BPS Research Digest

Link feast

2013-05-24T09:00:00.002+01:00

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. What an inspiration - Neuropsychologist Brenda Milner, aged 94 and still making new research discoveries about the human brain.

2. More than 40,000 people are likely to die by suicide in the US this year, a grim new milestone. A Newsweek article details this "Suicide Epidemic" and asks - "Why are we killing ourselves and how can we stop it?"

3. The Scitable blog network from Nature has re-launched with a new psychology blog Mind Read, which kicks off with a post about synaesthesia, and a new neuroscience blog Brain Metrics, which asks: "Are There Really as Many Neurons in the Human Brain as Stars in the Milky Way?"

4. 60 short videos of emotion experts talking about ... emotion.

5. "Nine lessons for innovators from a Nobel Prize-Winning Psychologist" (yes, it's Danny Kahneman again).

6. Seven tools for thinking from Dan Dennett, excerpted from his new book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

7. Anyone can become an expert in anything with 10,000 hours of practice? Maybe Not - Annie Murphy Paul breaks news of a new study that debunks the popular myth.

8. A brief history of mental illness in art. From the always excellent Ferris Jabr.

9. The history and future of lie detection technology. BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by psychologist Geoff Bunn.

10. New Scientist has an interview with a man who was convinced his brain was dead. (Earlier this week I reported the results of a scan of this man's brain).

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Looking ahead to the weekend and beyond: On Sunday in Hay on Wye, Consultant psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely, sociologist Steve Fuller, and clinical psychologist Richard Bentall are debating the value of psychotherapy (there are other psych/neuro events too). On Tues in Bristol, Dan Dennett is talking about his new book: "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking". Across the pond, in New York on Friday, Carl Zimmer is hosting a workshop on how to measure consciousness.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The mindbus technique for resisting chocolate - should we climb aboard?

2013-05-23T09:29:00.000+01:00

Imagine you are the driver & your chocolate cravings are unruly passengers

If someone gave you a bag of 14 chocolates to carry around for five days, would you be able to resist eating them and any other chocolate? That was the challenge faced by 135 undergrads in a new study that compared the effectiveness of two different "mindfulness" resistance techniques.

Kim Jenkins and Katy Tapper taught 45 of their participants "cognitive diffusion", the essence being that "you are not your thoughts". The students were told to imagine that they are the driver of a mindbus and any difficult thoughts about chocolate are to be seen as awkward passengers. The students chose a specific method for dealing with these difficult thoughts/passengers and practised it for five minutes - either describing them, letting them know who is in charge, making them talk with a different accent, or singing what they are saying.

Another group of students were taught an acceptance technique known as "urge surfing". They were instructed to ride the wave of their chocolate cravings, rather than to sink them or give in to them. A final group of students acted as controls and were taught a relaxation technique.

As well as trying to resist the bag of chocolates, the students in all conditions were asked to avoid eating any other chocolate as far as possible, and to keep a diary of any chocolate they did eat over the five days.

The key finding is that the mindbus group ate fewer chocolates from their bag as compared with students in the control group. By contrast, the urge surfing group ate just as many of their chocolates as the controls. Diary records showed the differences between groups in their other chocolate consumption were not statistically significant, although there was a trend for the mindbus group to eat less (13g vs. 52g in the urge surfing group and 44g in the control condition). Another way of describing the results is to say that 27 per cent of the mindbus group ate some chocolate over the five-day period, compared with 45 per cent of the urge surfers and 45 per cent of controls.

A habits questionnaire suggested the mindbus technique was more effective because it reduced the students' mindless, automatic consumption of chocolate more than the other interventions. Jenkins and Tapper said their results show the mindbus "cognitive diffusion" technique is a "promising brief intervention strategy" for boosting self-control over an extended time period.

The serious chocaholics among you may not be so convinced. Although the students were recruited on the basis that they wanted to reduce their chocolate consumption, they appeared to show saintly levels of abstinence. On average, even the control group participants ate just 0.69 chocolates from their bag over the five day period (compared with an average of 0.02 chocolates in the mindbus condition; 0.27 in the urge surfing condition). The controls other chocolate consumption amounted to the equivalent of little more than four individual chocolates over five days. You've got to wonder - how serious were these participants about chocolate and just how tasty were the chocolates in that bag*?

Another thing - the researchers included a measure of "behavioural rebound". After the students returned to the lab on day five, they were presented with a bowl of chocolates and invited to eat as many as they liked. The groups didn't differ in the amount of chocolates they consumed, which the researchers interpreted as a good sign - after all, the mindbus group hadn't compensated for their restricted intake during the week. But hang on, they also showed no evidence of greater resistance to the chocolate. Sounds to me like the passengers had taken over the bus.

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Jenkins, K., and Tapper, K. (2013). Resisting chocolate temptation using a brief mindfulness strategy. British Journal of Health Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.12050

*Co-author Katy Tapper got in touch on Twitter to tell us: "The chocolates were very tempting Cadbury's Celebrations!"

--Further reading--
Self-licensing: when you indulge through reason, not lack of willpower
Good news and bad for a popular willpower-enhancing strategy
The first detailed study of daily temptation and resistance

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

The Special Issue Spotter

2013-05-22T10:08:00.001+01:00

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Psychotherapy Outcome (Psychotherapy).

Asexuality (Psychology and Sexuality). Editorial is open access.

Poverty and Class (virtual special issue from British Journal of Educational Psychology). Open access.

Australian Forensic Psychology (virtual special issue of the Australian Psychologist). Open access.

The Teenage Brain (Current Directions in Psychological Science).

Specificity, Methodology and Psychopathology of Emotional Attention (Biological Psychology).

Transcending Nativism and Empiricism in Cognitive Development (Cognitive Development).

Neural Plasticity, Behavior, and Cognitive Training: Developmental Neuroscience Perspectives (Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience).

Specificity, Methodology and Psychopathology of Emotional Attention (Biological Psychology).

Confronting Unsustainable Behaviors (Ecopsychology).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Scanning a brain that believes it is dead

2013-05-21T09:05:00.000+01:00

What is going on in the brain of someone who has the deluded belief that they are brain dead? A team of researchers led by neuropsychologist Vanessa Charland-Varville at CHU Sart-Tilman Hospital and the University of Liege has attempted to find out by scanning the brain of a depressed patient who held this very belief.

The researchers used a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner, which is the first time this scanning technology has been used on a patient with this kind of delusion - known as Cotard's syndrome after the French neurologist Jules Cotard. The 48-year-old patient had developed Cotard's after attempting to take his own life by electrocution. Eight months later he arrived at his general practitioner complaining that his brain was dead, and that he therefore no longer needed to eat or sleep. He acknowledged that he still had a mind, but (in the words of the researchers) he said he was "condemned to a kind of half-life, with a dead brain in a living body."

