BPS Research Digest

Feast

2012-01-27T18:58:00.001Z

Links to the best psychology and neuroscience writing and broadcasting, compiled for your weekend pleasure:

The latest issue of The Psychologist magazine is online (browse the contents or view the free preview). It includes an open-access feature on self-control by Roy Baumeister.

You can also listen to Baumeister's recent talk at the RSA in London.

How are you going to read all these links? Fear not: This Saturday's Guardian comes with a free supplement on time management.

New Yorker podcast of Jonah Lehrer explaining why brain storming doesn't work, but coffee breaks and criticism do. These ideas and more are in Lehrer's forthcoming book: "Imagine: How Creativity Works". I've covered similar ground on the Digest. Check out these previous posts: Why do we still believe in group brainstorming? Forget brainstorming - try brain writing! and Coffee helps women cope with stressful meetings but has the opposite effect on men.

Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias was another recent speaker at the RSA - listen to the audio.

A new book that's worth a look: "Together The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation" by Richard Sennett.

Another new book that's worth a look: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking" by Susan Cain.

BBC Radio 3 have broadcast a series of shorts about phonophobia - the fear and intolerance of noise.

A new video collection website features dozens of lectures for school students by university researchers.

Catch it while you can "Freud vs. Jung" from BBC Radio 4 is available for just one more day.

John Gray argues why Freud "the last great Enlightenment thinker" has gone out of fashion.

This could be Jung's century argues Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels.

This interest in Freud and Jung is due to the forthcoming release of A Dangerous Method, which charts the relationship between the two men.

Britons are more dishonest than they used to be, apparently. Or maybe just more honest about their dishonesty?

Go buy this week's New Scientist magazine if you can - it has features on the effects of space on the brain (see here also) and "orchid children" (kids who are vulnerable to neglect but who thrive in a nourishing environment).

Newly posted TEDx talk: Ariel Garten: Know thyself, with a brain scanner

A neuropsychoanalytic approach to the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs.

What goes on in the mind of a sniper?

Psychology professor Graham Davey (an expert in experimental psychopathology) has started a new blog.

Philosopher Roger Scruton with a long-form essay on the nature/nurture debate, in which he responds to recent books by Prinz, Eagleman and Greenfield.

Do women feel more pain than men? (see here also).

BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour had a special episode on the psychology of friendship.

Did evolution domesticate the bonobo?

Skeptikai explodes some myths about "right-brains" and "left-brains".

Heart disease patients who take their placebo pills are less likely to die.

A sad twist to a classic case study in psychology: Was Little Albert neurologically impaired?

That's all - have a great weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The life-long curse of an unpopular name

2012-01-27T08:30:00.000Z

Receiving an unpopular name can have lifelong consequences, according to new research

Making assumptions about someone based on their name is ridiculous. A few attention-seeking celebrities aside, most of us were given our names, rather than choosing them, so why should they be any indicator of the kind of person we are? And yet a new European study claims that people with unfashionable first names suffer from prejudice, with life-long implications for their self-esteem and well-being.

Jochen Gebauer and his team used data collected from the German eDarling dating website. With the consent of hundreds of registered users, they looked to see how people with unfashionable first names were treated.

In the first study, the researchers identified hundreds of users of the dating site who had names that had been rated positively (e.g. Alexander) or negatively (e.g. Kevin) by 500 teachers as part of a different project. The eDarling website sends emails to users suggesting contacts in the form of a person's name, age and region. Users specify their preferences for age and region, so a suggested contact's name is the only information daters can really use in choosing whether to purse a contact. The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin).

An obvious criticism is that this online dating is an artificial situation - perhaps in real life we use other information to overcome any potential prejudice we might have against unpopular names. However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What's more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site - as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they'd suffered in life.

A further two studies replicated these results with a wider range of names and different methods of measuring name popularity. For example, the final study simply used name frequency as a measure of popularity. This again showed that people with less popular names experienced more rejection in online dating and had lower self-esteem and other adverse outcomes. This was the case even if their name had once been popular. So it's not the case that the negative correlates of having an unpopular name can be traced back somehow to having had the kind of parents who choose unpopular names.

These new results echo earlier research in the USA that found racial prejudice could affect the way people are treated based on their name. Identical CVs were dramatically more likely to attract job interviews if they were attributed to a person with a White-sounding name than if they were attributed to a person with an African-American sounding name. However race prejudice wasn't the cause of the harmful correlates of unpopular names in the current study - nearly all the names were White-sounding. Aside from racial prejudice, what causes names to acquire negative connotations is for another research paper. No doubt the names of celebrities, fictional characters and other high profile people play a role.

"Seemingly benign factors, such as first names, add up in real life, gaining considerable collective power in predicting feeling, thought, and behaviour," the researchers said. "The results also highlight the self-presentational value of first names and underscore the importance for parents to choose positively valenced first names for their children."
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Gebauer, J., Leary, M., and Neberich, W. (2011). Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431644

Further reading from The Psychologist: The name game: We all have one, and it might determine our fate in a number of intriguing and bizarre ways. Nicholas Christenfeld and Britta Larsen investigate.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Easily embarrassed people are more altruistic, and onlookers can tell as much

2012-01-25T09:32:00.000Z

Social interactions can feel like walking a tight-rope, an excruciating pit of embarrassment always just one tiny misstep away. Well, here is some comforting news for the easily embarrassed. A new study claims that people prone to embarrassment are better citizens - more selfless and cooperative (more "prosocial" in the psychological jargon). What's more, onlookers interpret expressions of embarrassment as a sign that a person is prosocial, and as a consequence are more likely to cooperate with and trust them. This makes sense if you consider that signs of embarrassment signal to onlookers that you're sensitive to social rules and concerned that you've transgressed. Therefore, although it feels excruciating, claim the study authors, embarrassment "can also function in our favour, helping to advertise some of our better, more desirable qualities."

Matthew Feinberg and his colleagues at University California, Berkeley conducted five experiments in total, involving hundreds of undergrad participants. The first two studies were designed to test whether people who experience more embarrassment are more prosocial. In the first, participants were video recorded as they recounted a time they'd been embarrassed. The videos were coded and it was found that the students who displayed more signs of embarrassment (e.g. gaze aversion, nervous face touching and laughter) also tended to endorse values of fairness more, and they were actually more generous with money in an economic game. In the second study, participants were asked to say how much embarrassment they'd experience in a range of hypothetical social scenarios. The participants who said they'd be more embarrassed tended to be more generous in an economic game and they also scored more highly on a questionnaire measure of their pro-sociality.

The remaining three studies were designed to test whether people who display signs of embarrassment are perceived as more prosocial. In one, participants were shown clips of the videos from the first study. Individuals who'd appeared more embarrassed in these videos were rated as more prosocial by the participants. In another study, participants looked at static pictures of actors displaying an expression of either embarrassment, pride or a neutral expression. Embarrassed people were again rated as more prosocial. A follow-up study was similar, but this time participants agreed to cooperate more fully in an economic game with people who they'd seen pictured looking embarrassed.

