Shining a light on why sensory metaphors are so popular

A warm welcome to the latest Digest post, dear reader. You won’t find it hard work – my editor made some small changes, eliminating any sour notes to ensure a light read.

Did you notice how the metaphor phrases scattered through my previous sentences each relate to a sense – touch, sight, taste? This is common to many popular phrases, and to understand why, a new article draws on a combination of the Google Books dataset and a series of lab experiments. The research reveals that sensory metaphors owe their cultural success to the fact that we find sensory information easier to process and recall.

The first study by Egi Akpinar and Jonah Berger identified a set of 32 sensory metaphors in the adjective + noun structure I used above, each matched to a further three non-metaphorical equivalent phrases (e.g. "warm welcome" versus "friendly welcome", "kind welcome", "sincere welcome"). The researchers used Google Books’ frequency data on 5 million books to track the popularity of all these phrases since 1800, finding sensory metaphors enjoyed a steeper rise in popularity than their non-metaphorical equivalents.

To explore why, the researchers gave a subset of the metaphorical phrases together with their non-metaphorical equivalent phrases to 229 students. The students then rated each phrase on two criteria: How strongly did it relate to the senses? And does it have many or fewer associations with other ideas? After a filler task, the students tried to recall the phrases, and were able to remember only 18 per cent of the non-metaphorical phrases, but 28 per cent of the sensory metaphors, which also received higher ratings in sensory quality and associations. The higher its ratings, the better a phrase was remembered, and, critically, the steeper the increase in the popularity of that phrase in the Google Books data set.

This fits Akpinar and Berger’s hypothesis that cultural success stories are in debt to their psychological convenience. In their account, we will favour well-remembered concepts and phrases: those that are processed more automatically – as sensory knowledge is known to be – and that come to mind more easily. Sensory metaphors can be triggered by real-world phenomena: for example, bright future from the sight of a morning, torch or star. These small gains in popularity then snowball, as we lean on better-known phrases rather than the obscure, so that our listeners can understand us.

One note of caution is that the researchers may simply be backing winners, as sensory metaphors that were true failures would be unknown, and wouldn’t make it into their set of stimuli. To address this, the next study included each and every sensory metaphor found in the corpus of Jane Austin – 226 in all – including such gems as "clamorous happiness" and "delicious harmony", to see what characterised the phrases that succeeded versus those that did not. One hundred and thirty-five students studied, rated and recalled these metaphors, and those that enjoyed a rise to popularity in the Google dataset were, again, those rated higher in sensory quality and associations, and more easily recalled by participants.

It’s great to see research leveraging big cultural data and marrying it with experimental technique. “We study how the senses shape language,” the authors begin their general discussion, and given the clear evidence they present, it’s hard to disagree.

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Akpinar, E., & Berger, J. (2015). Drivers of cultural success: The case of sensory metaphors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109 (1), 20-34 DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000025

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

Doing the "happy walk" made people's memories more positive

Walking in a more happy style could help counter the negative mental processes associated with depression. That's according to psychologists in Germany and Canada who used biofeedback to influence the walking style of 47 university students on a treadmill.

The students, who were kept in the dark about the true aims of the study, had their gait monitored with motion capture technology. For half of them, the more happily they walked (characterised by larger arm and body swings, and a more upright posture), the further a gauge on a video monitor shifted to the right; the sadder their gait, the more it shifted leftwards. The students weren't told what the gauge measured, but they were instructed to experiment with different walking styles to try to shift the bar rightwards. This feedback had the effect of encouraging them to walk with a gait characteristic of people who are happy.

For the other half of the students, the gauge direction was reversed, and the sadder their gait, the further the gauge shifted to the right. Again, these students weren't told what the gauge measured, but they were instructed to experiment with their walking style and to try to shift the gauge rightwards as far as possible. In other words, the feedback encouraged them to adopt a style of walking characteristic of people who are feeling low.

After four minutes of gait feedback on the treadmill, both groups of students were asked how much forty different positive and negative emotional words were a good description of their own personality. This quiz took about two minutes, after which the students continued for another eight minutes trying to keep the gait feedback gauge deflected to the right. The students' final and crucial task on the treadmill was to recall as many of the earlier descriptive words as possible.

The striking finding is that the students who were unknowingly guided by feedback to walk with a happier gait tended to remember more positive than negative self-referential words, as compared with the students who were guided to walk with a more negative style. That is, the happy walkers recalled an average of 6 positive words and 3.8 negative words, compared with the sad walkers who recalled an average of 5.47 positive words and 5.63 negative words. Focusing on the students who achieved the happiest style of gait, they recalled three times as many positive words as the students who achieved the saddest style of gait.

