Blogging for mental health

To coincide with the Mental Health Month Blog Party organised by the APA, I've collated some highlights from our coverage of mental health issues here at the BPS Research Digest.

What is mental illness? In 2010 I reported on a Psychological Medicine editorial that dissected the definition used by the fourth edition of US psychiatry's diagnostic manual. Another post from 2006 explored differences in the way the public and experts view mental disorders.  How we conceive of mental illness isn't only of theoretical interest, it can have an impact on people's lives. For example, this post showed that biological accounts of mental illness may dent patients’ hope and increase stigma.

Mental illness is normal. Several studies I've covered have illustrated just how common mental health problems are. One paper suggested that one in two of us will experience mental difficulties in our life-times. Another asked Who doesn't suffer from paranoia? Other research has shown that psychotic symptoms aren't always pathological and tried to find out how non-problematic symptoms differ from those experienced by patients. Another paper had a similar aim: The same voices, heard differently?

Drug-free treatment is often helpful. Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, there are drug-free ways to help people with schizophrenia, including using CBT. In fact, psychotherapy has a drug-like effect on the brain. In a guest post, Richard Bentall described the treatment of schizophrenia with maximum kindness and minimum medication. Elsewhere, I covered new research showing that fears could be unlearned without the use of drugs. I reported on a computer game that holds promise in helping prevent traumatic flashbacks. I've also uncovered some novel and straightforward approaches to improving mental health, including floral arrangement as a cognitive training tool for schizophrenia and Grab it, bag it, bin it - a new approach to psychological problem solving.

Self-help strategies sometimes backfire. But we shouldn't assume that all interventions, however well-intentioned, will be beneficial. Popular strategies or tools for being happier or more successful can sometimes be harmful, as these posts demonstrate: CBT-based self-help books can do more harm than good. Positive psychology exercises can be harmful for some Why positive fantasies make your dreams less likely to come true. A related feature article in The Psychologist magazine delved into the world of unscrupulous therapies: When therapy causes harm.

Research into the therapeutic process. Lots of research in psychology tries to get to the bottom of the factors that make therapy effective. For example, this paper put cognitive therapy on the couch. Another found that therapy is more effective when psychologists focus on their clients' strengths (yet another showed that successful therapists focus on their clients' strengths). This paper examined those times when clients in therapy show sudden, dramatic improvements. Other papers I've covered have asked some awkward and tricky questions about therapy - for example, is it really true that therapists don't improve with experience? Can therapists tell when their clients have deteriorated? What happens when therapists have the hots for their clients? And what should a therapist do if a client confesses to murder? Other studies looked at therapy from the clients' perspective, for example What do clients think CBT will be like and how is it really?

Mental health research isn't easy. Because mental health problems are so widespread, it's not always easy to conduct properly controlled experiments, as these posts show: Just how non-clinical are so-called non-clinical community samples? and Beware the "super well" - why the controls in psychology research are often too healthy.

Intriguing case studies. I've covered a few of these, such as the boy who thought 9/11 was his fault and the time that a spontaneous panic attack was caught during a brain imaging scan.

Be happy. There's reason for hope. Sometimes mental health problems can have an upside, for example this post suggested that anxiety has benefits. Remember too that most people with a mental disorder are happy If you want to be happier than you are, this study suggested that frequent, mundane positive activities will make you happier, rather than rare, profound events.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When are two heads better than one?

The Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched invasion of Iraq ... all these historical calamities have in common that they've been blamed on dud group decision making. Bang heads together, it seems, and you dull people's minds. And yet there's the almost-magic "Wisdom of Crowds" effect - average people's verdicts together and you'll arrive at a more accurate answer than any one person would have achieved on their own. How to solve this paradox? A new series of intriguing studies by Asher Koriat provides part of the answer, highlighting the roles played by people's confidence and the type of problem they're tackling.

Across five studies Koriat tasked dozens of participants with answering a mix of forced-choice questions - some were to do with visual attention (e.g. which of two displays of patterns includes an odd-one-out?); others were general knowledge (e.g. which of two European cities has the larger population?); and there were visual judgement questions (e.g. which of two squiggly lines is longer?). The participants were asked to say how how confident they were in each of their answers.