A fifth and final study was the most realistic. Participants saw their research partner praised for his or her superb performance on a mental performance test. Unbeknown to the participants, their partner wasn't another volunteer but was in fact an accomplice of the researchers. On being praised, this actor either responded with embarrassment or with pride. Crucially, later on, the participants tended to cooperate more with their partner if he or she had shown embarrassment earlier, as opposed to pride. What's more, the greater the intensity of their partner's earlier display of embarrassment, the more participants tended to trust and cooperate with him or her. The researchers also ruled out the possibility that the actor was displaying shame, rather than embarrassment. One final important detail: the researchers checked and these effects of embarrassment weren't because the participants saw their embarrassed partner as weak, liked them more, or because they felt compassion towards them.

"Our data are the first to reveal that people who feel and show intense embarrassment are indeed more prosocial," the researchers concluded, "and that this display triggers prosocial inferences and actions." The new results chime with earlier work on blushing, showing that onlookers make positive assumptions about blushers. However, the new data show that blushing isn't necessary for these positive effects.

The researchers acknowledged the limits of their study, including the fact that they were reading a lot into the behaviour shown by participants during economic games, and that the findings could be different in different cultures. They also said there was a need for more research - for example, to find out whether it's possible for people to feign embarrassment and thereby benefit from the flattering assumptions onlookers make about easily embarrassed people.

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Feinberg, M., Willer, R., and Keltner, D. (2012). Flustered and faithful: Embarrassment as a signal of prosociality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (1), 81-97 DOI: 10.1037/a0025403

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?

2012-01-23T09:56:00.001Z

We wore ankle-length blue coats at my school, in the Tudor-style. When it rained, the wool of the coat gave off a pungent smell, rather like wet dog. Now when I encounter a similar scent, it propels me back in time to my school days. This effect is called the "Proustian phenomenon". The name comes from Proust's description in Remembrance of Things Past of how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine biscuit transported him back in time to his childhood.

Smells do have this uncanny, evocative power, don't they? It's because of the relative proximity of the olfactory bulb (which processes smells) and the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in memory and emotions. Right?

Not so fast. In fact very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt.

Marieke Toffolo and her collaborators invited 70 female student participants to watch a disturbing 12-minute film featuring road traffic accidents, surgery and reports on the Rwandan genocide. Whilst the students watched the film, the smell of Cassis, a neutral berry-like odour, was sprayed into the room; coloured lights were projected onto the back wall; and inoffensive background music was played over speakers (no mention was made to the students of these cues; pilot work established that they were equally noticeable, pleasant and arousing). The researchers chose to focus only on female participants to keep things simple, because it's known that there are sex differences in olfactory perception.

A week later the students were called back and asked to write down as many memories about the film as they could. As they did so, either the smell, the lights or the music were presented again. The students also answered questions about the quality of their memories. The main finding is that students exposed again to the smell of Cassis rated their memories of the film as more detailed, unpleasant and arousing (but no more transporting or vivid) than students re-exposed to the music. However, the students re-exposed to the odour rated their memories no differently from students re-exposed to the lights. In other words, smell appeared to be more evocative than music, but no more evocative than lights.

"It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odours are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers," the researchers said. "Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odour is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odours."
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Toffolo, M., Smeets, M., and van den Hout, M. (2012). Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories. Cognition and Emotion, 26 (1), 83-92 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2011.555475

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Win a BPS-approved textbook on evolutionary psychology

2012-01-23T09:08:00.001Z

We've got two copies of Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction

by Dr Viren Swami to give away, kindly donated to us by Wiley-Blackwell.

For your chance to win, answer the following question: Who first coined the phrase "Survival of the fittest"?

Post the answer to us on Twitter (mention @researchdigest and use the hashtag #Swamicomp) or post the answer as a comment to this post (if you use the comment option, please provide a way for us to contact you).

At the end of the week, we'll pick randomly one correct answer from all entries on Twitter and one correct answer from the comments section of this blog post.

Good luck!

Feast

2012-01-20T10:32:00.000Z

Our round-up of links to the latest and best psych writing and broadcasting:

The Sherlock Holmes of neuroscience, VS Ramachandran, wrote a piece about case studies for The Telegraph.

The first 2012 issue of The British Journal of Psychology is free to access.

Philosopher John Gray on why Freud "the last great Enlightenment thinker" is out of fashion today.

The New Atlantic has an in-depth essay about the founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow.

" ... the built environment could — and should — be radically reconceptualized around the fundamental workings of the human mind." I agree - more dialogue between psychology and architecture is long overdue. The Psychologist had a feature on this topic in 2006.

On a similar theme: How our brains navigate the city.

Priming studies - for example, in which exposure to ageing-related words leads participants to walk away more slowly - could be prone to experimenter effects. A new study, excellently covered by Ed Yong, found that the participants only walked away more slowly when the experimenters knew which priming condition they were in.

Worth a look? New book: The Joy of Sin, The Psychology of The Seven Deadly Sins (and Why They're Good For You). The Psychologist magazine had a feature on this topic last year.

An artist is collecting people's false memories, in association with the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths.

How many neurons do you really have?

Suffering from choice paralysis? Sheena Iyengar's TED talk will help (she's the author of The Art of Choosing).

The Guardian has a positive review of The Locked Ward: Memoirs of a Psychiatric Orderly by Dennis O'Donnell.

A new book investigates people who are capable of learning numerous languages. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings says: "Captivating and illuminating, Babel No More is as much an absorbing piece of investigative voyeurism into superhuman feats as it is an intelligent invitation to visit the outer limits of our own cerebral potential."

5 must-read articles on the history of psychology.

The value of eye movement research was highlighted in Time magazine: "Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are". (Disclaimer: my PhD was on eye movements!)

Babies are born with synaesthesia.

Nature's Action Potential blog is reborn and promises to reveal the stories behind which papers get accepted and which rejected.

How would you behave in an emergency? Bruce Hood reflects on the behaviour of the vilified captain of the Costa Concordia.

BBC Radio 4 is currently broadcasting a dark, surreal comedy series featuring a "regression therapist".

In more socially diverse environments we're drawn even more strongly to people who are just like us, says Jonah Lehrer.

Roy Baumeister is talking at LSE next Tues (24/1/2012) about willpower. The event is free and will also be podcast. I predict Will Self won't be in the audience.

Movement and noise could lead to spurious brain imaging results.

That's all, have a fun weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When wives believe they do an unfair share of the housework, everyone loses

2012-01-19T09:36:00.000Z

More women than ever go out to work and yet surveys in Western countries show that wives continue to take on the lion's share of domestic chores.

A new study has quizzed 389 couples in Austria, Germany and Switzerland to build up the most comprehensive picture yet of how this uneven distribution of domestic chores is associated with men's and women's marital satisfaction.

These were all dual-earning couples with young children, with both spouses working at least 15 hours per week. Eighty-nine per cent of the couples were married. The average professional work load for women was 30.2 hours per week; for men it was 48.6 hours. Consistent with past surveys, the women in this sample took on nearly two thirds of the domestic chores.

The researchers Gerold Mikula, Bernhard Riederer and Otto Bodi asked their participants several things: what share of the chores they took on; whether they thought that was fair; whether they felt the way the share had been decided was fair (so-called "procedural justice"); how much conflict they experienced in their relationship; and how happy they were with their relationship. They threw all these factors into a statistical pot and looked to see how they related to each other.