"Our results show that biased memory towards self-referent negative material [a feature of depression] can be changed by manipulating the style of walking," said the research team led by Johannes Michalak. The observed effects of gait on memory were not accompanied by any group differences in the students' self-reported mood at the end of the study, suggesting a direct effect of walking style on emotional memory processes.

The results build on past research that suggests pulling a happy facial expression can lift people's mood. There could be exciting practical implications for helping people with depression, but the researchers acknowledged some issues need to be addressed. For example, the current study involved a small non-clinical sample, and the researcher who delivered the forty emotional words to the walking students was not blind to the gait condition they were in, raising the possibility that he or she inadvertently influenced the results in some way. It's also notable that there wasn't data from a baseline control group whose gait was not influenced; it would have been useful to see how they performed on the memory test.
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  Michalak, J., Rohde, K., & Troje, N. (2015). How we walk affects what we remember: Gait modifications through biofeedback change negative affective memory bias Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 46, 121-125 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2014.09.004

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

People's belief in free will is lower when they need to urinate or desire sex

Embodied or grounded cognition is the name for the idea that physical states affect our thoughts and emotions. It's a controversial field, but typical findings include people's judgments of social closeness being shaped by room temperature, and their attentional style by the clothes they wear. A new paper takes things further, asking whether bodily states affect people's philosophical beliefs, specifically their belief in the notion of free will, defined and measured here in the lay sense of having self control and being in charge of one's actions (a typical questionnaire item was "I actively choose what to do from the options I have").

Michael Ent and Roy Baumeister began with an online survey of 23 people with panic disorder and 16 people with epilepsy. Compared with 35 healthy controls, individuals with these conditions believed that people in general have less free will (though their beliefs in their personal free will were no different from controls). The researchers acknowledged that the people with epilepsy and panic disorder may differ from controls in many ways other than their physical illness, but they believe this finding is consistent with their main thesis that having less control of one's body undermines belief in free will.

They further tested this idea with a second online survey of 81 more people (aged 18-70; 29 women), who were asked to rate their current state of needing to urinate, wanting sex, feeling tired, or hungry. People who felt any of these physical needs more strongly, except for hunger, tended to report lower beliefs in their own personal free will.

The anomaly of hunger was explained by a third and final survey with 112 more people, in which they were asked to report their hunger and also whether they were dieting. This time, if dieters were excluded from the analysis, feeling more hunger did go hand in hand with lower beliefs in personal free will. The researchers reasoned that for dieters, feeling hunger was actually a prime for stronger beliefs in free will, since their pangs were a sign they were successfully controlling their urges to eat.

Ent and Baumeister concluded that "embodiment may be a more far-reaching phenomenon than previous research has demonstrated" affecting not only people's views of the world and interactions with others, but also their abstract, philosophical beliefs. "Others have assumed that beliefs about free will are shaped by religious and political doctrines and logical reasoning," they said, "yet such beliefs are at least influenced by bodily cues as seemingly innocuous as a full bladder or an unfulfilled desire for sex."

Some may find these conclusions premature. This was not an experimental study, so rather than states of physical need being induced, they were entirely subjective. Of course physical need is a subjective experience, but the current methodology can't rule out the possibility that people with reduced beliefs in free will also tend to be more sensitive to their physical needs, or more happy to disclose them. In a similar vein, unmeasured factors such as mood or personality could be causally responsible for both greater sensitivity to one's physical needs and a reduced belief in free will. Unmeasured factors, such as differences in affluence and lifestyle, could also help explain the findings for people with epilepsy and panic disorder, without recourse to theories of embodied cognition.

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Ent, M., & Baumeister, R. (2014). Embodied free will beliefs: Some effects of physical states on metaphysical opinions Consciousness and Cognition, 27, 147-154 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2014.05.001

--further reading--
More on free will from the Digest archive.
Toilet psychology.

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

With hand on heart, people are seen as more honest, and they really do behave more honestly

Image: Greg Peverill-Conti / Flickr

You know when you want a friend or partner to tell you, honestly, how you look in a new outfit? A new study offers a way. Daft as it may sound, the findings suggest that if you truly want an honest verdict, it could work to ask your friend to put his hand on his heart before he answers (in British and Polish cultures, at least).

In one of several experiments Michal Parzuchowski and Bogdan Wojciszke asked 48 Polish undergrads (eight men) to rate the physical attractiveness of ten women - ostensibly friends of the experimenter. In fact, half these target women had been selected from a German equivalent of the Hotornot.Com website for supposedly being extremely unattractive, and the other half because they were moderately attractive, and this categorisation was confirmed in pilot work.

