We all differ in our ability to cope with contradictions and paradoxes. Introducing the "aintegration" test

Life is full of paradoxes and uncertainty – good people who do bad things, and questions with no right or wrong answer. But the human mind abhors doubt and contradictions, which provoke an uncomfortable state of "cognitive dissonance". In turn, this motivates us to see the world in neat, black and white terms. For example, we'll decide the good person must really have been bad all along, or conversely that the bad thing they did wasn't really too bad after all. But a pair of researchers in Israel point out that some of us are better than others at coping with incongruence and doubt than others – an ability they call "aintegration" for which they've concocted a new questionnaire. The full version, together with background theory, is published in the Journal of Adult Development.

If you want to hear what the researchers found out about who copes best with uncertainty, skip past the two example items coming up next.

Jacob Lomranz and Yael Benyamini's test begins: This questionnaire explores the way people think and feel about various attitudes. In the following pages you will be presented with attitudes held by different people. Please read each attitudinal position carefully and use the ratings scale to state your general and personal reaction as to such attitudes.

The test then features 11 items similar to these two:

EXAMPLE ITEM 1 There are people who will avoid making decisions under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. In contrast, other people would make decisions even under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. 

(a) In general, to what extent do you think it is possible to make decisions under
conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity?
1,2,3,4, or 5 (choose 1 to 5 where 1= not at all and 5=to a very great extent)

(b) Assuming someone does make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and
ambiguity, to what extent do you think this would cause her/him discomfort?
12345

(c) To what extent do you make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and
ambiguity?
12345

(d) Assuming you made a decision under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, to
what extent would that cause you discomfort?
12345

EXAMPLE ITEM 2 There is an opinion that in every relationship between couples there are contradictory feelings; on the one hand, the individual benefits from the relationship (for example, love) and on the other hand loses from the relationship (for example, loss of independence).

- Some people claim that even when the couple has contradictory feelings about their relationship, a good relationship can still exist.
- In contrast, there are those who claim that when there are contradictory feelings about the couple relationship, it is impossible to maintain a good relationship.

(a) In general, to what extent do you think it is possible to have a good relationship when a couple has contradictory feelings about that relationship?
1234, or 5 (choose 1 to 5 where 1= not at all and 5=to a very great extent)

(b) Assuming someone persists with a relationship about which they have contradictory feelings, to what extent do you think this would cause her/him discomfort?
12345

(c) To what extent do you have contradictory feelings about your relationship(s)?
12345

(d) Assuming you have contradictory feelings, to what extent would that cause you discomfort?
12345

Higher scores for (a) and (c) questions and lower scores for (b) and (d) questions mean that you have higher aintegration – that is, that you are better able to cope with uncertainty and contradictions.

To road test their questionnaire, the researchers gave the full version with 11 items to hundreds of people across three studies and they found that it had high levels of "internal reliability" – that is, people who scored high for aintegration on one item tended to do so on the others.

Lomranz and Benyamini also found some evidence that older people (middle-aged and up), divorcees, the highly educated and the less religious tended to score higher on aintegration. So too did people who had experienced more positive events in life, and those who saw their negative experiences in more complex terms, as having both good and bad elements. Moreover, higher scorers on aintegration reported experiencing fewer symptoms of trauma after negative events in life.

This last finding raises the possibility that aintegration may grant resilience to hardship, although longer-term research is needed to test this (an alternative possibility is that finding a way to cope with trauma promotes aintegration).

Higher scores on aintegration also tended to correlate negatively with the established psychological construct of "need for structure".

The researchers said their paper was just a "first step" in establishing the validity of aintegration and that the concept could help inform future research especially with people "who dwell in states of transitions or 'betweenness', for example, struggling with national identities, cultural adjustment or conflicting values."

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Lomranz, J., & Benyamini, Y. (2015). The Ability to Live with Incongruence: Aintegration—The Concept and Its Operationalization Journal of Adult Development, 23 (2), 79-92 DOI: 10.1007/s10804-015-9223-4

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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After learning to identify with someone else's face, do people think their appearance has changed?

Past research has shown that it’s possible to hack our sense of our own bodies in bewildering ways, such as perceiving another person’s face as our own by stroking both in synchrony. These body illusions can alter our sense of self at a psychological level too. For example, embodying a child-sized body in a virtual reality environment leads people to associate themselves with child-like concepts. Can such effects also operate in the opposite direction, from the psychological to the physical? A new paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology aimed to find out by seeing if shifting people’s sense of self at a psychological level warped their sense of their facial appearance.

Sophie Payne’s team at Royal Holloway, University of London manipulated their participants’ sense of self by repeatedly presenting them with a black and white cropped photo of a gender-appropriate face that was labelled "self", and with two other face images that were labelled as "friend" and "stranger". To consolidate these associations, the researchers then tested the participants, repeatedly showing them one of the earlier faces together with the correct label used earlier or the wrong label, and the participants had to say each time whether the label matched the face or not.

As the test went on, the participants became especially quick at spotting when the “self face” was correctly labelled as “self”, just as the researchers hoped would happen. This suggests that the previously unknown face had been incorporated into their self concept, at least temporarily. Think of it as a weaker version of the way we are particularly sensitive to any sounds that resemble our name, even against the hubbub of a cocktail party.

