BPS readers digest and other research articles

p.pete · 04-09-2006 10:36AM

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 02:34PM

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 02:36PM

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 04:52PM

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 04:53PM

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 01:47PM

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 01:48PM

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 05:08PM

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 05:09PM

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 09:14PM

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

Comments