It's not just criminals who feel unsafe when the police are around

The idea that police on our streets makes people feel safer is usually taken as a given. It's the basis of the so-called "reassurance policing" agenda, which advocates higher numbers of visible front-line police. And when increased police numbers are announced, members of the public often welcome the news. "I'm all for more police on the streets," said a Chicago resident earlier this month after the announcement of increased patrols, "It makes me feel safer seeing them around my community."

A new study challenges this received wisdom. Whereas most surveys ask people to reflect on whether they'd feel safer with more visible police, Evelien van de Veer and her colleagues took a different approach, looking at how the presence of police affected people's sense of safety right at that moment.

The researchers quizzed over 200 Amsterdam residents out shopping about how safe they currently felt. For some, two to four police were currently visible patrolling the vicinity; for others no police were present. Overall, the presence of police made no difference to participants' answers. However, focusing just on the male participants - those who answered when a police patrol was nearby actually reported feeling less safe.

Next, the researchers showed 124 students pictures of a street scene and asked them to rate how safe it seemed. The photos were doctored so that some of the participants saw a police officer in the scene. The key finding here was that a graffiti-daubed alleyway was rated as safer when a policeman was in the scene, but a leafy residential street was rated as less safe when a policeman was present. This difference was found for both sexes, but was more pronounced for men.

Van de Veer and her colleagues proposed two possible explanations for what they described as this "ironic" consequence of police presence. They said the sight of a police officer could act as a warning signal, directing people's attention to potential danger in the vicinity. Or they suggested the sight of police could trigger automatic mental associations of concepts like crime or violence (this would be a social priming effect - an area of study that's currently under close scrutiny).

Why were men particularly prone to feeling unsafe in the presence of police? The researchers suggested this may be because they are more often the victim of violent crimes, and more often the cause of police needing to be called to a scene. This reasoning seems vague and van de Veer's team admitted "further exploration of this issue is required."

The researchers concluded that their findings have real-life implications for police forces and policy makers. "A general increase in the number of visibly present police officers may not have the intended effect," they said.

Past research covered on the Digest has shown that CCTV cameras can also increase feelings of insecurity; so too neighbourhood watch signs.

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van de Veer, E., de Lange, M., van der Haar, E., and Karremans, J. (2012). Feelings of Safety: Ironic Consequences of Police Patrolling. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42 (12), 3114-3125 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00967.x

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

Are 3D films more psychologically powerful than 2D?

The revival of 3D movies in recent years has prompted much debate among fans and critics. Some say it's gimmicky and too expensive. Others have heralded the return of the technology as the industry's saviour. A key claim in favour of 3D technology is that it makes for a more realistic, immersive experience. But does it really?

Brendan Rooney and his colleagues at University College Dublin showed 8 different movie clips (ranging from 13 to 68 seconds in length) to 27 participants (13 males; average age 27). The gory clips were chosen deliberately for their disgusting content and were taken from Bugs 3D, Friday 13th, Jaws 3-D and Frankenstein.

Each participant watched the clips alone in a mini-cinema on campus featuring a 2.5m x 2.5m screen. Crucially, half the participants viewed the clips in 3D, the others in 2D. To ensure any effects of the 3D format were not due to novelty, all the participants watched an abridged version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 3D, at least 24 hours prior to the study proper.

Participants in the 3D condition reported finding the film clips more realistic. They also had a higher heart rate whilst watching the clips compared with participants in the 2D condition. However, there was no difference in amount of skin conductance (another measure of arousal) between the two groups, and no difference in how much they said they enjoyed the clips.

Rooney and his colleagues explain that skin conductance - that is, the skin's sweatiness - is influenced only by the sympathetic nervous system (which triggers the fight or flight response) and not by the parasympathetic nervous system (which calms us down). By contrast, heart rate is influenced by both. This suggests to them that the calming parasympathetic nervous system is less active in viewers of 3D. Why? Well, one theory for how we calm our emotions during films is by reminding ourselves that they're not real. The 3D viewers said they found the viewing experience more realistic and it's possible that this made it more difficult for them to step outside of the experience, leaving their emotional response relatively unchecked. The researchers concede that the causal direction could also run the other way - the 3D viewers raised heart rate could cause them to perceive the experience as more realistic. Most likely the influences are bi-directional.

Is it a good thing that the 3D clips were rated as more realistic and triggered more physiological arousal? The 3D viewers didn't rate the clips as any more enjoyable, but then they only gave these ratings afterwards, which means they were relying on their memory of the experience. Also, they had no baseline to measure their ratings against. Finally, perhaps "enjoyment" is the wrong word when it comes to disgusting movie clips. If the study were repeated with a different genre, perhaps 3D viewers would give higher enjoyment ratings.

Rooney's team stressed that this was an exploratory study and that more research is clearly needed. For now they concluded the "suspension of disbelief is ... assisted by stereoscopic depth, with associated increases in reported perceived apparent reality and in heart-rate ... ".

