Psychology posts

February 13, 2012
01:35 AM
17 views

21st Century Treatments for Insomnia

Are you having trouble sleeping? But you're not feeling that 19th century retro hipster insomniac vibe? Try some of these behavioral remedies recommended by the finest scientific and medical journals of today.What a Difference a Day MakesIs Intensive Sleep Retraining (ISR) a new overnight treatment for chronic insomnia (Harris et al., 2012)? ISR is conducted in one 25 hr session at a sleep lab, where the insomniac sleeps a maximum of 3 min every 30 min for a period of 25 hrs. Instant cure! (supposedly). The basic idea is that the person will learn they can fall asleep fairly quickly and easily, and this will translate directly to real life sleeping patterns.In a commentary accompanying the main article in Sleep, Spielman and Glovinsky (2012) describe it as:...a novel insomnia treatment that while radical in procedure is grounded in learning theory, a long-established conceptual framework for understanding insomnia. ISR combines two familiar components of sleep research—sleep deprivation and the polysomnographic recording of sleep onset—to yield an entirely new therapeutic procedure: repeated practice in falling asleep quickly. Massed practice in achieving sleep is here shown to possess a therapeutic value rivaling that of stimulus control therapy (SCT), that mainstay of behavioral sleep medicine, as well as offering a possible additive effect when administered in conjunction with SCT.ISR employs sleep laboratory technology to measure the speed of sleep onset, limit the duration of sleep, and allow immediate feedback to subjects as to whether objectively recorded sleep has occurred. It typically provides dozens of successful entries to sleep over the course of a single night and day. Then it is over, handing off responsibility for good sleep management to sleep hygiene recommendations.In contrast to ISR, there is already strong research support for stimulus control therapy (SCT), which is designed to:...reduce the anxiety or conditioned arousal individuals may feel when attempting to go to bed. Specifically, a set of instructions designed to reassociate the bed/bedroom with sleep and to re-establish a consistent sleep schedule are implimented. These include: 1) Going to bed only when sleepy; 2) Getting out of bed when unable to sleep; 3) Using the bed/bedroom only for sleep and sex (i.e., no reading, watching TV, etc); 4) Arising at the same time every morning; and 5) Avoiding naps.One question, then, is whether ISR is better than SCT, an accepted behavioral therapy for insomnia. Eighty participants in the study of Harris et al. were randomized into one of four groups: (1) ISR + sleep hygeine instruction (SH); (2) SCT + SH; (3) ISR + SCT; (4) SH alone, which served as the control condition. All participants kept a sleep diary, answered questionnaires, and wore an actigraph to measure motor activity. Those in the ISR groups slept no more than 5 hrs the night before they came to the lab.The highly intrusive ISR procedure involved arriving at 21:00.Following an explanation, the signing of an informed consent form, electrode application, and a quiet settling period, treatment began at 22:30. Treatment trials were conducted every half hour, finishing after 23:00 on night 2. Thereby, the ISR treatment routine allowed a series of 50 half-hourly sleep onset opportunities. ... Within each treatment trial, the opportunity for sleep onset was limited to a 20-min period, with the trial stopping if sleep onset had not occurred by this time. For those trials in which sleep was initiated, 3 consecutive minutes of sleep were permitted, prior to being awoken [the method of awakening was not described]. Upon awakening, treatment participants first rated their perception of whether sleep onset had occurred (on a Likert scale of 1 “No, definitely not” to 7 “Yes, definitely”). Following this response, participants were provided with information as to whether sleep onset had or had not occurred.Then they got out of bed to read or watch DVDs. After 10 trials of this nonsense, people were falling asleep in 5 min or less.Ultimately, did this punitive procedure work? Yes. But it wasn't significantly better than SCT for most of the subjective sleep measures used. All three active treatment conditions produced improvements in self-reported duration and efficiency of sleep, relative to the SH control. Of the 16 or so analyses at 2 of 7 selected time points (which did not seem to be corrected for multiple comparisons), there were some instances where ISR or the combined ISR + SCT treatment was better than stimulus control therapy (see below), but nothing earth shattering.In another graph (Fig. 5 - Mean sleep diary wake time after sleep onset), the SCT groups were superior to ISR at Week 1 and Post-Treatment.What about the objective sleep measures obtained by actigraphy?The actigraphy data failed to support significant changes in sleep, despite using an adjusted manual scoring method and a sensitivity setting in the scoring algorithm that calibrated actigraphy TST [total sleep time] to PSG [polysomnography] TST. Actigraphy has similarly failed to mirror subjective sleep changes in other treatment studies in insomnia, and objective measures (i.e., EEG) fail to replicate the extent of subjective sleep changes in clinical insomnia treatment studies.The authors concluded that actigraphy is useless and that subjective sleep report is the only thing that matters (basically).So what's next? Intensive Sleep Retraining is costly and available only from highly specialized centers.1 But the possibility of self-administered ISR is on the horizon, using portable EEG headsets, actigraphs, and vibrating alarms. Is there an app for that?Footnote1 I'm not sure that it's even being offered as a clinical treatment. The RCT was conducted in Australia.References... Read more »