The researchers used the PET scanner to monitor levels of metabolic activity across the patient's brain as he rested. Compared with 39 healthy, age-matched controls, he showed substantially reduced activity across a swathe of frontal and temporal brain regions incorporating many key parts of what's known as the "default mode network". This is a hub of brain regions that shows increased activity when people's brains are at rest, disengaged from the outside world. It's been proposed that activity in this network is crucial for our sense of self.

"Our data suggest that the profound disturbance of thought and experience, revealed by Cotard's delusion, reflects a profound disturbance in the brain regions responsible for 'core consciousness' and our abiding sense of self," the researchers concluded.

Unfortunately the study has a number of serious limitations beyond the fact that it is of course a single case study. As well as having a diagnosis of Cotard's Delusion, the patient was also depressed and on an intense drug regimen, including sedative, antidepressant and antipsychotic medication. It's unclear therefore whether his distinctive brain activity was due to Cotard's, depression or his drugs, although the researchers counter that such an extreme reduction in brain metabolism is not normally seen in patients with depression or on those drugs.

Another issue is with the lack of detail on the scanning procedure. Perhaps this is due to the short article format (a "Letter to the Editor"), but it's not clear for how long the patient and controls were scanned, nor what they were instructed to do in the scanner. For example, did they have their eyes open or closed? What did they think about?

But perhaps most problematic is the issue of how to interpret the findings. Does the patient have Cotard's Delusion because of his abnormal brain activity, or does he have that unusual pattern of brain activity because of his deluded beliefs? Relevant here, but not mentioned by the researchers, are studies showing that trained meditators also show reduced activity in the default mode network. This provides a graphic illustration of the limits to a purely biological approach to mental disorder. It seems diminished activity in the default mode network can be associated both with feelings of being brain dead or feelings of tranquil oneness with the world, it depends on who is doing the feeling. Understanding how this can be will likely require researchers to think outside of the brain.

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Charland-Verville, V., Bruno, M., Bahri, M., Demertzi, A., Desseilles, M., Chatelle, C., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Hustinx, R., Bernard, C., Tshibanda, L., Laureys, S., and Zeman, A. (2013). Brain dead yet mind alive: A positron emission tomography case study of brain metabolism in Cotard's syndrome. Cortex DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.03.003

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

Stand by me: Close friendships appear to counteract genetic vulnerability to depression in girls, but not boys

2013-05-20T09:10:00.001+01:00

Publication of US psychiatry's updated diagnostic code has provoked renewed debate in recent weeks over the extent to which mental illness ought to be framed as a psychosocial or a biological problem. The answer of course is that it is both. A new Canadian study captures this interplay, showing how close friendships appear to mitigate the risk for girls whose genes mean they are more vulnerable than average to depression.

Mara Brendgen and her colleagues studied 294 pairs of twins aged ten years old (147 girls). Some of the twins were identical (they share the same genes), the others were non-identical (sharing just half their genes). Each twin pair was raised together in the same family.

The researchers obtained ratings of the children's signs of depression from their teachers and classmates. They also gauged their close friendships by asking each child to nominate up to three best friends in their class, and to indicate who was their very best friend. Reciprocal nominations were a sign of mutual friendship. The children also answered questions about the quality of their friendships, including whether they do fun things together or get angry with each other.

Consistent with past research, there was evidence of the role of genes in depression. That is, correlations in signs of depression were much higher between identical versus non-identical twins. If one of a pair of identical twins had signs of depression, this was taken as an indication that the second twin had genetic vulnerability for the condition. If one of a pair of non-identical twins showed signs of depression, this was also taken to mean the other twin had genetic vulnerability, but less so than in the case of identical twins.

Here's the main result. Genetic vulnerability to depression in girls was less likely to manifest if they had at least one close friend. Stated differently, the apparent protective effect of having at least one close friend was magnified in girls who were genetically vulnerable to the condition. This means that for girls there was an interplay between genetic risk and the protective effect of friendship. This was not the case for boys. Friendships did appear to protect boys from depression, but this was not related in any way to their genetic vulnerability. Perhaps, the researchers surmised, there is a gender difference because "girls tend to rely more on social relationships as a source of self-definition and self-validation, and their friendships are also characterised by greater intimacy, self-disclosure, empathy and emotional support."

Separate from any issues of genetic vulnerability, another gender difference was that boys, but not girls, showed an apparently additive protective effect against depression of having more friends. The researchers said this may be because girls more often have intimate one-on-one friendships, whereas boys are more often part of friendship groups.

Other details to emerge from the study: better quality friendships were more protective against depression (regardless of genetic vulnerability); genetic vulnerability to depression wasn't associated with the likelihood of a child having friends, but it was negatively associated with the perceived quality of their friendships.

The study has some limitations, particularly the relatively small sample size, the reliance on observer ratings of depression, and the cross-sectional design, which means a causal role for friendships cannot be assumed. It's possible that the manifestation of depression symptoms in genetically vulnerable girls leads to fewer friends, rather than more friends reducing signs of depression (note however that social support is a known mitigating factor against depression). Also, the results may be specific to this age group.

Despite these shortcomings, this is an innovative study on an important topic. Children who show signs of depression pre-adolescence are at heightened risk for having problems in their teens and beyond, so the more we understand about mitigating this risk, the better. The researchers said their results "emphasise the importance of teaching social interactional skills that promote positive relations with others to help prevent the development of depressive behaviour in children."

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Brendgen, M., Vitaro, F., Bukowski, W., Dionne, G., Tremblay, R., and Boivin, M. (2013). Can friends protect genetically vulnerable children from depression? Development and Psychopathology, 25 (02), 277-289 DOI: 10.1017/S0954579412001058

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

Link feast

2013-05-17T09:31:00.002+01:00

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the last week:

1. How too much empathy can actually lead us to do the wrong thing - thought-provoking essay by Paul Bloom. (related research covered on the Digest).

2. Thanks to books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and, most recently, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are discovering the manifold biases that muddle human judgment. So how come there hasn't been a revolution in good sense and shrewd decision making? Samuel McNerney may have the answer.

3. The Digest nearly won an award this week (hold the applause), reaching finalist position for psychology/neuroscience in the inaugural Science Seeker blogging awards. Many congratulations to all the winners, especially to Aatish Bhatia winner of the psych/neuro category; to psychologist Pete Etchells who won "best post about peer-reviewed research"; and to Virginia Hughes, who won "post of the year" for her superb story about hypersomnolence.

4. The build up to the release of US psychiatry's updated diagnostic code (DSM-5) continued this week as the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology published a statement calling for a "paradigm shift" in psychiatric diagnosis "away from an outdated disease model" towards "an approach which pays far more attention to the complex range of life experiences of people experiencing mental distress."

5. The story broke at the Observer on Sunday with an unfortunate spin that implied psychology was at war with psychiatry. Professor Sir Simon Wesseley, a psychiatrist, showed there is in fact a great deal of consensus ("Mindless psychiatry is as unhelpful as brainless psychiatry, and the psychiatrist who ignores the social environment is, well, not a psychiatrist").

