BPS Research Digest

Simple fist-squeezing procedure helps athletes avoid choking under pressure

2013-06-19T15:09:00.001+01:00

The next time you're faced with a high-pressure situation in sport, try squeezing your left fist tight for thirty seconds. According to a team of German sports psychologists, doing so will activate your right hemisphere, aiding automatic, skilled performance and preventing choking under pressure, which they say is linked with left-hemisphere activity, excess self-focus and conscious deliberation.

Jurgen Beckmann and his colleagues tested their intervention across three studies. In the first, 30 semi-professional footballers aimed penalty kicks at holes in a wall. They did this in a low-pressure situation then competitively in front of a crowd. The fist squeezing was described to participants as a way to boost concentration. Kickers who squeezed a soft ball in their right fist for thirty seconds prior to the high-pressure situation choked - their performance dipped compared with the no pressure situation. By contrast, the competitors who squeezed their left fist showed no evidence of choking.

It was a similar story with 20 Taekwondo practitioners who performed kick combinations in a relaxed context and then again in a filmed high-pressure situation. Those fighters who squeezed a ball with their right fist prior to the high-pressure challenge showed evidence of choking. By contrast, those who squeezed a ball with their left fist actually showed improved performance.

The last study involved badminton players performing serves. This time there were three stages - relaxed context, high pressure, and high pressure plus fist tightening. All players showed evidence of choking in the first high pressure situation, but then players who squeezed their left fist prior to the second high-pressure challenge showed a return to normal performance levels while those who squeezed their right fist continued to choke.

Beckmann and his colleagues said their "hemisphere specific priming" intervention has practical applications for athletes. "Squeezing the left hand before performing a task under pressure may become a useful part of pre-performance routines in addition to imagination, deep breathing, or cue words."

These results are certainly intriguing but it seems amazing that such a simple task could have such profound effects (in statistical terms, the effect sizes were large). Scrutinising the methodology, the most serious problem seems to be a lack of blinding. It sounds from the researchers' descriptions as though the person instructing participants knew the purpose and rationale of the study, so it's possible their expectations about left-fist squeezing may have influenced the performers (a study last year showed how important these effects can be). It's also a shame there wasn't a no-squeeze control group.

There must also be question marks over the theory underlying this study. Beckmann's group said there is "a large body of research that shows enhanced right-hemisphere activity facilitates skilled performance." But I looked up a couple of references they cited - including EEG studies with archers and marksmen - and these showed correlations between hemispheric activity and performance, not causal effects. It's also important to remember this study didn't even measure brain activity, so the researchers are asking us to take quite a leap of faith in believing their explanation of the results. I think they realise this. "The exact mechanism underlying the effect of hemisphere-specific priming is still unknown," they wrote.

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Beckmann, J., Gröpel, P., and Ehrlenspiel, F. (2013). Preventing Motor Skill Failure Through Hemisphere-Specific Priming: Cases From Choking Under Pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0029852

--Further reading--
A study published in April that linked fist squeezing with memory performance came in for some serious peer criticism.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image credit: zirac

What stereotypes do Europeans of today hold about men and women's intuition?

2013-06-17T07:42:00.000+01:00

"She works by intuition and feeling;" wrote the US psychologist G. Stanley Hall of the typical woman, "fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater intensity [than in men]."

That was in 1904. Fast forward a hundred years, what beliefs do modern-day Europeans still hold about the intuition of men and women? Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues surveyed 1016 men and women in Germany and 1002 in Spain to find out.

Overall, the participants didn't see either sex as having more intuition than the other. But that's because they held stereotypes about the intuitive strengths of the sexes in different domains. In both Germany and Spain, the majority of participants believed that women's intuitions are better when it comes to personal life. For instance, 63 per cent of Germans believed that women's intuitions about choosing the right romantic partner are superior (and the figures were almost identical in Spain). Gigerenzer's team said there could be some validity to a related stereotype held by their participants: the idea that women are better at understanding other people's intentions. After all, there is evidence, the researchers said, that women are better at recognising emotional displays than men.

