BPS readers digest and other research articles

snorlax · 24-02-2006 2:54pm #1

a sticky resource for psychological articles/ studies that you find interesting (that are credible and are from informed sources).

p.pete · 24-02-2006 3:11pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 61 (16/2/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Against speed reading

There are at least three different types of reader, with those people who make frequent backward glances to earlier subject headings and key sentences, demonstrating the better comprehension for what they’ve just read. The two other types of reader are slow and fast ‘linear readers’, who tend to read continuously from one line to the next, making few backward glances. The finding comes from an analysis of the eye movements of 44 undergraduate students by Jukka Hyönä and Anna-Mari Nurminen at the University of Turku in Finland, who say their finding has implications for the teaching of reading.

“This finding demonstrates the usefulness and functionality of the look-back and rereading fixations”, the researchers said. Jukka Hyönä told the Digest: “Our study clearly shows that the advocates of speed reading are wrong in saying that regressions are a sign of poor reading and a bad habit. We have shown that selective looking back is in fact a sign of strategic reading”.

Hyönä and Nurminen drew their conclusions after recording the students’ eye movements as they read a 12 page on-screen text about animals in danger of extinction. They classified 16 per cent of students as ‘topic structure processors’ who spent more time rereading earlier parts of the current sentence, as well as going back to earlier subject headings and the first sentences of paragraphs. Eighteen per cent of the students were classified as fast linear readers, and 66 per cent as slow linear readers. After reading the text, the students wrote down as many of the main points as they could think of, with the readers who performed more rereading tending to produce a more comprehensive summary of the text.

A later questionnaire showed that the students had good insight into the kind of reader they were, accurately estimating how fast they read compared to other people, and how often they looked back over earlier text.

Jukka Hyona told the Digest “The smart processing strategy that we found could easily be taught to children or adults. In fact, I understand some teachers are actually teaching something similar to our ‘topic structure processing strategy’”. __________________________________

Hyona, J. & Nurminen, A-M. (2006). Do adult readers know how they read? Evidence from eye movement patterns and verbal reports. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 31-50.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/9q4yv
Author weblink: http://users.utu.fi/~hyona/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: This has implications for educational psychology. See [Edexcel]: Unit 4 (A2), the psychology of education;
[OCR]: A2, psychology and education.

2. Detecting psychological distress from where a patient sits

Patients suffering from depression or anxiety are more likely to choose to sit to their left when visiting the GP, an observation that has implications for the detection of psychological distress among patients. That’s according to a study by Dr. Peter Luck, at Christmas Maltings Surgery in Suffolk.

“The seating arrangement I now use in my surgery allows patients to choose their spatial orientation (left/right) with me during face-to-face consultations. I use this system to alert me, when patients choose to sit to their left, that there is a greater possibility that they may be suffering from psychological distress “, Dr. Luck told the Digest.

During Luck’s research, a GP’s consulting room was arranged for five months so that two chairs were positioned an equal distance to the left or right of the GP’s desk. The choice of chair made by 756 patients seeing their GP was recorded, and after their consultation each patient was tested for anxiety and depression using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Their handedness was determined according to the hand they wrote with.

Among the 674 right-handed patients, Dr. Luck found that those who scored positively for anxiety or depression (358 of them) were significantly more likely to sit in the left-hand chair facing the GP (59 per cent of them did) than those who weren’t anxious or depressed (27 per cent of them sat on the left). A similar effect was not found among the 82 left-handers, possibly because they were too few in number.

The right-handed patients who weren’t depressed or anxious tended to choose the right-hand chair, reflecting their attentional preference for the left side of space, consistent with past research. Somehow, psychological distress seems to affect this usual attentional bias, thus explaining the Dr. Luck’s pattern of results. The finding adds to past research showing that depressed mothers tend to cradle their baby on their right, the opposite of the usual bias among mothers to hold their baby on the left (see Digest issue 26, item 1; http://tinyurl.com/95f8z). __________________________________

Luck, P. (2006). Does the presence of psychological distress in patients influence their choice of sitting position in face-to-face consultation with the GP? Laterality, 11, 90-100.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/9u5sv

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences and perspectives, psychopathology, depression; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4 options, psychology of atypical behaviour, mood disorders; [SQA higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, therapeutic approaches in specific common disorders.

3. How we misunderstand evolution

Everyone thinks they understand natural selection, but very few do, Richard Dawkins surmised in his 1987 book The Blind Watchmaker. “It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism”, he wrote.

Indeed, in a new study, Andrew Shtulman found the majority of 42 Harvard undergraduates misunderstood evolution, seeing it in terms of the transformation of the essence of a species. Such students tended to believe, for example, that a parent adapts to her environment before passing her acquired characteristics onto her offspring.

Just to remind you, Darwinian evolution is a two step process based on variation within species populations: chance mutations and sexual recombinations introduce differences between individual organisms, and whether or not these are retained depends on the success or not of an individual organism’s reproduction.

Shtulman tested the students’ understanding of evolution with a comprehensive battery of questions on variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation and extinction. For example, the students had to choose the most Darwinian explanation for why a youth basketball team did better this season than last. Students who understood evolution picked the answer “more people completed trials for the same number of team places this year”, whereas students who had an incorrect, ‘transformational’ understanding of evolution chose answers such as “each returning team member grew taller over the summer”.

As has been found with naïve students’ understanding of other scientific theories such as in thermodynamics, acoustics and cosmology, the kind of misunderstandings shown by the students here tended to parallel the development of evolutionary perspectives through history, for example mirroring aspects of theories put forward by Lamarck, Cope and Haeckel.

Could the widespread misunderstanding of evolutionary theory explain the appeal of Intelligent Design creationism? It seems not. Students who understood evolutionary theory were no more likely to believe it was the best explanation for how a species adapts to its environment than those students who misunderstood evolution. _________________________________

Shtulman, A. (2006). Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 52, 170-194.

Abstract weblink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2005.10.001
Author weblink: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~shtulman/
Link to paper in TICS that discusses the implications of this and related research for understanding the Intelligent Design controversy: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.12.001

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: This has implications for educational psychology. See [Edexcel]: Unit 4 (A2), the psychology of education;
[OCR]: A2, psychology and education. See also evolutionary psychology
modules: [AQA spec A]: comparative psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour; [SQA higher]: understanding the individual, domain: physiological psychology, "the origins of adaptive behaviours in the evolutionary development of species".

p.pete · 24-02-2006 3:11pm

4. How being ill can be good for you

The characters of people who recover from physical or psychological illness are strengthened by the experience. That’s the suggestion of an internet-based study by positive psychologists Christopher Peterson and colleagues, who say longitudinal research is now needed to confirm their results.

Two thousand and eighty-seven participants logged onto a research website and completed a 240-item questionnaire about their character strengths (see http://www.authentichappiness.org/). It was only at the end of the questionnaire that participants were asked about any previous physical or psychological illness they had suffered. “Thus, our participants were not explicitly primed to respond in terms of a survivor identity”, the researchers said.

Peterson’s team found that compared with the participants who had always been well, the 422 participants who had recovered from a physical illness scored slightly higher on bravery, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, humour, kindness, love of learning, spirituality and appreciation of beauty. Meanwhile, recovery from psychological illness was associated with slightly increased appreciation of beauty, creativity, curiosity, gratitude and love of learning. The researchers said these small but significant effects were notable “given the prevailing emphasis on the psychologically scarring effects of illness and disorder”.

The illnesses most frequently cited by the participants were allergies, diabetes and autoimmune diseases. A history of illness was associated with lower life satisfaction but only among participants who hadn’t recovered.

The participants who had recovered from physical illness were more likely to report higher lifer satisfaction if they also scored highly on bravery, kindness and especially humour. For those who’d recovered from psychological illness it was appreciation of beauty and love of learning that was associated with more life satisfaction. “We suggest that deliberate interventions to increase these particular strengths may help people flourish following a major health crisis”, the researchers concluded. ___________________________________

Peterson, C., Park, N. & Seligman, M.E.P. (2006). Greater strengths of character and recovery from illness. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1, 17-26.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/aqvw4
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/9sgsm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology
option;[Edexcel]: A2 unit 5c, the psychology of health; [OCR]: A2 health psychology.

5. Dissecting good parenting

How affectionate parents are towards their children, and how they respond to their children’s distress are two distinct aspects of good parenting that each have a unique effect on a child’s development, psychologists at the University of Toronto have reported.

From studying 106 children aged between six and eight, and their parents, Maayan Davidov and Joan Grusec found that parents’ sensitivity to their children’s distress was associated with how well their children could manage being upset (with mothers, this association only held for
sons) and how much empathy their children had. In contrast, a parent’s warmth and affection were not related to these factors.

On the other hand, unlike parental sensitivity to distress, parental warmth and affection were associated with how well children could manage positive emotions and how many friends they had (again, with mothers this association only held for sons).

“…[A] differentiated approach to positive parenting can further our understanding of child development, by uncovering the different paths through which parents can promote their children’s competencies by being sensitive and caring in different ways”, the researchers concluded.

Regarding the fact that for mothers, some of the associations only applied to sons, not daughters, the researchers said: “It is thus possible that boys are more susceptible than girls to variation in maternal interventions…this possibility is also consistent with findings indicating boys’ increased vulnerability to a variety of developmental and behavioural problems".

The results were derived from a combination of measures including parental reports, teacher reports, some videoing of parents interacting with their children and also tests of the children’s empathy using dolls in mock scenarios. The cross-sectional nature of the research means the children’s behaviour could have affected their parent’s parenting style, rather than the other way around, a fact acknowledged by the researchers who called for longitudinal research to clarify the results. ___________________________________

Davidov, M. & Grusec, J.E. (2006). Untangling the links of parental responsiveness to distress and warmth to child outcomes. Child Development, 77, 44-58.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/bu4y9
Author weblink: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~grusec/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [SQA higher]: understanding the individual, domain social psychology, early socialisation, parenting.

6. Successful therapists focus on their clients' strengths

Research is increasingly showing that the success of therapy depends not on the theoretical orientation of the therapist, but on key therapeutic processes that cross theoretical boundaries. Two such processes are ‘problem activation’ – helping the client to face up to their problems, and ‘resource activation’ – reminding the client of their strengths, abilities and available support. In a new study, Daniel Gassmann and the late Klaus Grawe have shown that for therapy to be successful, simply using these mechanisms is not enough; rather, success depends on how and when the mechanisms are brought into play.

Gassman and Grawe’s research team studied videos of 120 therapy sessions conducted with 30 clients who had a range of psychological problems. The success of each therapy session had also been reported by the clients and therapists on a session-by-session basis.

From minute-by-minute analysis of the sessions, the researchers found that unsuccessful therapists tended to focus on their clients’ problems, but neglected to focus on their strengths. Moreover, when the unsuccessful therapists did focus on their clients’ strengths, they tended to do so at the end of a therapy session, too late to have a positive effect. Successful therapists, by contrast, focused on their clients’ strengths from the very start of a therapy session, before moving onto dealing with their problems. “They created an environment in which the patient felt he was perceived as a well functioning person”, the researchers said. “As soon as this was established, productive work on the patient’s problems was more likely”. Successful therapists also made sure they ended sessions by returning to their clients’ strengths.

The researchers concluded that a prerequisite for successfully dealing with a patient’s problems is to remind them of their strengths and available support. “The therapist can achieve this not only by establishing a good therapeutic bond”, they said, “but also by focussing more explicitly on the healthy parts of the patient’s personality”. ___________________________________

Gassman, D. & Grawe, K. (2006). General change mechanisms: The relation between problem activation and resource activation in successful and unsuccessful therapeutic interactions. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 13, 1-11.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/dgjsb
Author obituary: http://tinyurl.com/8tard

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [SQA higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, therapeutic approaches in specific common disorders;
[Edexcel]: A2, Unit 4a, clinical psychology, approaches and therapies.

p.pete · 03-03-2006 3:29pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 62 (3/3/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Body image - it's 'healthy' people who are deluded

We’re all going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. Depressing? Well, it’s been argued that depressed people are the sane ones because they see the world for how it really is. Now consider this – a study has found people with eating disorders have an accurate perception of how attractive their bodies look to other people. In contrast, healthy controls are the ‘deluded’ ones – they think their bodies look far more attractive to other people than they really do.

Anita Jansen and colleagues took photos of 14 women with eating-disorder symptoms and of 12 healthy controls, all wearing underwear only. A panel of 24 men and 64 women then looked at the photos and, without knowing which women had eating disorder symptoms, rated the women’s bodies for attractiveness. The photos didn’t show the women’s faces.

Although the bodies of the women with eating disorder symptoms and the healthy controls did not differ on objective measures (such as body mass index and waist to hip ratio), the panel rated the bodies of the women with eating disorder symptoms as significantly less attractive than the control women’s bodies. This would have come as no surprise to the eating disorder women – their ratings of their own appearance closely matched the ratings they received from the panel.

But even though the healthy controls’ appearance was rated higher than the eating disorder women, they would have been upset – the appearance ratings they gave themselves were much higher than the ratings given to them by the panel. “This points to the existence of a self-serving body-image bias in the normal controls”, the researchers said. “Self-serving biases or positive illusions are prototypical for healthy people, they maintain mental health and help to protect from depression”.

So, what are the implications of this research for helping women with eating disorders? Lead researcher Anita Jansen told The Digest about research into a possible cognitive intervention: “We have started a training for people who are dissatisfied with their looks, to expose them to their own bodies and to teach them to focus on the
(self-defined) beautiful parts of their bodies only and to describe them in very positive terms. Focusing at the beautiful parts instead of the ugly ones makes them happier and more satisfied with their bodies is our experience until now”. __________________________________

Jansen, A., Smeets, T., Martijn, C. & Nederkoorn, C. (2006). I see what you see: The lack of a self-serving body-image bias in eating disorders. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 45, 123-135.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/jkzv8
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/fkbtl
NICE guidelines for the treatment of eating disorders: http://www.nice.org.uk/page.aspx?o=20079

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See topics on eating disorders (e.g. the AQA spec A individual differences module critical issue; AQA spec B (A2) psychology of atypical behaviour option; and the psychology of individual differences, SQA adv higher).

2. Winning gold - comparing American and Japanese media coverage

With a final, gargantuan burst of effort, the sprinter breaks through the finishing tape to win gold. An individual triumph, achieved through a combination of physical prowess and sheer determination on the day? Or is it a shared success, the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of trials and tribulations, shaped by the sprinter’s friends, family and coaches?

An analysis of media coverage during the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City suggests the answer depends very much on where you are.

Hazel Rose Markus and her colleagues found American media coverage focused on athletes’ personal attributes and the competition they faced on the day, whereas the Japanese media also devoted attention to athletes’ life experiences, their reactions to winning or losing, and the role played by the people around them. Moreover, American coverage of athletes was overwhelmingly positive, whereas Japanese coverage paid equal attention to negative and positive aspects of the athlete and their story.

In a second study, 60 American and 60 Japanese students were asked to select 15 out of 40 possible statements that could be used by the media to describe a fictional athlete. The Americans chose statements that emphasised personal attributes and uniqueness whereas the Japanese chose statements emphasising the athlete’s coach and team, their motivation, emotion and doubt.

“Performance does not just happen for the Olympian or for the fans”, the researchers concluded. “Rather it is fashioned and ‘identified’ with the aid of a variety of implicit socioculturally grounded models…Beyond construing the ‘same’ world differently, perceivers experience and create somewhat different worlds”. __________________________________

Markus, H.Z., Uchida, Y., Omoregie, H., Townsend, S.S.M. & Kitayama, S. (2006). Going for the Gold. Models of agency in Japanese and American contexts. Psychological Science, 17, 103-112.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/locbs
Author weblinks: http://waldron.stanford.edu/faculty/markus.html;
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/shinobu.kitayama

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: All exam boards emphasise the importance of appreciating the role of cultural context. But particularly relevant is [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology, social cognition, social perception, cultural influences on the perception of the social world; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, social psychology, social cognition, cultural influences in the perception of people. See also, [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, social psychology, social psychology of sport; and [Edexcel]: A2 sports psychology; and [OCR]: A2 sports psychology.

3. Are you a grumpy maximiser or a happy satisficer?

From finding a TV channel to picking a restaurant, are you one of those people – a maximiser – who always has to perform an exhaustive check of all the available choices to make sure you pick the best? Or are you are a satisficer – someone who searches only for as long as it takes to find something adequate? If you’re a maximiser, take heed – you might end up with something better, but your pains will make you unhappy in the process. At least that’s what Barry Schwartz and colleagues found happens when it comes to job hunting.

Five hundred and forty-eight graduating students from 11 universities were categorised as maximisers or satisficers based on their answers to questions like “When I am in the car listening to the radio, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing, even if I am relatively satisfied with what I’m listening to”.

When questioned again the following summer, the maximisers had found jobs that paid 20 per cent more on average than the satisficers’ jobs, but they were less satisfied with the outcome of their job search, and were more pessimistic, stressed, tired, anxious, worried, overwhelmed and depressed.

“We suggest that maximisers may be less satisfied than satisficers and experience greater negative affect with the jobs they obtain because their pursuit of the elusive ‘best’ induces them to consider a large number of possibilities, thereby increasing their potential for regret or anticipated regret, engendering unrealistically high expectations”, the researchers said. Indeed, the researchers found that maximisers were more likely to report fantasising about jobs they hadn’t applied for and wishing they had pursued even more jobs than they did.

“Even when they get what they want, maximisers may not always want what they get”, the researchers concluded. “Individual decision-makers and policymakers are thus confronted by a dilemma: What should people do when ‘doing better’ makes them feel worse?”. _________________________________

Iyengar, S.S., Wells, R.E. & Schwartz, B. (2006). Doing better but feeling worse. Looking for the ‘best’ job undermines satisfaction. Psychological Science, 17, 143-149.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/fmzyo
Author weblink: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/
Abstract of recent study showing it's not always best to think too hard about difficult decisions: http://tinyurl.com/logw3 ; BBC coverage at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4723216.stm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, problem solving and decision making.

Related seminal paper: Simon, H.A. (1955). A behavioural model of rational choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 59, 99-118.

p.pete · 03-03-2006 3:29pm

4. Meaningful hand gestures help people remember what you said

Complement your speech with gestures if you want people to remember what you’re telling them, but make sure they’re related to what you’re saying and not just random gesticulations.

Pierre Feyereisen at the University of Louvain in Belgium showed 59 student participants a video of an actor uttering different sentences. Afterwards, he asked them to recall as many of the sentences as possible. He found they remembered more sentences that were accompanied by a meaningful gesture (e.g. “the buyer went round the property”, accompanied by the actor pointing his right index finger downwards and drawing a circle”) than sentences accompanied by a meaningless gesture (e.g. “He runs to the nearest house” accompanied by the actor holding his right hand open, palm facing upwards). A control condition with different students confirmed that without gestures, the sentences were all equally memorable.

The finding suggests it is the meaning inherent in gestures that acts as a memory aid, rather than the mere act of gesturing making some sentences more distinctive than others.

This was confirmed in a second experiment in which video editing was used to jumble up the actor’s utterances and gestures. When a meaningful gesture didn’t match the sentence it was combined with, it no longer acted as a memory aid. Again, this shows it isn’t the inherent physical complexity or appearance of meaningful gestures that underlies their mnemonic value, rather it is their representation of the sentence’s meaning that is important. ___________________________________

Feyereisen, P. (2006). Further investigation on the mnemonic effect of
gestures: Their meaning matters. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18, 185-205.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/g9x34
Lab weblink: http://www.code.ucl.ac.be/indexus.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See cognitive psychology modules on memory and especially [SQA higher]: domain cognitive psychology, memory, mnemonics.

5. How lies breed lies

Lies breed because we’re more likely to tell lies to people who have lied to us. That’s according to James Tyler and colleagues who found telling multiple lies of exaggeration (e.g. “I got a first class degree at university”) is more likely to mean you will be lied to in return, distrusted and disliked, than if you tell lies of underestimation (e.g. “Berlusconi only gifted me £150,000”).

Tyler’s team showed 64 undergrads a video of another student being interviewed. The participants were given a sheet of facts about the student (presented on university headed paper, and ostensibly gathered from the student’s admission interview to the university) so they could tell whether he was lying on not in the video. In fact the student in the video was a confederate of the researchers, and five versions of the video were made, featuring varying levels of honesty.

Afterwards each participant was secretly filmed while he/she briefly met the student who they’d just watched being interviewed. Then the participants were debriefed and asked to point out any lies they had told to the interviewee student.

Participants who’d watched a version of the video in which the interviewee had told several lies of exaggeration were more likely to report having lied to him when they subsequently met, than were participants who watched a version of the video in which the interviewee always told the truth, only told lies of underestimation, or only told one lie of exaggeration.

Unsurprisingly, participants who watched a version in which the interviewee told multiple lies of exaggeration also tended to say they liked him less and found him less trustworthy.

“When people are lied to they may consider a requisite amount of reciprocal deception as a legitimate and called for response”, the researchers concluded. They said this finding could be interpreted in support of the negative norm of reciprocity “in which people tend to ‘reciprocate in kind’ to others who mistreat them”, or it might instead reflect a form of the chameleon effect “in which people non-consciously alter their behaviours to match those of interaction partners”. ___________________________________

Tyler, J.M., Feldman, R.S. & Reichert, A. (2006). The price of deceptive
behaviour: Disliking and lying to people who lie to us. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 69-77.

Abstract weblink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.02.003
Author weblink: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~rfeldman/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: Lewis, M. & Saarni, C. (Eds.) (1993). Lying and deception in everyday life. New York: Guildford Press.

6. You won't forget this

Last year researchers reported they were able to use real-time images of a person’s brain activity to tell what version of an ambiguous shape they were looking at (see http://tinyurl.com/qgzmu). Now Leun Otten and colleagues report that they can use measures of the brain’s surface electrical activity to predict whether someone will remember a word that they’re about to look at.

Participants were repeatedly presented with a symbol and then a word. The symbol indicated whether the participant had to judge if the ensuing word was a living thing, or if they had to decide whether its first and last letters were in alphabetical order. From the brain activity that occurred after the symbol, Otten’s team found that they could tell whether participants would remember the ensuing word when it was presented to them again 45 minutes later. Specifically, more negative electroencephalographic waveforms at the front of the brain after a symbol was shown, indicated the ensuing word was more likely to be remembered later.

“These findings demonstrate that neural activity preceding a stimulus event can influence memory for the event up to at least 45 minutes later”, the researchers said. The finding adds to previous research by showing that it’s not only brain activity elicited by a to-be-remembered stimulus that is important. Preceding brain activity “that in some sense provides a ‘neural context’ for the event”, is also crucial, the researchers explained.

Lead researcher Leun Otten said: “It sounds a bit like clairvoyance in the sense that we're able to predict whether someone will remember a word before they even see it. That's really new - scientists knew that brain activity changes as you store things into memory but now we have found brain activity that tells how well your memory will work in advance”. Spooky. ___________________________________

Otten, L.J., Quayle, A.H., Akram, S., Ditewig, T.A. & Rugg, M.D. (2006). Brain activity before an event predicts later recollection. Nature Neuroscience. In Press. DOI: 10.1038/nn1663.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/fzjee
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/k8jo9

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: Memory is covered by all the exam boards in their cognitive psychology modules. Further reading: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01845-3

p.pete · 16-03-2006 4:42pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 63 (16/3/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Oops! How sarcastic emails fall flat

“Dear Boss – Really? You’d like me to attend the Hawaii meeting?! Hang on, I might have something on, let me just check my diary…” you email sarcastically – obviously you’d drop anything to be there. But then the reply comes back “Don’t worry, if you’re likely to be busy, I’ve asked Sarah instead”.

Disaster! Another message misinterpreted because of the ambiguity of email communication, stripped as it is of any extra-linguistic cues such as gestures and intonation. According to Justin Kruger and colleagues, this kind of communication breakdown is all too common because we overestimate how likely it is that recipients of our emails will appreciate our intended tone.

Indeed in several experiments, they confirmed overconfidence in intended meaning occurred more for email than for spoken communication, and that it still occurred whether or not senders and recipients knew each other well. Recipients too overestimated their ability to interpret the intended tone of emails.

One reason is that as we compose an email, we read it to ourselves silently with our intended tone, forgetting as we do that our
recipient(s) might not read it that way at all. A solution could be to read emails to yourself in a neutral tone before sending them.

Indeed, when Kruger’s team asked participants to read a sarcastic message out loud to themselves in a neutral tone before sending it, they found they were more accurate than normal at judging how unlikely recipients were to realise they were being sarcastic.

By contrast, in another study, participants sending an email of a joke were more likely to overestimate how funny recipients would think the email was, if before sending the message, they watched a video clip of the joke being performed live.

“If comprehending human communication consisted merely of translating sentences and syntax into thoughts and ideas, there would be no room for misunderstanding. But it does not, and so there is”, the researchers concluded. __________________________________

Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J. & Zhi-Wen, Ng. (2005). Egocentrism over email: Can we communicate as well as we think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 925-936.

*Free* full-text weblink: http://tinyurl.com/h3gzz
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/owhyu
Are we also uncharacteristically impatient when it comes to emails: http://tinyurl.com/odbv9

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, language and thought; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, language and thinking; [SQA adv higher]: cognitive psychology, theoretical explanations and research evidence in cognitive psychology, language and thinking.

2. Who replaced all my things?

Capgras syndrome – in which the patient believes their friends and relatives have been replaced by impersonators – was first described in 1923 by the French psychiatrist J.M.J. Capgras in a paper with J. Reboul-Lachaux.

Now Alireza Nejad and Khatereh Toofani at the Beheshti Hospital in Iran have reported an extremely rare variant of Capgras syndrome in which a 55-year-old woman with epilepsy believes her possessions have all been replaced by substitute objects that don’t belong to her. When she buys something new, she immediately feels that it has been replaced.

However, the authors reported “there was no evidence of dementia, her memory was intact, and her immediate, recent, and remote memories were okay. She was oriented to time, place and person, and had appropriate intelligence”. She also had no history of head injury or migraine, and brain scans revealed no gross abnormality.

The woman developed grandmal epilepsy when she was thirty. Then three months before her psychiatric referral, she had a seizure followed by the sensation that someone was following her. Then it was after her next seizure that she developed the delusional belief that all her things had been swapped. The authors can’t explain her delusion but believe it may be related to right-hemisphere frontal and temporal abnormalities. “No remarkable point was present in the patient’s history, and there was no psychosocial stress prior to her psychotic episode” they said. __________________________________

Nejad, A.G. & Toofani, K. A variant of Capgras syndrome with delusional conviction of inanimate doubles in a patient with grandmal epilepsy. Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 18, 52-54.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/kkgze
University weblink: http://www.mubabol.ac.ir
Wikipedia entry on Capras syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Classic paper: Capgras, J. & Reboul-Lachaux, J. (1923). Illusion des sosies dans un delire systematise chronique. Bulletin de la Societe Clinique de Medicine Mentale, 2, 6–16. In another paper, a patient thought hospital staff were hired actors in a stage production. See Silva, J.A. et al. (1990). An unusual case of Capgras syndrome: the psychiatric ward as a stage. Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottowa, 15, 44-46.

3. Chimps and toddlers lend a helping hand

It’s been argued that only humans display truly altruistic behaviour, but now, under laboratory conditions, Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology have observed altruistic behaviour by chimpanzees towards a human experimenter, suggesting we’re not so unique after all. They’ve also observed surprising degrees of altruistic helping by 18-month old children.

Three young chimpanzees were observed helping a human experimenter reach items she’d dropped or couldn’t reach. They helped without verbal prompting, training or any form of reward or punishment (see movie http://tinyurl.com/j4dhj). However, they didn’t help when the experimenter's needs were more complicated – for example they didn’t open the doors to a cabinet when she had her hands full.

In a related study, Tomasello’s group also observed chimps letting another chimp in from an adjacent room when they needed help reaching a food platform, and that given a choice, they chose the more able chimp from two potential collaborators (see movie here http://tinyurl.com/zvhbr). “The implication is that human forms of collaboration are built on a foundation of evolutionary precursors that are present in chimpanzees and a variety of other primate species”, the researchers said.

Tomasello found the altruism shown by 18-month old infants was even more extensive – they helped a researcher reach things he’d dropped but also did things like open a cabinet door so he could place books inside (see movie here http://tinyurl.com/zmr32). Again this behaviour was observed without any verbal requests for help or any reward or praise. And importantly, the infants (and chimps) rarely helped in control conditions – for example, if the researcher deliberately threw something on the floor, or clearly intended to place books on top of the cabinet rather than inside.

“Children and chimpanzees are both willing to help, but they appear to differ in their ability to interpret the other's need for help in different situations," the researchers said.

The observed altruism in chimpanzees appears to contradict an earlier study (http://tinyurl.com/o449f) that showed chimps tended not to share food with others when given the opportunity at no cost to themselves. However, Tomasello and colleagues suggest that study may not have used ideal conditions to study altruism because chimps are notoriously competitive with each other when it comes to food. _________________________________

Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311, 1301-1302. http://tinyurl.com/grygc Melis, A.P., Hare, B., Tomasello, M. (2006). Chimpanzees recruit the best collaborators, 311, 1297-1300. http://tinyurl.com/z4qqu

Author weblink: http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: comparative psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour; [SQA higher]: understanding the individual, domain: physiological psychology, "the origins of adaptive behaviours in the evolutionary development of species". And also, [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, child development, social development, moral development.

p.pete · 16-03-2006 4:42pm

4. Women need female role models

The promotion of young female MPs like 26-year-old Jo Swinson, the Lib Dems' newly-appointed Scotland spokesperson, could be just what’s needed to inspire more women into politics and other male-dominated fields. According to Penelope Lockwood at the University of Toronto, women more than men need role models who are the same gender as they are.

Lockwood asked 44 female and 38 male students to read a fictional newspaper account of an outstanding professional who had excelled in the same field that they aspired to work in. Some of the students read an account of a female professional while others read about a man.

Afterwards female students who’d read an account of a female professional rated themselves more positively than the female students who read about a man, and more positively than control students who hadn’t read any account. By contrast, male students who read about a male role model did not rate themselves any more positively than male students who read about a female role model, or than control students who hadn’t read any account.

