Put more effort into a project and you'll become more passionate about it

The entrepreneur is one of the archetypes of our age, defined above all – if countless commencement speeches and hagiographies are anything to go by – by the passion they hold for their business, allowing them to devote so much to it. New research by Michael Gielnik and colleagues published in the Academy of Management Journal suggests this common belief has things backwards: in fact entrepreneurs get passionate because they get stuck in.

The first study spent eight weeks surveying 54 German entrepreneurs during the pre-launch period of their budding business opportunity. They answered questions like “In the last week, how much effort did you put into venture tasks beyond what was immediately required?” and rated their agreement with statements like “In the last week, establishing a new company excited me”. Their answers were used to generate ratings of effort and passion. The researchers found that for each entrepreneur, fluctuation in these two ratings could be explained by one relationship: the previous week’s effort influenced this week’s passion, such that more effort led to more passion.

Another study looked at this more systematically, asking 136 students to develop a business idea by answering questions about likely competitors, customers, and the conditions and trends of the market. In the primary condition, participants could choose between twelve possible business ideas or even put forward one of their own. The key question was whether their entrepreneurial passion would be higher following the task than it was prior to it. The experiment established that it was, but only under certain conditions.

Firstly, in a variation in which participants were only given 30 minutes to spend on the task, and told it was an unimportant pilot study (as opposed to being given an hour and told that their efforts would make a real difference), their subsequent appetite for founding a business was unaffected. This suggests investing minimal effort is not enough to boost passion. Secondly, half of the participants received feedback that their analysis was superficial and that they hadn’t advanced the readiness of this business idea. For these participants, it didn’t matter how much effort they invested, their passion didn’t tip upwards. Making an effort without seeing any impact is also not enough to boost passion.

One more factor: in another variant of the study, participants weren’t given free reign to select their entrepreneurial goal, but were handed one to work on. In this case, their passion never went up, even with positive feedback on making progress – and when there was no progress, it actually dropped.

Although there are undoubtedly character traits that lead some people to find passion more readily, it doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It requires an engagement with the world, an engagement this study suggests has a particular structure. Free choice, results, and genuine effort: the three ingredients that passion needs.

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Gielnik, M., Spitzmuller, M., Schmitt, A., Klemann, D., & Frese, M. (2014). "I Put in Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate": Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in Entrepreneurship Academy of Management Journal, 58 (4), 1012-1031 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0727

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

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The comforting power of comedy is due to more than just distraction

By guest blogger David Robson

When screenwriter Nora Ephron's mother was on her deathbed, she had one instruction: "Take notes". For the family of writers and raconteurs, no event was too painful to be burned in the crucible of their wit. "Everything," Ephron Senior said, "is copy". Nora Ephron applied the philosophy religiously with the semi-autobiographical novel and film Heartburn, documenting her husband's cruel affair with "a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb".

As she explained later: "When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh, so you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke."

Clearly, it worked for Ephron - with Heartburn, she laughed her way from the divorce lawyers to Hollywood, becoming one of the world’s most successful comedy writers. But how about the rest of us? Recently, Lisa Kugler and Christof Kuhbandner at the University of Regensburg in Germany decided to test whether humour really does offer a valuable form of emotional regulation. They were particularly concerned with the possibility that jokes simply work as a distraction, making you think about something other than your hurt feelings. While that may help in the short term, it could impair your memory, so that you no longer remember exactly why you were upset. That would be a rather counter-productive way to manage our feelings: we all need to learn from our mistakes if we are to protect ourselves from further heartbreak.

If, on the other hand, the value of comedy comes from "reappraisal" – turning yourself from the victim into the hero, as Ephron claimed – then the memory should not be weakened, since you are still paying attention to the details. If so, humour should be a particularly effective way of helping you to flourish after upset.

To disentangle these two possibilities, Kugler and Kuhbandner opted to perform a carefully controlled lab study, to compare the effects of humour with a form of "rational appraisal" – a technique in which you try to detach yourself from an event and look at it logically, while distancing yourself from the emotional pain it brings.

Sixty-three undergraduates looked at a set of negative emotionally charged pictures, some of which were accompanied by a sentence that was either a straight, "rational" appraisal, or a joke. For instance, next to a scary picture of a snake bearing its mouth, the subjects either saw a straight, factual sentence explaining that this snake couldn't bite because it didn't have any teeth, or a funny quip about the snake's glare: "When eggs are sold out in her favourite supermarket, Henrietta can get very angry". Other negative images included a wounded child, a bomb, a hurricane, and a crying soldier, among others, all with either an accompanying factual and reassuring explanation or a joke.

The students rated how negative or positive they found each image, and whether they felt emotionally aroused by it or not, and then, a few minutes later, they had to note down details of as many of the pictures as they could remember. As a further test of the students' memory, Kugler also showed them another set of images, which included some of the previous pictures, and the students had to report whether or not they recognised the images.