As the participants made their ratings of the women (from 1 "definitely unattractive" to 9 "definitely attractive"), they were told to place their hand on their heart, or on their hip. The cover story was that the study was about the effects of cognitive load on judgments of appearance, and this extra action acted as cognitive load. The key finding was that participants who had their hand on their heart provided significantly harsher (yet more honest) ratings for the women previously categorised as unattractive, as compared with participants who had their hand on their hip. In contrast, there was no difference between the groups in the ratings they gave to the women categorised previously as moderately attractive.

The researchers said that because of its cultural meaning, the gesture of putting a hand on the heart automatically activates concepts related to honesty, which increased participants' bluntness in their ratings of the less attractive women. There was no social need to tell a white lie about the more attractive women, and so no differences emerged between the groups in this case.

This result complemented findings from the whole series experiments the researchers conducted. For example, in a separate test, participants used more words related to honesty and integrity to describe a woman photographed with her hand on her heart, as opposed to on her stomach. In another experiment, participants rated the boastful claims of a job candidate as more credible when she was photographed with her hand on her heart, as opposed to having her hands behind her back.

Finally, participants were less likely to lie about their performance on a series of maths problems if they had their hand on their heart, as opposed to over their shoulder. In this case the participants were tricked into assuming these postures because they thought they were testing a breathing monitor (either held against the chest or against the forearm over the shoulder). In debriefing across all experiments, none of the participants guessed the true purpose of the research.

Parzuchowski and Wojciszke said their results extend the embodied cognition literature in a new direction, showing how bodily gestures associated with honesty can both alter our perception of other people's morality, and influence our own moral behaviour. "…[A]n abstract concept of honesty can be grounded on a very concrete level," the researchers said, "and can be primed with an unobtrusive use of bodily feedback from a hand configuration."

Can we apply this in the real world? Of course the only snag when it comes to getting an honest answer about how you look in your new outfit is that the researchers tricked participants into putting their hand on their heart for some other reason than increasing honesty. I'm sure you'll find a way.

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Parzuchowski M, and Wojciszke B (2014). Hand over Heart Primes Moral Judgments and Behavior. Journal of nonverbal behavior, 38, 145-165 PMID: 24489423

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

Low self-esteem and scared of death? Try hugging a teddy

Teddy bears and cuddly "haptic" jackets could be the solution to existential angst for people with low self-esteem. That's according to a team of psychologists based in Amsterdam who say that people with low self-belief are unable to use meaning in their lives to protect against fear of death, as other more confident individuals do. But on the plus side, the psychologists say that touch can provide the less confident with visceral comfort.

"Although the thought of the body's mortality fuels people's existential concerns," Sander Koole and his colleagues write, "the body itself may help people come to terms with their deepest fears."

What's their evidence? For an initial study, a female experimenter passed a pair of questionnaires measuring death angst and self-esteem to each of 61 participants (35 men) who took part. If she touched a participant gently on the back for one second as she passed them the papers, then afterwards they tended to report having less fear of death, as compared with if no physical contact was made. But crucially, this was only the case for participants with low self-esteem.

The researchers said this shows touch provides existential security to people with low self-esteem. Unfortunately, other explanations were not examined. For example, no information was provided about the experimenter's attractiveness, nor about the participants' loneliness or mood. Differences in male and female participants were not explored.

A second study was a bolt-on to the first. An additional 59 participants underwent the same procedure except they were asked about their fear of dentists rather than of death. A gentle touch from the experimenter made no difference to the dental fears of any of these participants, whether they had low self-esteem or not. This helps make the case that the effect of touch in the first study was specific to existential angst.

Next, 50 participants were asked to estimate the value of a metre-high teddy bear enclosed in a box and viewed through a plexiglass panel. Those who'd first been reminded of death and who had low self-esteem put a price on the bear of €23. In contrast, participants with high self-esteem who were reminded of death, and all participants not reminded of death, valued the teddy at just €13. This shows that thoughts of death "increased the desire for touch among individuals with low self-esteem," the researchers said.

Unfortunately we can't be confident this is true. Because there were no control conditions in which participants rated the value of other objects, we can't know if low self-esteem individuals reminded of death wouldn't have placed a higher value on any product.