In a second study, students were asked to name a real person who was a role-model for them in their career ambitions. Sixty-three per cent of female students chose a woman, 75.6 per cent of male students chose a man. But crucially, whereas the male students said gender was not a factor in their choice, 27 per cent of female students who named a female role-model said that they were inspired by the gender-related obstacles overcome by their choice.

“Outstanding women can function as inspirational examples of success, illustrating the kinds of achievements that are possible for women around them. They demonstrate that it is possible to overcome traditional gender barriers, indicating to other women that high levels of success are indeed attainable”, Lockwood concluded. ___________________________________

Lockwood, P. (2006). “Someone like me can be successful”: Do college students need same-gender role models? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30, 36-46.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/qsw7b
Author weblink: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~lockwood/
8th March was International Women’s Day: http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the psychology of gender. [OCR]: A2 psychology and education, individual differences in educational performance, cultural diversity and gender issues.

5. Rabbit illusion tricks the brain too

Like a kind of neural Voodoo doll, there’s a representation of our body in our brain, so that when we’re touched on, say, our left arm, the brain’s representation of our left arm is activated. So what do you think would happen in a tactile illusion when being touched on one part of the body leads to the sensation of having been touched somewhere else? Would it be the brain’s representation of the body part that was touched that was activated, or would it be the brain’s representation of where the touch was ‘felt’ to have occurred, that was activated.

That’s what Felix Blankenberg and colleagues have investigated using a brain scanner and the Rabbit illusion. In this illusion a person’s wrist is tapped several times followed by tapping of their elbow. Under optimal conditions it can lead to the sensation that the tapping continued up the arm from the wrist to the elbow, like a ‘rabbit’ hopping up the arm.

Blankenberg placed electrodes along the arms of thirteen participants and compared the brain activity that occurred: when pulses were delivered all the way up their arm; when six pulses on the wrist were followed by three at the elbow (inducing the Rabbit illusion, as confirmed by participants’ reports); and in a control condition, in which three pulses were given at the wrist, three at the elbow, followed by three at the wrist again – a pattern that does not induce the illusion.

They found the brain’s representation of the middle part of the forearm (in the primary somatosensory cortex) was activated when pulses were actually delivered there, and crucially, also when, during the illusion, sensations were felt there even though no pulses were actually delivered there. By contrast, the region was not activated during the control condition.

“The intervening hops of the rabbit that get mislocalised and filled-in for conscious phenomenology evidently also get filled in and appropriately re-localised within human primary somatosensory cortex”, the researchers concluded. ___________________________________

Blankenburg, F., Ruff, C.C., Deichmann, Rees, G. & Driver, J. (2006). The cutaneous rabbit illusion affects human primary sensory cortex somatotopically. PLoS Biology, 4, e69.

*Free* full-text weblink: http://tinyurl.com/qblgu
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/r5kfl

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the cerebral cortex; [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, the physiological approach; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the biological approach, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the brain; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological psychology; [SQA adv
higher]: biological psychology.

6. Admit it, you love work meetings really...

Employees are always in meetings these days and the popular consensus is that, at best, they’re a chore, and at worst, they’re a serious disruption to productivity. But when Steven Rogelberg and colleagues surveyed 980 employees in America and the UK, they found no association between employees’ time spent in meetings and how positive or negative they felt about their work, or how well they felt in general.

“It may be socially unacceptable to publicly claim that meetings are desirable. Instead, a social norm to complain about meetings may exist – not doing so could reflect poorly on the employee”, the researchers said.

In the first study, hundreds of employees completed an online survey that asked about the number of meetings (and time spent in meetings) they typically had in a week. In the second study, participants answered questions about meetings they’d had that same day.

Overall participants who endured more meetings were just as positive about their jobs as people who had few meetings. However, employees who reported being particularly goal driven did tend to be negatively affected by meetings. Moreover, in the first study, participants whose responsibilities didn’t require working with other people were also negatively affected by meetings. Finally, the perceived quality of meetings had an impact on employees’ attitudes in the second study but not the first, probably because they were recalling specific experiences from that same day rather than responding more generally.

“Trade literature argues that perceptions of meeting effectiveness would appear to be promoted to the extent that people come prepared to meetings, an agenda is used, meetings are punctual, purposes are clear, and there is widespread attendee participation. We recommend that organisations include such factors in good-practice guidelines for the conduct of their meetings”, the researchers said. ___________________________________

Rogelberg, S.G., Leach, D.J., Warr, P.B. & Burnfield, J.L. (2006)."Not another meeting!" Are meeting time demands related to employee well-being? Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 83-96.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ofwmb
Author weblink: http://personal.uncc.edu/sgrogelb/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [OCR]: A2 psychology and organisations.

p.pete · 30-03-2006 6:13am

BPS Research Digest Issue 64 (29/3/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Is day care harmful to small children? - The latest

Does it matter that young children are spending increasingly more time in day care, as more women than ever before are choosing to return to work soon after giving birth?

Yes, according to Jay Belsky in his round-up of the main findings from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care in America – “a unique and massive collaborative enterprise”, in which over 1200 children from 10 communities were followed from birth through to starting school.

Critics of earlier research had suggested the problem of day care was all to do with poor quality, but the new study found that even when controlling for the quality of care, the quantity of day care still mattered. Children who spent early, extensive and continuous time in the care of non-relatives were more likely to show later behavioural problems, such as aggressiveness and disobedience, as indicated by ratings from their caregivers, their mothers and eventually their teachers.

The type of care mattered too. The study found children who spent more time in a child care centre (as opposed to in another person’s home with a non-relative, or in a home with a relative other than their mother) tended to show benefits in terms of their cognitive and linguistic development, but to also show more behavioural problems, being more aggressive and disobedient.

Finally, and not surprisingly, the quality of care was also found to be relevant, in terms of how attentive and responsive carers were, and how stimulating the care environment was. Low quality care was particularly detrimental to the children of mothers who lacked sensitivity. High quality care on the other hand was associated with later superior cognitive-linguistic functioning.

Given these results, and similar findings from British studies such as the EPPE Study, Belsky concluded that policies should be introduced to discourage parents from putting their children into day care for too long, including the expansion of parental leave, and tax policies to reduce the economic factors that encourage parents to leave their children in the care of other people. “Of significance is that all of these conclusions could be justified on humanitarian grounds alone”, Belsky said. __________________________________

Belsky, J. (2006). Early child care and early child development: Major findings of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 3, 95-110.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ecucx
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/zqqp5
The NICHD study: http://secc.rti.org/
The EPPE study: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/eppe/index.htm
Link to related article in Prospect magazine: http://tinyurl.com/r425e

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: AS module 1, developmental psychology, critical issue: day care; [Edexcel]: A2 Unit 5a child psychology, deprivation and privation, day care.

2. Reasons to own a dog

No wonder they’re man’s best friend. Deborah Wells of the Canine Behaviour Centre at Queen’s University Belfast has surveyed the literature and found widespread evidence for the benefits that dogs can bring to our physical and psychological well-being.

While acknowledging the methodological weaknesses of research in the area, Wells writes that “…the domestic dog may be able to prevent us becoming ill, facilitate our recovery from ill-health and predict certain types of underlying ailment”.

For example, a study in 1995 found “Dog owners were roughly 8.6 times more likely to still be alive one year after a heart attack than those who did not own a dog”. Meanwhile a study in the Lancet reported the case of a dog who repeatedly sniffed a mole on its owner’s leg that turned out to be malignant. “Tumours typically produce odorous compounds…the dog, with its olfactory acuity, may be able to detect these compounds, even in minute quantities”, Wells said. Other work suggests dogs may be able to use facial expressions and postures to predict the imminent onset of an epileptic seizure, and use their sense of smell to detect hypoglycaemia in diabetics.

Regarding psychological health, research has shown dogs can ameliorate the effects of stressful life events such as bereavement and divorce, reduce anxiety loneliness and depression, and enhance feelings of autonomy, competence and self-esteem. “Dogs may also help promote psychological well-being indirectly through the facilitation of social interactions between people”, Wells said. For example, a study found walkers experienced significantly more chance conversations with strangers when accompanied by a dog, than when alone. Other research has documented the benefits dogs can bring to nursing homes, prisons, and to the disabled.

“The dog should not be regarded as a panacea for ill-health in humans. Nonetheless, the findings from this overview suggest that this particular companion animal can contribute to a significant degree to our well-being and quality of lives”, Wells concluded. __________________________________

Wells, D.L. (2006). Domestic dogs and human health: An overview. British Journal of Health Psychology. In Press, DOI: 10.1348/135910706X103284.

Journal weblink: http://www.bpsjournals.co.uk/bjhp
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/gwkr5
Canine Behaviour Centre newsletters: http://tinyurl.com/l67gz

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See health psychology modules (AQA spec B, Edexcel, and OCR).

3. Patients with Tourette's have more self-control, not less

People with Tourette’s syndrome can’t stop themselves from making sudden repeated movements or noises, so you might infer that they have an impairment in their mental control processes. On the contrary, according to a new study they actually have greater cognitive control than healthy people, suggesting the cause of their symptoms lies deeper, in their subcortical inhibitory mechanisms.

To test cognitive control, Sven Mueller and colleagues at the University of Nottingham asked nine young patients with Tourette’s and 19 controls to sometimes make fast eye movements towards an onscreen target, and sometimes to do the reverse – to make fast eye movements in the opposite direction to a target. A coloured border on the screen told them which rule to follow, and the rule changed every two trials. Switching between the two commands takes mental effort, especially when the natural reflex to look at a suddenly appearing target must be inhibited.

As expected, the participants were slower to respond whenever the rule changed, as they adjusted their mental ‘set’ to the new rule. However, to the researchers surprise, without sacrificing their accuracy the Tourette’s patients actually slowed down less than the healthy controls.

The researchers said the patients’ superior performance at the task “may reflect a compensatory change in which the chronic suppression of tics results in a generalised suppression of reflexive behaviour in favour of increased cognitive control”.

“It is also consistent with the suggestion that the occurrence of vocal and motor tics does not result from a failure in inhibitory control at a cognitive level, but instead reflects a deficit in subcortical control mechanisms”, they added. _________________________________

Mueller, S.C., Jackson, G.M., Dhalla, R., Datsopoulos, S. & Hollis, C.P. (2006). Enhanced cognitive control in young people with Tourette’s syndrome. Current Biology, 16, 570-573.

Abstract weblink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.01.064
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ztzy2

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: see Serrien, D.J. et al. (2005). Brain, 128, 116-125. http://tinyurl.com/j8qzd and LeVasseur, A.L. et al. (2001). Brain, 124, 2045-2058. http://tinyurl.com/kldyt.

p.pete · 30-03-2006 6:13am

4. Be creative: Don't even think about it

Not thinking about a problem for a while doesn’t just give you a fresh perspective when you come back to it. It also allows your more creative unconscious to get to work as it “…ventures out to the dark and dusty nooks and crannies of the mind”.

That’s according to Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs at the University of Amsterdam, who were keen to show that the benefits of taking a break from thinking hard about a problem are not merely passive (for example, by freeing you from an incorrect line of thought), but that unconscious thought actually offers an alternative, active mode of thinking that is more divergent and creative.

In one experiment Dijksterhuis and Meurs asked 87 students to think of as many new names for pasta as they could, giving them five examples of existing names that all began with the letter ‘i’. Those students who were engaged in a distracter task for three minutes before giving their suggestions thought of far more varied names than students who were given three minutes to concentrate on thinking of new names (they mostly thought of new names beginning with ‘i’).

In another experiment, students were asked to think of places in Holland beginning with the letter ‘A’. Those students who were distracted before being asked to give their suggestions named a wide variety of cities, towns and villages, whereas students who were given time to think of places, and students who answered immediately, tended to just name the most obvious main cities in Holland.

Finally, students were asked to name as many uses as they could for a brick. Again, students who were distracted by a different task before giving their suggestions, didn’t name more uses, but were judged by two independent raters to have proposed more creative and unusual uses than students who were given dedicated time to think, or than students who answered immediately.

“Upon being confronted with a task that requires a certain degree of creativity, it pays off to delegate the labour of thinking to the unconscious mind”, the authors concluded. ___________________________________

Dijksterhuis, A. & Meurs, T. (2006). Where creativity resides: The generative power of unconscious thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 135-146.

Abstract weblink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.04.007
Author weblink: http://dijksterhuis.socialpsychology.org/
Guy Claxton celebrates the irrational in The Psychologist: http://tinyurl.com/gthh5

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: New Scientist magazine had a special issue on creativity last October http://tinyurl.com/jemtw as did Scientific American Mind last April http://tinyurl.com/pl9bz.

5. Dreaming about the war

Don’t mention this at the World Cup, but interviews conducted in the year 2000 revealed 17.3 per cent of German people who lived through the Second World War were still experiencing war-related dreams 55 years after it ended.

Michael Schredl and Edgar Piel interviewed representative samples of thousands of people in 1956, 1970, 1981 and 2000 about the content of their dreams. Participants had to indicate whether their dreams featured any of 20 different themes, among which were included four war-related themes – air raid, war captivity, war-zone exposure, and being on the run, as well as more mundane themes such as travelling and work.

Overall, war-related dreams were far rarer in the year 2000 than in 1956, except among people aged over 60, 17.5 per cent of whom still had war-related dreams, a level comparable to the 1956 average across all age groups of 19.9 per cent. In contrast, in 2000, just 8.6 per cent of interviewees aged between 18 and 29 reported having war-related dreams.

“The present study clearly indicates that World War II had a strong and lasting effect on the people visible in their war-related dreams at night”, the researchers said. “The findings are consistent with the ‘generational hypothesis’…i.e. political events or changes have their strongest effect on persons when experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood and when experienced directly”, they said.

Schredl and Piel said their study showed how “…eliciting and analysing dreams is an informative approach to study the effects of political events on the inner lives of people”, and that it added to earlier research such as that carried out among war Veterans showing nightmare frequency was correlated with time endured in concentration camp captivity. ___________________________________

Schredl, M. & Piel, E. (2006). War-related dream themes in Germany from 1956 to 2000. Political Psychology, 27, 299-307.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ehnl9
Author weblink: http://www.dreamresearch.de/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology, biological rhythms, sleep and dreaming; [Edexcel]: AS Unit 2, the psychodynamic approach.

6. Concerns raised about the use of computer animations in court

Things seem so much more predictable once they’ve happened – a flaw in our thinking that’s been dubbed the ‘hindsight bias’. It’s a particular problem in legal cases where jurors are asked to judge the extent to which a defendant should have known what was likely to happen when they took a certain decision (for example, when they decided to overtake on a bend).

Now for the first time, Neal Roese at the University of Illinois and colleagues have investigated the impact of computer animation on the hindsight bias, a topical issue given the increased use of such animations in American and UK courtrooms.

Participants were shown real-life road traffic scenarios either via dynamic computer animations, or via old-fashioned text descriptions and diagrams. Those participants who saw a complete version that ended with a serious crash were asked to discount what they’d seen and to estimate the likelihood of a crash happening from the moment the driver made an error (e.g. at the point of overtaking). Consistent with the hindsight bias, participants who’d seen the crash happen (via animation or
diagram) estimated a crash was more likely to happen than participants who were only shown the early stages of the road scenario. Crucially, this hindsight bias was twice the size in the participants who saw the animation than in the participants who were shown diagrams.

Another finding came from participants who were shown an animation, or diagrams, up to the moment just before, but not including, the crash. Participants shown the animation up to this point (but not the participants shown diagrams) judged a crash was more likely to happen than any of the other participant groups, including those who’d seen the animation through to the end – a bias the researchers dubbed ‘the propensity effect’.

”The propensity effect is an entirely new phenomenon that stands alongside the hindsight bias, apparently born of the unique combination of motion perception plus an inference of propensity toward a salient end point (‘I just know it’s headed over there’)”, the researchers said.

They concluded with a warning about the implications for legal practice: “Our research indicates that the clarity of computer animation can obscure the underlying certainty of accident reconstruction, creating a biased feeling of knowing”. ___________________________________

Roese, N.J., Fessel, F., Summerville, A., Kruger, J. & Dilich, M.A. (2006). The propensity effect. When foresight trumps hindsight. Psychological Science, 17, 305-310. http://tinyurl.com/ga5s9

Author weblink: http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~roese/
Court animations in the news: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/3732573.stm
Forensic animation company: http://www.forensicvisuals.com/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: A2 Unit 4b, criminological psychology, jury decision making; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, contemporary topics in psychology, criminological psychology.

7. Extras

Studies that didn't make the final cut for this issue:

How children develop an understanding of the dangers of crossing roads http://tinyurl.com/hwz2f.

Treating a woman with Down's Syndrome whose fear of her feet being touched was impeding vital physiotherapy http://tinyurl.com/flvhx.

Is chronic fatigue syndrome associated with perfectionism? http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.10.023.

What is an anger attack? http://tinyurl.com/g697e.

p.pete · 13-04-2006 6:16am

BPS Research Digest Issue 65 (12/4/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Magazine reports on eating disorders are superficial and misleading

The propagation of the ‘thin ideal’ by glossy magazines is held by many to be partly responsible for the prevalence of eating disorders among women in western society. Ironically, for many people, those same magazines have become their main source of information about eating disorders. Now Rebecca Inch and Noorfarah Merali report that coverage of eating disorders by these magazines is inappropriate, with overemphasis on weight loss strategies, thinness, and a widespread failure to accurately convey the grave health consequences associated with eating disorders.

Inch and Merali analysed eating disorder coverage from 1998 to 2003 in ten magazines: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Self, Seventeen, Vogue, Young and Modern, People Weekly and Teen People.

Although research suggests that bulimia (insatiable overeating) is up to three times more common than anorexia (deliberate starvation), Inch and Merali found that 75 per cent of the 42 articles they identified were features on anorexia.

They also found 97 per cent of the articles mentioned at least one disordered eating behaviour, with many highlighting common weight loss strategies such as the consumption of non-nutritive substances, and yet scarcely more than half mentioned the fact that eating disorders are potentially fatal (in fact according to a 2002 study, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders).

Furthermore, whereas most articles mentioned the exact menu used by eating disorder suffers when they were ill, fewer than 15 per cent gave a similar description of what sufferers ate after they had recovered. Similarly, a sufferer’s weight when they were ill was mentioned more often than their healthy weight.

The researchers made a number of suggestions to improve magazine coverage of eating disorders, including a call for more pieces on bulimia, a greater emphasis on the serious health consequences of eating disorders, and on healthy eating plans. “These recommendations could be presented to the magazines industry through the dissemination of this study to magazine editors in lay language”, they said. _________________________________

Inch, R. & Merali, N. (2006). A content analysis of popular magazine articles on eating disorders. Eating Disorders, 14, 109-120.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/n6rkg
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/n7ubl
Eating Disorders Association: http://www.edauk.com/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See topics on eating disorders (e.g. the AQA spec A individual differences module critical issue; AQA spec B (A2) psychology of atypical behaviour option; and the psychology of individual differences, SQA adv higher).

2. Who will behave violently in the next two years?

Psychologists and psychiatrists often get the blame on the rare occasions that a former mental health patient goes on to commit a violent act (see note, below). They are expected to be able to predict which patients are a risk. But a new American study has found a sample of 67 psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses and social workers were unable to use archived hospital admission evaluations and clinical notes to predict which of 52 patients went on to behave violently in the next two years. The finding comes from an investigation by Michael Odeh and colleagues into the cues used by mental health professionals to predict whether a patient is likely to be violent.

The 67 clinicians were asked to use the patient reports to predict how likely it was that each patient went on to be violent in the two years following their hospital admission. Afterwards the clinicians were asked which information they had used to come to that judgment.

The thirteen most commonly used cues for predicting dangerousness were: past assaults, non-compliance with medication, history of substance abuse, presence of psychosis, violent thoughts, previous admission to a psychiatric hospital, paranoid delusions, a diagnosis of mental illness, uncooperativeness, a history of poor impulse control, prior use of a weapon, hostility, and family problems. However, these cues did not accurately predict which patients went on to behave violently in the next two years.

The research also revealed professional differences. For example, nurses and social workers cited ‘hostility’ three times as frequently as psychologists and psychiatrists. They were also twice as likely to cite delusions, medication compliance and family problems as relevant cues predicting dangerousness – perhaps, the authors suggested, because of their more direct involvement in patient care.

While noting that the clinicians in this study never actually had the opportunity to meet the patients they were assessing, the researchers concluded that “the findings in this study may be further justification for a more structured approach to help clinicians evaluate risk factors when making clinical predictions”.

An earlier study by the same researchers suggested that although individual clinicians’ predictions of violence were inaccurate, accuracy was achieved by aggregating the judgments of multiple clinicians. __________________________________

Odeh, M.S., Zeiss, R.A. & Huss, M.T. (2006). Cues they use: Clinicians’ endorsement of risk cues in predictions of dangerousness. Behavioural Sciences and The Law, 24, 147-156.

Note, 95 per cent of murders are not committed by psychiatric patients and most psychiatric patients are not dangerous. http://tinyurl.com/fwjag

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/eplvy
Author weblink: http://puffin.creighton.edu/psy/faculty.htm (M. Huss).

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: There is a body of research suggesting clinicians have difficulty predicting violence. See Litwack, T.R. (2001). Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 7, 409-443. Gardner, W. et al. (1996). Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 602-609. And Webster, C.D. et al. (2002). Criminal Justice and Behaviour, 29, 659-665.

3. Clever children's brains develop differently

An investigation into the link between intelligence and brain development, rare in its use of a longitudinal methodology and large sample size, has found superior intelligence is associated with particularly dynamic developmental changes to the cortex – rapid cortical thickening during childhood, followed by a period of marked pruning during adolescence.

“’Brainy children’ are not cleverer solely by virtue of having more or less grey matter at any one age," the researchers said. "Rather, IQ is related to the dynamic properties of cortical maturation”.

Philip Shaw and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in America divided 307 participants aged between 3 and 25 years into three groups – average, high and superior intelligence – based on their scores on age-appropriate IQ tests. Over half the sample had at least two brain scans, 30 per cent had three or more scans.

They found the frontal cortex of participants with ‘superior’ intelligence started off thinner than in ‘high’ and ‘average’ intelligence participants, but thickened rapidly until the age of 11 years, at which stage rapid thinning occurred. By contrast, the cortex of the high and average intelligence participants thickened more slowly until the age of about 7 or 8 years, followed by a period of less marked thinning than in the superior intelligence participants.

“The prolonged phase of prefrontal cortical gain in the most intelligent might afford an even more extended ‘critical’ period for the development of high-level cognitive cortical circuits”, the researchers said. _________________________________

Shaw, P., Greenstein, D., Lerch, J., Clasen, L., Lenroot, R., Gogtay, N., Evans, A., Rapoport, J. & Giedd, J. (2006). Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents. Nature, 440, 676-679.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/rxjqk
Study website: http://tinyurl.com/qbnlb

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, developmental psychology, development of measured intelligence; comparative psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, biological approach, arguments for and against the genetic basis of intelligence; [Edexcel]: A2 psychology of education; [SQA
higher]: the individual in social context: intelligence; [SQA adv
higher]: individual differences: intelligence.

p.pete · 13-04-2006 6:16am

4. Don't worry, anxiety has its benefits

A quick internet search for book titles hints at the scale of the market in helping people become less anxious: ‘Overcome anxiety’…; ’Calming your anxious mind’…; ’What to do when you worry too much’…; ’Power over panic’ and on and on they go. But hang on a minute, it’s a dangerous world out there – what if being anxious is actually a sensible approach for staying alive?

Enter William Lee at the Institute of Psychiatry and colleagues, who used data from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (http://www.nshd.mrc.ac.uk/) to find out whether anxious people have fewer fatal accidents.

Using the survey to follow the fortunes of 5,362 people born in 1946, the researchers found that those individuals who had higher anxiety – as determined by the opinion of their school teacher when they were 13 – were significantly less likely to die in accidental circumstances before they were 25 (only 0.1 per cent of them did) than were non-anxious people (0.72 per cent of them did). Similar trends were observed when anxiety was measured using the teachers’ anxiety judgments when the sample were 15-years-old, or using the sample’s own completion of a neuroticism questionnaire when they were 16. By contrast, anxiety had no association with the number of non-accidental (e.g. illness-related) deaths before 25. “Our findings show, for the first time in a representative sample of humans, a relatively strong protective effect of trait anxiety”, the researchers said.

It’s not all good news for anxious people though. After the age of 25 they started to show higher mortality rates than calmer types thanks to increased illness-related deaths.

“Our results suggest there are survival benefits of increased trait anxiety in early adult life, but these may be balanced by corresponding survival deficits in later life associated with medical problems”, the researchers said. ___________________________________

Lee, W.E., Wadsworth, M.E.J. & Hotop, M. (2006). The protective role of trait anxiety: a longitudinal cohort study. Psychological Medicine, 36, 345-351.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/q25ut
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/npvgt

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences, psychopathology, anxiety disorders; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, options, psychology of atypical behaviour, anxiety disorders.

5. Change your personality, learn a new language

The personality of people who are bilingual changes depending on which language they use, lending credence to the Czech proverb “Learn a new language and get a new soul”.

That’s according to Nairan Ramirez-Esparza and colleagues who assessed the personality of dozens of people in America and Mexico who were fluent, current users of both English and Spanish.

Participants twice completed a questionnaire gauging the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness and neuroticism – once in English and once in Spanish. Across three separate samples, the researchers observed the same pattern – when the participants completed an English version of the questionnaire, they tended to score higher on extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness, and slightly lower on neuroticism, compared with when they completed a Spanish version.

However, it’s important to note that the overall shape of participants’ personalities did not change profoundly depending on which language they used. The researchers explained: “Thus, an extravert does not suddenly become an introvert as she switches languages; instead a bilingual becomes more extraverted when she speaks English rather than Spanish but retains her rank ordering within each of the groups”.

The research with bilinguals was consistent with a study of thousands of monolingual participants who spoke only Spanish, or only English, that showed English speakers tended to score higher on extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Careful analysis confirmed none of these reported effects were due to the way the questionnaires were translated. Instead, the researchers explained the effect of using different languages on personality as a kind of ‘Cultural Frame Switching’ – “the tendency of bicultural individuals (i.e. people who have internalised two cultures, such as
bilinguals) to change their interpretations of the world… in response to cues in their environment (e.g. language, cultural icons)”. _________________________________

Ramirez-Esparza, N., Gosling, S.D., Benet-Martinez, V., Potter, J.P. & Pennebaker, J.W. (2006). Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 99-120.

Abstract weblink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2004.09.001
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/g8ekz

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [SQA adv higher]: the psychology of individual
differences, personality; [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, developmental psychology, personality development.

6. Student drinking

There’s a new approach to reducing student drinking that’s based on the finding that most students think all their mates drink loads more than they do, which encourages them to drink more themselves.

‘Social norms’ campaigns aim to reduce student drinking by spreading the word that, actually, the majority of students don’t drink that much. With the jury still out on how effective these campaigns are, Kelly Broadwater and colleagues wanted to investigate the premise behind the approach – the idea that students want to drink more when they believe their peers drink more than they do.

The researchers asked 171 first year students to report how much they drank over the last month; how much they wished they had drunk over the last month; and to estimate how much they thought their peers drank.

Consistent with the social norms approach, 91 per cent of the sample thought their peers drank more than they did. But contrary to the approach, when it came to how much the students wished they had drunk, there was no difference between the students who thought their peers drank more than them, and the students who thought their peers drank less than them.

Moreover, when they were followed up a month later, those students who said earlier that they wished they drank more, actually reported they didn’t drink any more than usual over the following month. It was only the students who said they wanted to drink less, who reported a change, saying that they had indeed drunk less than usual over the ensuing month.

The researchers said more work was needed to clarify the mechanisms behind social norms campaigns, and acknowledged the limitations of their own findings: “Although we found no evidence that our college student participants who perceived their peers were heavier drinkers than themselves desired to increase their drinking, the fact that 91 per cent of participants believed their close friends were heavier drinkers than themselves left us with limited power to detect differences”. ___________________________________

Broadwater, K., Curtin, L., Martz, D.M. & Zrull, M.C. (2006). College student drinking: Perception of the norm and behavioural intentions. Addictive Behaviours, 31, 632-640.

Abstract weblink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2005.05.041
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ot8wv
More on social norms campaigns: http://www.socialnormslink.com/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, options, contemporary issues in psychology, substance abuse; and [Edexcel]: A2, the psychology of health, factors of addiction.

7. Extras

Girls are better at recognising faces, http://tinyurl.com/gxqoq.

What kind of teenager carries a weapon? http://tinyurl.com/lwp68.

The children of fathers with stressful jobs are at increased risk of suicide. http://tinyurl.com/eqmq4.

Awake rats learn new routes by mentally replaying them in reverse, whereas sleeping rats replay new routes forwards. http://tinyurl.com/n6vwx.

p.pete · 27-04-2006 2:14pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 66 (27/4/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. How to avoid death row...

Whether jurors decide to hand down a life sentence or the death penalty depends in part on their perception of the defendant’s appearance. That’s the finding from interviews with 80 jurors during their involvement in real-life American murder cases.

Even after taking into account the nature of the murder, defendants who were perceived by jurors to be sorry and sincere were more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment than to be sentenced to death. On the other hand, defendants who appeared bored or who looked frightening were more likely to be given the death penalty. That’s despite jurors being instructed to make their decision based only on the legal facts of the case.

Appropriately, the jurors’ choice of punishment was also related to the nature of the crime. They were more likely to opt for the death penalty if the victim was made to suffer before being killed, or if they were maimed or mutilated after death. Murders that weren’t premeditated were more likely to be punished by life imprisonment.

“Finding that trial outcomes are not solely the result of legal facts and evidence brought out during the trial, but are attributable to extra-legal factors, including the defendant’s appearance, may be disturbing to many who believe in the integrity of our criminal justice system…” said Michael Antonio, author of the study. _________________________________

Antonio, M.E. (2006). Arbitrariness and the death penalty: How the defendant’s appearance during trial influences capital jurors’ punishment decision. Behavioural Sciences and the Law, 24, 215-234. http://tinyurl.com/njwzg

The Capital Jury Project: http://www.cjp.neu.edu/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: A2 Unit 4b, criminological psychology, jury decision making; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, contemporary topics in psychology, criminological psychology.