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Rooney, B., Benson, C., and Hennessy, E. (2012). The apparent reality of movies and emotional arousal: A study using physiological and self-report measures Poetics, 40 (5), 405-422 DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2012.07.004

--Further reading--
Right-handers sit to the right of the movie screen to optimise neural processing of the film.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why do humans walk in circles?

It's a trusted plot device of many a thriller. The lost protagonists stagger for hours through creepy forest only to end up back where they started. In fact the idea that humans walk in circles is no urban myth. This was confirmed by Jan Souman and colleagues in a 2009 study, in which participants walked for hours at night in a German forest and the Tunisian Sahara. But the question remains - why?

Souman's team rejected past theories, including the idea that people have one leg that's stronger or longer than the other. If that were true you'd expect people to systematically veer off in the same direction, but their participants varied in their circling direction.

Now a team in France has made a bold attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. Emma Bestaven and her colleagues hired out a huge indoor exhibition space in Bordeaux (90m x 150m) and blindfolded their participants, thus ensuring that there was no way any environmental sounds or bumps on the ground could interfere with the results.

Another innovation was that the researchers used EMG to monitor the participants' muscle activity in their legs whilst they walked; they had them stand on a force plate to check how their balance was distributed; and they assessed their subjective sense of the vertical, via their placement of a vertical bar.

Given six attempts to walk in a straight line, the fifteen blindfolded participants (7 women) in fact frequently veered off in one direction or the other, just as expected based on past research. Half the time they deviated off to the left, 39 per cent of the time to the right, and the remainder of the walks they managed to go straight. Six of the participants always veered in the same direction, the others mixed it up. There was no evidence of participants getting straighter with each attempt, but a faster walking speed was associated with a straighter trajectory.

Many past theories for why humans walk in circles were ruled out - walking deviation was unrelated to hand, eye or leg dominance. The recordings of muscle activity drew a blank. But there was one clue. The participants' "centre of pressure" score obtained when they stood on the force plate, which reflects their postural balance, was correlated with how much they deviated from a straight line when they walked. In turn, this "centre of pressure" score was correlated with participants' subjective sense of a straight vertical line.

Taken together, Bestaven's team said this suggests that our propensity to walk in circles is related in some way to slight irregularities in the vestibular system. Located in inner ear, the vestibular system guides our balance and minor disturbances here could skew our sense of the direction of "straight ahead" just enough to make us go around in circles.

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Emma Bestaven, Etienne Guillaud, and Jean-René Cazalets (2012). Is “Circling” Behavior in Humans Related to Postural Asymmetry? PLoS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043861

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

People assume it's hillier up north

Give people a choice of two cross-country routes to the same destination, one more northerly, the other more southerly, but both covering similar terrain, and they'll tend to favour the southerly route, and to anticipate it being quicker and easier going. According to a new study, this is true for people who've been tested from regions such as Southern New England in the USA, where the north is more mountainous, but it's true too for people who live in regions such as Sofia in Bulgaria, where the south is mountainous and the north is flat. Tad Brunyé and his colleagues think this spatial bias may have to do with our life-long association of north with up (with additional connotations of being uphill) and south as down - as is the convention on maps.

Brunyé's team tested this idea with a series of implicit association tasks. Student participants from Tufts University in Boston looked at pictures of landscapes and categorised them as either flat or mountainous. They also saw aerial shots of geographic areas and had to indicate whether a star on the picture was located north or south. The main finding here is that the participants were quicker to respond during experimental blocks when the same keyboard response key was used for answering "north" or "mountainous" (and another key was for answering "south" or "flat") compared to the contrasting situation where the same key was used for indicating "north" or "flat" (and another key was for "south" or "mountainous").

This finding suggests that the participants implicitly associated the concepts of "north" and "mountainous" in their minds. The same result was obtained when the images for north vs. south consisted of a large compass in the middle of the screen (with a large N in the centre denoting north or a large S denoting south). Although most Tufts students are from areas outside of Southern New England, where the university is based, the researchers also repeated the study with a student sample based in Ohio, where there are mountains to the south east. Again, despite living in an area where the south is more hilly, the same implicit association of north with hills and mountains was exhibited by the students.

A final study measured participants' implicit associations and their more explicit associations. This latter task came in the form of a free association test - participants were given a word such as "north" or "south" and they had to write the first five words that came to mind (the researchers were interested to see if they'd mention words like "up" or "hilly"; past research has generally found that most people don't explicitly associate the north with a mountainous landscape). This study also involved the participants choosing between pairs of routes through similar terrain to the same destination - one more northerly, one more southerly. Once again the usual bias for southern routes was obtained (these were picked 62 per cent of the time); participants who showed a stronger implicit association of north with mountainous terrain, as revealed on the implicit association test, were more likely to pick the more southerly route.

