The Dutch are renowned for their tolerance but racial tensions have been running high in the Netherlands, fuelled last year by the murder of film maker Theo Van Gogh, not long after the release of his controversial film about the abuse of Muslim women.
Now Maykel Verkuyten at Utrecht University has investigated the kind of language and arguments used by Dutch people when they talk about immigration. Seventy-one native Dutch participants (aged 22 to 71 years), most of them middle class, were interviewed.
Some participants talked of people choosing to come to the Netherlands by their own free will (e.g. “…nobody made them come to Holland…”), whereas other participants argued immigrants had no option, either because they had fled persecution or because they had been actively recruited by the Dutch authorities (e.g. “…we brought them over here…so we’ve got ourselves to blame”). Participants tended to adopt one view or the other regardless of whether they were talking about persecuted refugees, or migrant workers seeking employment. And each person’s take on the free-will issue tended to predict how they viewed multiculturalism. Those emphasising immigrants’ ‘choice’ argued immigrants should therefore respect Dutch culture. In contrast, those participants who saw immigrants as having had no choice tended to defend the immigrants’ cultural rights, arguing there was actually an onus on the Dutch to respect the immigrants’ culture.
Next Verkuyten presented 76 native Dutch students with a short factual account of Dutch immigration, ostensibly taken from the American National Encyclopaedia. The accounts were manipulated so that some students read an account emphasising the immigrants’ choice, whereas others read an account emphasising their lack of choice (e.g. either their flight from persecution or their recruitment by the Dutch authorities). Those students who read an account emphasising lack of choice were more likely to endorse multiculturalism in a subsequent questionnaire.
“This suggests that distinctions made in the media, in policies, and by politicians, between, for example, ‘real refugees’ and ‘fortune seekers’ can have important implications for intergroup relations in culturally plural societies”, Verkuyten said.
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Verkuyten, M. (2005). Immigration discourses and their impact on multiculturalism: a discursive and experimental study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 223-241.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Monday, 30 May 2005
Sunday, 15 May 2005
Does sexual abuse leave intellectual as well as emotional scars?
There’s evidence that on top of their emotional and psychological suffering, victims of child sex abuse also experience learning and memory problems. But the evidence is inconsistent, and some studies comparing abused children with unharmed children have failed to take into account the possible role played by differences in the social class and wealth of the children’s families (i.e. their ‘socioeconomic status’). To investigate further, Corinna Porter (Brigham Young University, Utah) and her team recruited 24 children (19 girls; average age 10 years) who had suffered repeated sexual abuse, mostly perpetrated by an elder brother, and compared their intellectual functioning with an age- and gender-matched group of unharmed children.
Not surprisingly, the abused children all exhibited signs of emotional and behavioural problems, including depression and anxiety, whereas the unharmed children did not. In fact, all the abused children were undergoing therapy for their problems. However, after controlling for socioeconomic status and IQ, there was no difference between the groups in terms of their learning and memory performance (as measured by TOMAL, see http://tinyurl.com/dvmoe).
“…having children under therapeutic management may reduce the deleterious effects of sexual abuse on memory and intellectual functioning”, the researchers concluded. They also noted that work in this area is impeded by the lack of a standardised measure of the severity of child sexual abuse – perhaps it is differences in severity of abuse that explains the inconsistent findings between studies. They also highlighted their lack of brain imaging data (previous studies have reported structural brain abnormalities in abused children) and the fact they didn’t investigate the children’s ability to concentrate on the task at hand, or to switch easily between tasks (i.e. executive functioning).
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Porter, C., Lawson, J.S. & Bigler, E.D. (2005). Neurobehavioural sequelae of child sexual abuse. Child Neuropsychology, 11, 203-220.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Not surprisingly, the abused children all exhibited signs of emotional and behavioural problems, including depression and anxiety, whereas the unharmed children did not. In fact, all the abused children were undergoing therapy for their problems. However, after controlling for socioeconomic status and IQ, there was no difference between the groups in terms of their learning and memory performance (as measured by TOMAL, see http://tinyurl.com/dvmoe).
“…having children under therapeutic management may reduce the deleterious effects of sexual abuse on memory and intellectual functioning”, the researchers concluded. They also noted that work in this area is impeded by the lack of a standardised measure of the severity of child sexual abuse – perhaps it is differences in severity of abuse that explains the inconsistent findings between studies. They also highlighted their lack of brain imaging data (previous studies have reported structural brain abnormalities in abused children) and the fact they didn’t investigate the children’s ability to concentrate on the task at hand, or to switch easily between tasks (i.e. executive functioning).
__________________________________
Porter, C., Lawson, J.S. & Bigler, E.D. (2005). Neurobehavioural sequelae of child sexual abuse. Child Neuropsychology, 11, 203-220.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Is your time always running out?
Psychologists have shown that people tend to underestimate how long things will take them, both in their personal and business lives. But most research into ‘the planning fallacy’, as it’s known, has been with individuals. Now psychologists in Canada have shown that when working in a group, we’re even more unrealistically optimistic about how quickly we can get things done.
In two studies, Roger Buehler at Wilfrid Laurier University and his colleagues followed hundreds of business students as they undertook lengthy group projects. They asked the students to estimate individually how long the different project stages would take, and they also asked them to make a group estimate once they had discussed the projects together. Their estimates were compared with how long the work actually took. In a third study, hundreds of participants estimated individually, and in groups, how long a group puzzle task would take them. As a guide, they were even told how long the task had taken other groups. Findings from all three studies pointed to the same conclusion – in groups we become even more unrealistically optimistic about how long things will take us.
Why might this happen? From notes they were asked to make afterwards, it was found that when participants made time estimates in a group, they tended to think more positively, focusing on things like their skill at the task, or the apparent ability of their team-mates. It’s also possible that in groups people might want to be seen to be positive by their team mates, thus encouraging them to make more optimistic estimates.
“These findings may be applicable to many collaborative work ventures” the authors said. “…Forecasters may well be advised to collect and aggregate individual forecasts, instead of engaging in group discussion”.
__________________________________
Buehler, R., Messervey, D. & Griffin, D. (2005). Collaborative planning and prediction: does group discussion affect optimistic biases in time estimation. Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 97, 47-63.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
In two studies, Roger Buehler at Wilfrid Laurier University and his colleagues followed hundreds of business students as they undertook lengthy group projects. They asked the students to estimate individually how long the different project stages would take, and they also asked them to make a group estimate once they had discussed the projects together. Their estimates were compared with how long the work actually took. In a third study, hundreds of participants estimated individually, and in groups, how long a group puzzle task would take them. As a guide, they were even told how long the task had taken other groups. Findings from all three studies pointed to the same conclusion – in groups we become even more unrealistically optimistic about how long things will take us.
Why might this happen? From notes they were asked to make afterwards, it was found that when participants made time estimates in a group, they tended to think more positively, focusing on things like their skill at the task, or the apparent ability of their team-mates. It’s also possible that in groups people might want to be seen to be positive by their team mates, thus encouraging them to make more optimistic estimates.
“These findings may be applicable to many collaborative work ventures” the authors said. “…Forecasters may well be advised to collect and aggregate individual forecasts, instead of engaging in group discussion”.
__________________________________
Buehler, R., Messervey, D. & Griffin, D. (2005). Collaborative planning and prediction: does group discussion affect optimistic biases in time estimation. Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 97, 47-63.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Testing mediums
Can mediums really speak with the dead? Scientists have been testing mediums since the nineteenth century, but according to Ciaran O’Keeffe and Richard Wiseman, their experiments have always suffered from serious methodological flaws that might allow the mediums to pick up information about their ‘sitters’ (the person the reading is for) via more earthly means, like the clothes they wear.
O’Keeffe and Wiseman asked five mediums to give 60-minute readings for five volunteer sitters, so there were 25 readings in all. The mediums and sitters never met and were placed in separate rooms. The sitters never actually heard their readings which were recorded and transcribed.
Afterwards, the sitters read through all the statements taken from all 25 readings, and they indicated how much each statement was appropriate to them. They had no way of knowing which statements came from their readings and which were taken from the other participants’ readings. The readings couldn’t be identified by any references to the day of the week either because all the sitters received one reading a day for five days.
If the mediums’ powers were genuine, the participants should have rated the statements from their own readings as more appropriate to them than the other statements. But in fact, with only one exception, statements from a given reading tended to be rated as less appropriate by the person for whom they were actually intended, than by the other participants. And among the statements, there were those that were rated highly, regardless of who they were intended for – these tended to be general (e.g. “Yes, a relative. Is it a man?”), and it’s thought such statements could make readings seem convincing. It’s known, for example, that there are statements (e.g. “I have scar on my left knee”) that appear highly specific but which the majority of people actually agree with.
“The present study found no evidence to support the notion that the professional mediums involved in the research were, under controlled conditions, able to demonstrate paranormal or mediumistic ability”, the authors said.
__________________________________
O’Keeffe, C. & Wiseman, R. (2005). Testing alleged mediumship: methods and results. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 215-231.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
O’Keeffe and Wiseman asked five mediums to give 60-minute readings for five volunteer sitters, so there were 25 readings in all. The mediums and sitters never met and were placed in separate rooms. The sitters never actually heard their readings which were recorded and transcribed.
Afterwards, the sitters read through all the statements taken from all 25 readings, and they indicated how much each statement was appropriate to them. They had no way of knowing which statements came from their readings and which were taken from the other participants’ readings. The readings couldn’t be identified by any references to the day of the week either because all the sitters received one reading a day for five days.
If the mediums’ powers were genuine, the participants should have rated the statements from their own readings as more appropriate to them than the other statements. But in fact, with only one exception, statements from a given reading tended to be rated as less appropriate by the person for whom they were actually intended, than by the other participants. And among the statements, there were those that were rated highly, regardless of who they were intended for – these tended to be general (e.g. “Yes, a relative. Is it a man?”), and it’s thought such statements could make readings seem convincing. It’s known, for example, that there are statements (e.g. “I have scar on my left knee”) that appear highly specific but which the majority of people actually agree with.
“The present study found no evidence to support the notion that the professional mediums involved in the research were, under controlled conditions, able to demonstrate paranormal or mediumistic ability”, the authors said.
__________________________________
O’Keeffe, C. & Wiseman, R. (2005). Testing alleged mediumship: methods and results. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 215-231.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Are you thinking what I say you're thinking?
The idea that your brain contains information that ‘you’ cannot access is, of course, not new – Freud wrote about that years ago; and neither is it an unfamiliar phenomenon in our everyday lives – how often do we struggle to find a word that we know is in there somewhere? But what is new, is the demonstration by scientists that they can use a scan to read off information from your brain that you are unable to access yourself.
Using functional imaging, John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees at University College London first showed that some parts of the brain involved in early visual processing are activated more than others, depending on the particular angular orientation (e.g. / or \ ) of the visual pattern being looked at. That some brain cells are organised according to sensitivity to different orientations is well-known from the direct recording of individual neurons in monkeys, but this is the first time it has been shown in humans using brain scanning.
Next, Haynes and Rees presented participants with ‘invisible’ visual patterns. The patterns were invisible because they were presented so briefly, and because each one was followed by a visual mask – a second stimulus that interferes with processing of the first. This meant that when asked, a participant couldn’t say what orientation a pattern had – they could only guess. But although a pattern was invisible to a participant, its orientation still left a signature trace of activity in their brain. This meant the researchers could discern the orientation of the pattern by observing the distribution of activity in the participant’s brain (in their early visual cortex, called ‘V1’). So the researchers could read information in a participant’s brain that was inaccessible to the participant herself. “Human V1 can represent information about the orientation of visual stimuli that cannot be used by participants to make a simple behavioural discrimination”, the authors concluded.
___________________________________
Haynes, J-D. & Rees, G. (2005). Predicting the orientation of invisible stimuli from activity in human primary visual cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 686-691.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Using functional imaging, John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees at University College London first showed that some parts of the brain involved in early visual processing are activated more than others, depending on the particular angular orientation (e.g. / or \ ) of the visual pattern being looked at. That some brain cells are organised according to sensitivity to different orientations is well-known from the direct recording of individual neurons in monkeys, but this is the first time it has been shown in humans using brain scanning.
