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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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- February 8, 2012
- 02:17 PM
- 76 views
Having superior working memory capacity can make time go faster
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Working memory is like a neural memo-pad. People with higher working memory capacity can hold more items in mind whilst solving a concurrent problem or performing a distracting task. There's been some excitement lately about the possibility that working memory can be improved through training, with knock-on benefits for IQ and academic attainment. A new study suggests such training should come with a footnote: "Improving your working memory could affect your perception of time".
James Woehrle and Joseph Magliano divided 99 students into two groups according to whether they had high or low working memory capacity. Next, the students solved subtraction problems in their heads. They were told the maths was their primary task but an extra challenge was to solve the problems for a certain duration, as judged by their own internal sense of time: either two minutes or four minutes.
The intriguing finding is that time went faster for the students with higher working memory capacity. When tasked with doing the maths for four minutes, they tended to work for longer, estimating that the time was up later than the low working memory participants.
What was going on? Why should having more working memory speed up the passage of time? Woehrle and Magliano said the finding was consistent with a popular account of time estimation, which posits that pulses are released by an internal pacemaker and accumulate in a counter. More pulses in the counter suggests more time has passed. Crucially, this process is gated by attention. When we pay attention to time, each pulse makes it into the counter and the passage of time feels slower. By contrast, if our attention is focused elsewhere, fewer pulses make it into the counter, as if less time has passed than really has (i.e. giving the subjective feeling of time having flown).
According to Woehrle and Magliano's Working Memory Capacity Hypothesis - the students in the current study with more working memory were able to allocate their attention almost entirely on the primary maths task. This benefited their maths performance but meant they were less vigilant of pulses accumulating in their internal clock. By contrast, the low working memory students couldn't help but allocate some attention to the secondary time-keeping task, making them more aware of the passage of time. As a consequence the low working memory students' time perception was actually more accurate but their maths performance suffered. The researchers said this evidence could have "profound implications in academic situations ... low working memory students may 'think' too much about how much time they put into their school work."
The new findings complement previous research showing that greater working memory capacity is associated with more accurate time perception, when time perception is the primary task. In this case, having more working memory allows for greater vigilance of the internal pacemaker and counter. Indeed, in the current study, the time perception of the higher working memory group was superior in a control condition in which they only had to estimate the passage of time.
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Woehrle, J., and Magliano, J. (2012). Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity. Acta Psychologica, 139 (2), 314-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.006
Previously on the Digest: Doubt cast on the maxim that time goes faster as you get older.
The surprising links between anger and time perception
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Woehrle, J., & Magliano, J. (2012) Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity. Acta Psychologica, 139(2), 314-319. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.006
- February 2, 2012
- 04:25 AM
- 10 views
Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Social networking sites have changed our lives. There were 500 million active Facebook users in 2011 and approximately 200 million Twitter accounts. As users will know, the sites have important differences. Facebook places more of an emphasis on who you are and who you know. Twitter restricts users to 140-character updates and is more about what you say than who you are. A new study asks whether and how the way people use these sites is related to their personality, and whether there are personalty differences between people who prefer one site over the other.
David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online - most (70 per cent) were based in Europe, others were from North America, Asia and beyond. There were 207 women and the age range was from 18 to 63. Participants answered questions about the way they used Facebook and Twitter and which site they preferred. They also answered questions about their personality based around the "Big Five" personality factors of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Openness and Agreeableness, as well as the dimensions of sociability and "need for cognition" (this last factor is about people's need to be mentally engaged and stimulated).
Perhaps the most glaring finding is that personality actually explained little of the variance - less than 10 per cent (rising to 20 per cent alongside age) - in the way participants used these sites. This suggests that other factors not explored here, such as intelligence and motivation, have a big influence.
However, the associations with personality were interesting. People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don't use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination.
What about using the sites as an informational tool? There was an intriguing divergence here. People who said they used Facebook as an informational tool tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and "need for cognition". Informational users of Twitter were the mirror opposite: they scored higher on conscientiousness and "need for cognition", but lower on neuroticism, extraversion and sociability. The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation - as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).
Finally, what about people's overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in "need for cognition" tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information.
These results should be treated with caution. The sample was biased towards young females and the data were entirely self-report. Nonetheless, the findings suggest there are some meaningful differences in the personality profiles of people who prefer Twitter vs. Facebook and some intriguing personality links with the way the sites are used. "Different people use the same sites for different purposes," the researchers said.
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Hughes, D., Rowe, M., Batey, M., and Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 561-569 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Hughes, D., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012) A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 561-569. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001
- February 1, 2012
- 04:36 AM
- 6 views
When your hands are tied, your eyes are tied up too
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Our eyes and hands operate in wonderful balletic synchrony. When we reach for an object, our eyes jump first, grabbing our intended target visually. Something similar also happens when we watch another person reaching. Our eyes jump ahead to their intended target, as if we were making the same grasping movement ourselves.
In an intriguing new study, Ettore Ambrosini and his team tested whether these anticipatory, vicarious eye movements still occur if our hands are tied up, literally. The researchers reasoned that watching another person's reaching movement triggers the same motor programme in our own brain and it's this programme that guides our anticipatory eye movements. But if our hands are tied, they predicted, the motor programme will stall and the eye movements won't occur so much.
Fifteen participants had their eye movements recorded whilst they watched short videos of a man reaching for one of two tomatoes. Sometimes the man clenched his fist and merely touched one of the tomatoes. This fist hand-shape doesn't provide much predictive information about the kind of movement that's being planned and so participants weren't expected to show much anticipatory gaze behaviour.
In other videos, the man either made a precise, preparatory grasping shape with his fingers, as if he were going to pick up the small tomato, which is what he then did; or he made a whole-hand grasp shape, as if he were reaching for the larger tomato, which is what he went on to do. These two hand-shapes provide clues as to the reaching movement that's underway and were expected to trigger more vicarious, anticipatory eye movements in the participants.
So what actually happened? The man's hand-shapes had just the effect that the researchers predicted. When he formed a precision-shape with his fingers, or a whole-hand grabbing shape, the participants tended to glance ahead towards his intended target, more often and sooner than they did when the man formed a fist. Crucially - and this is the intriguing result - this proactive, vicarious looking behaviour was significantly diminished when the participants had their hands tied behind their backs compared with when their hands were loose in front of them. Having their hands tied seemed to somehow tie up their eyes too.
"... having tied or somehow constrained hands does not allow one to take full advantage of specific motor cues, if any, to grab [with the eyes] the target of the observed action," the researchers said. "This suggests that actions of others are processed most efficiently when we are specifically able to perform the same actions."
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Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., and Costantini, M. (2011). Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance DOI: 10.1037/a0026570
Further reading: Armchair experts have their limits.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., & Costantini, M. (2011) Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. DOI: 10.1037/a0026570
- January 30, 2012
- 04:00 AM
- 7 views
Psychology ignored and depression neglected in the media's coverage of mental health research
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Research into some mental disorders receives disproportionate media coverage at the expense of other disorders. That's according to the first systematic study of the way the UK mass media covers mental illness. And in a wake-up call to psychology and its advocates, the analysis found that mental health research stories were biased towards neurobiological aspects of mental illness. They tended to be accompanied by commentary from medical charities, and to neglect psychosocial angles and opinion.