Having incorporated this face into their self-concept, did the participants view their facial appearance any differently? To address this, the researchers presented the participants with 100 faces and asked them to rate how similar each face was to their own. Fifty of the faces were blends of their own real face with the "stranger" face from earlier, and another 50 blended their real face with the “self face” paired earlier with their self concept.

The participants had actually completed this resemblance task earlier, before they’d learned to associate the “self face” with their self concept. The crucial test was whether, now that they'd learned to associate themselves with the “self face”, they would see themselves as resembling that face physically, more so than they had done earlier. Payne’s team predicted that they would, but in fact the results showed that this hadn’t happened. Identifying themselves with the face hadn't made them believe that they looked like the face.

Payne’s prediction was credible partly because we know the psychological self is malleable, body perception is malleable, and changes to body perception usually result in shifts in sense of self. Furthermore, and making this new result extra surprising, psychological influences have already been shown to affect our judgments about the physical appearance of our own face.

For example, a study from 2014 showed that people were more likely to say that they resembled a face that reflected a blend of their own face with someone else’s, when that other face belonged to a trustworthy partner in an earlier trading task rather than a cheat. Essentially, that result showed that the lines between self and other can be easily blurred, unlike in the current study. What gives?

The non-significant result in the current study may have uncovered the limits to these kinds of blurring effects. The findings suggest that it may be quite easy to adapt our self-concept, for example attuning us to identify with a new nickname or onscreen avatar, but that for this process to go deeper and influence how we perceive our own physical appearance, we need a more motivated, involving, and perhaps social context, like being betrayed or treated loyally.

The new hypothesis, then, is that we are engineered to perceptually link – or distance ourselves – from those who have helped or wronged us, and that the heat of social emotion is the soldering iron that fixes these connections fast. Further research will tell.

_________________________________

Payne, S., Tsakiris, M., & Maister, L. (2016). Can the self become another? Investigating the effects of self-association with a new facial identity The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-13 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1137329

--further reading--
Embodying another person's face makes it easier to recognise their fear

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Teaching children the ancient "mental abacus" technique boosted their maths abilities more than normal extra tuition

Seeing an expert abacus user in action is a sight to behold. Their hands are a blur as they perform arithmetic operations far quicker than anyone using an electronic calculator. The mental abacus technique is even more impressive – it works just the same as a real abacus, except that you visualise moving the beads in your mind's eye (check out this video of people using mental abacus to perform amazing feats of arithmetic).

Surprisingly, there is little research on the benefits of teaching the mental abacus technique to children. But now, for a paper in Child Development, psychologists in the US have conducted a three-year randomised controlled trial of the effects of teaching the mental abacus on 183 five-to-seven year-old children at a charitable school in Vadodara, India. Their results suggest that training in the mental abacus can have impressive benefits for students'  mathematical abilities, above and beyond those seen for standard supplementary teaching, but that these benefits may not extend to children with weaker cognitive abilities.

The children took baseline tests of their maths and cognitive abilities, then they were allocated randomly to a group to receive three hours per week extra tuition in the abacus (the first year focused mostly on the physical abacus – specifically the Japanese soroban style – and then later years graduated to the mental abacus) or to a group that received three hours per week supplementary maths tuition, following the OUP New Enjoying Maths series.

When the children's maths and cognitive abilities were tested again at the end of the three-year study, those in the mental abacus group showed superior improvements in their maths abilities, including calculation, arithmetic and the conceptual understanding of place value, compared with the control group (effect sizes were large), and some modest advantages in their academic grades in maths and science. The mental abacus did not lead to wider benefits in cognitive abilities and it didn't change the children's attitudes to maths or reduce their maths anxiety – this latter result sounds disappointing, but also means the main benefit to maths ability is unlikely to be a placebo effect. Unfortunately, the exceptional benefits of mental abacus training to maths ability were not found among a subset of children who started out the study with weak spatial and working memory abilities.

"We find evidence that mental abacus – a system rooted in a centuries-old technology for arithmetic and counting – is likely to afford some children a measurable advantage in arithmetic calculation compared to additional hours of standard math training," the researchers said. "Our evidence suggests that mental abacus provides this benefit by building on children's pre-existing cognitive capacities rather than by modifying their ability to visualise and manipulate objects in working memory."

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Barner, D., Alvarez, G., Sullivan, J., Brooks, N., Srinivasan, M., & Frank, M. (2016). Learning Mathematics in a Visuospatial Format: A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Mental Abacus Instruction Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12515

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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What does an ambivalent mood do to your problem-solving skills?

Psychologists have got a pretty good picture of how we’re influenced by the big emotional states. Feeling positive encourages an explorative cognitive style that is risk-tolerant and well suited to the open aspects of creativity, whereas negative emotions make us sensitive to threat and prone to vigilant, focused thinking. But what happens when our emotional states are a mix of the two – when we’re in an ambivalent mood? Appropriately, research to date has been inconsistent, with some work suggesting it sharpens our minds, others that it distracts us. In a new paper in Journal of Applied Psychology researchers at the University of Virginia have tidied up the mixed findings about mixed feelings.