2. ...And how fingerprint experts are susceptible to bias

Itiel Dror and colleagues at Southampton University recruited five fingerprint experts with 85 years of experience between them, and asked them to analyse a pair of fingerprints that, unbeknown to them, they had previously declared as matching in a real-life criminal case five years earlier.

Crucially, the researchers misled the experts, telling them that the pair of prints – including one from the scene of the crime, and one from a suspect – were the same pair that had led to the wrongful arrest of an innocent Muslim as the Madrid bomber. In this context, and even though they were allowed to use their usual lab facilities, only one of the experts now declared the two prints as a match. Three said the prints didn’t match, and one said a definite decision couldn’t be made.

“This study shows that fingerprint identification decisions of experts are vulnerable to irrelevant and misleading contextual influences”, the researchers said. “Further research should use different and more subtle manipulations to examine in greater depth when such factors affect performance and render the experts vulnerable to misjudgements”. _________________________________

Dror, I.E., Charlton, D. & Peron, A.E. (2006). Contextual information renders experts vulnerable to making erroneous identifications. Forensic Science International, 156, 74-78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2005.10.017

BBC coverage of Mayfield print: http://tinyurl.com/zmzxo
BBC coverage of the McKie fingerprint row in Scotland: http://tinyurl.com/s6wd3 Lead researcher Itiel Dror on Newsnight: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~id/bbc.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: AS module 2 cognitive psychology, cognition and law.

3. Why eye movement therapy works

It involves recalling your horrific experience and then following your therapist’s moving finger with your eyes, which may sound a bit wacky, but as a treatment for post-traumatic stress, eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) is endorsed by National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines. However, the treatment continues to attract controversy, not least because it’s unclear how it works. But now Christopher Lee and colleagues report that EMDR’s critical ingredient is that it allows traumatised people to relive their trauma ‘at a distance’, as a detached observer.

Lee’s team followed 44 traumatised patients – some were car crash survivors, others had been sexually assaulted – through their first session of EMDR. Those patients whose statements during therapy suggested they were recalling their trauma at a distance (e.g. “The faces seem all blurred”; “It doesn’t seem so real”) showed the most improvement in their symptoms a week later. By contrast, there was no association between the number of statements made by patients that related to reliving the trauma first hand (e.g. “I am in the ambulance”; “I see her crawling away from me”) and their improvement a week later.

The researchers said this undermines the notion that EMDR works like traditional exposure therapy, in which patients are encouraged to relive their trauma first hand. “A distancing process…was associated with more improvement than when participants relived the trauma experiences” they said.

Although critics of EMDR have doubted the importance of the eye movement aspect of the therapy, Lee’s team concluded “The distancing may be partly facilitated by the distraction of the eye movement task…[or] facilitated by the therapist encouraging a dual focus of attention, that is, simultaneously being aware of the trauma material and of being in the therapist’s office”. __________________________________

Lee, C.W., Taylor, G. & Drummond, P.D. (2006). The active ingredient in
EMDR: Is it traditional exposure or dual focus of attention? Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 13, 97-107. http://tinyurl.com/lap46

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/pzk5u
From The Psychologist magazine: For EMDR: http://tinyurl.com/kwjha; against EMDR: http://tinyurl.com/rrnrq

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[SQA higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, therapeutic approaches in specific common disorders;
[Edexcel]: A2, Unit 4a, clinical psychology, approaches and therapies.

p.pete · 27-04-2006 2:14pm

4. Stop looking at my feet!

There’s something about feet that allows us to detect the movement of other people or animals even in the most difficult viewing conditions.

That’s the implication of a study by Nikolaus Troje and Cord Westhoff, who were investigating the remarkable human sensitivity to biological movement. Previous research has shown that in the pitch dark, all it takes for us to be able to recognise the shape of a walking human, is for someone to wear a spot of light on each of the main joints of their body.

However, if the image is turned upside down, we’re useless at recognising human movement in this way, leading researchers to suggest it’s the signature configuration of the joints (disrupted when inverted) that allows us to recognise biological motion.

However, Troje and Westhoff’s experiments suggest this can’t be the sole explanation. They presented participants with a display that looked like either a person, cat or pigeon, walking in the dark, with a light on each of their main joints (see http://tinyurl.com/hxwf2), but they distorted the positioning of the lights, thus removing the configural information previously thought to be so vital. Crucially, they found that even with the configural information removed, the participants were still better at recognising which direction the person/animal was walking in when they viewed the image the right way up, compared with upside down. That is, inverting the images must have disrupted some other source of information the participants were using besides the spatial arrangement of the joints.

So they tried inverting some parts of the image but not others, and found the secret lay in the feet. Only inverting the feet disrupted performance, while contrarily, even with the positioning of the lights distorted, and with the rest of the body upside down, so long as the joints of the feet were shown moving the right way up, the participants were able to tell which direction the person or animal was walking in.

The researchers said the movement of feet may serve as a kind of ‘life detector’, providing “…a reliable cue for the presence and the location of an animal in the visual environment”. They added: “The observation that it is relatively easy to get close to wild animals in a car, a canoe, or similar vehicle might be due to the absence of the typical movement of feet”. _________________________________

Troje, N.F. & Westhoff, C. (2006). The inversion effect in biological motion perception: Evidence for a ‘life detector’? Current Biology, 16, 821-824. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.03.022

Lab weblink: http://www.biomotionlab.ca

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, attention and pattern recognition, pattern recognition; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, attention and perception; [SQA adv higher]: domain cognitive psychology, perception.

5. Goth subculture linked with history of suicide and self harm

A Scottish study that collected information from 1,258 teenagers when they were aged 11, 13, 15 and 19 has found particularly high rates of attempted suicide and self harm (cutting, scratching, or scoring) among those who said they identified with the Goth subculture.

Of the 15 teenagers who described themselves as heavily into Goth culture at age 19, 53 per cent said they’d self harmed at some stage in their lives, and 47 per cent said they had tried to kill themselves. By contrast, of the 1165 teenagers who said they didn’t identify at all with the Goth culture, only 6 per cent reported they had previously self harmed, and just 5 per cent reported ever having tried to kill themselves.

Other factors associated with self harm and suicide were being female, having divorced or separated parents, smoking and drug taking, and prior depression. But even controlling for these factors, identification with the Goth subculture remained the strongest predictor of self harm and suicide.

Among the other 14 common youth subcultures that the teenagers were asked about, several others, including Punk and Mosher, were also associated with an unusually high prevalence of self harm and suicide, although to a lesser extent than Goth.

Whether the Goth culture plays a causal role in people’s self harm and/or suicide, or if instead people who self harm are drawn to the Goth culture remains unclear. Of the 25 participants who said they had at some point in their lifetime identified with Goth culture, five had harmed themselves before identifying with Goth, two afterwards and four at about the same time.

Robert Young, lead researcher on the study, said: “Since our study found that more reported self harm before, rather than after, becoming a Goth, this suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the Goth subculture. Rather than posing a risk, it's also possible that by belonging to this subculture young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers.” ___________________________________

Young, R., Sweeting, H. & West, P. (2006). Prevalence of deliberate self harm and attempted suicide within contemporary Goth youth subculture: longitudinal cohort study. BMJ, Online First. DOI:10.1136/bmj.38790.495544.7C. http://tinyurl.com/gaz8u

Research Unit weblink: http://www.msoc-mrc.gla.ac.uk/
Rapid responses to the BMJ article: http://tinyurl.com/kbmdg How the media report on Goth culture: http://tinyurl.com/hska7

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences and perspectives, psychopathology, depression; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4 options, psychology of atypical behaviour, mood disorders; [SQA higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, therapeutic approaches in specific common disorders.

6. Localising 'Oops!' in the brain

Researchers have identified the part of the brain that is activated when we make a costly mistake, and they think the same region may be implicated in conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) that are associated with disproportionate anxiety in everyday life.

Stephan Taylor and colleagues at the University of Michigan scanned the brains of 12 healthy participants while they performed a task that required them to press a particular button as fast as possible when they saw certain letters embedded among a string of distracters (e.g. the letter ‘S’” embedded like this ‘HHHSHHH’). Participants started out ten dollars in credit, and if they didn’t react fast enough, or they pressed the wrong button in response, they either missed out on a cash reward or incurred a cash penalty.

The researchers found that a part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a region of the frontal lobe associated with emotions, was activated far more when participants incurred a cash penalty, than when they just missed a reward.

“In general, the response to a mistake that cost them money was greater than the response to other mistakes, and the involvement of the rACC suggests the importance of emotions in decision and performance-monitoring processes” said lead researcher Stephan Taylor.

An earlier study with OCD sufferers found mistakes triggered activity in this brain region even when no penalty was incurred. “It appears to us so far that OCD patients may have a hyperactive response to making errors, with increased worry and concern about having done something wrong” Taylor said. His team now hope to test OCD sufferers on this task, and to study the impact of cognitive behavioural therapy on their response to errors. _________________________________

Taylor, S.F., Martis, B., Fitzgerald, K.D., Welsh, R.C., Abelson, J.L., Liberzon, I., Himle, J.A. & Gehring, W.J. (2006). Medial frontal cortex activity and loss-related responses to errors. The Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4063-4070. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/15/4063

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/holg4

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences, psychopathology, anxiety disorders, OCD; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, options, psychology of atypical behaviour, anxiety disorders, OCD.

p.pete · 11-05-2006 12:38pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 67 (11/5/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Recognising the sacrifice of organ donation

Eight thousand people in the UK are waiting for donated organs to become available; over 90,000 are waiting in the USA. This chronic shortage will continue while pro-donation activists continue to oversimplify the issue by focusing on the idea of organ donation as a ‘gift of life’. So argue Magi Sque and colleagues, who believe greater recognition should be given to the sacrifice made by the relatives of deceased donors, from whom consent is often needed before a donation can proceed.

Sque and her collaborators analysed data collected in the UK and the USA from interviews with the relatives of deceased donors, and from letters written by donors’ families to donor recipients and to the National Donor Family Council.

While it was clear that relatives were motivated by the idea of their loss leading to the chance of life for others, it was also apparent that many struggled to “relinquish guardianship” of their loved one’s body, and to accept the idea of them being operated on. Many found it difficult to overcome the feeling that their deceased relative had already suffered enough.

A particular source of pain and distress came from the situation of ‘neurological death’, in which loved ones’ bodies appeared to still be alive because of a ventilator, even though they had been certified as neurologically dead. “She looked so beautiful, she wasn’t marked in anyway, can’t cut these eyes out you know, that’s how I sort of visualised it then”, one father said.

The researchers concluded: “Although the gift of life discourse may remain useful for heightening public awareness about the benefits of donation, this is not an adequate framework for understanding what is important for the family at the bedside faced with a donation decision…Such decisions are more closely related to sacrifice”. _________________________________

Sque, M., Payne, S. & Clark, J.M. (2006). Gift of life or sacrifice?: key discourses for understanding of organ donors’ decision-making by families. Mortality, 11, 117-132. http://tinyurl.com/h2995

-Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/hkh2z
-UK Transplant, where you can add your name to the organ donor register: http://www.uktransplant.org.uk

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: A2 Unit 5 part a, applications of psychology, health psychology; [OCR]: A2, psychology and health.

2. Why you should add a bit of Grrr to your negotiations...

Past research has shown it’s disadvantageous to feel down or angry when you’re negotiating, but now Marwan Sinaceur and Larissa Tiedens argue that pretending you’re angry can be beneficial, especially when dealing with someone who has few options, because it gives the impression you are “dominant, strong and tough”.

First they asked 157 students to imagine they were a salesman for a technology company, and to read a fictional account of a negation between themselves and a buyer. Afterwards, the students who read a version in which the buyer got angry agreed to more concessions than the students who read a version in which he stayed calm, but only if they were told beforehand that their business was struggling at the moment.

In a second experiment, 142 students role-played in pairs, with half of them acting as an employer and half as a job candidate. The students playing the role of ‘employer’ were given negotiation advice beforehand. Compared with the ‘employers’ advised to hide their emotions, the ‘employers’ who were told it was good to look angry (plus tips on feigning anger by frowning or banging the table) managed to negotiate better terms on salary, holiday, work location and equipment, but only if they were negotiating with a ‘candidate’ who thought there were no other jobs available.

“Whereas feeling angry has been shown to lead to bad negotiation outcomes, we showed that expressing anger can lead to good negotiation outcomes”, the researchers concluded. However, they advised that the strategy be treated with caution in light of earlier work showing that expressing an emotion can cause you to feel that emotion, and because you could put people off negotiating with you in the future. “As such, the expression of anger may be a strategy best suited for relatively short single-shot negotiations”, they said. __________________________________

Sinaceur, M. & Tiedens, L.Z. (2006). Get mad and get more than even: When and why anger expression is effective in negotiations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 314-322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.05.002

-Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/hxf37

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[OCR]: A2, psychology and organisations; [SQA
higher]: the individual in the social context.

3. …And how testosterone fuels entrepreneurship

I'm not sure what this says about the female finalists of The Apprentice
(http://tinyurl.com/nsbee) but a new study argues that, among men at least, entrepreneurs have more testosterone than usual.

Using saliva swabs, Roderick White and colleagues found 31 male business students who’d previously invested and managed their own ventures had significantly higher testosterone levels than 79 of their male class mates who’d never led their own business venture.

“A specific heritable characteristic of each individual, their testosterone level, explains something about the likelihood of that individual being significantly involved in creating a new venture”, the researchers said. “Entrepreneurs may not be born; but what one is born with affects the likelihood of that person engaging in entrepreneurial activities”.

The researchers said that, if replicated, the finding could raise ethical dilemmas. “Should venture capitalists be allowed to test the testosterone levels of would-be-entrepreneurs requesting new venture funding?”, they asked. __________________________________

White, R.E., Thornhill, S. & Hampson, E. (2006). Entrepreneurs and evolutionary biology: The relationship between testosterone and new venture creation. Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 100, 21-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.11.001

-Author weblink: http://www.ivey.uwo.ca/faculty/Rod_White.html
-Testosterone boxer shorts: http://tinyurl.com/f9zkc

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[OCR]: A2, psychology and organisations; [SQA adv higher]: biological psychology; [AQA spec A]: AS module 2 physiological psychology; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the biological approach; [Edexcel]: AS the physiological approach; [OCR]: AS physiological psychology.

4. Face-recognition problems more common than previously thought

Problems recognising faces, brought on by brain injury, could be more prevalent than previously thought. That’s according to Tim Valentine and colleagues who argue there’s been an over-reliance on ‘pure’ cases, and that “it is easy to dismiss a problem with face recognition as uninteresting if it is ‘just’ part of a generalised memory impairment, or ‘secondary’ to poor attention and concentration”.

Valentine’s team recruited 91 patients who had suffered brain injury either through an accident, a stroke or illness, and asked them to complete a raft of face recognition tests and general mental performance tests.

They found 50 per cent of the patients thought they would have trouble recognising people they had met only a few times, and 77 per cent scored significantly worse than the healthy population average when this ability was tested. This was done by presenting them with a large number of unfamiliar faces from which they had to distinguish those that had been shown to them once already from those that were entirely new.

On an easier version of the test that involved fewer faces, or more chances to view some faces, 20 per cent of the patients performed particularly poorly. Those patients who had difficulty learning to recognise new faces also often had general visual processing deficits, and general problems with recognition memory.

The researchers also noted how much variation there was in the sensitivity of the different face-recognition tests they used. “The likelihood of detecting a face recognition impairment in someone with brain injury therefore clearly depends on the particular test which is used” they said, before suggesting possible interventions for affected patients such as “verbally encoding particular facial features” and “using caricatures to accentuate structural properties of to-be-learned faces”. _________________________________

Valentine, T., Powell, J., Davidoff, J., Letson, S. & Greenwood, R. (2006). Prevalence and correlates of face recognition impairments after acquired brain injury. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 16, 272-297. http://tinyurl.com/g4kgz

-Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/fny2y

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[Edexcel]: AS unit 1, the cognitive approach, methods, brain-damaged patients.

p.pete · 11-05-2006 12:39pm

5. Reasons to do your maths homework

People who are good with numbers make better decision-makers. That’s according to Ellen Peters and colleagues at Decision Research who found the less numerate among 100 students were more likely to be influenced by so-called ‘framing effects’.

For example, less numerate students tended to rate a student’s exam performance as better on a 7-point scale if they were told she had answered 74 per cent of items correctly in her exam, than if they were told she had answered 26 per cent incorrectly. By contrast, more numerate students were less affected by the way such information was presented. (Numeracy was tested with 11 maths questions on probability).

In another experiment, students were given the chance to win cash if they picked a red bean from a jar. Less numerate students were more likely than numerate students (33 per cent vs. 5 per cent, respectively) to choose to take their chances with a jar that had 9 red beans out of 100, than with a jar that had 1 red bean among 10, probably because they were swayed by the sight of more red beans in the first case, even though the odds were poorer.

The differences in performance between the more and less numerate students couldn’t be explained by differences in their general intelligence, which was also measured.

“We believe that low-numeracy decision makers are left with information that is less complete and less understood, lacking the complexity and richness available to the more numerate”, the researchers concluded. ___________________________________

Peters, E., Vastfjall, D., Slovic, P., Mertz, C.K., Mazzocco, K. & Dickert, S. (2006). Numeracy and decision making. Psychological Science, 407-413. http://tinyurl.com/kdybt

-Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/k5ol4
-Decision Research: http://www.decisionresearch.org/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, problem solving and decision making.

6. Could prayers be harmful?

An American study has suggested prayer could sometimes do more harm than good.

Herbert Benson and colleagues followed the fortunes of nearly 2000 heart surgery patients between 1998 and 2000, some of whom they arranged to be prayed for by three Christian groups.

Among those patients who didn’t know whether or not they were being prayed for, 52 per cent of those prayed for suffered medical complications after their surgery, compared with 51 per cent of the patients who weren’t prayed for. Some of the patients were told they were definitely being prayed for by the Christian groups – they fared worse than the others, with 59 per cent experiencing post-operative complications. There was no difference between the groups on measures of survival.

“Our findings are not consistent with prior studies showing that intercessory prayer had a beneficial effect on outcomes in cardiac patients”, the researchers said.

However, like other studies in this area, the current project was fraught with methodological limitations. For example, the researchers could not rule out that any of the patients may have prayed for themselves or have been prayed for by their families. Moreover, the Christian groups were only sent the first name and last initial of the to-be-prayed-for patients, and were not allowed any communication with patients or their families, nor were they given any feedback on their condition. They were also given the specific wording to pray with, rather than being allowed to choose their own prayers.

“Private or family prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, and the results of this study do not challenge this belief”, the researchers concluded. ___________________________________

Benson, H., Dusek, J.A., Sherwood, J.B., Lam, P., Bethea, C.F., Carpenter, W., Levitsky, S., Hill, P.C., Clem Jr, D.W., Jain, M.K., Drumel, D., Kopecky, S.L., Mueller, P.S, Marek, D., Rollins, S. & Hibberd, P.L. (2006). Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicentre randomised trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. American Heart Journal, 151, 934-942. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ahj.2005.05.028

-The Mind/Body Medical Institute: http://www.mbmi.org/home/

-Related, earlier Digest item: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2005/07/does-prayer-work.html
-Related Cochrane review: http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab000368.html
-Commentary on studies of prayer by social psychologist David G Myers: http://www.stnews.org/Commentary-2776.htm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: A2 Unit 5 part a, applications of psychology, health psychology; [OCR]: A2, psychology and health;[AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, options, contemporary issues in psychology, parapsychology.

7. Did you see what just happened?

Say someone’s mugged outside the office window – you know what happens next, everyone starts talking about it. The problem for police investigators is that the witnesses start contaminating each other’s memories. But do you think a witness’s memory would be most prone to distortion following a big group chat about the event, or following a one-on-one conversation?

Andrea Dalton and Meredyth Daneman have found our memories are most susceptible to misinformation following a one-on-one conversation, and whereas previous research has focused on peripheral information that’s not that relevant, Dalton and Daneman have shown how easily people’s memories can be distorted for information central to what just happened.

In their study, 89 students watched a five-minute clip from the film Inner Space. They then discussed the clip, either alone with one other student who was an accomplice of the researchers, or in a four to six-person group that included the accomplice. In both cases the accomplice said some true things about the clip but also mentioned some deliberately inaccurate things – these were either central to what happened (e.g. that the main character had avoided colliding with a car, when in fact he had hit it), or were peripheral (e.g. he got the name of the shopping mall that was featured wrong).

Afterwards the participants read 16 statements about the clip, including some of the false statements made by the researchers’ accomplice. Crucially, participants who’d discussed the clip one-on-one with the accomplice said his false statements were true 68 per cent of time whereas participants who’d had a group discussion accepted his statements 49 per cent of the time.

This sometimes included the misremembering of central events – participants accepted false statements about central events made by the accomplice 35 per cent of time (versus 82 per cent for peripheral events, and 10 per cent for false statements about central events not mentioned by the accomplice).

“A thorough investigation of the extent to which eyewitnesses’ memories can be altered may contribute to greater acknowledgements within the justice system that absolute reliance on even the most convincing of testimonials may be dangerous”, the researchers said. _________________________________

Dalton, A.L. & Daneman, M. (2006). Social suggestibility to central and peripheral misinformation. Memory, 14, 486-501. http://tinyurl.com/gomft

-Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/h9x6a

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: For problems with eye-witness testimony, see [AQA spec B]: AS module 2 cognitive psychology, cognition and law; [AQA spec A]: AS module 1, cognitive psychology, critical issue; and the topic is also covered by [OCR] AS, core studies.

8. Extras

The 'implicit association test', used to measure people's inherent biases, might not be as pure a measure as some would suggest. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.04.006 And see this on Mind Hacks: http://tinyurl.com/qmzk4

Can false memories recover spontaneously? http://tinyurl.com/m4yhe

Black defendants judged by participants to be more stereotypically black in appearance were more likely to have been sentenced to death following their conviction for murdering a white victim. The same trend was not found among black defendants convicted of murdering a black victim. http://tinyurl.com/le896

p.pete · 30-05-2006 12:38pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 68 (30/5/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. The neurobiological effect of psychotherapy

There is now widespread evidence that successful psychological therapies induce changes to brain function, often in a way comparable to drug treatments. That’s according to a new review by Veena Kumari at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Take the example of depression: a recent brain imaging study found recovery was associated with decreased metabolism in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, both in patients who had improved after taking Seroxat, and in patients who had undergone successful cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Successful CBT was also associated with brain changes not seen with Seroxat, including increased activity in the cingulate, frontal and hippocampus regions, probably reflecting a cortical ‘top down’ mechanism of action.

Or consider the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder: another brain imaging study found recovery was associated with similar changes in the right caudate metabolic rate, following either behavioural therapy or Prozac.

Elsewhere, more research is needed. CBT is often beneficial to schizophrenia patients who don’t respond to antipsychotic medication but no research has yet been published on the neural correlates of this benefit.

“The reviewed studies clearly demonstrate that psychological interventions, such as CBT, are able to modify activity in dysfunctional neural circuitries linked to the development of various psychopathological conditions” Kumari concluded.

In fact, she added that psychotherapy may provide a clearer insight into the brain changes associated with recovery from mental illness because “it has minimal side-effects (if any) and [unlike drugs] lacks direct pharmaceutical actions to obscure brain changes directly related to behavioural change…”. _________________________________

Kumari, V. (2006). Do psychotherapies produce neurobiological effects? Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 18, 61-70. http://tinyurl.com/olzvs

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/qwszz

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, biological approach to therapy; [AQA spec B]: AS, module 1, the biological approach to psychology; [AQA spec A]: AS module 2, individual differences, biological and psychological models of abnormality; A2 module 5, biological and psychological explanations of chosen disorder; [SQA adv
higher]: biological perspective.

2. Educational TV must overcome young children's video deficit

Designers of educational television for young children face a major stumbling block - two-year-old children tend to ignore information presented to them on a TV screen.

For example, in an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds told face-to-face where a toy was going to be hidden went and found it in the first place they looked 77 per cent of the time, whereas those told by the same researcher via a video-recording found the toy in the first place they looked just 27 per cent of the time.

Troseth’s team think this ‘video deficit’ is caused by the fact young children quickly learn to distinguish between video and reality, predisposing them to ignore information presented by someone on TV.

One way to overcome this could be to encourage children to see the person on TV as socially relevant. To test this, some two-year-olds interacted with a researcher over a live video-link for five minutes, playing games, chatting and singing songs. Later on, when the researcher appeared on a pre-recorded video telling the same children where she had hidden a toy, they went and found it in the first place they looked 69 per cent of the time. In contrast, a control group of children who hadn't interacted with the researcher over the live video-link earlier on, found the toy just 35 per cent of the time.

“Learning that a person on video was a social partner who could share relevant information eliminated the typical deficiency in two-year-olds’ acquisition and use of information from video”, the researchers said.

The finding has implications for the design of educational TV. “If social cues suggest that people on television are serving as conversational partners, children will be more likely to pay attention and learn” the researchers concluded, pointing to the example of Blues Clues as a programme that is “on the right track”. __________________________________

Troseth, G.L., Saylor, M.M. & Archer, A.H. (2006). Young children’s use of video as a source of socially relevant information. Child Development, 77, 786-799. http://tinyurl.com/p2vbl

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/rjxeu
Blues Clues: http://nickjr.co.uk/shows/blues/index.aspx

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: Unit 4 (A2), the psychology of education; [OCR]: A2, psychology and education.

3. Caring for learning-disabled clients with challenging behaviour

Care staff working with learning-disabled clients who also exhibit challenging behaviours – for example, throwing objects, screaming and hoarding things – could be particularly prone to making the ‘fundamental attribution error’, that is believing the client is behaving that way deliberately because of who they are, rather than because of their circumstances. That’s according to a study by Luise Weigel and colleagues at the University of East Anglia.

Fifteen care staff were asked to recall two recent negative events, one involving a client of theirs who had intellectual disabilities and displayed challenging behaviours, and another involving a client who had intellectual disabilities but who did not exhibit challenging behaviour.

Unlike their view of negative events involving the learning-disabled client who didn't have behavioural problems, the staff tended to describe the negative events involving the client with challenging behaviour as being more within that client’s control, and they believed such events had less to do with environmental circumstances and more to do with the client. Moreover, when asked to comment for five minutes on the two clients, the staff were more critical, hostile and overly emotionally involved when talking about the client with challenging behaviour.

To help care staff working with people with intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviour, Dr. Peter Langdon, a co-researcher on the study, told The Digest that he and a colleague were attempting to adapt a family intervention programme used with families who have a relative with psychosis (previously developed by Elizabeth Kuipers and colleagues). The new intervention for care staff would involve “psycho-education, and a cognitive component” he said. _________________________________

Weigel, L., Langdon, P.E., Collins, S. & O’Brien, Y. (2006). Challenging behaviour and learning disabilities: The relationship between expressed emotion and staff attributions. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 45, 205-216. http://tinyurl.com/msuaw

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/lbcag

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: For Fundamental Attribution Error, see Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relation. New York: Wiley. http://tinyurl.com/nugp8

Psychologists call overly critical feelings and over emotional involvement 'high expressed emotion', see: Barrowclough, C. & Hooley, J.M. (2003). Attributions and expressed emotion: A review. Clinical Psychology Review, 23, 849-880. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0272-7358(03)00075-8

p.pete · 30-05-2006 12:39pm

4. The misrepresentation of coma in films

The unrealistic portrayal of coma in films could be misleading the general public at a time when society is struggling with the ethical issues raised by high-profile cases like that of Terri Schiavo. She died last year after her feeding tube was removed, following 15 years living in a persistent vegetative state.

Eelco Wijkicks and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine analysed the portrayal of coma in thirty popular films, including Kill Bill and Regarding Henry (see http://tinyurl.com/fo2m7). In all the films bar one, coma patients were seen to remain well-groomed with a normal, muscular tanned appearance. In 18 of the films, the coma patient awoke, usually in a sudden fashion and without any noticeable cognitive deficits.

The authors said that not showing the muscle atrophy, bed sores, incontinence and feeding tubes associated with coma “may be a conscious decision to maximise entertainment but is a disservice to the viewer”.

"To imply full physical and cognitive recovery after prolonged coma is gratuitous", they added.

Indeed, a survey of 72 lay viewers who were shown 22 scenes taken from the analysed films revealed more than a third would use the fictional scenes to inform decisions that could potentially face them in real life.

“We are concerned that the comatose states depicted in these movies often can be misinterpreted as realistic representations” the authors concluded. However, they pointed to one film ‘Dream Life of Angels’ “…that was truly able to convey the complexities of care surrounding a loved one in a coma”. _________________________________

Wijdicks, E.F.M. & Wijdicks, C.A. (2006). The portrayal of coma in contemporary motion pictures. Neurology, 66, 1300-1303. http://tinyurl.com/ljoca

Author weblink: http://www.mayoclinic.org/neurology-rst/11571926.html

Data on the 30 analysed films: http://tinyurl.com/fo2m7

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: Hollywood coverage of mental disorders, from The Psychologist magazine http://tinyurl.com/n9l7a (free access); And see Baxendale, S. (2004). Memories aren't made of this: Amnesia at the movies. BMJ, 329, 1480-1483. http://tinyurl.com/qu3xb (free access).

5. Three-person groups best for problem-solving

Individuals may outperform groups when it comes to brainstorming for ideas (see Digest issue 60), but for logic-based problem solving, it seems three-person groups work best.

That’s according to Patrick Laughlin and colleagues who tested 760 students on a series of letters-to-numbers problems. Such problems involve the numbers 1 to 10 being allocated to the letters A to J, and the task is to find out which letters refer to which numbers in as few trials as possible. On each trial, equations (e.g. A + B = ?) are put to the researchers who will provide the answer in letter form, and the students can then make a guess for what that letter stands for, with the researchers saying whether the guess is true or false.

For each of 40 letter-to-number problems, the performance of students working alone was compared with the performance of a two-, three-, four- and five-person group working on the same problem.

The two-person groups didn’t tend to perform any better than the best of two students who were working alone on the same problem. However, the three, four and five-person groups consistently outperformed the best of three, four or five individuals working alone on the same task. The groups solved the problem more quickly and used more sophisticated equations.

However, the four- and five-person groups were no better than the three-person groups, suggesting a team of three is the optimum group size for logic-based problem solving.