George Szmukler at the Institute of Psychiatry and his colleagues focused on coverage of mental disorders research on the BBC news website from 1999 to 2008, and in New Scientist magazine news and features from Aug 2008 to April 2010. This led to the identification of 1015 relevant stories on the BBC (102 per year) and 133 stories from New Scientist (76 per year).
The approach of Szmukler and co was to compare rates of coverage for various mental disorders against the disease burden of those disorders as measured by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Disease burden is calculated based on years of life lost due to dying early, and years of life affected by disability and loss of full health.
Providing some background context, the researchers said the UK disease burden of mental disorders is 60 per cent greater than cancer, yet in the period studied the BBC had half as many news stories on mental disorder research as compared with cancer research (in defence of the BBC, cancer is the subject of more research than mental disorders). By contrast, New Scientist had 2.5 times as many mental disorder research stories as cancer research stories.
Comparing coverage of research into various mental disorders, both the BBC and New Scientist tended to neglect depression, which is the mental disorder with the greatest disease burden by far. The BBC also tended to neglect alcoholism, whilst focusing more on drug addiction. It also focused disproportionately more than other conditions on Alzheimer's Disease and sleep disorders.
There was also a bias in the type of research that received BBC and New Scientist attention. Seventy-five per cent of the BBC's coverage was on biological research; New Scientist showed a similar trend. "Both sources rarely reported on psychological interventions," the researchers said: on the BBC it was one per cent of stories; for New Scientist it was 1.5 per cent. The dominant approach of both outlets was to present mental disorders as neurobiological in origin. The researchers don't know what proportion of research into mental health disorders is actually psychological, but they said "it is unlikely that talking treatments, in particular, would be so poorly represented."
Most stories on the BBC were accompanied by quotes from commentators intended to provide some context, including from 973 named individuals. There was a bias towards medical commentary. The six most frequently quoted commentators included three from the Alzheimer's Society, two from the Alzheimer's Research Trust and one from SANE. Szmukler and his team said that there was a need for organisations like the Mental Health Research Network to examine ways "in which commentators can be made more readily available across the whole spectrum of mental health research."
The researchers concluded that it was important to study the way the mass media covers mental health research because the media can influence the public's perception of disorders and their perception of the value of different types of research. In turn, this can affect funding decisions by government. In this respect, it is worrying that psychological research into mental disorders was found to have received so little coverage. On a positive note, the overall quality of the analysed news stories was found to be high and to have a neutral or sympathetic tone.
"Studies of media reporting of research, such as this one, can provide ideas as to how the research community, together with its funders and other supporters, can enhance the range and quality of media coverage," the researchers said.
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Lewison, G., Roe, P., Wentworth, A., and Szmukler, G. (2011). The reporting of mental disorders research in British media. Psychological Medicine, 42 (02), 435-441 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001012
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Lewison, G., Roe, P., Wentworth, A., & Szmukler, G. (2011) The reporting of mental disorders research in British media. Psychological Medicine, 42(02), 435-441. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001012
- January 27, 2012
- 01:13 PM
- 13 views
The life-long curse of an unpopular name
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Receiving an unpopular name can have lifelong consequences, according to new research
Making assumptions about someone based on their name is ridiculous. A few attention-seeking celebrities aside, most of us were given our names, rather than choosing them, so why should they be any indicator of the kind of person we are? And yet a new European study claims that people with unfashionable first names suffer from prejudice, with life-long implications for their self-esteem and well-being.
Jochen Gebauer and his team used data collected from the German eDarling dating website. With the consent of hundreds of registered users, they looked to see how people with unfashionable first names were treated.
In the first study, the researchers identified hundreds of users of the dating site who had names that had been rated positively (e.g. Alexander) or negatively (e.g. Kevin) by 500 teachers as part of a different project. The eDarling website sends emails to users suggesting contacts in the form of a person's name, age and region. Users specify their preferences for age and region, so a suggested contact's name is the only information daters can really use in choosing whether to purse a contact. The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin).
An obvious criticism is that this online dating is an artificial situation - perhaps in real life we use other information to overcome any potential prejudice we might have against unpopular names. However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What's more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site - as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they'd suffered in life.
A further two studies replicated these results with a wider range of names and different methods of measuring name popularity. For example, the final study simply used name frequency as a measure of popularity. This again showed that people with less popular names experienced more rejection in online dating and had lower self-esteem and other adverse outcomes. This was the case even if their name had once been popular. So it's not the case that the negative correlates of having an unpopular name can be traced back somehow to having had the kind of parents who choose unpopular names.
These new results echo earlier research in the USA that found racial prejudice could affect the way people are treated based on their name. Identical CVs were dramatically more likely to attract job interviews if they were attributed to a person with a White-sounding name than if they were attributed to a person with an African-American sounding name. However race prejudice wasn't the cause of the harmful correlates of unpopular names in the current study - nearly all the names were White-sounding. Aside from racial prejudice, what causes names to acquire negative connotations is for another research paper. No doubt the names of celebrities, fictional characters and other high profile people play a role.
"Seemingly benign factors, such as first names, add up in real life, gaining considerable collective power in predicting feeling, thought, and behaviour," the researchers said. "The results also highlight the self-presentational value of first names and underscore the importance for parents to choose positively valenced first names for their children."
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Gebauer, J., Leary, M., and Neberich, W. (2011). Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431644
Further reading from The Psychologist: The name game: We all have one, and it might determine our fate in a number of intriguing and bizarre ways. Nicholas Christenfeld and Britta Larsen investigate.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Gebauer, J., Leary, M., & Neberich, W. (2011) Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431644
- January 25, 2012
- 04:56 AM
- 9 views
Easily embarrassed people are more altruistic, and onlookers can tell as much
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Social interactions can feel like walking a tight-rope, an excruciating pit of embarrassment always just one tiny misstep away. Well, here is some comforting news for the easily embarrassed. A new study claims that people prone to embarrassment are better citizens - more selfless and cooperative (more "prosocial" in the psychological jargon). What's more, onlookers interpret expressions of embarrassment as a sign that a person is prosocial, and as a consequence are more likely to cooperate with and trust them. This makes sense if you consider that signs of embarrassment signal to onlookers that you're sensitive to social rules and concerned that you've transgressed. Therefore, although it feels excruciating, claim the study authors, embarrassment "can also function in our favour, helping to advertise some of our better, more desirable qualities."