Cristiano Guarana and Morela Hernandez lay out why feeling ambivalent should facilitate decision-making: it sends a strong signal that a situation is complex, and that simple solutions are likely to be unsatisfactory. Consistent with this, past research, including their own, has shown ambivalence can lead to more cognitive flexibility and holistic, comprehensive solutions. But other research has linked ambivalence with poor decision-making. How can we reconcile these findings?

Guarana and Hernandez’s theory is that in a real-life situation it’s not always clear where your emotional states arrive from, and if you feel ambivalent, but haven’t bottomed out why, you won’t give that complex situation the attention it needs… and worse, you could attribute your feelings to a peripheral situation that will needlessly suck up your attention. For ambivalence to be cognitively advantageous, the state must be tied to its source.

The researchers conducted four experiments to test their explanation, with the final one combining all the clever bits of design into one setup. For this final study, the researchers first prompted their two hundred participants (all were employees from a range of organizations, on average 45 years old and two thirds were women) to experience feelings of ambivalence by asking them to write a short passage on a personal experience that involved either indifference or ambivalence. Next, the researchers warned half of the participants that the upcoming task could produce mixed reactions, priming them to recognise it as a source of ambivalence. The idea was that these participants would see the upcoming task as the source of their ambivalent feelings.

The main task involved participants reading a scenario about a fraudulent drug trial in which the researcher added made-up data points so he could release the drug to market. The participants then had to judge based on this limited information what happened next: whether they thought it was more likely that the drug was (a) withdrawn from the market, or (b) that it was withdrawn from the market after killing and injuring patients.

This is a classic decision-making conjunction problem: the conjunction of two events is never more likely than either alone, but superficial thinking can lead us to assume the more specific is more likely. In fact, the participants gave the wrong answer more often than right – unless they had been primed to see the test as a source of their ambivalent feelings, in which case they made the correct choice in two out of three instances.

Results from a supplementary task showed how participants thought about the scenario differently when they had been primed to see it as a source of their ambivalent feelings. After responding to the scenario, participants completed word fragments, e.g. DIS___, by writing in the end of words. Some of these fragments could potentially form words related to the drug-trial scenario (e.g. DISEASE). When participants completed the word fragments in this way, this was taken as a sign that they were more sensitive to the concepts in the scenario.

Participants in the priming condition produced more scenario-related words, and the more that they did this, the more likely it was that they also reached the correct solution. This is consistent with the idea that the primed participants tied their ambivalent feelings to the drug trial scenario, and that this encouraged them to pay more attention to it. Interestingly, Guarana and Hernandez showed this only applied to participants scoring low on a measure of self-control: people inclined to skirt difficult issues are the ones to benefit from recognising their ambivalence about a situation.

The message is clear: when you’re feeling a muss of conflicted feelings, take a step back and identify where that message is coming from. Do so, and you authorise your mind to attend to it in the best possible way.

________________________________

Identified Ambivalence: When Cognitive Conflicts Can Help Individuals Overcome Cognitive Traps. Guarana, Cristiano L.; Hernandez, Morela Journal of Applied Psychology, Mar 10 , 2016.

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Why are boys better than girls at maths in some countries but not others?

There are many reasons for the paucity of women in science and technology careers, but arguably one early contributing factor is the relatively weaker performance of girls in maths at school, compared with boys. Is this because girls are inherently poorer than boys at maths? To help find out, a new study in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology has compared gender differences in maths ability among 250 school children, aged six to seven, in three countries: USA, Russia and Taiwan.

On more complex addition problems involving double-digit operations (25 + 37), boys outperformed girls in the USA and Russia, but not in Taiwan. The researchers also asked the children how they arrived at their solutions. In the USA and Russia, girls preferred to use less effective counting strategies (for example, counting on their fingers) whereas boys used more "decomposition" – transforming original problems into two or more simpler problems. In Taiwan, by contrast, girls used decomposition for complex problems just as much as boys.

Taken together, the findings are consistent with the idea that girls may have a predisposition to use less effective arithmetic strategies compared to boys, but that this can be addressed through the right tuition.

The gender difference in strategy use, shown here and in earlier research, may be due to early social experiences, or it could be related to an innate gender difference in visualisation and spatial abilities that are useful for decomposition strategies.

Regardless, the fact that in Taiwan girls were adept as boys at complex addition problems, and that girls in this country used decomposition strategy as often boys strongly suggests that gender differences in maths skill and strategy use are not fixed. Consistent with this, it happens that the Taiwan education system places more emphasis than the US and Russia on teaching effective strategy use.

The researchers acknowledged their findings are observational, and that there is speculation in this interpretation of the results. We need experiments now to test the effects of early instruction in strategy use. "Interventions that start at the elementary school level may have a cumulative effect by increasing girls’ confidence and their participation in more challenging math classes later in school," the researchers said.

--Here, but not there: Cross-national variability of gender effects in arithmetic
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Want to remember something? Draw it

If you've got some revision to do, get yourself a sketch pad and start drawing out the words or concepts that you want to remember. That's the clear message from a series of studies in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology that demonstrates drawing is a powerful memory aid.