Next, Haynes and Rees presented participants with ‘invisible’ visual patterns. The patterns were invisible because they were presented so briefly, and because each one was followed by a visual mask – a second stimulus that interferes with processing of the first. This meant that when asked, a participant couldn’t say what orientation a pattern had – they could only guess. But although a pattern was invisible to a participant, its orientation still left a signature trace of activity in their brain. This meant the researchers could discern the orientation of the pattern by observing the distribution of activity in the participant’s brain (in their early visual cortex, called ‘V1’). So the researchers could read information in a participant’s brain that was inaccessible to the participant herself. “Human V1 can represent information about the orientation of visual stimuli that cannot be used by participants to make a simple behavioural discrimination”, the authors concluded.
___________________________________
Haynes, J-D. & Rees, G. (2005). Predicting the orientation of invisible stimuli from activity in human primary visual cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 686-691.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Video therapy
It’s not easy for people living on Scotland’s remote islands to find specialist psychological help. Susan Simpson and colleagues at Aberdeen’s Eating Disorders Service investigated the plausibility of using videoconferencing to deliver specialist therapy to six bulimia sufferers who lived in the Shetlands and the remote north east of Scotland. The technology allowed the clients to use a video link at their local clinic to see and talk to a therapist located hundreds of miles away in Aberdeen.
A concern with therapy via videoconferencing is that compared with meeting face to face, it might not be possible to build up the trust and rapport between client and therapist that is known to be so vital to successful therapy. But using a questionnaire-based measure of ‘therapeutic alliance’, Simpson and her team found their six clients had no trouble establishing a successful, rewarding relationship with their therapist via weekly videoconferencing. In fact, three of the clients said they would prefer video therapy to traditional therapy. Two clients had no preference and one said she would prefer face-to-face therapy because it would be more personal and private. By the end of the video therapy, three of the clients had recovered to the extent that they were no longer diagnosed with bulimia.
Interviewed afterwards, the participants said the video therapy was less intimidating than meeting a therapist face-to-face, and gave them a greater sense of control – after all, they could always turn the monitor off! The authors speculated video therapy might, therefore, be particularly beneficial to people with ‘shame-based’ difficulties such as eating disorders.
It wasn’t all positive: several of the local clinics had technical difficulties with the videoconferencing equipment. Also, the lack of soundproof rooms meant the clients sometimes feared other people might overhear their therapy sessions.
“Although the current sample is too small to draw any general conclusions, these initial findings suggest that video therapy leads to improvement in bulimic symptoms for some clients, and may be an acceptable means of treatment delivery for this client group”, the authors said.
___________________________________
Simpson, S., Bell, L., Knox, J. & Mitchell, D. (2005). Therapy via videoconferencing: a route to client empowerment. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 12, 156-165.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
A concern with therapy via videoconferencing is that compared with meeting face to face, it might not be possible to build up the trust and rapport between client and therapist that is known to be so vital to successful therapy. But using a questionnaire-based measure of ‘therapeutic alliance’, Simpson and her team found their six clients had no trouble establishing a successful, rewarding relationship with their therapist via weekly videoconferencing. In fact, three of the clients said they would prefer video therapy to traditional therapy. Two clients had no preference and one said she would prefer face-to-face therapy because it would be more personal and private. By the end of the video therapy, three of the clients had recovered to the extent that they were no longer diagnosed with bulimia.
Interviewed afterwards, the participants said the video therapy was less intimidating than meeting a therapist face-to-face, and gave them a greater sense of control – after all, they could always turn the monitor off! The authors speculated video therapy might, therefore, be particularly beneficial to people with ‘shame-based’ difficulties such as eating disorders.
It wasn’t all positive: several of the local clinics had technical difficulties with the videoconferencing equipment. Also, the lack of soundproof rooms meant the clients sometimes feared other people might overhear their therapy sessions.
“Although the current sample is too small to draw any general conclusions, these initial findings suggest that video therapy leads to improvement in bulimic symptoms for some clients, and may be an acceptable means of treatment delivery for this client group”, the authors said.
___________________________________
Simpson, S., Bell, L., Knox, J. & Mitchell, D. (2005). Therapy via videoconferencing: a route to client empowerment. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 12, 156-165.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Keep your eyes off the road
Harming innocent bystanders when racing to answer an emergency call is every police driver’s worst nightmare. Sadly such incidents, though rare, are on the increase. David Crundall and colleagues at the University of Nottingham investigated the suggestion that when they’re driving at speed, police drivers focus too much on the road ahead, neglecting to look out adequately for hazards all around them.
A group of trained police drivers and civilian drivers watched a series of 60-second video clips showing a normal drive, a police chase, and a police emergency call, all from the driver’s perspective. They had to continuously rate the level of hazard, as they judged it, using a sliding scale. Meanwhile the researchers monitored their eye movements to see where they were looking.
During the emergency call clips, the police and civilian drivers focused far more on the road directly ahead (at the ‘point of expansion’) than they did during the normal drive clips. “This is understandable in terms of the driver trying to obtain as much preview of their current course as possible, though the inevitable reduced attention to peripheral sources of hazards may be a cause for concern”, the researchers said.
During the chase clips, the civilian drivers who were more experienced tended to overly focus on the fleeing car, rather than all around. In contrast, and probably a sign of their training, this was far less the case for the police drivers who continued to look out for other potential hazards, like pedestrians. However, they did neglect to look at side roads as much as they did during the normal drive. The less experienced civilian drivers also focused less on the target car, but they spent the rest of the time looking at things like road markings rather than potential hazards.
“…it is hoped these data will help to form a foundation from which we can begin to understand the visual skills that are required for safe police driving”, the researchers concluded.
_________________________________
Crundall, D., Chapman, P., France, E., Underwood, G. & Phelps, N. (2005). What attracts attention during police pursuit driving? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 409-420.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
A group of trained police drivers and civilian drivers watched a series of 60-second video clips showing a normal drive, a police chase, and a police emergency call, all from the driver’s perspective. They had to continuously rate the level of hazard, as they judged it, using a sliding scale. Meanwhile the researchers monitored their eye movements to see where they were looking.
During the emergency call clips, the police and civilian drivers focused far more on the road directly ahead (at the ‘point of expansion’) than they did during the normal drive clips. “This is understandable in terms of the driver trying to obtain as much preview of their current course as possible, though the inevitable reduced attention to peripheral sources of hazards may be a cause for concern”, the researchers said.
During the chase clips, the civilian drivers who were more experienced tended to overly focus on the fleeing car, rather than all around. In contrast, and probably a sign of their training, this was far less the case for the police drivers who continued to look out for other potential hazards, like pedestrians. However, they did neglect to look at side roads as much as they did during the normal drive. The less experienced civilian drivers also focused less on the target car, but they spent the rest of the time looking at things like road markings rather than potential hazards.
“…it is hoped these data will help to form a foundation from which we can begin to understand the visual skills that are required for safe police driving”, the researchers concluded.
_________________________________
Crundall, D., Chapman, P., France, E., Underwood, G. & Phelps, N. (2005). What attracts attention during police pursuit driving? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 409-420.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Thursday, 12 May 2005
On marriage
Contributed by Leah Reynolds and Mandi Foote at Totton College.
Will your marriage turn out like your parents' marriage?
To find out, Jay Teachman looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth and looked for childhood factors that predicted the kind of marriage people had once they were grown up.
Teachman only took data for the female participants and focused on characteristics of their mothers' marriages, for example the age at which they married, and the level of education they had reached when they got married.
A main finding was that if parents married as teenagers, then there was a higher chance that they would divorce, and therefore there was a lower chance of success in their children's own marriage.
"Respondents who grew up with only their mothers had the lowest education at marriage, married husbands with the least education, and were most likely to have premarital birth," said Teachman. So if your parents have a good marriage then the chances are you will too. However if your parents' marriage is not as strong, you will have to work at changing the future so that you don't turn out like your parents.
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Teachman, J.D. (2004). The childhood living arrangements of children and the characteristics of their marriages. Journal of Family Issues, 25, 86-111.
Will your marriage turn out like your parents' marriage?
To find out, Jay Teachman looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth and looked for childhood factors that predicted the kind of marriage people had once they were grown up.
Teachman only took data for the female participants and focused on characteristics of their mothers' marriages, for example the age at which they married, and the level of education they had reached when they got married.
A main finding was that if parents married as teenagers, then there was a higher chance that they would divorce, and therefore there was a lower chance of success in their children's own marriage.
"Respondents who grew up with only their mothers had the lowest education at marriage, married husbands with the least education, and were most likely to have premarital birth," said Teachman. So if your parents have a good marriage then the chances are you will too. However if your parents' marriage is not as strong, you will have to work at changing the future so that you don't turn out like your parents.
__________________________________
Teachman, J.D. (2004). The childhood living arrangements of children and the characteristics of their marriages. Journal of Family Issues, 25, 86-111.
Friday, 6 May 2005
Political candidates - how do you choose yours?
How do we judge political candidates? By how closely their political views match our own, or by characteristics such as their integrity and conscientiousness?
Jeffery Mondak and Robert Huckfeldt at Florida State University and the University of California first showed that hundreds of students were able to decide whether they supported a fictional candidate just as quickly based on single-word descriptions such as "hardworking", and "trustworthy", as they were based on single-word descriptions of the candidates' political affiliation (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican). "Character is at least as accessible in candidate evaluation as are partisanship and ideology...perhaps slightly more so", the researchers said.
But what happens when information is available on a candidate's character and their political stance?
Mondak and Huckfeldt asked students to reveal their own political allegiances and then to evaluate fictional candidates based on information about some or all of the following information: their party, their own political slant within that party (e.g. left or right wing), and their character.
Contrary to their expectations, the researchers found that character information is not something we fall back on when we are lacking information about a candidate's politics. Rather, information on character plays a greater role when we also know, for example, that a candidate shares our own political views. "When character cues are provided, it is the information rich who get richer", the researchers said. "Competence and integrity matter the most for those respondents who are best positioned to evaluate candidates without taking character information into account".
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Mondak, J.J. & Huckfeldt, R. (2005). The accessibility and utility of candidate character in electoral decision making. Electoral Studies, in press.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Jeffery Mondak and Robert Huckfeldt at Florida State University and the University of California first showed that hundreds of students were able to decide whether they supported a fictional candidate just as quickly based on single-word descriptions such as "hardworking", and "trustworthy", as they were based on single-word descriptions of the candidates' political affiliation (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican). "Character is at least as accessible in candidate evaluation as are partisanship and ideology...perhaps slightly more so", the researchers said.
But what happens when information is available on a candidate's character and their political stance?
Mondak and Huckfeldt asked students to reveal their own political allegiances and then to evaluate fictional candidates based on information about some or all of the following information: their party, their own political slant within that party (e.g. left or right wing), and their character.
Contrary to their expectations, the researchers found that character information is not something we fall back on when we are lacking information about a candidate's politics. Rather, information on character plays a greater role when we also know, for example, that a candidate shares our own political views. "When character cues are provided, it is the information rich who get richer", the researchers said. "Competence and integrity matter the most for those respondents who are best positioned to evaluate candidates without taking character information into account".
__________________________________
Mondak, J.J. & Huckfeldt, R. (2005). The accessibility and utility of candidate character in electoral decision making. Electoral Studies, in press.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
'Informed' people more likely to vote
We're finding it harder than ever to drag ourselves to the polling station. Just 59 per cent of us bothered in the 2001 general election, compared with levels near 80 per cent postwar. Now a study from Copenhagen suggests a key factor affecting our decision to vote is whether we've formed a political opinion based on our own experiences.
In 1996, Copenhagen was divided into 15 districts, and in just four of these, local administration was introduced for a trial period, responsible for things like primary schools and care for the elderly. Four years' later, all the city's residents voted on whether to spread the local administration system city-wide, or to scrap it.
Afterwards, researchers surveyed 2,026 people across the city on whether they had voted, and crucially, on what they thought of the city's 'decentralised administration' trial. If they said it went well, okay, or bad, they were classified as 'informed', whereas those with no opinion were classified as 'uninformed'.
David Lassen at the University of Copenhagen found that regardless of their interest in politics per se, more people living in the four city districts that trialled the local administration voted, and this was because more of them were 'informed' - that is they had an opinion on the issue.