Matthew Feinberg and his colleagues at University California, Berkeley conducted five experiments in total, involving hundreds of undergrad participants. The first two studies were designed to test whether people who experience more embarrassment are more prosocial. In the first, participants were video recorded as they recounted a time they'd been embarrassed. The videos were coded and it was found that the students who displayed more signs of embarrassment (e.g. gaze aversion, nervous face touching and laughter) also tended to endorse values of fairness more, and they were actually more generous with money in an economic game. In the second study, participants were asked to say how much embarrassment they'd experience in a range of hypothetical social scenarios. The participants who said they'd be more embarrassed tended to be more generous in an economic game and they also scored more highly on a questionnaire measure of their pro-sociality.
The remaining three studies were designed to test whether people who display signs of embarrassment are perceived as more prosocial.
In one, participants were shown clips of the videos from the first study. Individuals who'd appeared more embarrassed in these videos were rated as more prosocial by the participants. In another study, participants looked at static pictures of actors displaying an expression of either embarrassment, pride or a neutral expression. Embarrassed people were again rated as more prosocial. A follow-up study was similar, but this time participants agreed to cooperate more fully in an economic game with people who they'd seen pictured looking embarrassed.
A fifth and final study was the most realistic. Participants saw their research partner praised for his or her superb performance on a mental performance test. Unbeknown to the participants, their partner wasn't another volunteer but was in fact an accomplice of the researchers. On being praised, this actor either responded with embarrassment or with pride. Crucially, later on, the participants tended to cooperate more with their partner if he or she had shown embarrassment earlier, as opposed to pride. What's more, the greater the intensity of their partner's earlier display of embarrassment, the more participants tended to trust and cooperate with him or her. The researchers also ruled out the possibility that the actor was displaying shame, rather than embarrassment. One final important detail: the researchers checked and these effects of embarrassment weren't because the participants saw their embarrassed partner as weak, liked them more, or because they felt compassion towards them.
"Our data are the first to reveal that people who feel and show intense embarrassment are indeed more prosocial," the researchers concluded, "and that this display triggers prosocial inferences and actions." The new results chime with earlier work on blushing, showing that onlookers make positive assumptions about blushers. However, the new data show that blushing isn't necessary for these positive effects.
The researchers acknowledged the limits of their study, including the fact that they were reading a lot into the behaviour shown by participants during economic games, and that the findings could be different in different cultures. They also said there was a need for more research - for example, to find out whether it's possible for people to feign embarrassment and thereby benefit from the flattering assumptions onlookers make about easily embarrassed people.
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Feinberg, M., Willer, R., and Keltner, D. (2012). Flustered and faithful: Embarrassment as a signal of prosociality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (1), 81-97 DOI: 10.1037/a0025403
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Keltner, D. (2012) Flustered and faithful: Embarrassment as a signal of prosociality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(1), 81-97. DOI: 10.1037/a0025403
- January 23, 2012
- 05:05 AM
- 2 views
Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
We wore ankle-length blue coats at my school, in the Tudor-style. When it rained, the wool of the coat gave off a pungent smell, rather like wet dog. Now when I encounter a similar scent, it propels me back in time to my school days. This effect is called the "Proustian phenomenon". The name comes from Proust's description in Remembrance of Things Past of how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine biscuit transported him back in time to his childhood.
Smells do have this uncanny, evocative power, don't they? It's because of the relative proximity of the olfactory bulb (which processes smells) and the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in memory and emotions. Right?
Not so fast. In fact very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt.
Marieke Toffolo and her collaborators invited 70 female student participants to watch a disturbing 12-minute film featuring road traffic accidents, surgery and reports on the Rwandan genocide. Whilst the students watched the film, the smell of Cassis, a neutral berry-like odour, was sprayed into the room; coloured lights were projected onto the back wall; and inoffensive background music was played over speakers (no mention was made to the students of these cues; pilot work established that they were equally noticeable, pleasant and arousing). The researchers chose to focus only on female participants to keep things simple, because it's known that there are sex differences in olfactory perception.
A week later the students were called back and asked to write down as many memories about the film as they could. As they did so, either the smell, the lights or the music were presented again. The students also answered questions about the quality of their memories. The main finding is that students exposed again to the smell of Cassis rated their memories of the film as more detailed, unpleasant and arousing (but no more transporting or vivid) than students re-exposed to the music. However, the students re-exposed to the odour rated their memories no differently from students re-exposed to the lights. In other words, smell appeared to be more evocative than music, but no more evocative than lights.
"It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odours are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers," the researchers said. "Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odour is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odours."
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Toffolo, M., Smeets, M., and van den Hout, M. (2012). Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories. Cognition and Emotion, 26 (1), 83-92 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2011.555475
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Toffolo, M., Smeets, M., & van den Hout, M. (2012) Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories. Cognition , 26(1), 83-92. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2011.555475
- January 20, 2012
- 09:10 AM
- 5 views
When wives believe they do an unfair share of the housework, everyone loses
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
More women than ever go out to work and yet surveys in Western countries show that wives continue to take on the lion's share of domestic chores.
A new study has quizzed 389 couples in Austria, Germany and Switzerland to build up the most comprehensive picture yet of how this uneven distribution of domestic chores is associated with men's and women's marital satisfaction.
These were all dual-earning couples with young children, with both spouses working at least 15 hours per week. Eighty-nine per cent of the couples were married. The average professional work load for women was 30.2 hours per week; for men it was 48.6 hours. Consistent with past surveys, the women in this sample took on nearly two thirds of the domestic chores.
The researchers Gerold Mikula, Bernhard Riederer and Otto Bodi asked their participants several things: what share of the chores they took on; whether they thought that was fair; whether they felt the way the share had been decided was fair (so-called "procedural justice"); how much conflict they experienced in their relationship; and how happy they were with their relationship. They threw all these factors into a statistical pot and looked to see how they related to each other.
First, Mikula and co focused only on the direct associations between housework distribution and women's and men's answers. For women, it wasn't the precise share of housework they did that was correlated with their experience of conflict and satisfaction, but rather how fair they thought that share was. Women who thought the division of household chores was unfair tended to experience more relationship conflict and less marital satisfaction. Women's sense of whether the decision process for housework had been fair also had its own independent link with levels of conflict. So feeling that they did an unfair amount of housework was bad enough, but conflict was even more likely when women felt the unfair arrangement had been arrived at unfairly.
Men, by contrast, seemed largely detached from the way housework was shared. There was no direct correlation between the division of housework and their reports of fairness. And even men who said the arrangement was unfair didn't tend to report more relationship conflict or less satisfaction - no doubt because the unfair arrangement was usually in their favour. In fact, the only direct association of housework distribution with men's answers, was that the greater share their female partners took on, the more satisfied they tended to be.
But here's where the picture gets more complicated. The researchers also looked at associations between participants' answers and their partners' reported sense of justice and experience of conflict and satisfaction. This suggested that men suffered when their female partners believed the housework arrangements were unfair. In fact, the negative correlates for men (more conflict, less satisfaction) of having a female partner who sensed injustice in the division of housework, outweighed the satisfaction associated with having a female partner who did lots of housework.