“If groups of three perform as well as groups of larger size, it is obviously a more efficient use of human and logistic resources to use three-person groups”, the researchers concluded. “Further research should be conducted to determine whether three persons are necessary and sufficient for groups to perform better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on other problem solving tasks”. ___________________________________

Laughlin, P.R., Hatch, E.C., Silver, J.S. & Boh, L. (2006). Groups perform better than the best individuals on letters-to-numbers problems: Effects of group size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 644-651. http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/psp904644.pdf

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/kqpwv

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [OCR]: A2, psychology and organisations, group behaviour and organisations.

6. Brain dread

It makes time slow down when you want it to go fast, and it keeps turning your mind back to the very thing you want to forget – dread is a most unpleasant emotion. Now Gregory Berns and colleagues at Emory University School of Medicine think they’ve found where dread is represented in the brain.

Berns’ team scanned the brains of 32 participants while applying electric shocks to their feet. Dread was induced in the participants by giving them information before each shock that told them how powerful it would be and how long until it would be applied (e.g. “60 per cent strength in 27 seconds”).

Compared with the 23 participants classified as mild dreaders, the researchers found the nine participants classified as extreme dreaders exhibited more activity in their caudal anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain’s pain ‘matrix’ that is known to be involved in paying attention to the location of pain. However, levels of activity in the amygdala, a region associated with fear and anxiety, did not differ between the two groups.

“Taken together, the anatomical locations of dread responses suggest that the subjective experience of dread that ultimately drives an individual’s behaviour comes from the attention devoted to the expected physical response and not simply a fear or anxiety response”, the researchers wrote. In other words, dread can probably be reduced by distracting yourself from what it is you're dreading.

The participants were classified as mild or extreme dreaders based on their pattern of behaviour in a different part of the experiment in which they had to choose between more pain sooner versus less pain later (i.e. after a longer period of dread). The extreme dreaders sometimes chose more pain sooner, and they also reported finding the longer waits more unpleasant than trials in which the electric shock came sooner.

“The neurobiological mechanisms governing dreading behaviour may hold clues for both better pain management and improvements in public health”, the researchers concluded. ___________________________________

Berns, G.S., Chappelow, J., Cekic, M., Zink, C.F., Pagnoni, G. & Martin-Skurski, M.E. (2006). Neurobiological substrates of dread. Science, 312, 754-758. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5774/754

Author weblink: http://www.ccnl.emory.edu/greg/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the cerebral cortex; [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, the physiological approach; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the biological approach, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the brain; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological psychology; [SQA adv
higher]: biological psychology.

7. Extras

Does the detrimental effect of early deprivation on children's cognition last into adolescence? http://tinyurl.com/qn9ok

Improving the labelling of medicines to reduce patient confusion. http://tinyurl.com/qshp6

The psychological and health effects of disasters on firefighters. http://tinyurl.com/mjolg

Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex encode the value of offered and chosen goods. http://tinyurl.com/ljbjw

p.pete · 12-06-2006 7:29am

BPS Research Digest Issue 69 (9/6/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Rare counting ability induced by temporarily switching off brain
region

A minority of people with autism, sometimes referred to as idiot savants, have one or more extraordinary intellectual talents, such as the rapid ability to calculate the day of the week for a given date, or to count large numbers of discrete objects almost instantaneously. Now Allan Snyder and colleagues have shown that by placing a pulsing magnet over a specific area of the brain, these kind of abilities can, to some extent, be induced in people who aren’t autistic.

Twelve healthy participants were given several chances to estimate, from 50 to 150, how many blobs appeared on a computer screen. The blobs appeared for just 1.5 seconds, and the number of blobs changed on each attempt. Remarkably, the performance of ten of the subjects improved drastically after Snyder’s team applied 15 minutes of low frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to their left anterior temporal lobe, a brain region that’s been implicated in the savant syndrome.

For example, before the TMS, one participant had 20 goes at guessing the number of blobs onscreen, and each time she was more than 5 away from the true figure. Yet immediately after receiving the TMS, she made 6 out of 20 guesses that were within 5 blobs of the true figure. Before TMS, another participant scored 3 guesses out of 20 that were within 5 of the true figure, compared with 10 out of 20 immediately after the TMS.

The enhanced ability was gone within an hour, and moreover, no such improvements followed application of a sham version of the TMS that made all the same noises, but was applied only weakly over a different brain region. In fact, the participants’ performance deteriorated slightly in this condition.

The researchers think that by temporally inhibiting activity in the left anterior temporal cortex, the TMS allowed the brain’s number estimator to act on raw sensory data, without it having already been automatically grouped together into patterns or shapes. In other words, they believe it caused the healthy brain to function more like an autistic brain. “We argue that it removes our unconscious tendency to group discrete elements into meaningful patterns, like grouping stars into constellations, which would normally interfere with accurate estimation”, the researchers said. “By inhibiting networks involved in concepts, we may facilitate conscious access to literal details, leading to savant-like skills”.
_________________________________

Snyder, A., Bahramali, H., Hawker, T. & Mitchell, D.J. (2006).
Savant-like numerosity skills revealed in normal people by magnetic pulses. Perception, 35, 837-845.
http://www.perceptionweb.com/perabs/p35/p5539.html

Author weblink: http://www.centreforthemind.com/director/index.cfm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, child development, exceptional development, gifted children.

2. A case of pseudologia fantastica, otherwise known as pathological
lying

The events that led to Lorraine being incarcerated on a secure forensic unit at age 22 are mind-boggling. It began when she reported to police that a colleague had been sending her death threats in the post. Then about a year later she reported to police that her best friend Abby had developed a lesbian infatuation with her and was stalking her. Two weeks later, her friend Abby appeared to have abducted Lorraine at knifepoint and was subsequently charged and imprisoned. Fast forward another year and Lorraine now reported receiving death threats from her fiancé’s ex wife, and soon after that she blamed her fiancé’s three-year-old son for the starting of two fires in relatives’ homes.

The thing is, there were no death threats, Lorraine had made it all up.
She had persuaded her best friend Abby that by appearing to abduct her, she would actually be doing Lorraine some kind of favour. And she set the fires that she accused the three-year-old of starting.

According to Cheryl Birch and colleagues, Lorraine has pseudologia fantastica – a disorder that is characterised not only by the quantity of lies, but also by their fantastical quality. The lies are typically harmful to the liar and are not part of a manipulative plan with a clear objective in mind. Instead they are motivated by internal psychological desires – to boost self-esteem or characterise oneself as a hero or victim. The person with pseudologia fantastica often struggles to distinguish between fiction and reality, but does not experience true delusions and does not have an organic memory impairment. Consistent with this, Lorraine did eventually confess to everything she’d done.

The authors concluded that through better understanding and more awareness of cases like this “…some of the exceedingly costly medical, legal, and social consequences often associated with it can be avoided.
[In Lorraine’s case] improved awareness of pseudologia fantastica may have hastened the administration of justice and helped avert some of the attendant social tragedy”.
__________________________________

Birch, C.D., Kelln, B.R.C. & Aquino, E.P.B. (2006). A review and case report of pseudologia fantastica. The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, 17, 299-320. http://tinyurl.com/m7j2s

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: The first English review of Pseudologia Fantastica was written by William and Mary Healey in 1915. See http://tinyurl.com/r6hxc

3. Forget STROOP, here's the SNARC

You’ve probably heard of the Stroop effect (if not, see http://tinyurl.com/pyzzx), now let me introduce you to the SNARC.

The Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect is the observation that people are faster to make a judgment about a number if the hand they use to respond is congruous with the size of the number in question – with the left hand being quicker for smaller numbers and the right quicker for larger numbers. It suggests we automatically associate smaller numbers with the left side of space and larger numbers with the right-hand side, and it reinforces the age-old notion that mentally we represent numbers as if they are located along a line.

For example, when instructed to respond to even numbers by pressing a button with their left hand, and to respond to odd numbers by pressing a button with their right hand, people will be quicker responding to ‘2’
compared with ‘98’, whereas they will be quicker responding to ‘97’
compared with ‘3’.

The SNARC effect can also operate in the vertical dimension, with people associating larger numbers with upper space and smaller numbers with lower space.

Now Wim Gevers and colleagues have shown that the vertical and horizontal effects interact. Imagine a lower left-hand key must be pressed for even numbers and an upper-right hand key must be pressed for odd numbers. In this case, the SNARC effect will be particularly large when responding to small, even numbers.

However, the researchers also showed that a given spatial advantage (i.e. left versus right; upper versus lower) is only activated if it is relevant to the response. For example, if people are instructed to press an upper button in response to an odd number, and a lower button to an even number, with no left/right dimension, the usual left-hand advantage for small numbers will disappear or be reduced.
_________________________________

Gevers, W. Lammertyn, J., Notebaert, W., Verguts, T. & Fias, W. (2006).
Automatic response activation of implicit spatial information: Evidence from the SNARC effect. Acta Psychologica, 122, 221-233.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2005.11.004

Author weblink: http://users.ugent.be/~tverguts/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: See (full text at http://tinyurl.com/lhjzj) Dehaene, S., Bossini, S., & Giraux, P. (1993). The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 122, 371–396.

p.pete · 12-06-2006 7:30am

4. Social phobics' memories are focused on themselves

People with social phobia experience extreme anxiety when they mix with other people. Now a study has shown their memories for social events tend to be experienced as if looking in on themselves from another person’s perspective. And they also contain more information about their own thoughts and behaviour at the expense of detail on what other people were saying or doing, and other sensory detail.

Arnaud D’Argembeau and colleagues made these observations after asking
17 sufferers of social phobia and 17 non-anxious controls to recollect four specific experiences from the last year: a positive and negative social event, and a positive and negative non-social event. The memory differences they observed applied to both negative and positive social events, but not to non-social events.

“As suggested by cognitive models of social phobia, people with social phobia may focus their attention on themselves both while experiencing social situations and while reviewing these situations afterwards, thus favouring the encoding and consolidation of self-referential information in memory”, the researchers concluded.

Speaking to the Digest, lead author Arnaud D’Argembeau explained the implications of these findings for treating social phobia: “Encouraging patients to remember their social experiences in a more balanced manner, by focusing less on themselves and more on how others actually behaved in the situation, may help them to reinterpret their experiences in a more positive manner and may therefore contribute to reduce negative beliefs and expectations regarding their social environment”.
_________________________________

D’Argemeau, A., Van der Linden, M., d’Acremont, M. & Mayers, I. (2006).
Phenomenal characteristics of autobiographical memories for social and non-social events in social phobia. (2006). Memory, 14, 637-647.
http://tinyurl.com/q5jhr

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ogt4l

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences, psychopathology, anxiety disorders ; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, psychology of atypical behaviour option, anxiety disorders;
[Edexcel]: A2 unit 4 clinical psychology, approaches and therapies; [SQA
higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, atypical behaviour, therapies.

5. Compose original music? In your dreams

The source of professional musicians’ creativity could lie in their dreams, report Piero Salzarulo and colleagues at the University of Florence.

They asked 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musical students to complete a record of their dreams and musical activity for 30 days. Over that period, the musicians, who either played an instrument or sang for a living, experienced twice as many dreams featuring music compared with the students (40 vs. 18 per cent of nights). And 28 per cent of the time, the music that featured in the musicians’ dreams was an original piece. “The occurrence of unknown musical pieces shows that new musical productions could be created in dreams”, the researchers said.

You might say it’s obvious for musicians to dream about music because we often expect the content of our dreams to reflect our waking activities.
But actually, past research has shown more complex activities like reading, writing or calculating seldom occur in dreams. The researchers
surmised: “This could be an additional argument for the difference between music and the other cognitive skills”.

And moreover, in this study, the likelihood of dreaming of music was not linked to hours of musical activity on the previous day. Instead, frequency of musical dreams was associated with the age at which the musician began their musical instruction. “This finding is in agreement with the notion that the early years of childhood are crucial for establishing the lifelong development of musical skills”, the researchers said.
_________________________________

Uga, V., Lemut, M.C., Zampi, C., Zilli, I. & Salzarulo, P. (2006). Music in dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 351-357.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.09.003

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/mvyv9

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology, biological rhythms, sleep and dreaming; [Edexcel]: AS Unit 2, the psychodynamic approach.

6. Watch a movie, learn a new language...?

How cool would it be if you could learn a new language simply by watching subtitled foreign films? So far, research has shown that you can certainly learn new vocabulary this way, but not grammar. Now Sven Van Lommel and colleagues at the University of Leuven have again tested whether subtitled films can be used to learn grammar, following their belief that prior research was hindered by methodological shortcomings, such as the lack of suitable control groups.

Van Lommel’s team showed a film in Esperanto (‘En Somera Vilao’), with Dutch subtitles, to half of 94 Dutch-speaking primary school sixth-formers and 84 secondary school sixth-formers. Unfortunately, watching the film brought the pupils no advantage in a subsequent test on Esperanto grammar.

In fact, watching the film actually impaired grammar test performance among those pupils who were previously read a short story that introduced some rules of Esperanto grammar. Overall the pupils who heard the story tended to perform better on the grammar test, but among the pupils who heard the story, those who also watched the film did worse than those who didn’t. “Inserting a movie between the advance rule presentation and the test increased the retention interval and may have caused some interference, leading to more forgetting of the presented rules” the researchers said.

When it comes to learning, it seems there’s no substitute for practising speaking a new language yourself. In the researchers’ words “…grammar acquisition may remain minimal without verbal production of the to-be-acquired language forms”. However, they also said the possibility remains that the film shown in this study was too short to be of any benefit, and that a sequence of several films spread over an extended period of time could be useful.
___________________________________

Van Lommel, S., Laenen, A. & d’Ydewalle, G. (2006). Foreign-grammar acquisition while watching subtitled television programmes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 243-258. http://tinyurl.com/on22b

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/s2ayl

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, language and thought; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, language and thinking; [SQA adv higher]: cognitive psychology, theoretical explanations and research evidence in cognitive psychology, language and thinking.

7. Extras

Studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Teenagers who do one or more of the following - take drugs, commit crimes, gamble, skip school, join gangs - are more likely to have tattoos and body piercings.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2005.06.001

The last century's most important quantum physicists - Niels Bohr, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauliwere - were all interested in the mind-body problem.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2005.12.005

Introducing the brilliantly-named 'Warpy Thoughts Scale' for measuring dysfunctional attitudes. http://tinyurl.com/oohqj

The decision-making process underlying whether to restrain violent patients in a horizontal position. http://tinyurl.com/lgx27

Middle Eastern shoppers enjoy the crowds more than North America shoppers. http://tinyurl.com/ndrc3

How the prestige of the university that clinical psychologists train at affects where they end up working. http://tinyurl.com/mbyby

8. The Special Issue Spotter

A new service from the BPS Research Digest:

The mental health of African American women.(Journal of Clinical Psychology).http://tinyurl.com/mrevg

Autobiographical memory and psychopathology. (Cognition and Emotion).
http://tinyurl.com/qcgow

Self-regulation. (Applied Psychology).
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/apps/55/3

The use of experiments in Political Psychology. (Political Psychology).
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/pops/27/3

Indigenous psychologies. (The International Journal of Psychology).
http://tinyurl.com/pbpe3

Is the Journal of Organisational and Occupational Psychology any use to practitioners? http://tinyurl.com/mg77a

If you're aware of any forthcoming journal special issues in psychology, please let me know on christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

p.pete · 23-06-2006 1:53pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 70 (23/6/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Why you should invest in companies with simple names

When it comes to predicting short-term share price fluctuations, it appears a simple psychological explanation has succeeded where countless complex economic theories have failed. The human tendency to respond positively to easily processed information means buyers are drawn to shares in companies with simple names, thus driving their value up over the short term.

Using real stock market records, Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton University have shown that, over a year, new shares in companies with fluent, easy-to-pronounce names like ‘Barnings Inc.’ tend to outperform shares in companies with awkward names like ‘Aegeadux Inc’.

Alter and Oppenheimer asked 29 students to rate the fluency of a random sample of real company names. They then calculated that over their first year’s performance, $1000 invested in the 10 companies rated to have the most fluent names would have netted $333 more profit than $1000 invested in the 10 companies with the least fluent names.

Further analysis showed the association between a company’s name and its share performance was not due to larger companies, or companies in a certain industry sector, tending to have simpler names.

Nor was it due to simpler company names conveying some kind of appealing meaning – the researchers found companies with pronounceable ticker codes (used for abbreviation on TV and on websites) like KAR tended to outperform companies with an unpronounceable ticker code like RDO.

In fact, across the entire NYSE and AMEX markets, Alter and Oppenheimer calculated $1000 invested in shares with pronounceable ticker codes would have netted $85.35 more profit after one day compared with an equal amount invested in companies with an unpronounceable ticker code.

“Given that investors traded shares valued at roughly $2 billion on the average day in 2006, these differences have dramatic practical consequences”, they said.

“Researchers’ intuitive attempts to understand complex real-world phenomena with equally complex models may not always be the best approach” Alter and Oppenheimer concluded, adding: “Keeping in mind that humans are forced to seek a simple thread of understanding when bombarded with excessive information, sometimes a surprisingly simple theory is a successful predictor of human behaviour”.
_________________________________

Alter, A. & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 103, 9369-9372.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/24/9369

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/mvyv9

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, problem solving and decision making.

2. Body psychotherapy for hard-to-treat schizophrenia

We all know about the hallucinations and delusions, but it’s actually schizophrenia’s so-called ‘negative symptoms’ – the emotional withdrawal, slowing of movement, and lack of responsiveness – that are the most difficult to treat. Now a new study suggests ‘body psychotherapy’ could succeed where so many drug treatments fail.

Over a course of body psychotherapy, patients describe how their bodies feel; perform ‘travelling movements’ – walking in different directions at different speeds; mirror each others’ movements; and create group sculptures.

Frank Rohricht and Stefan Priebe, who conducted the trial, said body psychotherapy is based on the premise that “movement and emotional experiences are biologically and experientially associated”. This is supported by the fact the brain’s emotional centre – the limbic system – is anatomically and functionally linked with the basal ganglia, a brain region involved in movement control.

Of 24 patients with schizophrenia who, on top of treatment as usual, received 20 sessions of body therapy over 10 weeks, half showed a clinically significant (i.e. 20 per cent) reduction in their negative symptoms relative to a pre-treatment baseline – they were less emotionally blunted and performed more spontaneous movements. By contrast, just 21 per cent of a control group of 21 patients who received supportive counselling on top of their treatment as usual, showed a significant improvement in their negative symptoms relative to baseline.

Both groups were equally satisfied with the treatment and therapeutic relationship, suggesting the superior effect of body psychotherapy was not due to these non-specific factors.
__________________________________

Rohricht, F. & Priebe, S. (2006). Effect of body-oriented psychological therapy on negative symptoms in schizophrenia: a randomised controlled trial. Psychological Medicine, 36, 669-678. http://tinyurl.com/kklme

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/grobj

European Association of Body Psychotherapists: http://www.eabp.org/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences, psychopathology, schizophrenia; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, atypical behaviour, schizophrenia; [Edexcel]: Unit 4a, clinical psychology, specific mental disorders, schizophrenia; [SQA higher]:
domain individual differences, atypical behaviour, schizophrenia.

3. The power of 'one' - why larger portions cause us to eat more

The effect of portion size on how much people eat is something of a mystery – why don’t they simply leave what they don’t want, or alternatively, where possible, why not help themselves to more? Andrew Geier and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania think it has to do with ‘Unit bias’ – “…the sense that a single entity (within a reasonable range of sizes) is the appropriate amount to engage, consume or consider”.

To test this, the researchers left a bowl of M&M sweets in the hallway of an apartment building with a sign that read “Eat Your Fill: please use the spoon to serve yourself”. Some days they left a tablespoon-sized scoop, other days they left a quartercup scoop that was four times as big. Passers-by could obviously help themselves to as little or as much as they wanted regardless of which spoon was provided, but on average,
1.67 times more M&M’s were taken on the days the big scoop was left compared with the tablespoon-sized scoop.

In another experiment, the researchers found that, measured by weight, significantly more pretzels were taken by passers-by when a complimentary bowl of 60 whole pretzels was left in an apartment building, compared with when a bowl of 120 half-pretzels was left. And it was a similar story when either a bowl of 80 small Tootsie rolls (an American snack bar) or a bowl of 20 large Tootsie rolls was left in an office building.

In other words, throughout the study, people took more food when the unit on offer was larger. “Consumption norms promote both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a single unit is the proper portion”, the researchers said. However, they also acknowledged that other factors must have been at play because the amount of food taken did not vary in direct proportion with the increase in unit size on offer.

The researchers concluded that this ‘unit bias’ applies in other walks of life too – they cited the example of films: “double features are rare, but very long movies are not”, and amusement-park rides: “one ride on a particular attraction is usually enough, whether it takes one or five minutes”.
_________________________________

Geier, A.B., Rozin, P. & Doros, G. (2006). Unit bias. A new heuristic that helps explain the effect of portion size on food intake.
Psychological Science, 17, 521-525. http://tinyurl.com/h5me7

Author weblink: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~andrewbg/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See topics on eating disorders (e.g. the AQA spec A individual differences module critical issue; AQA spec B (A2) psychology of atypical behaviour option; and the psychology of individual differences, SQA adv higher).

p.pete · 23-06-2006 1:53pm

4. An eye for an eye...

When people are deciding the appropriate punishment for a crime, they’re most interested in ensuring that the perpetrator gets the payback they deserve. They’re less interested in practical issues relating to whether the perpetrator needs to be locked up to protect the public, or in how much of a deterrent to other potential criminals the punishment will be.

Kevin Carlsmith at Colgate University asked 42 students to imagine they were responsible for deciding the punishment to be given to a criminal.
To help them come to a decision, they had five chances to choose different categories of information about the criminal and the crime.

They could select information relevant to issues of retribution (e.g.
how much harm the criminal caused; how much intent they had), incarceration (e.g. how likely the criminal was to offend again), or deterrent (e.g. how much publicity the crime attracted).

Carlsmith found the students were more likely to choose information pertinent to retribution first, and that choosing such information led them to be more confident in their sentencing decision. In a further experiment, students were allocated a random selection of information to help them make their sentencing decision – in this case, those students given information pertinent to retribution tended to be more confident in their punishment decision than the other students.

“Although people say they value utilitarian goals, when it comes to actually seeking information and assigning sentences, their behaviour reveals that they care most about retribution”, Carlsmith concluded.
_________________________________

Carlsmith, K.M. (2006). The roles of retribution and utility in determining punishment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 437-451. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.06.007

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/zpzlf

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: A2 Unit 4b, criminological psychology, jury decision making; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, contemporary topics in psychology, criminological psychology.

5. Heroin craving not like thirst for water

When an addict craves another shot of their chosen drug, how similar is this urge to the basic human drives for sex, food and water? One way scientists have approached this question is to look at the neurocircuitry underlying craving for drugs and compare it with the neurocircuitry underlying these other drives. A previous study suggested there might be a great deal of overlap – 10 out of the 13 brain areas associated with craving for cocaine were also activated when addicts and control participants watched erotic films.

Now Zhuangwei Xiao and colleagues in China have compared the brain activation triggered when 14 heroin addicts looked either at pictures of people drinking water, people injecting heroin, or at neutral pictures, such as of furniture. The addicts were both thirsty and drug-deprived, having been denied water for 6 hours before scanning, and heroin for an average of 8.5 hours.

The researchers didn’t find the overlap they expected. Compared with looking at neutral pictures, looking at drug-related pictures triggered increased brain activation in frontal, occipital and cerebellar regions.
By contrast, looking at water-related pictures didn’t increase activity in any of those regions, but triggered activity in the anterior cingulate.

The researchers concluded: “Our results show an important role of prefrontal cortex in heroin craving and suggest that heroin craving may involve different neural substrates than do desire from basic physiological drives”.
___________________________________

Xiao, Z., Lee, T., Zhang, J.X., Wu, Q., Wu, R., Weng, X. Hu, X. (2006).
Thirsty heroin addicts show different fMRI activations when exposed to water-related and drug-related cues. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 83, 157-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2005.11.012

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/fbvhn

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, options, contemporary issues in psychology, substance abuse; and [Edexcel]: A2, the psychology of health, factors of addiction.

6. Unpleasant words and pictures make us move more slowly

In much the same way that an animal freezes or slows at the sight of a predator, humans are automatically slowed down when they see or read something unpleasant.

That’s according to Benjamin Wilkowski and Michael Robinson at North Dakota State University. They presented 38 students with a series of pictures that were either positive (e.g. a passionate couple), negative (e.g. a gun placed to someone’s head) or neutral (e.g. a basket). After the presentation of each picture, the students had to identify whether the screen was showing one or two dots, and then press the appropriate number on a button box as quickly as possible. They had to do this three times after each picture to ensure any effects weren’t simply due to difficulty disengaging their attention from the last picture.

The researchers found that, on average, the students’ responses were significantly slower after they’d just seen a negative picture than if they’d seen a neutral picture (475 ms average response time vs. 423 ms).
A similar slowing effect was found after the presentation of violent words (e.g. murder) compared with neutral words (e.g. walk). In contrast, there was no difference in their response times after viewing positive pictures or words compared with after viewing neutral pictures/words.

A final experiment featuring a joystick, showed negative words slowed the speed with which participants moved the joystick up and down, but did not slow the actual onset of their movement. The researchers said this makes evolutionary sense because it means that in the presence of danger we still decide which movement to make quickly, but “that avoidance behaviours, once initiated, are performed in a stealthful and thus less detectable manner”.
_________________________________

Wilkowski, B.M. & Robinson, M.D. (2006). Stopping dead in one’s tracks:
Motor inhibition following incidental evaluations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 479-490.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.08.007

Author weblink: http://www.psych.ndsu.nodak.edu/robinson/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, comparative psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour;[SQA higher]:
understanding the individual, domain: physiological psychology, "the origins of adaptive behaviours in the evolutionary development of species".

7. Extras

Studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Questions are more often misremembered as statements, than vice versa.
http://tinyurl.com/lh74x

Do anti-depressants cure or create abnormal brain states?
http://tinyurl.com/sydbs

What lies beneath homophobia - defensive loathing or a secret attraction? http://tinyurl.com/quup2

The pros and cons of labelling chronic fatigue syndrome.
http://tinyurl.com/qyoty

The mental health of husbands and wives becomes more similar across the first five years of their relationship. http://tinyurl.com/pk5eh

8. The Special Issue Spotter

A new service from the BPS Research Digest:

New insights into how we process the spatial relations between objects, and how we recognise objects regardless of viewing angle.
(Neuropsychologia). http://tinyurl.com/onhhx

All about imitation, from its role in child development to its use in communicating with dementia sufferers. (Infant and Child Development).
http://tinyurl.com/qzkhw

A comprehensive overview of the emerging profession of counselling in Australia. (International Journal of Psychology). http://tinyurl.com/n86ok

All about the importance of rest and recovery after work. (European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology). http://tinyurl.com/qm8ts

The effect of when a word is learned on its processing later in life, otherwise known as 'age of acquisition effects'. (Visual Cognition).
http://tinyurl.com/lqbxn

Delusional beliefs and criminal responsibility - an international perspective. (Behavioural Sciences and the Law). http://tinyurl.com/pwun3

Consciousness and self-representation - is it true that for a mental state to be conscious, it must both represent something else while also being represented itself? (Psyche). http://tinyurl.com/7coq6

If you're aware of any forthcoming journal special issues in psychology, please let me know on christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

p.pete · 07-07-2006 1:26pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 71 (7/7/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Well, it can't hurt to ask...Yes it can!

Asking someone how likely they are to take illegal drugs in the future can actually increase the likelihood that they will indeed take drugs – a finding with worrying implications for health research.

Patti Williams and colleagues recruited 167 undergrads and asked some of them about their intentions to take drugs, and the others about their intentions to exercise. Two months later, the students were contacted again, and those who had been asked about drugs reported taking drugs an average of 2.8 times in the intervening period, compared with an average of 1.1 times among the students previously asked about exercise.

The effect was even more dramatic when those students who said they hadn’t taken any drugs at all were omitted from the analysis. Among the remaining students, those asked about their drug-taking intentions said they’d used drugs an average of 10.3 times over the past two months, compared with an average of 4 times among the students previously asked about their exercise intentions.

This observation, together with further analysis, suggested it wasn’t that new drug users had been created, but rather that the questioning had led to increased use among current users who presumably had a positive attitude towards drugs in the first place.

“The results of the current study may well be troubling for researchers trying to survey respondents in at-risk populations”, the researchers said. “By virtue of surveying the at-risk population in an attempt to help them, serious harm may actually be done to the sampled group”.

It wasn’t all bad news – those students asked about their intentions to exercise subsequently reported having exercised more than the students who were earlier asked about their drug-taking intentions. But the message remains – asking someone a question about their intentions can alter their future behaviour, sometimes in negative ways.
__________________________________

Williams, P., Block, L.G. & Fitzsimons, G.J. (2006). Simply asking questions about health behaviours increases both healthy and unhealthy behaviours. Social Influence, 1, 117-127. http://tinyurl.com/qs6a3

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/rbjuz

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: A2 Unit 5a, the psychology of health; [OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

2. Was altruism borne out of a universal willingness to punish?

If human nature has been shaped entirely by evolutionary pressures, then why are so many people prepared to help complete strangers? Surely those ancestors of ours with an altruistic bent would have been wiped out by the more ruthless and self-serving among our forebears. Joseph Henrich and colleagues believe the answer lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the universal human willingness to punish unfair behaviour.

Henrich’s team used three economic games involving real money to test the behaviour of 1762 participants from 15 different societies on five continents. Across the world, from the Samburu in Kenya to the Sursurunga in Papua New Guinea, they found people playing anonymously were willing to sacrifice their own winnings to punish a player who was unfair in the way they shared money with themselves or a third party.

Willingness to punish varied across the cultures, but in every society, less equal sharing was more likely to be punished. And crucially, those societies that showed the greatest willingness to punish unfair behaviour also turned out to be the most altruistic, as judged by their performance in the games. “You evolve into a more cooperative being if you grow up in a world where there are punishers” Joseph Henrich told Science.