"Given physical experiences associating upward mobility with relative difficulty, the north-south canonical axis becomes misperceived as indicative of physical effort," the researchers said. "Thus if participants misperceive northward areas as higher elevation (or 'uphill') then it logically follows that they would strategically avoid travelling through what they perceive as relatively demanding areas. Indeed, everyday colloquialisms such as heading down south or going up north may reflect how pervasive such associations are throughout cognition." The researchers added that their finding could have practical implications - for example, affecting driving behaviour within towns and cities and also over greater distances, which could be of interest to city planners and civil engineers.

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Tad T. Brunyé, Stephanie A. Gagnon, David Waller, et al (2012). Up north and down south: Implicit associations between topography and cardinal direction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : 10.1080/17470218.2012.663393

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Dead plants encourage belief in global warming

In 2006, the Conservative party in the UK unveiled its new logo - a scribbled sketch of a healthy-looking oak tree. The image was intended in part to communicate the party's renewed dedication to environmental causes. A new study by French psychologist Nicolas Guéguen suggests that if the Conservatives want to help change people's attitudes towards the environment, they should consider adapting their logo to one of a dying tree. Why? Guéguen has shown that the presence of dead plants strengthens people's beliefs in global warming.

In the first of two studies, Guéguen had 60 participants fill out a questionnaire about current affairs, including four questions about global warming, such as: "It seems to me that the temperature is warmer now than in previous years." Crucially, half the participants filled out the questionnaire in a room in the presence of a 150cm tall ficus tree with luscious green leaves; the other participants in a room in the company of a dead ficus tree. The finding: participants in the dead tree condition expressed far stronger beliefs in global warming than the participants in the other group, whilst their answers to the remaining questions were no different.

In a follow-up study, Guéguen introduced a no-tree condition, to make sure that it's not the case that the presence of a healthy plant weakens beliefs about global warming. He also featured a condition with three dead or healthy plants - a ficus, a bonsai and a dracaena. The presence of healthy plants made no difference to global warming beliefs versus the no-plant control condition. Once again, however, the presence of a dead plant strengthened beliefs in global warming, and more dead plants meant even stronger such beliefs. No students in either study guessed the aims of the research.

Guéguen speculated that the sight of dead plants probably triggered in participants' minds concepts associated with global warming, such as heat and drought, without them being consciously aware of this effect. The new findings chime with earlier research showing how incidental circumstances influence people's belief in climate change - for example, people are more likely to say they believe in climate change on warmer days. A weakness of the study is that there's no mention of whether the female experimenter who dealt with the participants was blind to the aims of the research - might she have affected their results through her own behaviour?

Notwithstanding that issue, the study has obvious practical implications. Guéguen suggested that in public toilets, for example, the presence of plants without foliage could encourage less water consumption when washing one's hands (though that might harm hygiene initiatives!). More generally, Guéguen advised, "people who want to heighten public awareness on the topic [of global warming] could profitably use photographs or videos of dead plants, or plants without foliage, thus increasing the effectiveness of public awareness campaigns."

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Guéguen, N. (2012). Dead indoor plants strengthen belief in global warming. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 32 (2), 173-177 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2011.12.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?

To focus on details or the whole? This is one of the major ways that people differ in their style of mental processing. Past research has shown that people on the autism spectrum tend to focus more on details. Other studies reveal cross-cultural differences. People from collectivist cultures like Japan show a bias for focusing more on the bigger picture, known as "global processing", whilst citizens in individualist cultures like Britain show a comparatively greater bias for detail or "local processing". Now a study, led by Serge Caparos at Goldsmiths, of a remote African society, makes the case that this cultural difference is caused, not so much by degrees of collectivism or individualism, but rather by exposure to varying levels of urbanisation.

Caparos and his team used two kinds of stimuli presented on-screen to measure processing bias. The first is known as the Ebbinghaus illusion, in which the perceived size of a central circle is affected by the relative size of the circles surrounding it. A circle surrounded by bigger circles will generally be perceived as smaller, especially by people with a bias towards more global processing.

The second stimuli involved large letters comprised of little letters or shapes. Participants had to make a similarity judgement - for example, they were presented with a large X made up of little x's and had to say whether it was more similar to a large circle made up of little x's or a large X made up of little squares. People with a bias towards global processing would be expected to say the two large X's are more similar.

To gauge the effect of urbanisation, the researchers tested dozens of people from the remote Himba society of Namibia, as well as dozens of undergrads from Japan and Britain. Crucially, some of the Himba lived traditionally in village huts and homesteads whereas others had moved to, and lived for several years in, Opuwo, the Himba's only permanent, urban settlement. Also, some of the traditional Himba had visited Opuwo, either once, twice or three times.

The Japanese were more sensitive to the Ebbinghaus illusion than the Brits (indicative of a greater global processing bias, consistent with past research); the Brits, in turn, were more sensitive to it than the traditional Himba. Critically, though, the urban Himba were just as sensitive to the illusion as the British. Visits to the town Opuwo made no difference to the performance of the traditional Himba on this task.