Harris, J., Lack, L., Kemp, K., Wright, H., & Bootzin, R. (2012) A Randomized Controlled Trial of Intensive Sleep Retraining (ISR): A Brief Conditioning Treatment for Chronic Insomnia. SLEEP. DOI: 10.5665/sleep.1584

Spielman, A., & Glovinsky, P. (2012) What a Difference a Day Makes. SLEEP. DOI: 10.5665/sleep.1574

February 13, 2012
01:11 AM
17 views

Valentine's Day Special: An Insider's Guide to Speed Dating

by Psych Your Mind in Psych Your Mind

To my never-ending delight, being a social psychologist can sometimes make me feel like I have an insider’s guide to social life. When I discovered that two dear friends of mine were about to try speed dating for the first time, I couldn’t help offering some (yes, unsolicited) terribly handy research-based advice: “Be selective! They’ll like you more if you don’t show interest in everybody.” My random tip amused my friends, but my outburst didn’t do justice to the scope of research done on speed dating in our field in recent years. For you, dear readers, just in time for Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d provide a quick and dirty guide to the basics of what goes down in speed dating interactions.

Source
First, a bit of background: speed dating began in the late 90’s in LA, and has rapidly spread since. In a typical session people participate in a round-robin series of interactions, meeting each eligible partner for a 3-8 minute speed date and rating interest in them afterwards. If two people indicate mutual interest (i.e., match), each is provided with his or her match’s contact info. The super short format of these dates lets people make rapid decisions about each other’s eligibility as a mate, and as such provides a rich microcosm of the first impression and romantic attraction dynamics psychologists have speculated about and researched for decades. As you might expect, our field has started studying speed dating interactions to distill the basic elements of initial interpersonal attraction. So what have we found?
Read More-... Read more »

Back, M., Penke, L., Schmukle, S., Sachse, K., Borkenau, P., & Asendorpf, J. (2011) Why mate choices are not as reciprocal as we assume: The role of personality, flirting and physical attractiveness. European Journal of Personality, 25(2), 120-132. DOI: 10.1002/per.806

Eastwick, P., Finkel, E., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2007) Selective Versus Unselective Romantic Desire: Not All Reciprocity Is Created Equal. Psychological Science, 18(4), 317-319. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01897.x

Eastwick, P., & Finkel, E. (2008) Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 245-264. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.245

Finkel, E., & Eastwick, P. (2009) Arbitrary Social Norms Influence Sex Differences in Romantic Selectivity. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1290-1295. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02439.x

February 13, 2012
12:12 AM
22 views

Just ONE Copy of The Daily Mail Could Ruin Your Life

by Neurobonkers in Neurobonkers

A comprehensive debunking of the Daily Mail's reporting of science.... Read more »

The Poynter Institute. (2006) Eyetracking the news. A study of print and online reading. Poynter. info:/

February 10, 2012
07:02 AM
79 views

News You Can Use (like how Pepsi knows there was no mouse in your Mountain Dew)

by Doug Keene in The Jury Room

From time to time we play catch-up with the research and include a number of things we think you would want to know. Most of it is serious. Every once in a while though, a need-to-know tidbit slips out in litigation that we cannot resist incorporating into a post. We know there was no mouse [...]
Related posts:
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... Read more »

McAndrew, FT, & De Jonge, CR. (2011) Electronic Person Perception: What do we infer about people from the style of their email messages? . Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(4), 403-407. info:/