"The results support the proposition that it is not the balance of the division of labour itself but rather the subjective sense of justice associated with the division that matters primarily to the relationship satisfaction of the persons concerned," the researchers concluded. "Spouses should exchange their personal views and preferences in open discussions to arrive at an agreement that considers the wishes of both parties ... "
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MIKULA, G., RIEDERER, B., and BODI, O. (2011). Perceived justice in the division of domestic labor: Actor and partner effects. Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01385.x
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MIKULA, G., RIEDERER, B., & BODI, O. (2011) Perceived justice in the division of domestic labor: Actor and partner effects. Personal Relationships. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01385.x
- January 18, 2012
- 04:42 AM
- 9 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.
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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
- January 17, 2012
- 10:54 AM
- 5 views
Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists.
Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various scenarios. This included whether or not they or others would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or boring videos); having anonymity. Whilst some of the students predicted how they and others would behave in these situations, other students were actually placed in these circumstances and their behaviour was recorded. The predictions were then compared against the reality.
When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd "lay psychologists" and took situational factors into account. For example, in reality, people were 27 per cent less likely to help clear up the jigsaw when in a group than when alone. When predicting other people's behaviour, the students anticipated this: they said their peers would be 22 per cent less likely to help when in a group. When predicting their own behaviour, however, they didn't think it would make any difference whether they were in a group or alone.
It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating. In reality, students provoked into a bad mood gave 23 per cent less money to charity. And students given the cloak of anonymity cheated more. The students in the predicting role anticipated these situational effects (although they underestimated them) when considering the behaviour of their peers, yet they imagined that their own behaviour would be immune. They thought they'd give just as much money whether in a good or bad mood, and be just as likely to cheat, or not, regardless of whether they had the benefit of anonymity.
Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own altruism (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people's altruism more reliably. This is consonant with a mountain of past research showing that we tend to assess ourselves in an unrealistically favourable light.
"The good news," Balcetis and Dunning concluded, "is that people display some level of insight into the ability of situational variations to shape potential actions that their peers will choose. The bad news is that people fail to realise, or choose not to realise, that this knowledge should be applied to predictions of their own behaviour as well."
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Balcetis, E., and Dunning, D. (2011). Considering the situation: Why people are better social psychologists than self-psychologists. Self and Identity, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2011.617886
See also: We're unable to read our own body language (earlier Digest post).
Strangers to ourselves (Psychologist magazine article).
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2011) Considering the situation: Why people are better social psychologists than self-psychologists. Self and Identity, 1-15. DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2011.617886
- January 16, 2012
- 10:03 AM
- 5 views
Is it time to resurrect post-trauma psychological debriefing for emergency responders and aid workers?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
You've probably seen on the news, after a disaster, the announcement that trained counsellors will be on hand as a matter of routine. Or you used to. In fact, the practice of offering routine post-trauma psychological debriefing (Critical Incident Stress Debriefing - CISD - to give it its original, formal title) is all but dead and buried. It's hard to say who exactly executed the fatal blow.
NICE - the trusted, independent UK body that provides health advice - is a chief culprit. Based on seven randomly controlled trials (RCTs) comparing psychological debriefing against control groups, NICE recommended in 2005 that brief, single-session interventions not be routinely offered to individuals who have experienced a traumatic event. In 2006, another likely culprit, the Cochrane Collaboration, (widely respected for its meta-analyses of published studies) identified 15 relevant RCTs and made a similar recommendation.
Psychiatrist Simon Wesseley, based at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, went further and must also be a chief suspect. In a debate held at the Royal Institution in 2006, he proposed psychological debriefing after trauma as the "worst ever idea on the mind", based on the fact that it's ineffectual and possibly harmful. "It's a bad idea and a bad intervention," he said.
I must confess that I too may have played a part, however minor, in the demise of post-trauma counselling. In my Psychologist magazine article When Therapy Causes Harm, I highlighted Critical Incident Stress Debriefing as among the therapies identified by Emory University psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld as potentially harmful and that should be avoided. In my book The Rough Guide to Psychology, I used the possible harm caused by post-trauma psychological debriefing as an example of a counter-intuitive finding in psychology.
Now a team of therapists and trauma consultants, Debbie Hawker, John Durkin and David Hawker, who've worked extensively with NGOs, aid workers and emergency responders, have called for post-trauma debriefing to be resurrected for these specific client groups. In a scholarly plea, they've argued that the damning conclusions formed by NICE, Cochrane, Wesseley and others were premature and too narrowly interpreted (NICE acknowledges that their guidance may not apply to debriefing of emergency workers or group debriefing). Hawker and co claim that there are many who would welcome the return of post-trauma debriefing: "As mental health professionals active in the military, emergency service and humanitarian fields, we are aware that the personnel we work with often request debriefing, and speak of its benefit for them". Yet the debriefing is usually not available: "Professionals ... are afraid of being accused of professional misconduct if they offer psychological debriefing ...".
Hawker and co point out that of the 15 RCTs identified by the NICE and Cochrane reviews, three found a positive effect of debriefing, nine found no effect and only two found a harmful effect. These two studies, they explain, were seriously flawed. The patients who received debriefing were more severely injured than the controls; they received debriefing too soon, before they were ready; the debriefing was too brief (it averaged 44 minutes, whereas experts say it should last at least two hours, with at least one follow up); and the debriefers were inadequately trained (a research assistant delivered the debriefing in one study; the other negative outcome study said the debriefers had received half a day's training).
In effect, Hawker et al say, these trials were more like "inefficacy trials" - exploring what happens when an intervention is delivered badly to the wrong people. As it was originally conceived, they explain, post-trauma psychological debriefing was meant to be part of:
"a package for emergency workers who'd experienced critical incident stress as part of their work. It was specifically designed for selected psychologically resilient personnel who are trained to cope with expected pressure during their routine work in stressful situations. These are teams of people who have trained together and been briefed together before working together."
Post-incident debriefing was also meant to be delivered by a mental health worker and a peer debriefer, both of whom should have experience of the emergency services they're working with, thus lending the debriefers all-important credibility.
Debriefing is popular with emergency workers and aid workers, Hawker and co say, because many of them see it as their only chance to talk about their experiences. It allows them to do so as a matter of routine, without the stigma of therapy, which they sometimes fear could be detrimental to their careers. Given this need, perhaps it's no surprise that post-trauma psychological debriefing is surfacing under new names like "powerful event group support" and "trauma risk management".
"We have been told that the case against debriefing is proven and the debate is closed," Hawker, Durkin and Hawker conclude. "We disagree ... We predict that appropriate psychological debriefing will be shown to have benefits for secondary victims of trauma who have been briefed together and who have worked together through traumatic events. Research into these uses of debriefing should be encouraged and supported."
