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John Grohol, Psy.D.
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- September 9, 2010
- 06:30 AM
- 539 views
An Emotional Timeline of 9/11
by John M Grohol PsyD in World of Psychology - Psych Central
As we approach the ninth anniversary of 9/11, researchers writing in Psychological Science this week analyzed 85,000 text pages sent through pagers during the 2 hours before and 18 hours after 9/11 took place. (You do remember what a pager is, don’t you?) WikiLeaks, the website in the news lately for other reasons, has made the 573,000 lines consisting of 6.4 million words freely available on its website for the past year.
What would these 85,000 pages tell us about the human emotion that people were expressing during those 20 hours?
Researchers’ favorite tool when it comes to text analysis is the good ole Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). So it’s no surprise that’s what these researchers also turned to to analyze the word content of these communications for three specific emotions — sadness, anxiety and anger. The researchers “computed the percentage of words related to (a) sadness (e.g., crying, grief), (b) anxiety (e.g., worried, fearful), and (c) anger.”
What did they find?
(Click on the graphic above for a larger, more readable version.)
For sadness, the researchers didn’t find much of significance. I suspect this was largely because the shock of the attacks was still with most of us, and the extent of the human toll was not known that first day.
For anxiety, the researchers found that anxiety spiked after each big event — “the crash of the hijacked planes into the WTC and the Pentagon, the collapse of the WTC towers, and information concerning the terroristic nature of the attacks were all mirrored by a marked increase in anxiety-related words.”
And finally for anger? “Anger was present as soon as the first airplane crashed into the WTC, and it continued. The expression of anger steadily and strongly increased with ongoing information regarding the terrorist attacks.”
The researchers found that, perhaps contrary to what some might expect, the initial overall reaction from people wasn’t that of sadness, but instead some anxiety that spiked around specific incidents. They also found a significant increasing sense of anger at the senselessness of the attacks as the day progressed and more information became known.
This leads us to the question, “Why study such population-wide emotional reactions? What can we learn from such data?”
This uncovering of the emotional experiences of thousands of people on a minute-by-minute basis might be useful for evaluating and refining theories of emotion generation and coping in general, as well as sense making following disaster.
Further, this dynamic pattern of immediate negative emotions in response to the terrorist attacks has important implications for understanding the individual and societal consequences of September 11: On the one hand, anger might have been helpful for regaining a sense of control over the tide of events on an individual and collective level.
On the other hand, anger is known to predict moral outrage and a desire for vengeance, which — once aroused — seem to require an outlet. This might help to explain individual acts of discrimination following the attacks, as well as societal responses such as political intolerance and confrontational policy.
Interesting ideas. And an interesting analysis of the pulse of the nation during 9/11. I can imagine how this can be done so much more easily now with the prevalence and use of Facebook and Twitter. But I’m less convinced of the applicability of these data to any psychological theories. We already have a pretty good understanding of human emotions and coping with a disaster. Perhaps the data may shed light on these issues, but nothing in the current data don’t seem to do much of that.
Reference:
Back MD, Küfner AC, & Egloff B (2010). The Emotional Timeline of September 11, 2001. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID: 20805373
... Read more »
Back MD, Küfner AC, & Egloff B. (2010) The Emotional Timeline of September 11, 2001. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. PMID: 20805373
- September 16, 2010
- 02:44 PM
- 495 views
Why Are Cell Phone Conversations So Distracting?
by John M Grohol PsyD in World of Psychology - Psych Central
We’ve all been there — sitting in a public place, and feeling like that person over there, talking on their cell phone, is so annoying. Why are they so annoying? What makes a cell phone conversation that you overhear so distracting?
Four researchers, led by Lauren Emberson (2010) from Cornell University, set to find out.
Previous research has shown that we don’t seem to be as distracted when listening to a full dialogue between two people as when we are listening to a “halfalogue” — that is, just one side of a two-sided conversation.
In two small studies conducted exclusively on 41 college undergraduates, the researchers devised tasks to measure how distracting mobile phone conversations are when we hear only one side of the conversation. Specifically, they were interested in measuring whether such conversations could affect our ability to concentrate on a task that demanded good attention in order to complete successfully.
In the first study, 24 undergrads were seated in front of a computer and told they were going to complete two tasks that demanded their complete and undivided attention:
One involved tracking a moving dot with the computer mouse, and the other involved responding to letters presented on the computer screen. They were given 1 min of practice with each of these tasks in silence. They were then instructed that they would be completing these tasks a number of times and would sometimes hear speech from the two computer speakers situated on either side of the monitor. Participants were asked to focus their attention on the attentionally demanding tasks.
They found significant differences in a person’s ability to concentrate on both tasks at hand when listening to half a conversation (the “halfalogue”) as opposed to silence, a monologue, or a complete two-sided conversation.