On the similarity judgement task, the Japanese and Brits showed the most global choices, more than both groups of Himba. However, the urban Himba made more global choices than the traditional Himba and, moreover, global choices were made more often by traditional Himba who'd visited the town than those who hadn't. Indeed, just two visits to Opuwo increased global choices by ten per cent.

Age and levels of schooling made no difference to any of these results and past research has confirmed that the Himba are unfazed by testing with a computer monitor.

The more established theory for cross-cultural differences in local/global processing bias would predict that the Himba should show even more of a global processing bias than the Japanese, given the highly collectivist nature of their society. Also, this social orientation account would predict that experience of more individualistic urban living should lead to more local processing bias, not the greater global processing that was observed.

"Our proposal," the researchers said, "is that exposure to the urban environment investigated here introduced visual clutter with consequent changes in global/local processing." Their claim tallies with past research showing the opposite effect - that exposing townies to natural environments increases their bias for details.

"Further research will need to determine the processes by which cluttered visual input and/or other aspects of the urban environment come to change perceptual foci of interest in the dramatic way observed here," the researchers concluded.

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Caparos, S., Ahmed, L., Bremner, A., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K., & Davidoff, J. (2012). Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture Cognition, 122 (1), 80-85 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.08.013

Related studies covered on the Digest:

• Living in a city, or growing up in one, is associated with heightened brain sensitivity to social stress.
• Asian Americans and European Americans differ in how they see themselves in the world.
• We underestimate the benefits of nature.

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Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Children's moral judgments about environmental harm

Young children in northeastern USA see harms against the environment as morally worse than bad manners. And asked to explain this judgment, many of them referred to the moral standing of nature itself - displaying so-called "biocentric" reasoning. This precocity marks a change from similar research conducted in the 1990s, leading the authors of the new study, Karen Hussar and Jared Horvath, to speculate about "the possible effects of the increased focus on environmental initiatives during the last decade ... Although typically thought to emerge in later adolescence, a willingness to grant nature respect based on its own unique right-to-existence was present in our young participants."

Hussar and Horvath presented 61 children (aged 6 to 10 years) with 12 story cards: 3 portrayed a moral transgression against another person (e.g. stealing money from a classmate); 3 portrayed bad manners (e.g. eating salad with one's fingers); 3 portrayed a mundane personal choice (e.g. colouring a drawing with purple crayon); and 3 portrayed an environmentally harmful action (e.g. failing to recycle; damaging a tree). For each card, the children were asked to say if the act was OK, a little bad or very bad, and to explain their reasoning.

The children rated moral transgressions against other people as the worst of all, followed by harms against the environment, and then bad manners. Mundane personal choices were judged largely as "OK". There were no differences with age.

Asked to justify their judgments about environmental harm, 74 per cent of the explanations given referred to "biocentric" reasons (e.g. "A tree is a living thing and, it's like, breaking off your arm - someone else's arm or something"); 26 per cent invoked anthropocentric reasons (e.g. "Because without trees we wouldn't have oxygen"). The ratio of these categories of explanation didn't vary by age, but did vary by gender, with girls more likely to offer biocentric reasons. This fits with a wider, but still inconclusive, literature suggesting that women tend to base their moral judgments on issues of care, whereas men tend to base their moral judgments on issues of justice.

Hussar and Horvath said it was revealing that the children placed environmental harms midway between harms against other people and bad manners. "This environmental domain [of moral harm] implies a sophisticated comprehension by young children such that consideration is afforded to environmental life over social order, but, at the same time, consideration is afforded to human life over environmental life."

In contrast with the present findings, research conducted in the 90s found that young children tended to offer anthropocentric reasons for the immorality of environmental harm, only invoking biocentric reasons more frequently in late childhood or adolescence.

"To conclude, it is evident that the participants in the current study are constructing morally-based views about nature and humans' place within it from a very young age," the researchers said. "This moral stance was succinctly articulated by one of our participants: 'Even if there's no rules you should respect ... (and) be good to the environment.'."
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Hussar, K., and Horvath, J. (2011). Do children play fair with mother nature? Understanding children’s judgments of environmentally harmful actions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31 (4), 309-313 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2011.05.001

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Psychology at the end of the world

Epic adventures into the world's last wildernesses often prompt poetic reflection about the triumph of the human spirit. Such expeditions also attract the scientific eye of psychologists, who are interested in studying what happens to the human psyche and social relationships under extreme conditions.

A new paper by Gloria Leon and her colleagues has gauged the psychological profile and experiences of two polar explorers - given the pseudonyms Bill (age 32) and Andrew (age 35) - who in 2009 became the first team from the USA to reach the North Pole without outside support. Starting out from Ward Hut Island in Canada, they reached their target in 55 days.

Personality profiles of the men prior to the challenge were largely as you might expect - they were both high-scorers in leadership and extraversion and low scorers on harm-avoidance. Andrew also scored low in conscientiousness, which may be unexpected given the preparation required for an expedition, and had a tendency to become highly engrossed in his own thoughts and surroundings.