In relation to intuitions in a "professional social context", there was no overall sex-related stereotype about leadership intuition (this may also be an accurate reflection of fact, since studies show companies with more women in leadership positions do at least as well, if not better, than those with fewer women). Both countries showed a weak preference for believing that men have a better intuition for choosing a business partner and in politics.

Beliefs about intuitions in the last domain of "professional individual tasks" were stronger and exposed the greatest differences between the countries. In Spain, the majority of men and women believed that the sexes have equally good intuition for scientific discoveries; in contrast, in Germany only one third felt the same, with most people favouring men. This study can't speak to cause and effect, but it's notable that a greater percentage of scientists in Spain are female.

Participants in both countries also endorsed the stereotype that men have better intuition for dangerous situations, but this was almost entirely down the beliefs held by men! In both countries, men and women further endorsed the stereotype that men have better intuition for investing in stocks. This actually flies in the face of research that has found women to be more effective at portfolio investment.

Across the whole study there was evidence of in-group bias - men and women tended to attribute more credit to the intuition of their own sex. Intriguingly, there was no difference in beliefs with age group. This led the researchers to suppose that people's beliefs about the intuitive skills of the sexes is based on the current social context rather than the past. If the past had had more influence you'd expect older participants to endorse more traditional stereotypes.

Related to this, it was curious that gender-stereotypes were more often endorsed in Germany even though this country has been a liberal democracy for longer than Spain and is said to value gender-egalitarianism more strongly. The researchers said this may reflect the fact that Spain is catching up fast and maybe even overtaking Germany. We already discussed Spain's female advantage in science. Despite Germany having a female Chancellor, it's also a fact that there is a larger percentage of female politicians in Spain.

All all in all Gigerenzer and his team concluded their study shows "widespread stereotypes about men's and women's intuitions still exist even a century after the first president of the American Psychological Association made his infamous statement."

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Gigerenzer, G., Galesic, M., and Garcia-Retamero, R. (2013). Stereotypes About Men's and Women's Intuitions: A Study of Two Nations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology DOI: 10.1177/0022022113487074

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

Link feast

2013-06-14T12:03:00.001+01:00

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

1. The fascinating story of how fall out from Cold War atomic bomb tests has helped, decades later, to settle the debate over whether or not adult brains can grow new neurons. The new findings suggest that more than 1400 new neurons are added to the adult hippocampus every day!

2. How do people survive solitary confinement? Also the focus of this afternoon's (3.30BST) episode of The Truth About Mental Health on BBC World Service.

3. How much consciousness does an iPhone have? Interesting blog post on phi - a way of measuring consciousness. But it's a cheeky headline - iPhones are barely mentioned in the article.

4. Michael Jackson was a paradox - the world's greatest showman and yet so bashful in person. Scott Barry Kaufman, author of a new book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, explains that such a contradictory personality is actually common place among creative people.

5. Ever get that feeling that, no matter how much practice you put in, your progress seems to have stalled? I found this post over at 99U really inspiring: 3 Tips on Overcoming Learning Plateaus.

6. BBC Radio 4 started a new series of Frontiers this week, featuring scientists who are building brains from scratch. ""I believe these cultures are half-way to having a mind," says neuroengineer Steve Potter.

7. With all the recent talk about the need for replications in psychology and better rules about the storage and sharing of data, cognitive psychologist Rolf Zwaan urges us not to forget the value of weirdness and wackiness in science. Interesting post, but it felt like a bit of a false dichotomy to me. Surely science can be open, replicable and wacky.

8. This is your brain on coffee.

9. Need a gift idea for the neuroscientist in your life? - neuroscience dress featuring retinal ganglion cells (ht @vaughanbell)

10. Psychology confirms what Jerry Seinfeld knew - we'd enjoy restaurant meals more if we could pay for them in advance. Fun and interesting blog post by Dave Nussbaum based on a new book Happy Money.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

A preliminary psychology of "keeping it real"

2013-06-13T09:46:00.002+01:00

Keeping it real often means hanging out

From Ancient Greek philosophy to humanistic psychology to modern day rap songs, there's a long tradition of espousing the benefits of being true to yourself or "keeping it real". Despite this interest, a new study by Alison Lenton and colleagues is one of the first to investigate what being true to oneself actually feels like, how often it happens and in what circumstances.