However, whilst welcoming the cross-cultural nature of the study design, and acknowledging the contribution it makes to the debate on altruism, evolutionary psychologist John Tooby told Science that he was wary of reading too much into these anonymous games – “…in ancestral societies, people lived in small groups where everybody knew each other. In that environment, anonymous punitive interactions would have been rare to nonexistent, so there would have been no selection to adapt to such situations”.
__________________________________

Henrich, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J.C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D. & Ziker, J. (2006). Costly punishment across societies. Science, 312, 1767-1770.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5781/1767

Supplementary material on methods: http://tinyurl.com/zzfnv

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/hlrqe

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
pro- and anti-social behaviour and A2 module 4, comparative psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour; [SQA adv higher]: social psychology, altruism.

3. Communicating off the top of your head

Forget lip-reading, the way the top of the head moves as we speak also plays a part in communication, a finding that has implications for creating more realistic animated characters.

In an initial experiment, Chris Davis and Jeesun Kim presented students with silent videos that showed the top half of a man’s head as he read out various sentences.

When presented with two pairs of such videos, one in which the man read the same sentence out in each video, and another in which he read different sentences, the students were able to use the movement of the top of his head to judge better than chance which pair was the same and which was different. Note that in the matching pair, the videos were not identical – the man was recorded reading the same sentence on two separate occasions.

Performance was also better than chance when the students had to match the sound of the man reading a sentence with the correct silent video that showed only the top half of his head as he read the same sentence.

In both cases, performance was better when the man was reading an expressive sentence like “that is really annoying; I have to let you know” rather than a mundane sentence like “the jacket hung on the back of the wide chair”.

In a further experiment, the sound of a person speaking was deliberately distorted. This time, the student participants were able to correctly recognise more words if the sound was accompanied by a video showing only the outline of the top of half of the head of the person who was speaking. Again, the sight of the top of the head provided greater advantage if the speaker was uttering an expressive sentence.

“That people are sensitive to speech related upper head movements makes it clear that the production of natural looking virtual characters will need to consider more than the correct animation of the mouth and jaw”, the researchers said.
__________________________________

Davis, C. & Kim, J. (2006). Audio-visual speech perception off the top of the head. Cognition, 100, B21-B31.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.09.002

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/fgucx

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: Munhall, K.G. et al. (2004). Visual prosody and speech intelligibility head movement improves auditory speech perception.
Psychological Science, 15, 133-137.
http://psyc.queensu.ca/~munhallk/Munhall_Psyc.Sci.pdf

p.pete · 07-07-2006 1:28pm

4. One-year-olds can predict people's intentions

Babies as young as 12 months already have a rudimentary understanding of other people’s intentions. That’s according to Terje Falck-Ytter and colleagues who observed babies’ eye movements as they watched a video presentation of a person picking up toys and putting them in a bucket.

Six-month-olds tended to follow the trajectory of the toys through the air. By contrast, 12-month-olds’ eyes jumped ahead to the bucket as if they were anticipating the person’s intentions, just as happened when adult participants watched the video.

However, this jumping ahead to the bucket only occurred when a person was moving the toys. It didn’t occur when the video showed the toys flying through the air apparently self-propelled, or they were moved mechanically, in which case the 12-month-olds and adults both moved their eyes as the 6-month-olds had done – that is, they were mostly fixated on the toys and didn’t jump ahead to the bucket.

The researchers believe the 12-month-olds’ ability to anticipate people’s intentions is based on the functioning of mirror neurons that are activated both when the baby performs a movement and when they see that same movement performed by someone else. Crucially, the 12-month-old babies, but not the 6-month-olds, have themselves mastered the action of putting toys in a bucket, thus allowing them to map their observation of someone else performing the action onto their own neural representation for performing the action.

“We have demonstrated that when observing actions, 12-month-old infants focus on goals in the same way as adults do, whereas 6-month-olds do not”, the researchers said.
__________________________________

Falck-Ytter, T., Gredeback, G. & von Hofsten, C. (2006). Infants predict other people’s action goals. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 878-879.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v9/n7/abs/nn1729.html

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/r7say

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [OCR]: AS core studies, cognitive psychology, understanding the central issues in the area of autism and theory of mind.

5. Hey girls: Science helps people!

The story of women’s under representation in science begins at school where fewer girls than boys choose to pursue science, especially physics. According to Erica Weisgram and Rebecca Bigler, the secret to enticing more girls into science could be to show them that science helps people, and that it contributes to the overall well-being of society. But the hard part is finding an effective way to convince them of that.

Weisgram and Bigler assessed hundreds of girls before and after they completed a programme in America called ‘Expand Your Horizons’ that’s designed to increase girls’ interest in science.

The programme involved the girls attending four one-hour sessions on different scientific subjects such as earth science and engineering. The sessions were all presented by a female scientist and involved hands-on activities. Half the girls went on a special version of the programme in which the presenters took extra care to emphasis how their work as a scientist helps people and society.

After the programme, the girls who believed in the altruistic value of science also tended to report having more interest in it, to believe it was more important and they had stronger belief in their own scientific ability. But the bad news was twofold: firstly, the girls who attended the special version of the course emphasising altruism were no more likely to believe in the altruistic value of science, so in that sense it failed. Secondly, although the course did increase the girls’
interest in science overall, their belief that science is equally appropriate for men and women actually dropped, perhaps because the exclusive use of female presenters focused the girls’ attention on the need for women in science.

“To encourage more women to enter scientific fields, public advertising campaigns, vocational counselling programmes, and educational materials might usefully highlight the ways in which science fulfils individuals’
altruistic values”, the researchers said.
___________________________________

Weisgram, E.S. & Bigler, R.S. (2006). Girls and science careers: The role of altruistic values and attitudes about scientific tasks. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 27, 326-348.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2006.04.004

Lab weblink: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/BiglerLAB/

Previous, related Digest item:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2006/03/women-need-female-role-models.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the psychology of gender. [OCR]: A2 psychology and education, individual differences in educational performance, cultural diversity and gender issues.

6. Don't suppress negative thoughts about yourself

Most of us have those horrible nagging thoughts of self-doubt that begin ‘I wish I weren’t so…’ or ‘I hate that I’m so…’ but apparently the worst thing we can do is push them out of mind. According to Jennifer Borton and Elizabeth Casey at Hamilton College in New York, not only does this cause us to have more of such thoughts – a phenomenon known as the rebound effect – it can also detrimentally affect our overall mood and self-esteem.

Previously evidence for this has come from laboratory studies, but now Borton and Casey have conducted a field experiment to test the effect of negative thought suppression on participants going about their everyday lives.

Before completing a web diary every evening for 11 days, 57 students were asked to bring to mind their most upsetting thought about themselves. Crucially, 29 of them were also given the following
instruction: “What I’d like you to do over the course of the next 11 days is to work particularly hard at SUPPRESSING this negative thought, pushing it from mind, trying not to think about it. If the thought should pop into your head, do your best to just push it away and try not to think about it”.

At the end of the 11-day period, the web diaries were analysed, and it was found the students instructed to suppress their negative thoughts about themselves actually had more of such thoughts, reported more anxious mood, more depressed mood, and if their negative thoughts made them feel ashamed, then they also tended to report lower self-esteem too.

So rather than suppressing these kinds of thoughts, what should we do?
Lead researcher Jennifer Borton told the Digest: “Moving one's attention away from the negative thought and onto something else is different from the ‘non-strategy’ of simply erasing the thought from mind. Of course, if the thought about oneself is true, one may need to deal with it later. If the thought is not true or exaggerated (e.g., ‘I'm ugly’), one should pick a single replacement thought on which to focus when the negative thought comes to mind (e.g., ‘I have a nice smile’; ‘I am smart’).
___________________________________

Borton, J.L.S. & Casey, E.C. (2006). Suppression of negative self-referential thoughts: A field study. Self and Identity, 5, 230-246.
http://tinyurl.com/fr3tv

Author weblink:
http://academics.hamilton.edu/psychology/jborton/default.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: Daniel Wegner at Harvard has done a lot of research in this area and his website contains links to many of his publications:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/ip.htm

p.pete · 07-07-2006 1:28pm

7. Link-fest

Other new research and reviews of note:

Why extraverts are happier than introverts.
http://tinyurl.com/lkrmf

The use of toys in clinical interviews with children.
http://tinyurl.com/rh9c8

A behaviourist criticism of the DSM manual. http://tinyurl.com/nhwdk

A quick guide to Tourette's. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.038
And see here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2006.01.001.

The effect on kids of seeing their mum or dad be violent to their partner. http://tinyurl.com/pxwoo

More evidence showing the efficacy of dilectical behavioural therapy for borderline personality disorder - this time in an in-patient setting.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.08.012

(See http://tinyurl.com/mumuy for more on DBT and http://tinyurl.com/92mda for more on BPD).

Choice and uncertainty clog the bottleneck of central processing in the brain. http://tinyurl.com/obt27

Body maps don't facilitate children's reports of where they've been touched - with implications for court procedure.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112657029/ABSTRACT

More evidence for the fallibility of human memory - 63 per cent of participating undergrads said they remembered seeing video footage of the assassination of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn - footage that actually doesn't exist.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112657025/ABSTRACT

In psychopathology research, people's self-reports differ wildly from how other people report on them - this has implications for relying on self-report data in research. http://content.apa.org/journals/bul/131/3/361

And quite a few this fortnight on animal cognition:

Trust in fish. http://tinyurl.com/pdpxa

It's not all learning by association - animals really are cognitive.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.040

Dolphins can go a month without sleep.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/edsumm/e060622-05.html

Social animals prove their smarts.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;312/5781/1734

Man's best friend(s) reveal the possible routes of social intelligence.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;312/5781/1737

8. The Special Issue Spotter

A new service from the BPS Research Digest:

Science magazine looks at 'life': some of the insights that social scientists are making as they study humans at different stages of the life cycle. (Science). http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/lifecycles/

Four papers that showcase the power and promise of cognitive neuropsychology approaches to selective developmental disorders, with an introduction by Bradley Duchaine at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London. (Cognitive Neuropsychology).
http://tinyurl.com/ns8nv

How can research in applied developmental psychology best inform policies that will promote human welfare? (Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology). http://tinyurl.com/r65le

Humans can only process so much information at once - where and why do such limitations arise? (European Journal of Cognitive Psychology).
http://tinyurl.com/ns8nv

A four-day workshop entitled 'Health-related Stigma and Discrimination'
held in the Netherlands in 2004 led to the formation of the 'International Consortium for Research and Action Against Health-Related Stigma' and to this special issue - understanding and tackling health-related stigma. (Psychology, Health and Medicine).
http://tinyurl.com/ns8nv

Crisis! Its aftermath and its psychological treatment. (Journal of Clinical Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112673068

This special issue is dedicated to Elizabeth Loftus, and is full of research inspired by her work on the fallibility of human memory.
(Applied Cognitive Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112657017 For Loftus'
webpage see http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/.

p.pete · 31-07-2006 6:44pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 72 (21/7/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. New dawn in brain-machine interfacing

Scientists have made a breakthrough in their efforts to bring paralysed people the ability to use thought power alone to control artificial limbs, and to interact with computers and other electrical devices.

John Donoghue and colleagues implanted a tiny array of electrodes into the brain of a 25-year-man who is unable to move his arms or legs following a knife wound that severed his spinal cord. The brain implant allowed him to use his thoughts to check emails, play a simple computer game, change channels and volume on a TV, and to control a robotic arm.
It is the first time an implant of this kind has been tested in a human.

The electrode array was implanted into the part of the man’s brain that, prior to his injury, would have controlled his left arm. By forming the intention to move his arm, neurons were activated in this region, their pattern of firing was recorded by the implant and then an external computer converted the neuronal firing into a command for a mouse cursor or robotic arm.

The findings represent a significant advance on at least three fronts – the man was able to achieve this control within a few minutes of practice; he was able to chat with researchers while he was exerting mental control of the cursor, TV or robot arm; and his control was in all directions, rather than just up/down or left/right. This is in contrast to non-invasive brain-machine interfaces that rely on recording the surface electrical activity of the brain. They require weeks or months of training, demand the user’s full attention when in operation, and, until recently, only allowed one-dimensional cursor control. This new study also shows that several years after paralysis, neurons that were previously involved in controlling limbs still respond to the will to move.

However, significant hurdles remain. As well as involving surgery and the risk of infection, the device used in this trial was connected by wires to bulky computing equipment and required constant fine tuning. A fully-implantable, wireless device would be preferable. Moreover, the precise control we achieve with our natural limbs depends on constant sensory feedback from touch and proprioception – the sense of where our limbs are in space. Scientists have a long way to go before they ‘close the loop’ by mimicking this kind of feedback.
__________________________________

Hochberg, L.R., Serruya, M.D., Friehs, G.M., Mukand, J.A., Saleh, M., Caplan, A.H., Branner, A., Chen, D., Penn, R.D. & Donoghue, J.P. (2006).
Neuronal ensemble control of prosthetic devices by a human with tetraplegia. Nature, 442, 164-171. http://tinyurl.com/fsfqh (open access).

Lab weblink: http://donoghue.neuro.brown.edu/ Accompanying videos:
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/brain/video/index.html
EEG-based system: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/51/17849

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: For biological psychology in general and the functions of different brain areas, see [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the cerebral cortex; [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, the physiological approach; [AQA spec B]:
AS module 1, the biological approach, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the brain; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological psychology; [SQA adv higher]: biological psychology.

2. Why marginalised minorities may be wary of intergroup contact

When people from different social groups mix, they generally come away with a more positive attitude towards the other social group. However, this benefit is not always symmetrical - people from a minority group are less likely to emerge with improved attitudes. It depends on how they perceive the experience, and how they perceive the dynamics between their social group and the majority group.

Nick Hopkins and Vered Kahani-Hopkins have explored such perceptions by analysing some of the diverse positions on inter-faith dialogue adopted by British Muslims in the 1990’s. For example, they found speakers at one event arguing that inter-faith dialogue was unhelpful until the Muslim community was fully united and better organised.

One speaker said: “At present interfaith dialogue is conducted on both sides by individuals and groups who have no interest in Islam. Under such circumstances interfaith dialogue becomes a tool through which the religious rights of one group - Muslims - are slowly eroded away”.

Hopkins told The Digest: “It seems that for some minority group activists, interventions involving contact could be problematic because they are perceived as undermining group members’ abilities to act collectively and bring about social change”.

However, this was not a feeling held by all Muslims at the time. Hopkins and Kahani-Hopkins also analysed a 1997 report by the Runneymede Trust -
‘Islamaphobia: a challenge for us all’ which represented an important strand of Muslim opinion. The report emphasised the need for inter-group contact if Islamaphobia were to be overcome, and mentioned “the importance of practical projects which require people from different communities and faiths to work as partners on the resolution of shared problems, and to make common cause to other bodies”.

The researchers believe it is only through this kind of careful, qualitative analysis of people’s perceptions of inter-group dynamics that a more realistic, politically sophisticated understanding of how different groups feel about intergroup contact can be achieved.
__________________________________

Hopkins, N. & Kahani-Hopkins, V. (2006). Minority group members’
theories of intergroup contact: A case study of British Muslims’
conceptualisations of ‘Islamaphobia’ and social change. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 245-264. http://tinyurl.com/guc3s

Author weblink: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/nphopkins/welcome.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: The idea that contact between groups can help reduce prejudice is known as the contact hypothesis. AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology, social cognition, prejudice and discrimination; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2,social psychology, attitudes, prejudice and discrimination; [Edexcel]:AS unit 1, the social approach, in-depth area of study, obedience and prejudice; [SQA higher]: the individual in the social context, domain social psychology, prejudice; [SQA adv higher]: social psychology, prejudice.

3. Your trustworthiness is judged in a tenth of a second, or less

It takes just a tenth of a second for people to make judgements about you based on your facial appearance.

Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov asked university students to rate the attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness of actors’ faces after looking at their photos for just 100ms. The ratings they gave the faces correlated strongly with ratings given by other students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces. The strongest correlation was for trustworthiness. “Maybe as soon as a face is there, you know whether to trust it”, the researchers surmised.

As the time the students were given was increased up to half a second, or to a whole second, their ratings continued to correlate just as strongly with the ratings given by the students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces. However, with more time, the students’
ratings became slightly more negative and their confidence in their judgments increased.

“These findings suggest that minimal exposure to faces is sufficient for people to form trait impressions, and that additional exposure time can simply boost confidence in these impressions. That is, additional encounters with a person may only serve to justify quick, initial, on-line judgments”, the researchers said.
__________________________________

Willis, J. & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions. Making up your mind after a 100-Ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17, 592-598.
http://tinyurl.com/n3n5f

Author weblink: http://www.princeton.edu/~atodorov/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4 options, contemporary topics in psychology, human relationships, interpersonal attraction.

p.pete · 31-07-2006 6:44pm

4. 'Blind' drunk after just one drink

If your attention is elsewhere you can miss something right in front of your eyes – a phenomenon that’s been dubbed ‘inattentional blindness’.
For example, witnesses confronted by an armed attacker sometimes fail to remember anything else about the assailant apart from their weapon, so preoccupied were they by the knife or gun. Now Seema Clifasefi and colleagues report that just one stiff drink can exaggerate inattentional blindness, a finding they argue justifies the setting of a lower legal alcohol driving limit.

Forty-seven students watched a short video clip of two teams passing a basketball between their respective team members. The participants’ task was to count the number of passes made by one of the teams. During the clip, a woman in a gorilla suit runs between the players and beats her chest. Crucially, when asked afterwards, only 18 per cent of the students given a drink of vodka and tonic said they’d noticed the woman, compared with 46 per cent of the students given a drink of plain tonic water.

Alcohol clearly exaggerated the inattentional blindness that was also experienced by many of the sober students.

This wasn’t a placebo effect – half the students given plain tonic water were told they had been given vodka, and yet 42 per cent of them noticed the gorilla woman. By contrast, half the students given vodka were told they’d been given tonic water, and yet only 18 per cent of them noticed the gorilla. The alcohol seems to have had a direct effect on the participants’ cognition.

“Even at only half the legal driving limit in the US, our subjects were at significantly increased risk of failing to notice an unexpected object compared with their sober counterparts. In light of this result, perhaps lawmakers should reconsider the level of intoxication deemed legal to operate a vehicle”, the researchers concluded.
__________________________________

Clifasefi, S.L., Takarangi, M.K.T. & Bergman, J.S. (2006). Blink drunk:
The effects of alcohol on inattentional blindness. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20, 697-704.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112657032/ABSTRACT

The video clip: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html
The creators of this clip won an Ig Nobel prize:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6468
Here's the paper that used the gorilla video originally:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, perceptual processes; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, perception and attention; [SQA higher and adv higher]:
cognitive psychology, perception and attention.

5. Reading to babies gives them a head-start

Toddlers read to daily by their mothers from an early age have bigger vocabularies and superior cognitive skills.

Helen Raikes and colleagues asked 2,581 mothers from poor families enrolled on the Early Head Start programme in America how often they read to their child at age 14, 24 and 36 months. At each time point, children read to daily, or several times a week, had a larger vocabulary.

Of course it’s probable that parents are more likely to read to children if they have a larger vocabulary, but the researchers also found that children read to more at 24 months had a larger vocabulary at age 36 months, irrespective of how much they were read to at that later time point. Moreover, among English speaking families only, those children read to daily at the age of 14, 24 and 36 months, had superior cognitive skills when tested at the age of 36 months.

“This study shows relations between reading to children and children's language and cognitive development begin very early and implies that parent-child bookreading and other language-oriented interventions for vulnerable children should begin much earlier than has generally been proposed”, said lead researcher Helen Raikes of Nebraska-Lincoln university.

The researchers also found first born children were more likely to be read to, as were girls, and the children of better educated mothers.
___________________________________

Raikes, H.H., Raikes H.A., Pan B.A., Luze, G., Tamis-LeMonda, C.S., Rodriguez, E.T., Brooks-Gunn, J., Constantine, J. & Tarullo, L.B.
(2006). Mother-child bookreading in low-income families: Correlates and outcomes during the first three years of life. Child Development, In Press.

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/hw7mn

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, language and thought, language acquisition; [SQA adv
higher]: developmental psychology, cognitive development, factors affecting language development.

6. Mobile phone use can be beneficial

Thirty minutes exposure to a digital mobile phone can improve people’s working memory functioning, at least in the short term, according to Vanessa Keetley and colleagues at Swinburne University in Australia.

The performance of 120 participants on a battery of neuropsychological tests was compared before and after they were exposed for thirty minutes to a mobile phone that was either on full power, or switched off. The phone was clipped to a headset leaving it 0.5 to 1.5 cm from the participants’ heads. The researchers took pains to ensure neither the participants nor experimenters knew whether the phone was on or not. For example, the phone was covered in sound-proofing material to hide the slight buzzing sound it made when it was on, and a piece of foam prevented the participants from feeling whether the phone was warming up.

After exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation from the switched on phone, the participants were significantly quicker at a trail making task, a measure of working memory performance that required them to join up 25 circled digits, or a mixture of letters and digits, with a line. The researchers speculated the phone might have this effect by altering blood flow in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved in working memory.

However, exposure to a switched on phone slowed down participants’
performance on simple or choice reaction time tasks that required them to press a button as quickly as possible when they saw a particular on-screen stimulus.

“The negative effects of digital mobile phone exposure on reaction time performance indicate that the more basic functions were adversely affected by exposure. In contrast, the improved performance reaction time for the trail making working memory task suggests that digital mobile phone exposure has a positive effect on tasks requiring higher level cortical functioning, such as working memory”, the researchers concluded.
___________________________________

Keetley, V., Wood, A.W., Spong, J. & Stough, C. (2006).
Neuropsychological sequelae of digital mobile phone exposure in humans.
Neuropsychologia, 44, 1843-1848.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.03.002

Lab weblink: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/lss/bsi/index.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: See also Smythe, J.W. & Costall, B. (2003). Mobile phone use facilitates memory in male but not female subjects.
Neuroreport, 14, 243-246. http://tinyurl.com/qcau7

7. Link-fest

Other new research and reviews of note:

A woman recovers her ability to see depth after years of stereo-blindness, thus providing further evidence of the brain's adaptability even into adulthood. http://tinyurl.com/gb5nz

The neural basis of human dance. http://tinyurl.com/o4qsj

Autism more common than previously thought. http://tinyurl.com/nn7e2.
But see http://tinyurl.com/eoq8t.

The benefits of playing video games.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.10.004

Is Bush unintelligent really? http://tinyurl.com/g9sa6

8. The Special Issue Spotter

Advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience - an evolving field that investigates the relations between brain maturation and cognitive development. (Neuropsychologia). http://tinyurl.com/npc6n

'Memory editing' - a study of the interplay between those mechanisms that distort memory and those mechanisms that protect memory against distortion. (Memory). http://tinyurl.com/gtu9h

If you're aware of a forthcoming journal special issue in psychology, please let me know (christian@psychologywriter.org.uk).

p.pete · 08-08-2006 3:10pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 73 (8/8/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Eyes closed shut, mind wide open

There always seems to be a story in the news about the latest findings showing this or that brain area is activated when someone’s jealous, embarrassed or solving a crossword. But activated relative to what resting baseline? After all, unless you’re testing a group of Buddhist monks, it’s probably unrealistic to expect participants to think of absolutely nothing as they lie in the brain scanner.

Now Martin Wiesmann and colleagues have shown that another complicating issue, even in the complete pitch dark, is whether participants have their eyes open or shut.

They found that when participants closed their eyes in the dark, brain areas related to vision, touch, hearing, balance, smell and taste were all activated relative to when they lay in the dark with their eyes open. By contrast, lying in the dark with their eyes open, activated participants’ brain areas related to attention and eye movement.

The researchers said the findings point to the there being two kinds of mental activity: “…with the eyes closed, an ‘interoceptive’ state characterised by imagination and multisensory activity, in contrast to an ‘exteroceptive’ state, with the eyes open, characterised by attention and oculomotor activity”.

“It therefore seems critical that subjects do not change the state of their eyes during an experiment”, they added.

Wiesmann and his colleagues said more research was needed to test whether the increased sensory activity observed in the brain when someone closes their eyes in the dark is also accompanied by an enhancement of their sensory acuity.
__________________________________

Wiesmann, M., Kopietz, R., Albrecht, J., Linn, J., Reime, U., Kara, E., Pollatos, O., Sakar, V., Anzinger, A., Fest, G., Bruckmann, H., Kobal, G. & Stephan, T. (2006). Eye closure in darkness animates olfactory and gustatory cortical areas. NeuroImage, 32, 293-300.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.03.022

Critique of functional brain imaging by Paul Bloom, writing in Seed
Magazine: http://tinyurl.com/ze8fm. (Open access).

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See modules on research methods and on localisation of function in the brain. [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the cerebral cortex; [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, the physiological approach; [AQA spec B]:
AS module 1, the biological approach, physiological psychology, localisation of function in the brain; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological psychology; [SQA adv higher]: biological psychology.

2. Pick a doctor, any doctor

Some countries are worried that so many of their doctors are coming to work in the UK. Now Adrian Furnham and colleagues have highlighted another concern regarding the NHS’ increasing dependence on foreign doctors. They report that white British people have a strong preference to be treated by a doctor trained here in the UK.

Presented with a list of eight general practitioners, including their names, age and place of training, 395 white British men and women showed a strong preference for doctors trained in the UK rather than in Asia.
Presented with a list of consultants, this preference remained, but to a lesser extent, perhaps because patients realise they have less choice when it comes to consultants.

In contrast to early research in this area, men showed a stronger preference than women to be seen by a doctor of the same sex, perhaps reflecting the fact so many more doctors are female now. The participants didn’t show any preference for older versus younger doctors if they were trained in the UK, but if they were trained in Asia, they showed a preference for an older doctor.

“It is important to establish the extent and nature of any adverse effects resulting from a patient being unable to see a doctor of his or her choice”, the researchers concluded.
__________________________________

Furnham, A., Petrides, K.V. & Temple, J. (2006). Patient preferences for medical doctors. British Journal of Health Psychology, 11, 439-449.
http://tinyurl.com/zjyb4

Author weblink:
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/people/profiles/furnham_adrian.htm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See health psychology modules. [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4; [Edexcel]: A2, unit 5 part a; [OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

3. A case of hyperlexia in an autistic boy

Researchers at the University of London’s School of Languages have observed a four-year-old boy with autistic spectrum disorder who rarely speaks spontaneously and shows little evidence of verbal comprehension but who can read aloud precociously – a phenomenon that’s known as hyperlexia.

On psychological tests, the boy is found to have a mental age of just one and half years and yet he can correctly pronounce irregular words not normally encountered by children before the age of nine. Irregular words like ‘yacht’ don’t follow the usual letter-to-sound rules and his correct pronunciation of them betrays a level of linguistic development far beyond that predicted by his mental age.

Even when presented with novel Greek letters, he attempts to read them as English letters and numbers. “This behaviour is possibly indicative of the type of driven, compulsive, and indiscriminate reading behaviour associated with hyperlexia”, the researchers said. Indeed, the boy’s mother recalled that her son looked through newspapers with an unusual intensity before he was even two years old.

Because the boy doesn’t communicate it is difficult to gauge his actual comprehension of the words he can read. Nonetheless it remains remarkable that his reading ability “just happened”, as his mother put it, and the researchers concluded “Existing cognitive accounts are inadequate to account for the development of literacy in this child”.
__________________________________

Atkin, K. & Lorch, M.P. (2006). Hyperlexia in a 4-year-old boy with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 19, 253-269.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2005.11.006

Author weblink:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/llc/subjects/applied_linguistics/appli_staff/mpl

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, language and thought, language acquisition; [SQA adv
higher]: developmental psychology, cognitive development, factors affecting language development.

4. The pursuit of power

Everyone knows that power is seductive, but is it power over others that we crave or power over our own actions and decisions?

To find out, Marius Van Dijke and Matthijs Poppe devised a financial game in which hundreds of undergrads took turns with a ‘partner’ to make share investment decisions. The students didn’t know this, but they actually played the game with a computer.

When the participants chose how much to invest, as well as using a share’s performance history, their decision was constrained within a recommended upper and lower limit set by their ‘partner’. In turn, the participants were able to set the upper and lower limits for what they thought was their partner. The researchers made it so that some participants had more control over their partner than their partner had over them, some participants had less control, and the remainder had equal control.

When quizzed afterwards, the participants consistently said they would like in the future to have more control over their own investment decisions, but they didn’t wish to have more control over their partner’s decisions. In fact, if they’d previously had more power over their partner’s decisions than their partner had had over theirs, many of the participants actually said they’d like in the future to have less power over their partner. This general pattern remained the same regardless of how much agreement or conflict there appeared to have been between their own and their partner’s investment decisions.

The researchers said this showed people are more motivated to decrease their dependence on other people’s power than they are to increase their power over others. In other words, they believe we’re driven to increase our ‘personal power’ over ourselves, but not necessarily our ‘social power’ over others.

“We believe we have advanced our understanding of the complexities involved in strivings for personal power”, they said.
__________________________________

Van Dijke, M. & Poppe, M. (2006). Striving for personal power as a basis for social power dynamics. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 537-556.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112702462/ABSTRACT

Author weblink: http://www.uvt.nl/webwijs/english/show.html?anr=944122

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: AS module 3, social influence; [AQA A spec A]: AS module 2, social influence; [Edexcel]: AS, the social approach; [SQA higher]: The individual in the Social Context, conformity and obedience.

p.pete · 08-08-2006 3:11pm

5. Psychopaths unmoved by words

Imagine I show you the word “love” and I ask you to classify it as positive or negative. You’ll classify it far quicker as positive, if just beforehand I had showed you another positive word such as “honesty”
– a phenomenon that’s known as affective priming. Now James Blair and colleagues at the National Institute for Mental Health in America have shown that affective priming is greatly reduced in callous people who score high on psychopathy.

Blair’s team think psychopaths show reduced affective priming because positive and negative words don’t trigger activity in their brains’ fear and reward hub, the amygdala, in the same way as happens in healthy people. In healthy people, it’s this amygdala activity, triggered by the sight of one positive/negative word that is thought to speed the response to a subsequent positive/negative word.

The researchers made these observations by testing affective priming in thirty people resident in a high security institution in England, 15 of whom were psychopathic and 15 of whom weren’t, based on their scores on an established measure of psychopathy.

It’s not that psychopathic people have some kind of general language or priming problem because the researchers found psychopaths showed normal semantic priming. Similar to affective priming, semantic priming is when we’re quicker to categorise a word when it follows a preceding word that had a related meaning.