For each round of questions, Koriat paired up the participants "virtually". That is, the partners in a pair didn't have anything to do with each other. But for each pair, Koriat followed the same rule, always taking the answer from the partner who was more confident.

Over a series of questions, Koriat found that always taking the answer from the most confident partner in a pair led to superior performance for that series (69.88 per cent correct on average in one study) compared with always taking the answer from whichever individual had the most impressive overall performance (67.82 per cent correct). In other words, the more confident of two heads working together nearly always outperformed the most proficient individual working on their own. In the first study using visual patterns, this was true for 18 of the 19 dyads. In further analysis, taking the most confident answer from a virtual group of three led to even more impressive performance.

The strategy even worked for people working alone if they were given two chances, a week apart, to provide answers to a series of questions, as well as rating their confidence. Always taking the more confident of their answers led to superior performance overall and was more effective than simply averaging their two answers (see earlier Digest item: Unleash the crowd within).

But here's the all-important caveat. This strategy of taking the answer of the most confident partner only worked for questions for which most people, "the crowd", tend to get the answer right. When the questions were tricky and wrong-footed most people, then the rule was reversed. Take the example of "Which city has the larger population - Zurich or Bern?". Most people get this question wrong - they think it's Bern because that's the capital city, but the correct answer is Zurich. For questions like this, the most effective strategy is actually to always take the answer of the dyad partner who is least confident (doing so beats the average score of the individual with the overall best performance).

Reflecting on these new results, Ralph Hertwig at the University of Basel said there were two important, tantalising questions for future research - is it possible to categorise problems somehow into those that tend to wrong-foot the crowd, and those that don't?  Similarly, are there any cues that can be used to recognise in advance whether a problem is of the kind that the crowd gets right (in which case it's best to go with the most confident team member) or wrong (if so, go with the least confident member)?

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Koriat, A. (2012). When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why? Science, 336 (6079), 360-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549

Further reading: The much maligned group brainstorm can aid the combining of ideas.
Three-person groups best for problem-solving.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Focus on social neuroscience (Nature Neuroscience).

Complexities of mild traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder (virtual issue of Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society).

Spatial neglect and attention (Neuropsychologia).

Neuropsychiatric disorders (Trends in Neurosciences).

Neuropsychiatric disorders (Trends in Cognitive Sciences).

World Autism Awareness Day (virtual special issue from Wiley).

Metacognition: computation, neurobiology and function (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B).

Why has the neuroscientific revolution been so popular? (Australian Journal of Psychology)

Social technologies (Theory and Psychology).

Personality and information processing (European Journal of Personality).

The social signal value of emotions (Cognition and Emotion).

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Skilled liars make great lie detectors

Abagnale runs a security consultancy

Frank Abagnale Jr, the confidence trickster whose escapades inspired the hit film "Catch Me If You Can", later became a security consultant for the FBI. There's intuitive logic to the agency's recruitment strategy - if you want to catch con artists, who better to spot them than a master con artist. But does this logic apply at a more basic level? Do skilled liars really make skilled lie detectors?

Surprisingly, psychologists haven't investigated this idea before. Dozens of studies have shown that most people are very poor at detecting lies, and other research has shown that the propensity to lie is partly inherited, but no-one's looked to see if good liars make good lie spotters.

Now Gordon Wright and his colleagues have done just that, recruiting 51 participants (27 women; mean age 25) to take part in a competitive group task. None of them had met before. Arranged in groups of 5 or 6, the participants took turns to spend about 20 seconds telling the group their position on a social issue, such as whether smoking should be allowed in public places or whether they were in favour of reality TV. Their true opinions had been reported in private to the researchers earlier. On each round, cards handed to the participants told them which opinion to share with the group and whether to tell the truth or lie. The task of the rest of the group was to judge whether the speaker was lying or not. Fifty pounds was up for grabs for the best liar and the best lie spotter.

The key finding was that participants whose lies were harder to spot tended to do better at spotting whether other participants were lying (the correlation was -0.35, with an effect size of 0.7, which is usually considered large). "As far as we are aware," the researchers said, "this study is the first to provide evidence that the capacity to detect lies and the ability to deceive others are associated."

