Feast

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

A Dangerous Method: David Cronenberg's film about the relationship between Freud, Jung and Spielrein, opens across the UK this weekend. The Guardian calls it "a cool, measured, loquacious film".

This week, BBC One broadcast two episodes of Super Smart Animals about animal intelligence - both are now available on iPlayer for the next 6 days.

The Atlantic published a fascinating in-depth interview with bioethicist Allen Buchanan (author of Better Than Human) about the potential pros and cons of cognitive enhancement technologies.

A new report from the Kings Fund claims that the NHS is losing billions of pounds by failing to address the mental health needs of people with long-term illness.

Nature Neuroscience has published an obituary and suite of free-to-access Jon Driver articles in memory of the great cognitive neuroscientist, who died late last year.

The UK government's Behavioural Insight Team has published a new report into psychologically-informed ways to reduce fraud, error and debt.

The Royal Society has published its latest Brainwaves report, this one examines possible applications of neuroscience for military and civilian law enforcement.

One to watch: The newly launched PsyCh Journal claims to be China's first international journal.

The Chronicle had a super overview and ethical discussion of the work of Adrian Raine, who studies developmental brain markers of later criminality.

Guardian blogger Mo Costandi reported on a new study that compared the way human and monkey brains responded to the experience of watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Guardian published a summary of the widespread concerns about psychiatry's revision of its diagnostic code.

Prime Minister Cameron said this week that we need more women in the country's boardrooms. Our sister blog, the Occupational Digest published an overview of research into the Glass Cliff - the tendency for women to be appointed to leadership positions when an organisation is in crisis.

PLoS Blogger Steve Silberman published an interview with synaesthete Perry Hall. Hall has created an App called Sonified that allows the less-synaesthetic among us to experience a morphing of the senses. In related news, veteran Times columnist Matthew Parris wrote in the paper this week that he's experienced synaesthesia all his life, but only just discovered that the condition has a name, and that his experiences aren't shared by everyone.

Starting tomorrow at 2.30pm and continuing on Sunday, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting dramatisations of two of Freud's classic case studies - Dora and the Wolfman.

That's all, have a mindful weekend!
_________________________________

Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Doubts cast on the influential dual-stream theory of visual processing

Psychologists in Germany have challenged one of the most influential theories in neuropsychology - the dual stream model of visual processing proposed by Mel Goodale and David Milner. This model proposes that visual information entering the brain splits down two parallel paths: the dorsal path heads to the top and rear of the brain where the information is used for guiding actions; the ventral path reaches the temporal lobes where it used for conscious perception and recognition. The model is hugely influential and will be familiar to all contemporary psychology graduates. The three seminal papers proposing and supporting the model have been cited over 930 times.

Much of the supporting evidence came from studies of the brain-damaged patient known in the literature as D.F. This woman's damage to her occipital and parietal lobes from carbon monoxide poisoning appeared to have left her with a rare form of "visual agnosia" - she was unable to recognise everyday objects but was perfectly able to grasp and use them. In other words, she appeared to have an impaired ventral stream but a preserved dorsal stream.

Marc Himmelbach and his team at Eberhard Karls University say that D.F. has become one of the most influential brain-damaged patients in neuropsychology, comparable to Paul Broca's aphasic patient Leborgne and Phineas Gage - the nineteenth century railway worker who survived an iron rod passing through his brain. However, as is the case with Leborgne and Gage, the German team believe that standards of testing have becoming more stringent since the seminal work with D.F. was published back in the 90s. In particular, conclusions were drawn about D.F. without comparing her performance and behaviour to age-matched controls.

For their paper, Himmelbach and his team have replicated the three main tests performed on D.F. with 20 female, age-matched healthy controls (mean age 36.5 years). These tests included indicating the size of various rectangular wooden blocks using the thumb and forefinger; actually reaching and picking up the blocks; indicating the orientation of a narrow slot in a disc; posting a card through that slot; and indicating the size and shape of odd-regular shapes and then actually picking up those shapes. Results from the original work with D.F. was compared against the results from these new healthy controls.