This is an important finding because past research showing better informed people are more likely to vote has been undermined by the possibility that some other factor, for example wealth, affects both how informed a person is and their propensity to vote. In this study, by contrast, people were more informed because of where they lived - not because they were rich or because of some other personal characteristic - and being informed in this way was shown to increase the likelihood they would vote, regardless of their wealth, education or even how interested they were in politics.
_________________________________
Lassen, D.D. (2005). The effect of information on voter turnout: evidence from a natural experiment. American Journal of Political Science, 49, 103-118.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
In 1996, Copenhagen was divided into 15 districts, and in just four of these, local administration was introduced for a trial period, responsible for things like primary schools and care for the elderly. Four years' later, all the city's residents voted on whether to spread the local administration system city-wide, or to scrap it.
Afterwards, researchers surveyed 2,026 people across the city on whether they had voted, and crucially, on what they thought of the city's 'decentralised administration' trial. If they said it went well, okay, or bad, they were classified as 'informed', whereas those with no opinion were classified as 'uninformed'.
David Lassen at the University of Copenhagen found that regardless of their interest in politics per se, more people living in the four city districts that trialled the local administration voted, and this was because more of them were 'informed' - that is they had an opinion on the issue.
This is an important finding because past research showing better informed people are more likely to vote has been undermined by the possibility that some other factor, for example wealth, affects both how informed a person is and their propensity to vote. In this study, by contrast, people were more informed because of where they lived - not because they were rich or because of some other personal characteristic - and being informed in this way was shown to increase the likelihood they would vote, regardless of their wealth, education or even how interested they were in politics.
_________________________________
Lassen, D.D. (2005). The effect of information on voter turnout: evidence from a natural experiment. American Journal of Political Science, 49, 103-118.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Rocking the vote
Just 39 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds voted at the last general election, down from 68 per cent at the election before that in 1997. Clearly young people are feeling disengaged from politics. A new American study offers hope that youth-targeted initiatives can help reverse this trend.
Mitchell McKinney and Mary Banwart compared the political attitudes of a group of young people before and after they watched a televised political debate. In 2003, 181 students watched a youth-tailored 'Rock the vote' debate in which eight candidates to become the Democratic nominee for President answered questions from a youth audience and took questions by email and text message. Their reaction to that debate was compared to the experience of 149 other students who watched a standard televised debate in which journalists put questions to a panel of Democratic candidates.
McKinney and Banwart found that compared with the students who watched the standard debate, the students who watched the 'Rock the vote' debate expressed greater political trust, reported being less cynical and reported feeling the political candidates were more interested in them and their concerns.
Analysis of the debate transcripts revealed that during the 90 minutes of the standard debate, not a single reference was made to or about young citizens. In contrast, the youth-targeted debate involved frequent appeals directed at a youth audience. For example, Senator Edwards told the audience "You know they stereotype you...I'm here to tell you it is wrong, it is condescending...I'm going to reach out to you, to hear what you have to say". On the Iraq war, Senator Liberman said "I understand how it tears apart the generation that's in this room because most of the troops that are in Iraq today are from your generation".
The researchers concluded: "Our findings here suggest the 'Rock the Vote' debate was an effective youth engagement effort. We encourage debate sponsors and broadcasters to continue to develop such forums...".
________________________________
McKinney, M.S. & Banwart, M.C. (2005). Rocking the youth vote through debate: examining the effects of a citizen versus journalist controlled debate on civic engagement. Journalism Studies, 6, 153-163.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Mitchell McKinney and Mary Banwart compared the political attitudes of a group of young people before and after they watched a televised political debate. In 2003, 181 students watched a youth-tailored 'Rock the vote' debate in which eight candidates to become the Democratic nominee for President answered questions from a youth audience and took questions by email and text message. Their reaction to that debate was compared to the experience of 149 other students who watched a standard televised debate in which journalists put questions to a panel of Democratic candidates.
McKinney and Banwart found that compared with the students who watched the standard debate, the students who watched the 'Rock the vote' debate expressed greater political trust, reported being less cynical and reported feeling the political candidates were more interested in them and their concerns.
Analysis of the debate transcripts revealed that during the 90 minutes of the standard debate, not a single reference was made to or about young citizens. In contrast, the youth-targeted debate involved frequent appeals directed at a youth audience. For example, Senator Edwards told the audience "You know they stereotype you...I'm here to tell you it is wrong, it is condescending...I'm going to reach out to you, to hear what you have to say". On the Iraq war, Senator Liberman said "I understand how it tears apart the generation that's in this room because most of the troops that are in Iraq today are from your generation".
The researchers concluded: "Our findings here suggest the 'Rock the Vote' debate was an effective youth engagement effort. We encourage debate sponsors and broadcasters to continue to develop such forums...".
________________________________
McKinney, M.S. & Banwart, M.C. (2005). Rocking the youth vote through debate: examining the effects of a citizen versus journalist controlled debate on civic engagement. Journalism Studies, 6, 153-163.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Political distrust - the lesson from Canada
"This election is all about trust" Conservative leader Michael Howard said at a recent press conference. He presumably thinks trust is a vote-winning issue for the Conservatives, but just how does political distrust affect the way people vote? Some insight comes from a study by Eric Belanger and Richard Nadeau that used data from the 1984, 1988 and 1993 Canadian elections - a period in which people's trust in politics dropped steadily.
Before each election, participants indicated their trust by agreeing, or not, with statements like "We can trust the government in Ottawa to do what is right" and "People running the government are a little crooked".
Results from the '84 and '88 elections provide good news for the Lib Dems here in the UK. Canadians who were distrustful were more likely to vote for Canada's third party - the New Democratic Party - at the expense of the two main parties. "...third parties can be thought of as channels used by voters to voice popular disenchantment with representative government and 'politics as usual'", the researchers said.
It also makes a difference whether a party exploits the trust issue as the Conservatives are doing in the current UK election. In the '93 Canadian election, two new parties entered the fray, one of which made trust a central campaign issue - and in that election it was these newer parties who benefited most from a voter's political distrust. "...parties' choice of campaign strategies and rhetoric are important" the researchers said.
What about voter apathy? Belanger and Nadeau estimated that if trust hadn't fallen from 1984 onwards, then turn out would only have been 1-2 per cent higher. And each election would also have seen the same winning party. "Declining levels of trust affected the electoral participation", the researchers said "but in a less dramatic way than one would expect".
___________________________________
Belanger, E. & Nadeau, R. (2005). Political trust and the vote in multiparty elections: The Canadian case. European Journal of Political Research, 44, 121-146.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Before each election, participants indicated their trust by agreeing, or not, with statements like "We can trust the government in Ottawa to do what is right" and "People running the government are a little crooked".
Results from the '84 and '88 elections provide good news for the Lib Dems here in the UK. Canadians who were distrustful were more likely to vote for Canada's third party - the New Democratic Party - at the expense of the two main parties. "...third parties can be thought of as channels used by voters to voice popular disenchantment with representative government and 'politics as usual'", the researchers said.
It also makes a difference whether a party exploits the trust issue as the Conservatives are doing in the current UK election. In the '93 Canadian election, two new parties entered the fray, one of which made trust a central campaign issue - and in that election it was these newer parties who benefited most from a voter's political distrust. "...parties' choice of campaign strategies and rhetoric are important" the researchers said.
What about voter apathy? Belanger and Nadeau estimated that if trust hadn't fallen from 1984 onwards, then turn out would only have been 1-2 per cent higher. And each election would also have seen the same winning party. "Declining levels of trust affected the electoral participation", the researchers said "but in a less dramatic way than one would expect".
___________________________________
Belanger, E. & Nadeau, R. (2005). Political trust and the vote in multiparty elections: The Canadian case. European Journal of Political Research, 44, 121-146.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Wednesday, 4 May 2005
It's not the economy, actually
"It's the economy, stupid", was Bill Clinton's campaign mantra back in the nineties. Well, no it's not actually. At least not according to a new analysis of British voting behaviour in the 1997 and 2001 general elections.
As part of the British Household Panel Study, over three thousand people provided annual information from 1992 to 2001, on their current financial situation and expectations, as well as stating who they voted for in the '92, '97 and 2001 elections.
If we choose who to vote for based on economics, then you'd think that previously non-Tory voters who were financially comfortable in 1997 would reward the Conservative government (who had been in power) by voting for them. But Ron Johnston and his colleagues at Bristol University found very few examples of this happening. Similarly in 2001 (when Labour returned to power), examples were rare of previously non-Labour voters switching their allegiance to Labour because of their agreeable financial situation. In fact, an opposite pattern was apparent - those people who reported being in dire financial circumstances were twice as likely as the financially comfortable to switch their vote to Labour!
So according to these findings, either we don't base our choice of vote on economics, or if we do, then we do it selflessly, based on our perception of the country's economy as a whole rather than on our own circumstances.
An alternative possibility here is that our political allegiance colours how we judge our financial situation. Johnston found some evidence for this. People who voted Tory in '92 were more likely to report their finances were okay at the '97 election, as if viewing the economy through blue-tinted spectacles.
__________________________________
Johnston, R., Sarker, R., Jones, K., Bolster, A., Propper, C. & Burgess, S. (2005). Egocentric economic voting and changes in party choice: Great Britain 1992-2001. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 15, 129-144.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
As part of the British Household Panel Study, over three thousand people provided annual information from 1992 to 2001, on their current financial situation and expectations, as well as stating who they voted for in the '92, '97 and 2001 elections.
If we choose who to vote for based on economics, then you'd think that previously non-Tory voters who were financially comfortable in 1997 would reward the Conservative government (who had been in power) by voting for them. But Ron Johnston and his colleagues at Bristol University found very few examples of this happening. Similarly in 2001 (when Labour returned to power), examples were rare of previously non-Labour voters switching their allegiance to Labour because of their agreeable financial situation. In fact, an opposite pattern was apparent - those people who reported being in dire financial circumstances were twice as likely as the financially comfortable to switch their vote to Labour!
So according to these findings, either we don't base our choice of vote on economics, or if we do, then we do it selflessly, based on our perception of the country's economy as a whole rather than on our own circumstances.
An alternative possibility here is that our political allegiance colours how we judge our financial situation. Johnston found some evidence for this. People who voted Tory in '92 were more likely to report their finances were okay at the '97 election, as if viewing the economy through blue-tinted spectacles.
__________________________________
Johnston, R., Sarker, R., Jones, K., Bolster, A., Propper, C. & Burgess, S. (2005). Egocentric economic voting and changes in party choice: Great Britain 1992-2001. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 15, 129-144.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Tuesday, 3 May 2005
Why Minghella got it right
It may have attracted derisory sniggers from the media, but Anthony Minghella's short 'romantic film' starring Messrs. Blair and Brown was probably worth it - a new study shows that political adverts accompanied by moody music and lighting really are more effective.
Against the backdrop of the 1998 election for the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Ted Brader at the University of Michigan recruited 286 volunteers ostensibly to participate in research into TV news. Participants watched a real 30-minute news programme into which Brader had embedded a carefully-designed political broadcast, either in favour or against one of the opposing candidates. Brader wanted to see whether adding moody music, lighting and images to an advert would have some extra effect on viewers even if the script were identical. So whereas some of his volunteers saw a positive advert with no music and set outside a local government building, others saw a version with uplifting music and colourful images of children playing. Similarly with the negative advert - some saw it with tense discordant music and black and white images of drug use, whereas others saw a neutral version.
Questioned afterwards, those participants who'd seen the positive advert with uplifting music reported being more interested in the election than those who'd seen the positive, unemotional version. They were also 29 per cent more likely to say they planned to vote, and were more likely to base their choice of candidate on their pre-existing preferences, rather than on topical issues.
The negative adverts - with or without emotive effects added - had no influence on people's stated intention to vote. But whereas the positive advert entrenched people's current beliefs, the addition of music and provocative images to the negative advert had the opposite effect, making people more likely to choose their candidate based on topical issues.
"Until now, we lacked hard evidence on whether emotions in general are an important part of political advertising.", Brader's report concludes, ".this study confirms what some observers long held on faith".