Jeffrey Wammes and his colleagues first presented dozens of students with 30 easily drawable words such as "apple". For each word, they had to spend 40 seconds writing it out repeatedly, or drawing it. The students then completed a filler task for a couple of minutes, which involved classifying the pitch of different tones. Then they were given a surprise memory test and asked to recall as many of the earlier words as possible. Participants recalled more than double the proportion of drawn words than written words. The drawing advantage held in a variation of the experiment in which the 40 seconds were spent either drawing each word repeatedly, or writing out each word just once and then spending additional time adding visual detail, such as shading.

In further experiments with dozens more students, the researchers showed that drawing was a better memory aid than visualising the words, than writing a description of the physical characteristics of each word's meaning (designed to encourage deep-level encoding of the words), and more effective than looking at pictures of the words. The drawing advantage also remained when participants were given just four seconds to draw each word, and whether they performed the tasks alone or together in a lecture hall.

The researchers think that drawing has this effect because it involves lots of different mental processes that are known to benefit memory, such as visualization and deep-level elaboration. "We propose that drawing, through the seamless integration of its constituent parts, produces a synergistic effect, whereby the whole benefit is greater than the sum of the benefit of each component," they said. They acknowledged more research is needed to show the usefulness of these findings to real life: "While we did show that the drawing effect is reliable in group testing in our experiments, the content was still only single words and hardly representative of an academic setting."

--The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Most of us are overconfident about how much we understand things – this simple intervention can help

Most of us massively overestimate our understanding of everyday objects, like the vacuum cleaner

"True wisdom is knowing what you don't know" Socrates.

When we're asked how much we understand the workings of everyday things like vacuum cleaners or computer printers, most of us massively overestimate our own knowledge. This overconfidence extends beyond objects to more abstract matters, such as our comprehension of political policies, and collectively the phenomenon is known as "the illusion of explanatory depth".

One already established antidote is to ask people produce a detailed explanation of whatever it is that they think they understand – after doing this, most of us come to realise the true modesty of our knowledge. However, as an intervention or "cure" for reducing over-confidence, producing full explanations is impractical because it is time consuming and unappealing. But now a team of psychologists at Washington and Lee University has demonstrated that it's not necessary to have people generate full explanations – merely asking them to reflect briefly, in a very specific way, on their knowledge is enough to effectively combat overconfidence.

Across nine studies involving hundreds of people recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, the researchers tested the effectiveness of what they call "Reflecting on Explanatory Ability". Before estimating their understanding of various objects, including vacuum cleaners, crossbows, treadmills and umbrellas, participants were instructed to:

"Carefully reflect on your ability to explain to an expert, in a step-by-step, causally-connected manner, with no gaps in your story how the object works".

Spending a few seconds doing this was enough to substantially reduce people's estimates of their own knowledge, almost as much as spending time typing out a full explanation, and far more than simply spending time on unguided reflection (in the unguided condition, the instruction was to "carefully reflect on your understanding of how the object works").

The researchers believe that "Reflecting on Explanatory Ability" works because it forces people to assess the complexity of the object they're thinking about and to get a sense of the number of gaps in their knowledge. Supporting this interpretation, the researchers found that the guided reflection instructions were not as effective when they lacked the specific wording "in a step-by-step, causally connected manner". Similarly, adding the additional, later instruction to "estimate how many steps it would take to explain how the parts enable the object to work" did not enhance the "Reflection on Explanatory Ability" intervention, suggesting that this is what the intervention already prompts participants to do.

Also consistent with the idea that the "Reflection on Explanatory Ability" intervention works by provoking participants to perform a quick complexity assessment, the researchers found that their intervention was less effective at correcting people's confidence in their knowledge of less complex objects (the researchers acknowledged this means there is still a useful role for generating full explanations in these cases).

In another test, the researchers checked and confirmed that the benefits of their "Reflection on Explanatory Ability" intervention were not due to participants producing silent explanations in their heads – that is, the intervention was just as effective whether participants reflected for five or twenty seconds (if they were engaging in covert explanation, then the intervention should have been more effective after twenty seconds).

In the final study, the researchers showed that their intervention doesn't just help combat people's overconfidence in their understanding of objects, it can also reduce their overconfidence in their understanding of political policies (such as the idea of merit-based pay for teachers), and as a consequence, it makes their attitudes towards those policies more moderate.