This result begs the question - what underlying psychological processes grant a person skill at lying and lie spotting? It wasn't IQ or emotional intelligence - the researchers tested for that, but they don't yet know much more. "It is clear," they said, "that identification of the precise nature of the proposed 'deception-general' ability is an important aim for deception research, and that further research should be devoted to this question."

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Wright, G., Berry, C., and Bird, G. (2012). “You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00087

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Be careful when comforting struggling students

Previous research tells us that students who see intelligence and ability as fixed will tend to give up when confronted by a difficult problem, whereas those who see intelligence as growable will persevere. But how do teachers' beliefs about ability affect the way they perceive and respond to their students' performance?

A new investigation led by Aneeta Rattan, together with Carol Dweck, the doyenne of this area, and Catherine Good, began by asking 41 undergrads about their beliefs regarding maths ability (e.g. did they agree that "You have a certain amount of math intelligence and you can't really do much to change it"?). Asked to imagine they were a maths teacher responding to a student's initial poor maths exam result, those undergrads who endorsed this fixed "entity" theory of maths ability tended to jump to conclusions - assuming that their student had struggled because he or she lacked maths ability.

A second study was similar but went further and showed that undergrad participants who believed ability is fixed were more likely to say that they'd comfort their student for his or her poor maths ability (e.g. they said they'd "explain that not everyone has maths talent"), and that they'd pursue strategies such as setting the student less maths homework.

A third study elevated the realism levels a little by recruiting postgrads who worked as teachers or research demonstrators in their university departments. The same findings emerged - participants who saw maths ability as fixed were more likely (than those who saw ability as malleable) to make premature, ability-based assumptions about the reasons why a student was struggling, and they were more likely to respond by comforting the student for their poor ability and by pursuing counter-productive teaching strategies, such as encouraging the student's withdrawal from the subject.

So, what's it like for a struggling student to receive this kind of treatment from their teacher? A final study with 54 students asked them to imagine they'd struggled at an initial maths test. Some of them then received comforting feedback ("I want to assure you that I know you're a talented student in general, it's just the case that not everyone is a maths person. I'm going to give you some easier tasks ... etc"); others received constructive strategy tips (e.g "I'm going to call on you more in class and I want you to work with a maths tutor"); and others received neutral, control feedback. The key finding here was that the students who received the comforting feedback felt their teacher had low expectations for them and felt less encouraged and optimistic about their future prospects in the subject.

Rattan and her colleagues said their findings pointed to some important real-world implications. University teachers who form fixed-ability judgements about their students and who provide comfort may be well-intentioned, but they risk derailing their students' chances before they've even had the opportunity to get going. "As upsetting as poor performance may be to a student," the researchers concluded, "receiving comfort that is oriented toward helping them to accept their presumed lack of ability (rather than comfort that is oriented toward helping them to improve) may be even more disturbing."
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Rattan, A., Good, C., and Dweck, C. (2012). “It's ok — Not everyone can be good at math”: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (3), 731-737 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.012

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling chilly? Indulge in some nostalgia

Over recent years a body of research has accumulated showing the psychological benefits of nostalgia. For example, reminiscing about the past can combat loneliness and off-set the discomfort of thinking about death. Now a team led by Xinyue Zhou has shown that nostalgia brings physical comforts too, making us feel warmer and increasing our tolerance to cold.

The researchers began their investigation by having 19 people keep a diary of their nostalgia activities for 30 consecutive days. It turned out that the participants indulged in more nostalgic reverie on colder days.

Next, the psychologists recruited 90 undergrads in China and sat some of them in a cold room (20 degrees Celsius), some in a room at a comfortable temperature (24 degrees), and some in a hot room (28 degrees). The students were asked to say how nostalgic they felt for things like "music" and "friends they'd known". The finding here was that students sat in the colder room tended to be more nostalgic (students in the comfortable and hot rooms didn't differ from each other).

A third study was conducted online with Dutch participants and involved them listening to songs known to provoke nostalgic feelings. The students who said the music made them feel nostalgic also tended to say that the music made them feel physically warmer. A fourth study with Chinese students found that those who were being nostalgic perceived the room they were in to be warmer.