_________________________________
Brader, T. (2005). Striking a responsive chord: how political ads motivate and persuade voters by appealing to emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49, 388-405.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Against the backdrop of the 1998 election for the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Ted Brader at the University of Michigan recruited 286 volunteers ostensibly to participate in research into TV news. Participants watched a real 30-minute news programme into which Brader had embedded a carefully-designed political broadcast, either in favour or against one of the opposing candidates. Brader wanted to see whether adding moody music, lighting and images to an advert would have some extra effect on viewers even if the script were identical. So whereas some of his volunteers saw a positive advert with no music and set outside a local government building, others saw a version with uplifting music and colourful images of children playing. Similarly with the negative advert - some saw it with tense discordant music and black and white images of drug use, whereas others saw a neutral version.
Questioned afterwards, those participants who'd seen the positive advert with uplifting music reported being more interested in the election than those who'd seen the positive, unemotional version. They were also 29 per cent more likely to say they planned to vote, and were more likely to base their choice of candidate on their pre-existing preferences, rather than on topical issues.
The negative adverts - with or without emotive effects added - had no influence on people's stated intention to vote. But whereas the positive advert entrenched people's current beliefs, the addition of music and provocative images to the negative advert had the opposite effect, making people more likely to choose their candidate based on topical issues.
"Until now, we lacked hard evidence on whether emotions in general are an important part of political advertising.", Brader's report concludes, ".this study confirms what some observers long held on faith".
_________________________________
Brader, T. (2005). Striking a responsive chord: how political ads motivate and persuade voters by appealing to emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49, 388-405.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Friday, 29 April 2005
Why moving faces are easier to recognise
Psychologists have previously shown that moving faces are easier to recognise than a static image of a face. Karen Lander and Lewis Chuang at the University of Manchester sought to find out why.
In a first experiment, 48 psychology students viewed degraded facial images of lecturers from their department. The students were split into four groups - one viewed static images only, whereas the other groups saw the faces either moving rigidly (nodding or shaking their head), talking (without sound), or forming a facial expression. Lander and Chuang found that students who observed the faces talking or expressing were better at recognising the faces. Rigid facial movements, by contrast, didn't seem to provide any advantage.
This led them to hypothesise that we may each have a unique way of moving our face - which is revealed when we speak or form an expression. To test this further, they harvested 2.5 second clips of dozens of famous faces from film and TV. Thirty people then rated these clips for how distinctive they thought each face's movement was.
Another 48 students then tried to identify the faces in degraded versions of these clips, as well as trying to identify static images of some of the faces. Lander and Chuang found the students were better able to recognise moving images of the famous faces, compared with static images, but that this advantage was significantly greater when the movement had been deemed distinctive by the earlier raters.
"We speculate that as the face moves in a more 'characteristic' or distinctive manner, so the usefulness of the motion cue is increased", the authors said.
__________________________________
Lander, K. & Chuang, L. (2005). Why are moving faces easier to recognise? Visual Cognition, 12, 429-442.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
In a first experiment, 48 psychology students viewed degraded facial images of lecturers from their department. The students were split into four groups - one viewed static images only, whereas the other groups saw the faces either moving rigidly (nodding or shaking their head), talking (without sound), or forming a facial expression. Lander and Chuang found that students who observed the faces talking or expressing were better at recognising the faces. Rigid facial movements, by contrast, didn't seem to provide any advantage.
This led them to hypothesise that we may each have a unique way of moving our face - which is revealed when we speak or form an expression. To test this further, they harvested 2.5 second clips of dozens of famous faces from film and TV. Thirty people then rated these clips for how distinctive they thought each face's movement was.
Another 48 students then tried to identify the faces in degraded versions of these clips, as well as trying to identify static images of some of the faces. Lander and Chuang found the students were better able to recognise moving images of the famous faces, compared with static images, but that this advantage was significantly greater when the movement had been deemed distinctive by the earlier raters.
"We speculate that as the face moves in a more 'characteristic' or distinctive manner, so the usefulness of the motion cue is increased", the authors said.
__________________________________
Lander, K. & Chuang, L. (2005). Why are moving faces easier to recognise? Visual Cognition, 12, 429-442.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Wednesday, 27 April 2005
Good news for working mums
Working mums have had their fair share of bad press. Take the 2002 report from the Institute for Social and Economic Research that concluded "There is a negative and significant effect of the mother's full-time employment when the child was aged 0-5, on the child's educational attainment as a young adult". This spawned headlines like "Working mums 'bad for children'" in the Guardian and other papers.
But now there's some good news. An American study involving 1,053 families has found that controlling for a host of other maternal characteristics, a mother's time at work does not have a detrimental effect on her infant's social behaviour or cognitive performance as measured between the ages of 15 to 36 months.
Aletha Huston and Stacey Aronson at the University of Texas twice rang up the mothers in their sample and asked them to recall what they had been doing each hour for the last 24 hours. They also visited the mothers' homes to watch how they interacted with their children and to measure the children's behaviour and cognitive development.
The researchers found that the 580 working mums did spend less time with their children than the non-working mums but the difference was far less than might be expected based on their working hours. That's because working mothers tended to compensate by sacrificing other activities, like housework or socialising, and by spending more time with their children at weekends than non-working mothers. Moreover, the quality of interaction working mothers had with their child tended to be superior - involving more social interaction - playing, talking and holding their infants. Their home environments were also rated as slightly higher quality than non-working mothers'.
"The economic and social benefits of maternal employment outweigh any losses that may result from the time spent away from the child", Huston and Aronson concluded.
________________________________
Huston, A.C. & Aronson, S.R. (2005). Mothers' time with infant and time in employment as predictors of mother-child relationships and children's early development. Child Development, 76, 467-482.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
But now there's some good news. An American study involving 1,053 families has found that controlling for a host of other maternal characteristics, a mother's time at work does not have a detrimental effect on her infant's social behaviour or cognitive performance as measured between the ages of 15 to 36 months.
Aletha Huston and Stacey Aronson at the University of Texas twice rang up the mothers in their sample and asked them to recall what they had been doing each hour for the last 24 hours. They also visited the mothers' homes to watch how they interacted with their children and to measure the children's behaviour and cognitive development.
The researchers found that the 580 working mums did spend less time with their children than the non-working mums but the difference was far less than might be expected based on their working hours. That's because working mothers tended to compensate by sacrificing other activities, like housework or socialising, and by spending more time with their children at weekends than non-working mothers. Moreover, the quality of interaction working mothers had with their child tended to be superior - involving more social interaction - playing, talking and holding their infants. Their home environments were also rated as slightly higher quality than non-working mothers'.
"The economic and social benefits of maternal employment outweigh any losses that may result from the time spent away from the child", Huston and Aronson concluded.
________________________________
Huston, A.C. & Aronson, S.R. (2005). Mothers' time with infant and time in employment as predictors of mother-child relationships and children's early development. Child Development, 76, 467-482.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Monday, 25 April 2005
Could high cholesterol be good for your brain?
High cholesterol is bad for your body - it's associated with increased risk of stroke and heart disease - but new research suggests that paradoxically, it could be good for your brain. Cholesterol is a fat-like substance found in the blood and most cells, especially in the brain.
Penelope Elias and colleagues at Boston University analysed data from 789 participants in the Framingham Heart Study. From 1948 to 1974-78, the participants received biennial medical check-ups, some of which included measures of their total serum cholesterol. Then once between 1974 to 1978, the participants completed a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests, including measures of their learning and memory ability, their attention and concentration, executive functioning and abstract reasoning.
Controlling for a plethora of variables, including age, education, occupation, blood pressure, and smoking, the researchers found that lower cholesterol was modestly, but significantly, associated with lower cognitive performance, especially on those subtests related to executive functioning (i.e. the ability to stay focused on the task at hand, or to switch successfully between different types of task).
"These effects have biological plausibility", the authors explained. "Low serum cholesterol and poorer cognitive functioning may be related because neuronal cells require cholesterol for normal metabolic processes".
However, the authors cautioned that cholesterol could simply be a biological marker for some other physiological or psychological factor that affects cognition.
Moreover, this current data was collected before anti-cholesterol drugs had become effective or widespread. "The result of lowering cholesterol with current medications may be very different from naturally low cholesterol", researcher Merrill Elias said. Readers on prescription medication to reduce their cholesterol should note therefore that the benefits to their cardiovascular health will almost certainly outweigh any potential detriment to their cognition.
___________________________________
Elias, P.K., Elias, M.F., D'Agostino, R.B., Sullivan, L.M. & Wolf, P.A. (2005). Serum cholesterol and cognitive performance in the Framingham Heart Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 67, 24-30.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Penelope Elias and colleagues at Boston University analysed data from 789 participants in the Framingham Heart Study. From 1948 to 1974-78, the participants received biennial medical check-ups, some of which included measures of their total serum cholesterol. Then once between 1974 to 1978, the participants completed a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests, including measures of their learning and memory ability, their attention and concentration, executive functioning and abstract reasoning.
Controlling for a plethora of variables, including age, education, occupation, blood pressure, and smoking, the researchers found that lower cholesterol was modestly, but significantly, associated with lower cognitive performance, especially on those subtests related to executive functioning (i.e. the ability to stay focused on the task at hand, or to switch successfully between different types of task).
"These effects have biological plausibility", the authors explained. "Low serum cholesterol and poorer cognitive functioning may be related because neuronal cells require cholesterol for normal metabolic processes".
However, the authors cautioned that cholesterol could simply be a biological marker for some other physiological or psychological factor that affects cognition.
Moreover, this current data was collected before anti-cholesterol drugs had become effective or widespread. "The result of lowering cholesterol with current medications may be very different from naturally low cholesterol", researcher Merrill Elias said. Readers on prescription medication to reduce their cholesterol should note therefore that the benefits to their cardiovascular health will almost certainly outweigh any potential detriment to their cognition.
___________________________________
Elias, P.K., Elias, M.F., D'Agostino, R.B., Sullivan, L.M. & Wolf, P.A. (2005). Serum cholesterol and cognitive performance in the Framingham Heart Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 67, 24-30.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Thursday, 21 April 2005
Dangerous liaisons
What makes some women vulnerable to abusive relationships? To find out, April Few and Karen Rosen at the Department of Human Development at Virginia Tech., conducted 120 hours worth of interviews with 28 women (average age 22 years; 21 Caucasians and 7 African-Americans) who had been in an abusive relationship lasting from three months to nine years. According to Few and Rosen, violence occurs within 30 per cent of dating relationships, 50 per cent of which remain intact, thus leading to chronic abuse.
Analysis of the interviews pointed to two dimensions of vulnerability - 'relational vulnerability' and 'situational vulnerability', offset by protective factors like high self-esteem. Relational vulnerability refers to things like whether a woman was exposed to family violence in her childhood, and whether she has developed a 'caretaker identity' that stems from growing up too fast - what the authors call being 'adultified in childhood' - causing her to feel a responsibility to rescue and protect her violent partner. Situational vulnerability refers to a woman's current life circumstances, like being lonely after moving away from family; or feeling the need to be in a serious relationship, or to to lose her virginity after reaching a certain age.
There were also cultural vulnerability factors unique to the African-American participants. They cited the scarcity of eligible Black men, and their concern for protecting the wider perception of Black dating relationships in the community. One woman said "the public often sees Black relationships as dysfunctional; I didn't want to be a statistic".
The study authors said their findings have clinical implications: "...the Vulnerability Conceptual Model may be useful in helping survivors engage in self-reflexive exercises to determine their own relational and situational vulnerabilities". They also recommended "narrative therapy" that "provides options for the telling and retelling of preferred stories of people's lives (their solutions) while deconstructing problems through the techniques of externalisation (separating the person from the problem)".
This research is important, Few and Rosen said, because "Identifying women's vulnerabilities can enlighten those who might want to help women become, as one participant put it, 'abuse proof'".
__________________________________
Few, A.L. & Rosen, K.H. (2005). Victims of chronic dating violence: how women's vulnerabilities link to their decisions to stay. Family Relations, 54, 265-279.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Analysis of the interviews pointed to two dimensions of vulnerability - 'relational vulnerability' and 'situational vulnerability', offset by protective factors like high self-esteem. Relational vulnerability refers to things like whether a woman was exposed to family violence in her childhood, and whether she has developed a 'caretaker identity' that stems from growing up too fast - what the authors call being 'adultified in childhood' - causing her to feel a responsibility to rescue and protect her violent partner. Situational vulnerability refers to a woman's current life circumstances, like being lonely after moving away from family; or feeling the need to be in a serious relationship, or to to lose her virginity after reaching a certain age.