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Hawker, D., Durkin, J., and Hawker, D. (2011). To debrief or not to debrief our heroes: that is the question. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 18 (6), 453-463 DOI: 10.1002/cpp.730
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Hawker, D., Durkin, J., & Hawker, D. (2011) To debrief or not to debrief our heroes: that is the question. Clinical Psychology , 18(6), 453-463. DOI: 10.1002/cpp.730
- January 13, 2012
- 03:58 AM
- 6 views
Babies can tell whether you made a mistake or not from the tone of your voice
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
For decades, psychologists have been trying to find out when and how children develop the ability to step outside of themselves and understand other people's minds. Piaget, the great Swiss developmental psychologist, had children study a model of the mountains around Geneva and describe what the scene would look like from another perspective. His results led him to conclude that children younger than about seven are stuck with an ego-centric perspective. Since then, with ever more ingenious techniques, psychologists have demonstrated that even infants as young as one year old have a rudimentary sense that other people have a mind, perspective and intentions of their own. Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik, for example, observed how 18-month-olds would choose to feed an adult disgusting broccoli, rather than yummy crackers, if they'd seen the adult enjoying the dreaded vegetable earlier.
Now Elena Sakkalou and Merideth Gattis have performed a study looking specifically at the role of prosody in the ability of infants to infer whether an adult intended to perform an action or made a mistake. Prosody refers to the sing-song, rise and fall of speech - its tempo and fluctuating pitch. It's the quality of speech we can hear through a wall or ceiling. We might not be able to distinguish any of our next-door neighbour's actual words, but we can still get a sense of the mood and emotion of what they're saying.
This study combines what we know about the importance of prosody to children's learning, with what we know about their emerging ability to think about other people's minds and intentions. For example, past research has shown how mothers use prosody to convey approval and prohibition, and that 5-month-olds smile more in response to the former.
Sakkalou and Gattis first replicated an earlier study by showing that infants aged 14 to 18-months can use an adult's vocal utterances, specifically including the words "There" vs. "Whoops", to infer whether they intended an action or not. Twenty-eight toddlers saw an experimenter perform two actions on a toy (for example, pushing it or rolling it), one of which was accompanied by the word "There" as if the action were intended; the other by "Whoops". Given a chance to handle the toy themselves, the infants were more likely to imitate the action that was accompanied by the word "There" - as if they knew that it had been a deliberate action.
Next, Sakkalou and Gattis analysed the prosody of the experimenter utterances: "There" and "Whoops". The former was characterised by higher amplitude, longer duration and falling pitch; the latter by a rising pitch contour. The earlier experiment was then replicated with 56 more toddlers (mean age 16 months), but this time the words "There" and "Whoops" were replaced with the Greek words "Nato" and "Ochi" (or vice versa). Crucially, the words signifying a mistake or intentional action were always delivered with the prosodic profile established earlier as being associated with a mistake or intended action. The toddlers were raised in English-speaking homes so there's no way they could have known the meaning of the words. Nonetheless, the toddlers older than 16 months still imitated more "intentional" actions than accidental actions on the toys, thus suggesting strongly they were able to use the way the words were said to infer which actions were intended and which were accidental.
It's important to note that the "mistake" vs. "intent" prosodic patterns in the current study do not map simply onto approval/ disapproval - they were more complex, which could explain why it was only the older toddlers who could interpret the difference. This fits with other research showing that infants' preference for different types of vocalisations changes as they develop, with older infants preferring prosodic patterns that direct their attention whereas younger infants prefer comforting prosody.
"We propose that infants' understanding of vocal patterns supports their growing understanding of intentions," Gattis told The Digest. "Together these two forms of understanding shape the development of imitation and communication."
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Sakkalou, E., and Gattis, M. (2012). Infants infer intentions from prosody. Cognitive Development, 27 (1), 1-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2011.08.003
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Sakkalou, E., & Gattis, M. (2012) Infants infer intentions from prosody. Cognitive Development, 27(1), 1-16. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2011.08.003
- January 12, 2012
- 05:49 AM
- 5 views
Want to feel more powerful? Do a Barry White impression
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
As a rule, big beasts tend to make deep noises, whereas little creatures squeak. Perhaps it's little wonder then that we tend to rate human speakers with deeper voices as seeming more powerful. Another finding is that if you put a person in a position of power they will tend to lower their voice. These previous results prompted Mariëlle Stel and her fellow researchers to find out if speaking with a deeper pitch than usual would lead people to feel more powerful.
In an initial study, 81 student participants were split into three groups. Participants in the control group read a passage of geography text silently to themselves. The other two groups read the text out loud, either in a deeper or higher pitch than usual (by three tones). To make sure the participants didn't guess the true aims of the study, the students were next asked some filler questions about the text. The final stage of the experiment was then presented to them as being unrelated to the reading exercise. This involved the students answering seven questions about how powerful they felt (for example, indicating how much they felt dominant versus submissive). None of the students guessed the purpose of the study.
Reading the text with a deep voice didn't affect the students' answers to the questions about the text, but it did appear to affect their feelings of power. Students in the deep voice condition rated themselves as more powerful than students in the other two groups.
A second study was similar, but this time students read some text in a high or low pitch, or they heard someone else doing the reading with a high or low pitch. Only reading the pitch oneself affected feelings of power, with students who read in a low voice rating themselves as more powerful than students who read in a high voice.
One last study involved reading out loud in a deep or high voice, and then the participants completed a memory task that's designed to reveal abstract thinking (mistakenly believing a word was seen in an earlier to-be-remembered list, just because it's got a similar meaning to one of those earlier words, is taken as a sign of more abstract thinking). This time, reading out loud in a deep voice led to more abstract thinking. Stel and her colleagues said this makes sense when considered alongside an earlier study that found people in power tend to think more abstractly than low power people, perhaps because power makes people feel more "psychologically distant".
Throughout these experiments, the effects of lowering one's voice pitch on feelings of power were presumably subconscious. After all, the students weren't able to guess the aims of the study. The researchers said it would be interesting for the future to see if it's possible to deliberately lower your voice in order to feel more powerful. "If so," they concluded, "this would add a simple and generally available instrument to your strategic arsenal: your own voice. The lowering of your own voice could then be used not only to influence others but also to influence yourself."
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Stel, M., van Dijk, E., Smith, P., van Dijk, W., and Djalal, F. (2011). Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611427610
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Stel, M., van Dijk, E., Smith, P., van Dijk, W., & Djalal, F. (2011) Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly. Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611427610
- January 12, 2012
- 05:45 AM
- 4 views
Trainees in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy underestimate their therapeutic skills
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
For psychotherapists, the research literature can sometimes make for uncomfortable reading. Yes, most people benefit from therapy, but other findings are less welcome, such as that therapeutic outcomes are unrelated to therapist experience, and that therapists tend to overestimate their skills.
A new study of trainee cognitive behavioural therapists bucks this trend. Freda McManus and a her team have found that several dozen trainee CBT therapists tended to underestimate, not overestimate, how good they were at conducting CBT therapy.
Finding out how accurate therapists are at judging their own skills is important because quality control in therapy often relies on therapists seeking out extra help and supervision when they think they need it.