First, Mikula and co focused only on the direct associations between housework distribution and women's and men's answers. For women, it wasn't the precise share of housework they did that was correlated with their experience of conflict and satisfaction, but rather how fair they thought that share was. Women who thought the division of household chores was unfair tended to experience more relationship conflict and less marital satisfaction. Women's sense of whether the decision process for housework had been fair also had its own independent link with levels of conflict. So feeling that they did an unfair amount of housework was bad enough, but conflict was even more likely when women felt the unfair arrangement had been arrived at unfairly.

Men, by contrast, seemed largely detached from the way housework was shared. There was no direct correlation between the division of housework and their reports of fairness. And even men who said the arrangement was unfair didn't tend to report more relationship conflict or less satisfaction - no doubt because the unfair arrangement was usually in their favour. In fact, the only direct association of housework distribution with men's answers, was that the greater share their female partners took on, the more satisfied they tended to be.

But here's where the picture gets more complicated. The researchers also looked at associations between participants' answers and their partners' reported sense of justice and experience of conflict and satisfaction. This suggested that men suffered when their female partners believed the housework arrangements were unfair. In fact, the negative correlates for men (more conflict, less satisfaction) of having a female partner who sensed injustice in the division of housework, outweighed the satisfaction associated with having a female partner who did lots of housework.

"The results support the proposition that it is not the balance of the division of labour itself but rather the subjective sense of justice associated with the division that matters primarily to the relationship satisfaction of the persons concerned," the researchers concluded. "Spouses should exchange their personal views and preferences in open discussions to arrive at an agreement that considers the wishes of both parties ... "

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MIKULA, G., RIEDERER, B., and BODI, O. (2011). Perceived justice in the division of domestic labor: Actor and partner effects. Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01385.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

You're most creative when you're at your groggiest

2012-01-18T09:42:00.000Z

Are you an evening person? Guess what? Early in the day, when you're bleary eyed, stumbling about in the fog of sleepiness, you're probably at your creative peak. In contrast, if you're a morning person, then for you, the evening is the best time for musing.

How come? Insight-based problem-solving requires a broad, unfocused approach. You're more likely to achieve that Aha! revelatory moment when your inhibitory brain processes are at their weakest and your thoughts are meandering.

Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks recruited 428 undergrads and had them complete a questionnaire to identify whether they were night owls or morning larks. As you might expect, based on factors like preferred time of day and peak performance, most of the students - 195 of them - were owls and just 28 were larks. The remainder came out as neutral.

Next, the students tried to solve six problem-solving tasks - half of them were insight-type tasks (e.g. a prisoner in a tower finds a piece of rope that's half the length of the distance to the ground. He escapes by using scissors to divide the rope in half and then tying the two ends together. How could he have done this?*), and half were analytic questions that require a narrow focus (e.g. Bob's father is 3 times as old as Bob. They were both born in October. Four years ago, he was four times older. How old are Bob and his father?). Students had 4 minutes to solve each problem.

Crucially, half the students were tested first thing in the morning (between 8.30am and 9.30am), the others were tested late afternoon (between 4 and 5.30pm). Here's the headline result: the students were much more successful at solving the insight problems when the time of testing coincided with their least optimal time of functioning. When larks were tested in the evening and owls were tested in the morning, they achieved an average success rate of 56, 22 and 49 per cent, for the three insight tasks, compared with success rates of 51, 16, and 31 per cent achieved by students tested at their preferred time of day. By contrast, performance on the analytic tasks was unaffected by time of day.

A potential weakness in the findings is that there were so many more evening people among the student participants (who therefore excelled at the creative tasks in the morning). So perhaps the results were skewed and the creative advantage has to do with the morning, not to do with performing at your least favoured time of day. To test this possibility, Wieth and Zacks looked at the data for the students with a neutral disposition (no favoured time of day). They didn't perform the insight tasks any better in the morning than evening, thus suggesting the creative advantage specifically comes from operating at your least optimal time of day.

The researchers recommended that students consider designing their class schedules so that they take art and creative writing at their non-optimal time of day. "Previous research has shown that students tend to get higher grades when classes are in sync with their circadian arousal;" they said, "however, the interaction between time of day and type of class has not been investigated. The results of this study suggest that the relationship between time of day and grades needs to be investigated and may not simply follow a uniform pattern."

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Wieth, M., and Zacks, R. (2011). Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal. Thinking and Reasoning, 17 (4), 387-401 DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2011.625663

* The solution is that he cuts the rope length-wise into two thin strips and ties these together.

Related posts on the Digest:
Early risers are more proactive than evening people
The personality of early risers

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Is it time to resurrect post-trauma psychological debriefing for emergency responders and aid workers?

2012-01-16T09:59:00.000Z

You've probably seen on the news, after a disaster, the announcement that trained counsellors will be on hand as a matter of routine. Or you used to. In fact, the practice of offering routine post-trauma psychological debriefing (Critical Incident Stress Debriefing - CISD - to give it its original, formal title) is all but dead and buried. It's hard to say who exactly executed the fatal blow.

NICE - the trusted, independent UK body that provides health advice - is a chief culprit. Based on seven randomly controlled trials (RCTs) comparing psychological debriefing against control groups, NICE recommended in 2005 that brief, single-session interventions not be routinely offered to individuals who have experienced a traumatic event. In 2006, another likely culprit, the Cochrane Collaboration, (widely respected for its meta-analyses of published studies) identified 15 relevant RCTs and made a similar recommendation.

Psychiatrist Simon Wesseley, based at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, went further and must also be a chief suspect. In a debate held at the Royal Institution in 2006, he proposed psychological debriefing after trauma as the "worst ever idea on the mind", based on the fact that it's ineffectual and possibly harmful. "It's a bad idea and a bad intervention," he said.

I must confess that I too may have played a part, however minor, in the demise of post-trauma counselling. In my Psychologist magazine article When Therapy Causes Harm, I highlighted Critical Incident Stress Debriefing as among the therapies identified by Emory University psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld as potentially harmful and that should be avoided. In my book The Rough Guide to Psychology, I used the possible harm caused by post-trauma psychological debriefing as an example of a counter-intuitive finding in psychology.

Now a team of therapists and trauma consultants, Debbie Hawker, John Durkin and David Hawker, who've worked extensively with NGOs, aid workers and emergency responders, have called for post-trauma debriefing to be resurrected for these specific client groups. In a scholarly plea, they've argued that the damning conclusions formed by NICE, Cochrane, Wesseley and others were premature and too narrowly interpreted (NICE acknowledges that their guidance may not apply to debriefing of emergency workers or group debriefing). Hawker and co claim that there are many who would welcome the return of post-trauma debriefing: "As mental health professionals active in the military, emergency service and humanitarian fields, we are aware that the personnel we work with often request debriefing, and speak of its benefit for them". Yet the debriefing is usually not available: "Professionals ... are afraid of being accused of professional misconduct if they offer psychological debriefing ...".