In the last study, Koole and his team used an indirect measure of existential angst - people's racism. Past research has shown that death angst can make us more biased towards our in-group and more prejudiced towards perceived outsiders. Consistent with this, Koole and his colleagues found that low self-esteem Dutch participants (but not those with high self-esteem) reminded of death showed more evidence of prejudice when rating a typical Dutch person or a typical Muslim. But this was not the case if the low self-esteem participants were given the chance to touch a teddy bear as opposed to just look at it.

The researchers interpret this last result as showing that touching the bear reduced the low self-esteem participants' death angst, and so they showed less prejudice towards Muslims. It's a shame that the effect of handling other objects was not examined because we can't know for sure if the effect was due to the visceral comfort of touch or to the interest and distraction of handling any new product.

Based on what they admitted were "preliminary findings", Koole and his team suggested simulated touch could be an effective intervention for people with low self-esteem who have existential worries. Sceptical readers may feel their conclusions are premature and that more robust studies are required.

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Koole SL, Tjew A Sin M, and Schneider IK (2013). Embodied Terror Management: Interpersonal Touch Alleviates Existential Concerns Among Individuals With Low Self-Esteem. Psychological science PMID: 24190907

--Further reading--
This new paper builds on research published in 2011 that suggested touching a teddy could help people who feel socially excluded.

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

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

An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions.

Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute video of a face being stroked with a cotton bud, while at the same time their own face is stroked in synchrony. People who experience this illusion tend to rate the face in the video as being more similar to their own, and, if they see the face cut, they show a physiological stress reaction as if the wound was theirs.

In the study, 15 female participants were challenged with identifying the emotional expression shown by a woman in a photo - either happy, fearful or disgusted. The photos had been morphed with neutral expressions to varying degrees, leading to seven different levels of task difficulty.

The key finding was that the participants were significantly better at recognising the facial expression of fear after they'd experienced the enfacement illusion for the face showing the fear. Simply watching a two-minute video of the person displaying fear didn't lead to this subsequent performance boost, neither did a "sham" version of the illusion in which the stroking of the model's and participant's face is out of synch. Another detail - the genuine version of the illusion led to enhancement of fear recognition only, with no effect on recognising happiness and disgust.

The main result is consistent with past research suggesting that we recognise emotions in other people by simulating their state in our brains. It's as if we temporarily embody the person we are empathising with. Related to this, people with a rare condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia (they experience touch when they see someone else touched) show enhanced facial expression recognition.

It's curious that the enfacement illusion only enhanced the recognition of fear, but then previous studies have suggested that this emotion, more than others, is recognised through a process of embodying the person who is afraid. This makes evolutionary sense too. There are obvious advantages in responding to the sight of a fearful ally by preparing one's own body for a threat.

"Our results suggest that the way we represent the relationship between the bodies of self and other is an important factor in the somatosensory simulation of emotions," the researchers said, "and furthermore, demonstrate that such a process is sensitive to multisensory intervention."

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Maister L, Tsiakkas E, and Tsakiris M (2013). I feel your fear: Shared touch between faces facilitates recognition of fearful facial expressions. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 13 (1), 7-13 PMID: 23356565

Image reproduced with permission of the first author.

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

Married couples are happier when they commute in the same direction

What we do with our bodies can trigger metaphorical associations in our minds, having knock-on effects for perceptions and attitudes. For example, holding a warm drink can lead us to judge a person's character more favourably, presumably through activation of warmth-related personality metaphors. Washing our hands can make us feel less guilty, via activation of thoughts to do with purity. Most demonstrations of this kind have looked at immediate effects. A new study claims that physical actions that activate metaphors can also have long-lasting psychological implications. Specifically, Xun Huang and her colleagues found that couples are happier with their marriage if they commute in the same direction to work, as though it activates the metaphorical sense that they are heading in the same direction.

Huang's team surveyed 280 married adults in the USA (average age 33), via an online questionnaire, and they surveyed 139 commuting adults in Hong Kong (average age 42), face-to-face via interviews in the street. Other participants who'd didn't commute, or had a partner who didn't commute, were excluded. The participants thought they were taking part in a survey about the living conditions of married couples. They answered questions about their own and their partner's journey to work and about their martial satisfaction and their happiness with their spouse.

For both the USA and Hong Kong sample, there was a significant correlation (.20 and .35 respectively, where 1 would be a perfect match) between travelling in the same direction as one's spouse and marital satisfaction. This was true even after controlling for a range of other factors including years married, gender, income and between-partner differences in commuting time. Importantly, the association held regardless of how frequently partners left for work at the same time, so it doesn't seem to be related to spending time together.