The challenge itself was gruelling, with each man hauling a 300 pound sled. Temperatures ranged from minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit at the start to zero degrees Fahrenheit at the end. Both men lost significant amounts of weight. At one point, Bill fell through ice and was submerged up to his neck, only narrowly escaping hypothermia. The final leg of the trip was the most arduous as the duo fought to reach their destination before their helicopter arrived on Day 56 (it was to pick them up whether they'd reached their target or not). For the last 66 hours, the pair had just one hour of sleep for every 16 hours on the move. Throughout, the men filled out weekly questionnaires about their coping methods, their relationship, and mood. They were also interviewed a few weeks after their return and again six months later.

For the duration of the expedition both men scored high on positive mood and low on negative mood. They survived and succeeded by supporting each other and communicating effectively, and by adopting flexible coping strategies, including positive re-interpretation of challenges and use of relaxation and meditation. Their relationship hit a low point around day 40 when Andrew aired his grievances about planning for the trip, but they worked through this constructively. These observations contradict some earlier research suggesting that all-male groups suffer from excess competitiveness.

"We were basically one persona when it came to goal orientation," Bill said. "We had a high degree of self-care for each other and ourselves," he explained. Andrew said: "Anytime we expressed ourselves it brought us closer ... We talked more about recognising differences and embracing our similarities and we celebrated that it was really fun." Based on this, the researchers said it was important not to overgeneralise the effects of gender on group processes. "By focusing their interactions on supporting each other, competition between them was minimised or essentially eliminated," they said.

The men were affected somewhat differently by their adventure. Bill's changes were entirely positive: he felt more at peace spiritually and in his relations to other people. Andrew actually saw negative changes in his outlook, due largely to his personal circumstances on return, in terms of his work and relationships. "Seeing the same patterns emerge of the past which I did not want there anymore," was how he put it. However, both men experienced a greater sense of unity with nature and a reduction in their need for conventional achievement, in terms of social status and prestige.

Research of this kind is used to inform the training, selection and support of teams for challenging environments, including space exploration. To find out more, check out the features Psychology at the End of the World, about mind and behaviour in the Antarctic, and New Horizons, about the psychology of space travel, published in The Psychologist magazine in 2011 and 2008, respectively.
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Leon, G., Sandal, G., Fink, B., and Ciofani, P. (2011). Positive Experiences and Personal Growth in a Two-Man North Pole Expedition Team. Environment and Behavior, 43 (5), 710-731 DOI: 10.1177/0013916510375039

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

We underestimate the benefits of nature

Ottawa parkway and skyline

People underestimate the psychological benefits of spending time in nature. That's according to Elizabeth Nisbet and John Zelenski who say the consequence is that people spend less time outside in green spaces than they would do otherwise: this undermines their affiliation with the natural world and reduces the likelihood that they will care about the environment.

One hundred and fifty Carleton University students participated in what they thought was a study of "personality and impressions of the campus area". Carleton is located in Ottawa, with a green corridor that runs through the city located nearby. Half the students took a 17 minute walk - either along a canal path near the campus to an arboretum, or via underground tunnels used on campus for getting around. Afterwards they completed questionnaires about how they felt. The other students predicted how they would feel, either after the outdoor, nature-filled walk or after the tunnel walk, but they didn't actually take the walk. Both routes were equally familiar to all the students. The study was conducted on dry Autumn days with temperatures ranging from 2.5 to 14.6 degrees Celsius.

The key findings are that students felt more positive emotions after the natural walk than they did after the tunnel walk, but that those in the forecasting condition underestimated the positive benefits of a natural walk and overestimated the positive benefits of the tunnel walk. The students in the natural walk condition also reported feeling more connected to nature, an association that was mediated by their more positive emotions.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time the students who took the walks were the same ones who made predictions about how they'd feel afterwards. Also, different indoor and outdoor routes were used. Exactly the same findings were observed - students felt in a better mood after outdoor, natural walks and more connected with nature, yet they failed to anticipate the magnitude of these benefits.

"Together our results are consistent with the idea that, although people are innately drawn to nature, a general disconnection prevents them from fully anticipating nature's hedonic benefits," the researchers said. "When people forgo the happiness benefits of nearby nature, they also neglect their nature relatedness, a construct strongly associated with environmentally sustainable attitudes and behaviours." A weakness of their argument, as they acknowledge, is that there's no evidence yet that time spent in nature leads to long-term changes in one's affiliation with the natural world.