February 10, 2012
03:40 AM
66 views

Good Science, Bad History, in the British Journal of Psychiatry

by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic

The latest February 2012 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry features a paper about the association between child abuse and later mental health problems. I haven't read it yet, but it looks pretty good.However, it also includes an editorial from John Read and Richard Bentall which argues that: Just 20 years ago, however, it would have been difficult to get the paper published. Mental health professions have been slow, even resistant, to recognise the role of childhood adversities in psychiatric disorder... Until very recently the hypothesis that abuse in childhood has a causal role in psychosis was regarded by many biologically oriented psychiatrists as heresy...Really? I checked the BJP from exactly 20 years ago. The February 1992 issue contained:A paper about child sexual abuse in female psychiatric patients.A letter praising a different article, on the same topic.A review of 11 studies on psychosocial family interventions as treatments for schizophrenia.A paper looking at the effect of the social environment on symptoms of schizophrenia.Four strikes and they're out. It's not true that this kind of thing wasn't being discussed 20 years ago.Such grandstanding is bad for science. Few would deny that psychiatry in recent years has undervalued psychosocial factors and overvalued genetics and neuroscience, but it's actually quite a complicated story, not a Punch and Judy show with bad guys on one side and good guys on the other.Rhetorical flourishes like this editorial certainly get attention but in the long run, down that road lies madness.Read, J., and Bentall, R. (2012). Negative childhood experiences and mental health: theoretical, clinical and primary prevention implications The British Journal of Psychiatry, 200 (2), 89-91 DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.111.096727... Read more »

Read, J., & Bentall, R. (2012) Negative childhood experiences and mental health: theoretical, clinical and primary prevention implications. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 200(2), 89-91. DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.111.096727

February 10, 2012
02:39 AM
54 views

Friday Fun: One Researcher's P-Curve Analysis

by Psych Your Mind in Psych Your Mind

It's Me!

Two weeks ago when PYM was at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I went to a symposium about false-positive findings in psychology (see my summary here). In the symposium, the speakers discussed the prevalence of research practices that result in biased statistical testing. In that symposium, one of the researchers, Uri Simonsohn, presented a method for catching people who engage in these practices: the P-curve analysis. What follows is a p-curve analysis of one researcher/blogger: Michael W. Kraus!
Read More->... Read more »

Simmons JP, Nelson LD, & Simonsohn U. (2011) False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological science, 22(11), 1359-66. PMID: 22006061

February 8, 2012
06:34 PM
90 views

All Mixed Up: Julian Jaynes

by Cris Campbell in Genealogy of Religion

In 1976, the polymathic Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is one of those rare books which is mostly wrong but is filled with so many penetrating and provocative insights that it still deserves to be read. It’s a fun and big idea book [...]... Read more »

Jaynes, Julian. (1986) Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27(2), 128-148. DOI: 10.1037/h0080053

February 8, 2012
02:48 PM
62 views

Cyberchondria: Online health information and health anxiety

by Ben in Critical Science

Wondering what that rash on your arm is? If the cough you’ve had for a few days warrants making an appointment to see your doctor/physician? If you’ve ever used the internet to answer these sort of questions then you’re in the 60-80% of internet users who regularly do so. In theory this is a great idea – you get access to the collective knowledge of medicine, and you don’t get kicked out of the appointment room after 15 minutes. However, there are a few problems – research tell us that:... Read more »

Muse, K., McManus, F., Leung, C., Meghreblian, B., & Williams, J. (2012) Cyberchondriasis: Fact or fiction? A preliminary examination of the relationship between health anxiety and searching for health information on the Internet. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 26(1), 189-196. DOI: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2011.11.005

February 8, 2012
02:36 PM
83 views

Dating in the Digital Age

by APS Daily Observations in Daily Observations

The report card is in, and the online dating industry won’t be putting this one on the fridge. A new scientific report concludes that although online dating offers users some ... Read more »

Finkel, E. J., Eastwick, P.W., Karney, B. R., Reis, H.T., & Sprecher, S. (2012) Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(1). info:/

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.

_________________________________

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.