Johnson and his team concluded that "Reflection on Explanatory Ability; REA" is a "rare metacognitive tool in the arsenal to combat our proclivity to overestimate understanding" and that "perhaps REA can help us gain the wisdom to which Socrates was referring."
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  Johnson, D., Murphy, M., & Messer, R. (2016). Reflecting on Explanatory Ability: A Mechanism for Detecting Gaps in Causal Knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/xge0000161

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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10 Studies That Show The Advantages of Feeling Sad

As human beings, there's no avoiding feeling sad – as R.E.M. put it "everybody cries, and everybody hurts sometimes". We usually think of this as an unpleasant state, and for those of us who want to minimise our miserable moods as much as possible, the internet is bursting with tips on how to be happier. But with this post, I wanted to take a different approach, to explore the benefits, if any, of embracing your low moods. I'm not talking about serious, debilitating depression, but more mundane, moderate levels of moodiness. In short, I looked for any psychology research that shows the potential upsides to feeling a little bit down. Here are ten studies I found:

1. Bad moods can be motivating (when they're followed by good moods)
A 2011 study that assessed software developers twice a day for 55 days found that the most engaged with their work in the afternoon were those who'd switched from a bad mood to a positive one, as compared with those who were happy all day or fed up all day. The finding is consistent with what's known as the "affective shift model" of work engagement. "We think it is of benefit to understand and accept that negative mood and negative events, such as crises, conflicts, and errors, are integral and unavoidable aspects of human action at work," the researchers said. "In the absence of negative experiences, people will perceive less necessity to act and show lower levels of work engagement."

2. Embrace your bad moods and they won't do you harm
For a study published last year, researchers interviewed 365 German participants about their attitudes to negative and positive emotions, and about their mental and physical health. The researchers then monitored the participants' mood states over a three-week period using their smart phones. The links between people's frequency of bad moods and negative outcomes (in terms of mental and physical health) varied depending on the attitudes they held toward negative emotion. Those participants who had negative attitudes toward bad moods tended to pay the usual price: the more negative moods they experienced, the poorer their mental and physical health, both in the moment and longer term (for example, based on their number of health complaints). However, among the participants who had a more positive attitude toward bad moods, these links were mostly reduced, or in some cases even absent completely.

3. There's a good chance you'll feel better after having a proper cry
Giving yourself a chance to wallow in your sadness can sometimes be cathartic, at least in the short term. That was the message from a study published in 2011, in which 97 female undergrads completed a crying diary for between 40 and 73 days. Most often, mood after crying was reported as unchanged (60.8 per cent), but 30 per cent of tearful sessions were associated with a positive mood change, with only 8.8 per cent leading to a deterioration in mood. More intense (but not longer) crying episodes were associated with more positive mood outcomes, as were crying episodes that followed a feeling of inadequacy and that triggered a positive change in the situation. Also, crying in the company of one other person was associated more often with positive mood change than was crying alone or crying in the company of multiple people.

4. You're more persuasive when you're sad
For this research released in 2007, participants were provoked into happy or sad moods by watching short films, either featuring comedy or a person dying from illness. Next, they had to write down arguments to persuade someone to change their mind about a controversial issue, such as student fees or Aboriginal land rights in Australia. Across several studies testing variants of this set up, sad people produced more effective messages than happy people, and what's more, their arguments were more persuasive. The effect seemed to be due to the fact that sad people produced more concrete and specific arguments than happy people.

5. Mild depression may come with enhanced empathy 
Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged from the rest of the world, but in 2005 psychologists at Queen’s University in Canada found that mildly depressed students actually had a heightened ability to detect other people’s emotions from photos that showed only the eye region of their face. Unfortunately, this "advantage" could backfire. The researchers said ultra sensitivity to other people's emotions could cause problems for individuals prone to depression – "by being more sensitive, dysphoric and depressed individuals have more opportunities to deploy their negative biases in interpreting fleeting emotional reactions,” they said.

6. Being in a grump probably won't affect your mental performance
For a study published this year, researchers had participants complete similar versions of the same mental tests for five consecutive days, including memory and processing speed. Each day before the tests, the participants also completed comprehensive measures of their mood. The participants mood and mental performance fluctuated over the course of the study, but crucially the two were not linked – in other words, there was no evidence that being in a bad mood was associated with performing more poorly on the mental tests.

7. Sad leaders encourage an analytical thinking style 
In this research from 2013, business students received task instructions and encouragement from a manager who spoke to them via video link. The wording of the leader's guidance was the same for all students, but some of them watched the manager deliver his advice in a happy mood, while the others watched him while he was in a sad mood. After the video, those students who'd watched the happy manager excelled at a creative task (coming up with ideas of what you can do with a glass of water), but meanwhile the students who had the sad manager excelled at sudoku puzzles, used as a measure of analytical thinking.

8. Feeling sad makes you less prone to misleading information 
For research conducted in 2005, participants looked at pictures of a car crash. About an hour later, they recalled either happy or sad events from their lives, which had the effect of putting them in a happy or sad mood. Next, they answered questions about the car crash, some of which were misleading, such as "did you see the fireman holding a fire hose?" (in fact there was no fire hose). The key finding is that sad participants were less often mislead by this kind of false information than happy participants. The researchers said their results were consistent with other findings showing that "negative moods often promote a more accommodating, externally oriented and piecemeal information processing style that often results in more accurate and less distorted judgments and inferences."

9. You're less gullible when you're feeling down
Being sad also makes us less gullible and better at detecting lies, according to a study published in 2008. Participants were provoked into happy or sad moods by watching suitably themed films. Next, they watched videos of people lying or telling the truth about whether they'd stolen a movie ticket from someone's room. The sad participants were more skeptical in general in their response to these videos, and they were better at detecting when the people in the videos were lying. "Our findings may also help to highlight the potentially beneficial effects of negative mood and the possible undesirable consequences of good mood in some circumstances," the researchers said. "The cognitive benefits of negative affect can be understood in terms of the more accommodative, externally oriented processing style it induces," they added.