Finally, the researchers instructed 64 Chinese undergrads to think either about an ordinary event or a nostalgic event from their past, and then they had to hold their hand in an iced bucket of water for as long as they could stand it. You guessed it - those students who indulged in nostalgia managed to hold their hand in the water for longer. Crucially, the link between nostalgia and greater pain tolerance wasn't mediated by differences in general levels of positive or negative emotional feelings, which suggests the effect had something to do with nostalgia specifically, not just being in a better mood.

Based on their findings, Zhou and her colleagues suggested that nostalgia serves a homeostatic function, allowing the mind to return to previously enjoyed states, including states of bodily comfort. Anecdotally, Zhou's team said this fits with reports from concentration camp survivors, that they coped with starvation by recalling delicious meals from the past. This homeostatic account is also complemented by neuroimaging evidence showing that the same brain region - the anterior insular cortex - is involved in representing the physiological condition of the body and in emotional awareness.

If nostalgia plays this kind of "as-if" function, allowing us to travel mentally to preferable states, it raises an interesting evolutionary question about motivation - the adaptive benefit of this homeostatic function is obvious, but taken too far, could it drift into complacence or submission?

The researchers called for more research to see if nostalgia can combat other forms of physical discomfort, besides low temperature. Such findings "may further establish nostalgia as a remarkable adaptation built on the human capacities to think temporally and self-reflectively," they said, "an adaptation that provides an exquisite mechanism to anchor the organism in prior felicitous states."
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  Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Chen, X., and Vingerhoets, A. (2012). Heartwarming Memories: Nostalgia Maintains Physiological Comfort. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0027236

Related Digest items: Feeling lonely, have a bath.
A warm room makes people feel socially closer.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Young male drivers are more vulnerable than older men to sleepiness

One might imagine the vigour of youth would allow young men to shrug off the effects of a lack of sleep. In fact, a new study on driving performance documents that young men are particularly vulnerable to the effects of sleepiness, far more than older men.

Ashleigh Filtness and his colleagues recruited 20 healthy young men (average age 23) and 20 healthy older men (average age 67) to complete two early afternoon driving challenges in a full-size simulator. One of the monotonous two-hour drives was completed after a normal night's sleep, as confirmed by a wrist actimeter that records nocturnal movement. The other two-hour drive was performed after a previous night's sleep of just five hours. The participants weren't allowed to consume alcohol for 36 hours before either test.

The researchers were mainly interested in lane drifts, in which all four wheels of the car left the lane the driver was supposed to be in. As you'd expect, these increased in the later stages of both the drives. Both groups of men also drifted more on the drive that followed less sleep. But the key finding was that the young men were affected far more drastically by a lack of sleep. For instance, in the last 30 minutes of the drive that followed a five-hour sleep, the young men averaged just over six lane drifts compared with fewer than two by the older men. This difference was also reflected in other measures - the younger men reported feeling more sleepy after a lack of sleep than the older men and this was confirmed by their brainwave recordings.

The new findings are consistent with previous night time studies in simulators and on the road that showed young male and female participants struggled more than older participants to maintain safe driving performance. They also help make sense of road accident data that show sleep-related incidents predominantly involve young male drivers.

However there are some complications in interpreting the new research. For example, it's likely the older drivers had more driving experience. Are they less vulnerable to sleepiness or simply better drivers? The researchers state only that both groups were experienced, with all participants having driven for over two years, more than three hours per week. Another complication acknowledged by the researchers is that young men typically sleep for longer than older men. This means the five-hour sleep limit condition was a greater departure from routine for the younger men.

A problem not mentioned in the paper is the potential influence of "stereotype threat" - whereby a fear of fulfilling stereotypes can undermine the performance of stereotyped groups. A researcher was present in the driving simulator room and it's possible the young men were aware of the negative attitudes commonly felt towards young male drivers and were affected as a result. A final weakness is the use of a simulator - the participants would have known any errors were inconsequential.

"The greater vulnerability of [young men] ... to sleep restriction potentially puts them at a greater driving risk under these circumstances, and may help further explain the relatively high proportion of young men being responsible for serious sleep related road collisions," the researchers said.
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Filtness, A., Reyner, L., and Horne, J. (2012). Driver sleepiness—Comparisons between young and older men during a monotonous afternoon simulated drive. Biological Psychology, 89 (3), 580-583 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.01.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

Tuck into our latest round-up of the best psych and neuro links:

The British Psychological Society has launched a new sports psychology portal "Going for Gold" with news and interactive features.