The findings come as the UK government is seeking to revise the country's planning laws to make it easier to build on green land. The results show the quandary faced by a small, densely populated island. Green, open spaces are vital to our psychological health, which argues in favour of strict planning laws. Yet such laws can lead to dense development with fewer pockets of urban greenery. We shouldn't underestimate the value of these green oases in urban environments. As Nisbet and Zelenski observe: "Our findings suggest that even natural spaces in urban settings can increase happiness; the grandeur of national parks is not required."
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Nisbet, E., and Zelenski, J. (2011). Underestimating Nearby Nature: Affective Forecasting Errors Obscure the Happy Path to Sustainability. Psychological Science, 22 (9), 1101-1106 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611418527

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Ecological footprint feedback can make some people less green

The benefit of ecological footprint questionnaires for the environmental movement seems obvious enough, especially since the vast majority of people say they care about the planet. For most Westerners, their results on such a questionnaire are sobering, informing them about the unsustainability of their lifestyles. And that, you'd think, would lead them to start behaving in more environmentally friendly ways. Trouble is, it's been shown that if changing their behaviour seems too difficult, many people change their attitudes instead, in this case ditching their pro-environmental beliefs (as a way to reduce what's known as 'cognitive dissonance', which is when there's a mismatch between our attitudes and behaviour).

Amara Brook has illuminated this dilemma further. She measured how important environmental issues were to the self-esteem of 212 undergrads. Then she had them complete an ecological footprint questionnaire to which they received false feedback - either positive or negative (ie they were told that they consumed fewer resources than most people, or far more resources than most people). Finally, they were given the opportunity to write a letter to their local politician, on any pro-social topic they liked.

For those students for whom the environment was not important to their self-esteem, receiving negative feedback on the ecological footprint questionnaire actually prompted them to be less likely to write to their politician about environmental issues (relative to the students who received positive feedback about their footprint). In other words, for people who aren't green minded, alarming feedback on a footprint questionnaire can actually make them less sympathetic to green causes. For students whose self-esteem was tied to the environment, negative feedback on the footprint questionnaire had the effect you'd expect, prompting them to be more likely to write to their politician about environmental issues.

'Ecological and carbon footprints are in widespread use, but the present study suggests that they may fail to promote or even reduce sustainable behaviour for some people,' Brook wrote. 'Understanding how to modify footprint feedback to more effectively motivate sustainable behaviour is urgently needed.'

One strategy that might help is to provide practical information alongside footprint feedback, outlining ways to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle, thus encouraging people to respond to negative feedback by changing their behaviour, rather than abandoning their green sympathies. Or perhaps, Brook said, 'the ecological footprint should be targeted to people who are already invested in environmentalism, such as members of environmental groups, and should be used with caution, if at all, with the broader population.'
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Brook, A. (2011). Ecological footprint feedback: Motivating or discouraging? Social Influence, 6 (2), 113-128 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2011.566801

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

Why you should fill your rooms with rounded, curvy furniture

The principle of Feng shui - to arrange rooms and buildings in ways that are pleasing and health-giving - has popular appeal. Unfortunately, Feng shui's scientific credentials are lacking, being based as it is on the ancient Chinese concept of Ch'i or life-force. The good news is that psychologically informed, evidence-based design is on the increase. Consider this new study by Sibel Dazkir and Marilyn Read, which has compared the effects of curvilinear (rounded) and rectilinear (straight-edged) furniture on people's emotions.

Over one-hundred undergrad participants viewed four computer-generated room interiors via an online survey, and provided ratings about how each one made them feel in terms of pleasure (e.g. how happy, hopeful) and approach (how much time they'd like to spend in the room; how sociable the room made them feel). Two of the rooms contained curvy, rounded furniture arranged in two different ways, whilst in the other two rooms all the furniture had straight edges and sharp angles, arranged in the same two different formations. To control for other influences, the rooms were in grey-scale and devoid of any patterned decor or artwork.

Overall, the students rated the rooms negatively because they found them boring - no surprise given their simplistic form and lack of colour. Crucially, however, the two room versions full of curvilinear furniture provoked significantly higher pleasure and approach ratings from the students. In open-ended questions afterwards the students made comments like 'I like the rounded shapes. They make the furniture look comfortable and inviting.' Another said: 'The rounded furniture seems to give off that calming feel.'

Obviously this is just a preliminary result - future research needs to test cross-cultural samples, check whether the effects apply when people actually enter rooms furnished in these different ways, and check whether or not influences of colour and patterns drown out the effects of furniture shape. It's also worth considering whether rectilinear-themed rooms may have their own benefits for purposes other than relaxing and socialising. In the meantime, the researchers said their results 'can guide designers to design more welcoming and pleasant environments with the use of curvilinear lines in their designs.'
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Dazkir, S. and Read, M. (2011). Furniture Forms and Their Influence on Our Emotional Responses Toward Interior Environments. Environment and Behavior DOI: 10.1177/0013916511402063. Image is taken from the paper. 

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

Classroom lighting could be harming pupils' performance

Lighting conditions in UK classrooms could be needlessly harming children's school performance, psychologists have claimed. Mark Winterbottom and Arnold Wilkins assessed 90 classrooms in 11 secondary schools across the UK during the Summer of 2006.