6. How to spot a murderer's brain (or not).

7. Ed Yong reported on an ambitious and controversial new study of super-brainy participants that's looking to pin down the genetic influences on intelligence.

8. Do nice guys really finish last?

9. If only there were somewhere you could get an expert, no-nonsense discussion of psychology research that's been splashed all over the media ... hang on, psychologist and writer Tom Stafford has started a new column for The Conversation that does just that - first off, can a poster of staring eyes really deter bike thieves?

10. The 2013 illusion of the year has been chosen - check out the winner and runners up.

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

Experienced job interviewers are no better than novices at spotting lying candidates

2013-05-16T08:41:00.000+01:00

For the penultimate round of the TV show The Apprentice, the competing entrepreneurs must face a series of interviews with a crack team of hardened executives. The implicit, believable message is that these veterans have seen all the interview tricks in the book and will spot any blaggers a mile off. However, a new study provides the reality TV show with a reality check. A team led by Marc-André Reinhard report that experienced job interviewers are in fact no better than novice interviewers at spotting when a candidate is lying.

The researchers filmed 14 volunteers telling the truth about a job they'd really had in the past and then spinning a yarn about time in a job they'd never really had. The volunteers were offered a small monetary reward to boost their motivation. These clips were then played online to 46 highly experienced interviewers (they'd conducted between 21 and 1000 real-life job interviews), 92 interviewers with some experience (they'd interviewed at least once), and 214 students who'd never before acted as a job interviewer. The participants' task was to identify the clips in which the interviewee was speaking truthfully about their work experience, and the clips in which the interviewee was fabricating.

Overall the participants achieved an accuracy rate of 52 per cent - barely above chance performance, which is consistent with a huge literature showing how poor most of us are at spotting deception. But the headline finding is that the more experienced interviewers were no better than the novice interviewers at spotting lying job candidates - the first time that this topic has been researched. Greater work seniority, having more work experience and having more subordinates at work were also unrelated to the ability to spot lying job candidates.

There was a glimmer of hope that interview lie-detection skills could be taught. Participants who reported more correct beliefs about non-verbal cues to lying (e.g. liars don't in fact fidget more) were slightly more successful at recognising which job candidates were lying (each correct belief about a non-verbal cue added 1.2 per cent more accuracy on average). Experienced and novice interviewers in the current study didn't differ in their knowledge about lying cues, which helps explain why the veterans were no better at the task. The more experienced interviewers were however more skeptical overall, tending to rate more of the clips as featuring lying.

"Our results provide the first evidence that employment interviewers may not be better at detecting deception in job interviews than lay persons," the researchers said, "although it is a judgmental context that they are very experienced with."

Although the main gist of the results is consistent with related research in other contexts - for example, studies have found police detectives are no better at spotting lies, despite their interrogation experience - this study has some serious limitations, which undermine the applicability of the findings to the real world. Above all, the study did not involve real interviews, which meant the participants were unable to interact with the interviewees in a dynamic manner.

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Reinhard, M., Scharmach, M., and Müller, P. (2013). It's not what you are, it's what you know: experience, beliefs, and the detection of deception in employment interviews Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43 (3), 467-479 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01011.x

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

Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence

2013-05-14T09:09:00.000+01:00

Do fluent presenters make
learning feel too easy?

Eloquent and engaging scientific communicators in the mould of physicist Brian Cox make learning seem fun and easy. So much so that a new study says they risk breeding overconfidence. When a presenter is seen to handle complicated information effortlessly, students sense wrongly that they too have acquired a firm grasp of the material.

Shana Carpenter and her colleagues showed 42 undergrad students a one-minute video of a science lecture about calico cats. Half of them saw a version in which the female lecturer was confident, eloquent, made eye-contact and gestured with her hands. The other students saw a version in which the same lecturer communicated the same facts, but did so in a fumbling style, frequently checking her notes, making little eye contact and few gestures.

After watching the video, the students rated how well they thought they'd do on a test of its content ten minutes later. The students who'd seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent speaker breeds confidence. In fact, both groups of students fared equally well in the test. In the case of the students in the fluent lecturer condition, this wasn't as good as they'd predicted. Their greater confidence was misplaced.

A second study was similar - 70 students watched either a fluent or fumbling lecturer, but this time the students had a chance afterwards to spend as long as they wanted reviewing the script. On average, both groups of students devoted the same amount of time (perhaps out of habit). But only among the students who'd watched the fumbling lecturer was there a link between time spent on the script and subsequent performance on the test. This suggests only they used the time with the script to fill in blanks in their knowledge.

"Learning from someone else - whether it is a teacher, a peer, a tutor, or a parent - may create a kind of 'social metacognition'," the researchers said, "in which judgments are made based on the fluency with which someone else seems to be processing information. The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it. The question is, 'can I explain it clearly?'".

An obvious limitation of the study is the brevity of the science lecture and the fact it was on video. It remains to be seen whether this result would replicate in a more realistic situation after a longer lecture. Also, in real life, there may be costs to a fumbling lecture style that weren't picked up in this study, such as students mind wandering and skipping class.

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Carpenter, S., Wilford, M., Kornell, N., and Mullaney, K. (2013). Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0442-z

--Further reading--
Co-author on this study, Nate Kornell, wrote a guest Digest post in 2008 with study tips for students.
How fluency affects judgement, choice and processing style

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image: Paul Clarke Wikipedia Commons.

Occupational hazard - links between professions and suicide risk have changed over time

2013-05-13T09:06:00.000+01:00

Suicide rates have fallen among farmers

Among the various risk factors for suicide, psychologists have recognised for some time that a person's occupation plays an important part. Suicide rates have tended to be unusually high in professions that provide ready access to guns, drugs, or open water, such as in farming, medicine, dentistry and maritime careers.

A new analysis has examined whether this still holds true. Stephen Roberts and his colleagues accessed the UK suicide rates for dozens of occupations in 1979 to 1983 and compared these with similar data recorded between 2001 and 2005.

Consistent with the ready access theory, vets, pharmacists, dentists, doctors, and farmers were all among the top 15 occupations with the highest suicide rates back in the late 70s, early 80s. But this had all changed when looking at the more recent data. In the early noughties, none of these professions were in the top 30 occupations in terms of suicide rates. Instead, the occupations with the highest rates of suicide were largely manual, including coal miners, builders, window cleaners, plasterers and refuse collectors.

Stated differently, of 55 high-risk occupations, 14 had shown reductions in suicide rate in the noughties compared with the late seventies, and these were almost exclusively highly educated professional roles like doctors, radiographers and judges, as well as farmers, actors and authors. In contrast, five of the 55 high-risk professions showed an increased rate of suicide in the later data, and these were exclusively manual professions - coal miners, labourers, plasterers, fork-lift drivers and carpenters.

The new findings are published at a time when arguments are raging over the relative prominence that should be given to biological or social explanations of mental illness.

