The power of blobs on the brain

The media love those colourful brain images - the ones adorned by blobs purportedly showing which areas are most active when the experimental participant is thinking about something specific like cheese on toast. Now researchers in America have shown just how persuasive these images can be.

David McCabe and Alan Castel presented university students with 300-word news stories about fictional cognitive research findings that were based on flawed scientific reasoning. For example, one story claimed that watching TV was linked to maths ability, based on the fact that both TV viewing and maths activate the temporal lobe. Crucially, students rated these stories to be more scientifically sound when they were accompanied by a brain image, compared with when the equivalent data were presented in a bar chart, or when there was no graphical illustration at all.

McCabe and Castel repeated the experiment with a control condition featuring a topographical activation map - it's just as visually complex as a brain image but it doesn't look like a brain. These stories were rated as more credible when accompanied by a brain image compared with a topographical map, showing that the allure of brain images is not merely down to their complexity.

A final study used a real-life news story taken from the BBC: "Brain scans can detect criminals". This time the students were more likely to agree with the conclusions of the news report when it was accompanied by a picture of the brain.

McCabe and Castel said their results show people have a "natural affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena, such that physical representations of cognitive processes, like brain images, are more satisfying, or more credible, than more abstract representations, like tables or bar graphs."

These new results come after earlier research showing that the mere mention of cognitive neuroscience data leads people to judge scientific findings to be of higher quality.
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MCCABE, D., CASTEL, A. (2008). Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition, 107(1), 343-352. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.017

How group cooperation varies between cultures

Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one such game known as The Public Goods Game. Compared with students from developed Western nations, students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted.

In 16 countries, researchers gave 20 tokens each to thousands of students who were arranged into groups of four anonymous players. On each round, the students, who interacted via computer screens, had to choose how much to invest in the group kitty, such that every member would be paid 0.4 tokens for every token invested in the kitty, regardless of whether they themselves had contributed.

The nature of the game means that if everyone contributes the maximum amount, all members can gain by receiving a return of 32 tokens each. However, there is also the temptation to be selfish, to 'free-load'. For example, if one member contributes nothing to the kitty, while everyone else contributes the maximum, that selfish member will receive 44 tokens.

Crucially, after each round, players can see the choices of the other players, and in one version of the game they were able punish others if they wanted to, by sacrificing a token of their own so that another player loses several of theirs.

When players had the option to punish, the groups tended to display more cooperation, which is consistent with past research showing that the ability to punish can help foster cooperative behaviour. However, in some countries, 'selfish' players also punished cooperative players, perhaps as a means of revenge for punishments they had suffered, or maybe as a way of punishing do-gooders for showing them up. The researchers called this 'anti-social punishment', and the groups where this occurred tended to cooperate less.

Anti-social punishment occurred more in those countries, including Belarus and Saudi Arabia, shown by surveys to have less faith in the rule of law and less belief in civic cooperation. In a commentary on the findings, published in the same journal, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, said the results challenge the way people have tended to view capitalist democracies. "The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of 'naked self-interest' is radically incorrect," he wrote.
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Herrmann, B., Thoni, C., Gachter, S. (2008). Antisocial Punishment Across Societies. Science, 319(5868), 1362-1367. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153808

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the web for the latest psychology journal special issues so you don't have to:

The neurobiology and therapeutics of antidepressant-resistant depression (Biological Psychiatry).

Instructional support for enhancing students' information problem solving ability (Computers in Human Behaviour).

From individual to collective memory: Theoretical and empirical perspectives (Memory).

From philosophical thinking to psychological empiricism, Part II (Perspectives on Psychological Science).

More evidence that fear of snakes is hard-wired

Slithery, scaly, and downright terrifying is how many people view snakes. Even in Britain, which has only one species of poisonous snake, people are often afraid. Some experts have suggested the snake's public relations problem is based on the fact humans have a hard-wired fear of snakes and other threatening creatures like spiders. Now this argument has found fresh support from a series of experiments showing that, like adults, pre-school age children have a superior ability for detecting snakes compared with innocuous creatures.