Himmelbach and his colleagues don't dispute that D.F.'s performance was far more impaired for recognition tasks compared with the reaching and grasping tasks. However, compared against their new control data, they say it's clear that D.F. was also severely impaired in her reaching and grasping performance, seemingly undermining the neat interpretation that she had a preserved dorsal stream. The German group also point to more recent tests of D.F. showing that she has obvious motor deficits when the task is more complicated - for example, she was unable to grasp a disc through three holes in its surface using her thumb, index and middle fingers.

Other evidence highlighted by Himmelbach and co concerns a more recently identified patient "J.S." who has a similar pattern of brain damage to D.F. and who is more impaired on recognition than motor tasks, but who nonetheless is clearly severely impaired on motor tasks compared with healthy controls. Based on a scan of J.S., the researchers also doubt that the pattern of brain damage suffered by D.F is as circumscribed as previously claimed. Finally, the researchers are critical of the lack of "kinematic data" from the original tests of D.F. - things like reaction times, peak velocity of movements and so forth. Such data, they say, would show whether her movements were really normal, or if she were, for example, taking longer than normal to compensate for her difficulties.

"In conclusion," the researchers said, "the behaviour and anatomy of D.F. on its own does not provide firm grounds for the perception vs. action interpretation of dorsal and ventral stream areas." They added that other sources of support for the dual stream model "do not provide unequivocal evidence in favour of or against [the model] without reference to D.F. and could also be integrated by alternative models that do not explicitly state an action-perception dissociation."
_________________________________

Himmelbach, M., Boehme, R. and Karnath, H. (2012). 20 years later: A second look on DF's motor behaviour. Neuropsychologia, 50 (1), 139-144 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.011

Further reading: One brain two visual systems.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When depressed mothers give birth to thriving babies

Shelves of evidence show the long-term, adverse consequences for an embryo of having a mother who is stressed or malnourished during pregnancy. For instance, there's medical data showing that underweight newborn babies are more at risk of heart diseases and other illnesses in adulthood.

According to the "thrifty phenotype" hypothesis, this is because the child is born with a body that's primed for malnutrition. When the baby instead encounters plentiful resources, its metabolism suffers as a result, leading to a long-term increased risk of stroke, heart disease and diabetes.

But what if the prenatal environment were a reliable predictor of the world that's to come? A surprising new study shows that adverse prenatal circumstances, in the form of having a depressed mother, are actually beneficial if that same context endures after birth. The finding is consistent with the "predictive-adaptive response model", which says that adversity in-utero can have adaptive advantages if adversity is also encountered after birth.

Curt Sandman and his team measured the depression levels of 221 healthy women during their pregnancy and for twelve months after their children were born. The babies were subsequently categorised into four groups. There were two "concordant" groups, for whom the environment was the same prenatally and post-natally, as in their mother was either depression-free in both phases or she had depression in both phases. And there were two "discrepant" groups, for whom the prenatal and postnatal environments were different, as in their mother had depression in one phase but not the other.

Here's the take-home finding: babies in the concordant groups exhibited superior scores on mental development at 3 and 6 months of age, and superior psychomotor development at 6 months, compared with the discrepant babies. Crucially, this was the case for both concordant groups. In other words, for babies whose mothers were depressed postnatally, it was those whose mothers were also depressed during pregnancy who fared better. This counterintuitive finding appears to contradict the received wisdom that adversity during pregnancy is only ever associated with adverse outcomes.