According to this new analysis, socio-economic forces appear to have become an increasingly major factor in occupational suicide risk. The percentage of variation in suicide rates explained by an occupation's socioeconomic grouping (e.g. managerial, trade, admin etc) almost doubled from 11.4 per cent in the early data to 20.7 per cent in the early noughties. Bear in mind these figures were from before the recession, so if anything it seems likely this trend will have intensified in more recent years.

The data also showed that suicide rates were much higher among men than women, and that among men, the most at-risk occupations tended to be manual, whereas in women they were more often (non-manual) professional.

If the pattern of these results are replicated in other European and Western countries, the researchers said this "could help in developing new suicide prevention interventions that can be targeted at specific occupational groups."

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Roberts, S., Jaremin, B., and Lloyd, K. (2013). High-risk occupations for suicide Psychological Medicine, 43 (06), 1231-1240 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712002024

--Further reading--
More Digest reports on suicide.
Men, suicide and society - why disadvantaged men in mid-life die by suicide (Samaritans report).

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

Link feast

2013-05-10T09:16:00.000+01:00

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Love this - "Neuroscience may be sexier than psychology right now, and it certainly has a lot more money and celebrity. But they really cannot get along without each other." Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal on How The Brain Really Works.

2. New Scientist has started a new column written by people with "mysterious neurological conditions". The first is by Heather Sellers who has a severe form of prosopagnosia (AKA face blindness).

3. There's been lots of coverage this last week about NIMH director Thomas R. Insel's announcement that his organisation - the world's largest funder of mental health research - will be moving away from US psychiatry's DSM categories, just as the profession is about to publish the latest version of its diagnostic manual. My favourite round-up of the affair was by Christopher Lane for Psychology Today. Other bloggers pointed out that the big news isn't really that surprising at all. (also, check out this measured response from the chair of DSM5).

4. "Probably the most boring book in the world" - that's how Prof Sir Simon Wesseley described the DSM on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind as he told presenter Claudia Hammond that the diagnostic code really isn't that relevant here in the UK. The programme also covered recent research that looked at rates of crying by therapists in therapy (check out my coverage of the research earlier this year).

5. The Guardian covered the psychological tricks that restaurant menu-compilers use to influence your dinner order.

6. Newly posted TED talk by positive psychology researcher Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit.

7. A new play on tour in the UK "Mess" sets out to demystify anorexia and it's getting rave reviews. It's written by and stars Caroline Horton, who has first-hand experience of the condition. (There's also a new book out soon about anorexia: Ministry of Thin, How the Pursuit of Perfection Got Out of Control).

8. I enjoyed this charming account of the decades-long research relationship between Suzanne Corkin and amnesiac Henry Molaison. (Corkin's new book about Molaison is out now in hardback and Kindle).

9. Nathan Azrin, the psychologist who pioneered the use of "token economies" on psychiatric wards has died aged 82. "It would be difficult to name a population that wasn’t affected by his work," said Alan Kazdin in this NYT obituary.

10. Bad news for "Tiger" parenting enthusiasts - "Children of parents ... classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or "easygoing.”

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Looking ahead to the weekend and beyond. There's a workshop this Saturday and Sunday in London on Havening Therapy, which promises to cure trauma in minutes. Here's why I won't be going. Later in the week in Oxford, there are still tickets available for three Pint of Science brain-related events.

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

Children aren't scared by nasty dentist visits, but by what they think of them

2013-05-09T10:21:00.000+01:00

The Greek Stoic Epictetus wrote that "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them." A new study involving 185 children and teenagers, 88 fathers and 97 mothers shows how this same principle applies to children's fear of the dentist. This is an important topic because many children avoid the dentist out of fear, and around half of dentally anxious adults trace their fears to childhood.

Antonio Crego and his colleagues assessed the children's fear of the dentist, any bad experiences they'd had, their personality, their relatives' fear and, most importantly for this study, their "cognitive vulnerability". This last measure looked at how much the children had feelings of uncontrollability (e.g. feeling trapped), unpredictability (not knowing what will happen), dangerousness (expecting pain) and disgustingness (expecting it to turn their stomach) about a visit to the dentist. The mothers and fathers answered the same questionnaires.

As you'd expect, all the non-cognitive factors were associated with the children's dental fear. So having a bad experience, having a more fearful temperament and having fearful parents were all associated with being more scared of the dentist. But none of these were as strongly related to the children's fear as their cognitive vulnerability, which explained an additional 20 per cent of variation in fear levels.

Particularly striking was the finding that a bad experience was no longer associated with children's dental fear once cognitive vulnerability was taken into account. The implication is that a bad experience only leads children to fear the dentist if it increases their feelings of uncontrollability, dangerousness and so forth. Of the various components of children's cognitive vulnerability, it was perceived disgustingness that was most strongly related to their fear of the dentist.

Another finding was an association between children's cognitive vulnerability and their parents' cognitive vulnerability. Although there's no proof here that the parents are passing their thinking style onto their children, the researchers said this could reflect a kind of "cognitive transfer" among family members. This suggests that interventions aimed at reassuring children may need to target parents too.

Some further curiosities - the dental fear of children younger than 13 was more closely associated with their father's fear; for teenagers over 13, their fear was tied more with their mother's fear. Overall, cognitive vulnerability was more strongly associated with dental fear in teenagers, perhaps because of their increasingly mature thought processes.

Crego and his colleagues said their "cognitive approach may help explain why some children develop dental fear problems after suffering a negative dental experience and how dental anxiety is passed from parents to children."

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Crego, A., Carrillo-Diaz, M., Armfield, J., and Romero, M. (2013). Applying the Cognitive Vulnerability Model to the analysis of cognitive and family influences on children's dental fear. European Journal of Oral Sciences DOI: 10.1111/eos.12041

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

"It's about accepting that you're mortal" - Extreme sports enthusiasts on overcoming fear

2013-05-08T09:14:00.000+01:00

In a safety-obsessed culture, why do some people throw caution to the wind and pursue sports where a wrong move often means instant death? Clues come from a series of interviews conducted with a group of 15 extreme sport participants (aged 30 to 70; 10 men) about their relationship with fear, including BASE jumpers (who launch themselves off high buildings), big wave surfers and waterfall kayakers.

Eric Brymer and Robert Schweitzer transcribed the interviews and looked for emerging themes. Contrary to traditional accounts of extreme sports enthusiasts as thrill seekers with a death wish, the interviewees described fear as an aversive, bodily sensation that the rest of us can recognise. A "gut-wrenching, terrible experience" was how one BASE jumper put it. "If you want a true slogan for these sports," he added, "it is Oh please don't let me die!". However, the interviewees also described how they face their fears and "push past" them.

Also contrary to some of the "devil may care" stereotypes that have dominated scientific and media portrayals of this group, the interviewees spoke of the importance of fear as a "healthy emotion" that "keeps you alive". Indeed, another of the themes related to "managing fear", with several participants describing their "fascination" with controlling their fear so as to avoid panic. "Fear is both a primal emotion and an experience to be savoured, confronted or broken through" the researchers said, "rather than as a stimulus for retreat."