... Read more »

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 8, 2012
11:32 AM
82 views

A psychological contagion? The mysterious case of LeRoy, NY

by Psych Your Mind in Psych Your Mind

LeRoy, NY
In a small country town, population 7,500, a cheerleader and honor roll student woke up from an afternoon nap to discover she had developed a stutter. Soon, the stutter gave way to uncontrollable twitching. When her mother took her to the doctor, they discovered that she wasn’t the only one with these symptoms - in all, 14 teenage girls, one teenage boy, and one 36 year-old woman had recently developed Tourettes-like symptoms. The local doctors diagnosed the mysterious illness as “conversion disorder,” a disorder in which mental and emotional stress literally plays out in physical symptoms. Sound like the plot of a bad TV movie? Perhaps. But it’s also the latest happenings in LeRoy, New York, where sixteen people suddenly developed twitching, facial tics and vocal outbursts last October, 15 of whom attended the same high school. Read More->... Read more »

Moss, P., & McEvedy, C. (1966) An epidemic of overbreathing among schoolgirls. BMJ, 2(5525), 1295-1300. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.2.5525.1295

Jones, T., Craig, A., Hoy, D., Gunter, E., Ashley, D., Barr, D., Brock, J., & Schaffner, W. (2000) Mass Psychogenic Illness Attributed to Toxic Exposure at a High School. New England Journal of Medicine, 342(2), 96-100. DOI: 10.1056/NEJM200001133420206

February 8, 2012
10:56 AM
49 views

Friends with Benefits

by Miss Behavior in The Scorpion and the Frog

"It is not so much our friends' help that helps usas the confident knowledge that they will help us."-Epicurus, Greek philosopher (341 - 270 BC)“Silences make the real conversations between friends.Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.”-Margaret Lee Runbeck, American author (1905 - 1956)photo by Jérôme Micheletta, Macaca Nigra ProjectWhere would we be without our friends? Friends lend a hand in bad times and cheer uson in good times. They make us laugh, share their food, and tell us where tofind interesting things… like fruit or coconuts!Okay,so maybe finding fruit and coconuts isn’t that high on your priority list, butit seems to be pretty high on the list for crested macaques. And lucky forthem, they have friends to rely on too.Jérôme Micheletta and Bridget Waller at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom set out to determine whether social factors influence the ability of crestedmacaques to follow the eye gaze of a group-mate and potentially gain importantinformation. To do this, they hung out at the Marwell Wildlife Zoological Parkin Winchester, U.K. every day to watch and video record the crested macaques.An experimenter would wait for two crested macaques to be within 1 meter ofeach other with one individual facing the experimenter (they called this animal“the informant”… not to be confused with Matt Damon) and the other individualfacing the informant and facing away from the experimenter (they called thisanimal “the subject”). You can imagine, this process involved a lot of waitingaround. Once the animals were in place, the experimenter held up a yummy treat(an orange, a banana, or a coconut). The informant would see the treat and thenthe subject would either look at the treat or not. In these cases, the subjectslooked at the treats 64% of the time.This figure from Micheletta and Waller's Animal Behaviour paper shows their experimental procedures.But how do we know that the subjects followed the informants’ gaze and didn’trespond to something the experimenter or some distant cage-mate did? Michelettaand Waller also recorded the responses of the same animals in a control situation:the experimenter would wait for a subject to be away from its cage-mates, butwith its back turned to the experimenter. Then the experimenter would hold upthe yummy treat. In these control trials, the subjects looked at the treatsonly 7% of the time.So it looks like crested macaques use their peers’ eye gaze as information onwhere to look. They also were faster to look if their cage-mate moved his/herhead in combination with an eye movement, rather than just the eyes. But, doesthe social context matter? For each pair of macaques, Micheletta and Wallercalculated the relative dominance status and friendship strength. They usedmonths of observations of aggressive encounters in which they knew the winnersand losers of each encounter to rank the overall dominance hierarchy of eachanimal in the group. A typical aggressive encounter either involved one monkeychasing another (which would either run away or crouch) or a monkey approachinganother and taking away his/her food or grooming-buddy or mate (How rude!). Theyalso determined friendship strength by calculating the average number of timesthey sat in contact with or groomed a specific individual versus other animalsin the group.If the informant was a friend, the subject was quicker to look at the food than ifthe informant was not a friend, although friendship did not influence theoverall success rate. And the relative dominance status didn’t seem to have anyeffect. Why might macaques follow their friends’ gazes faster than nonfriends’ gazes? Maybethey are generally more visually attentive to their friends than theirnonfriends, as is true in chimpanzees, siamangs, chacma baboons and ring-tailedlemurs. Or maybe a friend’s informationis more relevant than a nonfriend’s information. Friends often share motivationsand needs and often compete less and share more with each other than withnonfriends (although there are many exceptions to this, as you may haveexperienced). All of these possibilities leave open new avenues for futureresearch. But one thing is clear: It sure is good to have friends.Want to know more? Check this out:Micheletta, J., & Waller, B. (2012). Friendship affects gaze following in a tolerant species of macaque, Macaca nigra Animal Behaviour, 83 (2), 459-467 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.11.018Do you have a thought on friends that you would like to share? Comment below.... Read more »