As Ephron might have predicted, the students seeing the humorous stimuli found the negative images considerably less upsetting, even compared to those viewing the rational facts that helped put the pictures in a less disconcerting perspective: clearly, laughter does soothe distress. What's more, humour did not seem to impair memory any more than rational reappraisal: in fact, viewing the humorous comments even made the students slightly quicker to recognise the negative images later on. In other words, it didn’t seem that the jokes were distracting participants from the details of the images themselves and the value instead came from reinterpreting their content in a less negative light.

From these findings, you could conclude that humour really is the best medicine when it comes to heartache, even more than sober detachment and re-interpretation. But we should be a little reluctant to read too much into the experiment, with its rather restricted set-up. Viewing slightly upsetting pictures is a far cry from discovering a spouse's betrayal! What's more, the rational reappraisal process in the study was more passive than in real life: it's far easier, but perhaps less effective, to read a pithy picture caption, compared to finding a sober way to re-evaluate our real-life tribulations.

On the other hand, this study could have underestimated the power of humour. Participants completed the tasks alone, but laughter is most often a social activity. As Sophie Scott at University College London and others have found, we are far more likely to laugh when we're with other people, particularly people we like. It's likely that hearing others laugh could itself be cathartic and help to heal our wounds.

More realistic research is clearly needed to build on this lab study. Still, the findings are certainly consistent with the idea that, if nothing else, laughter may be the chink of light that reminds us even the darkest days will end eventually. As Ephron put it: "My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next." And that's enough to bring anyone comfort, the next time we face tragedy (or simply slip on a banana skin).

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Kugler L, & Kuhbandner C (2015). That's not funny! - But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory. Frontiers in psychology, 6 PMID: 26379608

--further reading--
Locating the "sweet spot" when jokes about tragedy are seen as funny
Psychologist magazine special issue on humour and laughter

Post written by David Robson (@d_a_robson) for the BPS Research Digest. David is BBC Future’s feature writer.

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Hiding negative emotions may take more of a toll on your relationship than faking positive ones, especially if you're extravert

Handling your emotions in a close relationship is often a balancing act. You want to be true to yourself and open with your partner, but there are also times when it seems necessary to exert some emotional control – to hide your frustration, for example, or to feign happiness at their news (perhaps your partner is thrilled about a work trip, which in truth you'd rather they didn't take).

A new study, published recently in the Journal of Psychology, is among the first the explore the toll of these two emotional strategies: hiding negative emotions and faking positive ones. Specifically, Tali Seger-Guttmann and Hana Medler-Liraz wanted to find out how the use of the two strategies in a relationship affects people's satisfaction with that relationship, and whether this varies depending on whether someone is introvert or extravert.

The researchers surveyed hundreds of male and female Israeli participants (average age 32), all of whom were in a relationship of at least six months; half of them were married, the others were living with their partner or dating. The participants answered questions about their levels of extraversion; how often they hid negative emotions like nervousness, hate and anxiety in their relationship; how often they faked positive emotions like happiness, concern and love; and they answered several questions about their relationship satisfaction and also how often they experienced health problems such as fatigue and headaches.

Overall, hiding negative negative emotions was more strongly associated with poorer relationship satisfaction than faking positive emotion. But importantly, this link was moderated by the participants' personality. Hiding negative emotions was linked much more closely to poor relationship satisfaction for extraverts than introverts. Faking positive emotion more often was also, but to a lesser extent than hiding negative emotion, linked with poorer relationship satisfaction, and this was equally true for both introverts and extraverts.

"The fact that both strategies [were] significantly related to less satisfaction with intimate relationships links our results to previous research on the importance and significance of authenticity in close relationships," the researchers said.

Turning to the scores for health problems, there was evidence that hiding negative emotions was linked to more health symptoms for extraverts, but not for introverts, presumably because concealing emotions in this way comes somewhat naturally for introverts but not for extraverts. On the flip side, faking positive emotions was less strongly associated to health problems for extraverts than for introverts – again, perhaps because faking positive emotions is more consistent with an extraverted personality.

Unfortunately, like any cross-sectional research that only surveys people at one point in time, this study requires us to make assumptions about the causal direction between the factors that were measured. The researchers believe that hiding and faking emotions are probably affecting relationship satisfaction and health, but of course it's likely the influence is at least partly in the other direction – when a relationship is going well, censoring our emotional displays is probably not so necessary.

Despite this shortcoming, this is the first study to explore links between hiding and faking emotions and personality, and the researchers say it could "help therapists and counsellors develop a deeper understanding of the interplay between emotional regulation styles (hiding and faking emotions) and personality style, and hence contribute to improving the quality of couples' relationships."

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Seger-Guttmann, T., & Medler-Liraz, H. (2015). The Costs of Hiding and Faking Emotions: The Case of Extraverts and Introverts The Journal of Psychology, 1-20 DOI: 10.1080/00223980.2015.1052358

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

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The powerful motivating effect of a near win

If you while away time in a games arcade – play some coin pushers here, a few fruit machines there – you will soon be familiar with that frustrating and enlivening sensation of the near win that follows getting four cherries out of five. New research from INSEAD suggests that these tantalising near wins produce high levels of motivational arousal, that encourage us to chase whatever alternative rewards are then available.