Past research has shown that fluorescent lights that flicker imperceptibly at a rate of 100Hz are harmful to mental performance. They're easily replaced by more efficient and less harmful lights, yet Winterbottom and Wilkins found 20 per cent of classrooms were lit solely by the harmful variety. In the remaining classrooms, an average of 90 per cent of lighting was of the harmful variety.

Excess or inadequate luminance is another problem in classrooms, usually caused by a lack of control over lighting in different areas of a room. The researchers found that luminance exceeded recommended levels in 88 per cent of the classrooms they investigated. More fine-tuned light control and more use and servicing of blinds could easily ameliorate these issues.

Another lighting problem, brought about since the introduction of data projectors into classrooms, is glare reflecting off the projection screen into pupils' eyes. The researchers found that all bar one of the classrooms they studied had equipment arranged in such a way as to exacerbate this problem, with projectors on the ceiling and screens mounted vertically. The situation can be improved by tilting the screen upwards slightly, so that the glare is directed towards the ceiling.

"Most of these problems are unnecessary and appear due to poor policy decisions," Winterbottom and Wilkins concluded. "In most cases, action to correct the problems would be simple, and any costs would be offset in the medium term, due to increased efficiency, reduction of wastage, and benefits in terms of health of pupils and staff."
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Winterbottom, M., & Wilkins, A. (2009). Lighting and discomfort in the classroom. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29 (1), 63-75 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2008.11.007

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

When thoughts of death turn to environmentalism

Reminding people of their own mortality can either turn them off environmentalism or reinforce their commitment to it, depending on how important the cause was to them in the first place. That's according to Matthew Vess and Jamie Arndt who asked 57 students to think about what will happen when they die, or to imagine physical pain (this served as a non-morbid control condition).

After completing an irrelevant distraction task, the students next read an article about a lawsuit concerning a city council's decision to prohibit development on parkland. Finally, the students gave their opinions on the lawsuit and chose further pro- or anti-environment articles to read.

Students who said being an environmentalist was unimportant to their self-esteem, and who'd earlier thought about their own death, subsequently showed less environmental concern in response to the development article than did non-environmentalists who had earlier thought about physical pain. This is consistent with previous work showing that thoughts of death lead people to reject their earthly origins (for example, one study showed that people reminded of their mortality subsequently rated a wilderness scene less favourably and a cityscape more favourably).

By contrast, students who said environmentalism was important to their self-esteem, and who'd earlier thought about their own death, subsequently showed far greater environmental concern than environmentalist students who'd earlier thought about physical pain.

"It appears that certain people derive existentially important feelings of self-esteem from pro-environmental behaviour and thus respond to concerns about mortality with increased concern for the well-being of the natural world," the researchers said. "These self-esteem investments can thus transform the protection of the natural world into an existentially relevant behaviour which can similarly function to mitigate concerns with our vulnerability to death."
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M VESS, J ARNDT (2008). The nature of death and the death of nature: The impact of mortality salience on environmental concern Journal of Research in Personality, 42 (5), 1376-1380 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2008.04.007

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

Finally, a clear guide to the most effective actions you can take to curb climate change

In America, a whopping 38 per cent of energy is consumed by private households - far more than is consumed by the entire industrial sector. Now, in a new article for Environment magazine, a pair of US-based psychologists have published a list of the most effective ways for households to reduce their energy consumption.

Gerald Gardner and Paul Stern argue that most (American) people believe in the idea that human activity is responsible for climate change, and most people are motivated to reduce their energy use. But they say that thanks to a lack of clear information on the most effective ways to reduce energy consumption, many people engage exclusively in activities, such as turning off lights, or turning down the thermostat, that while highly visible, are actually relatively ineffective.

Part of the problem is that many campaigns strive to increase people's motivation, without giving adequate information on what behaviours to change. High profile publications like "The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook" have tended to produce checklists of green behaviours without giving any indication of which steps will have the most impact.

In general, Gardner and Stern say that curtailing certain activities - the idea that we must make sacrifices to save the planet - is generally ineffective. By contrast, taking active steps to become more energy efficient will lead to much larger reductions in energy use.

"...efficiency-improving actions generally save more energy — and reduce carbon emissions more — than curtailing use of intrinsically inefficient equipment. For example, buying and maintaining a highly fuel-efficient vehicle saves more energy than carpooling to work with another person, lowering top highway speeds, consolidating shopping or errand trips, and altering driving habits in an existing gasoline-inefficient motor vehicle. This general finding challenges the belief that energy savings entail curtailment and sacrifice of amenities. Not only is efficiency generally more effective than curtailment, but it has the important psychological advantage of requiring only one or a few actions. Curtailment actions must be repeated continuously over time to achieve their optimal effect, whereas efficiency-boosting actions, taken infrequently or only once, have lasting effects with little need for continuing attention and effort."

With rising fuel prices and the credit crunch, the publication of this article is certainly timely. It also seems that the U.K. government may be on the right tack, seeing as they've announced today a scheme to fund half the cost of insulation for all households.