Zeroing in on the timings, it was specifically the consistency or not between a mother's depression state at 25 weeks' gestation and her depression state postnatally that had associations with the babies' developmental outcomes. This makes sense because past research has found mothers' depression at 25 weeks' gestation (as opposed to at other times) to be most strongly related with their emotional state postnatally. The researchers said it's as if the unborn child is "most sensitive to maternal signals of adversity when those signals are the most predictive of future outcomes."
_________________________________

  Sandman, C., Davis, E., and Glynn, L. (2012). Prescient Human Fetuses Thrive. Psychological Science, 23 (1), 93-100 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611422073

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Having superior working memory capacity can make time go faster

Working memory is like a neural memo-pad. People with higher working memory capacity can hold more items in mind whilst solving a concurrent problem or performing a distracting task. There's been some excitement lately about the possibility that working memory can be improved through training, with knock-on benefits for IQ and academic attainment. A new study suggests such training should come with a footnote: "Improving your working memory could affect your perception of time".

James Woehrle and Joseph Magliano divided 99 students into two groups according to whether they had high or low working memory capacity. Next, the students solved subtraction problems in their heads. They were told the maths was their primary task but an extra challenge was to solve the problems for a certain duration, as judged by their own internal sense of time: either two minutes or four minutes.

The intriguing finding is that time went faster for the students with higher working memory capacity. When tasked with doing the maths for four minutes, they tended to work for longer, estimating that the time was up later than the low working memory participants.

What was going on? Why should having more working memory speed up the passage of time? Woehrle and Magliano said the finding was consistent with a popular account of time estimation, which posits that pulses are released by an internal pacemaker and accumulate in a counter. More pulses in the counter suggests more time has passed. Crucially, this process is gated by attention. When we pay attention to time, each pulse makes it into the counter and the passage of time feels slower. By contrast, if our attention is focused elsewhere, fewer pulses make it into the counter, as if less time has passed than really has (i.e. giving the subjective feeling of time having flown).

According to Woehrle and Magliano's Working Memory Capacity Hypothesis - the students in the current study with more working memory were able to allocate their attention almost entirely on the primary maths task. This benefited their maths performance but meant they were less vigilant of pulses accumulating in their internal clock. By contrast, the low working memory students couldn't help but allocate some attention to the secondary time-keeping task, making them more aware of the passage of time. As a consequence the low working memory students' time perception was actually more accurate but their maths performance suffered. The researchers said this evidence could have "profound implications in academic situations ... low working memory students may 'think' too much about how much time they put into their school work."

The new findings complement previous research showing that greater working memory capacity is associated with more accurate time perception, when time perception is the primary task. In this case, having more working memory allows for greater vigilance of the internal pacemaker and counter. Indeed, in the current study, the time perception of the higher working memory group was superior in a control condition in which they only had to estimate the passage of time.

_________________________________


Woehrle, J., and Magliano, J. (2012). Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity. Acta Psychologica, 139 (2), 314-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.006

Previously on the Digest: Doubt cast on the maxim that time goes faster as you get older.
The surprising links between anger and time perception

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Two chances to win The Psychology Book from DK

We've got two copies of The Psychology Book from Dorling Kindersley to give away, kindly donated to us by the publisher (look out for a review in a forthcoming issue of The Psychologist).

"With the use of powerful and easy-to-follow images, quotations from all the major thinkers, and explanations that are easily understandable, this book demystifies hard-to-grasp concepts and shows how these have shaped our knowledge of the human mind. All the schools of psychology are covered from cognitive to behavioural psychology making this ideal for students or for anyone with a general interest in this popular area."

For your chance to win, answer the following question: Which psychologist bought the prestigious American journal Science in 1894, and then edited it for the next 50 years?

Post the answer to us on Twitter (mention @researchdigest and use the hashtag #thepsychbookcomp) or post the answer as a comment to this post (if you use the comment option, please provide a way for us to contact you).

At the end of the week, we'll pick at random one correct answer from all entries on Twitter and one correct answer from the comments section of this blog post. 

Good luck!

Feast

Our round-up of the latest and best psych and neuro links:

This Saturday it's a family fun day - Meet Your Brain - at the Royal Institution in London.