In one fascinating experiment, Monica Wadhwa and JeeHye Christine Kim gave lottery scratch-cards to 164 US shoppers about to enter a fashion store. A row of six winning symbols earned $20, and the cards were rigged so a third of participants won, a third lost abjectly, and a third nearly made it, with five in a row. Shoppers then went about their shopping, and on exiting the store, were asked to share their till receipts. The near-winners had made significantly more purchases than the other groups.

Why? Goal-gradient theory, proposed in the 1930s, suggests that when a reward is one hundred steps away, your initial step progresses you only one per cent towards your payoff. However, once you are almost in reach, the payoff for each effortful act is much higher, meaning we become more physiologically aroused and ready to act. But should the reward be snatched away, the readiness to act doesn’t disappear. Instead, it tends to be transferred to other sources; in the above example, the shoppers who just missed out on the lotto card were well positioned to seek out other rewards, thanks to the availability of tills.

Other experiments showed a near win encouraging participants to make more effort in a card-sorting task when money was on the line, to hurry more towards a chocolate bar, and even to salivate more heavily to images of high-value currency.

There is a caveat. Tightly-focused lab experiments demonstrated that almost winning really only matters when the heightened state of anticipation is prolonged. In a diamond-seeking video game, players who were just one diamond short of victory, but discovered very early that they’d lost (they turned over a tile showing a fatal rock rather than the winning diamond), did not show the near-win effect. By contrast, players who were just one diamond short, and who stayed alive in the game for a sustained amount of time (they avoided any rocks until the very end), did show the near-win effect – after the game had finished, they raced to get a chocolate bar, as if channelling the heightened motivation built up by their near win.

Wadhwa and Kim point out that we already know that repeatedly nearly winning a game can facilitate addiction to it, via heightened production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation and the anticipation of pleasure, among other functions. This new study show this feeling generalises beyond the game. If you almost vanquish the end-of-level boss, you might be more motivated to pound out that tricky article … or reward yourself with a bag of pretzels. So be aware of what you surround yourself with!

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Wadhwa, M., & Kim, J. (2015). Can a Near Win Kindle Motivation? The Impact of Nearly Winning on Motivation for Unrelated Rewards Psychological Science, 26 (6), 701-708 DOI: 10.1177/0956797614568681

--further reading--
How losing can increase your chances of winning

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

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How Do Horror Video Games Work, and Why Do People Play Them?

Horror video games target evolved defence mechanisms
by confronting the player with fright-inducing stimuli
such as darkness and hostile entities. 

By guest blogger Mathias Clasen

The video game industry outpaced the movie industry several years ago, and video games remain a rapidly growing market. In 2014, US consumers spent more than $22 billion on game content, hardware, and accessories. While researchers in media psychology have been busy investigating and discussing the effects of violent video games, another peculiar and persistent game genre—horror—has attracted very little empirical research. What are the effects of horror video games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Resident Evil, how do they work, and why do people play them?

A new study addresses these questions. Teresa Lynch and Nicole Martins of Indiana University looked at college students’ experiences with horror video games and found that about half of their sample (53 per cent) had tried playing such games and been frightened by them. They also found that: horror games produce these fright responses by targeting our evolved defence system (evolution has shaped us to be easily scared by the dangers that threatened our ancestors); that there are predictable individual differences in how likely people are to seek out and be scared by horror video games; and that interactivity is crucial to these effects. Moreover, the researchers found that horror video games can have strong spill-over effects, causing disrupted sleep and increased fearfulness after playing.

The researchers had 269 undergrad students complete online forms on their experiences with frightening video games. They were asked to indicate which games had scared them, identify the game stimuli that scared them, and list the kinds of fright reactions they experienced during and after gameplay. Most of the respondents (97 per cent) were 18-24 years old. The researchers used a combination of forced-choice and open-ended questions.

The list of games that had produced fright reactions in players is dominated by so-called survival horror games such as Slender: The Eight Pages. These games typically use a first-person perspective to situate the player in a game world that teems with danger, usually from hostile non-player characters (monsters, more often than not). The game objective is to survive while overcoming a number of challenges, such as finding concealed resources necessary for progressing in the game. The game features that participants identified as particularly scary included darkness, the unknown, and disfigured humans (including zombies). This makes psychological sense because all these features target our evolved defence mechanisms.

Our fearful instincts evolved to protect us from dangers in the real world, so why do horror video games use patently unrealistic stimuli such as zombies and other supernatural monsters? The researchers found that perceived realism in horror video games is important in producing fright responses. Strikingly, though, they found that graphic realism (the quality of a visual representation) is more important in scaring players than is manifest realism (how likely something is to occur in the real world). Even though zombies don’t exist in reality, a realistically rendered representation of a walking, rotting, infectious, homicidal corpse combines stimuli that evoke strong fear-and-disgust emotions in players.