Gardner and Stern's list is broken down into separate categories, taking into account that while costly actions might be more effective, there is also a need for people to know the relative effectiveness of cost-free or low cost actions.

• For individuals/households, the most effective low cost/short-term green behaviour in relation to transportation is to share car journeys or "carpool"; in relation to the home, it's to replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.
  
• For longer-term benefits, with a higher financial cost, the most effective action in relation to transport is to buy low-rolling resistance tyres. The next most effective action is to buy a more fuel-efficient car. The latter action is complicated by the issue of whether one's current car is still useable. If it is, then the energy cost of producing the new car counts against any gains.
  
• Finally, for home-owners (as opposed to tenants who can't really do these things), the most effective low-cost/short-term action is to weather strip the house, while the most effective, but more costly, longer-term action is to buy a more efficient heating system.

For the full list of 17 actions, see the original article. By some estimates, if people complete the whole list, they'll cut their energy use by a half.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link to full text (open access) of article: "The Short List: The Most Effective Actions U.S. Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change".
Link to the Energy Saving Trust, a UK-based organisation who provide advice on saving energy.

Nature on plasma TV not as beneficial as through a window

Nature, the outdoors, animals and fresh air: they're good for you. Don't take my word for it. Science says so. Hospital patients, for example, recover faster when their window looks out on a natural scene rather than a brick wall. Pet owners have lower blood pressure.

The trouble is we're showing a worrying trend towards not only harming our natural world, but also experiencing what's left of it through the prism of manufactured technologies: Telegardens (planting seeds in a remote garden using a robotic interface), virtual walks and robot-pets are the future. Does this matter? As a first step towards finding out, Peter Kahn Jr. and colleagues compared the restorative effects of a real window to the benefits of a giant plasma screen linked to a live, high-definition camera recording of the exact same view visible through the window.

Ninety students undertook a series of tasks including coming up with uses for a tin can and clever labels for ambiguous drawings. Heart rate was used to measure stress recovery during the rest periods between tasks, when a researcher gave instructions for the upcoming challenge.

Some of the students completed the tasks at a desk opposite a window with views toward a pleasant natural scene beyond; others sat opposite a similarly-sized "plasma window" showing the identical scene, with the real window concealed behind; the remainder sat in the same position but with drapes entirely obscuring the real window.

In terms of heart rate recovery, students who were sat opposite the plasma window showed no benefit at all relative to the students who performed with drapes covering the window. By contrast, the heart rate of the students sat opposite the real window recovered more quickly, consistent with past research showing the calming benefits of a natural scene.

It's unlikely the results are simply an effect of daylight in the room. Recovery among the students sat opposite the real window was no faster on brighter versus duller days. However, time spent looking out of the real window was correlated with speedier stress recovery.

So why didn't nature as displayed on the plasma window have any benefit? There are potential technical reasons to do with the limitations of the digital display, including issues of parallax, pixilation and 2-D depth perception. However the researchers think the reason is more likely to do with the participants knowing that the plasma view simply wasn't as "real".

"Our results, even at this early stage, provide some cautionary thoughts," the researchers said.
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KAHNJR, P., FRIEDMAN, B., GILL, B., HAGMAN, J., SEVERSON, R., FREIER, N., FELDMAN, E., CARRERE, S., STOLYAR, A. (2008). A plasma display window?—The shifting baseline problem in a technologically mediated natural world. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 28(2), 192-199. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2007.10.008

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

Don't ditch your paper maps just yet

You might think that hand-held global positioning systems (GPS), which can provide a live update of your location and surroundings, would make the benefit of a paper map redundant. But in a new study, Toru Ishikawa and colleagues have shown that people using a GPS device make more errors and take longer reaching their destination than people using an old-fashioned map.

Sixty-six participants on foot attempted to find their way to six locations in an urban environment. The routes were relatively short (between 157 and 325 yards) and each involved three turns. Twenty-two participants used a mobile phone with a GPS capability, 23 used an A4-sized map, and the remainder were taken along the routes by a researcher, before having to find their way on their own.

Not only did the GPS participants make more stops, walk further and more slowly than the map users, they also demonstrated less knowledge of the routes when asked to sketch a map of them afterwards. The most proficient participants were those who'd been shown the routes by the researchers - they arrived at their destinations faster and stopped fewer times than both the GPS and map users.

So why was the use of GPS inferior to using a paper map? The researchers said part of the explanation might be a lack of familiarity with the technology. Also, unlike the paper map, the size of the GPS screen meant it wasn't always possible to see one's own location and the destination at the same time. Finally, using GPS, which constantly updates itself, encourages people to stare down at the screen, rather than looking around at their environment. "We believe that for the development of effective navigational aids, continued empirical research on these issues is needed," the researchers said.
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ISHIKAWA, T. (2008). Wayfinding with a GPS-based mobile navigation system: A comparison with maps and direct experience. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 28(1), 74-82. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2007.09.002

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