The last theme on "self-transformation" was the most intriguing. The participants described how experiencing, controlling and pushing past intense fear left them positively changed and better equipped to deal with the tribulations of everyday life. A mountain climber described dealing with fear as "empowering" and "feeling very at peace" afterwards. A BASE jumper described the pursuit as "the ultimate metaphor for jumping into life rather than standing on the edge quivering". She also captured poetically the sense many of the interviewees had of becoming one with nature at the moment of most intense danger, as if "just a leaf in the wind: you're totally vulnerable and totally part of the environment at the same time. It's about accepting that you're mortal ... very vulnerable ... like a piece of dust ... in the wind." Another participant talked about a transformational "aura" that stayed with him "for as long as you care to remember."

According to Brymer and Schweitzer, these accounts "provide a critique of fear" as it is usually understood in conventional psychology, as always associated with dread. For the extreme sports enthusiast, fear is a useful emotion that aids survival but which ultimately can be transcended leading to personal growth and change. "By facing our greatest 'true' fears," said Brymer and Schweitzer "whether they be death, uncertainty or something else and taking action despite these fears, we transcend our own limitations and invite new possibilities into our lives."

_________________________________

Brymer, E., and Schweitzer, R. (2013). Extreme sports are good for your health: A phenomenological understanding of fear and anxiety in extreme sport. Journal of Health Psychology, 18 (4), 477-487 DOI: 10.1177/1359105312446770

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

Why your friends on Twitter are (probably) more interesting than you, and what to do about it

2013-05-06T08:53:00.000+01:00

Statistical logic means that your lover has probably had more sexual partners than you. Similarly, at the gym, most of the other users train more frequently than you. And your friends have more friends than you do - this last observation was labelled the "friendship paradox" by sociologist Scott Feld. It's a fact because popular people get counted in more people's tallies of how many friends their friends have (here's more explanation).

Now thanks to a new paper by Nathan Hodas and his colleagues, we can add to this humbling stats lesson the fact that for most users of Twitter, our followers and followees (the people we choose to follow), are better connected, more active, and more interesting than we are.

Hodas' team analysed Twitter data from the second half of 2009 featuring 476 million tweets and 5.8 million users, with 193.3 million links between them. First off, they found that for most of us, the people we choose to follow are better connected - that is, they typically follow ten times as many people as we do. Our followers too are better connected, typically by a factor of twenty.

Seeing as we choose how many other people we want to follow, this first observation isn't such a blow to the ego. However, the researchers found a similar result for popularity. That is, the people who follow us are typically ten times more popular than we are (in terms of their own follower count). Less surprising, the people we choose to follow are also more popular than we are. Here there are two distinct groupings - in one, the people we follow are typically ten times as popular as us; in the other, they are typically 10,000 times as popular (this is thanks to celebrity accounts and such like).

Not only are our followers and the people we follow better connected and more popular than we are, the people we follow are also usually more active. Eighty-eight per cent of users were found to be less active than a typical person they followed; this rose to 99 per cent when omitting accounts that ceased activity during the period covered by the data. This is probably because we're more likely to follow accounts that are more visible by virtue of being more active.

A related observation was the link between activity and popularity - that is, more active users tended to be more popular, a correlation the researchers described as "especially strong". This suggests being more active on Twitter could be a simple way to gain more popularity, although we need to be cautious because there's no proof here for a causal link. "The detailed mechanism for this explanation is not yet clear," the researchers admitted.

To connectivity, popularity and activity, we can add interestingness. The researchers looked at the "virality" of links shared on Twitter - literally how many times they were re-tweeted. Here they found that 79 per cent of Twitter users posted less viral content than the people they follow.

Another issue the researchers looked at was what they called "information overload". Here they found that as the number of people we follow increases, the information that we're subjected to increases "super-linearly" - each new user that we follow typically equals hundreds of new items of information in our Twitter stream. In part this is because, as we heard, the people we follow are usually highly active (or at least more active than we are). The risk is that we end up subscribing to more information than we can possibly manage to consume.

This last point about overload is relevant to readers hoping to boost their popularity and interestingness on Twitter. Comparing overloaded Twitter users (the third receiving the most amounts of info), and the underloaded (the bottom third), Hodas and his colleagues found that the overloaded tended to receive information that had gone massively viral, but tended to overlook "mini-cascades" - information that had viral potential. "It appears that overloaded users are only good detectors for information of mid-range interestingness," the researchers said. "Most likely the information that their friends already know." This suggests that if you want to be the kind of user who helps to break the next big story on Twitter, you need to be careful not to follow too many accounts in the pursuit of this aim. Pick and choose who you follow with care.

"If you have ever felt like your friends are more interesting or more active than you are," the researchers concluded, "it seems the statistics confirm this to be true for the vast majority of us."

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Nathan O. Hodas, Farshad Kooti, and Kristina Lerman (2013). Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You. arXiv arXiv: 1304.3480v1

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

Link feast

2013-05-03T09:00:00.000+01:00

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Ferris Jabr for Scientific American on a fascinating study conducted on the streets of New York into people's private conversations with themselves - their internal stream of consciousness. (see also).

2. The New York Times published an in-depth back story and interview with social psychology fraudster Diederik Stapel. Includes the revelation that Stapel wore suits as a grad student - a warning sign if I ever I heard one! (What do you think of the author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's suggestion that Stapel's fraud is on a continuum with questionable research practices in psychology? Psychologist Dave Nussbaum took to his blog to disagree strongly. Update: Pete Etchells has also blogged about this today).

3. Nature News reported on a new row that's erupted in the field of social priming research, this one concerning the purported idea that exposure to the "professor" concept boosts people's intellectual performance (check out the discussion in the comments beneath the report).

4. The last two items may give the impression that social psychology is in crisis. Gary Marcus wrote a welcome counterpoint in the New Yorker: "The crisis in social psychology that isn't". And if psychology needs more cheering up - two psychologists were voted as among the top ten thinkers in the world - wahoo!

5. A brand new series of BBC Radio 4's flagship psychology programme All in the Mind began this week. I was lucky enough to appear as a guest to discuss new psychology research. Also on the programme - what happens when doomsday prophets find their predictions are wrong?

6. For the Guardian, novelist and psychologist Charles Fernyhough asked: How much and in what way is neuroscience permeating literary fiction? (see also).

7. Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin. An in-depth, moving article that highlights the cost of not helping those with serious mental illness.

8. Neurobonkers interviews the authors of the recent paper exposing the serious power failure in neuroscience. (Here's the Digest report on the original paper).

9. A study published in open-access journal Plos One that claimed fist clenching affects memory has come under severe attack, sparking questions about the quality of open access journals and the virtues of post-publication peer review. (see this too from Neurocritic).