Lenton and her colleagues began by surveying 104 participants (average age 35; 66 women) on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MT) website that pays people for completing tasks online. The participants said they experienced a state of authenticity one to two times per week, and experienced inauthenticity nearly every two months. They were strongly motivated (5.8 on a scale of 1 to 7) to be their true selves and similarly motivated to avoid inauthenticity (5.2 on the same scale). The state of being true to oneself was different from the personality trait of being a "genuine person" - people reported experiencing both authenticity and inauthenticity regardless of their personality.

Hundreds of people were also recruited to write about either a time they'd felt most true to themselves, or a time they felt like they were being fake. Experiences of self authenticity tended to involve fun, familiar places or people, close others, helping someone or being creative. They were also associated with "low arousal" positive emotions like contentment and calmness, and the fulfilment of personal needs, especially self-esteem, relatedness to others and autonomy. "I was with my girlfriend and three best friends and we stayed there [at the millpond in Cambridge] late drinking, chilling out, and talking about our lives and childhoods," said one participant. "I was really happy at that moment in life and felt relaxed, honest, that nothing else mattered or would ever change."

Episodes of inauthenticity, by contrast, were associated with difficult events, being evaluated by others, demonstrating a lack of social competence, feeling isolated, failing one's own standards and feeling ill. The "signature" emotion of being phoney was anxiety, and there was a sense of failing to fulfil any personal needs. "The buildings were completely unrecognisable as were the people," said one person of their first day at uni. "I felt as though I was alone and had lost my sense of self."

One particularly intriguing finding - participants describing a time they'd felt authentic, as opposed to phoney, tended to say the experience overlapped far more with their ideal self. There's an obvious contradiction here. If they were being themselves, how come they resembled their ideal self, which is likely to be influenced by social expectations? One possibility is that what we really mean by "be true to yourself" is "be the person you want to be".

This recalls an intriguing study published in 2010, in which people reported feeling more authentic when they were behaving in an extraverted, agreeable and open-minded way, regardless of whether this matched their own personality. Behaving this way usually means certain needs are being met, including closeness with others and being competent. Another possibility, then, is that by "keeping it real" we really mean - satisfy the basic human desire to connect with others and be a creative, good person.

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Lenton, A., Bruder, M., Slabu, L., & Sedikides, C. (2013). How Does “Being Real” Feel? The Experience of State Authenticity. Journal of Personality, 81 (3), 276-289 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2012.00805.x

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

The Special Issue Spotter

2013-06-12T09:39:00.001+01:00

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

Anxiety disorders (Clinical Psychologist).

Open-access journal publishing in psychology (Psychological Inquiry). open access

Resilience in child development (The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry).

Exploring Cognitive Readiness in Complex Operational Environments (Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making).

Disgust (Psychological Bulletin).

Neuroscience of sleep (Nature).

Cognitive science approach to developmental disorders (Japanese Psychological Research).

Mapping the brain (Nature). open access

Styles, approaches, and patterns in student learning (British Journal of Educational Psychology).

Bullying - a social influence perspective (Social Influence).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

LEGO figures are getting angrier

2013-06-11T09:05:00.003+01:00

Nevermind increasingly violent video games or the ever-present danger of an uncensored internet, a far more insidious and unexpected change is afoot that could be affecting our children's emotional development. Researchers have discovered that the faces on LEGO Minifigures are becoming increasingly angry and less happy. Combined with a trend towards more combat-related LEGO themes, a team led by Christoph Bartneck at the University of Canterbury said "we cannot help but wonder how ... this impacts how children play."

The influence of LEGO is immense. The product is sold in more than 130 countries and the company produced more than 36 billion bricks in 2010 alone. The researchers state that on average each person on earth owns approximately 75 bricks.

Standing exactly four bricks high, the LEGO Minifigure was launched in 1975 with a standard enigmatic smile and yellow skin. In 1989, different facial expressions appeared; different skin colours debuted in 2003; and in 2010 the Minifigures started to be sold independently of other LEGO sets. Around 4 billion Minifigures have been sold worldwide.