Hawker and co point out that of the 15 RCTs identified by the NICE and Cochrane reviews, three found a positive effect of debriefing, nine found no effect and only two found a harmful effect. These two studies, they explain, were seriously flawed. The patients who received debriefing were more severely injured than the controls; they received debriefing too soon, before they were ready; the debriefing was too brief (it averaged 44 minutes, whereas experts say it should last at least two hours, with at least one follow up); and the debriefers were inadequately trained (a research assistant delivered the debriefing in one study; the other negative outcome study said the debriefers had received half a day's training).

In effect, Hawker et al say, these trials were more like "inefficacy trials" - exploring what happens when an intervention is delivered badly to the wrong people. As it was originally conceived, they explain, post-trauma psychological debriefing was meant to be part of:

"a package for emergency workers who'd experienced critical incident stress as part of their work. It was specifically designed for selected psychologically resilient personnel who are trained to cope with expected pressure during their routine work in stressful situations. These are teams of people who have trained together and been briefed together before working together."

Post-incident debriefing was also meant to be delivered by a mental health worker and a peer debriefer, both of whom should have experience of the emergency services they're working with, thus lending the debriefers all-important credibility.

Debriefing is popular with emergency workers and aid workers, Hawker and co say, because many of them see it as their only chance to talk about their experiences. It allows them to do so as a matter of routine, without the stigma of therapy, which they sometimes fear could be detrimental to their careers. Given this need, perhaps it's no surprise that post-trauma psychological debriefing is surfacing under new names like "powerful event group support" and "trauma risk management".

"We have been told that the case against debriefing is proven and the debate is closed," Hawker, Durkin and Hawker conclude. "We disagree ... We predict that appropriate psychological debriefing will be shown to have benefits for secondary victims of trauma who have been briefed together and who have worked together through traumatic events. Research into these uses of debriefing should be encouraged and supported."

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Hawker, D., Durkin, J., and Hawker, D. (2011). To debrief or not to debrief our heroes: that is the question. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 18 (6), 453-463 DOI: 10.1002/cpp.730

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

2012-01-13T17:32:00.001Z

Our round-up of the latest and best psychology articles, podcasts, TV shows, radio programmes and blog posts from around the web:

This weekend the Guardian and Observer reach the climax of their Memory Week with not one, but two pull-out supplements. Saturday's Guardian comes with Make the Most of Your Memory, including contributions from Charles Fernyhough, Jon Simons, Hugo Spiers, Alice Bell and me. Sunday's Observer promises a pull-out full of memory games. As part of Memory Week, Fernyhough took part in a live web chat on how to improve your memory. And there's still time to take part in the largest ever online memory experiment.

Our sister blog, The Occupational Digest, has hit the year running, with two advice-filled posts: Resolutions to take the harder edges off work and Make better selection decisions.

Want to get control of your dreams? Psychologist and Digest contributor Tom Stafford has penned a pay-as-much-as-you-want-for-it e-book that will show you how.

Did you catch the showcase of psychology and neuro-fun delivered by Bruce Hood for this year's Royal Institute Christmas Lectures? If not, or if you want to see them again, they're available online via the RI's new Video Channel.

Channel 4 is currently broadcasting a series on neuroaesthetics called What Makes a Masterpiece? - the second episode airs tomorrow, 9.30pm on More4.

Are you already struggling with your new year's resolutions? The secret to success is more about averting your eyes than gritting your teeth. Jonah Lehrer riffs on a study of temptation covered here on the Digest last week.

There's still time to hear cricket star Freddie Flintoff speak to sportsmen and women about their experiences of depression. Freddie Flintoff: Hidden Side of Sport on iPlayer.

Nudging meets the smartphone age. A new app available in the US penalises you financially when you miss your gym sessions - and it rewards you when you do go.

There's a buzz around the Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It's about a rising star in baseball who suddenly experiences a catastrophic loss of form. Mike Atherton, writing for the Times, said the book "will keep sports psychologists in conversation for years". Here's the Guardian review.

The latest issue of the American Psychological Association's Monitor magazine is online and includes a feature on alternatives to one-on-one therapy.

Monitor also features a list of "psychology's growing library of podcasts".

On the subject of podcasts, something the Digest missed last year was Slate's series of podcasts on how to negotiate in your personal and working lives.

Children have never had it so good - Paul Flatters for the BBC offers a counter-balance to the "toxic childhood" camp.

"Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species", says the author of a new research paper looking at gender differences in personality.

Professor of Gambling Studies, psychologist Mark Griffiths, has started his own blog.

Worth a look? New book: The Locked Ward: The Memoir of a Psychiatric Orderly by Dennis O'Donnell.

Another new book I think you'll enjoy is The Optimism Bias by cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot. The Guardian published an extract.

If that wasn't enough, there's also Situations Matter: How Context Shapes Our Lives by psychologist Sam Sommers. Says Maria Popova on Brain Pickings, "Sommers fuses cognitive science with sociology and witty observation to pull into question what personhood means (cue in Christian Smith’s What Is a Person?) and illuminate the puppeteering power of situations over our lives."

Want to know what it feels like to have a 70-year-old body? MIT have created a full-body suit that lets you experience it for yourself.

The importance of penis panics to cultural psychiatry - Vaughan Bell explains all over at Mind Hacks.

National Geographic published a super feature on twin research, together with a wonderful photo essay.

The New York Times had a feature on the difficulties experienced by people caring for a partner who suffered a brain injury.

They also had a feature on the romantic relationship between two young people with Asperger's.

I have pictures on my walls of places I've lived in the past. This feature in the Atlantic helped me understand why: The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much.

_ _

Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Babies can tell whether you made a mistake or not from the tone of your voice

2012-01-13T08:58:00.000Z

For decades, psychologists have been trying to find out when and how children develop the ability to step outside of themselves and understand other people's minds. Piaget, the great Swiss developmental psychologist, had children study a model of the mountains around Geneva and describe what the scene would look like from another perspective. His results led him to conclude that children younger than about seven are stuck with an ego-centric perspective. Since then, with ever more ingenious techniques, psychologists have demonstrated that even infants as young as one year old have a rudimentary sense that other people have a mind, perspective and intentions of their own. Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik, for example, observed how 18-month-olds would choose to feed an adult disgusting broccoli, rather than yummy crackers, if they'd seen the adult enjoying the dreaded vegetable earlier.

Now Elena Sakkalou and Merideth Gattis have performed a study looking specifically at the role of prosody in the ability of infants to infer whether an adult intended to perform an action or made a mistake. Prosody refers to the sing-song, rise and fall of speech - its tempo and fluctuating pitch. It's the quality of speech we can hear through a wall or ceiling. We might not be able to distinguish any of our next-door neighbour's actual words, but we can still get a sense of the mood and emotion of what they're saying.

This study combines what we know about the importance of prosody to children's learning, with what we know about their emerging ability to think about other people's minds and intentions. For example, past research has shown how mothers use prosody to convey approval and prohibition, and that 5-month-olds smile more in response to the former.

Sakkalou and Gattis first replicated an earlier study by showing that infants aged 14 to 18-months can use an adult's vocal utterances, specifically including the words "There" vs. "Whoops", to infer whether they intended an action or not. Twenty-eight toddlers saw an experimenter perform two actions on a toy (for example, pushing it or rolling it), one of which was accompanied by the word "There" as if the action were intended; the other by "Whoops". Given a chance to handle the toy themselves, the infants were more likely to imitate the action that was accompanied by the word "There" - as if they knew that it had been a deliberate action.