10. It's all been a bit serious this week - to round-off on a lighter note, here's a sardonic look at the 10 worst examples of management speak.
_________________________________

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

Greater use of "I" and "me" as a mark of interpersonal distress

2013-05-02T09:15:00.002+01:00

We each vary in how much we use first-person singular pronouns (I, Me, Myself) in our speech and writing, and how much we use first-person plural pronouns (We, Us, Ourselves). Researchers say it's a kind of habit and not something we usually have much control over. Now a study conducted in Germany claims that people who are more prolific users of "I" and "Me" tend to have more interpersonal problems and to experience more depression. "Using first-person singular pronouns highlights the self as a distinct entity," say the researchers led by Johannes Zimmermann, "whereas using first-person plural pronouns emphasises its embeddedness into social relationships."

Zimmermann and his colleagues counted pronoun use in transcripts recorded from 118 people who'd completed a 60 to 90-minute psychotherapeutic interview taking in topics including their past, their relationships and self-perception. This was an exploratory study and, knowing that these kind of interviews increase first-person singular pronoun use, the researchers thought this would be a good place to start.

The sample was made up of 99 patients at a psychotherapy clinic and 19 "healthy" controls (across both there were 103 women). The patients had problems ranging from anxiety to eating disorder. All the participants also filled out in-depth questionnaires that asked them about depression and their interpersonal behaviour.

Frequent use of first-person singular pronouns went hand in hand with higher depression scores and with interpersonal distress characterised by what the researchers called an "intrusive style", including inappropriate self-disclosure, attention seeking, and an inability to spend time alone. "First-person singular pronoun use may be part of a ... strategy that pulls for friendly-submissive attention from others," the researchers said. A "tendency to seek attention from others rather than self-focused attention."

In contrast, greater use of first-person plural pronouns was associated with lower depression scores and lower interpersonal distress. To the researchers' surprise, this was characterised by a "cold" interpersonal style. However, they think this is a "functional" kind of coldness - the ability to help others with their needs while also remaining appropriately detached for self-protection.

These are interesting findings that build on an established evidence base relating to pronoun use - for instance, past research has linked greater use of first-person singular pronouns with more marital dissatisfaction and social anxiety. However, the study has some obvious limitations, most notably its clinical sample, which limits the ability to say if the same findings would apply to the general population, and its reliance on participants' own descriptions of their interpersonal style. It's also important to note that there's no evidence here of a causal link - Zimmermann's team aren't saying that greater use of "I" and "Me" causes interpersonal problems. More likely, this way of speaking probably reflects how people see themselves and habitually relate to others.

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Zimmermann, J., Wolf, M., Bock, A., Peham, D., and Benecke, C. (2013). The way we refer to ourselves reflects how we relate to others: Associations between first-person pronoun use and interpersonal problems. Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (3), 218-225 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2013.01.008

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

The Special Issue Spotter

2013-05-01T16:35:00.001+01:00

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

The psychology of crime (Journal of Criminal Justice).

Hypnosis (Cortex).

Authoritarianism in societal context: The role of threat (International Journal of Psychology).

Contemporary Issues in Forensic Psychology in Australia (Australian Psychologist).

The vegetative state (Neuroethics).

Toward an interdisciplinary neuroaesthetics (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts).

Methodological Issues in Measuring and Interpreting the Predictive Validity of Violence Risk Assessments (Behavioural Science and Law).

Disgust (Psychological Bulletin, special section).

Serial and Parallel Processing in Reading (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology).

Green criminology (Crime, Law and Social Change).

_________________________________

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

Toddlers are afraid of falling but not of heights

2013-04-30T09:37:00.001+01:00

When we adults are confronted by a bridge, we're concerned not just by its width and sturdiness, but also by the height of the drop beneath. If there's a deep canyon, we'd usually rather the bridge was mighty strong and wide. If there's but a short drop, we'll happily jaunt along the narrowest, flimsiest of crossings - after all, it won't matter much if we fall.

Infants - those aged 11 to 14 months - are different. They don't want to fall, so they're wary of narrow bridges. But the height of the drop makes no difference to them at all. "We found clear evidence that infants are averse to falling from a height," said the researchers Kari Kretch and Karen Adolph, "but no evidence of adult-like anxiety that increases with drop-off height."

Kretch and Adolph challenged 37 14-month-olds to walk across a bridge of varying widths spanning a 76cm gap between two surfaces. The drop beneath the bridge was either large (71cm - nearly the infants' standing height) or short (17cm - roughly knee-high to the infants). An experimenter was on-hand to prevent any falls.

When faced with a more narrow crossing, the toddlers were more cautious as you'd expect - they hesitated, felt their way, and proceeded more slowly. Too narrow and they'd even refuse to go ahead. Crucially, however, their crossing behaviour didn't vary according to the height of the drop. A similar result was found when the study was repeated with 11-month-olds who were still crawling.

It's not that the walkers and crawlers couldn't perceive the difference in the height of the drops. When they refused to cross a very narrow bridge, they'd climb down into the small drop, but not the big drop.

At first, these new results might appear to contradict Gibson and Walk's classic "visual cliff" experiments conducted in the 1960s, in which babies refused to crawl onto a glass surface that had the appearance of a cliff edge. However, the visual cliff studies, and other research since, didn't disentangle risk of falling from the issue of fall height and the likelihood of injury. The researchers point out their new results aren't as surprising as they might seem. Toddlers are effectively averse to all dangers of falling, whether down a short or big drop. Unlike adults, they don't calibrate according to the relative risk.

"How would infants know that the longer an object (or baby) falls, the harder it hits the ground?" asked Kretch and Adolph. "Certainly by adulthood, we understand this intuitively. An open question is how and when this understanding develops." They acknowledged it would be useful for future research to explore a broader range of heights, to see if there's any level at which toddlers do register a greater danger.

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Kretch, K., and Adolph, K. (2013). No bridge too high: Infants decide whether to cross based on the probability of falling not the severity of the potential fall. Developmental Science, 16 (3), 336-351 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12045

--Further reading--
Toddlers don't take the risk of entrapment seriously.

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

Research Digest on the radio

2013-04-30T09:30:00.000+01:00

The BPS Research Digest makes its radio debut tonight on BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind programme. Tune in at 9pm (BST) to hear the Digest editor Christian Jarrett chat with presenter Claudia Hammond about some of the psychology and neuroscience studies reported in recent weeks here at the Digest.

The studies mentioned are:

Female political role models have an empowering effect on women

How children learn scientific thinking from their parents

Smiling fighters are more likely to lose

Also on the programme, Claudia talks to neuroscientist Kris de Meyer who spent six weeks interviewing followers of evangelical Christian broadcaster, Harold Camping, as they waited for May 21st, 2011, the date the earth was supposed to end. Also, is bad news bad for your mental health ? Rolf Dobelli, author of The Art of Thinking, believes so, and he's given up on the habit. Claudia talks to Rolf and Dr Pam Ramsden who discuss what we know about news consumption and mental wellbeing.

-- All in the Mind, BBC Radio 4, Tues 30 April, 9pm

"Wish you were here!" - how a postcard can help attract the best talent

2013-04-29T08:47:00.000+01:00

In 2004, in Silicon Valley, Google posted a huge billboard ad featuring a mathematical problem. The answer led to a web address with yet another puzzle to crack. People who successfully followed this intellectual treasure hunt ended up being invited in for a job interview.