There were also cultural vulnerability factors unique to the African-American participants. They cited the scarcity of eligible Black men, and their concern for protecting the wider perception of Black dating relationships in the community. One woman said "the public often sees Black relationships as dysfunctional; I didn't want to be a statistic".
The study authors said their findings have clinical implications: "...the Vulnerability Conceptual Model may be useful in helping survivors engage in self-reflexive exercises to determine their own relational and situational vulnerabilities". They also recommended "narrative therapy" that "provides options for the telling and retelling of preferred stories of people's lives (their solutions) while deconstructing problems through the techniques of externalisation (separating the person from the problem)".
This research is important, Few and Rosen said, because "Identifying women's vulnerabilities can enlighten those who might want to help women become, as one participant put it, 'abuse proof'".
__________________________________
Few, A.L. & Rosen, K.H. (2005). Victims of chronic dating violence: how women's vulnerabilities link to their decisions to stay. Family Relations, 54, 265-279.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Tuesday, 19 April 2005
Trust in the brain
In one of the first ever studies to simultaneously scan the brains of two people, researchers at the Human Neuroimaging Lab in Texas have furthered our understanding of how the brain represents trust.
Forty-eight pairs of participants took part in an economics game. Groundbreaking 'hyperscanning' software meant that while one person lay in a scanner in Texas, their partner lay in a similar machine hundreds of miles away in California, and yet their brain images could be analysed together.
One partner was given $20 and was the investor. Each round they chose how much money to pass to their partner, the 'trustee'. Both players knew that according to the rules, the money tripled once it was passed to the trustee. The trustee then chose how much of that profit to share back with the investor before the next round began. There were ten rounds.
When an investor raised their next investment despite the trustee having been unfair the previous round, the researchers found that the trustee's brain then reacted in a characteristic way. Their caudate nucleus - a neural area well-connected to the brain's reward pathways - became more active, probably reflecting their increasing 'trust' in the investor's good will. Activity in this region of their brain then also predicted how generously they shared that round's profit.
Moreover, as the game wore on, this differential activity in the caudate began occurring earlier by several seconds, suggesting the trustee was starting to anticipate a generous investment (or not) from their partner as they learned their playing style.
The researchers said: "Taken together, these results suggest that the head of the caudate nucleus receives or computes information about (i) the fairness of a social partner's decision, and (ii) the intention to repay that decision with trust".
_________________________________
King-Casas, B., Tomlin, D., Anen, C., Camerer, C.F. Quartz, S.R. & Montague, P.R. (2005). Getting to know you: reputation and trust in a two-person economic exchange. Science, 308, 78-83.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Forty-eight pairs of participants took part in an economics game. Groundbreaking 'hyperscanning' software meant that while one person lay in a scanner in Texas, their partner lay in a similar machine hundreds of miles away in California, and yet their brain images could be analysed together.
One partner was given $20 and was the investor. Each round they chose how much money to pass to their partner, the 'trustee'. Both players knew that according to the rules, the money tripled once it was passed to the trustee. The trustee then chose how much of that profit to share back with the investor before the next round began. There were ten rounds.
When an investor raised their next investment despite the trustee having been unfair the previous round, the researchers found that the trustee's brain then reacted in a characteristic way. Their caudate nucleus - a neural area well-connected to the brain's reward pathways - became more active, probably reflecting their increasing 'trust' in the investor's good will. Activity in this region of their brain then also predicted how generously they shared that round's profit.
Moreover, as the game wore on, this differential activity in the caudate began occurring earlier by several seconds, suggesting the trustee was starting to anticipate a generous investment (or not) from their partner as they learned their playing style.
The researchers said: "Taken together, these results suggest that the head of the caudate nucleus receives or computes information about (i) the fairness of a social partner's decision, and (ii) the intention to repay that decision with trust".
_________________________________
King-Casas, B., Tomlin, D., Anen, C., Camerer, C.F. Quartz, S.R. & Montague, P.R. (2005). Getting to know you: reputation and trust in a two-person economic exchange. Science, 308, 78-83.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Sunday, 17 April 2005
Does "No" to sex mean fewer STDs?
You might think that pledging not to have sex before marriage would reduce a young person's chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD). Think again.
Hannah Bruckner and Peter Bearman analysed urine samples and questionnaire results provided by 11,471 participants aged 18 to 24 as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found that although the 20 per cent of the sample who had made a virginity pledge were more likely to have sex later and with fewer people, that didn't protect them from STDs - their rates of diseases like Chlamydia, Gonorrhea and Trichomoniasis were no lower than among young people who hadn't made a pledge.
Possible reasons for this include the fact that 61 per cent of the virginity pledgers had had pre-marital sex, despite their promise not to (compared with 91 per cent of non-pledgers), and that many of them engaged in alternative forms of sex as a substitute for intercourse. In fact, virginity pledgers were six times as likely to have had oral sex as non-pledgers. Moreover, abstinence-based sex education often omits advice on using contraception. Consistent with this, virginity pledgers were less likely to report having used a condom the first time they had intercourse.
All this led the authors to conclude: "...a careful evaluation should accompany the generous federal and state funds that abstinence-only programmes have enjoyed". Meanwhile, National Abstinence Clearinghouse President Leslee Unruh described the study as "junk science" and "politically charged".
_________________________________
Bruckner, H.B. & Bearman, P. (2005). After the promise: the STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges. Journal of Adolescent Health, 36, 271-278.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Hannah Bruckner and Peter Bearman analysed urine samples and questionnaire results provided by 11,471 participants aged 18 to 24 as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found that although the 20 per cent of the sample who had made a virginity pledge were more likely to have sex later and with fewer people, that didn't protect them from STDs - their rates of diseases like Chlamydia, Gonorrhea and Trichomoniasis were no lower than among young people who hadn't made a pledge.
Possible reasons for this include the fact that 61 per cent of the virginity pledgers had had pre-marital sex, despite their promise not to (compared with 91 per cent of non-pledgers), and that many of them engaged in alternative forms of sex as a substitute for intercourse. In fact, virginity pledgers were six times as likely to have had oral sex as non-pledgers. Moreover, abstinence-based sex education often omits advice on using contraception. Consistent with this, virginity pledgers were less likely to report having used a condom the first time they had intercourse.
All this led the authors to conclude: "...a careful evaluation should accompany the generous federal and state funds that abstinence-only programmes have enjoyed". Meanwhile, National Abstinence Clearinghouse President Leslee Unruh described the study as "junk science" and "politically charged".
_________________________________
Bruckner, H.B. & Bearman, P. (2005). After the promise: the STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges. Journal of Adolescent Health, 36, 271-278.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Friday, 15 April 2005
"How sour sweet music is..."
"How sour sweet music is..." Shakespeare wrote in his play Richard II "...when time is broke and no proportion kept!". The musician known to researchers as E.S. can probably sympathise with this quote more than most - she consistently experiences specific tastes, like salt or bitterness, when she hears certain pairs of musical tones. This cross-talk between the senses is called synaesthesia, although it is a rare form. Most synaesthetes experience different colours when they hear sounds or see certain numbers/ words.
Doubters have suggested people with synaesthesia are making it up, or that they have a vivid imagination. But scientists at the University of Zurich tested E.S. on a version of the Stroop task and found evidence that what E.S reports is real. E.S. was able to identify musical tone-intervals faster than five control musicians when researchers applied to her tongue the taste that she normally experiences with a given tone-interval. Yet she was slower than controls with incongruent tastes applied to her tongue. In contrast, the different tastes didn't affect the control musicians' performance.
"This demonstrates that synaesthesias may be used to solve cognitive problems", Gian Beeli and his colleagues said.
Moreover, when the researchers presented E.S. with single taste-related words (rather than applying actual tastes to her tongue), they had no effect on her tone-interval Stroop task performance - thus suggesting strongly that the synaesthesic effect was sensory, not conceptual, and occurred via cross-talk between her auditory and gustatory senses.
There is a downside for E.S. though. According to New Scientist magazine, her synaesthesia affects her musical choice - for example, Bach's music is a favourite because it's particularly creamy.
__________________________________
Beeli, G., Esslen, M. & Jancke, L. (2005). When coloured sounds taste sweet. Nature, 434, 38.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Doubters have suggested people with synaesthesia are making it up, or that they have a vivid imagination. But scientists at the University of Zurich tested E.S. on a version of the Stroop task and found evidence that what E.S reports is real. E.S. was able to identify musical tone-intervals faster than five control musicians when researchers applied to her tongue the taste that she normally experiences with a given tone-interval. Yet she was slower than controls with incongruent tastes applied to her tongue. In contrast, the different tastes didn't affect the control musicians' performance.
"This demonstrates that synaesthesias may be used to solve cognitive problems", Gian Beeli and his colleagues said.
Moreover, when the researchers presented E.S. with single taste-related words (rather than applying actual tastes to her tongue), they had no effect on her tone-interval Stroop task performance - thus suggesting strongly that the synaesthesic effect was sensory, not conceptual, and occurred via cross-talk between her auditory and gustatory senses.
There is a downside for E.S. though. According to New Scientist magazine, her synaesthesia affects her musical choice - for example, Bach's music is a favourite because it's particularly creamy.
__________________________________
Beeli, G., Esslen, M. & Jancke, L. (2005). When coloured sounds taste sweet. Nature, 434, 38.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Wednesday, 13 April 2005
Seeing what things are
As soon as we know something is there, we already know what category of thing it is. That's according to Kalanit Grill-Spector and Nancy Kanwisher at Stanford University and MIT.
They showed people images for between 17 to 167ms, some of which contained an object - a jeep or a German shepherd dog, for example - some of which just showed an incoherent scramble of images. Sometimes participants had to say as fast as they could whether an object was present or not ('detection'), other times they had to indicate what category the object belonged to (e.g. a car or a dog), other times they had to identify the object specifically (e.g. to indicate as fast as possible whether or not the object was a German shepherd dog, for example).
People took no longer to categorise an object than they took to detect whether an object was present or not. Moreover, on trials when categorisation performance failed, detection performance was no better than chance, and vice versa, thus suggesting the processes were mutually dependent on each other. This has important implications for theories of visual object recognition. It suggests that segmentation of a visual scene into background and foreground, needed to detect objects, occurs at the same time as object categorisation. Either that, or conscious awareness only kicks in after the categorisation stage.
However, identifying an object took longer by about 65ms, suggesting object identification occurs only after its category has been determined.
________________________________
Grill-Spector, K. & Kanwisher, N. (2005). Visual recognition. As soon as you know it is there, you know what it is. Psychological Science, 16, 152-159.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
They showed people images for between 17 to 167ms, some of which contained an object - a jeep or a German shepherd dog, for example - some of which just showed an incoherent scramble of images. Sometimes participants had to say as fast as they could whether an object was present or not ('detection'), other times they had to indicate what category the object belonged to (e.g. a car or a dog), other times they had to identify the object specifically (e.g. to indicate as fast as possible whether or not the object was a German shepherd dog, for example).
People took no longer to categorise an object than they took to detect whether an object was present or not. Moreover, on trials when categorisation performance failed, detection performance was no better than chance, and vice versa, thus suggesting the processes were mutually dependent on each other. This has important implications for theories of visual object recognition. It suggests that segmentation of a visual scene into background and foreground, needed to detect objects, occurs at the same time as object categorisation. Either that, or conscious awareness only kicks in after the categorisation stage.
However, identifying an object took longer by about 65ms, suggesting object identification occurs only after its category has been determined.
________________________________
Grill-Spector, K. & Kanwisher, N. (2005). Visual recognition. As soon as you know it is there, you know what it is. Psychological Science, 16, 152-159.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Monday, 11 April 2005
Do mums know about child development?
An American study has tested how much mothers know about child development, safety issues in raising children, infant sleeping habits and nutrition.
Two hundred and three women at a paediatric clinic and an obstetric clinic in a southern state in America were approached by a researcher. The women were mothers or mothers-to-be aged from 18 to 52 years, and were predominantly Caucasian (52 per cent) or African American (39 per cent).
Overall, the mothers answered 65 per cent of questions correctly, being most aware of the importance of establishing eating and sleeping routines (82 per cent correct) but least aware of how much sleep infants need (26 per cent correct) or what 6-month-olds are capable of doing (53 per cent correct).