The researchers said their observations fit with the idea that “…individuals with psychopathy do represent the lexical meaning of emotions, but they do not experience their affective value; they ‘know the words but not the music’”.
___________________________________

Blair, K.S., Richell, R.A., Mitchell, D.G.V., Leonard, A., Morton, J. & Blair, R.J.R. (2006). They know the words, but not the music: Affective and semantic priming in individuals with psychopathy. Biological Psychology, 73, 114-123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2005.12.006

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/pczmw

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: The entirety of Hervey Cleckley's classic text on psychopathy 'The Mask of Sanity' is currently available online as a free PDF document: http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF (Thanks to Dr.
Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks for the pointer http://tinyurl.com/zf4kk).

6. Sound aids visual learning

The use of sound during visual training can enhance later performance on a purely visual task, a finding that demonstrates just how much multisensory interaction occurs in brain areas that before now were thought to be dedicated solely to vision.

Aaron Seitz and colleagues tested two groups of participants on a task that required them to view a screen full of moving dots. Most of the dots were moving randomly but sometimes a subset moved coherently either to the left of right. The participants’ task was to detect when this minority of dots moved coherently and which direction they moved in.

Training for half the participants involved practice on the task as described above. Crucially, however, the other half of the participants were trained on a version in which the coherently moving dots were accompanied by the sound of something moving leftwards or rightwards.

When the participants were tested on the purely visual task, the performance of the participants who were trained with sound improved faster than the vision-only participants, both within an individual session, and from one session to the next. For example, the participants trained with sound reached peak performance by the third testing session, whereas the participants trained without sound didn’t reach peak performance until the seventh session.

“Our results show that multisensory interactions can be exploited to yield more efficient learning of sensory information and suggest that multisensory training programmes would be most effective for the acquisition of new skills”, the researchers concluded.
___________________________________

Seitz, A.R., Kim, R. & Shams, L. (2006). Sound facilitates visual learning. Current Biology, 16, 1422-1427.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.048

Author weblink: http://cns-web.bu.edu/~aseitz/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: This research is some way off practical application in the real world, but could one day have implications for how we learn and train. [Edexcel]: A2 the psychology of education;
[OCR]: A2 psychology and education.

7. Extras

Other eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Different monetary currencies affect our perception of how expensive things are. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2006.01.006

Does psychological therapy for bulimia work when it's delivered remotely, over a video link?
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112478288/ABSTRACT

Opportunities and challenges in the collaboration between psychiatry, epidemiology and neuroscience in studying gene–environment interactions.
http://tinyurl.com/fdhs4 (Open access). (thanks Dr Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks for flagging up this one http://tinyurl.com/l56zr).

How lack of sleep affects your posture.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.03.033

What effect do pro-anorexia websites have on people who read them?
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112572637/ABSTRACT

Investigating how the police interview children who may have been sexually abused. http://tinyurl.com/fkrzt

Is autism a personality dimension like extraversion and neuroticism?
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.04.003

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

8. The Special Issue Spotter

Social power (European Journal of Social Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112702456

How children learn the names for colours. (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology). http://tinyurl.com/jbeq7

Boundaryless and protean careers. (Journal of Vocational Behaviour).
http://tinyurl.com/gvjxb

Pathologies of consciousness and awareness, bridging the gap between theory and practice. (Neuropsychological Rehabilitation).
http://tinyurl.com/gvjte

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue, please let me know? - email Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

p.pete · 21-08-2006 1:42pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 74 (21/8/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Intuition enhanced by drug

A sedative drug that interferes with memory also has the contrasting effect of enhancing intuition – the ability to use one’s ‘gut feelings’
– according to researchers at the Universities of Arizona and Colorado.

Michael Frank and colleagues tested the ability of 23 participants to learn the relative value of different abstract symbols. The participants learned through trial and error which of two symbols was the more valuable, one pair at a time. Later on, they were tested on their ability to recall the outcome of many of these specific pairings, and also on their ability to work out the more valuable of two symbols not previously compared.

After taking the tranquiliser Midazolam, participants became worse at remembering the outcome of previously encountered pairings, but they actually became better at solving the outcome of novel pairs. Novel pairings can be solved either by logically working through one’s memory of the previous pairings or by using one’s intuitive sense of which symbol is the more valuable based on its overall performance during the learning phase. The researchers believe Midazolam interfered with explicit memory for previous pairs, but enhanced participants’ ability to use their gut feeling to solve novel pairs.

The researchers say this supports the idea that learning can occur via two distinct systems – an explicit, hippocampus-based system, and an implicit, intuitive system, more dependent on the brain’s reward pathways. And they believe that by knocking out hippocampus-based explicit memory, Midazolam actually enhances memory based on intuition.

“We suggest that the brain areas associated with implicit reward-association decisions are dissociable from those supporting the explicit forms of decision making”, the researchers concluded. “Our findings suggest that it may be useful to rely on intuition to guide decisions, particularly when explicit memory fails”.
__________________________________

Frank, M.J., O’Reilly, R.C. & Curran, T. (2006). When memory fails, intuition reigns. Midazolam enhances implicit inference in humans.
Psychological Science, 17, 700-707. http://tinyurl.com/hpeqh

Author weblink: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~mfrank/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, remembering and forgetting; [AQA spec A]: AS module 1, cognitive psychology, memory; [Edexcel]: Unit 1, cognitive psychology, memory; [SQA higher/adv higher]: cognitive psychology, memory.

2. Why it's so difficult to reassure people with medically-unexplained symptoms

Doctors face a fundamental hurdle when seeking to reassure patients with medically-unexplained symptoms that they are physically well. Apparently such patients have a problem remembering information about how likely it is that they or other people have certain illnesses.

Winfried Rief and colleagues played 33 patients with medically-unexplained symptoms a tape-recording of a doctor’s report on a patient with abdominal pain. In his report, the doctor rules out certain illnesses – for example, that the pain is “certainly not stomach flu”. Yet later, when asked to indicate on a scale from 0 to 100 how likely the doctor said these illnesses were, the participants with medically-unexplained symptoms said the possibility was 20 per cent. By contrast, a group of depressed patients and healthy participants rated the possibility as significantly lower – as 13 and 3 per cent, respectively.

This memory bias shown by participants with medically-unexplained symptoms was specific to medical probabilities. They could hold as many numbers in short-term memory as the depressed and healthy participants.
And when played an audio-tape about a case of social rejection (a person not being invited to a neighbourhood barbeque), or about a car breakdown, they remembered probabilistic information contained in these reports just as accurately as the depressed and healthy participants.

“Our results show that medical reassurance and the presentation of negative test results can lead to patients remembering overestimated probabilities for medical explanations, especially in patients with unclear somatic complaints”, the researchers said. “Check-back questions on what patients have understood from doctors’ reports, and asking patients for summaries about the provided information, could help detect this memory bias…”, they advised.
__________________________________

Rief, W., Heitmuller, A.M., Reisberg, K. & Ruddel, H. (2006). Why reassurance fails in patients with unexplained symptoms – An experimental investigation of remembered probabilities. PLOS Medicine, 3, e269. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030269

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: A2 Unit 5a, the psychology of health; [OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

3. Writing about your romantic relationship could help it last

Writing down how you feel about your romantic relationship could help it last longer. That’s according to Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. They recruited 86 heterosexual undergrads and asked half of them to spend 20 minutes a day for three consecutive days writing about “…their deepest thoughts and feelings about their current relationship”. The other half of the undergrads were asked to spend the same amount of time writing about their daily activities. Three months later, 77 per cent of the undergrads who’d written about their relationship were still in the same relationship, compared with just 52 per cent of the students who’d written about their daily activities.

So why does writing about one’s relationship have this effect? Slatcher and Pennebaker analysed instant messaging communication (like instant
email) between the study participants and their partners, recorded before and after the writing exercise. They found that after a student had written about their relationship for three days, both they and their partner used more positive emotional words when they communicated with each other. If it was a man who had written about the relationship, then there was also more use of negative emotional words.

“That people may enhance their romantic relationships by simply writing down their thoughts and feelings about those relationships has clear implications for clinicians”, the researchers concluded.

The findings come as a survey of 2000 women by the UK government Department of Skills and Education (DfES) found 44 per cent had not received a love letter in over a decade. The DfES said its Get On campaign, which encourages adults to improve their literacy, could help men brush up on their love letter writing skills.
__________________________________

Slatcher, R.B. & Pennebaker, J.W. (2006). How do I love thee? Let me count the words. The social effects of expressive writing. Psychological Science, 17, 660-664. http://tinyurl.com/eb6fl

Author weblink: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/students/Slatcher/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, developmental psychology, adulthood, family and relationships in adulthood; [AQA spec
B]: A2 module 4, option - contemporary topics in psychology, human relationships.

4. Understanding why people take 'sickies'

You’re a company boss and you want to reduce illegitimate sickness leave among your employees. What do you do? Introduce schemes to increase job satisfaction among your staff? It sounds sensible – the problem is, time and again research has only found a weak link between measures of job satisfaction and employee sick leave. The same is true for measures of job involvement and organisational commitment. But now Jurgen Wegge and colleagues think they’ve found the reason for this. The key, they say, is looking at how these factors interact. Lack of involvement in one’s job only matters when it’s combined with low job satisfaction.

Wegge’s team administered questionnaires to 436 employees of a large German civil service organisation. On their own, neither job satisfaction (measured by agreement with statements like “In general I am satisfied with my job”), nor job involvement (measured by agreement with statements like “Most of my life goals have to do with my work”) was related to the amount of sick leave an employee had taken over the last year. However, low job satisfaction and low job involvement combined were strongly related to the amount of sick leave taken.

The researchers said their finding has practical implications. “…it can be argued that establishing high job satisfaction (e.g. by job-redesign strategies, promotions, increases of salary) among employees will pay off as this prevents the transformation of low job involvement into high absenteeism”.

p.pete · 21-08-2006 1:43pm

<continued>

__________________________________

Wegge, J., Schmidt, K-H., Parkes, C. & van Dick, R. (2006). ‘Taking a
sickie’: Job satisfaction and job involvement as interactive predictors of absenteeism in a public organisation. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology, In Press. DOI: 10.1348/096317906X99371.
http://tinyurl.com/emdxz

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/kw9hl

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[OCR]: A2, psychology and organisations.

5. Of cats and basketball players - how we're better at recognising the emotions of those we identify with

Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves.
Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University of Quebec at Montreal think this has to do with motivation. We identify more with people in the same group as us – that in turn leads us to be more motivated to imagine things from their perspective, thus aiding our ability to interpret their emotions.

To test this idea, they showed 88 participants video clips of cats that were showing either aggression, fear, disgust or interest. Regardless of how much experience they had of cats, the participants who said they identified closely with cats were better able to recognise whether the felines were showing fear, disgust or interest.

In a second experiment, 60 participants were asked to interpret the facial expressions of men who were randomly labelled either as basketball players or non-players. For half the participants, the labels were switched, to be sure the crucial factor was how the faces were labelled rather than how they looked. Remarkably, participants who played basketball themselves were better than non-players at recognising the emotional expressions of the men labelled as players. Simply being told that another person was a fellow basketball player enhanced their ability to interpret that person’s emotions.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest motivation plays a big part in our ability to understand other people’s emotions, with practical implications: “…[T]he misunderstanding that sometimes occurs between members of different ethnic groups could be explained in part by the lack of motivation that members of a given group display when trying to decode the emotions of members of the other group”, they said.
___________________________________

Thibault, P., Bourgeois, P. & Hess, U. (2006). The effect of group-identification on emotion recognition: The case of cats and basketball players. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 676-683. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.10.006

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/l64u6

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive psychology, attention and pattern recognition, pattern recognition:
faces; [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, cognition and law, face recognition.

6. The effect of war on soldiers' brains

American soldiers deployed in the recent Iraq war have returned confused, with impaired concentration, and a reduced ability to remember new information. But they’ve also come back with speeded reflexes and heightened behavioural reactivity, presumably a consequence of their prolonged exposure to life-threatening situations.

That’s according to Jennifer Vasterling and colleagues, who administered a raft of neuropsychological tests to 654 soldiers before and after they were deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Changes in their test performance were compared with changes in performance among 307 soldiers who were not deployed, but who were tested at similar time points.

Ninety-eight per cent of the deployed soldiers reported being fired on while on active duty, while over half had witnessed allies or enemies being seriously wounded or killed. Just under half the sample said they had participated in daily combat missions. The researchers said that the neuropsychological changes they observed in these troops were subtle but that they could “lead to problems in everyday life” and could also “represent a prodrome or surrogate for disease”.

In light of these findings, the researchers recommended the implementation of “neuropsychological screening among military personnel returning from war-zone deployment” and “attention to the cognitive complaints of military personnel returning from deployment”.
___________________________________

Vasterling, J.J., Proctor, S.P., Amoroso, P., Kane, R., Heeren, T. & White, R.F. (2006). Neuropsychological outcomes of army personnel following deployment to the Iraq war. Journal of the American Medical Association, 296, 519-529. http://tinyurl.com/rw7s5

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/p8ty4

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: A2 Unit 5a, the psychology of health; [OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

7. Extras

Other eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Adults with autistic spectrum disorder have reduced grey matter in the area of the brain thought to contain mirror neurons - brain cells that are active both when someone performs an action, and when they see that action performed by someone else. Open access. http://tinyurl.com/ldhhf

A neuropsychological test for finding out whether someone is faking a memory problem (after head injury) to support a fraudulent compensation claim. http://tinyurl.com/qr85h

Babies' brains respond differently when they watch the same action performed on TV compared with when they see it performed live.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.03.044

Two contrasting forms of fighting in judo (free fight versus kata) have a different effect on plasma cortisol, testosterone, and interleukin levels in male participants. http://tinyurl.com/oglk2

Reading the word 'cinnamon' activates regions of the brain involved in our sense of smell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.03.037

When healthy people distinguished between real and imagined information, it activated brain regions thought to be affected by schizophrenia.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.04.209

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

8. The Special Issue Spotter

Probabilistic models of cognition. (Trends in Cognitive Sciences).
http://tinyurl.com/ka9ws

Action perspectives in clinical psychology. Action theory is the notion that individuals affect the environment around them. (Journal of Clinical Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112735199

Where does the law stand on the issue of delusions?: An international perspective. (Behavioural Sciences and the Law).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112652661

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue, please let me know? - email Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

p.pete · 04-09-2006 9:35am

BPS Research Digest Issue 75 (1/9/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Who's the daddy?

Being a father profoundly alters the structure of your brain – at least it does if you’re a marmoset monkey. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy and colleagues at Princeton University psychology department used staining techniques to compare the brain structure of male marmoset fathers with the brain structure of male marmosets who had never fathered an infant.
Marmoset fathers are unusual among mammals because they care extensively for their offspring, spending large amounts of time carrying and feeding them.

The researchers found that compared with non-fathers, there was a marked increase in the connective branching between brain cells in the front of the marmoset fathers’ brains. Kozorovitskiy told The Digest that this could lead to enhanced information processing, thus promoting paternal behaviour. “Paternal behaviour in marmosets is a complex task, indeed – the infants must be watched over, picked up whenever necessary and handed back to the mother for feeding at regular intervals”, she said.
The marmoset fathers’ brains also had an increased number of receptors for vasopressin, a hormone that’s known to be associated with bonding.

But how relevant is this research to human fathers? Kozorovitskiy again:
“Since many human fathers are intimately involved in child-care, their brains might show somewhat similar changes. Yet, male marmosets are extremely engaged fathers and carry their offspring almost all the time during the first month or two of the infant’s life, and it remains to be seen how the brains of human dads measure up”.

In some ways this research is hardly surprising – from taxi-driving to juggling, countless studies have demonstrated how the brain’s structure changes to meet the demands placed on it. Indeed, Kozorovitskiy’s team are planning experiments to find out if the brain changes they observed in marmoset fathers will also be found among any marmoset that raises young, whether it’s the natural parent or not.
__________________________________

Kozorovitskiy, Y., Hughes, M., Lee, K. & Gould, E. (2006). Fatherhood affects dendritic spines and vasopressin V1a receptors in the primate prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, In Press. DOI:10.1038/nnl1753.
http://tinyurl.com/ptlck

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/pan3e

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, comparative psychology.

2. Job candidates want the chance to perform

The last thing companies want after a big recruitment drive is to leave a trail of unsuccessful applicants bearing a grudge. The key to avoiding this is for employers to ensure failed applicants believe they were given ample opportunity to perform. That’s according to Deidra Schleicher and colleagues at Purdue University, who say this is even more important than making sure the recruitment process appears relevant to the job.

The researchers asked hundreds of job applicants to a US government agency how relevant they felt the recruitment process was; how well they were treated; and how much they’d been given the opportunity to perform (as judged by their agreement with statements like “I felt that I could show my skills and abilities through this test”). Feeling they’d had the opportunity to perform was important to all applicants, but among those who were unsuccessful, it was the single strongest predictor of how fair they judged the whole selection process to be.

So, what causes an applicant to feel they haven’t been given a fair chance to perform? Reasons offered by participants in this study included feeling the instructions were unclear; not having enough time to complete tasks; and having too many distractions around. These issues should be easy enough for recruiters to deal with. More problematic could be the finding that what works best for selection (e.g. structured interviews), doesn’t necessarily match what applicants feel gives them the fairest chance to perform (they preferred open-ended interviews).
__________________________________

Schleicher, D.J., Venkataramani, V., Morgeson, F.P. & Campion, M.A.
(2006). So you didn’t get the job…Now what do you think? Examining opportunity-to-perform fairness perceptions. Personnel Psychology, 59, 590. http://tinyurl.com/p9jd9

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [OCR]: A2, psychology and organisations.

3. Why season of birth is related to intelligence

Countless studies have found that children’s intelligence appears to be related to the time of year they were born in. Some investigators have argued this is because seasonally varying environmental factors like temperature and infections can affect brain development. But now Debbie Lawlor and colleagues have analysed data from 12,150 children born in Aberdeen between 1950 and 1956, and they’ve concluded that the effect of season of birth is almost entirely explained by the age children happen to be when they start school.

Reading ability at age 9 and arithmetic ability at age 11 were both related to season of birth (children born in late Winter or Spring performed better), but this association virtually disappeared once age at starting primary school and age relative to class peers were taken into account. That is, season of birth was only related to later intelligence because it affected the age children started school, with those who started school younger or older than the average tending to score less well on later intelligence tests.

By contrast, the outside temperature when the children were conceived, during gestation, and at their birth, had no independent association with their later intelligence.

“We have found weak season of birth effects on some aspects of childhood intelligence, which appear to be explained by differences in age at school entry and/or age relative to peers”, the researchers concluded.

However, the story isn’t entirely straightforward. The researchers predicted that children who spent less time at primary school would perform less well on subsequent intelligence tests. Instead, they found the opposite pattern. “It is possible that those who had least time in primary school but most time at home were in fact given extra tuition by their parents”, they surmised.
__________________________________

Lawlor, D.A., Clark, H., Ronalds, G. & Leon, D.A. (2006). Season of birth and childhood intelligence: Findings from the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s cohort study. British Journal of Educational Psychology, In Press. DOI: 10.1348/000709905x49700. http://tinyurl.com/lvnze

Children of the 1950s cohort study:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/childrenofthe1950s/index.htm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: Unit 4 (A2), the psychology of education; [OCR]: A2, psychology and education.

p.pete · 04-09-2006 9:36am

4. What's different about those who attempt suicide rather than just thinking about it?

Only a minority of people who think about committing suicide actually go ahead and make a suicide attempt. Is there something different about these people – some way, perhaps, to identify those suicidal people who are at most risk?

Kate Fairweather and colleagues identified 522 people (aged between 20 and 44) from a massive community survey who said they had thought about taking their own life in the last year. Among these people, just under 10 per cent also reported that they had made an attempt on their life.

The researchers found those individuals who had actually attempted suicide, rather than just thinking about it, were more likely to have serious ill-health, to be unemployed and to have poor relationships with their friends and family. And these factors had a cumulative effect – a participant with two of these factors was three times more likely to have attempted suicide; someone with all three factors was 11 times more likely to have made an attempt.

Surprisingly perhaps, rates of self-reported depression and anxiety were no greater among the suicide attempters than among those who only thought about suicide.

There were also gender- and age-specific associations. For example, among men only, those reporting high levels of ‘mastery’ (feeling in control of the forces affecting their lives) were 20 per cent less likely to attempt suicide. “…[T]he male role prescribes autonomy, self-confidence and being goal-orientated. Accordingly, males who believe they are lacking in these domains may feel socially marginalised or incompetent”, the researchers said.

Among people aged between 40 and 44, unemployment was a particular risk, increasing the likelihood of a suicide attempt nine-fold. Perhaps people in this age group were particularly dependent on their workplace for social support.

“Contrary to the view that mental health differentiates suicide attempters from ideators…”, the researchers concluded, “…This [research] suggests that mental health professionals may be able to intervene in the progression of ideation into attempt if they identify recent instances of upsetting social interactions, diagnosis of a disabling physical illness or recent job losses”.
__________________________________

Fairweather, A.K., Anstey, K.J., Rodgers, B. & Butterworth, P. (2006).
Factors distinguishing suicide attempters from suicide ideators in a community sample: social issues and physical health problems.
Psychological Medicine, 36, 1235-1245. http://tinyurl.com/rvj2s

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/zg5so

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences and perspectives, psychopathology, depression; [AQA spec B]:
A2 module 4 options, psychology of atypical behaviour, mood disorders; [SQA higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, therapeutic approaches in specific common disorders.

5. The expert mind of the burglar

The way burglars select houses to target, and how they search once inside, reveal evidence of an expert mind at work. That’s according to Claire Nee and Amy Meenaghan who say the finding has implications for crime prevention.

Nee and Meenaghan interviewed 50 jailed burglars, all of whom had committed at least 20 burglaries in the last three years; half had committed more than 100.

In more scrupulous walks of life, a person is recognised as an expert when they no longer need to deliberately concentrate on what they’re doing – instead their performance becomes automatic and fast, freeing their mind up for other things. The researchers found this matched the way many of the burglars described searching inside houses. Over three quarters of them described searching as relatively routine, and 15 of them actually used terms such as ‘automatic’ and ‘instinctive’.

“People leave things in the same basic locations…could have done it with my eyes shut”, said one burglar. “…got to be totally focused on outside noises, sometimes sixth sense, the search is automatic”, said another.
Two thirds of the burglars described the same search pattern, beginning with the master bedroom and finishing with the kitchen.

There was also evidence of expertise in the stereotyped way the burglars reported checking for relative wealth, occupancy, access and security when selecting houses to target.

“All in all, the processes involved in executing a burglary worth several hundred pounds in around 20 minutes strongly suggest the use of expertise in the burglar”, the researchers concluded. They added that recognising this fact could help burglary prevention. “There may be some situational crime prevention mileage in confounding burglars’
expectations by altering the usual internal layout of properties”, they said. “Expert burglars appear to be highly habit driven, and crime prevention specialists should capitalise on this”.
___________________________________

Nee, C. & Meenaghan, A. (2006). Expert decision making in burglars.
British Journal of Criminology, 46, 935-949. http://tinyurl.com/o96bp

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/g2cwt

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: A2 Unit 4b, criminological psychology; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, contemporary topics in psychology, criminological psychology.

6. The brain invigorated by light

Twenty minutes of bright white light delays sleepiness, and sends a stimulating wave through the brain, enhancing neural activity even during tasks that have nothing to do with vision.

Gilles Vandewalle and colleagues used an optic fibre to shine bright white light into either the left or right eye of 19 participants, and then left them to sit in the dark. For most of the participants, the light exposure delayed the onset of self-reported sleepiness. Brain imaging showed this sustained alertness was related to altered activity in the thalamus, a structure buried deep in the brain.

Brain imaging also showed the light enhanced the activity of brain regions engaged when the participants subsequently completed an auditory oddball task in the dark (i.e. listen out for odd tones that don’t match all the others). These regions included areas at the front and back of the brain known to be involved in paying attention.

The effects of the light exposure were short-lived, lasting less than 10 minutes beyond the end of the light stimulation. However, the researchers believe their observations are evidence that the brain has a “non-image” forming (NIF) system that responds to light but which is quite separate from vision. They argue the NIF system response outlasts light exposure, in contrast to the classic visual system which only responds during light stimulation. “These findings suggest that light can modulate activity of subcortical structures involved in alertness, thereby dynamically promoting cortical activity in networks involved in ongoing non-visual cognitive processes”, the researchers concluded.
___________________________________

Vandewalle, G., Balteau, E., Philips, C., Degueldre, C., Moreau, V., Sterpenich, V., Albouy, G., Darsaud, A., Desseilles, M., Dang-Vu, T.T., Peigneux, P., Luxen, A., Dijk, D-J. & Maquet, P. (2006). Daytime light exposure dynamically enhances brain responses. Current Biology, 16, 1616-1621. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.06.031

Author weblink:
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/SBMS/ACADEMICS_homepage/dijk_derk-jan/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological psychology; [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, the physiological approach; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the biological approach, physiological psychology; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological psychology; [SQA adv higher]: biological psychology.

7. Extras

Other eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Eating disorders in women linked with having an overly protective dad, or feeling rejected by one's dad. http://tinyurl.com/rhfyv

The personality of people who choose not to participate in psychology research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.04.017

We find faces attractive if they appear to belong to the kind of person we'd like to be. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.04.015

Students who are physically active feel less hassled.
http://tinyurl.com/emf7y

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

8. The Special Issue Spotter

All about foreign accent syndrome, in which people start talking with a different accent following brain injury. Journal of Neurolinguistics.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09116044

Autistic spectrum disorders. Child Neuropsychology. http://tinyurl.com/qkjk6

p.pete · 02-10-2006 1:34pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 76 (18/9/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Finding consciousness within

It?s difficult to imagine anything worse than lying paralysed, being
fully aware and yet unable to signal to your loved ones sitting around
you that ? yes, you can hear them, you are there. If only the doctors
could scan your brain and see that you were listening and thinking.
Remarkably, that?s what British researchers Adrian Owen and colleagues
at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit claim to have done.

Owen?s team scanned the brain of a 23-year-old woman left in a coma by a
car accident. She had emerged from coma into what?s known as a
persistent vegetative state, characterised by periods of sleep and
wakefulness but showing no outward signs of being consciously aware.

First they found the language parts of her brain responded to spoken
sentences, and that ambiguous sounding words like creak/creek triggered
activity in an area known to be involved in selecting between
alternative meanings. More amazing, however, was what happened when they
asked her to imagine either playing tennis or walking around her home.
The tennis instruction prompted activity in the motor control parts of
her brain, whereas the home instruction triggered memory-related
activity associated with navigation ? both in a way indistinguishable
from the activity observed when healthy participants followed the same
instructions.

?Her decision to cooperate by imagining particular tasks when asked to
do so represents a clear act of intention, which confirmed beyond any
doubt that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings?,
the researchers concluded.

However, commentators have advised caution in interpreting the results.
?We should not generalise from this single patient, who suffered
relatively few cerebral lesions, to most other vegetative state
patients, who typically have massive structural brain lesions? said
Lionel Naccache at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, INSERM, writing in
the same journal issue. ?If this patient is actually conscious, why
wouldn?t she be able to engage in intentional overt motor acts, given
that she had not suffered functional or structural lesion of the motor
pathways?, he asked.
__________________________________

Owen, A.M., Coleman, M.R., Boly, M., Davis, M.H., Laureys, S., &
Pickard, J.D. (2006). Detecting awareness in the vegetative state.
Science, 313, 1402.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5792/1402

Author weblink: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~adrian/Site/Homepage.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological
psychology, localisation of function in the cerebral cortex; [Edexcel]:
AS unit 2, the physiological approach; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the
biological approach, physiological psychology, localisation of function
in the brain; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological psychology; [SQA adv
higher]: biological psychology.

2. A new approach to help people who hear voices

When it comes to the ?positive? symptoms of schizophrenia, such as
hearing voices, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has mostly be used
to help reduce the distress and burden that they can cause. But now
Jerome Favrod and colleagues in Switzerland have tested the idea that
CBT could help tackle the cognitive deficit that some argue causes the
voices to be heard in the first place.

One theory for why people with schizophrenia hear voices is that they
mistake their own inner thoughts, or words they are planning to say, as
being of external origin. Favrod?s team recruited a 38-year-old patient
who heard voices that he believed belonged to an evil spirit. They tried
to help him better recognise the source of the words he heard.

During training, the researchers would pick a category such as ?fruit?,
and then show the patient a picture of one fruit, name another fruit out
loud, show him the written name of another fruit and finally ask him to
name a fruit. Later they presented him with a list of all the fruits
mentioned, and asked him to recall which fruit he had named, and which
had been shown in a picture, written, or named out loud. They taught him
to better remember items he had suggested by using personal memories ?
for example if he suggested apple, to link this with an apple tree in
his grandmother?s garden.

After 6 hours of training over 11 weeks, the patient was better at
recognising his own suggestions, and better at recalling the personal
memories he had tied them to. Crucially, his auditory hallucinations
were also improved and continued to be improved at follow-up a year later.

?Even though we report a single case study, we think that the results
definitely encourage the potential use of cognitive remediation for
auditory hallucinations?, the researchers concluded.
__________________________________

Favrod, J., Vianin, P., Pomini, V. & Mast, F.W. (2006). A first step
toward cognitive remediation of voices: a case study. Cognitive
Behavioural Therapy, 35, 159-163. http://tinyurl.com/zyh5u

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual
differences, psychopathology, schizophrenia; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4,
atypical behaviour, schizophrenia; [Edexcel]: Unit 4a, clinical
psychology, specific mental disorders, schizophrenia; [SQA higher]:
domain individual differences, atypical behaviour, schizophrenia.

3. How professional rugby players cope with performance stress

Professional rugby players are more worried about getting injured than
anything else, including whether or not they win the match, or whether
their opponents cheated. That?s according to Adam Nicholls and
colleagues who succeeded in getting eight professional players to fill
out a diary after each rugby match they played during a 28-day period in
2004.

The players, including a full international All-Black and three full
Irish internationals, completed a check-list of potential stressors,
described the techniques they?d used to cope, and reflected on how
effective they felt these had been.