10. Bad moods are part of a meaningful life
They say only a fool can be happy. That might be overstating it, but an American survey published in 2013 did find that people who rated their lives as more meaningful also tended to report experiencing more stress, anxiety and worry. The researchers, led by Roy Baumeister, concluded that the highly meaningful but relatively unhappy life has "received relatively little attention and even less respect" to date. "But people who sacrifice their personal pleasures in order to participate constructively in society may make substantial contributions," they said.  "Cultivating and encouraging such people despite their unhappiness could be a goal worthy of positive psychology."

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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You'll get over it, you're probably better at managing guilt and shame than you think

A recurring finding in psychology is that people tend to overestimate the strength of their future emotions, an error known as the "intensity bias". You imagine that failing your driving test will leave you in the depths of despair, for example, but actually when it happens, you don't really feel too bad – the examiner was mean, you were feeling tired, and anyway you've still got your mate's party to look forward to next weekend. In other words, the reason you overestimated the emotional impact of the exam failure, is that you underestimated your powers of emotional regulation. A new study in Cognition and Emotion puts this account to the test, specifically for the emotions of guilt and shame.

Wilco van Dijk and his colleagues recruited 52 students and allocated half to complete three tests with a partner (an actor pretending to be another student), and the other half to forecast how they would feel in the testing situation were they to do it. The "experiencers" were told that if they and their partner together averaged a score of over 60 per cent on the maths, language and puzzle tests, then they would receive a cash bonus. After taking the tests, these participants were given fixed feedback informing them that they'd personally underperformed (designed to induce shame), and that therefore both they and their partner would miss out on the cash bonus (designed to induce guilt). The "forecasters" were asked to imagine being in this exact same situation and how they would feel.

After receiving the bad news about their performance, the experiencers rated their levels of guilt and shame, and how much they engaged in various strategies that usually reduce emotional intensity, including reappraising the situation (measured by agreement with statements like "the task wasn't that important"); suppressing their feelings ("I'm trying to be as calm as possible"); and acceptance ("I can live with the current situation"); and also how much they engaged in rumination, which usually increases emotional intensity ("I'm thinking mostly about what I did wrong"). Meanwhile, the forecasters stated how much guilt and shame they thought they would experience if they were in this situation, and how much emotional regulation they thought they would probably engage in.

The main finding is that the forecasters overestimated how much guilt and shame they thought they would experience (as compared with the actual emotions reported by the experiencers) – this is a classic example of the intensity bias, but the first time it's been demonstrated for the so-called "self-conscious" emotions of guilt and shame. The forecasters also underestimated how much acceptance they would engage in, and they overestimated how much they would ruminate. Moreover, the forecasters' overestimation of their guilt and shame was largely explained by their misjudgments about their likely use of acceptance and rumination.

Of course just because we tend underestimate the intensity of our future emotions from an objective point of view, doesn't mean that this is an unhelpful bias to have. The researchers point out, for example, that the intensity bias could help motivate us to avoid bad outcomes and find positive ones (I would add that in the case of anticipated guilt and shame, the bias also likely helps encourage people to engage in more ethical behaviour). "Thus, although turning a blind eye to our emotion regulation processes can be regarded as error when we look in the crystal ball of our emotion lives," the researchers said, "it is perhaps not a grave one".

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van Dijk, W., van Dillen, L., Rotteveel, M., & Seip, E. (2016). Looking into the crystal ball of our emotional lives: emotion regulation and the overestimation of future guilt and shame Cognition and Emotion, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1129313

--further reading--
Guilt-prone people are highly skilled at recognising other people's emotions
Guilt is catching

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Distrust of atheists is "deeply and culturally ingrained" even among atheists

Just as people throughout history have been subject to prejudice and persecution because of their religious beliefs, recent evidence suggests that atheists today are discriminated against because of their lack of faith. For instance, in a 2012 study, nearly one in two atheists and agnostics reported having experienced discrimination at work, in the family and elsewhere. Another US study that asked respondents to imagine their children marrying people from different social groups found that participants were most disapproving of the idea of their child marrying an atheist.

Building on these kinds of past results, most of which stem from the US, a new British study published in The International Journal for The Psychology of Religion, has found that many people's distrust of atheists seems to be deeply held, and what's more, even many atheists seem to have an instinctual distrust of other atheists. For background, Britain is a country where 13 per cent of people today consider themselves convinced atheists.

Leah Giddings and Thomas Dunn recruited 100 participants from Nottingham Trent University: their average age was 21 and 70 were women. Forty-three per cent were atheist, 33 per cent were Christian and the remainder subscribed to other faiths. The researchers presented the participants with a vignette about a man who one day backed his car into a van and failed to leave his insurance details, and later on, when he found a wallet, he removed the money from it for himself. In short, this chap wasn't very trustworthy or moral. Next, half the participants were asked to say whether it was more probable that the man was (a) a teacher or (b) a teacher and religious (let's call this the teacher+religious condition). The other half of the participants had to say whether they thought it was more likely that the man was (a) a teacher or (b) a teacher and an atheist (the teacher+atheist condition).