On a similar theme - can you cope with pressure? BBC Lab UK have put together an online test with a little help from Michael Johnson and few sports psychologists.

"Only in this case, the humans were the tools, and the dogs the tool-users," fascinating blog post by Jason Goldman on the social-cognitive differences between dogs and wolves.

"Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea," - Tom Stafford debunks irrational fears about internet use. It could even make you a better communicator.

New APA report on the benefits of diversity and the harms of discrimination.

The latest monthly APA monitor magazine is also online - includes an article on psychology's first forays into film.

Does the brain's wiring make us who we are? Here's a video of neuroscientists Sebastian Seung and Anothony Movshon debating minds, maps, and the future of their field (check out the retro lecture theatre!).

There's a mirror neuron-inspired art exhibition in Sunderland including some cool-sounding glass brain replicas (Guardian review).

New podcast from Wellcome: "Has our civilisation suffered from a failure to manage the binary division of our brains?" featuring Iain McGilchrist author of The Master and his Emissary: The divided brain and the making of the modern world.

Our sister blog The Occupational Digest explores the concept of an alternative selves - do you ever think about the person you might have been?

A new series of The Hoarder Next Door started last night on Channel 4. Should be up on Channel 4 on Demand soon.

Five innovative solutions to help people with dementia live well - including a new social networking site.

Stop what you're working on and do this quiz - Are you a workaholic?

The latest Neuropod podcast is online and includes items on the neural correlates of our sense of justice and how social relationships can prevent illness.

Your Brain on Fiction - interesting Op-ed from the New York Times.

One to watch - Scientific American has given birth to a new psych/neuro blog called Brainwaves.

BBC Radio's excellent All in the Mind series has returned, the first episode deals with the implications of government health reforms for mental health services; and does internet dating really work?

The final episode in the latest run of Mind Changers just aired and is now available on iPlayer - it covers Broadbent and the cocktail party phenomenon.

Access more than 200 free multi-disciplinary articles from top Wiley journals examining social media’s impact on the world.

Twenty-two giant brains are touring Indiana.

Winners announced in the 2012 Neuro film festival.

A new book that's worth a look: "Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired"

Why do we need a brain? Bruce Hood has the moving answer.

That's all for now. Feast will return in a couple of weeks. Have a great weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Strong reassurances about vaccines can backfire

Unwarranted public anxiety about vaccinations can have deadly consequences. Unfortunately, the challenge of communicating health risks is full of psychological complexity. A new German study brings this home, showing how messages that deny vaccination health risks in unequivocal terms can backfire, actually increasing concern among parents.

Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse recruited 115 participants online (mean age 34; 34 per cent were male; 43 per cent had one or more children). The participants were asked to imagine they were a parent of an 8-month-old and to read an account of a fictitious illness Phyxolitis pulmonis. They were further told that their paediatrician had advised vaccinating their child against this condition. Next, the participants were presented with anti-vaccine statements that they'd ostensibly found on the internet (e.g. "Multiple vaccines overwhelm the infant's immune system"). Finally, they read statements of reassurance about the vaccine, which claimed any risks were low - half the participants read weak versions (e.g. "There is only sporadic evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system") and half read strong versions of these statements (e.g. "there is no evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system").

The key finding here was that participants who read the strong statements of reassurance actually reported greater perceptions of risk afterwards, and lower intentions to vaccinate their child. This effect was heightened among participants who had a preference for complementary medicine. Results didn't vary according to whether participants were a parent in real life or not.

A second study with a further 119 participants was similar but this time the source of the reassuring statements was varied, either being from a pharmaceutical company (untrusted) or from a government health department (a trusted source). Again, strong statements of reassurance backfired, increasing risk perception and reducing vaccination intentions, but only if those statements came from an untrusted source. Again, this paradoxical effect was stronger among participants who favoured complementary medicine.