"On average, women overestimated development by three months or more" Stephanie Reich of Vanderbilt University said. "This is a disturbing finding, as research in child maltreatment suggest abusive parents tend to overestimate their child's abilities".
Mothers who'd had more education tended to answer more questions correctly. Non-White mothers tended to score less well - "this may be because non-White families tend to have less continuous care and report having a less participatory relationship with their paediatrician", Reich said "therefore leading to less provision of anticipatory guidance".
"What is needed now are ways to educate mothers about typical child development" Reich said. "Preliminary research has shown parenting classes are effective in teaching parents about typical child development".
"Since maternal knowledge affects how mothers raise their children, increasing knowledge about typical child development would be beneficial" Reich concluded.
___________________________________
Reich, S. (2005). What do mothers know? Maternal knowledge of child development. Infant Mental Health Journal, 26, 143-156.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Two hundred and three women at a paediatric clinic and an obstetric clinic in a southern state in America were approached by a researcher. The women were mothers or mothers-to-be aged from 18 to 52 years, and were predominantly Caucasian (52 per cent) or African American (39 per cent).
Overall, the mothers answered 65 per cent of questions correctly, being most aware of the importance of establishing eating and sleeping routines (82 per cent correct) but least aware of how much sleep infants need (26 per cent correct) or what 6-month-olds are capable of doing (53 per cent correct).
"On average, women overestimated development by three months or more" Stephanie Reich of Vanderbilt University said. "This is a disturbing finding, as research in child maltreatment suggest abusive parents tend to overestimate their child's abilities".
Mothers who'd had more education tended to answer more questions correctly. Non-White mothers tended to score less well - "this may be because non-White families tend to have less continuous care and report having a less participatory relationship with their paediatrician", Reich said "therefore leading to less provision of anticipatory guidance".
"What is needed now are ways to educate mothers about typical child development" Reich said. "Preliminary research has shown parenting classes are effective in teaching parents about typical child development".
"Since maternal knowledge affects how mothers raise their children, increasing knowledge about typical child development would be beneficial" Reich concluded.
___________________________________
Reich, S. (2005). What do mothers know? Maternal knowledge of child development. Infant Mental Health Journal, 26, 143-156.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Friday, 8 April 2005
Walking away from dementia
By Natalie Taplin at Totton College
Elderly people who are more physically active are protected from cognitive decline. That's the message from an American study led by Jennifer Weuve at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In 1986, part of the Nurses Health Study began tracking physical activity in more than 18,766 women aged 70-81, all of them former nurses. The women completed a baseline cognitive test over the telephone in 1995 and then again every two years until 2001.
Women who engaged in more leisure activity showed less cognitive decline and higher levels of cognitive function. Even those women who only walked a leisurely 90 minutes a week had better cognitive scores than those who walked less than 40 minutes a week.
It would appear that the differences in cognitive ability in women with higher vs. lower levels of activity, were similar to the differences in cognitive ability among women two to three years apart in age. So, on average, women who were 80 and highly active, had minds that functioned as if they were 77!
Overall, elderly women in the most active set had a 20% lower risk of cognitive impairment than those who were least active. "Physical activity may directly affect the brain", the authors explained "potentially preserving neuronal structure and promoting the expansion of neural fibres, synapses and capillaries".
__________________________________
Weuve, J., Kang, J.H., Manson, J.E., Breteler, M.M.B., Ware, J.H. & Grodstein, F. (2004). Physical Activity, Including Walking, and Cognitive Function in Older Women. Journal of the American Medical Association, 292, 1454-1460.
Elderly people who are more physically active are protected from cognitive decline. That's the message from an American study led by Jennifer Weuve at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In 1986, part of the Nurses Health Study began tracking physical activity in more than 18,766 women aged 70-81, all of them former nurses. The women completed a baseline cognitive test over the telephone in 1995 and then again every two years until 2001.
Women who engaged in more leisure activity showed less cognitive decline and higher levels of cognitive function. Even those women who only walked a leisurely 90 minutes a week had better cognitive scores than those who walked less than 40 minutes a week.
It would appear that the differences in cognitive ability in women with higher vs. lower levels of activity, were similar to the differences in cognitive ability among women two to three years apart in age. So, on average, women who were 80 and highly active, had minds that functioned as if they were 77!
Overall, elderly women in the most active set had a 20% lower risk of cognitive impairment than those who were least active. "Physical activity may directly affect the brain", the authors explained "potentially preserving neuronal structure and promoting the expansion of neural fibres, synapses and capillaries".
__________________________________
Weuve, J., Kang, J.H., Manson, J.E., Breteler, M.M.B., Ware, J.H. & Grodstein, F. (2004). Physical Activity, Including Walking, and Cognitive Function in Older Women. Journal of the American Medical Association, 292, 1454-1460.
Wednesday, 6 April 2005
Words can't explain maths
Psychologists have argued that mathematical ability depends on the same cognitive skills and processes that underlie language. But now a study by psychologists at the University of Sheffield shows you don't need language to do maths. They tested three men, all of whom had damage to the left perisylvian region of their brain, known to subserve language ability.
The men were unable to distinguish between sentences like 'The man killed the lion' and 'The lion killed the man', yet they were able to perform comparable maths tasks that depend on analogous syntactic rules, like distinguishing between '59 minus 13' and '13 minus 59'.
Similarly, the men - referred to in the research report as S.A., S.O. and P.R. - were able to use a pencil and paper to solve simple mathematical expressions like '36 divided by (3 x 2)' that depend on understanding embedded clauses, yet they couldn't understand the verbal equivalent - sentences like 'This is the dog that worried the cat that ate the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built'.
Rosemary Varley and her collaborators argue this shows the functional and neuroanatomical independence of maths and language: "...mathematics can be sustained without the grammatical and lexical resources of the language faculty", they said. Their findings also undermine the argument that complex thought cannot occur without language.
However, because the participants in this study were not brain damaged from birth, this research does not rule out the possibility that the acquisition of mathematical ability might depend on language, either in an individual's development, or evolutionarily.
_________________________________
Varley, R.A., Klessinger, N.J.C., Romanowski, C.A.J. & Siegal, M. (2005). Agrammatic but numerate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 3519-3524.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
The men were unable to distinguish between sentences like 'The man killed the lion' and 'The lion killed the man', yet they were able to perform comparable maths tasks that depend on analogous syntactic rules, like distinguishing between '59 minus 13' and '13 minus 59'.
Similarly, the men - referred to in the research report as S.A., S.O. and P.R. - were able to use a pencil and paper to solve simple mathematical expressions like '36 divided by (3 x 2)' that depend on understanding embedded clauses, yet they couldn't understand the verbal equivalent - sentences like 'This is the dog that worried the cat that ate the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built'.
Rosemary Varley and her collaborators argue this shows the functional and neuroanatomical independence of maths and language: "...mathematics can be sustained without the grammatical and lexical resources of the language faculty", they said. Their findings also undermine the argument that complex thought cannot occur without language.
However, because the participants in this study were not brain damaged from birth, this research does not rule out the possibility that the acquisition of mathematical ability might depend on language, either in an individual's development, or evolutionarily.
_________________________________
Varley, R.A., Klessinger, N.J.C., Romanowski, C.A.J. & Siegal, M. (2005). Agrammatic but numerate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 3519-3524.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Sunday, 3 April 2005
A secret investigation
Secrets range from the trivial - not telling a friend you borrowed their shoes - to the serious - not telling your partner that you're HIV positive, for example. John Caughlin at the University of Illinois and his colleagues investigated whether people's reasons for withholding a secret predict how long the secret will last, and how good people are at predicting the consequences of revealing their secret.
Two hundred and eighteen students with a secret were recruited. They stated what their secret was, who they were keeping it from (most cited a friend or romantic partner), why they were keeping it secret, and what they thought would happen if they gave the secret away. Two months later they stated whether they'd revealed their secret (63 had) and what the consequences were. Secrets ranged from things like "When I was a child I was molested by a family member" to "I still have feelings for my first love".
To some extent it was possible to predict which secrets would be revealed. Students who at the outset were less concerned about being negatively evaluated after revealing their secret, or who were less worried about the impact the revealed secret might have on their relationship (with their confidant), were more likely to have revealed the secret two months later.
The students also showed a modest ability to accurately predict the consequences of revealing their secret. In fact, how they said their friend/partner/relative reacted, tended to be more positive than they had predicted that person's reaction would be two months earlier. So go on, sharing that secret might not be as awkward as you think...
_________________________________
Caughlin, J.P., Afifi, W.A., Carpenter-theune, K.E. & Miller, L.E. (2005). Reasons for, and consequences of, revealing personal secrets in close relationships: a longitudinal study. Personal relationships, 12, 43-59.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Two hundred and eighteen students with a secret were recruited. They stated what their secret was, who they were keeping it from (most cited a friend or romantic partner), why they were keeping it secret, and what they thought would happen if they gave the secret away. Two months later they stated whether they'd revealed their secret (63 had) and what the consequences were. Secrets ranged from things like "When I was a child I was molested by a family member" to "I still have feelings for my first love".
To some extent it was possible to predict which secrets would be revealed. Students who at the outset were less concerned about being negatively evaluated after revealing their secret, or who were less worried about the impact the revealed secret might have on their relationship (with their confidant), were more likely to have revealed the secret two months later.
The students also showed a modest ability to accurately predict the consequences of revealing their secret. In fact, how they said their friend/partner/relative reacted, tended to be more positive than they had predicted that person's reaction would be two months earlier. So go on, sharing that secret might not be as awkward as you think...
_________________________________
Caughlin, J.P., Afifi, W.A., Carpenter-theune, K.E. & Miller, L.E. (2005). Reasons for, and consequences of, revealing personal secrets in close relationships: a longitudinal study. Personal relationships, 12, 43-59.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Tuesday, 29 March 2005
The persistence of happiness
When healthy people imagine the quality of life they would have with a chronic illness, their estimates are much more negative than reports from people who actually have a chronic illness. This suggests people tend to be much better able to cope with illness than we might think. But it could also be due to responses biases - for example, ill people might overestimate their mood for the benefit of their carers, or they might overly focus on positive aspects of their life as a coping strategy.
Jason Riis (University of Michigan) and colleagues sought to overcome this problem by asking patients and healthy controls, for one week, to rate their mood when prompted every 90 minutes or so by a pocket computer. This procedure, known as 'ecological momentary assessment', is thought to minimise the possible influence of biased recall. The 49 patients had end-stage renal disease and received a 3-hour-long hemodialysis treatment three times per week.
The average mood ratings made on the pocket computer were equally positive among both the patients and healthy controls. Yet when interviewed, the healthy participants predicted their mood would be negative most of them time if they had a chronic kidney illness. And the patients predicted their mood would be much more positive if they'd never had a kidney illness. That is, both groups of participants appeared to underestimate the resilience of people's mood to illness.
"For most of us, it would take a lot more than we think to make us permanently miserable", the authors said. And this has important implications for policy-makers: "...consideration of the moods experienced by patients may influence policy priorities between serious conditions such as, for example, paraplegia and depression."
__________________________________
Riis, J., Loewenstein, G., Baron, J., Jepson, C., Fagerlin, A. & Ubel, P.A. (2005). Ignorance of Hedonic Adaptation to Hemodialysis: A study using ecological momentary assessment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 3-9.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Jason Riis (University of Michigan) and colleagues sought to overcome this problem by asking patients and healthy controls, for one week, to rate their mood when prompted every 90 minutes or so by a pocket computer. This procedure, known as 'ecological momentary assessment', is thought to minimise the possible influence of biased recall. The 49 patients had end-stage renal disease and received a 3-hour-long hemodialysis treatment three times per week.
The average mood ratings made on the pocket computer were equally positive among both the patients and healthy controls. Yet when interviewed, the healthy participants predicted their mood would be negative most of them time if they had a chronic kidney illness. And the patients predicted their mood would be much more positive if they'd never had a kidney illness. That is, both groups of participants appeared to underestimate the resilience of people's mood to illness.
"For most of us, it would take a lot more than we think to make us permanently miserable", the authors said. And this has important implications for policy-makers: "...consideration of the moods experienced by patients may influence policy priorities between serious conditions such as, for example, paraplegia and depression."