The study found some reliable individual differences in horror video game susceptibility and consumption. Men play more horror video games, and enjoy playing them more, than do women. Contrary to expectations, however, the study found no gender-mediated difference in the frequency of experienced fright. Guys may be more drawn to horror video games, but they are just as spooked by those games, it appears. The study found a weak correlation between sensation-seeking—a personality trait that makes people susceptible to boredom and eager to seek out stimulating experiences—and enjoyment of horror video games. Sensation-seekers enjoy horror video games more and experience less fright while playing, but curiously they don’t seem to spend more time playing horror video games than do non-sensation-seekers.

The researchers also found that player perceptions of interactivity were crucial to the games’ function of producing fright responses. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that horror in whatever medium works by transporting the audience into a fictional world teeming with danger. Horror video games are particularly effective because they ease such imaginative transportation via the illusion of agency—the player interfaces with the game and interacts with the game world, using for example keyboard keys to control the avatar’s movements and actions. You may have noticed that when people recount their game experiences, they tend to use a first-person narrator: “I went into the warehouse and ganked all the zombies with my shotgun.” This suggests that horror video games foster immersion much more strongly than do films and fiction, even those stories that are told from a first-person point-of-view.

This study, however, did not operationalize interactivity. What makes some games feel more interactive than others, and does higher interactivity—for example, having more in-game behavioral options— produce stronger fright responses? The nascent technology of virtual reality suggests that interactivity is not the only route to immersion. Many of the horror video games designed for the Oculus Rift, a portable virtual reality headset, have very little interactivity, but they are still notoriously immersive. There’s a whole YouTube industry of Oculus Rift players filming themselves reacting strongly to primitive horror simulations.

Horror video games are here to stay, but we still know little about their short- and long-term effects, and while the present study makes important inroads, it does not tell us why so many people are attracted to the kinds of video games that are designed to make them feel bad. The researchers suggest that the games may function as a kind of training for real-life emergencies, but that hypothesis awaits experimental investigation.

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Lynch, T., & Martins, N. (2015). Nothing to Fear? An Analysis of College Students' Fear Experiences With Video Games Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59 (2), 298-317 DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2015.1029128

--further reading--
The Lure of Horror
Spook Me, Please: What Psychology Tells Us About the Appeal of Halloween
Our jumpiness at nighttime is not just because it's dark
Could violent video games make players more moral in the real world?

Post written by Dr Mathias Clasen (@MathiasClasen) for the BPS Research Digest. Clasen, an assistant professor of literature and media at the English Department, Aarhus University, has published on horror and evil monsters and is currently working on a book about the biological underpinnings of modern American horror in literature, films, and video games.

Smile at a party and people are more likely to remember seeing your face there

When you smile at a party, your facial expression is emotionally consistent with the happy context and as a consequence other guests will in future be more likely to remember that they've seen your face before, and where you were when they saw you. That's according to a team of Italian researchers led by Stefania Righi who have explored how memory for a face is affected by the emotion shown on that face and the congruence between that emotional expression and its surrounding context.

The researchers first presented 30 participants (11 men) with 64 unfamiliar face and scene pairings. The faces were either smiling or fearful and they were either presented alongside an image of a happy scene (e.g. a party) or a fear-inducing scene (e.g. a car crash). The participants' task at this stage was simply to indicate whether each face-scene pairing was emotionally congruent or not.

Next came the memory test. Different faces (some previously seen, some new) were flashed up on-screen against a black background and the participants had to say whether they'd seen the face before or if it was entirely new. After each face, three scenes appeared of the same genre (e.g. three party scenes), and the participants had to say which specific scene the face had previously appeared alongside.

Previously seen happy faces were better remembered than fearful faces, but only when they appeared alongside a happy scene. Memory for fearful faces, by contrast, was unaffected by the congruence of the accompanying scene. Why should smiling faces at a party or other happy context be better remembered than a fearful face? The researchers think the combination of a smiling face and happy scene has a broadening effect on observers' attention, enhancing their memories for the face. From a methodological point of view, it's a shame the study didn't also feature neutral faces: without these, we can't be certain whether smiling faces in a happy context were enhancing memory or if fearful faces in that context were harming memory, or a bit of both.

Figure 3 from Righi et al, 2015.

The researchers also propose that smiling faces have a "unitising effect" whereby the face and its context are bound together in memory. This idea also appeared to be supported by the results: participants were better at remembering the accompanying scenes (happy and fearful) for smiling faces than fearful faces.

Put these two key results together and it means that we're particularly likely to remember a smiling face we saw at a party, and the specific context we saw it in. Righi and her colleagues said it made sense for memory to work this way. "A smiling person communicates a social bond and the ability to remember, not only the face identity, but also the context of the first encounter with that 'potential friend', could reflect an adaptive behaviour in view of future social relations." The new results also complement past research on memory for face-name pairings: presented with a name, participants were better at remembering when it was earlier paired with a happy face than a neutral one.