Twenty-four different stressors were cited at least once, but the three
most frequently cited ? worry about injuries, or about previous mental
or physical errors ? made up 44 per cent of all stressor incidents. The
most frequently used coping strategies were putting the stressor out of
mind, increasing one?s effort and reinterpreting things in a positive
way. Crucially, however, the strategies the players reported using most
often were not the same strategies that they said were the most
effective (these included adapting techniques and improving
communication), suggesting the players could benefit from guidance in
choosing the right strategies. However, the picture was complicated by
the fact strategies varied in effectiveness depending on the stressor in
question.

?Given that a small number of stressors recur over time, we suggest that
practitioners teach athletes three or four effective coping strategies
that include at least one problem-focused, emotion-focused and avoidance
strategy?, the researchers said. ?This way, when faced with controllable
or uncontrollable stressors, athletes always have a relatively effective
coping strategy to deploy?.
__________________________________

Nicholls, A.R., Holt, N.L., Polman, R.C.J. & Bloomfield, J. (2006).
Stressors, coping, and coping effectiveness among professional rugby
union players. The Sport Psychologist, 20, 314-329. http://tinyurl.com/jwt3k

Author weblink: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/carnegie/5013.htm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Exexcel]: A2, sports psychology; [OCR]: A2,
psychology and sport.

4. Your conscience really can be wiped clean

We talk about ?washing away? our sins and ?feeling dirty? after doing
something naughty, but is this just a quirk of our language, or are
moral and physical cleanliness really intertwined?

Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist first demonstrated that the two
concepts really are linked in our minds. Participants asked to recall a
recent unethical deed they had committed were subsequently more likely
to convert word fragments (e.g. W__H) into a cleansing-related word
(e.g. WASH vs. WISH) than were participants who recalled something
ethical they had done.

Furthermore, participants who recalled an unethical deed were more
likely than participants who recalled an ethical deed (67 per cent vs.
33 per cent), to choose an antiseptic wipe as a free gift rather than a
pencil.

And it seems physical cleansing can actually clear our moral conscience.
A different set of participants were again asked to describe something
unethical they had done in the past. Some of them were then offered an
antiseptic wipe to clean their hands. Next, all the participants were
asked to volunteer to help a research student who desperately needed
participants. Remarkably, fewer of the participants who?d wiped their
hands clean volunteered ? 41 per cent of them did compared with 74 per
cent of the participants who hadn?t cleaned their hands. Apparently,
their moral stains having been washed away, the participants who?d
cleaned their hands subsequently felt less of a compulsion to compensate
for their previous unethical deed.

The findings raise intriguing questions about the effect washing might
have on people?s future moral behaviour. ?Would cleansing ironically
license unethical behaviour??, the researchers asked. ?It remains to be
seen whether clean hands really do make a pure heart, but our studies
indicate that they at least provide a clean conscience after moral
trespass? they said.
__________________________________

Zhong, C-B. & Liljenquist, K. (2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened
morality and physical cleansing. Science, 313, 1451-1452.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5792/1451

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/ktpm7

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
pro- and anti-social behaviour; [SQA adv higher]: social psychology,
altrusim.

p.pete · 02-10-2006 1:36pm

5. Bullying still too narrowly defined by some teachers

A minority of teachers may still have an overly-narrow conception of
what constitutes bullying, according to Paul Naylor and colleagues. They
asked 225 teachers and 1,820 pupils (aged between 11 and 14) from 51
schools to write down what ?they think bullying is?. Despite the fact
the participating schools all had high-profile anti-bullying policies,
33 per cent of pupils and 10 per cent of teachers restricted their
definition to direct physical or verbal abuse, failing to mention issues
surrounding social exclusion, power imbalance, the bully?s intention to
cause hurt, or whether the bullying was repetitive.

?The finding that even in the schools involved in this study where
anti-bullying policies and practices are so high profile there are still
many teachers who are working with very limited conceptions of bullying
is cause for concern? the researchers said. ?It may be that researchers
have so far not been very successful in communicating their ideas about
bullying to teachers?.

Girl pupils were twice as likely as boys to mention social exclusion in
their definitions of bullying. Older pupils too tended to have a more
sophisticated conceptualisation of what bullying is. Overall though, the
pupils tended to give narrower definitions of bullying than teachers,
and they were particularly less likely to mention the effect of bullying
on the victim, all of which led the researchers to conclude that many
children may not realise they are being bullied. ?Adults who work with
child targets of bullying should listen not only to the child?s
allegations of the bully?s behaviour, but also to the effects that it
has on him or her? the researchers said.
___________________________________

Naylor, P., Cowie, H., Cossin, F., de Bettencourt, R. & Lemme, F.
(2006). Teachers? and pupils? definitions of bullying. British Journal
of Educational Psychology, 76, 553-576. http://tinyurl.com/fp8h6

Author weblink: http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/mh/cscr/staff/pn.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: A2 the psychology of education;
[OCR]: A2 psychology and education.

6. The way children with autism draw people

Drawings of humans by children with autism tend to lack variety,
researchers have found, possibly reflecting the unusual way they think
about and relate to other people.

Anthony Lee and Peter Hobson compared drawings by 14 autistic children
(aged 8 to 15) with drawings by 14 non-autistic children who were
learning disabled. When the children were asked to draw two houses
followed by their own house, they all tended to draw three houses each
looking different to the next. However, when the children were asked to
draw a female person, a male person and to also draw themselves, crucial
differences between the groups emerged ? the non-autistic children
tended to draw three distinct figures, but the autistic children tended
to draw three human figures that varied little from one to the other.
The autistic children?s drawings of people were just as detailed but
they lacked variation.

??[T]here is evidence that [autistic] children?s sense of individual
kinds and characters of people, and their concepts of themselves, are
less infused with personal qualities than are those of people without
autism ? and undifferentiated human figures would be one result?, the
researchers said.
___________________________________

Lee, A. & Hobson, R.P. (2006). Drawing self and others: How do children
with autism differ from those with learning difficulties? British
Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24, 547-565. http://tinyurl.com/fk56p

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 child development, exceptional
development, autism and learning difficulties; and see all exam board
child development modules, particularly in relation to the development
of theory of mind.

7. Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

'Spot the book' and 'Spot the country' - new tests for estimating
people's IQ prior to brain-related illness or injury.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2005.12.004

The brains of men and women differ in how they respond to images of
sexual and emotional infidelity.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.05.049

Predicting which students will have drink problems based on
psychological tests of mental control. http://tinyurl.com/jxb36

What is it like to discover you have mental deficits after suffering a
brain injury? http://tinyurl.com/zd93s

Using transcranial magnetic stimulation to improve memory function in
older adults. (open access). http://tinyurl.com/h3dt9

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email
Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

8. The Special Issue Spotter

Approaches to identifying students with specific learning difficulties.
(Psychology In The Schools).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112771141

Mental representations of childhood attachment. (Attachment and Human
Development). http://tinyurl.com/zffh6

Inhibition of return (we're slower to return our gaze to the same place
twice). (Cognitive Neuropsychology). http://tinyurl.com/zdlb8

The nature of music. (Cognition). http://tinyurl.com/h5k9k

Genes, brain and cognition - a roadmap for the cognitive neuroscientist.
(Cognition). http://tinyurl.com/jfoqj

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue,
please let me know - email Christian@psychologywriter.org.uk

p.pete · 02-10-2006 3:52pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 77 (2/10/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Get out of my cyberspace

If you thought online virtual worlds would be an easy-going utopia where
players cast aside their awkward real-world inhibitions, think again.
Online games like Second Life allow people to adopt an alternative
identity and interact with other players in a vast three-dimensional
world. But far from producing their own social rules, Nick Yee and
colleagues at Stanford University found behavioural patterns relating to
personal space and eye contact were observed in Second Life just as they
are in the real world.

Over seven weeks, the researchers recorded details of 835 unique
two-person interactions in Second Life, including the distance between
players? digital characters and whether they were directly facing each
other. The gender of the actual players was not taken into account ?
only that of their digital characters. Mirroring findings in the real
world, they found two characters of the same gender tended to keep a
greater distance between each other than two characters of the opposite
gender. Moreover, the closer two characters were, the less likely they
were to be directly facing each other ? reflecting a real-world
phenomenon, in which people tend to make less eye-contact the closer
together they are. Two men close together in an indoor environment were
the least likely to make eye contact.

The researchers said their findings suggested ?social interactions in
online virtual environments, such as Second Life, are governed by the
same social norms as social interactions in the physical world?. They
added this equivalence between worlds was great news for investigators
seeking to use online games as a route to researching social psychology
more generally. ?These online gaming environments are both a goldmine of
longitudinal social interaction data as well as experimental research
platforms that have a far larger population and broader demographic than
the typical undergraduate pool?, they said.
__________________________________

Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N. & Urbanek, M. (2006). The unbearable likeness
of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online
virtual environments. Cyberspace and Behaviour, In Press.
http://tinyurl.com/ru6jt

Author weblink: http://www.nickyee.com/
Second Life: http://secondlife.com/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
cultural and sub-cultural differences in relationships; [AQA spec B]: A2
module 4, contemporary topics in psychology, human relationships; [SQA
adv higher]: social psychology, social relationships.

2. Shadow illusion casts light on psychotic experience

A 22-year-old epilepsy sufferer with no known psychiatric problems has
described the eerie feeling that a shadow-like person is mimicking her
actions, when really no-one is there. She had the experience when, prior
to surgery, Swiss researchers applied electrical probes to the left
temperoparietal junction region of her brain. This area is known to be
involved in multisensory integration and in distinguishing the self from
others.

When the patient was lying down and the probe was applied, she felt as
though a figure was behind her. ?He is behind me, almost at my body, but
I do not feel it?, she said. When she sat upright and embraced her
knees, she described the unpleasant sensation that the shadow-like man
was now also sitting and was clasping her arms. During a language-task
in which she was asked to read out words on cards, she said ?He wants to
take the card; he doesn?t want me to read?.

The woman?s perceptions resemble those reported by some psychiatric and
neurological patients ? in particular she didn?t realise the figure was
an illusion of her own body ? and Shahar Arzy and colleagues concluded
their findings may help understand the mechanisms behind experiences
like paranoia and alien control. ?It is notable that hyperactivity in
the temporoparietal junction of patients with schizophrenia may lead to
the misattribution of their own actions to other people?, they said.

Incidentally, the practice of exploring brain function in epilepsy
suffers prior to surgery is hardly new ? the celebrated Canadian
neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield famously charted some of the first
somatosensory maps by observing patients? responses when he stimulated
parts of their exposed brain with an electric probe.
__________________________________

Arzy, S., Seeck, M., Ortigue, S., Spinelli, L. & Blanke, O. (2006).
Induction of an illusory shadow person. Nature, 443, 287.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7109/abs/443287a.html

Related Digest item:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2005/06/woman-in-mirror.html

Author weblink: http://lnco.epfl.ch/page58563.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual
differences, psychopathology, schizophrenia; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4,
atypical behaviour, schizophrenia; [Edexcel]: Unit 4a, clinical
psychology, specific mental disorders, schizophrenia; [SQA higher]:
domain individual differences, atypical behaviour, schizophrenia.

3. Why do people use complementary medicine?

From acupuncture to homeopathy, complementary medicine is increasingly
popular despite continuing doubts about its effectiveness. Now Felicity
Bishop and colleagues have used an internet survey to see if people who
use complementary medicine tend to think about health and illness is a
distinct way.

Of 247 participants who reported having a health problem, 62 per cent
said they were currently using a form of complementary medicine. Those
who said they believed in holistic health (e.g. by agreeing with
statements like ?treatments should focus on people?s overall
well-being?) were more likely to be currently using complementary
medicine. So too were those participants who believed that emotional
factors can cause illness, those who had a strong understanding of their
illness, and those who believed it had serious consequences.

?Having a strong understanding of one?s illness relates to the emphasis
found in a range of complementary and alternative medicine modalities on
the importance of the individual in health, illness and treatment, and
the concept of the illness as an opportunity for personal development
and learning?, the researchers said.

Using complementary medicine wasn?t necessarily associated with a
rejection of orthodox medicine. Participants who evaluated their GP more
positively were actually more likely to use ?mind-body? interventions
like meditation.

However, as acknowledged by the researchers, the results of this study
should be treated with caution ? the sample were largely well-educated
women who clearly had an interest in attitudes to complementary medicine
otherwise they wouldn?t have volunteered. Moreover, the study is
cross-sectional in design, meaning it?s possible the health-related
attitudes of the participants currently using complementary medicine
could have been caused by their use of those interventions rather than
the other way around.
__________________________________

Bishop, F.L., Yardley, L. & Lewith, G.T. (2006). Why do people use
different forms of complementary medicine? Multivariate associations
between treatment and illness beliefs and complementary medicine use.
Psychology and Health, 21, 683-698. http://tinyurl.com/h77lr

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/lzsgs

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: Unit 5 part a, applications of psychology, health psychology;
[OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

4. How much money to make you happy?

Who says money can?t buy you happiness? Economists Jonathan Gardner and
Andrew Oswald report that winners of a medium-sized prize of between
?1000 and ?120,000 on Britain?s National Lottery subsequently enjoyed a
significant improvement in their psychological well-being compared with
others who had only a small win, or no win at all. However, the benefit
wasn?t instantaneous, rather it took approximately two years to kick in
? probably, the researchers surmised, because it was the act of spending
the winnings, rather than the winning itself, that had a positive effect.

Gardner and Oswald made these observations after studying data collected
as part of the British Household Panel Survey, a project based on yearly
interviews with the same sample of over 10,000 people, conducted since
1991. The researchers had access to the participants? lottery winnings
and to their annual scores on a measure of psychological well-being
called the ?General Health Questionnaire?, which features items like
?Have you recently felt under constant strain?? or ?Have you recently
been feeling unhappy and depressed??.

One hundred and sixteen participants had had a win of over ?1000, and
changes in their psychological well-being were compared with 2943
winners of prizes smaller than ?1000, and with 9677 people who had no
win at all.

There were no well-being differences between groups in the year after a
win. But two years after a win, those participants who?d won a
medium-sized prize showed a positive change in psychological well-being
of 1.22 points compared with two years prior to their win. The small
prize winners and non-winners, by contrast, actually showed a drop in
psychological well-being of 0.18 points over the same time period, so
there was a relative difference between the groups of 1.4 points.

But what do these point differences mean in real life? Gardner and
Oswald said earlier research had found being widowed was associated with
an average drop in well-being of 5 points on the same measure, leading
them to conclude the 1.4 point positive change enjoyed by medium-sized
winners was worth writing home about - or in their words: ?economically
significant and not merely statistically significant?.
__________________________________

Gardner, J. & Oswald, A.J. (2006). Money and mental well-being: A
longitudinal study of medium-sized lottery wins. Journal of Health
Economics, In Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2006.08.004

Author weblink: http://www.andrewoswald.com/
The British Household Panel Survey: http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/ulsc/bhps/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Further reading: Kahneman, D. et al. (2006). Would you be happier if you
were richer? A focusing illusion. Science, 312, 1908-1910.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5782/1908

p.pete · 02-10-2006 3:53pm

5. Music training changes children's brains

Psychologists have discovered that musical training not only changes the
way young children?s brains respond to sounds ? it also boosts their
memory performance.

Takako Fujioka and colleagues looked at how the brains of 12 children
aged between 4 and 6 years responded to two sounds ? a violin tone and a
burst of white noise. The children were tested on four occasions over
the course of a year, during which time half of them received Suzuki
music tuition.

Our brains show a characteristic wave of activity in the auditory cortex
when we hear a sound. Using magnetoencephalography, the researchers
found that in the children?s brains, this pattern of activity changed
over the course of a year, probably reflecting the maturation of their
brains. But crucially, there was an aspect of this changing brain
response ? between 100 and 400ms after hearing a sound ? that
distinguished between the groups. In the untrained children the
altered response was observed in both cerebral hemispheres and after
hearing either the white noise or violin. But in the musically trained
children, the change was localised to the left hemisphere and was
specific to the violin.

?Musical training resulted in specific changes in the responses to
musical sounds but not to responses to noise stimuli, probably
reflecting the development of neuronal networks specialised for
important sounds experienced in the environment?, the researchers said.

Moreover, from the beginning of the year to the end, the musically
trained children, but not the untrained children, showed an improvement
in their memory span for numbers. ?It suggests that musical training is
having an effect on how the brain gets wired for general cognitive
functioning related to memory and attention? said co-researcher Laurel
Trainor. ?It is clear that music is good for children's cognitive
development and that music should be part of the pre-school and primary
school curriculum? Takako Fujioka added.
___________________________________

Fujioka, T., Ross, B., Kakigi, R., Pantev, C. & Trainor, L.J. (2006).
One year of musical training affects development of auditory
cortical-evoked fields in young children. Brain, 129, 2593-2608.
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/awl247

Author weblink: http://www.psychology.mcmaster.ca/ljt/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [Edexcel]: A2 the psychology of education;
[OCR]: A2 psychology and education.

6. 'Senior moments' could be an early warning sign

They are often jokingly dismissed as ?senior moments?, but older
people?s concerns about their memory should perhaps be taken more seriously.

Andrew Saykin and colleagues scanned the brains of 40 people who
complained about their memory, but who scored normally on
neuropsychological tests ? all were aged 60 or over. The imaging
revealed they had reduced brain cell density in their frontal and
temporal lobes when compared with 40 healthy controls with no memory
complaints. Moreover, their cell loss was very similar to that observed
in 40 people diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment ? a condition that
is associated with poor scores on neuropsychological tests, and with
increased risk of full-blown dementia.

?These findings highlight the importance of cognitive complaints in the
clinical evaluation of older adults and suggest that those who present
with significant cognitive complaints warrant evaluation and close
monitoring over time?, the researchers said.

However, the researchers noted that their sample mostly consisted of
highly educated participants who had above average baseline abilities,
so it?s possible that not everyone will go through a phase of feeling
their memory is worsening, even while performing normally on tests.
?High baseline functioning or cognitive reserve may buffer the effects
of brain pathology on cognition?, they said.
___________________________________

Saykin, A.J., Wishart, H.A., Rabin, L.A., Santulli, R.B., Flashman,
L.A., West, J.D., McHugh, T.L. & Mamourian, A.C. (2006). Older adults
with cognitive complaints show brain atrophy similar to that of amnestic
MCI. Neurology, 67, 834-842.
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/67/5/834

Editor's note: Don't be overly alarmed by this study - memory
difficulties can be caused by a range of factors, including stress and
tiredness. However, if you're worried about your memory, you should
consult your doctor.

Author weblink: http://synapse.hitchcock.org/bios/saykin.shtml

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: Memory is covered by all the exam boards in
their cognitive psychology modules

7. Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Suicidal young people often believe professional psychological help will
be useless. Could films that feature suicidal or mentally disturbed
characters reinforce this belief?
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2005.11.007

The political psychology of leadership successions. PS. No experiments
here, just discussion. http://tinyurl.com/lts8p

The legal implications of the link between antidepressant use and
violence. http://tinyurl.com/j39qe

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email
christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

8. The Special Issue Spotter

How people's performance on neuropsychological tests varies around the
world. (International Journal of Psychology). http://tinyurl.com/pxdmj

Disrupting the Dynamics of Oppression in Intercultural Research
and Practice. (Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/113374373

Research inspired by Thomas C. Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize for
Economics last year "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict
and cooperation through game-theory analysis". (Journal of Economic
Psychology). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01674870

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue,
please let me know - email christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

p.pete · 02-11-2006 12:47pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 79 (18/10/06) [Issue 78 seems to be missing...]
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. The brain's great connector

Pick two people off the street at random, put them in a brain scanner,
and look at the thickness of their corpus callosums – that’s the massive
bundle of nerve fibres that connects the two halves of the brain. In all
likelihood, you’ll find it’s much thicker in one person than the other.
Indeed, some people can have up to three times as many nerve fibres in
their corpus callosum compared with the next person.

According to Bruce Morton and Stein Rafto, psychologists used to think
callosum thickness was largely explained by gender and left or right
handedness. For example, one theory had it that men have a thinner
connection between their hemispheres, thus causing them to have more
specialised brains suitable for maths and the like. But literally
hundreds of papers have now been published on the topic and the results
have been completely inconsistent – some showing men have thinner
hemispheric connectivity, others showing the opposite.

Morton and Rafto think these inconsistent findings are due to the fact
callosum thickness is related to hemisphericity – which side of a
person’s brain is dominant – irrespective of sex or handedness. To test
this, they scanned the brains of 113 participants who also completed
several tests of hemisphericity. These look not at handedness, but
rather at which side of the brain is dominant. For example, one test
measures whether a participant is more accurate at marking the exact
mid-point of a line with their left or their right hand.

Morton And Rafto found the thickness of the callosum varied little
between the sexes or between the left and right-handers (less than 3 per
cent difference in each case), but varied significantly according
hemisphericity, with right-brain dominant participants having a 10 per
cent thicker callosum on average.

Thickness of the callosum was also independently related to something
called ‘dichotic deafness’, a common characteristic of people with a
left-hemisphere dominant brain . This is the inability of some people to
hear two sounds presented simultaneously, when one sound is played to
one ear and the other sound to the other ear. Such people can only hear
the sound played to their ‘dominant’ ear, and Morton and Rafto found
they too tended to have a thinner corpus callosum.

The results suggest that men and women with a left-hemisphere dominant
brain have a thinner corpus callosum and so have less cross-talk between
their two hemispheres. Besides dichotic deafness, the practical
implications of a thin callosum are unknown. However, it doesn’t seem
associated with intelligence – the two participants in this study with
the thinnest corpus callosums and the two with the thickest, were all
university professors with doctoral degrees.
_________________________________

Morton, B.E. & Rafto, S.E. (2006). Corpus callosum size is linked to
dichotic deafness and hemisphericity, not sex or handedness. Brain and
Cognition, 62, 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2006.03.001

Author weblink: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bemorton/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus:[AQA spec A]: A2 module 4,
physiological psychology; [Edexcel]: AS unit 2, the physiological
approach; [AQA spec B]: AS module 1, the biological approach,
physiological psychology; [OCR]: AS core studies, physiological
psychology; [SQA adv higher]: biological psychology.

2. Are mental disorders real?

How do the public view mental disorders? Do they see them as real
entities with some kind of essence, or do they see them as the invention
of human culture? And how does their take differ from that of mental
health professionals?

To find out, Woo-kyoung Ahn and colleagues asked 30 university
undergrads and 30 experts to answer questions about the nature of a
selection of familiar and unfamiliar psychiatric diagnoses, such as ADHD
and undifferentiated somatoform disorder, as well as about familiar and
unfamiliar medical/physical disorders, such as high blood pressure and
nephritic syndrome.

In general, the students and experts believed mental disorders were less
‘real’ than medical disorders. For example, most of the participants
agreed that you either have a medical disorder or you don’t, but that
this isn’t true for mental disorders (although a third of the experts
felt it was). The experts and students also believed more strongly that
medical disorders exist ‘naturally’ in the world, than do mental
disorders. The familiarity of conditions didn’t make any difference to
the participants’ views.

There were also differences between the groups. The students believed
both medical and mental disorders have causal features that have to be
removed for successful treatment, but the experts only felt this way
about medical disorders. Perhaps, the researchers said, “experts’
knowledge about symptom-oriented treatment plans or the lack of agreed
upon aetiology [i.e. causes] might have made them more sceptical about
mental disorders”.

Ahn and colleagues concluded that these issues could have practical
implications: “patients, unlike therapists, may believe a single thing
can be changed to cure their mental disorders and therefore might not
follow multifaceted treatment plans developed by clinicians believing in
complexly caused mental disorders”.

The findings come after a group of mental health professionals in the UK
recently called for the abolition of the term ‘schizophrenia’, arguing
that it is scientifically meaningless.
__________________________________

Ahn, W-K., Flanagan, E.H., Marsh, J.K. & Sanislow, C.A. (2006). Beliefs
about essences and the reality of mental disorders. Psychological
Science, 17, 759-766. http://tinyurl.com/gq4ju

Author weblink: http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Ahn.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2, psychology of atypical
behaviour; [Edexcel]: A2 clinical psychology; [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5,
individual differences, psychopathology; [SQA higher]:
domain individual differences, atypical behaviour.

3. They didn't even say thank you

You sacrificed your Saturday afternoon, you faced the high-street
crowds, but after unwrapping the present you so generously bought for
them, they didn’t even say thank you.

According to Catherine Roster of the University of New Mexico, when it
comes to the future of your relationship with them, that’s the worst
thing an unhappy gift recipient can do.

Roster interviewed 186 people who were able to recall a recent occasion
when they gave someone a present that they clearly didn’t like. From
frowns and false smiles, to never seeing the gift again, Roster
identified several means by which participants recognised their gift had
been unsuccessful. But of these indicators, a failure to say thank you
was the only one that was reliably associated with how detrimental
participants said the incident would be to the future of their
relationship. Moreover, in an open-ended part of the interview, when
participants were asked how the ungrateful friend or relative could have
made things better, over half said expressing thanks would have done the
trick, even if it clearly wasn’t genuine.

“She could’ve done what the entire family does when opening gifts –
acted disgustingly gracious and forget about it”, said one participant.

Roster also found that more distant relationships – such as between work
colleagues as opposed to relatives – and relationships that participants
said were already of poorer quality, were the more likely to be harmed
by the unsuccessful gift exchange.
_________________________________

Roster, C.A. (2006). Moments of truth in gift exchanges: A critical
analysis of communication indicators used to detect gift failure.
Psychology and marketing, 23, 885-903. http://tinyurl.com/s696e

Author weblink: http://marketing.mgt.unm.edu/vita/croster.pdf

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
relationships; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, option - contemporary topics
in psychology, human relationships.

4. Reading novels linked with increased empathy

"'Oh! it is only a novel!' or, in short, only some work in which the
most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its
varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are to be conveyed
to the world in the best chosen language." From Northanger Abbey (1818)
by Jane Austen.

The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the
better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By
contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite
association. That’s according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say
their finding could have implications for educating children and adults
about understanding others.

Finding out how much people read is always difficult because it’s
socially desirable for people to report that they read a lot. Mar and
colleagues avoided this by asking 94 participants to identify the names
of fiction and non-fiction authors embedded in a long list of names that
also included non-authors. Prior research has shown this test correlates
well with how much people actually read. Among the authors listed were
Matt Ridley, Naomi Wolf (non-fiction), Toni Morrison and PD James
(fiction).

The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher
they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of
empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a
picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s
perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite
association.

The researchers surmised that reading fiction could improve people’s
social awareness via at least two routes – by exposing them to concrete
social knowledge concerning the way people behave, and by allowing them
to practise inferring people’s intentions and monitoring people’s
relationships. Non-fiction readers, by contrast, “fail to simulate such
experiences, and may accrue a social deficit in social skills as a
result of removing themselves from the actual social world”.

However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has
not been established – it might simply be that more empathic people
prefer reading novels.
___________________________________

Mar, R.A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J. & Peterson, J.B. (2006).
Bookworms versus nerds: exposure to fiction versus non-fiction,
divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of
fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40,
694-712. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.002

Author weblink: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~raymond/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
pro- and anti-social behaviour, altruism and empathy; [SQA adv higher]:
social psychology, altruism and empathy.

5. Skydiving used to mimic effect of trauma on memory

Following a traumatic experience, people often have a persistent, yet
strangely incomplete, memory for what happened to them. One explanation
is that in times of hyper-arousal, such as during trauma, our attention
becomes extremely focused on the most relevant details of what’s
happening, thus impairing our memory for more peripheral aspects.

To test this idea, Tamara Cavenett and Reginald Nixon recruited a group
of 70 skydivers. Half of them learned a list of words in the relative
calm of the waiting room prior to a later jump, whereas the other half
learned the words while 10,000 feet up in the plane, just before making
their skydive. Some of the words were related to skydiving (e.g.
parachute), others weren’t (e.g. lamp). The rationale was that the
hyper-arousal experienced by the latter group would serve as simulation
of the extreme arousal experienced during trauma.

As the researchers expected, at a test later in the day, the
participants in the plane subsequently remembered just as many words as
the participants in the waiting room. However, crucially, there was a
difference in the kind of words most often remembered by the two groups.
Compared with the participants who studied the word list in the waiting
room, the participants who studied the list in the plane tended to
recall fewer of the words that had nothing to do with skydiving, but
they remembered more of the words related to skydiving. Recordings of
the participants’ heartbeat confirmed the participants in the plane had
experienced increased arousal while learning the words, whereas the
other participants hadn’t.

The researchers said the findings could help explain the experiences of
people who suffer trauma. “Selective processing of relevant details may
explain the high incidence of vivid flashbacks and re-experiencing of
the traumatic event. Additionally, the inattention to the irrelevant
details may account for the overall incomplete and fragmented memory of
the trauma often associated with the disorder [PTSD]”.
_________________________________

Cavenett, T. & Nixon, R.D.V. (2006). The effect of arousal on memory for
emotionally-relevant information: A study of skydivers. Behaviour
Research and Therapy, 44, 1461-1469.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.11.002

Author weblink: http://www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/psyc/staff/RegNixon/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A] and [AQA spec B]: see
psychopathology/ atypical psychology modules covering PTSD.

p.pete · 02-11-2006 12:48pm

6. Developing countries' poor life expectancy attributed to low IQ

People in countries with a large gap between the rich and poor have
short life expectancies, not because of the economic inequality and lack
of resources, but rather because they are unintelligent. That’s the
controversial claim of Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of
Economics, who has used data from the UN and World Bank to look at the
associations between average life expectancy, prosperity and economic
inequality within over 120 countries around the world.

The economic historian Richard Wilkinson has argued that economic
inequality leads to shorter life expectancy because being at the bottom
of the social pile puts people under prolonged stress. But Kanazawa
rejects this hypothesis. He argues his data show that once population IQ
is taken into account, a country’s average life expectancy is no longer
related to economic development and inequality. Indeed, he found IQ was
between seven and eight times more strongly related to life-expectancy
than were measures of income inequality.

Kanazawa’s theory is that what we refer to as IQ is effectively a
measure of people’s ability to adapt to evolutionarily new threats and
demands. Populations with a higher IQ are, he argues, better able to
deal with contemporary hazards like guns, cars, sedentary lifestyles (by
having the sense to exercise), and drugs and alcohol – thus living
longer. And he rejects the notion that IQ is simply an indirect measure
of economic wealth via improved education. Intelligence, he argues, is
largely genetically determined.

