2012). Listen to Your Heart: When False Somatic Feedback Shapes Moral Behavior. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 22889162
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Gu J, Zhong CB, & Page-Gould E. (2012) Listen to Your Heart: When False Somatic Feedback Shapes Moral Behavior. Journal of experimental psychology. General. PMID: 22889162
- July 12, 2012
- 04:14 AM
- 257 views
Introducing "inattentional deafness" - the noisy gorilla that's missed
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
One of the most famous experiments in cognitive psychology (pdf) involved a person in a gorilla suit walking through a basketball game between two teams of players, one dressed in white, the other in black. Told to count passes between the players in white, most people who watched a video of this scene completely failed to notice the gorilla. The experiment provided a dramatic demonstration of what's known as inattentional blindness - our failure to process unexpected visual stimuli that we aren't paying attention to. Now a pair of researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London have provided the first demonstration of prolonged inattentional deafness. Their participants failed to hear a man walk through an auditory scene for nineteen seconds saying repeatedly "I am a gorilla".
Polly Dalton and Nick Fraenkel first created a real auditory scene lasting 69 seconds, in which two conversations about a party took place: one between a pair of women located on one side of the room, the other between a pair of men located on the other. The sounds were recorded via a dummy's head with microphones implanted in its "ears", thus simulating as closely as possible what it would be like for a person to actually hear the scene unfold in real life. Thirty-three seconds into the scene, a man entered from the back of the room and for 19 seconds walked through the scene uttering "I am a gorilla" (listen to the recording).
In an initial study, 40 participants listened to the scene and they were told to pay attention either to the men's conversation or the women's. Afterwards they were asked if they'd heard anything odd. Of the participants who were focused on the men's conversation, 90 per cent noticed the gorilla. In stark contrast, just 30 per cent of participants who were focused on the women's conversation noticed the gorilla.
So, in the same way that tuning out the sight of the basketball players in black led most participants (in the classic research) to miss the sight of an unexpected black gorilla, tuning out the sound of the men's conversation led most participants in this study to completely miss the sound of a male-voiced gorilla.
A potential confound in this new study is that as the auditory gorilla passed through the room, he walked behind the location where the two men were talking. This means that participants focused on the women could have been ignoring male voices and/or one particular side of space. In a second study, the location of the auditory gorilla was reversed so that he passed behind the women. This time 55 per cent of participants focused on the women's conversation still failed to notice the gorilla even though he actually passed on the same side of space that they were focused on.
"The present experiments show that the absence of attention can leave people 'deaf' to a sustained and dynamic auditory stimulus that is clearly noticeable under normal listening conditions," the researchers said, "providing the first ever demonstration of sustained inattentional deafness."
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Dalton P, & Fraenkel N (2012). Gorillas we have missed: Sustained inattentional deafness for dynamic events. Cognition PMID: 22726569
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Dalton P, & Fraenkel N. (2012) Gorillas we have missed: Sustained inattentional deafness for dynamic events. Cognition. PMID: 22726569
- July 19, 2012
- 07:34 AM
- 256 views
Humour reduces our resistance to aggressive marketing
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Whether it's messages on smartphone Apps or the old fashioned way on billboards, radio and TV, advertisers bombard us relentlessly. Fortunately, our brains have an inbuilt BS-detector that shields us from the onslaught - a mental phenomenon that psychologists call simply "resistance". Ads from dodgy companies, our own pre-existing preferences, and a forewarning of a marketing attack can all marshal greater psychological resistance within us. However, a new study suggests that funny adverts lower our guard, leaving us vulnerable to aggressive marketing.
Madelijn Strick and her team exposed 86 Dutch university students to pictures of 12 foreign peppermint brands, each of which appeared together with one of four types of text: funny; positive but unfunny; distracting neutral (simple maths problems); and non-distracting neutral. Crucially, before they saw the brands and text, half the students were primed to be resistant. They were told that the experiment was being conducted in collaboration with a cunning local supermarket manager who was planning to bombard university students with email and text ads, and that he was even willing to use subliminal messages to make more money.
Three minutes after seeing the brands (during which they completed irrelevant filler tasks), the students completed tests designed to gauge the impact the brands had made on them. They were shown pictures of peppermint brands, some new, and had to say as quickly and accurately as possible whether they'd seen them earlier or not. Another test involved pictures of one of the original brands being flashed on-screen before a positive or negative word, and participants had to categorise the words. Brands with positive connotations would be expected to speed up the recognition of positive words.
As expected, those students who were primed to be resistant tended to perceive the brands as having more negative connotations ... unless that is, the brands were accompanied by distracting text, be that humorous or neutral. The distracting text appeared to interfere with the automatic processes that usually underlie our resistance to aggressive marketing. Separately from nullifying resistance, positive text (humorous or not) led to the brands acquiring positive connotations.