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Righi, S., Gronchi, G., Marzi, T., Rebai, M., & Viggiano, M. (2015). You are that smiling guy I met at the party! Socially positive signals foster memory for identities and contexts Acta Psychologica, 159, 1-7 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.05.001

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

Here's a technique that helps self-critical people build confidence from a taste of success

The directed abstraction technique acts a springboard,
allowing the timid to gain confidence from initial success

Last week Kathleen finally put aside her fears about public speaking to give a presentation… and it went pretty well! But when you caught her at lunch today and asked if she wanted future opportunities to present, you found she was as pessimistic about her ability as ever.

This story reflects an unfortunate truth: people with low self-belief are liable to hold onto negative assumptions about themselves despite concrete evidence of the contrary; that is, they fail to "generalise from success". Thankfully, in a new paper, psychologist Peter Zunick and his colleagues describe a technique, called directed abstraction, that can help the self-critical change their mindsets.

Direct abstraction means stopping to consider how a specific success may have more general implications – this is the abstraction part – and also ensuring this thinking is directed towards how personal qualities were key to the success. Let’s see what this means in practice.

In a first study, 86 students guessed the number of dots flashed up on screen, and were given fake but convincing positive feedback on their performance. Half the students were then asked to explain how they completed the task, which kept their thoughts on a very concrete, specific level. The other half were prompted to engage in directed abstraction by completing the sentence: “I was able to score very high on the test because I am: ... ” This query is not about how, but why – a more abstract consideration – and also focuses on the individual’s own qualities.

Engaging in directed abstraction appeared to give a particular boost to those participants who’d earlier reported believing they have low competence day to day:  afterwards, they not only had more confidence in their estimation ability (than similarly self-critical control participants), they also believed they would do better at similar tasks (like guessing jelly beans in a jar) that they faced in the future.

In another experiment, Zunick’s research team sifted through hundreds of students to find 59 with low faith in their public speaking skills. Each of them was given a few minutes to prepare and then make a speech to camera on the topic of transition to college life, a fairly easy one to tackle. Each participant then watched themselves on video, with the experimenter offering reassuring feedback and implying that they did surprisingly well.

The same participants then engaged in directed abstraction (or the control "how" query) before being thrown once more into the breach with a second speechmaking experience, this time on a tough topic, with no coddling feedback afterward – this was the real deal. Did the directed abstraction participants gain confidence from their early success that could survive a rockier second round? They did, reporting more confidence for future public speaking than their peers.

The technique seems to be appropriate for a range of settings, although obviously it’s only useful to use it following an event that can be reasonably seen as a success, otherwise it could backfire. And it’s simple to use to help a friend or yourself, just by taking the time after a success to think through what it owes to your personal qualities. Then confidence can follow.

 _________________________________

Zunick PV, Fazio RH, & Vasey MW (2015). Directed abstraction: Encouraging broad, personal generalizations following a success experience. Journal of personality and social psychology, 109 (1), 1-19 PMID: 25984786

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

New research challenges the idea that willpower is a "limited resource"

A popular psychological theory says that your willpower is
a "limited resource" like the fuel in your car, but is it wrong?

When we use willpower to concentrate or to resist temptation, does it leave us depleted so that we have less self-control left over to tackle new challenges? This is a question fundamental to our understanding of human nature and yet a newly published investigation reveals that psychologists are in open disagreement as to the answer.

The idea that willpower is a limited resource, much like the fuel in your car, is popular in academic psychology and supported by many studies. In their recent report What You Need To Know About Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-control, the American Psychological Association states "A growing body of research shows that resisting repeated temptations takes a mental toll. Some experts liken willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse."

This view was backed by an influential meta-analysis published in 2010 [pdf] that looked at the results from nearly 200 published experiments. But now a team led by Evan Carter at the University of Miami has argued that the 2010 study was seriously flawed and they've published their own series of meta-analyses, the findings of which undermine the limited resource theory (also known as the theory of ego depletion).

Many psychology studies on willpower follow a similar format: one group of participants is first asked to perform an initial challenging task designed to drain their willpower, before completing a second "outcome" task that also requires willpower. For comparison, a control group of participants performs the outcome task without the first challenge. Superior performance by the control participants (on the outcome task) is taken as evidence that the willpower of the first group was left depleted by the initial challenge, thus supporting the theory that willpower is a limited resource.

The new meta-analyses and the 2010 effort both consider the combined results from many studies following this format, but the new analyses are far stricter in that they only consider studies that used tasks well-established in the literature as ways to challenge willpower, including suppressing emotional reactions to videos and resisting tempting food, and that also used established tasks as outcome measures, including persistence on impossible anagrams, food consumption and standardised academic tests (such as the graduate record exam). The 2010 analysis, by contrast, included a far wider range of studies including those that stretch the definition of a willpower challenge to its limits, including darts playing and purely hypothetical temptations.