The new data come from 26 trainees enrolled on the Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and 38 trainees enrolled on the MSc in Advanced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - both courses are at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre. The Diploma and MSc students submitted two to six video recordings of therapy sessions they'd conducted. They watched these tapes themselves and rated their own performances. These self ratings were then compared against ratings provided by expert supervisors on the training courses.
Overall the trainees tended to underestimate their skills as compared with ratings provided by their supervisors. Splitting the trainees into two groups - more and less competent - it was the more competent trainees who tended to underestimate themselves. The less competent trainees' self ratings didn't differ from the ratings they received from supervisors.
"These results are encouraging in suggesting that CBT therapists may be less susceptible to over-estimation of their competence than has been previously reported," the researchers said, "which is likely to have benefits for the delivery of CBT interventions in routine clinical practice."
Why would trainees be underestimating their skills? One explanation lies in a concept known as "defensive pessimism" - a way for high performers to ensure they still receive support and remain motivated to improve their standards. Potentially this is a good thing for clients, but the trainees could suffer in terms of job satisfaction and morale.
There are some question marks over the new findings. For example, the rating scale that was used to assess CBT performance (the Cognitive Therapy Scale) is known to be rather unreliable. Also, it's possible that the supervisors' ratings were lenient so as not to demoralise their students. A strength of the study is that the participants were not self-selected - they were all obliged to submit their therapy recordings. By contrast, an earlier study that reported over-confidence in CBT therapists was a highly selective sample obtained by inviting participation. It's possible that sample may have been biased towards particularly over-confident therapists.
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McManus, F., Rakovshik, S., Kennerley, H., Fennell, M., & Westbrook, D. (2011). An investigation of the accuracy of therapists’ self-assessment of cognitive-behaviour therapy skills. British Journal of Clinical Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.2011.02028.x
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McManus, F., Rakovshik, S., Kennerley, H., Fennell, M., & Westbrook, D. (2011) An investigation of the accuracy of therapists’ self-assessment of cognitive-behaviour therapy skills. British Journal of Clinical Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.2011.02028.x
- January 12, 2012
- 05:43 AM
- 4 views
When therapists have the hots for their clients
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The fictional Dr Weston
(played by Gabriel Byrne)
experiences lust for a client
Clients go to psychotherapy seeking a mind massage, but all too often things turn physical. Cases of inappropriate sexual contact in psychotherapy average around 10 per cent prevalence, and a 2006 survey of hundreds of psychotherapists found that nearly 90 per cent reported having been sexually attracted to a client on at least one occasion. It's an issue dramatised artfully in the HBO series In Treatment, which follows the life and work of psychotherapist Dr Paul Weston.
A new paper by clinical psychologist Carol Martin and colleagues discusses how therapists deal with these awkward feelings. The researchers interviewed 13 psychotherapists (7 men), including 2 clinical psychologists and 2 psychoanalysts, in-depth about times they'd been attracted to a client but had stopped themselves acting on those urges.
The results can be broken down into three categories: the therapists' general views about being attracted to clients; the effective coping processes that therapists went through on realising they were attracted to a client; and harmful ways of coping.
The therapists were generally of the view that sexual attraction to clients was normal and not necessarily harmful. However, views differed on exactly where the boundaries should lie. For example, some therapists condoned fantasising about clients whereas others did not.
Effective ways of coping involved the following processes, though not always in order: noting the attraction, which was often accompanied by feelings of anxiety or unease; facing up to the feelings, which often involved managing shame and embarrassment; reflecting on the attraction, including the relevance of the therapist's own past; processing the feelings, including considering the implications of the situation; and finally formulating a way forward that would be to the client's benefit.
Harmful ways of coping included: clumsily reinforcing therapeutic boundaries, which often left the client feeling rejected and to premature ending of therapy; taking a moralising or omnipotent stance, including implying that the client had inappropriate feelings; feeling needy ("... it seems inevitable that being single ... you imagine those 'what if' questions, if we'd met elsewhere ...", said one male, middle-aged therapist); over-identifying with the client (one therapist talked of feelings of "yearning and anguish" after therapy ended; another spoke of being overwhelmed by a client's pain and extending therapy sessions to cope); and finally responding with over-protective anxiety, including offering support that they didn't usually offer, including allowing meetings between sessions, touch, hugging and sharing of personal information.
Martin and her team said that none of what they'd heard in the interviews constituted a boundary violation so severe that they had to blow the whistle on any of their participants (participants were warned that this would happen where appropriate). However, the researchers said the results showed that "even among experienced, accredited practitioners, sexuality and sexual feelings commonly intrude into the therapeutic encounter and required management for client benefit."
Every therapist may be vulnerable to practising in ways that they later regret, the researchers concluded, especially at times of personal stress or difficulty. "The framework and typology of common problematic reactions developed through this study has potential value in training and supervision for sensitising practitioners to the issues early on, and in maximising therapeutic benefit," they said.
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Martin, C., Godfrey, M., Meekums, B., and Madill, A. (2011). Managing boundaries under pressure: A qualitative study of therapists’ experiences of sexual attraction in therapy. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 11 (4), 248-256 DOI: 10.1080/14733145.2010.519045
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Martin, C., Godfrey, M., Meekums, B., & Madill, A. (2011) Managing boundaries under pressure: A qualitative study of therapists’ experiences of sexual attraction in therapy. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 11(4), 248-256. DOI: 10.1080/14733145.2010.519045
- January 12, 2012
- 05:42 AM
- 6 views
Your memory of events is distorted within seconds
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Your memory automatically fills in the blanks in unfolding events
Memory isn't etched in neural stone. It's a creative process, sketched in sand. In one of the most dramatic demonstrations of this yet, Brent Strickland and Frank Keil have shown how people's memory for a video clip was distorted within seconds, to form a coherent episode "package". They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses "sophisticated compression routines ... for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory."
Fifty-eight uni students watched three types of 30-second video clip, each featuring a person kicking, throwing, putting or hitting a ball or shuttlecock. All videos were silent. One type of video ended with the consequences of the athletic action implied in the clip - for example, a football flying off into the distance. Another type lacked that final scene and ended instead with an irrelevant shot, for example of a linesman jogging down the line. The final video type was scrambled, with events unfolding in a jumbled order. Crucially, regardless of the video type, sometimes the moment of contact - for example, the kicker actually striking the ball - was shown and sometimes it wasn't.
After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn't featured in the video they'd just watched. Here's the main finding. Participants who watched the video type that climaxed with the ball (or shuttlecock etc) flying off into the distance were prone to saying they'd seen the causal moment of contact in the video, even when that particular image had in fact been missing.
In other words, because seeing the ball fly off implied that the kicker (or other protagonist) had struck the ball, the participants tended to invent a memory for having seen that causal action happen, even when they hadn't. This memory distortion happened within seconds, sometimes as soon as a second after the relevant part of the video had been seen.