Bartneck obtained images of all 3655 Minifigure types manufactured by LEGO between 1975 and 2010. The 628 different heads on these figures were then shown to 264 adult participants recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk online survey website. The participants' task was to categorise the emotions on the heads in terms of the six main human emotions, and to rate their intensity.

There was ambiguity in the faces - each received an average of 3.9 emotion labels. Looking at historical trends - there was a massive increase in the variety of emotional expressions from early 1990s onwards, a process that continued up to 2010. The vast majority of figures have happy faces (324), but the next most common is angry (192), followed by sadness (49), disgust (28), surprise (23) and fear (11). And the trend is for an increasing proportion of angry faces, with a concomitant reduction in happy faces.

The presence of a body changed the way faces were perceived in different ways depending on the emotion in question. For instance, a body tended to increase ratings for anger and happiness but reduce ratings for disgust and sadness. Skin colour made no difference.

Bartneck's team also observed that "LEGO has a considerable array of weapon systems in their program" and that the company "is moving towards more conflict based play themes." Together with the rising prevalence of angry faces, the researchers warned that LEGO "might not be able to hold onto its highly positive reputation. The children that grow up with LEGO today will remember not only smileys, but also anger and fear in the Minifigures' faces."

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C Bartneck, M Obaid, & K Zawieska (2013). Agents with faces - What can we learn from LEGO Minifigures? [pdf] Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (iHAI 2013), Sappor, Japan. ht @jonmsutton

--Further reading--
When psychologists become builders ... Where psychology and LEGO intersect.
Mother-toddler play-time is more interactive and educational with old-fashioned toys
Live animals versus fancy toys - which do toddlers prefer?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image credit Jon Sutton

Shining a light on the intuition of homicide detectives

2013-06-10T09:32:00.001+01:00

"Just one more thing ..."

Dishevelled, diminutive and deep in thought, the TV detective Columbo would often bring a cigar-bearing hand to his forehead. You could almost hear the cogs whirring. Like so many other fictional detectives he had a brilliant intuitive sense, largely mysterious, almost magical. The same can be said for the puzzle-solving skills of real-life homicide detectives, whose thought processes have received little research attention. Now psychologist Michelle Wright has shone a light on detective intuition in a new study using photographs from twenty real-life solved murder scenes featuring victims who'd been beaten, stabbed, strangled or shot.

Wright asked 40 experienced UK detectives (aged 36 to 59; one woman) to look at the photos and sort them into groups, "so that all the crime scenes in a group are similar to each other in some way but different from those in another group." As they sorted the photos, the detectives were asked to speak their thoughts out loud. The task took about one and a half hours.

The detectives tended to sort the crimes into three groups according to their inferences about the nature of the murder as either: a domestic homicide, a crime-related homicide (in which the murder had taken place during the commission of another crime), or a male brawl. Wright found that the detectives readily spun a narrative from the photos, with first clues (e.g. a toppled chair and signs of Christmas decorations) leading to generation of a hypothesis (tension between spouses is often high at Christmas), leading to inferences (this could be a domestic), thus guiding their inquiry plans ("I would be looking at those known to her").

Overall, the detectives made 594 inferences, most of them about the homicide type and the relationship between victim and killer. Using recorded facts from the murders, Wright found that 67 per cent of the detectives' inferences were accurate, 23 per cent were inaccurate and 9.5 per cent were ambiguous or contradictory. More senior detectives made more inferences without losing accuracy.

Three murder scenes were misinterpreted by the majority of the detectives because they made the same kind of inaccurate inferences. For example, one killing involved the victim's dress being pulled up around her neck with most detectives interpreting this as a sexually motivated crime. In fact the woman had been killed by her nephew for financial gain. Another scene was at a disco and many detectives inferred it was the result of a drunken brawl. In fact the killer was having an affair with the victim's wife and the murder was premeditated.

The initial decisions made during what detectives call the "golden hour" of a murder investigation can have huge implications for its success. For this reason it is vital that we learn more about the decision making processes involved. "The findings of this study make the first step at demystifying the notion of detective intuition," said Wright.