Another key difference between the 2010 study and the new analyses is that Carter and his team trawled conference reports to find unpublished studies on willpower. This is important because in this scientific field, as with most others, it's likely there has been a bias in the literature towards publishing positive results (in this case, those consistent with the popular idea that willpower becomes depleted with repeated use).

When Carter's team analysed the evidence from the 68 relevant published and 48 relevant unpublished studies that they identified, they found very little overall support for the idea that willpower is a limited resource. The one exception was when the outcome measure involved a standardised test – here performance did appear to be diminished by a prior self-control challenge.

But for other outcome tasks such as resisting food, the combined data from published and unpublished experiments either pointed to no effect of a prior self-control challenge, or there was worrying evidence of a publication bias for positive results, as was the case, for example, when the outcome challenge involved impossible anagrams or tests of working memory. The new meta-analyses even found some support for the idea that self-control improves through successive challenges, a result that's consistent with rival theories such as "learned industriousness".

This new series of meta-analyses should be not be taken as the end of the theory of willpower as a limited resource. Proponents of that theory will likely respond with their own counter-arguments, including questioning the use of unpublished work by the new study. However, the results certainly give pause. "We encourage scientists and non-scientists alike to seriously consider other theories of when and why self-control might fail," Carter and his team conclude. It's worth noting too that this message comes after the recent doubts raised about a related idea in willpower research – specifically, the notion that depleted self-control is caused by a lack of sugar in the body.
_________________________________

  Carter, E., Kofler, L., Forster, D., & McCullough, M. (2015). A Series of Meta-Analytic Tests of the Depletion Effect: Self-Control Does Not Seem to Rely on a Limited Resource. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/xge0000083

--further reading--
Self-control – the moral muscle. Roy F. Baumeister outlines intriguing and important research into willpower and ego depletion

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

Why do we sometimes like getting sad together?

We spend most of our lives trying to be as happy as possible, but a team of researchers in Israel has explored how we sometimes appear to find, if not pleasure exactly, at least a certain satisfaction in sharing moments of sadness with others.

To investigate this phenomenon, Roni Porat and her team focused on Jewish-Israeli people's expectations around Israeli National Memorial Day. The day is used to commemorate Israeli soldiers who died in service as well as civilians killed by terrorism.

Based on surveys of Jewish-Israeli undergrads, the researchers found that people who were more motivated to belong (they agreed with statements like "It is important for me to feel a part of the Israeli society"), also tended to say they wanted to feel sad on Memorial Day, and they expected this sadness to make them feel closer to their country.

Porat's team followed this up by deliberately prompting the need to belong in Jewish-Israeli participants recruited online. The researchers did this by asking the participants to look at pairs of photos of faces and to indicate in each case which face belonged to a Jewish-Israeli and which to a Palestinian; this was followed by fixed feedback so that the participants thought they'd failed to identify members of their own ethnic group. Compared to control participants, those made to feel inadequate had raised hopes for feeling sad (but not other emotions) on Memorial Day.

It was a similar story for participants who were prompted to want to belong by having them read about the basic human need for feeling part of a larger social group. After reading such arguments, participants had raised wishes for feeling sad on Memorial Day.

Porat and her colleagues said this is the first time that anyone has studied how the need to belong shapes people's preferences for the emotions they want to feel. The new results extend past research that's shown how people deliberately influence their own emotions for individual (rather than social) reasons – for example, fostering anger in themselves as an aid to aggression.

It remains to be seen how far the results will generalise beyond the specific contexts of this study. If they do, real-world applications might follow. For example, as with sadness, it's plausible that people sometimes seek out group anger as a way to feel greater belonging with their national or religious group. By helping people feel a greater sense of belonging in other ways, the researchers said, it might be possible to reduce the appeal of group anger thereby helping reduce hostility between different social groups.
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Porat, R., Halperin, E., Mannheim, I., & Tamir, M. (2015). Together we cry: Social motives and preferences for group-based sadness. Cognition and Emotion, (ahead-of-print), 1-14.

--further reading--
Why do people like listening to sad music when they're feeling down?
 
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Researchers say: Don't worry what other people think, going out on your own can be fun

In our part of the world, more people are living on their own than ever before. People also say they have fewer close friends. Yet it's still rare, especially at the weekend, to see someone eating alone in a busy restaurant, or rolling up solo to the cinema to watch the latest blockbuster.

According to a pair of US researchers, Rebecca Ratner and Rebecca Hamilton, this reluctance to partake in leisure activities on our own means many of us are missing out unnecessarily – not just on the fun experience itself (be that going to the movies or something else), but on the chance to meet new people while we're out.

The researchers asked hundreds of US, Indian and Chinese participants to say how interested they'd be in doing various activities alone or with friends, and how much they would expect to enjoy those activities. The results were clear across all cultures: people were less interested in, and thought they would enjoy pleasurable activities (like eating out) in public less, if they were alone than with friends. This wasn't true for chores like grocery shopping or exercise, in which case they thought it would be as much fun alone as with company.