Micheletta, J., & Waller, B. (2012) Friendship affects gaze following in a tolerant species of macaque, Macaca nigra. Animal Behaviour, 83(2), 459-467. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.11.018

February 8, 2012
07:02 AM
46 views

Osama bin Laden is dead and (simultaneously) Osama bin Laden lives!

by Rita Handrich in The Jury Room

Conspiracy theorists are strange. While they can provide both consternation and entertainment value in mock trials, the idea they could show up on your jury is not in the least bit funny. New research shows us that not only are they strange–they are also contradictory. Researchers wanted to find out if the suspicion of conspiracy [...]
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“Reactions vary along traditional partisan lines”
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Wood, M., Douglas, K., & Sutton, R. (2012) Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611434786

February 8, 2012
12:02 AM
47 views

How Do People Think About the “Social Safety Net”?

by erichorow in peer-reviewed by my neurons

I’m amazed at the poor job progressives do when it comes to “messaging” about the social safety net. Obviously it would be easier if the unemployment rate wasn’t two points higher than the president said it would be, but proponents of strong welfare programs tend to concede the token anti-welfare complaint of “I don’t want [...]... Read more »

Mallett, R., Huntsinger, J., Sinclair, S., & Swim, J. (2008) Seeing Through Their Eyes: When Majority Group Members Take Collective Action on Behalf of an Outgroup. Group Processes , 11(4), 451-470. DOI: 10.1177/1368430208095400

Galinsky, A., & Moskowitz, G. (2000) Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 708-724. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.78.4.708

Psychology

February 7, 2012
04:20 PM
74 views

Oxytocin’s (Not So) Better Half

by APS Daily Observations in Daily Observations

Feeling all warm and fuzzy? Chalk it up to oxytocin, the touchy-feely hormone that allows us to trust, bond, and even fall in love. Despite nicknames such as “the moral ... Read more »

Kemp, A., & Guastella, A. (2011) The Role of Oxytocin in Human Affect: A Novel Hypothesis. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(4), 222-231. DOI: 10.1177/0963721411417547