Huang and her colleagues recognised that many potential confounds were still unaccounted for. Perhaps couples who travel to work in a similar direction are more likely to meet up for a drink in the evening, for instance. To rule out such effects, a lab experiment was conducted in Hong Kong with 80 undergrads who were strangers to each other and thought the study was about the effects of exercise on product evaluations. The students were arranged into pairs and after a brief meeting they were sent off to exercise in different rooms. Crucially, some of them headed off in the same direction, although sometimes via different routes, whilst other pairs headed in different directions. Supporting the survey of married couples, the researchers found that student partners who headed off in the same direction, even by different routes, subsequently rated each other more positively.

The researchers said their results show that "similarity in the direction of goal directed behaviour [commuting to work or walking to an experiment] can activate a mental representation that includes more general concepts of goal-directed activity (i.e. the pursuit of goals more generally)."

Past research on the effects of grounded cognition, they noted, "has normally been restricted to consideration of immediate reactions to bodily sensations such as carrying a heavy weight ... our work shows that the influence of embodiment can be much more enduring."
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Xun (Irene) Huang, Ping Dong, Xianchi Dai, & Robert S. Wyer Jr. (2012). Going my way? The benefits of travelling in the same direction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.021

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling chilly? Indulge in some nostalgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Secrets leave us physically encumbered

We talk metaphorically of secrets as great weights that must be carried through life like a heavy burden. Consistent with the ever-growing literature on embodied cognition, a new study shows how secrets affect perception and action, as if their keepers are encumbered, literally.

A first study used participants recruited online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk website. Those asked to write a recollection about a big secret rated a hill, depicted head-on, as being steeper than participants who wrote about a trivial secret. This matches previous research (pdf) showing that people who are physically encumbered tend to rate hills as steeper. By contrast, the big secret vs. small secret groups didn't differ on other measures, such as their rating of the sturdiness of a table.

Next, 36 undergrads threw a small beanbag at a target located just over two and a half meters away. Those who'd been asked to recall a meaningful secret threw their beanbag further, on average, than those asked to recall a trivial secret. It's as if they perceived the target to be further away, consistent with prior research showing that people who are physically encumbered tend to overestimate spatial distances.

In a penultimate study, forty participants who'd recently been unfaithful to their partners were recruited via Amazon. Those who said the secret of their infidelity was a burden (it bothered them, affected them and they thought about it a lot) tended to rate physical tasks, such as carrying shopping upstairs, as requiring more physical effort and energy than those who were unburdened by their infidelity. Ratings of non-physical tasks, by contrast, did not vary between the groups.

Finally, keeping a significant secret (in this case not revealing one's homosexuality whilst being video-interviewed) led gay male participants to be less likely to agree to help the researchers move some books; keeping a trivial secret (concealing one's extraversion) had no such effect.

Michael Slepian and his colleagues said their findings showed how carrying a secret leads to the experience of being weighed down. They don't think the findings can be explained by the mental effort of keeping a secret - for example, past research has shown that cognitive load prompts people to underestimate, not overestimate, physical distances. The researchers warned about the health implications of their findings. "We suggest that concealment ... leads to greater physical burden and perhaps eventually physical overexertion, exhaustion, and stress," they said.

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Slepian, M., Masicampo, E., Toosi, N., and Ambady, N. (2012). The Physical Burdens of Secrecy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0027598

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Passengers litter less on carriages that smell of cleaning product

A team of Dutch social psychologists has proposed a simple solution to the litter problem on trains - infuse carriages with the citrus scent of cleaning product. Martinijn de Lange and his colleagues made their recommendation after conducting a field experiment in which they concealed seven small containers of cleaning product (spiced up with a little Capitaine perfume oil) in the luggage racks of two carriages on a train travelling between Amersfoort-Schothorst and Enkhuizen, a journey of one hour and forty-four minutes.

The amount of rubbish not in bins on these two carriages was collected at the final stop, counted and weighed and compared with the amount of rubbish left in two, scent-free control carriages. Based on measures taken over 18 journeys, the average amount of rubbish on the unscented carriages was more than three times the weight of the rubbish collected from the scented carriages (35.6 grams vs. 11.7 grams). In terms of individual rubbish items, there were an average of 5.1 in the control carriages per journey vs. 2.7 in the scented carriages.

For comparison, rubbish was also collected from these exact same carriages over several journeys a week or so earlier, prior to the use of the scent (the train company agreed to use the same train on the same route during the period of the study rather than following their usual practice of rotating train stock across different routes). In this case, there was no difference in the amount of litter left in the different carriages.

"It seems to be possible to change the littering behaviour of people in a train environment using a simple and relatively cheap intervention," the researchers said.