This memory invention didn't happen for the videos that had an irrelevant ending, or that were scrambled. So memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence (e.g. a ball flying off into the distance) that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. In this case, the participants appeared to have "filled in" the missing moment of contact from the video, thus creating a causally coherent episode package for their memories. A similar level of memory invention didn't occur for other missing screen shots that had nothing to do with the implied causal action in the clip.
A second study replicated these memory distortion effects with 58 more participants and with new contexts involving kicking, throwing and bowling.
The researchers said their findings have obvious implications for crime scene witnesses. Imagine a witness sees a man wielding a gun, and imagine seconds later they also see a person nearby falling from a gunshot wound - these new results show how easily the mind of the witness could invent a memory of having seen the moment the trigger was actually pulled. "In some circumstances," the researchers said, "conceptual packaging can induce the perceiver to insert unseen information in order to fulfil structural requirements. This was the case in the present study."
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Strickland, B., and Keil, F. (2011). Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121 (3), 409-415 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.007
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Strickland, B., & Keil, F. (2011) Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121(3), 409-415. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.007
- December 22, 2011
- 04:52 PM
- 117 views
How our collective memory of 1066 could be souring Anglo-French relations
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Anglo-Saxon troops confront the invaders
No doubt you've noticed that the Entente Cordiale has been looking a little strained lately. That's mostly due to contemporary European politics and economics. Isn't it? We can't blame 1066. Can we?
In fact, British attitudes towards the French today probably aren't helped by memories and myths surrounding the Norman Conquest. This may seem like an odd claim, but a timely and intriguing new study focuses on the Norman Conquest of Britain as an example of a "distant memory" that could be affecting contemporary attitudes towards the French specifically, and towards immigrants more generally. Where psychologists usually study short-term or autobiographical memory in individuals, this study is an academic investigation of our collective or cultural memory.
Siobhan Brownlie's data comes from two main sources: a search of Norman Conquest mentions in ten British newspapers between 2005 and 2008 (she found 807 relevant articles) and a survey of 2,179 members of the UK population.
Our collective memory of 1066 is salient - 79 per cent of survey participants said the conquest was important - but it is also distorted by mythology. For example, many of us identity with the pre-invasion "Anglo-Saxon" population (DNA research exposes the fallacy of this belief), yet paradoxically we also see the Norman invasion and Norman buildings as part of our collective British identity. Many of us (18 per cent in the survey) see the Norman invaders as French, yet Normandy at the time was an independent territory with a distinct identity.
Unlike recent trauma memories, which are overwhelmingly negative, Brownlie said the emotional quality of distant memories, even for violent events, is far more flexible and varied. Forty-nine per cent of those surveyed had a neutral attitude towards the Norman invasion. Newspaper coverage also demonstrated ambivalence. Sometimes the Conquest was portrayed negatively, alongside other violent dates; and right-wing papers implied we shouldn't lose control of immigration as we did in 1066. Yet other times, 1066 was portrayed proudly as a foundation date of British identity.
What about the impact on contemporary attitudes? Of those survey participants (6 per cent) who had a negative attitude towards the Norman Conquest, 25 per cent said this contributed to their negative feelings towards the French today. Brownlie acknowledged this seems to suggest that the influence of 1066-attitudes on contemporary views is a "marginal phenomenon". However, she argued that those raw stats expose only the extent to which the influence is consciously recognised.
From a negative perspective, Brownlie sees echoes of the Norman conquest in British National Party literature. Where medieval chroniclers of the Conquest wrote about England becoming a "dwelling-place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood," the BNP literature says similarly: "The white working class has been abandoned, replaced, and displaced by a new ethnic electoral power base."
But memories of the Norman Conquest can also be invoked for positive symbolism. The monument at the British war cemetery in Bayeux says in Latin: "We who were conquered by William have liberated the homeland of the conqueror" (again we find the myths about our Anglo-Saxon roots and the Frenchness of the Normans, but this time in a positive message).
"Old enemies can become friends and allies," Brownlie writes. "This kind of message with specific reference to the Norman Conquest is found in friendly political speeches by French and British politicians and dignitaries ... ".
"In sum," Brownlie concludes, "from the BNP manifesto to the Second World War British cemetery in Bayeux, the study shows that memory of the distant past matters today, in profound and sometimes surprising ways."
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Brownlie, S. (2011). Does memory of the distant past matter? Remediating the Norman Conquest. Memory Studies DOI: 10.1177/1750698011426358
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Brownlie, S. (2011) Does memory of the distant past matter? Remediating the Norman Conquest. Memory Studies. DOI: 10.1177/1750698011426358
- December 19, 2011
- 05:02 AM
- 75 views
You're more likely to catch a yawn from a relative than a stranger
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Reading this blog post is likely to make you yawn. Not, hopefully, because it's boring, but rather because yawning is so contagious that even reading about it has been shown to provoke the behaviour. A popular theory for how yawns spread is that they automatically engage the empathy systems in our brains. Consistent with this, past research found that children with autism, some of whom have difficulty empathising, are immune to the contagious effects of yawns.
Now Ivan Norscia and Elisabetta Palagi have developed this line of enquiry, showing that we're more likely to catch a yawn from relatives than acquaintances, and more likely to catch them from acquaintances than strangers - presumably because we have more empathy for people with whom we're emotionally intimate.
The study was entirely observational. The researchers hung out in offices, restaurants, and waiting rooms and observed discreetly the yawning behaviour of the people about them. If one person yawned, the researchers waited to see if anyone else present yawned within the next three minutes. Data from one researcher was lost because they also caught the yawns and fell asleep (not really, I made that up). Sometimes the researchers knew the relationships of the people they were watching, other times they eavesdropped Bond-style on conversations to discern the social ties.
Of all the factors the researchers looked at, including things like the situational context and whether the yawner and their company were of the same nationality, it was only emotional closeness that was relevant. The closer, relationship-wise, a person was to the initial yawner, the more likely they were to yawn themselves. Emotional closeness was also associated with the number of times a yawn-catcher yawned, and the promptness with which they did so after being exposed to the precipitating yawn. Consonant with past research, it didn't matter if that precipitating yawn was seen or heard (one earlier study found that yawns are contagious even when they're "seen" non-consciously by people with damage to the visual part of their brains).
"The importance of social bond in shaping yawn contagion demonstrates that empathy plays a leading role in the modulation of this phenomenon," the researchers said. "Not only is contagion greater between familiar individuals, but it also follows an empathic gradient, increasing from strangers to kin-related individuals."
It's a hard life
Contagious yawning is also seen in monkeys and great apes. Indeed, this new study replicates similar findings with chimps, where the yawn contagion is greater between group members, and findings with baboons, for whom yawns are more often caught from intimate yawners (where intimacy is discerned from rates of mutual grooming). "When considered together," the researchers concluded, "these results suggest that the relationship between yawn contagion and empathy may have developed earlier than the last common ancestor between monkeys, humans and non-human apes."