This is an extreme example of a recruitment principle spelled out in a new article by psychologists in Belgium. They say that distinctive recruitment procedures are the secret to attracting more and better job applicants, especially in fields like engineering where competition for the best talent is intense.

Working with a Belgian technology company, Saartje Cromheecke and her colleagues sent out a real job opportunity to 1,997 potential applicants, around half of them via email (as is the industry standard), and half via a hand-written postcard depicting a coffee mug and a blank daily agenda. The email and postcard message featured the same layout and included the same written information and content about the job vacancy.

Sixty-two of the contacted engineers applied for the job - 82% of them had received the postcard, just 18% had received the email. Stated differently, only 1% of the engineers who were emailed actually applied for the job compared with 5% of those who received a postcard. This latter figure represents a high response rate for the field. Moreover, the respondents to the postcard tended to be better educated, consistent with the researchers' prediction that a recruitment message sent via a "strange" medium will be more likely to grab the attention of better-qualified personnel who aren't actively looking for new opportunities.

The researchers said that social cognition research has shown how we adopt mental "scripts" for different aspects of our lives. "... recruiting in a strange way that differs from what competitors are doing is likely to be inconsistent with recruitment scripts," they said, "enhancing potential applicants' attention, attraction, and intention to apply."

It's important to note, Cromheecke's team aren't saying that postcards will always be the answer. Rather, "this field experiment puts forth 'media strangeness' as a more general evidence-based principle, which recruiters might take into account when selecting media for communicating job postings."
_________________________________

Cromheecke, S., Van Hoye, G., and Lievens, F. (2013). Changing things up in recruitment: Effects of a ‘strange’ recruitment medium on applicant pool quantity and quality. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/joop.12018

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

Link Feast

2013-04-26T10:54:00.001+01:00

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. "Research suggests that mental illnesses lie along a spectrum — but the field's latest diagnostic manual still splits them apart" - ace feature by David Adam for Nature News.

2. "Can you catch depression?" asked the Daily Mail on the back of a new study published in the new journal Clinical Psychological Science. NHS Choices takes a calm, objective look at the evidence.

3. Why is it so hard to quit smoking? Open-access article by Lynne Dawkins in the newly published May issue of The Psychologist magazine.

4. Last Friday's episode of the delightful BBC Radio 4 Mind Changers series was on Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs.

5. "Neurodiversity rewires conventional thinking about brains" - by Steve Silberman for Wired.

6. Children are like little scientists in the way they learn about their environment through play. David Dobbs visits Alison Gopnik's lab at University of California, Berkeley. (more from the Digest archive).

7. Across two posts, our sister blog the Occupational Digest explored what we know about psychopathy in the work place. (more from the main Digest archive).

8. Two of psychology's greats in conversation - Steve Pinker and Howard Gardner.

9. How Could a Terrorist Seem So Normal? - Allen McConnell looks to self-complexity research for answers.

10. From psychologist Rolf Zwaan - Witty reflections on the actual mechanisms underlying social priming (like when you warm to a person who gives you a hot drink).

--

Looking ahead to next week: Skeptics in the pub meets in Greenwich on Weds eve and features psychologist Chris French.
________________________________

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

Atheists as stressed as believers when daring God to do bad things

2013-04-25T09:23:00.003+01:00

Why are most people in the world religious? Some say it is because we're naturally predisposed to believe in a god or gods and that religion brought evolutionary advantages to our ancestors. But if that's the case, how come there are over half a billion atheists in the world? One theory is that atheists consciously suppress their instincts for religion, with only varying degrees of success. A new study provides tentative support for this idea. Marjaana Lindeman and her colleagues report that atheists get just as stressed as religious people when they ask God to do nasty things, as in "I dare God to make someone murder my parents cruelly."

The researchers tested 16 atheists and 13 religious people (Finns aged 17 to 45 recruited via a skeptics group and bible group, respectively). The participants were wired up to a skin conductance machine that records the sweatiness of the fingers - a basic marker of stress. Next the participants read aloud 36 sentences - some were requests for God to do something awful; others were offensive statements not involving God (e.g. it's okay to kick a puppy in the face); and the remainder were neutral (e.g. I hope it's not raining today).

The participants' views about this experience differed as you'd expect. The religious folk found the God-related statements more unpleasant than the atheists. However, they were no more likely than the atheists to refuse to utter the God statements, or to retract them later when given the chance. Most importantly, skin conductance was higher for both participant groups when reading the God statements compared with the neutral statements. Moreover, across both groups, skin conductance when reading the God statements did not vary according to a person's level of religious belief. The atheists seemed to get just as stressed as believers when daring God to do awful things.

An obvious flaw in this evidence is that the mention of God was confounded with horrible outcomes. Perhaps the atheists were stressed reading the God statements simply because of the ideas involved, not because of God's role per se. A second study examined this with nineteen more Finnish atheists (aged 20 to 30). The participants were wired up to the skin conductance machine while they uttered unpleasant sentences involving God (e.g. "I dare God to make me die of cancer") or not involving God (e.g. "I wish I would die of cancer"). Signs of stress were higher for the God statements, suggesting the involvement of God brings some extra stress to atheists beyond the unpleasant outcomes involved.

"The results imply that while atheists' and religious individuals' beliefs about God and explicit attitudes towards God statements are different, they become equally emotionally aroused when daring God to do unpleasant things," the researchers said.

The study has its limitations - the participant samples were very small for a start - and the findings are difficult to interpret. Certainly it would be inappropriate to conclude that the results prove atheists believe in God at a subconscious level. Other plausible explanations for the findings include atheists finding the God statements stressful because they know friends or family who do believe in God; or perhaps atheists experience stress reading the God statements because the wording implies God is real, which runs counter to their own beliefs.

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Lindeman, M., Heywood, B., Riekki, T., and Makkonen, T. (2013). Atheists become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.771991

--Further reading--
The unscientific thinking that forever lingers in the minds of physics professors
Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention
The children of securely attached mothers think that God is close
Can God make people more aggressive?

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

Extras

2013-04-24T11:19:00.000+01:00

10 eye-catching studies that I didn't get the chance to report on in full:

How do our brain hemispheres cooperate to avoid false memories?

The psychological benefits of refusing to apologise.

What's the fastest speed at which a face can be recognised?

Exploring the transitional process from receiving a diagnosis to living with motor neurone disease

"Power gets the job" Boost your interview chances by first remembering a time you were in a position of power.

Forget the Mozart effect, listening to Vivaldi boosts mental alertness.

Using fMRI to decode people's dreams (see here for a calm assessment).

How stress affects nurses' referral decisions.

Use of laptops in lectures doesn't only distract the user, but also nearby students.

Evidence that "emotional blindness" in autism is not caused by autism per se, but by the co-occurring condition alexithymia

_________________________________

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

What is cognitive behavioural therapy like for a teenager?