Another study tested whether these effects had any bearing on actual consumer behaviour. A similar procedure was followed but this time the brands were energy drinks and accompanying pictures were used rather than text (as before, these were: humorous; positive but unfunny; neutral non-distracting; and neural distracting). A new batch of students, as well as completing the post-presentation tests, also indicated how many discount coupons they wanted for each brand.
Regardless of whether they were primed to be resistant, students generally preferred brands that had been accompanied by positive images (funny or not). For students primed to be resistant, it was specifically brands accompanied by funny and neutral-distracting images that were more popular. The more resistance the students said they felt, the more they tended to show a favourable bias towards the brands accompanied by a humorous picture.
Strick and her team said that humour has a double effect - because it's distracting, it prevents the formation of negative brand associations, and separately it engenders positive connotations for the brand because of the pleasure of mirth. These effects were implicit in the sense that they occurred regardless of whether participants remembered that a brand had been paired earlier with humour. There was also a cost (to advertisers) of humour - brands were remembered less well if they were accompanied by funny text or pictures, presumably because of their distracting effect.
Taken altogether, the results paint a nuanced picture. "The main contribution of this research is not the overall conclusion that humour in ads 'works'," the researchers said, "but that it sheds light into when and why humour should be preferred over non humorous positive emotions and neutral distractions." For brands that expect to meet resistance in their target audience, humour can help prevent the formation of negative associations. But distraction should be used in moderation - too much and the brand won't be remembered. From the consumers' perspective, beware advertisers bearing jokes - they could be using them to lower your guard.
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Strick M, Holland RW, van Baaren RB, and van Knippenberg A (2012). Those who laugh are defenseless: How humor breaks resistance to influence. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Applied, 18 (2), 213-23 PMID: 22564085
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Strick M, Holland RW, van Baaren RB, & van Knippenberg A. (2012) Those who laugh are defenseless: How humor breaks resistance to influence. Journal of experimental psychology. Applied, 18(2), 213-23. PMID: 22564085
- January 18, 2012
- 04:42 AM
- 252 views
You're most creative when you're at your groggiest
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Are you an evening person? Guess what? Early in the day, when you're bleary eyed, stumbling about in the fog of sleepiness, you're probably at your creative peak. In contrast, if you're a morning person, then for you, the evening is the best time for musing.
How come? Insight-based problem-solving requires a broad, unfocused approach. You're more likely to achieve that Aha! revelatory moment when your inhibitory brain processes are at their weakest and your thoughts are meandering.
Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks recruited 428 undergrads and had them complete a questionnaire to identify whether they were night owls or morning larks. As you might expect, based on factors like preferred time of day and peak performance, most of the students - 195 of them - were owls and just 28 were larks. The remainder came out as neutral.
Next, the students tried to solve six problem-solving tasks - half of them were insight-type tasks (e.g. a prisoner in a tower finds a piece of rope that's half the length of the distance to the ground. He escapes by using scissors to divide the rope in half and then tying the two ends together. How could he have done this?*), and half were analytic questions that require a narrow focus (e.g. Bob's father is 3 times as old as Bob. They were both born in October. Four years ago, he was four times older. How old are Bob and his father?). Students had 4 minutes to solve each problem.
Crucially, half the students were tested first thing in the morning (between 8.30am and 9.30am), the others were tested late afternoon (between 4 and 5.30pm). Here's the headline result: the students were much more successful at solving the insight problems when the time of testing coincided with their least optimal time of functioning. When larks were tested in the evening and owls were tested in the morning, they achieved an average success rate of 56, 22 and 49 per cent, for the three insight tasks, compared with success rates of 51, 16, and 31 per cent achieved by students tested at their preferred time of day. By contrast, performance on the analytic tasks was unaffected by time of day.
A potential weakness in the findings is that there were so many more evening people among the student participants (who therefore excelled at the creative tasks in the morning). So perhaps the results were skewed and the creative advantage has to do with the morning, not to do with performing at your least favoured time of day. To test this possibility, Wieth and Zacks looked at the data for the students with a neutral disposition (no favoured time of day). They didn't perform the insight tasks any better in the morning than evening, thus suggesting the creative advantage specifically comes from operating at your least optimal time of day.
The researchers recommended that students consider designing their class schedules so that they take art and creative writing at their non-optimal time of day. "Previous research has shown that students tend to get higher grades when classes are in sync with their circadian arousal;" they said, "however, the interaction between time of day and type of class has not been investigated. The results of this study suggest that the relationship between time of day and grades needs to be investigated and may not simply follow a uniform pattern."
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Wieth, M., and Zacks, R. (2011). Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal. Thinking and Reasoning, 17 (4), 387-401 DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2011.625663
* The solution is that he cuts the rope length-wise into two thin strips and ties these together.
Related posts on the Digest:
Early risers are more proactive than evening people
The personality of early risers
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Wieth, M., & Zacks, R. (2011) Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal. Thinking , 17(4), 387-401. DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2011.625663
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