Next, Sakkalou and Gattis analysed the prosody of the experimenter utterances: "There" and "Whoops". The former was characterised by higher amplitude, longer duration and falling pitch; the latter by a rising pitch contour. The earlier experiment was then replicated with 56 more toddlers (mean age 16 months), but this time the words "There" and "Whoops" were replaced with the Greek words "Nato" and "Ochi" (or vice versa). Crucially, the words signifying a mistake or intentional action were always delivered with the prosodic profile established earlier as being associated with a mistake or intended action. The toddlers were raised in English-speaking homes so there's no way they could have known the meaning of the words. Nonetheless, the toddlers older than 16 months still imitated more "intentional" actions than accidental actions on the toys, thus suggesting strongly they were able to use the way the words were said to infer which actions were intended and which were accidental.

It's important to note that the "mistake" vs. "intent" prosodic patterns in the current study do not map simply onto approval/ disapproval - they were more complex, which could explain why it was only the older toddlers who could interpret the difference. This fits with other research showing that infants' preference for different types of vocalisations changes as they develop, with older infants preferring prosodic patterns that direct their attention whereas younger infants prefer comforting prosody.

"We propose that infants' understanding of vocal patterns supports their growing understanding of intentions," Gattis told The Digest. "Together these two forms of understanding shape the development of imitation and communication."

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Sakkalou, E., and Gattis, M. (2012). Infants infer intentions from prosody. Cognitive Development, 27 (1), 1-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2011.08.003

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

2012-01-12T10:42:00.001Z

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

The Obama Presidency (Political Psychology).

Neuroscience focus on Addiction (Nature Reviews Neuroscience).

Sizes of Our Science (Perspectives on Psychological Science, special section).

Innovation in Theory and Research on Collective Action and Social Change (British Journal of Social Psychology).

Beliefs and Expectancies in Legal Decision Making (Psychology, Crime and Law).

Disease avoidance: from animals to culture (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B).

Advances in mixed methods in family psychology: Integrative and applied solutions for family science (Journal of Family Psychology, special section).

The Psychological Foundations of Strategic Management (Strategic Management Journal).

Self Modeling (Psychology in the Schools).

Neurocognitive Processing of the Chinese Language (Brain and Language).

Pre-term birth (Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews).

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Your memory of events is distorted within seconds

2012-01-11T09:02:00.001Z

Your memory automatically fills in the blanks in unfolding events

Memory isn't etched in neural stone. It's a creative process, sketched in sand. In one of the most dramatic demonstrations of this yet, Brent Strickland and Frank Keil have shown how people's memory for a video clip was distorted within seconds, to form a coherent episode "package". They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses "sophisticated compression routines ... for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory."

Fifty-eight uni students watched three types of 30-second video clip, each featuring a person kicking, throwing, putting or hitting a ball or shuttlecock. All videos were silent. One type of video ended with the consequences of the athletic action implied in the clip - for example, a football flying off into the distance. Another type lacked that final scene and ended instead with an irrelevant shot, for example of a linesman jogging down the line. The final video type was scrambled, with events unfolding in a jumbled order. Crucially, regardless of the video type, sometimes the moment of contact - for example, the kicker actually striking the ball - was shown and sometimes it wasn't.

After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn't featured in the video they'd just watched. Here's the main finding. Participants who watched the video type that climaxed with the ball (or shuttlecock etc) flying off into the distance were prone to saying they'd seen the causal moment of contact in the video, even when that particular image had in fact been missing.

In other words, because seeing the ball fly off implied that the kicker (or other protagonist) had struck the ball, the participants tended to invent a memory for having seen that causal action happen, even when they hadn't. This memory distortion happened within seconds, sometimes as soon as a second after the relevant part of the video had been seen.

This memory invention didn't happen for the videos that had an irrelevant ending, or that were scrambled. So memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence (e.g. a ball flying off into the distance) that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. In this case, the participants appeared to have "filled in" the missing moment of contact from the video, thus creating a causally coherent episode package for their memories. A similar level of memory invention didn't occur for other missing screen shots that had nothing to do with the implied causal action in the clip.

A second study replicated these memory distortion effects with 58 more participants and with new contexts involving kicking, throwing and bowling.

The researchers said their findings have obvious implications for crime scene witnesses. Imagine a witness sees a man wielding a gun, and imagine seconds later they also see a person nearby falling from a gunshot wound - these new results show how easily the mind of the witness could invent a memory of having seen the moment the trigger was actually pulled. "In some circumstances," the researchers said, "conceptual packaging can induce the perceiver to insert unseen information in order to fulfil structural requirements. This was the case in the present study."

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Strickland, B., and Keil, F. (2011). Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121 (3), 409-415 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.007

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Extras

2012-01-10T09:36:00.002Z

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

How many neurons do you REALLY have? Some dogmas of quantitative neuroscience.

Smiley faces are perceived to be brighter, literally.

Don't tell Sarkozy - people in power overestimate their own height.

Neural correlates of body-size overestimation in eating disorder patients.

Adopting a star-shaped power posture boosts pain tolerance, as does interacting with someone else who's in a submissive posture.

Brain regions with mirror properties: A meta-analysis of 125 human fMRI studies.

The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out?

Depressed participants made better decisions than healthy controls and those recovering from depression.

Hey Benton! Benton! How dogs know when communication is intended for them.

Men who view pornography are significantly less likely to intervene as a bystander (in potential rape situations).

Participants performed better on cognitive and sensor-motor tasks when partnered with a person they knew was homosexual, as compared with participants partnered with someone whose sexual orientation they didn't know.

Creativity has a dark side - people who are more creative tend to be more dishonest.

Do nice guys and gals really finish last? Links between agreeableness and income.

Media hype about neuro-enhancing drugs.

Unhappy moods trigger mind-wandering about the past.

"Torture at Yale": Milgram misrepresented (a) the extent of his debriefing procedures, (b) the risk posed by the experiment, and (c) the harm done to his participants.

Google Calendar as a memory rehab aid for brain damaged patients.

Can brain activity when viewing a picture of your mother be used as a test for depression?

_________________________________

Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Trainees in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy underestimate their therapeutic skills

2012-01-09T13:48:00.000Z

For psychotherapists, the research literature can sometimes make for uncomfortable reading. Yes, most people benefit from therapy, but other findings are less welcome, such as that therapeutic outcomes are unrelated to therapist experience, and that therapists tend to overestimate their skills.

A new study of trainee cognitive behavioural therapists bucks this trend. Freda McManus and a her team have found that several dozen trainee CBT therapists tended to underestimate, not overestimate, how good they were at conducting CBT therapy.

Finding out how accurate therapists are at judging their own skills is important because quality control in therapy often relies on therapists seeking out extra help and supervision when they think they need it.

The new data come from 26 trainees enrolled on the Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and 38 trainees enrolled on the MSc in Advanced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - both courses are at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre. The Diploma and MSc students submitted two to six video recordings of therapy sessions they'd conducted. They watched these tapes themselves and rated their own performances. These self ratings were then compared against ratings provided by expert supervisors on the training courses.