Logically speaking, in both conditions the correct answer is always (a) because (b) is a subset of (a) and therefore less likely by definition. However, it's well known in psychology that many people struggle to answer these kinds of questions logically because they're swayed by the connotations of the secondary category that's mentioned in (b) – an error that's known as the conjunction fallacy.

What was particularly revealing in this study is that participants in the teacher+atheist condition were much more prone to committing the conjunction fallacy (66 per cent of them did so), than the participants in the teacher+religious condition (just 8 per cent of participants in this condition fell for the conjunction error). These results suggest that at a superficial level, the description of the distrustful man sounded to many of the participants like a typical atheist, and hence many of them said they thought it more likely that he was both a teacher and an atheist than a teacher.

To test the strength of this apparent prejudice towards atheists, the researchers asked the participants the same question again, and they also presented them with information about the proportions of the population who are religious or atheist. To participants in the teacher+atheist condition, this barely made any difference to their answers, suggesting their instinctual prejudice towards atheists was robust. Even though they were given a chance to think more rationally, they still fell for the fallacy. By contrast, the participants in the teacher+religious condition committed the conjunction fallacy even less often when they were asked the question for a second time.

The prejudice shown towards atheists in this study was more pronounced among those who professed a stronger belief in God, but it was also present, albeit to a lesser extent, among the non-religious. Another thing – the non-religious participants, like the religious, showed more instinctual distrust toward atheists than towards religious people (that is, they committed the conjunction fallacy more often in the teacher+atheist condition than the teacher+religious condition).

The researchers said their findings "suggest anti-atheist distrust is deeply and culturally ingrained regardless of an individual's group membership". This raises the question – why are people, at least in the UK and the US, so distrustful of atheists? The researchers speculated that it may be because most people assume that religious folk believe they're being monitored by a higher being, and that this will therefore encourage these people to behave morally, whereas this supervision is absent for atheists. Also, perhaps people's distrust of atheists stems from the fact that, unlike religious people, atheists lack a coherent set of known moral rules (of course they have their own individual moral code, but as a group they don't have a code that they all follow).

"Looking to the future," the researcher said, "it is also important to explore how these perceptions and attitudes toward atheists manifest behaviourally, whether people act on these prejudices and in what contexts. It is only once the nature and extent of the issue is better understood that we can take measures to address it."

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Giddings, L., & Dunn, T. (2016). The Robustness of Anti-Atheist Prejudice as Measured by Way of Cognitive Errors The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 26 (2), 124-135 DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2015.1006487

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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People with schizophrenia-like traits can tickle themselves (whereas most people can't)

Go ahead, try tickling yourself on your inner forearm or neck. If you're like most people, you'll find it doesn't work. The sensation would make you shiver or giggle with ticklishness if someone else did it, but when you do it yourself, it no longer has any tickle power.

The inability of most people to tickle themselves has been documented by psychologists for a while, and it's thought be due to the fact that the brain creates predictions of the sensory consequences of our own actions, and then cancels them out. Although it might be fun to be able to tickle ourselves, on balance it's probably a good thing that our brains work this way most of the time – it helps us pay more rapid attention to other people's actions rather than our own, and it contributes to our sense of self.

At the turn of the century, neuroscientist Sarah Jayne-Blakemore and her colleagues showed that some patients diagnosed with schizophrenia can tickle themselves. This fitted with other features of their illness – for example, the patients who could self-tickle also experienced hallucinations and the feeling that other people were controlling their actions. One theory is that the apparent failure of these patients' brains to adequately cancel out the sensory consequences of their own actions could be contributing both to their symptoms and to their self-tickling ability.

Now a team of psychologists in France has extended these findings, showing for the first time that psychologically healthy people who score highly in schizophrenia-like personality traits – for example, they have vivid imaginations and are prone to mild paranoia – are also capable of tickling themselves. The findings are in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

The researchers, led by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, first identified from an initial pool of 397 students, 27 students who scored very highly on the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, and 27 students who scored very low on the same measure. The questionnaire includes questions on things like unusual beliefs and strange perceptual experiences. None of the students had ever been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. They also completed a questionnaire about their experience of feelings of passivity, measured with items like "feeling you were a robot or zombie without a will of your own".

Next, the students took part in different tickle tasks involving a brush. The participants either tried to tickle their own forearm with the brush, or the brush was controlled by the researcher. In each case, the participants rated how ticklish the brush movements felt on their arm.

Overall, the students who scored high in schizotypic traits were no more ticklish than the low schizotypic students. Crucially, however, the highly schizotypic students found the self-tickling condition more ticklish than did the low schizotypic students, and they also found the self-tickling condition just as ticklish as when the researcher applied the tickling, whereas the low schizotypic students found the self-tickling condition less ticklish than when the researcher did it.

A limitation of the study that jumps out immediately is that there was no control group with intermediate levels of schizotypic traits, meaning that if you were to interpret these results in isolation, it's possible the low schizotypic students were unusually non-ticklish in the self-tickle condition, rather than the high schizotypic students being unusually self-ticklish.