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Norscia, I., and Palagi, E. (2011). Yawn Contagion and Empathy in Homo sapiens PLoS ONE, 6 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028472
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Norscia, I., & Palagi, E. (2011) Yawn Contagion and Empathy in Homo sapiens. PLoS ONE, 6(12). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028472
- December 15, 2011
- 07:08 AM
- 80 views
Questionable research practices are rife in psychology, survey suggests
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Update (15 Dec 2011): the uncorrected proofs of this article have now been released online (pdf).
Questionable research practices, including testing increasing numbers of participants until a result is found, are the "steroids of scientific competition, artificially enhancing performance". That's according to Leslie John and her colleagues who've found evidence that such practices are worryingly widespread among US psychologists. The results are currently in press at the journal Psychological Science and they arrive at a time when the psychological community is still reeling from the the fraud of a leading social psychologist in the Netherlands. Psychology is not alone. Previous studies have raised similar concerns about the integrity of medical research.
John's team quizzed 6,000 academic psychologists in the USA via an anonymous electronic survey about their use of 10 questionable research practices including: failing to report all dependent measures; collecting more data after checking if the results are significant; selectively reporting studies that "worked"; and falsifying data.
As well as declaring their own use of questionable research practices and their defensibility, the participants were also asked to estimate the proportion of other psychologists engaged in those practices, and the proportion of those psychologists who would likely admit to this in a survey.
For the first time in this context, the survey also incorporated an incentive for truth-telling. Some survey respondents were told, truthfully, that a larger charity donation would be made by the researchers if they answered honestly (based on a comparison of a participant's self-confessed research practices, the average rate of confession, and averaged estimates of such practices by others). Just over two thousand psychologists completed the survey. Comparing psychologists who received the truth incentive vs. those that didn't showed that it led to higher admission rates.
Averaging across the psychologists' reports of their own and others' behaviour, the alarming results suggest that one in ten psychologists has falsified research data, while the majority has: selectively reported studies that "worked" (67 per cent), not reported all dependent measures (74 per cent), continued collecting data to reach a significant result (71 per cent), reported unexpected findings as expected (54 per cent), and excluded data post-hoc (58 per cent). Participants who admitted to more questionable practices tended to claim that they were more defensible. Thirty-five per cent of respondents said they had doubts about the integrity of their own research. Breaking the results down by sub-discipline, relatively higher rates of questionable practice were found among cognitive, neuroscience and social psychologists, with fewer transgressions among clinical psychologists.
John and her colleagues said that many of the iffy methods they'd investigated were in a "grey-zone" of acceptable practice. "The inherent ambiguity in the defensibility of research practices may lead researchers to, however inadvertently, use this ambiguity to delude themselves that their own dubious research practices are 'defensible'." It's revealing that a follow-up survey that asked psychologists about the defensibility of the questionable practices, but without asking about their own engagement in those practices, led to far lower defensibility ratings.
John's team think the findings of their survey could help explain the "decline effect" in psychology and other sciences - that is, the tendency for effect sizes to decline with replications of previous results. Perhaps this is because the original, large effect size was obtained via questionable practices.
The current study also complements a recent paper published in Psychological Science by Joseph Simons and colleagues that used simulations and a real experiment to show how toying with dependent variables, sample sizes and other factors (the kind of practices explored in the current study) can massively increase the risk of a false-positive finding - that is, claiming a positive effect where there is none.
"[Questionable research practices] ... threaten research integrity and produce unrealistically elegant results that may be difficult to match without engaging in such practices oneself," John and her colleagues concluded. "This can lead to a 'race to the bottom', with questionable research begetting even more questionable research."
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Leslie John, George Loewentstein, and Drazen Prelec (In Press). Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth-telling. Psychological Science
Pulled from the comments: Psychfiledrawer is a repository for non-replications of published results.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Leslie John, George Loewentstein, & Drazen Prelec. (2012) Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth-telling. Psychological Science. info:/
- December 15, 2011
- 05:17 AM
- 77 views
Mention of the word "loving" doubles charitable donations
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
"Love begets love." Proverb
French researchers say that adding the text "donating=loving" to a charitable collection box almost doubled the amount of money they raised.
Nicolas Guéguen and Lubomir Lamy placed opaque collection boxes in 14 bakeries in Brittany for two weeks. All the boxes featured the following text in French: "Women students in business trying to organise a humanitarian action in Togo. We are relying on your support", together with a picture of a young African woman with an infant in her arms. Some boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: "DONATING=LOVING"; others had the text "DONATING=HELPING"; whilst others had no further text below the slot. Different box types were placed in different bakeries on different days and the amount of money collected each day was recorded.
The text on the donation boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in boxes with the "donating=loving" text, as compared with the "donating=helping" boxes and the boxes with no additional text (€1.04 per day vs. €0.62 and €0.54; the effect size was d=2.09). "Given the high effect-size ... we can conclude that evoking love is a powerful technique to enhance people's altruistic behaviour," the researchers said. In contrast, the difference in the amount of money left in "donating=helping" boxes and boxes without additional text was not statistically significant.
Guéguen and Lamy think that the word "loving" acts as a prime, activating related concepts such as compassion, support and solidarity, and thereby encourages behaviour consistent with those ideas. Such an explanation would fit the wider literature showing how our motivations and attitudes can be influenced by words and objects without us realising it. For example, one previous study showed how exposure to ageing-related words like "retired" led participants to walk away more slowly after an experiment. Other research found a poster of a pair of eyes on a wall led to greater use of an honesty box in a university canteen. Previous research by Guéguen and Lamy has further shown how asking a male passerby for directions to "Saint Valentine Street" as opposed to "Saint Martin Street" makes them subsequently more likely to help a nearby woman who's had her phone stolen, presumably because of the automatic activation of romance-related concepts.
Why should the text "donating=helping" not have had a similar beneficial effect on giving behaviour? Guéguen and Lamy think this might be due to a compensatory counter-reaction against words that are perceived as too much like a command. Indeed, in French, the verb "donner" to donate is also used to order someone to do something. However, why this reactance should have happened with "donating=helping" and not with "donating=loving" isn't entirely clear. Another reason for the impotence of the word "helping", the researchers said, is its redundancy - it was really just repeating the plea for support in the main text.
The measure of giving was crude, which is a weakness of the study. We don't know if the "donating=loving" text led more people to donate, or to more generous giving among those people who donated.
"Despite the shortcomings of our study, the results will no doubt be of interest to those involved in philanthropic planning and support assessment in the aresas of corporate giving, nonprofit organisations, charitable foundations, and grants," the researchers said. "Conducted in a field setting, the experiment demonstrates how a simple, low-cost intervention can increase charitable giving."
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Guéguen, N., and Lamy, L. (2011). The effect of the word “love” on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting. Social Influence, 6 (4), 249-258 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2011.627771
Previously on the Research Digest: How Michael Jackson's Heal The World really could help heal the world.
Other Digest posts related to altruism.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
... Read more »
Guéguen, N., & Lamy, L. (2011) The effect of the word “love” on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting. Social Influence, 6(4), 249-258. DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2011.627771
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