Overall the trainees tended to underestimate their skills as compared with ratings provided by their supervisors. Splitting the trainees into two groups - more and less competent - it was the more competent trainees who tended to underestimate themselves. The less competent trainees' self ratings didn't differ from the ratings they received from supervisors.

"These results are encouraging in suggesting that CBT therapists may be less susceptible to over-estimation of their competence than has been previously reported," the researchers said, "which is likely to have benefits for the delivery of CBT interventions in routine clinical practice."

Why would trainees be underestimating their skills? One explanation lies in a concept known as "defensive pessimism" - a way for high performers to ensure they still receive support and remain motivated to improve their standards. Potentially this is a good thing for clients, but the trainees could suffer in terms of job satisfaction and morale.

There are some question marks over the new findings. For example, the rating scale that was used to assess CBT performance (the Cognitive Therapy Scale) is known to be rather unreliable. Also, it's possible that the supervisors' ratings were lenient so as not to demoralise their students. A strength of the study is that the participants were not self-selected - they were all obliged to submit their therapy recordings. By contrast, an earlier study that reported over-confidence in CBT therapists was a highly selective sample obtained by inviting participation. It's possible that sample may have been biased towards particularly over-confident therapists.
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McManus, F., Rakovshik, S., Kennerley, H., Fennell, M., & Westbrook, D. (2011). An investigation of the accuracy of therapists’ self-assessment of cognitive-behaviour therapy skills. British Journal of Clinical Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.2011.02028.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own

2012-01-06T08:52:00.000Z

Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists.

Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various scenarios. This included whether or not they or others would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or boring videos); having anonymity. Whilst some of the students predicted how they and others would behave in these situations, other students were actually placed in these circumstances and their behaviour was recorded. The predictions were then compared against the reality.

When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd "lay psychologists" and took situational factors into account. For example, in reality, people were 27 per cent less likely to help clear up the jigsaw when in a group than when alone. When predicting other people's behaviour, the students anticipated this: they said their peers would be 22 per cent less likely to help when in a group. When predicting their own behaviour, however, they didn't think it would make any difference whether they were in a group or alone.

It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating. In reality, students provoked into a bad mood gave 23 per cent less money to charity. And students given the cloak of anonymity cheated more. The students in the predicting role anticipated these situational effects (although they underestimated them) when considering the behaviour of their peers, yet they imagined that their own behaviour would be immune. They thought they'd give just as much money whether in a good or bad mood, and be just as likely to cheat, or not, regardless of whether they had the benefit of anonymity.

Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own altruism (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people's altruism more reliably. This is consonant with a mountain of past research showing that we tend to assess ourselves in an unrealistically favourable light.

"The good news," Balcetis and Dunning concluded, "is that people display some level of insight into the ability of situational variations to shape potential actions that their peers will choose. The bad news is that people fail to realise, or choose not to realise, that this knowledge should be applied to predictions of their own behaviour as well."
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Balcetis, E., and Dunning, D. (2011). Considering the situation: Why people are better social psychologists than self-psychologists. Self and Identity, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2011.617886

See also: We're unable to read our own body language (earlier Digest post).
Strangers to ourselves (Psychologist magazine article).

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Want to feel more powerful? Do a Barry White impression

2012-01-05T08:58:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When therapists have the hots for their clients

2012-01-04T09:30:00.000Z

The fictional Dr Weston
(played by Gabriel Byrne)
experiences lust for a client

Clients go to psychotherapy seeking a mind massage, but all too often things turn physical. Cases of inappropriate sexual contact in psychotherapy average around 10 per cent prevalence, and a 2006 survey of hundreds of psychotherapists found that nearly 90 per cent reported having been sexually attracted to a client on at least one occasion. It's an issue dramatised artfully in the HBO series In Treatment, which follows the life and work of psychotherapist Dr Paul Weston.

A new paper by clinical psychologist Carol Martin and colleagues discusses how therapists deal with these awkward feelings. The researchers interviewed 13 psychotherapists (7 men), including 2 clinical psychologists and 2 psychoanalysts, in-depth about times they'd been attracted to a client but had stopped themselves acting on those urges.

The results can be broken down into three categories: the therapists' general views about being attracted to clients; the effective coping processes that therapists went through on realising they were attracted to a client; and harmful ways of coping.

The therapists were generally of the view that sexual attraction to clients was normal and not necessarily harmful. However, views differed on exactly where the boundaries should lie. For example, some therapists condoned fantasising about clients whereas others did not.

Effective ways of coping involved the following processes, though not always in order: noting the attraction, which was often accompanied by feelings of anxiety or unease; facing up to the feelings, which often involved managing shame and embarrassment; reflecting on the attraction, including the relevance of the therapist's own past; processing the feelings, including considering the implications of the situation; and finally formulating a way forward that would be to the client's benefit.

Harmful ways of coping included: clumsily reinforcing therapeutic boundaries, which often left the client feeling rejected and to premature ending of therapy; taking a moralising or omnipotent stance, including implying that the client had inappropriate feelings; feeling needy ("... it seems inevitable that being single ... you imagine those 'what if' questions, if we'd met elsewhere ...", said one male, middle-aged therapist); over-identifying with the client (one therapist talked of feelings of "yearning and anguish" after therapy ended; another spoke of being overwhelmed by a client's pain and extending therapy sessions to cope); and finally responding with over-protective anxiety, including offering support that they didn't usually offer, including allowing meetings between sessions, touch, hugging and sharing of personal information.

Martin and her team said that none of what they'd heard in the interviews constituted a boundary violation so severe that they had to blow the whistle on any of their participants (participants were warned that this would happen where appropriate). However, the researchers said the results showed that "even among experienced, accredited practitioners, sexuality and sexual feelings commonly intrude into the therapeutic encounter and required management for client benefit."

Every therapist may be vulnerable to practising in ways that they later regret, the researchers concluded, especially at times of personal stress or difficulty. "The framework and typology of common problematic reactions developed through this study has potential value in training and supervision for sensitising practitioners to the issues early on, and in maximising therapeutic benefit," they said.

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Martin, C., Godfrey, M., Meekums, B., and Madill, A. (2011). Managing boundaries under pressure: A qualitative study of therapists’ experiences of sexual attraction in therapy. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 11 (4), 248-256 DOI: 10.1080/14733145.2010.519045

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Already struggling to keep New Year resolutions? Here's the first detailed study of daily temptation and resistance

2012-01-03T09:07:00.000Z

There it is, posing. A small, perfectly formed chocolate. The diminutive trouble-maker causes you angst. You adore chocolate, but you're battling to lose weight. Immediate longing clashes against a longer-term goal. Just how often are we torn in this way? And how often are we able to resist?

To find out, Wilhelm Hofmann and his colleagues equipped 205 participants (66 per cent female, average age 25; mostly students, but also the general public) in Würzburg, Germany with Blackberry smartphones. For seven days, the participants were beeped seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a desire now or in the preceding 30 minutes. The participants noted what their desire(s) was, how keenly it was felt, whether it caused internal conflict, whether they attempted to resist it, their success, as well as who they were with and where they were. Data was also collected on the participants' personalities.