Dozens of children aged between three and five years were presented with 3 x 3 grids on a computer screen. Their task was to touch the one square containing a snake as fast as possible while ignoring the squares which all contained either flowers, caterpillars or frogs, depending on the particular experiment. For a comparison condition, the children had to touch the one square containing either flowers, a caterpillar or frog (again, it depended on the experiment), while ignoring all the other squares which contained snakes.

Throughout, the children were significantly faster when the task was to spot a snake from among distractors than when the task was to spot flowers, frogs or caterpillars. Crucially, in many cases the children's parents said their offspring had never experienced snakes and were unaware of the dangerous reputation they have -yet the kids still showed this selective advantage for spotting snakes.

The researchers Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache said their findings were consistent with the idea that humans have a fear module in the brain which is selectively sensitive to evolutionarily relevant threat stimuli. "The evolutionary claim," they said "is that [in the past] individuals who more rapidly detected the stimulus attributes signifying the presence of a poisonous snake or spider would have been more likely to escape the danger and hence to survive and reproduce."
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LoBue, V., DeLoache, J.S. (2008). Detecting the Snake in the Grass: Attention to Fear-Relevant Stimuli by Adults and Young Children. Psychological Science, 19(3), 284-289. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02081.x

Extras

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

A crying baby is perceived to be in more distress if the adult listener has just thought about someone who betrayed them.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) not effective for treating depression.

TMS - the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?

Women's experiences and expectations of pain relief in labour.

What studying brain-damaged patients with anosognosia (who deny they have anything wrong with them) can reveal about the way the brain monitors its movements and sensations.

Other people's misfortune alleviates our own regret

There can be few feelings worse than that pang of regret when you know you've made a bad decision. The perfect antidote, according to psychologists in Holland, is hearing about the misfortune of others....unless, that is, the future offers us a chance to make amends for our earlier mistake.

Frenk van Harreveld and colleagues first invited nearly one hundred students to place either a large or small bet on how well they thought they'd do at a trivia quiz. The procedure was fixed so that students opting for a safer, small bet were given an easy quiz, whereas the students who chose a large bet were given an impossible quiz, thus inducing both groups to regret their choice of bet.

Afterwards, some of the students were given fake information showing that they'd actually fared pretty well financially compared with the majority of other students -news that helped alleviate their regret. By contrast, hearing that other students had fared better did not serve to increase regret.

In a second experiment, Frenk van Harreveld and colleagues showed that the best antidote for regret depends on whether or not the future offers a way for us to make amends. Students once again bet on their performance at a trivia quiz - not for cash this time, but rather to determine how long they'd have to spend on a forthcoming arduous memory task.

The procedure was again fixed so that those betting conservatively (for the prize of a short rather than long memory test) were given easy quiz questions, while those who bet riskily (for the prize of no memory test at all) were given impossible questions, thus inducing both groups to experience regret.

Next, half the students were told that yet another quiz would give them a chance to earn some money. With the prospect of a second quiz, the students tended to shun hearing about the relative misfortune of other students at the previous quiz, choosing instead to hear information on likely future quiz topics. In this case, the researchers said, useful information was a better antidote to regret than hearing about others' misfortune.

"When there is no chance to do better in the future, misery seems to love (and even actively look for) company," the researchers concluded. "If however, there is a subsequent opportunity, regret can motivate us to do better next time."
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van Harreveld, F., van der Pligt, J., Nordgren, L. (2008). The relativity of bad decisions: Social comparison as a means to alleviate regret. British Journal of Social Psychology, 47(1), 105-117. DOI: 10.1348/014466607X260134

Why the same words keep getting stuck on the tip of your tongue

Not being able to think of a word that you know you know can be so frustrating. What's extra annoying about these tip-of-the-tongue states is that often we'll keep experiencing them for the same word. That's despite the fact that the relief we experience on finally discovering an elusive word often leads us to feel that we'll surely never forget it again.