To support his case further, Kanazawa also focused on 29 sub-Saharan
countries which have changed little since ancient times. In these
countries where modern threats are absent, Kanazawa found IQ is not
related to life-expectancy whereas income inequality is.

Kanazawa’s findings come after a recent Scottish study reported a
positive association between intelligence and longevity, and another
study that found less obese men were more intelligent than their obese
peers.

“These results point to the need for epidemiologists and health
psychologists to pay closer attention to the role of general
intelligence in health and longevity. General intelligence may be the
key that allows individuals in evolutionarily novel contemporary society
to recognise health risks and deal with them appropriately”, he concluded.
___________________________________

Kanazawa, S. (2006). Mind the gap…in intelligence: Re-examining the
relationship between inequality and health. British Journal of Health
Psychology, 11, 623-642. http://tinyurl.com/yjsrab

Author weblink: http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/s.kanazawa@lse.ac.uk/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, developmental
psychology, development of measured intelligence, the role of genetics
and environmental factors.

7. Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

The role of auditory 'mirror neurons' in human empathy. In monkeys these
cells are activated both when a certain action is performed and when the
sound of that action is heard. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.07.072

Counsellors need to find ways to get clients to talk about difficult
experiences they've had with therapy.
http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=m58p52915r736575

How the presence of an audience changes participants' brain response to
stories of social or moral transgressions.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.06.011

What factors affect how much interest and involvement people have in the
arts? http://tinyurl.com/yy3m8t

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email
christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

8. The Special Issue Spotter

Childhood development disorders. (Nature Neuroscience).
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v9/n10/index.html

Judgment and decision-making in sport and exercise. (Psychology of Sport
and Exercise). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/14690292

Race, ethnicity and culture in child development. (Child Development).
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/cdev/77/5

Integration of cognitive assessment and response to intervention - Part
II. (Psychology in the Schools).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/32084

Music and the brain. (Brain).
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol129/issue10/index.dtl

Malingering. (Behavioural Sciences and the Law).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/113385512

Chronic pain. (Journal of Clinical Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/31171

Modelling the mind. (Science).
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol314/issue5796

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue,
please let me know - email christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

9. Elsewhere

For when you've had enough of journal articles:

The sleeping pill that is awakening coma patients.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1870171,00.html

The lady who changed her husband's behaviour using animal training
techniques (free registration required).
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25love.html

Does neuroscience hold the key to the placebo effect?
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX033590.html

What happened when the psychiatrist went for psychoanalysis?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1920517,00.html

p.pete · 06-11-2006 4:08pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 80 (2/11/06) [Issue 78 seems to be missing...]
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Take another look at the Digest blog

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

Items from the Research Digest are also published online at the Digest
blog, in colour, with images and extra links to further info. You can
also comment on the research we've featured, and you'll find links there
to other psychology blogs. Following an upgrade you can also now use the
blog to browse past items by category, as well as by date of
publication. Over 300 people are currently visiting the blog everyday.
Go on, have a look and let me know what you think - how else could it be
improved? Email christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

2. Why it's so hard to find a blue banana

We like to think we see things how they are. Often, however, what we
actually see is based less on the outside world and more on what our
brain expects to be there, like a kind of mentally-generated virtual
reality.

Now psychologists in Germany have demonstrated this in an elegant
experiment involving people’s memory for the colour of everyday fruit
and vegetables.

Karl Gegenfurtner and colleagues presented 14 participants with
strangely coloured fruits on a computer screen – for example a pink
banana – against a grey background. The participants’ task was to adjust
the colour of the onscreen banana until it blended exactly with the grey
background. It sounds easy, but the participants couldn’t do it because
as they adjusted the colour, they compensated not just for the banana’s
actual pink pigmentation, but also for a yellowness that only existed in
their mind, thus leaving the banana with a slight bluish hue. That is,
their memory for the typical colour of a banana was interfering with
their performance.

By contrast, the participants didn’t have any trouble adjusting the
colour of anonymous spots of light to make them blend in with the grey
background – thus suggesting it wasn’t some quirk of the experimental
set-up that was causing the participants difficulties with the fruit and
veg.

Moreover, when presented with a banana that had been correctly adjusted
to perfectly blend in with the grey background, the participants
reported that it looked slightly yellow – a percept generated by their
own mind, not by the actual colour of the banana.

“Our results show a high-level cognitive effect on low-level perceptual
mechanisms”, the researchers said.
_________________________________

Hansen, T., Olkkonen, M., Walter, S. & Gegenfurtner, K.R. (2006). Memory
modulates colour appearance. Nature Neuroscience, DOI:10.1038/nn1794.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v9/n11/abs/nn1794.html

Author weblink: http://www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/karl/karl.html

Related review paper: http://www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/karl/pdf/42.nrn.pdf

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive
psychology, visual perception, constructivist theories; [AQA spec B] AS
module 2, cognitive psychology, perception; [SQA adv higher]: cognitive
psychology, perception, constructivist theories.

3. Are you tuned into your heartbeat?

You’ve probably been there – waiting for an interview, palms sweaty,
heartbeat pounding… or perhaps not, maybe you don’t tend to hear your
heartbeat. It’s increasingly being recognised that people differ in how
much attention they pay to their internal bodily sensations, and that
people who suffer from panic attacks probably pay more attention than most.

Rachel Pollock and colleagues recruited 136 participants and identified
34 of them who reported being particularly afraid of anxiety-related
symptoms and 31 who were unbothered by them. They played the
participants the sounds of either normal or abnormal, palpitating
heartbeats against varying degrees of background white noise.

In trials containing normal heartbeats only, the more anxious
participants were, as expected, just as good at detecting them, but
crucially, they also tended to report hearing a heartbeat when there
wasn’t one – far more often than the non-anxious participants did.

Less expected was the observation that the more anxious participants
were actually poorer at detecting abnormal heartbeats – the researchers
think this might be because the sound of an abnormal heartbeat triggered
a fearful response in the anxious participants, thus compromising their
performance.

Finally, given a mixture of normal and abnormal heartbeats, the anxious
participants showed a greater tendency to mistake a normal heartbeat for
an abnormal one.

Prior research has suggested panic attacks can be triggered by the
catastrophic misperception of a normal heartbeat. Given this, the
researchers said the current findings suggest people who fear anxiety
symptoms may have a particular vulnerability for panic because of the
way they perceive heartbeats.
__________________________________

Pollock, R.A., Carter, A.S., Amir, N. & Marks, L.E. (2006). Anxiety
sensitivity and auditory perception of heartbeat. Behaviour Research and
Therapy, 44, 1739-1756. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.12.013

Author weblink: http://pngu.mgh.harvard.edu/staff/staffPollock.php

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual
differences, psychopathology, anxiety disorders ; [AQA spec B]: A2
module 4, psychology of atypical behaviour option, anxiety disorders;
[Edexcel]: A2 unit 4 clinical psychology, anxiety disorders.

4. Visual skills could hold key to boosting people's work confidence

Past research looking at mental faculties and work ability has taken the
approach you’d expect – participants are asked to complete tests of
memory, language, attention and so on, and their performance on those
measures is then compared with how well they get on at work. This
approach has identified IQ, memory and executive function as being the
faculties most strongly associated with work performance.

But rather than looking at actual work ability, Johnny Wen and
colleagues have examined which mental skills are most strongly
associated with a person’s confidence in their ability to work.

Seventy-three participants were recruited from an outpatient medical
centre – most were of low socioeconomic status, 89 per cent were out of
work, and many were suffering from psychological or medical problems
(patients with dementia or a profoundly low IQ had already been
omitted). Participants completed a raft of neuropsychological tests and
then answered questions about their attitudes to work and their beliefs
in their work skills.

Of all the mental faculties tested, it was only the participants’
performance on tests of visual skill that was consistently related to
their overall belief in their work ability. That is, the better a
participant’s visual skills, the more confident they were likely to be
in their ability to work. Visual skills were tested by asking
participants to re-draw a complex figure, or to re-create a figure using
blocks.

Considering their participants were largely unemployed and relatively
unskilled, the researchers surmised “Perhaps this population views
visual constructional skills which are required for common skilled jobs,
such as carpentry, plumbing… as a tangible measure of greater
employability…”.

The researchers added that their results “raise the intriguing
possibility that targeting of visual spatial skills for remediation and
development might play a separate and unique role in the vocational
rehabilitation of a lower socioeconomic status population” by boosting
their confidence in their own employability.
_________________________________

Wen, J.H., Boone, K. & Kim, K. (2006). Ecological validity of
neuropsychological assessment and perceived employability. Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 28, 1423-1434.
http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=h520648403pv3x46

Author weblink: http://www.education.pitt.edu/people/KevinKim/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: In the A-level syllabus:[OCR]: A2, psychology
and organisations.

5. It's not always beneficial to feel in control of your illness

Feeling in control of your illness is normally considered a good thing –
research shows it means you’re more likely to take constructive,
pro-active steps to cope and more likely to engage in health-promoting
behaviours.

But now Carolyn Fang and colleagues have looked at the specific case of
women who are at dramatically increased risk of developing ovarian
cancer because they have one or more close relatives with the disease.
Fang’s team found those women who felt more in control of the
possibility of developing cancer, and who actively engaged in
problem-focused coping strategies, actually suffered more distress over
time and were less likely to attend ovarian cancer screening.

Why might this be? Possibly because feeling in control is only
beneficial if it matches reality. Unfortunately, there is currently
little that a woman at risk of hereditary ovarian cancer can do to
protect herself against developing the disease. “The subgroup of women
who perceived high control and reported high levels of problem-focused
coping may have become increasingly more distressed if their efforts to
reduce or manage their cancer risk did not lead to actual changes in
risk”, the researchers said.

Consistent with this, the women in this study who felt in control, but
who didn’t pursue problem-focused coping strategies, did not experience
increased distress over time – perhaps because they were “not faced with
their subsequent failure to control or alter the health threat”.

But why would the women with high-perceived control and active coping
strategies be less likely to attend cancer screening? Perhaps because of
the increased distress they were experiencing – this would fit with past
research. The researchers said “Health professionals should be aware
that, although some women may appear to be actively coping with and
managing their cancer risk well, [they] may be less likely to adhere to
recommended ovarian cancer-screening regimens”.

The findings come from a three month follow-up of 80 women enrolled on a
family risk assessment programme at a cancer centre, all of whom had one
or more immediate relatives with ovarian cancer.
___________________________________

Fang, C.Y., Daly, M.B., Miller, S.M., Zerr, T., Malick, J. & Engstrom,
P. (2006). Coping with ovarian cancer risk: The moderating effects of
perceived control on coping an adjustment. British Journal of Health
Psychology, 11, 561-580. http://tinyurl.com/yk422j

Author weblink: http://www.fccc.edu/research/pid/fang

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2
module 4, health psychology; [Edexcel]: Unit 5 part a, applications of
psychology, health psychology; [OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

6. So-called 'implicit' test of attitudes is affected by social desirability

A perennial problem with asking people about their views is that they
are likely to moderate their answers to make them socially acceptable.
The ‘implicit association test’ (IAT) is supposed to get round that
problem by tapping into people’s deep-held attitudes below the level of
their conscious control. But now Guy Boysen and colleagues report that
the IAT is also affected by what is socially acceptable.

Boysen’s team used the IAT to measure participants’ attitudes toward
homosexuality. Participants responded to pictures of gay and straight
couples and pleasant and unpleasant words as fast as possible using two
keys. In one condition, the same key was pressed in response to the
sight of gay couples and unpleasant words, with another key used to
respond to straight couples or pleasant words. A homophobic person would
be expected to respond more quickly in this condition because the key
pairings are consistent with their attitudes, but more slowly in a
second condition in which the same key is allocated to gay couples and
pleasant words, with another key for straight couples/ unpleasant words.

Over one hundred and fifty straight students performed this test, with
half told their responses would be kept private and the others told the
researchers would see the results. If the test is truly implicit, the
participants shouldn’t have been able to moderate their performance.
However, the researchers found the participants who believed their
results would be public showed a significantly reduced bias against
homosexuals compared with the participants who thought their results
would be private.

So the IAT can be affected by social desirability, but does this happen
deliberately or at a subconscious level? In a second experiment, all the
participants were told their results would be seen by the researchers.
Crucially, however, half were also told physiological measures taken
afterwards would reveal whether they had tried to fake their results to
make them more acceptable. If moderation of the IAT is under deliberate
control, participants subjected to this latter manipulation should have
been put off faking their attitudes, but actually there was no
difference between the groups. This suggests social desirability can
affect the IAT, but only at a subconscious level beyond participants'
control.
_________________________________

Boysen, G.A., Vogel, D.L. & Madon, S. (2006). A public versus private
administration of the implicit association test. European Journal of
Social Psychology, 36, 845-856.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112478310/ABSTRACT

Author weblink: http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/~dvogel/

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
social cognition, prejudice and discrimination; [AQA spec B]: AS module
2,social psychology, attitudes, prejudice and discrimination;
[Edexcel]:AS unit 1, the social approach, in-depth area of study,
obedience and prejudice; [SQA higher]: the individual in the social
context, domain social psychology, prejudice; [SQA adv higher]: social
psychology, prejudice.

p.pete · 06-11-2006 4:09pm

7. Anyone remember what Chandler's job was in the sitcom Friends?

It can be so embarrassing when you bump into a person you haven’t seen
for years – you recognise them, you even remember lots of things about
them like their job…but you just can’t quite recall their name.

This phenomenon has been replicated in the psychology lab countless
times and explained by that staple of the undergraduate psychology diet
– the Bruce and Young serial model of face recognition – which states
names are stored separately from other knowledge about a person, and
that names can only be retrieved after enough of that knowledge has been
accessed.

But now Lesley Calderwood and Mike Burton have challenged this account.
They’ve shown that for people who we’re extremely familiar with, we’re
actually quicker to recall their name than other information about them.

They recruited 24 undergrads who confessed to being hard-core fans of
the American sitcom Friends, watching approximately two hours of it per
week. Participants first read aloud the names and occupations of the six
main characters. Next they were shown the faces of the characters and in
one condition had to name them as fast as possible, and in another they
had to state their occupation as quick as they could. They were faster
at naming the characters than stating their occupation.

The researchers also repeated this observation with children, using
pictures of the children’s classmates. The children were quicker to
name their classmates than say which maths group they were in.

“One reason why the name disadvantage may be reversed for highly
familiar faces is the frequency with which their names are retrieved in
our day-to-day lives”, Calderwood and Burton explained. This also
applies to programmes we watch regularly. “We are much more likely to
have heard the [characters’] names Ross and Rachel than to have heard
about their jobs over the years of watching Friends”, they said.

The finding supports parallel models of face processing which don’t
propose information about a person is accessed in a sequential manner.

Oh and in case you were wondering, Chandler was apparently in advertising.
___________________________________

Calderwood, L. & Burton, A.M. (2006). Children and adults recall the
names of highly familiar faces faster than semantic information. British
Journal of Psychology, 97, 441-454. http://tinyurl.com/y2mafu

Author weblink: http://www.psychology.stir.ac.uk/staff/lcalderwood/index.php

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA A spec A]: A2 module 4, cognitive
psychology, pattern recognition, theories of face recognition; [AQA spec
B]: AS module 2, cognitive psychology, cognition and law, face recognition.

8. Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

The right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a vital role in our
willingness to punish unfair behaviour by others, even at a cost to
ourselves. http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1129156v1

The boundaries between different colours are arbitrary - determined by
which wavelengths we decide to allocate labels to. It seems different
cultures around the world slice colour up in the same way. (Open access)
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/44/16608

Men maybe more vulnerable than women to depression if their spouse
suffers cognitive decline.
http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=j78tl066h7485276

Dyslexic students may be particularly prone to anxiety.
http://tinyurl.com/ycjmxq

Should you reveal information about yourself when you're negotiating?
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112557865/ABSTRACT

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email
christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

9. The Special Issue Spotter

Inequality and injustice: implications (Cognitive Development).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/08852014

Neuroimaging. (The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry).
Forthcoming at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/JCPP

Memory and Psi. (European Journal of Parapsychology).
Forthcoming at http://ejp.org.uk/

Magda B. Arnold's contributions to emotion research and theory.
(Cognition and Emotion).
http://www.journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=h5p1414g8878

Visual search and attention. (Visual Cognition).
http://www.journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=j422430r6175

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue,
please let me know - email christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk

10. Elsewhere

For when you've had enough of journal articles:

The curse of the yips. http://tinyurl.com/y54neh

Apparently, it's now good to push your kids to excel.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1890325,00.html

The psychology of fairground rides. http://tinyurl.com/yxv3p4

How to be a good journal referee. http://tinyurl.com/y6mpfr

How to win the Nobel prize. http://tinyurl.com/vtl3c

Nature Neuroscience launches a podcast:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/podcast/index.html

Do microexpressions reveal what we're really feeling?
http://tinyurl.com/ycfesa

Gestures lend a vital hand to communication.
http://tinyurl.com/yk4ust

Are best friends a dying species?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2415885,00.html

p.pete · 25-11-2006 8:14pm

BPS Research Digest Issue 80 (16/11/06)
http://www.researchdigest.org.uk

1. Electric stimulation during sleep boosts memory

Having a nap is a great way to consolidate your memory for what you’ve
just learnt. Now it appears researchers have found a way to boost this
beneficial effect.

A control condition confirmed the benefits of sleep: 13 participants
remembered an average of 37.42 words in a memory task before sleep,
compared with 39.5 on waking. On another occasion with a different set
of words, Jan Born and colleagues applied an oscillating electrical
current through the participants’ skulls just as they were entering a
period of slumber known as slow wave sleep. In this case the
participants recalled an average of 36.5 words before sleep, compared
with 41.27 words when they were tested on waking – a larger benefit than
in the control condition.

"This improvement in retention following stimulation is striking
considering that most subjects were medical students, who were highly
trained in memorising facts and already performed well in the sham
[control] condition", the researchers said.

During slow wave sleep, populations of neurons oscillate between
activity and rest, and the application of an oscillating electric
current at this time seemed to accentuate the process. The stimulation
also caused more sleep spindles – these are bursts of activity that the
researchers said could have led to a strengthening of the synaptic
connections involved in memory.

Crucially, the stimulation didn’t boost the participants’ memory when it
was given at a different frequency or at a different time (just before
waking). It also didn’t help participants’ ability to learn patterns of
finger movements. Such a task depends on procedural memory as opposed to
the declarative memory tested by the word task. "Our results indicate
that slow oscillations have a causal role in consolidating
hippocampus-dependent memories during sleep", the researchers said.
_________________________________

Marshall, L., Helgadottir, H., Molle, M. & Born, J. (2006). Boosting
slow oscillations during sleep potentiates memory. Nature, DOI:
10.1038/nature05278.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature05278.html

Author weblink: http://www.kfg.uni-luebeck.de/html/gb/born.htm

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, physiological
psychology, biological rhythms, sleep and dreaming; [Edexcel]: the
physiological approach, states of awareness; [OCR]: AS core studies,
physiological psychology, sleep states; [SQA adv higher]: biological
psychology, awareness, sleep and dreaming.

2. Getting families to turn off the TV

Barely a day goes by that obesity isn’t mentioned in the British media –
indeed, news reports suggest we’re now the fattest nation in Europe and
our children the laziest.

One alleged culprit is TV, with a 2005 BMJ report finding that
three-year-olds who watch more than eight hours TV week are at increased
risk of obesity (http://tinyurl.com/ybu5yo). Interventions aimed at
reducing TV watching in children have met with some success; now Amy
Gorin and colleagues at the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Centre
in America have piloted what they say is the first intervention
targeting the whole family.

The typical TV viewing habits of six families were monitored over four
days using commercially available devices (http://www.tvallowance.com/)
connected between the families’ TVs and their power supplies. For eight
weeks these same devices were then used to limit the families’ TV
viewing to 75 per cent of their typical amount. To complement this, the
families were also sent a pack full of advice on ways for the family to
watch less TV and suggestions for alternative activities.

After eight weeks, the TV viewing restriction was removed, and the time
the families spent watching TV was again recorded for four days and
compared with their original habits. The families had originally watched
an average of 7.45 hours per day, but at follow up, this was reduced to
an average of 3.73 hours. All the families said they would
recommend using the ‘TV Allowance’ devices.

The researchers said more work was needed to establish whether this
improvement would be seen long-term, and whether the participants health
had benefited from the intervention or whether instead they had simply
switched from watching TV to another sedentary activity.
__________________________________

Gorin, A., Raynor, H., Chula-Maguire, K. & Wing, R. (2006). Decreasing
household television time: A pilot study of a combined behavioural and
environmental intervention. Behavioural Interventions, 21, 273-280.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112772173/ABSTRACT

Author weblink:
http://www.lifespan.org/behavmed/corefacultypages/a%20gorin.htm

Link to international campaign against TV:
http://www.whitedot.org/issue/iss_front.asp

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4, health psychology;
[Edexcel]: Unit 5 part a, applications of psychology, health psychology;
[OCR]: A2 psychology and health.

3. Seeing others as less than human

A satisfactory psychological explanation for man’s inhumanity to man –
the genocides, the serial murders – may always be beyond reach. But
surely at the heart of any attempt at explanation will be the idea that
the purveyors of these atrocities come to see their victims as somehow
less than human. Indeed, perhaps we are all capable of seeing those who
we are most prejudiced against as not quite as human as ourselves.

Support for this notion comes from a new study by Lasana Harris and
Susan Fiske who scanned the brains of ten Princeton university students
while they viewed pictures of people from different social groups.

As predicted, pictures of sporting heroes, the elderly and businessmen
all triggered activity in a region of the brain – the medial prefrontal
cortex – known to be associated with thinking about other people or
oneself. By contrast, pictures of the homeless or of drug addicts failed
to trigger activity in this area, and instead prompted activity in the
areas of the brain related to disgust. “Members of some social groups
seem to be dehumanised, at least as indicated by the absence of the
typical neural signature for social cognition”, the researchers said.

A second study with 12 students confirmed that, like pictures of the
homeless or of drug addicts, images of objects also failed to trigger
activity in the medial prefrontal cortex – except for the sight of
money, which participants said caused them to think about wealthy people.

“If replicated and extended, this kind of evidence could begin to help
explain the all-too-human ability to commit atrocities such as hate
crimes, prisoner abuse, and genocide against people who are
dehumanised”, the researchers said.
__________________________________

Harris, L.T. & Fiske, S.T. (2006). Dehumanising the lowest of the low.
Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17,
847-853. http://tinyurl.com/y84tgm

Author weblink:
http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/fiske/index.php

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 4, social psychology,
social cognition, prejudice and discrimination; [AQA spec B]: AS module
2,social psychology, attitudes, prejudice and discrimination;
[Edexcel]:AS unit 1, the social approach, in-depth area of study,
obedience and prejudice; [SQA higher]: the individual in the social
context, domain social psychology, prejudice; [SQA adv higher]: social
psychology, prejudice.

4. "If I cover my eyes I'll be hidden" - how kids understand visibility

Young children aged between two and four years believe that you only
have to hide your head to become invisible – if your legs are on view,
it doesn’t matter, you still can’t be seen.

That’s according to Nicola McGuigan and Martin Doherty who say this is
probably because young children think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual
engagement between people. It explains why young children often think
they can’t be seen if they cover their eyes.

The researchers placed a Teletubby toy in various degrees of concealment
behind a screen on the opposite side of a table to a Care Bear toy. If,
from the perspective of the Bear, the Telebubby was completely hidden,
completely visible, or just its head was showing, the children were able
to accurately judge whether the Bear could see the Telebubby (at least
86 per cent accuracy). By contrast, when the Teletubby’s legs were
showing but its head was hidden, the children wrongly tended (49 per
cent of the trials) to say it could not be seen by the Bear.

A second experiment showed young children don’t make the same mistake
when judging if inanimate objects are hidden – they realise if any bit
is poking out, the object is visible to an observer.

“In the case of a human target (including themselves), children may
misconstrue ‘see’ as mutual engagement. If so, when covering their eyes
they are really attempting to avoid engagement with others – and in this
sense, their action can be effective”, the researchers concluded.
___________________________________

McGuigan, N. & Doherty, M.J. (2006). Head and shoulders, knees and toes:
Which parts of the body are necessary to be seen? British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 24, 727-732. http://tinyurl.com/y79frl

Author weblink: http://psy.st-andrews.ac.uk/people/lect/nm32.shtml

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: See developmental psychology modules.

5. Cryptic crosswords impair face recognition

Solving cryptic crosswords impairs our subsequent ability to recognise
faces, a finding that has obvious practical implications for the kind of
activities eye-witnesses get up to prior to an identity parade.

Michael Lewis at Cardiff University presented 60 students with 14 faces,
one at a time, for three seconds. Some of the students then read a
passage of a Dan Brown book for five minutes, others performed a Sudoku
puzzle during this time, some completed a simple crossword, while others
worked on a cryptic crossword. The students were then presented with a
further 28 faces and they had to identify the original faces among
these. During this identification phase, the participants also continued
with their allotted puzzle/reading for 30 seconds between the
presentation of each face.

The students working on the cryptic crossword performed significantly
worse at the face recognition task than all the other participants (68%
accuracy compared with 80% for simple crossword, 76% for reading and 79%
for Sudoku). Relative to chance performance, Lewis said this represented
a 40 per cent reduction in performance for the cryptic crossword
participants relative to the others.

The finding is consistent with other research showing face recognition
is impaired after reading the small letters of Navon stimuli – these are
images in which a large letter or symbol is composed of many tiny
repeats of a different letter or symbol (http://tinyurl.com/t2e7s).

Lewis speculated that both Navon stimuli and cryptic crosswords involve
the suppression of obvious, irrelevant information – the large letter in
the first case, or the literal meaning of a word in the latter case –
and that this process could have a negative impact on face recognition.
“This observation, however, does not explain how such suppression has
such a detrimental effect on face recognition”, he said.
_________________________________

Lewis, M.B. (2006). Eye-witnesses should not do cryptic crosswords
prior to identity parades. Perception, 35, 1433-1436.
http://www.perceptionweb.com/perc1006/p5666.pdf

Author weblink: http://www.cf.ac.uk/psych/home/lewismb/indexmain.html

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec B]: AS module 2, cognitive
psychology, cognition and law, face recognition.

6. Screening troops for psychological vulnerability is futile

The idea of screening members of our armed services for psychological
vulnerability before their deployment to war zones surely makes sense.
However, historically, doing this has proved hugely problematic. For
example, a screening programme introduced before the Second World War
was deemed a costly failure after rates of psychiatric breakdown among
the forces were as high or higher than in the First World War. Now
according to a longitudinal study of British troops, screening for
psychological vulnerability remains as futile as ever.

In 2002, prior to preparations for the Iraq war, Roberto Rona
at the Kings Centre for Military Health Research, and colleagues, gave
2,873 personnel from the army, navy and RAF psychological screening
questionnaires to complete, including a checklist for PTSD symptoms and
questions about alcohol abuse. Hundreds of them went on to be deployed
in Iraq.

The mental health of the sample was again assessed between 2004 and 2006
to see if their earlier scores on the psychological screening tools were
usefully related to their having psychological problems later on. The
only reliable link the researchers found between the participants’
original screening scores and their later mental health was for PTSD –
that is, personnel with PTSD symptoms in 2002 were particularly likely
to have such symptoms later. However, because so few personnel had PTSD
symptoms at baseline (< 3.2 per cent), the researchers concluded that
even the use of a PTSD checklist may not be worthwhile. The results
didn’t change if analysis was restricted to just those personnel who
were deployed to Iraq.

“This study provides little support for the use of mental health
screening before deployment for preventing mental disorders after
deployment”, the researchers said.
___________________________________

Rona, R.J., Hooper, R., Jones, M., Hull, L., Browne, T., Horn, O.,
Murphy, D., Hotopf, M. & Wessely, S. (2006). Mental health screening in
armed forces before the Iraq war and prevention of subsequent
psychological morbidity: follow-up study. BMJ,
DOI:10.1136/bmj.38985.610949.55.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/333/7576/991

Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/yh64cx

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG:
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [OCR]: A2 psychology and organisations,
selecting people for work; [SQA higher]: individual in the social
context, recruitment in employment and military organisations.

7. Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight:

Breast feeding does not affect children's intelligence.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj;333/7575/945

Elephants recognise themselves in the mirror.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0608062103v1

Most psychologists asked to share their data failed to do so
(PDF). http://users.fmg.uva.nl/jwicherts/datasharing.pdf

The stigmatisation of smokers.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/113440473/ABSTRACT

Everyday crimes by middle class people.
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/46/6/1011

Some batsmen are less likely to be out leg before wicket when playing at
their home ground.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-985X.2006.00433.x

Depression linked with loss of bone mass.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/short/103/45/16876

Have you spotted a particularly noteworthy psychology paper? - email
christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk (remove brackets around @ symbol)

8. The Special Issue Spotter

Attitudes towards immigrants and immigration (International Journal of
Intercultural Relations).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01471767

Understanding and challenging stigma (Journal of Community and Applied
Social Psychology).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/113440468

Menstruation (Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology).
http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=n68x65537v2r

Developmental disability in chronic disease (Mental Retardation and
Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews).
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/113422832

If you're aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue,
please let me know - email christian[@]psychologywriter.org.uk (remove
brackets around @ symbol).

9. Elsewhere

For when you've had enough of journal articles:

Simon Baron-Cohen argues autism may be on the rise because people with
autistic-like traits tend to mate with partners who also have such
traits.
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/11/when_two_minds_think_alike.php

One way of solving the cocktail party problem.
http://www.cis.hut.fi/projects/ica/cocktail/cocktail_en.cgi

Can fish oils improve schoolchildren's exam results? (audio).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/items/01/2006_43_thu.shtml

Which is the world's happiest nation?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm

The biggest questions ever asked - New Scientist celebrates its 50th
(subscription required).
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780.068-the-biggest-questions-ever-asked.html

Mental processes in the human brain - a discussion meeting at the Royal
Society (Video). http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?tip=1&id=5552 And
look out for our forthcoming reports from this event in December's
Psychologist magazine (www.thepsychologist.org.uk).

It's time to rediscover our sense of smell.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7953

BPS readers digest and other research articles

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