"To our knowledge," the researchers said, "this study is the first one that has used experience sampling methods to map the course of desire and self-control in everyday life."

Here are some of the basic findings. The participants were experiencing a desire on about half the times they were beeped. Most often (28 per cent) this was hunger. Other common urges were related to: sleep (10 per cent), thirst (9 per cent), media use (8 per cent), social contact (7 per cent), sex (5 per cent), and coffee (3 per cent). About half of these desires were described as causing internal conflict, and an attempt was made to actively resist about 40 per cent of them. Desires that caused conflict were more likely to prompt an attempt at active self-constraint. Such resistance was often effective. In the absence of resistance, 70 per cent of desires were consummated; with resistance this fell to 17 per cent.

"Inner conflict is a frequent feature of daily life," the researchers said. "The findings suggest that self-regulation is needed many times in a typical day, because conflicts are frequent."

Strong desires and weak desires were just as likely to provoke an attempt at self-restaint, but as you'd expect, it was strong desires that were least likely to be constrained. However, even desires rated by participants as "irresistible" were often successfully controlled.

Broadly speaking, personality traits were related to participants' experience of desire and conflict, whereas environmental factors, such as the company of others, had a bearing on whether those desires were enacted and/or resisted.

For example, people who scored highly on a measure of trait self-control had just as many desires, but they were less likely to report experiencing internal conflict; their desires were generally weaker; and they attempted to resist them less often. These findings are revealing. It's not that people with high self-control have saintly willpower, it seems. Rather, they seem to avoid putting themselves in situations in which they are exposed to problematic temptations. "The result is not a desire-free life," the researchers said. "Au contraire, the result appears to be that they mainly have desires that they can satisfy."

Other relevant personality factors included perfectionism (associated with strong desires, high conflict and frequent resistance) and narcissism, which was associated with less conflict - these people felt they were entitled to their desires.

As for environmental factors: being highly inebriated weakened resistance to desires; desires were felt more strongly; and they also led to more internal conflict. The presence of other people, meanwhile, increased people's ability to resist conflict-inducing desires - perhaps because of the fear of disapproval, or maybe other people's help was sought to fight temptation. Company also led to fewer desires being consummated, even ones that weren't resisted. But there was an exception to this - if other people were engaging in the desired behaviour, then this had the effect of weakening resistance and made it more likely that the desire would be fulfilled. Finally, when at work, desire provoked inner conflict more than it did in any other context.

"Our findings suggest that desire is a common, recurrent theme in the daily lives of modern citizens," Hofmann and his team concluded. " ... everyday life may be an ongoing drama in which inner factors set the stage for motivation and conflict, while external factors contribute to how well people manage to resist and enact their current wants and longings."

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Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R., Förster, G., and Vohs, K. (2011). Everyday temptations: An experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0026545

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Do Northerners really feel the cold less?

2011-12-28T13:37:00.001Z

In Britain, we all know the stereotype of hardy Northerners: out on the town on a Winter's night, arms and legs bare, seemingly oblivious to the cold. But do people up North really feel the cold less? According to a report in yesterday's Times newspaper by Paul Simons, an ongoing survey is aiming to find out. Initial results from this research by the Met Office and Open Air Laboratories suggests that people feel the cold just as much regardless of which region they live in. Moreover, contrary to the myth, there's some evidence that Northerners are more likely to change their clothing than Southerners, be that for warmth or to be cooler. Another emerging finding is a rural/urban divide, with rural folk being more likely to don coats in colder weather. "Whether this is due to an urban climate is difficult to say," Simons writes, "but towns and cities can generate their own microclimates which affect temperature."

Link to the research on people's response to the cold (there's still time to take part)
Link to Times article "Weather Eye: northerners vs southerners" (subscription required)

The top-5 most popular posts on the Digest this year

2011-12-22T17:29:00.001Z

I've reported on well over a hundred psychology studies this year, as well as publishing a variety of other posts and guest features. Can you guess which were the most popular, in terms of web-clicks?

Here are the Digest top 5 posts for 2011:

How walking through a doorway increases forgetting? (over 39,000 page views so far!) This study, by Gabriel Radvansky at the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues, showed how walking through a doorway creates an episode boundary in our memories.

Toddlers won't bother learning from you if you're daft (over 11,000 page views so far) Diane Poulin-Dubois and her team at Concordia University demonstrated that children as young as 14 months are discerning in who they learn from. Many infant participants didn't bother copying the behaviour of an adult who had previously acted surprised for no reason.

The books and journal articles all psychologists should read (over 10,000 page views to date) The one-on-one series of interviews with leading psychologists in The Psychologist magazine includes a challenge to name one book or journal article that all psychologists should read. This post gathers all the answers together in one place.

Psychology to the rescue (over 9,000 page views to date) This post is the "menu" for our anniversary feature in which psychologists shared their experiences of using psychology in real life. A selection also appear in this month's (Jan 2012) issue of The Psychologist.

Is it time to rethink the way university lectures are delivered? (over 8,000 page views so far) Physics students enrolled on a week-long course of unconventional lectures, including group discussions, quizzes, mutual critiquing, instructor feedback and clicker questions, showed a dramatic improvement in their academic performance, and far greater engagement, as compared to a control group of their peers who sat and listened passively to a highly skilled lecturer.

Are you surprised that these were the most popular Digest posts? Which were your favourites this year? If you like, you can use the archive menu at the top of the right-hand column to browse through the year's posts. Merry Christmas!

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Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How our collective memory of 1066 could be souring Anglo-French relations

2011-12-21T10:15:00.000Z

Anglo-Saxon troops confront the invaders

No doubt you've noticed that the Entente Cordiale has been looking a little strained lately. That's mostly due to contemporary European politics and economics. Isn't it? We can't blame 1066. Can we?

In fact, British attitudes towards the French today probably aren't helped by memories and myths surrounding the Norman Conquest. This may seem like an odd claim, but a timely and intriguing new study focuses on the Norman Conquest of Britain as an example of a "distant memory" that could be affecting contemporary attitudes towards the French specifically, and towards immigrants more generally. Where psychologists usually study short-term or autobiographical memory in individuals, this study is an academic investigation of our collective or cultural memory.

Siobhan Brownlie's data comes from two main sources: a search of Norman Conquest mentions in ten British newspapers between 2005 and 2008 (she found 807 relevant articles) and a survey of 2,179 members of the UK population.

Our collective memory of 1066 is salient - 79 per cent of survey participants said the conquest was important - but it is also distorted by mythology. For example, many of us identify with the pre-invasion "Anglo-Saxon" population (DNA research exposes the fallacy of this belief), yet paradoxically we also see the Norman invasion and Norman buildings as part of our collective British identity. Many of us (18 per cent in the survey) see the Norman invaders as French, yet Normandy at the time was an independent territory with a distinct identity.

Unlike recent trauma memories, which are overwhelmingly negative, Brownlie said the emotional quality of distant memories, even for violent events, is far more flexible and varied. Forty-nine per cent of those surveyed had a neutral attitude towards the Norman invasion. Newspaper coverage also demonstrated ambivalence. Sometimes the Conquest was portrayed negatively, alongside other violent dates; and right-wing papers implied we shouldn't lose control of immigration as we did in 1066. Yet other times, 1066 was portrayed proudly as a foundation date of British identity.