A masterful, moving long-form essay and love story about the use of virtual reality to treat burns victims.

Fascinating blog post from Jason Goldman on how women eat at the same pace as their eating companion and eat a similar amount.

Asperger's syndrome is supposed to be a diagnosis you have for life. Meet Benjamin Nugent, novelist and lecturer. He does not have Asperger's. However back in the late 90's he was diagnosed with Asperger's and appeared in a video made by his psychologist Mum called "Understanding Asperger's". Now he's written a piece for the New York Times "I had Asperger's" calling for the diagnostic criteria for Autistic Spectrum Disorders to be narrowed.

The Association of Psychological Science are launching a new journal Clinical Psychological Science - submissions accepted from Spring.

Willpower guru Roy Baumeister can't resist appearing almost everywhere. Read his interview with The Atlantic and take part in a survey he's conducting with New Scientist.

The Guardian are hosting their first ever open weekend in March. Sunday 25th March has a "neuroscience and the law" theme with talks and debates.

Self portraits of a declining brain.

A study that involved decoding words a person had heard from their brain activity provoked a blitz of media coverage. My favourite was Mo Costandi's report for Nature News. On his Guardian blog he also reproduces a report he wrote on a similar study published in 2009, which decoded signals from Broca's area, revealing sub-areas involved in both language production and comprehension.

Group brainstorming has come in for a lot bad press in recent years (e.g. see the New Yorker's recent"Brainstorming doesn't really work" article). On his Work Matters blog Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton comes to brainstorming's defence.

If work psychology is your bag, our sister blog The Occupational Digest has recently published the last of its evidence-based tips for improving your workplace practices - here's a handy menu of all the advice.

Plenty of psychology at the Brighton Science Festival, which kicked off this month.

Salon has an interview with Shimon Edelman, a psychologist and author of the new book: “The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life.”

A new amnesiac movie is coming to UK screens later this month.

Vote for psychology studies that you'd like to see replicated.

New TEDx talk - the sociology and neuroscience of humour.

Free journal issues from BPS Journals: latest issue of British Journal of Clinical Psychology and latest issue of British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology.

Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell chat about writing about psychology research for a mass audience (includes link to podcast).

Read in DEEP VOICE: Why are the voice overs on movie trailers always delivered by men?

Jonathan Haidt on the tribal psychology of politics.

Brian Mossop has reviewed Haidt's new book (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion) for Scientific American Mind.

Joy of Stats BBC documentary is now available online in full.

Alison Gopnik on the teenage brain.

Are we ready for a morality pill? A question prompted by a new study that appeared to show signs of empathy in rats.

January's Neuropod podcast is waiting to be downloaded.

That's all, enjoy your weekend!
--
Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?

Social networking sites have changed our lives. There were 500 million active Facebook users in 2011 and approximately 200 million Twitter accounts. As users will know, the sites have important differences. Facebook places more of an emphasis on who you are and who you know. Twitter restricts users to 140-character updates and is more about what you say than who you are. A new study asks whether and how the way people use these sites is related to their personality, and whether there are personalty differences between people who prefer one site over the other.

David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online - most (70 per cent) were based in Europe, others were from North America, Asia and beyond. There were 207 women and the age range was from 18 to 63. Participants answered questions about the way they used Facebook and Twitter and which site they preferred. They also answered questions about their personality based around the "Big Five" personality factors of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Openness and Agreeableness, as well as the dimensions of sociability and "need for cognition" (this last factor is about people's need to be mentally engaged and stimulated).

Perhaps the most glaring finding is that personality actually explained little of the variance - less than 10 per cent (rising to 20 per cent alongside age) - in the way participants used these sites. This suggests that other factors not explored here, such as intelligence and motivation, have a big influence.

However, the associations with personality were interesting. People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don't use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination.