But of course, it makes sense to interpret these new findings in light of past research, including the Blakemore finding of self-tickling ability in patients with schizophrenia, and another paper from 2010 that showed high scorers on schizotypy were poor at controlling their own strength to match the force produced by a machine (another indication of diminished self-monitoring).

Moreover, in the current research, the more self-tickling sensations that the high schizotypic students reported, the more they tended to agree with items related to suspicion and unusual perceptual experiences on the Schizotypy questionnaire, such as "I'm sure I'm being talked about behind my back" and "I often hear a voice speaking my thoughts aloud", and the higher they scored on the passivity scale.

These findings don't mean that if you can tickle yourself you are likely to develop schizophrenia. However, they are consistent with the idea that the same brain processes (involved in movement control and monitoring) that may contribute to the symptoms experienced by patients with schizophrenia, may also contribute to schizophrenia-like beliefs and experiences in healthy people.

The researchers said their results show that "non-clinical subjects with schizophrenia-like symptoms have an abnormal subjective experience of willed actions". They added: "When considering a continuum ranging from the absence of a disorder to the full-blown symptoms of schizophrenia, our data provide a basis for understanding the illusions of control experienced by schizophrenic patients."

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Lemaitre, A., Luyat, M., & Lafargue, G. (2016). Individuals with pronounced schizotypal traits are particularly successful in tickling themselves Consciousness and Cognition, 41, 64-71 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2016.02.005

--further reading--
You still can't tickle yourself, even if you swap bodies with another person

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Liberals prefer to solve problems through insight

It often feels as though political liberals and conservatives are from different planets – whatever the issue, they come at it from a completely different angle. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology confirms this impression, finding that liberals and conservatives even take a different approach when confronted with non-political word puzzles.

Carola Salvi and her colleagues at Northwestern University asked 22 liberal and 22 conservative students to try to solve several examples of the Remote Associates Task – this simply involves looking at word triplets (e.g. pine/crab/sauce) and identifying the one word that goes with each of them (in this case APPLE). After each problem, the students stated whether they'd arrived at the solution through insight (suddenly realising the answer without knowing how) or analysis (thinking through the problem logically).

The liberal participants solved more problems by insight (29 per cent) than by analysis (15 per cent) whereas there was no statistically significant difference in the proportion of problems that the conservatives solved by insight or analysis (21 per cent by insight vs. 17.9 per cent by analysis). Moreover, the liberals solved more problems by insight than the conservatives did.

"Our study provides novel evidence that political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy," the researchers said. "A better understanding of differences in cognitive strategies between individuals holding different social/political orientations may benefit efforts to help them reconcile differences in dealing with social concerns," they concluded, perhaps a little optimistically.

-- The politics of insight
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Does being in a bad mood affect your mental performance?

We've all had days when we got out of the wrong side of the bed and the world looked greyer than usual. This daily variation in mood is a potential problem for psychologists who want to use tests to compare people's mental ability – competing job candidates, for example. Mood, like tiredness and motivation, could be another factor that leads some people to perform below par, by their own standards, thus distorting the test results.

Indeed, there's some evidence that being in a bad mood is distracting because it takes mental effort to deal with unpleasant emotions. Being in a good mood, by contrast, is thought to be energising. However, a new study in the journal Intelligence looked at how people's mood and mental performance varied over five consecutive days and it actually found no link between the two.

Sophie von Stumm recruited 98 participants, mostly students (74 women; average age 24), to complete five different versions of the same three mental tests on five consecutive days, Monday to Friday. Seventy-seven participants turned up for all the sessions. One test concerned short-term memory (remembering lists of numbers or letters); another was a test of processing speed (comparing as quickly as possible whether strings of letters and numbers were identical); and the final test tapped working memory (involving mental arithmetic).

Each day, before beginning the mental tests, the participants completed a comprehensive measure of their current mood, using a sliding scale to indicate how much they were feeling 10 different positive emotions and 10 different negative emotions. Participants could arrive any time each day between 9 to 6 to complete the tests.

Von Stumm says she found "considerable" variability in the participants' mental performance and their mood from one day to the next, with mood varying more than cognitive performance. But crucially, there was no coupling between the two. That is, daily changes in how well participants performed on the mental tests was not tied to daily fluctuations in their mood.

This result shouldn't be taken to mean that serious emotional distress is not harmful to mental performance, but the results do suggest that mundane fluctuations in our mood are unlikely to affect our mental performance. So if you're in a grump today, take heart – at least it's unlikely to slow you down mentally.

Taking a more sceptical view, note the relatively small sample size and the fact the study only looked at fluctuations over five days. It's possible the findings might differ over narrower (multiple tests in one day) or longer timescales.

Incidentally, there was a significant link between participants' average positive mood across the study and their test performance – that is, participants who were generally in a better mood across the five days tended to perform better than less happy participants on the mental tests. "Put bluntly," von Stumm said, "this suggests that people who have a general tendency to be more enthusiastic and alert have faster brains, but additional research will be needed to substantiate this observation."

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von Stumm, S. (2016). Is day-to-day variability in cognitive function coupled with day-to-day variability in affect? Intelligence, 55, 1-6 DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2015.12.006

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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