The reason we continue struggling with the same words isn't just because they are unusual or awkward. No, according to Amy Warriner and Karin Humphreys, when we're in a tip-of-the-tongue state, we're actually learning the wrong way of retrieving the word, thus making it less likely that we'll successfully recall it in the future.

Thirty students attempted to retrieve words based on definitions given to them by the researchers. Here's an example: What do you call an instrument for performing calculations by sliding beads along rods or grooves? Answer: abacus. If the students reported experiencing a tip-of-the-tongue state, then they were either given 10 seconds before being told the word, or 30 seconds.

When, two days' later, the students were tested with the same definitions again, they were more likely to have a repeat tip-of-the-tongue state for a given word, if they'd previously experienced 30 seconds of having the word on the tip of their tongue, than if they'd previously only been in that state for 10 seconds.

The researchers said this finding was consistent with the idea that when the tip-of-the-tongue participants were previously made to wait 30 seconds, they were effectively spending more time learning that erroneous state - thus reinforcing the incorrect pattern of activation that was causing their tip-of-the-tongue sensation.

"Metaphorically speaking, this is akin to spinning one's tyres in the snow, resulting in nothing more than the creation of a deeper rut," the researchers explained.

The Digest asked Karin Humphreys what implications her results have for stopping tip-of-the-tongue-states from perpetually reoccurring. "If you can find out what the word is as soon as possible [by looking it up, or asking someone], that's great. If someone tells you the correct word, you should actually say it to yourself. It doesn't even need to be out loud, but you should at least say it to yourself. So by laying down another procedural memory, you can help to ameliorate the effects of the error. However, even with this, it doesn't get rid of the effect entirely. One other possibility is if you just can't figure it out, stop trying, you are just digging yourself in deeper."
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Warriner, A.B., Humphreys, K. (2008). Learning to fail: Reoccurring tip-of-the-tongue states. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(4), 535-542. DOI: 10.1080/17470210701728867

Elsewhere

For when you've had enough of journal articles:

Are you happy? Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books, says research on happiness is hampered by the variety of interpretations of what exactly it means to be happy. Her essay is a response to books on happiness by Dan Gilbert, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Tal Ben-Shahar, Eric G. Wilson, and Jerome Kagan.

Has science found a way to end all wars?

Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked has had enough of the enoughism espoused by Oliver James and others.

In Psychology Today: How even the most hard-core skeptic thinks magically, believing in karma, luck, curses, and tempting fate.

Depression, illustrated.

The Am I Normal? series on BBC Radio 4 has continued with episodes on dyslexia, dyscalculia and insomnia.

The nature of consciousness debate has continued on ABC Radio's All in the Mind series (part 1 here).

Also on BBC Radio 4: Celebrating 70 years of Relate, the world's largest counselling organisation for relationships.

Smokers ignore "what might have been"

Thankfully, most of us don't keep plumbing for the same option in life, over and over, regardless of how rewarding it might seem to be. No, we take into account what might have happened if we'd taken a different path, made a different decision. These so-called 'fictive' thoughts can lead us to change the way we behave in the future. But now Pearl Chiu and colleagues have shown this ability is lacking in smokers - a finding they say could have implications for treating addiction.

Thirty-one smokers and 31 non-smokers had their brains scanned as they played an investment game. They were given $100 with which to invest in stocks and shares and after each round they were told how much money they'd made, relative to how much money they could have made if they'd invested the maximum amount in their chosen shares.

Discovering how much money they could have made if they'd invested a larger amount affected the subsequent decision-making of the non-smokers but not the smokers. It's not that the brains of the smokers didn't register this information - they, like the non-smokers, showed increased activity in a part of the brain called the caudate when shown what they'd missed - it's just they didn't act on it. Pearl Chiu and co-workers say this cognitive anomaly helps explain why smokers carry on puffing away without regard for the positive outcomes that could have ensued had they have given up.