2013-04-23T09:20:00.000+01:00

Most research into CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) for teenagers has focused on whether it works or not, with largely positive results. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to finding out what it is actually like for a teenager to undertake CBT.

Deanna Donnellan and her colleagues have made an initial effort to plug this gap, conducting in-depth interviews with three teenage girls who'd completed a course of individual CBT, asking them about their perception of the therapy and what it meant to them.

The pseudonymous interviewees were Mary, who had problems with sickness and anxiety; Katherine, who had anxieties around her appearance and restricted her eating; and Samantha, who experienced low mood and practised self-harm. The teenagers were aged 15 years on average.

One the main themes to emerge related to progress and change. Mary saw the therapy in terms of helping to remove her problems; Samantha saw it as more than that, as a chance to move forward in her life; and Katherine felt she had developed new perspectives on life and the future. All three experienced increases to their self-efficacy (their confidence in their own abilities). Donnellan and her colleagues pointed out a related practical insight here - they found the teenagers clearly had "ultimate goals" for therapy (such as a growth in character or a return to "normality"), which could be hidden beneath the immediate aims of the CBT.

Another key theme to emerge related to engagement with therapy. The teens were mostly disengaged and passive at the start, but they gradually began to participate more. Mary achieved this engagement by taking some control - she agreed to take on some of her homework tasks around eating, but refused others. Samantha didn't say much at the start, but came to realise that she could benefit from exploring her emotional issues. Katherine felt desperate and unable to make decisions at the start, but the graded nature of the therapy helped her feel more stable.

The researchers said issues of control were very important in teen therapy given that most teenagers' therapy will have been instigated by their parents. "Power and its ability to impact negatively upon therapeutic potential might ... be mitigated by a process of collaboration and encouraging the client to negotiate their position in the therapeutic relationship," they said.

What about rapport with the therapist? Although she benefited from therapy, Mary was not on the same page as her therapist:

"for an example she might use someone being scared of dogs and how the thoughts of the dog biting them would make them cross the road (...) it was like relates nowhere near to like feeling sick and how feeling sick affects ya it was nothing near that".

Mary blamed part of this on her therapist seeming "really old". "I think for most teenagers," Mary said, "... you'd feel easier to talk to someone who, not obviously dead young, but d'ya know not someone in their 50s or something or like old." In contrast, Samantha was pleasantly surprised at her therapist's ability to relate to her situation:

"It was a bit disconcerting cos she like, not knew about it, but knew how to like deal with all this stuff, which I wasn't entirely expecting but it was helpful."

The final theme related to the structure of the way therapy was delivered. Mary felt like some of the progress was too slow and there was frequent repetition. For Samantha, the structure and predictability of CBT was an advantage, and the boundaries laid down by her therapist helped her feel safe. Katherine also liked the graded pace of therapy, with the gentle start helping her to feel more comfortable.

Donnellan's team said their interviews were a "tentative" first step towards finding out what CBT is like for young people. The findings demonstrate "the importance of the process of therapy, just as much as the content," they said. Based on this, some practical recommendations include: recognising the importance of the first stages of therapy for engaging with a teenage client; addressing the teen client's preconceptions about therapy; and finding out the pace and style they'd like the therapy to progress at.

"The service delivering CBT needs to promote the young person as being in control from the outset," the researchers said, "regardless of who is making the decision to access therapy. This may set the scene for them to develop control over their problems and establish stability in their life."

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Donnellan, D., Murray, C., and Harrison, J. (2012). An investigation into adolescents' experience of cognitive behavioural therapy within a child and adolescent mental health service. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 18 (2), 199-213 DOI: 10.1177/1359104512447032

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

Students motivated by wealth are just as likely as others to help in an emergency

2013-04-22T09:19:00.001+01:00

Bankers, investors, stock market traders and their ilk have been vilified in recent years, in large part because the global financial crisis has been blamed on their allegedly unchecked selfishness and greed.

In fact, there's a widespread implicit belief that a love of money goes hand in hand with selfishness. A study published in 2008 backed this up - people with a greater love of money tended to report being more selfish at work.

A new study with business students at Loyola University challenges this narrative. In contrast to the 2008 paper, Michael Babula's study measured actual behaviour. The fifty students completed questionnaires about their religiosity and desire for wealth, then they headed, one at a time, across the building to give a short presentation, either about careers for economics students or about the relevance of the Good Samaritan parable to their future career.

Before they headed over to give their speech, half were told to hurry, time was short; the others were told there was no rush. Then, just before they reached the lecture room, a distressed, anxious stranger approached them. This person had just heard news that a relative had had an accident, but now their mobile phone had run out of battery and they had no change for a public pay-phone. The key test was whether and how much each student would offer to help the stranger in distress.

Seventy-eight per cent of the business students offered some kind of help to the stranger. Sixty-six per cent went so far as refusing to leave the stranger or giving him/her their mobile phone. The degree to which the students reported being wealth-driven was not associated with their levels of helping. Neither was their self-reported willingness to accept an illegal stock trading tip off. Being in a hurry also made no difference, neither did the content of the speech they were about to give. A factor that was linked with helping behaviour was "intrinsic religiosity" - that is, pursuing religion as an end in itself, not for the sake of status or other gain.

Babula cautioned that this was an exploratory study and he acknowledged the small size of his sample. However, he said it showed the importance of measuring actual behaviour, rather than relying on questionnaires as past research has tended to do. "Wealth-driven individuals often do engage in intrinsically motivated helping behaviour when directly facing an emergency situation," he said.

Though today's executives are widely reviled - an attitude reflected by Hollywood's release of a new version of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and Vatican official Tarcisio Bertone's statement: "Greed market has substituted free market" - Babula urged social scientists to "reserve judgment" and to "take a cautious approach to studying the helping behaviour of wealth-driven individuals.

"The world has certainly encountered modern-day Samaritans coming from the business community." he added. "Witness the life of Oskar Schindler."

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Babula, M. (2013). The unlikely Samaritans. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43 (4), 899-908 DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12055

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

5 chances to win a cutting edge occupational psychology textbook

2013-04-22T09:05:00.003+01:00

update: this competition is now closed and the winners have been contacted. Thanks for your entries. We have five copies to give away of Occupational Psychology: An Applied Approach by Gail Steptoe-Warren, kindly donated to us by the publishers Pearson.

From the publishers: "Occupational Psychology: An Applied Approach introduces students to the essential theories in this area, from motivation and wellbeing to group roles and individual differences. The book explores the impact of every topic from the perspective of the individual, management, and the organisation as a whole, encouraging the reader to consider the consultancy process at each stage."

For your chance to win the book, simply post a brief answer to this question set by Pearson - "How do you think an occupational psychologist can have the most impact on a workplace?" Five winners will be picked at close of play on Friday 26 April. Please remember to leave an email address for us to contact you.

For inspiration, remember you can read about new occupational psychology research here on the main Research Digest and over at our sibling blog the Occupational Digest. Good luck.