__________________________________
Riis, J., Loewenstein, G., Baron, J., Jepson, C., Fagerlin, A. & Ubel, P.A. (2005). Ignorance of Hedonic Adaptation to Hemodialysis: A study using ecological momentary assessment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 3-9.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Thursday, 24 March 2005
Looks matter most when it comes to a fling
by Anita Gay at Totton College
Is your partner fit, rich, beautiful and kind? No? Well, individuals who are a perfect 10 in every mating dimension are extremely rare, if they exist at all! So how do we choose which mate characteristics are most important to us when looking for a partner?
Participants chose their preferred partner from descriptions of six pairs of potential mates. Each potential partner had varying levels of warmth/trustworthiness, attractiveness/vitality and status and resources. For each pair, one trait remained constant (e.g. warmth/trustworthiness), whereas the remaining two traits were reversed in positivity across the two partners. For example, one partner was described as: warm and trustworthy, fit and attractive, but poor, with a low status job; whereas the other partner was described as: warm and trustworthy, unattractive and unfit but rich and with a high status job. Participants indicated their preference in three scenarios - a fling, casual date and a long-term relationship.
Both men and women overwhelmingly chose positive levels of warmth/trustworthiness when pitted against status/resources (with levels of attractiveness/vitality kept constant) regardless of whether long-term or short-term liaisons were considered.
However, when attractiveness/vitality was contrasted with warmth/trustworthiness, the results were much more stereotypical! Men desired much higher levels of attractiveness/vitality for both a fling and long-term relationship than women did.
Both men and women tended to maintain or even increase the importance given to attractiveness and vitality when shifting from long-term to short-term relationships, but to lower the importance assigned to warmth and trustworthiness.
"The results were generally as expected", the authors said, "...the sex differences were marked for both long-term relationships and short-term flings; however, unexpectedly, sex differences disappeared when respondents were considering a casual date".
________________________________
Fletcher, G. J. O., Tither, J.M., O'Loughlin, C., Friesen, M. & Overall., N. ( 2004). Warm and homely or cold and beautiful? Sex differences in trading off traits in mate selection. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 659-672.
Is your partner fit, rich, beautiful and kind? No? Well, individuals who are a perfect 10 in every mating dimension are extremely rare, if they exist at all! So how do we choose which mate characteristics are most important to us when looking for a partner?
Participants chose their preferred partner from descriptions of six pairs of potential mates. Each potential partner had varying levels of warmth/trustworthiness, attractiveness/vitality and status and resources. For each pair, one trait remained constant (e.g. warmth/trustworthiness), whereas the remaining two traits were reversed in positivity across the two partners. For example, one partner was described as: warm and trustworthy, fit and attractive, but poor, with a low status job; whereas the other partner was described as: warm and trustworthy, unattractive and unfit but rich and with a high status job. Participants indicated their preference in three scenarios - a fling, casual date and a long-term relationship.
Both men and women overwhelmingly chose positive levels of warmth/trustworthiness when pitted against status/resources (with levels of attractiveness/vitality kept constant) regardless of whether long-term or short-term liaisons were considered.
However, when attractiveness/vitality was contrasted with warmth/trustworthiness, the results were much more stereotypical! Men desired much higher levels of attractiveness/vitality for both a fling and long-term relationship than women did.
Both men and women tended to maintain or even increase the importance given to attractiveness and vitality when shifting from long-term to short-term relationships, but to lower the importance assigned to warmth and trustworthiness.
"The results were generally as expected", the authors said, "...the sex differences were marked for both long-term relationships and short-term flings; however, unexpectedly, sex differences disappeared when respondents were considering a casual date".
________________________________
Fletcher, G. J. O., Tither, J.M., O'Loughlin, C., Friesen, M. & Overall., N. ( 2004). Warm and homely or cold and beautiful? Sex differences in trading off traits in mate selection. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 659-672.
Wednesday, 23 March 2005
What on Earth...?
Children's drawings of the Earth as flat, or hollow with people inside, have led some psychologists to believe children develop naive, but coherent, mental models of what the planet is like based on their own observations. Such accounts predict that teaching science to children will be difficult because these entrenched beliefs must be overcome first.
But there are problems with interpreting children's drawings. They might draw a flat Earth because it's easier, for example. So Gavin Nobes and colleagues at the University of East London used a different technique. They asked 62 children, aged from 5 to 10, to put 16 cartoon-style pictures of the Earth in order of how much they looked like the Earth. The pictures varied systematically along three dimensions - the Earth's shape, the location of people, and the location of the sky.
All the children consistently ranked the spherical depiction of the Earth as most realistic. Two thirds of the 7 to 10 year-olds also showed a clear preference for pictures showing people and the sky all around the Earth. The 5 to 6 year-olds showed no consistent preference for the location of the sky and/or people. None of the children ranked the pictures in a way consistent with an alternative, naive mental model of the Earth (as flat, with people and the sky only on top, for example).
"These findings indicate that even young children have some knowledge of the scientific view of the Earth", the authors concluded, adding: "The only theory that children acquire is the scientific theory that culture communicates, presumably through linguistic and visual means by school, parents and the media".
___________________________________
Nobes, G., Martin, A.E. & Panagiotaki, G. (2005). The development of scientific knowledge of the Earth. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 47-66
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
But there are problems with interpreting children's drawings. They might draw a flat Earth because it's easier, for example. So Gavin Nobes and colleagues at the University of East London used a different technique. They asked 62 children, aged from 5 to 10, to put 16 cartoon-style pictures of the Earth in order of how much they looked like the Earth. The pictures varied systematically along three dimensions - the Earth's shape, the location of people, and the location of the sky.
All the children consistently ranked the spherical depiction of the Earth as most realistic. Two thirds of the 7 to 10 year-olds also showed a clear preference for pictures showing people and the sky all around the Earth. The 5 to 6 year-olds showed no consistent preference for the location of the sky and/or people. None of the children ranked the pictures in a way consistent with an alternative, naive mental model of the Earth (as flat, with people and the sky only on top, for example).
"These findings indicate that even young children have some knowledge of the scientific view of the Earth", the authors concluded, adding: "The only theory that children acquire is the scientific theory that culture communicates, presumably through linguistic and visual means by school, parents and the media".
___________________________________
Nobes, G., Martin, A.E. & Panagiotaki, G. (2005). The development of scientific knowledge of the Earth. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 47-66
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Tuesday, 22 March 2005
Judging your worth
How happy we are with our salary depends on how much we think other people earn. More specifically, Paul Sweeney and Dean McFarlin (University of Daytona) predicted, it is how much we think people similar to us earn - others with the same job, or who work at the same company. Their prediction was based on Leon Festinger's 'social comparison theory'.
To their surprise, however, Sweeney and McFarlin found that people's pay satisfaction was more widely affected, being predicted not only by whether they thought people with the same job in their own company earned more or less than them, but also by their sense of how much people earned doing different jobs from their's, either in the same or a different company.
So why isn't a person's satisfaction affected more by 'similar others' as psychological theory would predict?
"Similarity is in the eyes of the beholder", the authors said. "Perhaps respondents who are mobile and in a well-defined industry with clear competitors identify more with their counterparts in other organisations than with co-workers doing the same job".
Regarding comparison with people in different kinds of work, the authors suggested "such comparisons might provide workers with a sense of how their jobs 'stack up' with respect to other occupations...It may be that pay level is the most overt marker of one's status...if this plays an important role in defining the self in our society then our findings become more understandable".
"It may also explain an apparent obsession in today's world with lists of the richest people", they added.
The researchers surveyed 235 engineers at an American public utility company, 31,645 employees of the U.S. Federal Government, and 1,387 people with a range of different occupations.
__________________________________
Sweeney, P.D. & McFarlin, D.B. (2005). Wage comparisons with similar and dissimilar others. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 78, 113-133.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
To their surprise, however, Sweeney and McFarlin found that people's pay satisfaction was more widely affected, being predicted not only by whether they thought people with the same job in their own company earned more or less than them, but also by their sense of how much people earned doing different jobs from their's, either in the same or a different company.
So why isn't a person's satisfaction affected more by 'similar others' as psychological theory would predict?
"Similarity is in the eyes of the beholder", the authors said. "Perhaps respondents who are mobile and in a well-defined industry with clear competitors identify more with their counterparts in other organisations than with co-workers doing the same job".
Regarding comparison with people in different kinds of work, the authors suggested "such comparisons might provide workers with a sense of how their jobs 'stack up' with respect to other occupations...It may be that pay level is the most overt marker of one's status...if this plays an important role in defining the self in our society then our findings become more understandable".
"It may also explain an apparent obsession in today's world with lists of the richest people", they added.
The researchers surveyed 235 engineers at an American public utility company, 31,645 employees of the U.S. Federal Government, and 1,387 people with a range of different occupations.
__________________________________
Sweeney, P.D. & McFarlin, D.B. (2005). Wage comparisons with similar and dissimilar others. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 78, 113-133.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Monday, 14 March 2005
Is it possible to grow bored of skydiving?
Despite the risks, an estimated 250,000 people go skydiving in the UK every year. Common sense suggests they're doing it for the buzz; an adrenaline shot in a sterile, safety-obsessed world. But what about those people for whom it becomes a regular past-time - does the kick ever fade?
Ian Price and Claire Bundesen (University of New England, Australia) asked 105 skydivers with varying experience to rate how much they were feeling 33 emotional states before and after completing a jump. The participants also completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and a tailor-made measure of how 'addicted' they were to skydiving.
The principal emotions felt by the skydivers were anxiety before a jump followed by happiness afterwards. This contrast was most striking for novices and was far less pronounced for experienced divers (those who'd made more than 500 jumps). "More experienced skydivers have minimised anxiety and maximised the positive emotions of fun, happiness and pleasure" Price and Bundesen said. "(they) will increase access to
skydiving stimulation in order to achieve something like the original experience...more mid-air manoeuvres, night jumps, freefall..."
The experienced jumpers also tended to score low on neuroticism. "People high in neuroticism may find the concerns raised by skydiving too much to bear and hence select themselves out of continued involvement" Price and Bundesen said.
Skydivers who reported signs of being addicted to jumping, tended to be the least anxious before a jump. Having one's calmness recognised by others in the skydiving community "when others are feeling life-endangering fear and panic might be a major reinforcing factor", the authors concluded.
_________________________________
Price, I.R. & Bundesen, C. (2005). Emotional changes in skydivers in relation to experience. Personality and Individual Differences, 38, 1203-1211.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Ian Price and Claire Bundesen (University of New England, Australia) asked 105 skydivers with varying experience to rate how much they were feeling 33 emotional states before and after completing a jump. The participants also completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and a tailor-made measure of how 'addicted' they were to skydiving.
The principal emotions felt by the skydivers were anxiety before a jump followed by happiness afterwards. This contrast was most striking for novices and was far less pronounced for experienced divers (those who'd made more than 500 jumps). "More experienced skydivers have minimised anxiety and maximised the positive emotions of fun, happiness and pleasure" Price and Bundesen said. "(they) will increase access to
skydiving stimulation in order to achieve something like the original experience...more mid-air manoeuvres, night jumps, freefall..."
The experienced jumpers also tended to score low on neuroticism. "People high in neuroticism may find the concerns raised by skydiving too much to bear and hence select themselves out of continued involvement" Price and Bundesen said.
Skydivers who reported signs of being addicted to jumping, tended to be the least anxious before a jump. Having one's calmness recognised by others in the skydiving community "when others are feeling life-endangering fear and panic might be a major reinforcing factor", the authors concluded.
_________________________________
Price, I.R. & Bundesen, C. (2005). Emotional changes in skydivers in relation to experience. Personality and Individual Differences, 38, 1203-1211.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Sunday, 13 March 2005
Give and take
Most of us have had the experience of opening yet another present of socks or hankies from a well-intentioned older relative. But even among friends, why is it that people giving presents so often get it wrong? Norwegian psychologists Karl Teigen, Marina Olsen and Odd Solas investigated.
They wondered whether people playing the role of giver overestimate the importance of exclusivity, not realising that the person they're giving to will appreciate quantity and practicality just as much, if not more. Their initial findings seemed to support this hypothesis. They asked hundreds of students to choose between gift alternatives (e.g. one expensive bottle of wine, or two cheap bottles), either from the perspective of a giver or a receiver. This showed that givers prefer to buy others gift vouchers, expensive wine and new dictionaries, whereas recipients said they'd prefer cash to vouchers, more (cheaper) wine, and larger, better second-hand books.