Co-author Read Montague told The Digest: "It's not at all clear from our work yet whether subjects who end up smoking (chronically) start out with a weak coupling between fictive error systems and behavioural control or whether this connection weakens as they become addicted to nicotine. We are gearing up to do a longitudinal study to find this out."
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Chiu, P.H., Lohrenz, T.M., Montague, P.R. (2008). Smokers' brains compute, but ignore, a fictive error signal in a sequential investment task. Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn2067

Aesthetic appreciation on the line

Seeking to understand aesthetics from the perspective of brain processes is all the rage these days, and has given birth to the nascent field of neuroaesthetics. Now Valeria Drago and co-workers have shown that people who are able to more accurately bisect a line, also tend to be more emotionally sensitive to paintings.

The researchers tested the ability of 17 right-handed participants to accurately bisect 100mm horizontal lines - that is, to mark the midpoint of the lines. The participants also looked at 10 paintings by the relatively unknown abstract artist Stephen Duren, before indicating how moved they were by each picture.

The more accurate a participant was at the line bisection task, the more moved they tended to be by the pictures. Moreover, when the participants were divided into two groups according to their accuracy at the line task, it was those in the more accurate group who were more emotionally affected by the paintings.

Valeria Drago at University Florida College and her truly international team of colleagues, based in Italy, Argentina, Korea, Japan and New Zealand, said this pattern of findings was consistent with the idea that the right hemisphere of the brain is associated both with attentional skills (underlying accurate line bisection) and the perception of emotion.

"For subjects to obtain the full evocative impact, it might have been important for the viewer to be attentive to the entire painting and this might explain why the [more accurate line bisection group] experienced a greater evocative impact," the researchers said.

A flaw in the study is that participants were asked to rate their emotional response to the paintings by marking a point on a horizontal line from little emotional impact on the left, to high impact on the right - a similar procedure to the line bisection task. However, in the bisection task, the less accurate participants tended to mark the midpoint further to the right than the more accurate participants, so if anything they should have shown a bias towards rating the paintings as more emotionally evocative. "It might be useful for future research to...use verbal ratings of evocative impact," the researchers said.
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DRAGO, V., FINNEY, G., FOSTER, P., AMENGUAL, A., JEONG, Y., MIZUNO, T., CRUCIAN, G., HEILMAN, K. (2008). Spatial-attention and emotional evocation: Line bisection performance and visual art emotional evocation. Brain and Cognition, 66(2), 140-144. DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2007.06.005

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the web for the latest psychology journal special issues, so you don't have to:

Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology: Historical Connections and Contemporary Applications (Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology).

Youth mental health (Clinical Psychologist).

Attentional capture (Visual Cognition).

Consciousness and Perception: Insights and Hindsights - A Festschrift in Honour of Larry Weiskrantz (Neuropsychologia).

Music can help people recover from stroke

Given its power to move us, perhaps it's no surprise that a great deal of research has focused on whether or not music can help people with depression or anxiety. Now researchers in Finland have asked whether music can benefit people recovering from stroke. Their study is notable for its sound methodological quality, and the results are promising: music does indeed appear to make a difference to patients' cognitive recovery.

Soon after their hospitalisation, 60 stroke patients were allocated randomly to one of three groups. Those in the music group were provided with a portable CD player and asked to listen to their favourite music for at least an hour a day for two months. Patients in the audio book group spent at least an hour a day for two months listening to audio books of their choosing. A final control group were not given a listening task.

Compared to the patients who listened to audio books and the control patients, the patients who listened to music daily showed superior performance when tested three months and six months later on measures of verbal memory and focused attention. Crucially, the psychologists who performed these neuropsychological assessments were unaware of which groups the patients had been in - making this a single-blind, randomised, controlled trial. The music and audio book patients also showed reduced depression and confusion compared with the control patients.