Why should the scent of cleaning product have had this effect on passengers' littering behaviour? de Lange and his colleagues think the effect probably occurs via the non-conscious priming of cleaning related motives and behaviours. Supporting this account, a 2005 lab study (pdf) reported that exposing participants discreetly to the smell of citrus cleaning product led them to list more cleaning-related activities in their plans for the day and to spill fewer crumbs when munching on a cookie. "The positive results of our scent manipulation in a field setting provide support for the idea that the cognitive route of scents to behaviour can be used as a tool for behavioural change," de Lange and his team said. "Merely dispersing a scent seems to trigger related goals and influence subsequent behaviour."

Alternatively, perhaps passengers grew sick of the citrus smell and simply avoided sitting in the scented carriages! That would explain a surprising finding I didn't mention earlier - that rubbish in the non-scented carriages (but not the scented ones) was higher during the intervention period than during the earlier comparison weeks. The researchers put that down to the intervention weeks being busier than the comparison weeks, leading to more rubbish in the non-scented carriages (but not in the scented carriages because of the behavioural effect of the scent).

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de Lange, M., Debets, L., Ruitenburg, K., and Holland, R. (2012). Making less of a mess: Scent exposure as a tool for behavioral change. Social Influence, 7 (2), 90-97 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.659509

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Introducing "enclothed cognition" - how what we wear affects how we think

Whether donning a suit for an interview or a sexy outfit for a date, it's obvious that most of us are well aware of the power of clothing to affect how other people perceive us. But what about the power of our clothes to affect our own thoughts?

Relevant to this question is the growing "embodied cognition" literature showing that the position and state of our bodies can affect our thoughts - for example, cleaning their hands makes people feel morally purer. In a new study Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky propose that clothes can have similar effects on our thoughts - a phenomenon they call "enclothed cognition". In contrast to embodied cognition effects which are fairly direct, the researchers think enclothed cognition effects will depend on two conditions - first, the symbolic meaning of the clothing and second, the actual wearing of the clothes.

To test this idea, the researchers focused on the power of white coats, synonymous with scientists and their attention to detail. In an initial study, 58 students took part in a test of their powers of selective attention known as the Stroop Test (on critical trials, the ink colour of a word must be named whilst ignoring the colour meaning of the word, e.g. RED written in blue ink). Half the students performed the task in a scientist's white lab coat (they were told that this was to be consistent with previous participants who'd taken part during building work and worn the coat for protection). The other students just wore their own clothes. The key finding - students in the lab coats made half as many errors on the critical trials of the Stroop Test.

The researchers next wanted to test their proposal that enclothed cognition effects depend on the symbolic meaning of clothes and actually wearing them. For these studies, the participants completed sustained attention tests that involved spotting differences between two similar images. Participants who donned a lab coat performed significantly better than others who merely saw a lab coat on the desk (thus suggesting the enclothed effect is more powerful than mere priming) or others who wore the same kind of coat but were told it belonged to a painter.

Is the enclothed effect about some kind of identification with the clothing? It seems it is more than that. For a final study, participants who wore a lab coat performed better on the sustained attention task than those who wore no coat but wrote an essay about how they identified with a lab coat. In turn, those who wrote the essay performed better than participants who wore a painter's coat.

"Clothes can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioural consequences for their wearers," the researchers said. Future research, they suggested, could examine the effects of other types of clothing: might the robe of a priest make us more moral? Would a firefighter's suit make us more brave? "Although the saying goes that clothes do not make the man," the researchers concluded, "our results suggest they do hold a strange power over their wearers."

As well as building on the embodied cognition literature, these new findings also chime with recent "positive contagion" research showing that amateur golfers' performance improved, and their perception of the hole changed, when they thought they were playing with a putter that belonged to a professional.

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Adam, H., and Galinsky, A. (2012). Enclothed Cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008 (thanks to Marc Brysbaert for the tip-off). 

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Want to feel more powerful? Do a Barry White impression

As a rule, big beasts tend to make deep noises, whereas little creatures squeak. Perhaps it's little wonder then that we tend to rate human speakers with deeper voices as seeming more powerful. Another finding is that if you put a person in a position of power they will tend to lower their voice. These previous results prompted Mariëlle Stel and her fellow researchers to find out if speaking with a deeper pitch than usual would lead people to feel more powerful.