What about the impact on contemporary attitudes? Of those survey participants (6 per cent) who had a negative attitude towards the Norman Conquest, 25 per cent said this contributed to their negative feelings towards the French today. Brownlie acknowledged this seems to suggest that the influence of 1066-attitudes on contemporary views is a "marginal phenomenon". However, she argued that those raw stats expose only the extent to which the influence is consciously recognised.

From a negative perspective, Brownlie sees echoes of the Norman conquest in British National Party literature. Where medieval chroniclers of the Conquest wrote about England becoming a "dwelling-place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood," the BNP literature says similarly: "The white working class has been abandoned, replaced, and displaced by a new ethnic electoral power base."

But memories of the Norman Conquest can also be invoked for positive symbolism. The monument at the British war cemetery in Bayeux says in Latin: "We who were conquered by William have liberated the homeland of the conqueror" (again we find the myths about our Anglo-Saxon roots and the Frenchness of the Normans, but this time in a positive message).

"Old enemies can become friends and allies," Brownlie writes. "This kind of message with specific reference to the Norman Conquest is found in friendly political speeches by French and British politicians and dignitaries ... ".

"In sum," Brownlie concludes, "from the BNP manifesto to the Second World War British cemetery in Bayeux, the study shows that memory of the distant past matters today, in profound and sometimes surprising ways."
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Brownlie, S. (2011). Does memory of the distant past matter? Remediating the Norman Conquest. Memory Studies DOI: 10.1177/1750698011426358

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Our Xmas special: gift psychology and psychology gifts

2011-12-19T16:44:00.001Z

Psychology-themed gifts:

Inception DVD - Jungian symbolism, action adventure and Leonardo DiCaprio!

A subscription to Scientific American Mind magazine.

"I'm statistically significant" and other stats-themed t-shirts.

Memento DVD - the best amnesia movie that we can remember.

The Force Trainer - Become a Jedi: wireless headset interprets your brainwaves and moves an object.

"Connect it" brain/usb t-shirt.

Mindflex brainwave game - go head to head with a friend.

A subscription to The Psychologist magazine.

Serotonin necklace.

Freudian slippers.

Dopamine t-shirt.

Inflatable brain.

Ramon y Cajal t-shirt.

Make a donation to Mind - the UK's leading mental health charity.

The best psychology books of 2011 (and there's always the new Rough Guide to Psychology by the editor of the Research Digest!)

Gift-giving research

If in doubt, give them what they want. A study published this year suggested people prefer receiving what they asked for, rather than a surprise gift.

Don't bundle your gifts. Gift receivers rate a single high-value gift more positively than a big gift bundled with a stocking filler.

This study, from 2002, found that money was a poor gift because it doesn't convey meaningful information about intimacy and can send the wrong message about the relative status between gift giver and receiver.

Be careful when buying a gift for your man. A study from 2008 found that men responded to dud gifts more negatively than women.

Given the choice, people seem to prefer receiving gifts of plenty and practicality over exclusivity.

Finally, don't forget to say thank you, even if you don't like the gift you've been given.

Merry Christmas!
--
Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest. Many of the gift ideas were found via mindhacks.com

You're more likely to catch a yawn from a relative than a stranger

2011-12-19T09:54:00.000Z

Reading this blog post is likely to make you yawn. Not, hopefully, because it's boring, but rather because yawning is so contagious that even reading about it has been shown to provoke the behaviour. A popular theory for how yawns spread is that they automatically engage the empathy systems in our brains. Consistent with this, past research found that children with autism, some of whom have difficulty empathising, are immune to the contagious effects of yawns.

Now Ivan Norscia and Elisabetta Palagi have developed this line of enquiry, showing that we're more likely to catch a yawn from relatives than acquaintances, and more likely to catch them from acquaintances than strangers - presumably because we have more empathy for people with whom we're emotionally intimate.

The study was entirely observational. The researchers hung out in offices, restaurants, and waiting rooms and observed discreetly the yawning behaviour of the people about them. If one person yawned, the researchers waited to see if anyone else present yawned within the next three minutes. Data from one researcher was lost because they also caught the yawns and fell asleep (not really, I made that up). Sometimes the researchers knew the relationships of the people they were watching, other times they eavesdropped Bond-style on conversations to discern the social ties.

Of all the factors the researchers looked at, including things like the situational context and whether the yawner and their company were of the same nationality, it was only emotional closeness that was relevant. The closer, relationship-wise, a person was to the initial yawner, the more likely they were to yawn themselves. Emotional closeness was also associated with the number of times a yawn-catcher yawned, and the promptness with which they did so after being exposed to the precipitating yawn. Consonant with past research, it didn't matter if that precipitating yawn was seen or heard (one earlier study found that yawns are contagious even when they're "seen" non-consciously by people with damage to the visual part of their brains).

"The importance of social bond in shaping yawn contagion demonstrates that empathy plays a leading role in the modulation of this phenomenon," the researchers said. "Not only is contagion greater between familiar individuals, but it also follows an empathic gradient, increasing from strangers to kin-related individuals."

It's a hard life

Contagious yawning is also seen in monkeys and great apes. Indeed, this new study replicates similar findings with chimps, where the yawn contagion is greater between group members, and findings with baboons, for whom yawns are more often caught from intimate yawners (where intimacy is discerned from rates of mutual grooming). "When considered together," the researchers concluded, "these results suggest that the relationship between yawn contagion and empathy may have developed earlier than the last common ancestor between monkeys, humans and non-human apes."
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Norscia, I., and Palagi, E. (2011). Yawn Contagion and Empathy in Homo sapiens PLoS ONE, 6 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028472

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Two chances to win the BPS-approved Psychopathology textbook by Graham Davey

2011-12-19T09:02:00.000Z

update 23 Jan: This competition is now closed.

update 12 Jan 2012 12.15 hrs: We still don't have our second winner! OK - simply RT the Digest's Twitter message about this competition today and I'll pick a winner at random at the end of the day. Good luck.

update 9 Jan 2012, 10.22 hrs: The rules of the competition have been relaxed. There's still one copy left to win. Now you need only have someone with more than 50,000 followers retweet you mentioning @researchdigest and #psychopathologycomp. The winner themselves must have fewer than 50,000 followers. Let me know (via @researchdigest) if you succeed. The first person to succeed, and inform me they've done so, will win the book. Good luck!

update 19 Dec, 13.50hrs: one copy still left to be won.

We've got two copies of the BPS-approved textbook Psychopathology by Graham Davey to give away, kindly donated to us by Wiley-Blackwell.

How to win
This competition challenges your influence on Twitter. Your task is to get someone with a verified Twitter account to retweet (~~old style~~ new or old style) you mentioning @researchdigest and #psychopathologycomp. The first two people to achieve this goal will win a copy of the book. Make sure you tweet us (@researchdigest) when you think you've succeeded. Good luck!

Small print

Sorry, on this occasion, holders of verified Twitter accounts cannot win the book for themselves.