Teppo Sarkamo and colleagues who conducted the research said that music may exert these benefits by virtue of its wide-ranging impact on brain activity. Neuroimaging studies have shown that listening to music "naturally recruits bilateral temporal, frontal and parietal neural circuits underlying multiple forms of attention, working memory, semantic and syntactic processing, and imagery," the researchers said. By contrast, the brain activity triggered by speech without music is less extensive and more focused on the language-dominant hemisphere (usually the left).

The new finding is consistent with research on animals showing that a stimulating environment can speed recovery after stroke. Yet the researchers noted with regret that many stroke patients are left in their rooms without much stimulation or interaction. "We suggest that everyday music listening during early stroke recovery offers a valuable addition to the patients' care," they concluded.
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Sarkamo, T., Tervaniemi, M., Laitinen, S., Forsblom, A., Soinila, S., Mikkonen, M., Autti, T., Silvennoinen, H.M., Erkkila, J., Laine, M., Peretz, I., Hietanen, M. (2008). Music listening enhances cognitive recovery and mood after middle cerebral artery stroke. Brain, 131(3), 866-876. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awn013

"Just looking at a cake makes me feel fatter"

Have you ever caught yourself staring at sumptuously-formed cake, only to come away with the guilty feeling that the mere act of looking has led you to put on weight? If so, you're not alone.

Following research showing that people with eating disorders are prone to these irrational thoughts, Jennifer Coelho and colleagues have now confirmed that people without an eating disorder experience them too, though to a lesser extent.

However, that was not the aim of their research. Coelho's group conducted this study because at least one expert has suggested that people with eating disorders displace their emotional problems onto their bodies, thereby experiencing increased fatness when they're distressed. To test this, Coelho's team investigated whether for people with eating disorders, it is specifically thinking about food that can lead to guilty feelings about weight gain, or if anxiety in general can have the same effect.

The researchers asked women with eating disorders and female university students without an eating disorder, to imagine eating a naughty food. As a control, other women with eating disorders and other female university students imagined giving a public presentation.

Imagining eating large quantities of a naughty food led the eating disordered participants, and to a lesser extent the university students, to experience guilt and feelings of weight gain. By contrast, the participants who imagined giving a public presentation did not report these feelings, thus undermining the idea that for people with an eating disorder, it is any kind of anxiety that leads to guilt and a sense of weight gain.

A further, counter-intuitive finding was that a subgroup of the university students - those who reported restricting what they ate - actually did not experience guilt or feelings of weight gain after imagining a naughty food. The researchers said this could be because this group deliberately suppress their food-related thoughts.

The researchers concluded that future research should examine whether it is beneficial for treatment approaches to target the kinds of irrational thoughts examined in this study, or if instead such thoughts will reduce naturally as people recover from their eating disorders.
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COELHO, J. (2008). "Just looking at food makes me gain weight": Experimental induction of thought-shape fusion in eating-disordered and non-eating-disordered women. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(2), 219-228. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2007.11.004

More resources for A-level students

New podcasts and classroom posters are available for download from the OCR exam board, following two events held in association with the British Psychological Society in January.

The resources relate to the core studies part of OCR's new syllabus starting in September 2008, but all psychology students and teachers will hopefully find them useful.

Podcasts:

MP3 of Mark Griffiths talking about his research on problem gambling.
MP3 of Stephen Reicher talking about research that is leading experts to reconsider the psychology of tyranny.
MP3 of Alexander Haslam talking on the same topic.

A3 Posters:

PDF: Spontaneous symbol acquisition and communicative use by pygmy chimpanzees.
PDF: Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study.
PDF: Navigation related structural change in the hippocampi of London taxi drivers.
PDF: Another advanced test of theory of mind: evidence from very high-functionality adults with autism or Asperger Syndrome.
PDF: The role of cognitive bias and skill in fruit machine gambling.

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Link to podcasts and posters via OCR resources page.
Link to previous Digest post dedicated to the OCR core studies module.

Behind the news