In an initial study, 81 student participants were split into three groups. Participants in the control group read a passage of geography text silently to themselves. The other two groups read the text out loud, either in a deeper or higher pitch than usual (by three tones). To make sure the participants didn't guess the true aims of the study, the students were next asked some filler questions about the text. The final stage of the experiment was then presented to them as being unrelated to the reading exercise. This involved the students answering seven questions about how powerful they felt (for example, indicating how much they felt dominant versus submissive). None of the students guessed the purpose of the study.

Reading the text with a deep voice didn't affect the students' answers to the questions about the text, but it did appear to affect their feelings of power. Students in the deep voice condition rated themselves as more powerful than students in the other two groups.

A second study was similar, but this time students read some text in a high or low pitch, or they heard someone else doing the reading with a high or low pitch. Only reading the pitch oneself affected feelings of power, with students who read in a low voice rating themselves as more powerful than students who read in a high voice.

One last study involved reading out loud in a deep or high voice, and then the participants completed a memory task that's designed to reveal abstract thinking (mistakenly believing a word was seen in an earlier to-be-remembered list, just because it's got a similar meaning to one of those earlier words, is taken as a sign of more abstract thinking). This time, reading out loud in a deep voice led to more abstract thinking. Stel and her colleagues said this makes sense when considered alongside an earlier study that found people in power tend to think more abstractly than low power people, perhaps because power makes people feel more "psychologically distant".

Throughout these experiments, the effects of lowering one's voice pitch on feelings of power were presumably subconscious. After all, the students weren't able to guess the aims of the study. The researchers said it would be interesting for the future to see if it's possible to deliberately lower your voice in order to feel more powerful. "If so," they concluded, "this would add a simple and generally available instrument to your strategic arsenal: your own voice. The lowering of your own voice could then be used not only to influence others but also to influence yourself."

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Stel, M., van Dijk, E., Smith, P., van Dijk, W., and Djalal, F. (2011). Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611427610

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

For Christians, Dawkins and the Qur'an leave a bad taste in the mouth, literally

Many studies have shown that moral disgust is "embodied". Contemplation of taboo deeds really does leave people physically sickened. Now Ryan Ritter and Jesse Preston have extended this literature to show that religious beliefs that contradict one's own also leave a bad taste in the mouth, literally.

The genius in this study is the cover story. Eighty-two Christian student participants were told they were taking part in two separate investigations: one a marketing survey requiring that they taste two different drinks; the other a study of handwriting and personality. The participants first tasted a lemon-based drink and rated it. Then, ostensibly to allow their palates to refresh, they completed the handwriting task, which involved them copying out either a neutral text (an intro to a dictionary); a section from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (in which he describes the God of the Old Testament as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction"); or a section from the Qur'an (from Surah 47: 1-2). A personality questionnaire helped embellish the cover story. Finally, the students tested the second drink and rated it. A handful of participants guessed the true purpose of the study and were excluded from the analysis.

In reality the two drinks were identical and the key measure was how the participants responded to the drink after exposure to religious beliefs that contradicted their own. The findings were clear: the Christian participants reported finding the drink far more disgusting after they'd written out a passage from either Richard Dawkins or from the Qur'an. In contrast, their ratings of the drink were unchanged after writing out the neutral passage.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time some of the participants had a chance to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe after writing out a passage from the Qur'an, from Dawkins, or from the Bible. Once again, exposure to Dawkins or the Qur'an (but not the Bible) heightened participants' disgust reaction to the drink, unless, that is, they had a chance to clean their hands.

Other ratings of the drink, such as bitterness or sourness, were unaffected so this was a specific effect on disgust. Also, general negative affect was unable to explain the results.

"The present research provides evidence that contact with rejected beliefs elicits disgust," the researchers said. "Whereas the majority of past work on moral purity has focused on disgust in response to morally questionable objects and actions, these data suggest that contact with outgroup religious beliefs may be an equally threatening source of impurity, and can literally leave a bad taste in the mouth."

Future research is needed to see if it's necessary for people to write or say rejected religious beliefs in order to experience disgust (perhaps by provoking the feeling that they've violated their own sanctity) or if instead mere contemplation of the material suffices. Ritter and Preston also plan to test the reactions of people from other religious groups and the effect of rejected non-religious beliefs - in all cases they predict morally rejected beliefs will elicit physical disgust.
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RS Ritter and JL Preston (2011). Gross gods and icky atheism: disgust responses to rejected religious beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 DOI: 10.1016.j.jesp.2011.05.006

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling lonely? Have a bath

Wallowing in the bath, immersed in soothing warm water, the benefits are more than sensuous, they're social too. That's according to John Bargh and Idit Shalev, researchers at Yale University, whose new research shows that physical warmth can compensate for social isolation. Indeed, their study suggests that people subconsciously self-comfort against loneliness through the use of warm baths and showers.