What about using the sites as an informational tool? There was an intriguing divergence here. People who said they used Facebook as an informational tool tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and "need for cognition". Informational users of Twitter were the mirror opposite: they scored higher on conscientiousness and "need for cognition", but lower on neuroticism, extraversion and sociability. The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation - as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).

Finally, what about people's overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in "need for cognition" tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information.

These results should be treated with caution. The sample was biased towards young females and the data were entirely self-report. Nonetheless, the findings suggest there are some meaningful differences in the personality profiles of people who prefer Twitter vs. Facebook and some intriguing personality links with the way the sites are used. "Different people use the same sites for different purposes," the researchers said.
_________________________________

  Hughes, D., Rowe, M., Batey, M., and Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 561-569 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001


Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When your hands are tied, your eyes are tied up too

Our eyes and hands operate in wonderful balletic synchrony. When we reach for an object, our eyes jump first, grabbing our intended target visually. Something similar also happens when we watch another person reaching. Our eyes jump ahead to their intended target, as if we were making the same grasping movement ourselves.

In an intriguing new study, Ettore Ambrosini and his team tested whether these anticipatory, vicarious eye movements still occur if our hands are tied up, literally. The researchers reasoned that watching another person's reaching movement triggers the same motor programme in our own brain and it's this programme that guides our anticipatory eye movements. But if our hands are tied, they predicted, the motor programme will stall and the eye movements won't occur so much.

Fifteen participants had their eye movements recorded whilst they watched short videos of a man reaching for one of two tomatoes. Sometimes the man clenched his fist and merely touched one of the tomatoes. This fist hand-shape doesn't provide much predictive information about the kind of movement that's being planned and so participants weren't expected to show much anticipatory gaze behaviour.

In other videos, the man either made a precise, preparatory grasping shape with his fingers, as if he were going to pick up the small tomato, which is what he then did; or he made a whole-hand grasp shape, as if he were reaching for the larger tomato, which is what he went on to do. These two hand-shapes provide clues as to the reaching movement that's underway and were expected to trigger more vicarious, anticipatory eye movements in the participants.

So what actually happened? The man's hand-shapes had just the effect that the researchers predicted. When he formed a precision-shape with his fingers, or a whole-hand grabbing shape, the participants tended to glance ahead towards his intended target, more often and sooner than they did when the man formed a fist. Crucially - and this is the intriguing result - this proactive, vicarious looking behaviour was significantly diminished when the participants had their hands tied behind their backs compared with when their hands were loose in front of them. Having their hands tied seemed to somehow tie up their eyes too.

"... having tied or somehow constrained hands does not allow one to take full advantage of specific motor cues, if any, to grab [with the eyes] the target of the observed action," the researchers said. "This suggests that actions of others are processed most efficiently when we are specifically able to perform the same actions."
_________________________________

Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., and Costantini, M. (2011). Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance DOI: 10.1037/a0026570

Further reading: Armchair experts have their limits.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

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

The specialization of function: Cognitive and neural perspectives on modularity (Cognitive Neuropsychology).

The effects of early experience and stress on brain and behavioural development (International Journal of Behavioural Development).

The interplay between collective memory and the erosion of nation states – the paradigmatic case of Belgium (Memory Studies).

Theory and Research on Collective Action in the European Journal of Social Psychology (European Journal of Social Psychology).

Child Development in Developing Countries (Child Development).

Collaboration in Psychotherapy (Journal of Clinical Psychology).

--
Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Psychology ignored and depression neglected in the media's coverage of mental health research

Research into some mental disorders receives disproportionate media coverage at the expense of other disorders. That's according to the first systematic study of the way the UK mass media covers mental illness. And in a wake-up call to psychology and its advocates, the analysis found that mental health research stories were biased towards neurobiological aspects of mental illness. They tended to be accompanied by commentary from medical charities, and to neglect psychosocial angles and opinion.