February 7, 2012
09:41 AM
60 views

Leadership positions for women are often atop a glass cliff

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Back in 2003, Michelle Ryan checked her pigeonhole and found an article from the business section of The Times in 2003, stating that the ‘triumphant march of women into the country’s boardrooms has wreaked havoc’ on companies' performance. This was to be the spark for a line of enquiry that has borne years of fruitful research, and the story began her DOP keynote tour of the 'glass cliff'. The term riffs on the metaphor of the glass ceiling – the invisible limit which prevents women from making it to the top of organisations. The glass cliff is an invisible risk, referring to the experience of women who make it to senior positions, only to discover they are unusually precarious.Ryan began to perceive the glass cliff by scrutinising the claims of that newspaper article, deposited by an unknown friendly colleague. Historical data comparing 19 women appointed to the Board of Directors with a matched sample showed that appointments of women were indeed associated with slumps in share price, but that the slump preceded the appointment. The article had based its claims on a false assumption of causality, and it seemed instead that women were more likely to be appointed to companies in crisis.Ryan then used experimental investigations involving hypothetical situations. She asked participants to decide how they would fill a position, such as company finance director, by choosing between two similar candidates who differed in gender. When the position was presented within a stable context – a growing company, a winnable political seat – then the candidates were similarly favoured. However, when the situation was presented as one with a high chance of failure – a company in crisis, or an unwinnable seat – the women was a far more popular selection. People were even more likely to choose a female youth representative for a festival that was experiencing declining popularity.Perhaps women are seen as better crisis managers than men? (Ryan quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘women are like teabags. You don’t know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.’) In another study, participants judged that a company in a stable context need a leader who was assertive, competitive, or possessed other traits judged to be stereotypically masculine by other participants in a pre-study phase. Meanwhile, leaders in crisis situations should be understanding, tactful, creative – more stereotypically feminine.But what is it about crises that women are seen as suited for: taking control and improving performance, for instance? Not so; a follow-up that separated out different aspects of leading in crisis found female traits were only favoured for the purpose of soaking up criticism or enduring negative conditions. And another study showed that when the crisis situation had full support of senior leadership, there was no preference for women to take the role. The data suggests that women are preferred when the situation is not just risky but actively precarious, with likely negative repercussions for the situation and themselves.What are the consequences for female board members? Well, there is evidence that female CEOs have far shorter tenures, and these may reflect the fact that their positions are often set up to fail. Ryan concluded that in the pursuit of equal opportunity, we shouldn't be misled by the raw numbers of women in leadership positions; the nature of the role matters just as much.In an interesting extension of her experimental work, Ryan and colleagues collected folk theories for the glass cliff via the BBC website. Women tended to believe that women are singled out for precarious positions, or that they have fewer opportunities and therefore accept riskier positions. The majority of men simply didn’t believe that women are differentially placed on the glass cliff.----Sample article:Ryan MK, Haslam SA, Hersby MD, & Bongiorno R (2011). Think crisis-think female: the glass cliff and contextual variation in the think manager-think male stereotype. The Journal of applied psychology, 96 (3), 470-84 PMID: 21171729... Read more »

Ryan MK, Haslam SA, Hersby MD, & Bongiorno R. (2011) Think crisis-think female: the glass cliff and contextual variation in the think manager-think male stereotype. The Journal of applied psychology, 96(3), 470-84. PMID: 21171729

February 6, 2012
12:18 PM
94 views

Good Stress vs. Bad Stress: How Stress can Impair or Improve Performance

by Psych Your Mind in Psych Your Mind

Imagine times in your life when you felt stress – a job
interview, a first date, a piano recital, or a championship soccer game. It’s
no wonder you may have felt stress in these situations: They are meaningful, they
require effort to achieve success, and they involve evaluation by others. Each
of these factors can contribute to
feelings of uneasiness and anxiety.

The question is: how do these feelings of stress impact performance?

Read More-... Read more »

Mendes, W., Blascovich, J., Hunter, S., Lickel, B., & Jost, J. (2007) Threatened by the unexpected: Physiological responses during social interactions with expectancy-violating partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(4), 698-716. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.4.698

February 6, 2012
12:00 PM
58 views

Help Jurors Stay Off the Bandwagon

by Persuasion Strategies in Persuasive Litigator

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: Sometimes the bandwagon isn't a bad place to be. If your case embraces what is likely to be the popular position (e.g., the big company is to blame or the accused is guilty), then a tidal wave of opinion reaching a swift conclusion, and sweeping the doubters along in its wake, might seem like a pretty good thing. But lawyers often find themselves on the opposite side of that dynamic. In the toughest cases, your preferred verdict will rely on jurors exercising their own independent judgment long enough to consider the unpopular view and avoid being...... Read more »

Luppi, B., & Parisi, F. (2012) Jury Size and the Hung-Jury Paradox. SSRN Electronic Journal. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.1980387

February 6, 2012
07:02 AM
87 views

My soul is not for sale!

by Doug Keene in The Jury Room

Oh really? Then why are the US Navy, the US Air Force and the NSF looking at how we make decisions to sell our souls? As it happens, when we are considering disavowing “sacred values”, a specific cognitive process occurs. That has to be good, of course, since we wouldn’t want soul-selling to be relegated [...]
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Pretrial publicity & bias: Take a look at the age of your jurors!
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Berns, G., Bell, E., Capra, C., Prietula, M., Moore, S., Anderson, B., Ginges, J., & Atran, S. (2012) The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1589), 754-762. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0262

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