However, this difference all seemed to come down to whether we evaluate things in isolation, or in comparison with something else. So when Teigan's team asked people to rate from 1-10 how much they would like to receive certain gifts - two cheap bottles of wine, say - then exclusive or more expensive gifts received higher ratings every time.
"Positive attributes like quantity are harder to evaluate without a comparator", the authors said. "Exclusive, spotless items are ideal gifts whereas quantitatively superior items need to be compared with something else to be fully appreciated [...] Accordingly, the art of successful gift giving consists of selecting items that can
be appreciated even when they are presented on their own".
__________________________________
Teigen, K.H., Olsen, M.V.G. & Solas, O.E. (2005). Giver-receiver asymmetries in gift preferences. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 127-148.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
They wondered whether people playing the role of giver overestimate the importance of exclusivity, not realising that the person they're giving to will appreciate quantity and practicality just as much, if not more. Their initial findings seemed to support this hypothesis. They asked hundreds of students to choose between gift alternatives (e.g. one expensive bottle of wine, or two cheap bottles), either from the perspective of a giver or a receiver. This showed that givers prefer to buy others gift vouchers, expensive wine and new dictionaries, whereas recipients said they'd prefer cash to vouchers, more (cheaper) wine, and larger, better second-hand books.
However, this difference all seemed to come down to whether we evaluate things in isolation, or in comparison with something else. So when Teigan's team asked people to rate from 1-10 how much they would like to receive certain gifts - two cheap bottles of wine, say - then exclusive or more expensive gifts received higher ratings every time.
"Positive attributes like quantity are harder to evaluate without a comparator", the authors said. "Exclusive, spotless items are ideal gifts whereas quantitatively superior items need to be compared with something else to be fully appreciated [...] Accordingly, the art of successful gift giving consists of selecting items that can
be appreciated even when they are presented on their own".
__________________________________
Teigen, K.H., Olsen, M.V.G. & Solas, O.E. (2005). Giver-receiver asymmetries in gift preferences. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 127-148.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Monday, 7 March 2005
Helping yobs
New Home Office research suggests one in four boys aged 14 to 17 could now be classified as a "prolific or serious offender" (but see link). Claire Nee and Tom Ellis at the University of Portsmouth tested the effectiveness of a new intervention for young offenders - the Persistent Young Offender Project.
The project involves one-to-one mentoring on anger management and group work on things like antisocial behaviour, problem solving, and interpersonal skills. There are also workshops on music, art and drama, as well as outdoor activities. The authors said a key novel feature of the intervention is "responsivity", to "constantly refine and change the level and types of individual intervention".
Nee and Ellis compared 41 young offenders aged seven to sixteen enrolled on the project, with 19 age and behaviourally-matched control participants. Of the 41 project participants, 40 were male, 36 had been excluded from school, half had thieved, a third had committed criminal damage or assault, and six had raped or committed indecent assault.
After six months, participants on the project were judged to be at significantly less risk of offending using an established inventory (the LSI-R). This showed more participation in organised activity, more engagement with education, including improved attitudes to authority figures at school, and improved attitudes to crime. In contrast, the offending risk of the control group had increased. Moreover, the project participants' police charges had dropped whereas the control participants' had risen.
"Now we know the Persistent Young Offender Project works, it now remains for us to establish why", the authors said.
__________________________________
Nee, C. & Ellis, T. (2005). Treating offending children: what works? Legal and Criminological Psychology, 10, 133-149.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
The project involves one-to-one mentoring on anger management and group work on things like antisocial behaviour, problem solving, and interpersonal skills. There are also workshops on music, art and drama, as well as outdoor activities. The authors said a key novel feature of the intervention is "responsivity", to "constantly refine and change the level and types of individual intervention".
Nee and Ellis compared 41 young offenders aged seven to sixteen enrolled on the project, with 19 age and behaviourally-matched control participants. Of the 41 project participants, 40 were male, 36 had been excluded from school, half had thieved, a third had committed criminal damage or assault, and six had raped or committed indecent assault.
After six months, participants on the project were judged to be at significantly less risk of offending using an established inventory (the LSI-R). This showed more participation in organised activity, more engagement with education, including improved attitudes to authority figures at school, and improved attitudes to crime. In contrast, the offending risk of the control group had increased. Moreover, the project participants' police charges had dropped whereas the control participants' had risen.
"Now we know the Persistent Young Offender Project works, it now remains for us to establish why", the authors said.
__________________________________
Nee, C. & Ellis, T. (2005). Treating offending children: what works? Legal and Criminological Psychology, 10, 133-149.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Friday, 4 March 2005
Last but definitely not least
Here's a tip - if you're applying for a new job or place at university, try to be the last one interviewed. Research suggests that when people judge successive performances, they tend to give progressively higher ratings to later performers.
Wandi Bruine de Bruin at the University of Technology in Holland checked back through scores given over 47 editions of the Eurovision Song Contest from 1957-2003. Over that time the scoring system has varied, sometimes each nation's judges have scored every song at the end of the contest; other years they scored songs one-at-a-time, after each performance. Regardless of the scoring system, and controlling for known national biases and other confounds, the later a singer appeared in the contest, the higher the score they tended to receive. Don't tell Terry.
de Bruin then analysed scores given during past European and World Figure Skating Championships. Again, despite skaters being scored one-at-a-time, those performing later tended to receive higher ratings. Moreover, judges tended to give later performers more extreme scores - perhaps because they gave early performers medium scores in the absence of anything to compare them by.
So why do judges give later performers higher scores? "Watching a sequence of performances, each new one may become more salient...positive features may have received more attention than shared ones, and made candidates seem better than earlier ones", de Bruin suggested. Of course it's possible that later performers were actually better - perhaps spurred on by the earlier performances. Either way, de Bruin, said, performers and candidates awaiting their turn should keep in mind "The Drifters' 1961 hit song - 'save the last dance for me'".
________________________________
de Bruin, W.B. (2005). Save the last dance for me: unwanted serial position effects in jury evaluations. Acta Psychologica, 118, 245-260.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Wandi Bruine de Bruin at the University of Technology in Holland checked back through scores given over 47 editions of the Eurovision Song Contest from 1957-2003. Over that time the scoring system has varied, sometimes each nation's judges have scored every song at the end of the contest; other years they scored songs one-at-a-time, after each performance. Regardless of the scoring system, and controlling for known national biases and other confounds, the later a singer appeared in the contest, the higher the score they tended to receive. Don't tell Terry.
de Bruin then analysed scores given during past European and World Figure Skating Championships. Again, despite skaters being scored one-at-a-time, those performing later tended to receive higher ratings. Moreover, judges tended to give later performers more extreme scores - perhaps because they gave early performers medium scores in the absence of anything to compare them by.
So why do judges give later performers higher scores? "Watching a sequence of performances, each new one may become more salient...positive features may have received more attention than shared ones, and made candidates seem better than earlier ones", de Bruin suggested. Of course it's possible that later performers were actually better - perhaps spurred on by the earlier performances. Either way, de Bruin, said, performers and candidates awaiting their turn should keep in mind "The Drifters' 1961 hit song - 'save the last dance for me'".
________________________________
de Bruin, W.B. (2005). Save the last dance for me: unwanted serial position effects in jury evaluations. Acta Psychologica, 118, 245-260.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Wednesday, 2 March 2005
The brain can't ignore angry voices
We're highly tuned to emotional signals. So whereas most of the information bombarding our brain is filtered, emotion-related signals seem to strike home regardless. Take fearful faces - research has shown these trigger the same activity in a fear-sensitive brain region, the amygdala, regardless of whether we're paying attention to them. This is in contrast to how the brain normally works. For example, a face will trigger a different amount of activity in the brain's fusiform gyri – a kind of face-processing module - depending on whether that face is being attended to. Didier Grandjean and colleagues at the University of Geneva wanted to find out whether the brain treats emotional sounds with the same priority as emotional sights.
Fifteen participants had their brains scanned while they were played two meaningless but word-like utterances to both their ears at once. These utterances were either neutral in their stress, tone and timing or they could convey anger. The participants' attention was always directed to one ear at a time by a task which required them to identify the gender of the voice at either their left or right ear.
An angry utterance at one ear triggered the same enhanced activity in the right middle superior temporal sulcus, regardless of whether a person was paying attention to that ear. "This suggests the right superior temporal sulcus...(is) finely tuned to extract socially and affectively salient signals from conspecficis (others of the same species)", the authors said. Together with past research, this points to a system that prioritises "orienting towards significant stimuli even when these are not the focus of attention".
___________________________________
Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M.L., Scherer, K.R. & Vuilleumier, P. (2005). The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 145-146.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Fifteen participants had their brains scanned while they were played two meaningless but word-like utterances to both their ears at once. These utterances were either neutral in their stress, tone and timing or they could convey anger. The participants' attention was always directed to one ear at a time by a task which required them to identify the gender of the voice at either their left or right ear.
An angry utterance at one ear triggered the same enhanced activity in the right middle superior temporal sulcus, regardless of whether a person was paying attention to that ear. "This suggests the right superior temporal sulcus...(is) finely tuned to extract socially and affectively salient signals from conspecficis (others of the same species)", the authors said. Together with past research, this points to a system that prioritises "orienting towards significant stimuli even when these are not the focus of attention".
___________________________________
Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M.L., Scherer, K.R. & Vuilleumier, P. (2005). The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 145-146.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Tuesday, 1 March 2005
Why exercise helps depression
Many studies have suggested exercise can help alleviate depression. Lynette Craft (Michigan State University) wanted to find out the psychological mechanisms that might underlie this benefit.
Nine women with moderate depression underwent a nine-week exercise programme. Two days per week the participants undertook moderate-intensity (30mins) exercise on cycles and treadmills, and were taught stretching, and how to monitor their heart rate. One day a week they exercised at home. To facilitate a 'mastery experience', they were gradually given greater control over their exercise.
A control group of 10 depressed women did not complete the exercise programme. Both the control and exercise participants were on antidepressant medication, and had been for an average of 47 months.
A self-report assessment of depression symptoms (BDI-II) showed the exercise group's depression was significantly reduced both at three weeks after the programme start, and at the programme end. By contrast, the control group's depression symptoms remained unchanged.
'Coping self-efficacy' is a measure of a person's belief that they can cope with their depression. Craft found that the exercise participants' coping self-efficacy was increased at three and nine weeks into the programme, and that it correlated with their reduced depression symptoms, thus suggesting a possible mechanism for the exercise's beneficial effect. "Learning and mastering new health-related skills may have given them the confidence necessary to master new techniques to deal with their symptoms", Croft said. The exercise participants had also stopped thinking about their worries so much (i.e. ruminating) but this didn't correlate with their depression symptoms.
__________________________________
Craft, L.L. (2005). Exercise and clinical depression: examining two psychological mechanisms. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 6, 151-171.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Nine women with moderate depression underwent a nine-week exercise programme. Two days per week the participants undertook moderate-intensity (30mins) exercise on cycles and treadmills, and were taught stretching, and how to monitor their heart rate. One day a week they exercised at home. To facilitate a 'mastery experience', they were gradually given greater control over their exercise.
A control group of 10 depressed women did not complete the exercise programme. Both the control and exercise participants were on antidepressant medication, and had been for an average of 47 months.
A self-report assessment of depression symptoms (BDI-II) showed the exercise group's depression was significantly reduced both at three weeks after the programme start, and at the programme end. By contrast, the control group's depression symptoms remained unchanged.
'Coping self-efficacy' is a measure of a person's belief that they can cope with their depression. Craft found that the exercise participants' coping self-efficacy was increased at three and nine weeks into the programme, and that it correlated with their reduced depression symptoms, thus suggesting a possible mechanism for the exercise's beneficial effect. "Learning and mastering new health-related skills may have given them the confidence necessary to master new techniques to deal with their symptoms", Croft said. The exercise participants had also stopped thinking about their worries so much (i.e. ruminating) but this didn't correlate with their depression symptoms.
__________________________________
Craft, L.L. (2005). Exercise and clinical depression: examining two psychological mechanisms. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 6, 151-171.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.