George Szmukler at the Institute of Psychiatry and his colleagues focused on coverage of mental disorders research on the BBC news website from 1999 to 2008, and in New Scientist magazine news and features from Aug 2008 to April 2010. This led to the identification of 1015 relevant stories on the BBC (102 per year) and 133 stories from New Scientist (76 per year).

The approach of Szmukler and co was to compare rates of coverage for various mental disorders against the disease burden of those disorders as measured by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Disease burden is calculated based on years of life lost due to dying early, and years of life affected by disability and loss of full health.

Providing some background context, the researchers said the UK disease burden of mental disorders is 60 per cent greater than cancer, yet in the period studied the BBC had half as many news stories on mental disorder research as compared with cancer research (in defence of the BBC, cancer is the subject of more research than mental disorders). By contrast, New Scientist had 2.5 times as many mental disorder research stories as cancer research stories.

Comparing coverage of research into various mental disorders, both the BBC and New Scientist tended to neglect depression, which is the mental disorder with the greatest disease burden by far. The BBC also tended to neglect alcoholism, whilst focusing more on drug addiction. It also focused disproportionately more than other conditions on Alzheimer's Disease and sleep disorders.

There was also a bias in the type of research that received BBC and New Scientist attention. Seventy-five per cent of the BBC's coverage was on biological research; New Scientist showed a similar trend. "Both sources rarely reported on psychological interventions," the researchers said: on the BBC it was one per cent of stories; for New Scientist it was 1.5 per cent. The dominant approach of both outlets was to present mental disorders as neurobiological in origin. The researchers don't know what proportion of research into mental health disorders is actually psychological, but they said "it is unlikely that talking treatments, in particular, would be so poorly represented."

Most stories on the BBC were accompanied by quotes from commentators intended to provide some context, including from 973 named individuals. There was a bias towards medical commentary. The six most frequently quoted commentators included three from the Alzheimer's Society, two from the Alzheimer's Research Trust and one from SANE. Szmukler and his team said that there was a need for organisations like the Mental Health Research Network to examine ways "in which commentators can be made more readily available across the whole spectrum of mental health research."

The researchers concluded that it was important to study the way the mass media covers mental health research because the media can influence the public's perception of disorders and their perception of the value of different types of research. In turn, this can affect funding decisions by government. In this respect, it is worrying that psychological research into mental disorders was found to have received so little coverage. On a positive note, the overall quality of the analysed news stories was found to be high and to have a neutral or sympathetic tone.

"Studies of media reporting of research, such as this one, can provide ideas as to how the research community, together with its funders and other supporters, can enhance the range and quality of media coverage," the researchers said.

_________________________________

Lewison, G., Roe, P., Wentworth, A., and Szmukler, G. (2011). The reporting of mental disorders research in British media. Psychological Medicine, 42 (02), 435-441 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001012

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

Links to the best psychology and neuroscience writing and broadcasting, compiled for your weekend pleasure:

The latest issue of The Psychologist magazine is online (browse the contents or view the free preview). It includes an open-access feature on self-control by Roy Baumeister.

You can also listen to Baumeister's recent talk at the RSA in London.

How are you going to read all these links? Fear not: This Saturday's Guardian comes with a free supplement on time management (also online).

New Yorker podcast of Jonah Lehrer explaining why brain storming doesn't work, but coffee breaks and criticism do. These ideas and more are in Lehrer's forthcoming book: "Imagine: How Creativity Works". I've covered similar ground on the Digest. Check out these previous posts: Why do we still believe in group brainstorming? Forget brainstorming - try brain writing! and Coffee helps women cope with stressful meetings but has the opposite effect on men.

Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias was another recent speaker at the RSA - listen to the audio.

A new book that's worth a look: "Together The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation" by Richard Sennett.

Another new book that's worth a look: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking" by Susan Cain.

BBC Radio 3 have broadcast a series of shorts about phonophobia - the fear and intolerance of noise.

A new video collection website features dozens of lectures for school students by university researchers.