This study can't reveal why the paradoxical effect occurs. However, one possibility proposed by Betsch and Sachse is that an extreme statement of no risk is more attention-grabbing, which only serves to highlight the possibility that risk is an issue. Another potential explanation is that people look for ways to combat claims they disagree with, and if those claims are stated more strongly then that encourages people to marshal even stronger counter-claims of their own.

The results have obvious implications for real-life risk communication. "Especially when organisations lack complete knowledge about how much trust the public puts in them, optimal risk negation is likely to profit from moderate rather than extreme formulations," the researchers said.
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Betsch, C., and Sachse, K. (2012). Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived Vaccination Risks. Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0027387


Previously on the Research Digest:
How to promote the MMR vaccine.
The psychological barriers facing MMR promotion campaigns.


Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Who are you protecting when you praise a dud performance?

Most of us have done it - told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.

Some participants were told they'd be providing the feedback face-to-face, others were told their feedback would be provided anonymously, and a third group were told their ratings of the essay would not be fed back to the writer. Additionally, the participants answered questions about their own self-esteem and they were given information about the writer's self-esteem, which was presented as either low, medium or high.

The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we're judging. If people's motives were selfless then arguably the feedback provided should have been just as positive regardless of how it was delivered. In fact, students in the face-to-face condition provided the most positive feedback, but only if they had low self-esteem (specifically low self-liking, as opposed to low feelings of self competence). "If one accepts that people with relatively low self-esteem are expected to place greater emphasis on wanting to be perceived as likeable or attractive to others, then this lends support for the self-protection motive," said the researchers, led by Carla Jeffries. By contrast, undergrad participants with high self-esteem gave the same kind of feedback regardless of whether it was delivered anonymously, face-to-face, or not at all.

There was further evidence of a self-serving motive. Students with low self-esteem who were told their ratings would not be fed back to the writer tended to give particularly critical ratings - it's as if judging the essay harshly made them feel better about themselves. "A particularly harsh assessment creates a downward social comparison and, in turn, a gain for one's self-esteem," the researchers said.

The results did throw up some modest evidence of altruistic motives. Ratings by low self-esteem students were more generous in the anonymous condition versus the undelivered feedback condition. Seeing as their identity would be concealed in both cases, this suggests they gave inflated feedback in the anonymous condition purely to protect the feelings of the writer. However, this empathy only went so far - none of the participants moderated the tone of their feedback in line with the writer's self-esteem scores.

Jeffries and her team said their findings could have implications for organisations. For example, bolstering people's self-esteem prior to their rating another person's performance could help them to be more honest. "The data ... speak to the importance of developing cultures that encourage frank and fearless feedback giving and non-defensive feedback receiving," the researchers said. "Strong and positive feedback cultures might help overcome some of the fears of feedback-givers, and reduce the tendency for feedback to be adjusted as a function of who is watching."

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Jeffries, C., and Hornsey, M. (2012). Withholding negative feedback: Is it about protecting the self or protecting others? British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02098.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:


"People with easier-to-pronounce surnames occupy higher status positions in law firms"

Congenitally blind humans can discern the emotional state of dog barks, even if they've never owned a dog.

More evidence of the benefits of viewing and making art for people with dementia.

The assumptions we make about sporty people: "Both team and individual sport athletes were perceived as being less lazy, more competitive, and healthier than non-participants by both males and females."

Cheesy lyrics are grounded in science: Your love lifts me higher! The energizing quality of secure relationships.

Who do we gossip about at work? A social network analysis.

Men feel more powerful if they have tenuous links with a powerful person.

Distinguishing science from pseudoscience in school psychology.

Visual illusion can boost putting performance by making the hole look bigger.

More materialistic, less civic minded, less concerned for others - charting generational changes in young adults'  life goals from 1966 to 2009.

The eye movements that underlie the rotating snakes illusion.

Conservatives are happier than liberals, but why?

"Our findings suggest that due to their expertise, architects were able to encode and detect building stimuli at a lower neural cost".

Men are attracted to women in red because they perceive them to be sexually receptive.

Women are more receptive to male advances when the smell of pastries or coffee is in the air. 

Does the weather really affect tipping?

Psychoanalysis and the brain – why did Freud abandon neuroscience?

After recalling a time they've been naughty, people judge the room they're in to be darker. Does anyone know - has Jeremy Hunt been turning all the lights on lately?
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.