The reason for thinking public leisure activities would be less enjoyable alone was at least partly explained by self-consciousness – the participants thought other people would assume they had fewer friends if they were seen eating out or going to the movies on their own.

But Ratner and Hamilton say people underestimate how much fun they'll have partaking in entertaining activities in public alone. In another part of the study, participants enjoyed a solo visit to an art gallery much more than they expected, even though the building's glass walls meant they could be seen on their lonesome from the street.

Next, the researchers looked at people's expectations about going to a coffee shop. Again, participants thought they'd enjoy this less on their own than with friends, unless they had work with them to do. And once more, a kind of embarrassment was at play, in that participants thought other people would assume they had fewer friends if they went to a cafe alone and had no work with them.

Finally, the researchers asked another set of participants about going to the cinema, alone or with friends, either on a busy Saturday night, or on Sunday when it's quieter. For participants contemplating a cinema visit on their own, Sunday was preferable, at least partly because they felt they would be seen by fewer people on the quieter night.

Ratner and Hamilton hope that "by identifying a widespread disinhibition to engage in public, hedonic activities alone as well as cues that attenuate this inhibition [i.e. when the activity is re-framed to involve work or to be functional in some way], we can encourage more consumers to go bowling – or whatever leisure activity is appealing but for which they lack an activity partner – alone."

The pair propose a number of creative suggestions for how businesses might encourage more lone customers, such as: communal tables for solo diners at restaurants and group seating in cinemas for lone film viewers, and by making activities "collectible", such as by offering incentives to sample a certain number of meals from a menu or plays at a theatre, thereby lending a functional aspect to fun experiences which might reduce the self-consciousness of doing them alone.

It's admirable to try to give people the confidence to go out on their own if that's what they want to do. And this study has succeeded in prompting newspaper headlines like "Why You Should Really Start Doing More Things Alone" (Washington Post). But sceptics will note that the current evidence is weak when it comes to actually showing that participating in leisure activities in public alone is more fun for people than they expect it to be.

Only one aspect of this study examined people's actual experience of completing an entertainment activity alone – and that was the five minute trip to an art gallery. This is surely quite a different prospect than, say, visiting a bustling restaurant or theatre by yourself, and it remains to be seen how accurate people are at forecasting their experience of those more challenging environments without any company.

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Rebecca K Ratner, & Rebecca W Hamilton (2015). Inhibited from bowling alone Journal of Consumer Research. In Press.

--further reading--
Is it the darkness within? Some people would rather shock themselves with electricity than spend time with their own thoughts
Social flow - how doing it together beats doing it alone
We're happier when we chat to strangers, but our instinct is to ignore them

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

Our jumpiness at nighttime is not just because it's dark

When something goes bump in the night, most of us are little jumpier than we would be in the day. But is that just because it's dark, or is it more to do with our bodies and brains switching to a vigilant nocturnal mode?

Yadan Li and her colleagues have attempted to disentangle the influences of darkness and nighttime. They recruited 120 young women to complete a computer task in a windowless cubicle, which involved them looking at neutral pictures (e.g. nature scenes), scary pictures (e.g. spiders; a person being attacked), and listening to scary sounds (e.g. screams) and neutral sounds (e.g. bird song).

The women were split into four groups: some of them completed the task in the day-time with bright lights on; some in the day-time in darkness; others at night-time with a dim light on; and others at night-time in complete darkness (although presumably the computer screen created some light).

The women who completed the task at nighttime said they found the scary pictures and sounds more scary (than the women tested in the day-time), and this was true regardless of whether they were tested in darkness or light. Moreover, their extra jumpiness was confirmed by recordings taken of their heart-rate and perspiration.

In contrast, the time of testing made no difference to the women's responses to the neutral pictures and sounds. Also, the lighting levels, whether in the day-time or at nighttime, made no difference to the women's reactions to the neutral or scary stimuli.

In other words, the findings appear to suggest that we're more sensitive to threats at nighttime because it's the night, not because it's dark. This raises the possibility that biological factors associated with our circadian rhythm affect our fear-sensitivity, although it's plausible that cultural factors are involved, in that we've learned to be more vigilant at night.

The day-time testing took place at 8.00am and the nighttime testing at 8.00pm (in February, so it was dark outside) – it remains to be seen whether and how the findings might vary at different times of day and night. We also don't know if the same findings would apply to male participants, or participants from different cultures or stages of life (the study was conducted in China where the authors are based, and the student participants had an average age of 22 years).

Li and her colleagues hope their findings will inspire other researchers to explore this topic. "[T]his study is merely a first step in understanding the underlying mechanisms involved in fear-related information processing and has implications for the underlying psychopathology of relevant phobias and anxiety disorders [such as nighttime panic attacks]," they said.

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Li, Y., Ma, W., Kang, Q., Qiao, L., Tang, D., Qiu, J., Zhang, Q., & Li, H. (2015). Night or darkness, which intensifies the feeling of fear? International Journal of Psychophysiology DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2015.04.021

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

Happy people have more children

Lots of research, much of it contradictory, has looked into whether having children brings happiness. There are studies showing marital satisfaction plummets after the kids arrive, but there's other evidence that the bundles of joy really do bring ... joy. A new study turns all this on its head and asks whether being happier makes it more likely that people will have children.