Since the researchers reasoned this effect may be caused by the unpredictability of simply the sounds of talking themselves, they conducted a second experiment that made the halfalogue conversation filtered and incomprehensible. They found that it isn’t the mere acoustic unpredictability itself — speech comprehension is necessary in order to reduce a person’s attention to the task at hand.
The researchers suggest that the reason that half a conversation is so distracting — and therefore, most cell phone conversations we overhear — is because the speech processing part of our brains is drawn to make sense of the pattern we’re hearing. Since it generally can’t do this with only half the data, our brains are straining under the load of this processing task. In a normal conversation, speech is predictable — Person A talks, then Person B responds, and so on.
In half a conversation, you don’t know what Person B is saying, so you also don’t know when or how Person A will respond. This is curious to the speech processing centers of our brains, apparently, and causes us to become distracted in trying to make sense of the conversation.
Finally, the researchers note why this finding may have more generalizable importance. We know from previous research that cell phone conversations by a driver in an automobile can negatively impact driving performance. In fact, some states have gone so far as to enact laws banning cell phone use while driving.
But this study demonstrates something even more disturbing that few lawmakers have considered — simply overhearing a cell phone conversation in the car (e.g., from one of your passengers) may also be significantly distracting. It may be sufficient to reduce a driver’s reaction time and performance, although further study would be needed to verify this hypothesis.
So now you know why cell phone conversations can be so distracting — it’s your brain’s attempt to make sense of the conversation without sufficient data (e.g., the other side of the conversation) it’s used to having. And it’s not just mobile phone conversations — it’s really any conversation conducted where you can only hear one side of it.
Reference:
Emberson LL, Lupyan G, Goldstein MH, & Spivey MJ (2010). Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is More Distracting. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID: 20817912
... Read more »
Emberson LL, Lupyan G, Goldstein MH, & Spivey MJ. (2010) Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is More Distracting. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. PMID: 20817912
- August 30, 2010
- 08:50 AM
- 248 views
Narcissistic College Students Spend More Time on Facebook
by John M Grohol PsyD in World of Psychology - Psych Central
It probably comes as little surprise to anyone, but a small exploratory study done on 100 college students from a single university suggests that students who score higher on a test of narcissism also spent more time checking and updating their Facebook profile.
Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. More than 50% of Facebook’s active users log on to Facebook in any given day, while the average user has 130 social connections (what Facebook calls “friends”).
The researcher (Mehdizadeh, 2010) also examined the relationship between narcissism and self-esteem, as well as gender differences in how people use Facebook for self-promotion. “Self-promotion,” according to how it was used in this study, was defined as “any descriptive or visual information that appeared to attempt to persuade others about one’s own positive qualities. ”
Mehdizadeh looked at only five profile features in Facebook: (a) the About Me section, (b) the Main Photo, (c) the first 20 pictures on the View Photos of Me section, (d) the Notes section, and (e) the Status Updates section. The researcher, rating these items on her own, examined to the extent they were considered self-promoting according to the above definition.
What did the research find?
A statistically significant correlation between narcissistic students, and the number of times Facebook was checked per day as well as the time spent on Facebook per session.
However, the researcher did not find a significant correlation between scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-16) and the “About Me” section, the most obvious place a person might be expected to express themselves in a narcissistic manner. A significant correlation was found for self-promotion in the following areas: Main Photo, View Photos, Status Updates, and Notes.
Significant gender differences between men and women were also found (regardless of their NPI-16 score). “Males displayed more self-promotional information in the About Me and Notes sections than women,” noted the researcher. “Conversely, women displayed more self-promotional Main Photos.”
Some reports of this research suggest that the researcher (not “researchers”) found a significant relationship between more self-promotion linked to higher narcissism and lower self-esteem. However, this was found for only one of the five features that the researcher looked at — Main Photos. “In this case, Main Photos could have been selected or enhanced to cover up undesirable features by individuals with low self-esteem in order to enable the actualization of their hoped-for possible selves.” This actually suggests that this isn’t really a very robust finding or one that is very significant. In comparison, women — regardless of their narcissistic scoring — also demonstrated a significant correlation between self-promotion and Main Photos.
Limitations of the study are numerous but standard for this sort of exploratory study. Only students from a single university were studied. This means these results may not be generalizable to Facebook users in general. The researcher also failed to use a group of independent raters, standard fare in good research. Researchers doing their own ratings is generally a no-no, as they may introduce unintended bias into their ratings.
The upshot of this study is simple and expected — those who score more highly on a test of narcissism check Facebook more often and spend more time on Facebook per session. Surprise, surprise.
Reference
Mehdizadeh S (2010). Self-presentation 2.0: narcissism and self-esteem on Facebook. Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking, 13 (4), 357-64 PMID: 20712493
... Read more »
Mehdizadeh S. (2010) Self-presentation 2.0: narcissism and self-esteem on Facebook. Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking_id, 13(4), 357-64.
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