Catch it while you can "Freud vs. Jung" from BBC Radio 4 is available for just one more day.

John Gray argues why Freud "the last great Enlightenment thinker" has gone out of fashion.

This could be Jung's century argues Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels.

This interest in Freud and Jung is due to the forthcoming release of A Dangerous Method, which charts the relationship between the two men.

Britons are more dishonest than they used to be, apparently. Or maybe just more honest about their dishonesty?

Go buy this week's New Scientist magazine if you can - it has features on the effects of space on the brain (see here also) and "orchid children" (kids who are vulnerable to neglect but who thrive in a nourishing environment).

Newly posted TEDx talk: Ariel Garten: Know thyself, with a brain scanner

A neuropsychoanalytic approach to the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs.

What goes on in the mind of a sniper?

Psychology professor Graham Davey (an expert in experimental psychopathology) has started a new blog.

Philosopher Roger Scruton with a long-form essay on the nature/nurture debate, in which he responds to recent books by Prinz, Eagleman and Greenfield.

Do women feel more pain than men?  (see here also).

BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour had a special episode on the psychology of friendship.

Did evolution domesticate the bonobo?

Skeptikai explodes some myths about "right-brains" and "left-brains".

Heart disease patients who take their placebo pills are less likely to die.

A sad twist to a classic case study in psychology: Was Little Albert neurologically impaired?

That's all - have a great weekend!
__

Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The life-long curse of an unpopular name

Receiving an unpopular name can have lifelong consequences, according to new research

Making assumptions about someone based on their name is ridiculous. A few attention-seeking celebrities aside, most of us were given our names, rather than choosing them, so why should they be any indicator of the kind of person we are? And yet a new European study claims that people with unfashionable first names suffer from prejudice, with life-long implications for their self-esteem and well-being.

Jochen Gebauer and his team used data collected from the German eDarling dating website. With the consent of hundreds of registered users, they looked to see how people with unfashionable first names were treated.

In the first study, the researchers identified hundreds of users of the dating site who had names that had been rated positively (e.g. Alexander) or negatively (e.g. Kevin) by 500 teachers as part of a different project. The eDarling website sends emails to users suggesting contacts in the form of a person's name, age and region. Users specify their preferences for age and region, so a suggested contact's name is the only information daters can really use in choosing whether to purse a contact. The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin).

An obvious criticism is that this online dating is an artificial situation - perhaps in real life we use other information to overcome any potential prejudice we might have against unpopular names. However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What's more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site - as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they'd suffered in life.

A further two studies replicated these results with a wider range of names and different methods of measuring name popularity. For example, the final study simply used name frequency as a measure of popularity. This again showed that people with less popular names experienced more rejection in online dating and had lower self-esteem and other adverse outcomes. This was the case even if their name had once been popular. So it's not the case that the negative correlates of having an unpopular name can be traced back somehow to having had the kind of parents who choose unpopular names.

These new results echo earlier research in the USA that found racial prejudice could affect the way people are treated based on their name. Identical CVs were dramatically more likely to attract job interviews if they were attributed to a person with a White-sounding name than if they were attributed to a person with an African-American sounding name. However race prejudice wasn't the cause of the harmful correlates of unpopular names in the current study - nearly all the names were White-sounding. Aside from racial prejudice, what causes names to acquire negative connotations is for another research paper. No doubt the names of celebrities, fictional characters and other high profile people play a role.

"Seemingly benign factors, such as first names, add up in real life, gaining considerable collective power in predicting feeling, thought, and behaviour," the researchers said. "The results also highlight the self-presentational value of first names and underscore the importance for parents to choose positively valenced first names for their children."
_________________________________


Gebauer, J., Leary, M., and Neberich, W. (2011). Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431644

Further reading from The Psychologist: The name game: We all have one, and it might determine our fate in a number of intriguing and bizarre ways. Nicholas Christenfeld and Britta Larsen investigate.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.