Jinhyung Kim and Joshua Hicks first analysed data collected from 559 US lawyers. In 1984, the law men and women rated their life satisfaction and reported whether they had any children, and then in 1990 they were contacted again and said how many kids they now had. Lawyers who were happier in 1984 had more children in 1990, even after accounting for their income, age, gender and number of children when they were first contacted.

Of course lawyers are not entirely like the rest of us, so a more valid follow-up study was needed. This time the researchers analysed data collected from nearly 5000 people across the US in 1995-96 and then again between 2004 and 2006. Once more the data showed that people who reported more happiness at the first time point tended to have more children at the second time point.

This second survey also had the advantage that it looked at different forms of happiness. Life satisfaction, more positive emotions, and more purpose and meaning in life were all independently associated with having more children, even after accounting for other factors like income, age and gender.

Kim and Hicks said: "The current studies suggest that children may not only serve as a source of happiness, but happiness itself is linked to future reproduction." The routes by which happiness might encourage procreation remain unknown and are likely manifold and complex. Speculating about the role of hedonic happiness specifically, the researchers said: "... people in a positive affective state may use the feeling as information that they are currently satisfied, motivating them to explore new opportunities such as childrearing."

It's also likely that relationship status plays a big part in the link between happiness and having more children. Happier people are more likely to form new, and sustain existing, relationships, which obviously makes it easier to have kids. Indeed, in the second survey, the statistical link between past happiness and future children disappeared once relationship status at the second time point was taken into account.

Another detail: the relationship between past happiness and later number of children was weaker for people who already had at least one child. The researchers wondered if this is because "... realistic issues associated with parenting override the effect of cognitive well-being and optimism on the willingness to have additional children."

It's important to note that we are talking about subtle associations here. For instance, in the second survey, life satisfaction at the first time point only explained 0.001 per cent of the variance in number of children at the second time point. This might sound derisory, but remember this was after taking into account other powerful factors such as income. The researchers said the small effect sizes are to be expected "considering the number of variables that influence the probability of having a child." But to be sure, they added: "... clearly happiness does not account for all of the variance associated with parenthood."

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Kim, J., & Hicks, J. (2015). Happiness begets children? Evidence for a bi-directional link between well-being and number of children The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1-8 DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2015.1025420

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

Do we really love our favourite brands the same way we love people?

People can get awfully attached to their preferred brands. Some tattoo logos on their skin, others camp out overnight to buy the latest products. Late in life, people often still favour and trust brands from their youth. But is brand obsession and attachment really the same as the love we feel for people?

The question is pertinent for researchers in the field of consumer psychology where there's a tendency to apply theories and measures from the study of interpersonal love to the study of brand attachment, as if the emotions are equivalent.

A new paper investigated people's feelings for their favourite brands by recording their physiological arousal levels (based on sweatiness of the skin) while they looked at pictures of the logo for a brand they said they love (such as Adidas, Audi and BMW), as compared with with their arousal while they looked at pictures of a romantic partner they love, and at their closest friend. The 20 participants also used a visual rating scale (mannequins pulling different facial expressions) to indicate the feelings triggered by their romantic partner, their friend and the brand they love.

The physiological readings and subjective ratings indicated that people's love for the partner is much more intense than their love for their favourite brand. Tobias Langner and his team predicted this result and said it shows romantic love and brand love "constitute different emotions". This interpretation was also supported by interviews the researchers conducted with 60 other participants: when people spoke of brand love, they did so much more in the context of an exchange (i.e .what they got from the brand), as compared with how they spoke of romantic love, which was often more altruistic in nature. Based on this, the researchers said scholars in their field should be cautious before continuing to transfer measures and theories from interpersonal love to brand love as if the two are synonymous.

And yet, the findings also suggest we should not underestimate the intensity of emotion some people feel for their favourite brands. The participants' physiological arousal in response to their loved brand logo was as intense as the arousal they showed when looking at a picture of their closest friend. And on the subjective rating scale for "valence" (featuring smiley and unhappy looking mannequins), the participants reported more positive feelings in response to the brand logo than the friend!

The small sample gives reason to treat this last finding with some scepticism, as does the fact that the participants were deliberately recruited on the basis that there was a consumer brand they really loved and could not live without. Bear in mind, however, that to qualify all participants also needed to be  in a romantic relationship. Perhaps brand attachment could be even more intense for people not in love with a partner?

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Langner, T., Schmidt, J., & Fischer, A. (2015). Is It Really Love? A Comparative Investigation of the Emotional Nature of Brand and Interpersonal Love Psychology & Marketing, 32 (6), 624-634 DOI: 10.1002/mar.20805

--further reading--
Brands leave their mark on children's brains
Is it worth hiring David Beckham to promote your brand?
The Psychology of Stuff and Things

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