Among 51 undergrads, those who reported being more lonely also tended to bath or shower more often, to do so for longer and with warmer water. Overall, 33.5 per cent of the variation in these measures was accounted for by loneliness. A similar result was found for a community sample of 16 women and 25 men. Perhaps lonely people simply have more time to take baths because they go out less, but the association with preferring warmer water is harder to explain away.

A second study confirmed the causal role that physical temperature can play in people's sense of social warmth. Students conducted what they thought was a product test of a small therapeutic pack, which was either warm or cold. Those who evaluated the cold pack, holding it in their palm, subsequently reported feeling more lonely than those who tested a warm version of the pack.

What about a direct test of the therapeutic benefit of physical warmth? Another study had students recall a time they'd felt socially excluded, then they went on to perform the same product test of a warm or cold pack used before. Recalling being excluded had the expected effect of making students desire friendly company and comforting activities like shopping. But this effect was eradicated if they'd product tested the warm pack. "...Warm physical experiences were found to significantly reduce the distress of social exclusion," the researchers said.

Our recognition of the link between physical and social warmth is reflected in our language - "a warm smile", "a cold shoulder" - and has been for centuries: Dante in the Inferno links the betrayal of trust with the punishment of being physically frozen. Yet Bargh and Shalev think this understanding remains largely unconscious. To test this they had participants rate the loneliness of a protagonist after reading one of two near-identical versions of a short story. Participants who read the version in which she took a bath and shower in the same day didn't perceive her to be any more lonely than those who read the version without the extra bathing.

These findings build on the broader literature on embodied cognition, which has shown the effects of physical states on our thoughts and behaviour, and vice versa (e.g. heavier books are considered more important; washing alleviates guilt). And they add to past research suggesting a specific link between physical and social/emotional warmth. One earlier study found that participants felt socially closer to a researcher when they were tested in a warm room. Other research has linked physical and social warmth to activity in the same brain region - the anterior insular.

But this new study is the first to suggest we subconsciously administer our own tonic of physical warmth to compensate for social rejection. And it's the first to provide causal evidence that physical warmth can ameliorate feelings of exclusion. Bargh and Shalev speculated their findings could even have practical applications ... "the physical-social warmth association may be a boon to the therapeutic treatment of syndromes that are mainly disorders of emotion regulation, such as Borderline Personality Disorder," they said.
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J Bargh, and I Shalev (2011). The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0023527

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Downright sexy: The contrasting effect of vertical position on the perceived attractiveness of men and women

If you're hoping to increase your online appeal to the opposite sex, you might want to consider where on the screen you place your photo. A study that's in press at Social Cognition has shown that women rate men's photos as more attractive when they're placed near the top of the screen. By contrast, men rate women's photos as more attractive when they're located near the bottom of the screen.

Brian Meier and Sarah Dionne say their finding can be understood in terms of 'embodied' or 'grounded cognition', in this case our tendency to think about abstract power in terms of physical height. Powerful people are talked about as being 'high' up in the hierarchy whereas junior staff are described as being on the 'bottom rung'. By this account, women are more attracted to men's photos at the top of the screen because this position is associated with power, whereas men are more attracted to women in the lower screen position associated with powerlessness.

This pattern of findings may sound controversial but is actually consistent with evolutionary accounts of what men and women are looking for in a potential mate. According to evolutionary psychologists, both men and women have evolved to seek partners who will maximise their chances of reproductive success. For men, this means finding a mate who is powerless in the sense of being young and faithful. Women, by contrast, are attracted to mates who are powerful in the sense of having status and resources to support and protect their offspring.

The researchers obtained their results by asking 79 heterosexual students (29 were male) to rate the attractiveness of photos of men and women located either at the top or bottom of a nineteen inch computer screen. The participants were told that the location of the photos was programmed to change so as to help maintain interest in the task.

The researchers concluded: 'These findings support evolutionary theory, reveal that grounded theory has implications for common social judgments, and illustrate how grounded theory can be used as a tool to examine predictions made by theories outside the realm of basic and fundamental cognitive processes.'

Meier and Dionne also mentioned that their results could help explain why, in even more cases than you'd expect based on sex differences in height, the man in a heterosexual couple is taller than the female. 'Height could be a cue to power and hence attractiveness,' they said.
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BP Meier, & S Dionne (2010). Downright sexy: Verticality, implicit power and attractiveness. Social Cognition, In Press.

Previous Digest posts on embodied cognition: here and here.

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