Detectives aim to keep an open mind, but this study revealed the ways their past experiences and knowledge lead them to make assumptions. Often times these are correct, but there were instances of systematic errors. Wright suggests that sorting tasks of the kind used in this study could be helpful during training of detectives, to "increase their awareness of the factors that influence their decision making behaviour" and to "enhance [their] knowledge of different types of homicide through exposure to a wide range of cases".

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Wright, M. (2013). Homicide Detectives' Intuition. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling DOI: 10.1002/jip.1383

--Further reading--
Does a murderer's crime-scene behaviour echo his criminal history?

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

Link feast

2013-06-07T08:48:00.001+01:00

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

1. "This study is about psychology, and should not have involved an MRI scanner," the excellent Neuroskeptic blog makes the case that a brain imaging study into people's reactions to strabismus would have been much better off without the brain imaging.

2. Why do identical twins end up having such different lives?

3. Keith Laws, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology, wrote a provocative blog post on the problems with the case formulation approach favoured by many clinical psychologists: "It is artistry linked to intuition...in short, it is anti-science..."

4. The surprising psychology of how names shape our thoughts (more from the Digest archive).

5. "There’s Nothing Cathartic About Expressing Anger"

6. Two new books with a very different take on psychiatry, reviewed together by Bryan Appleyard for The Sunday Times: Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry by Tom Burns; Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good by James Davies.

7. What happened when students, post docs and neuroscientsts were asked to draw a neuron?

8. Photographic portraits of New York therapy rooms.

9. Interesting insights into the consequences of making too little or too much eye contact.

10. Many psychologists are among over 70 signatories calling for registered reports to become an accepted journal format across the life sciences. Following this format, papers are accepted before the results are in, based on the proposed methodology and research question. The hope is that this will increase the publication of negative results and reduce questionable research practices.

Looking ahead: the Cheltenham Science Festival continues this weekend with several sessions on psychology and neuroscience.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Reading comprehension just as good using a Kindle as with paper

2013-06-06T09:27:00.003+01:00

A significant milestone was passed last August when Amazon announced that sales of books on its Kindle e-reader platform outstripped print sales for the first time. There's no question that e-readers are convenient - you can load a single device with thousands of titles. But some commentators have started to question whether digital reading has adverse effects on memory and comprehension compared with reading from print.

In 2010, a reassuring study in fact found no difference in recall after reading material electronically versus paper. Now Sara Margolin and her colleagues have looked at reading comprehension and again found no deficits in understanding of material consumed on a Kindle or a computer versus paper.

Margolin's team invited 90 student participants (average age 19 years) to read ten short passages of text. One third of them read on paper (A4 size, Times New Roman font), 30 of them read on a second gen. Kindle (6 inch screen), and the remainder read via a pdf reader on a computer monitor. Five of the passages were factual (biographies) and five were excerpts from literary fiction. After each passage, the students answered five to six multiple-choice comprehension questions. They could take as long as they wanted to read each passage, but there was no going back to the text once they started answering the questions.

Overall accuracy was at around 75 per cent and, crucially, there was no difference in comprehension performance across the three conditions. This was true whether reading factual or narrative passages of text. "From an educational and classroom perspective, these results are comforting," the researchers concluded. "While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students' comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text."

Unfortunately the study didn't look at the participants' familiarity with e-reader devices. It remains to be seen whether the same results would hold with an older sample and/or with readers who may be less experienced with digital devices. Also the text passages were only around 500 words long. Future research needs to examine comprehension for entire chapters and books. Devices like iPads, which are back-lit and have more potentially distracting functionality, also need to be tested.

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Margolin, S., Driscoll, C., Toland, M., and Kegler, J. (2013). E-readers, Computer Screens, or Paper: Does Reading Comprehension Change Across Media Platforms? Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2930

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

Extras

2013-06-05T10:00:00.002+01:00

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

Watching your favourite TV shows restores your levels of self-control.

Nearly one third of pedestrians were distracted by their phone when crossing the road.

Extreme political views are often founded on a misunderstanding of the relevant policy issues.

A man "previously evaluated as having a high level of physical attractiveness" asked young women on a shopping street for their phone number. When he was carrying a guitar case, 31 per cent obliged compared with 9 per cent when he was carrying a sports bag and 14 per cent when he carried no bag.

The psychological benefits of recreational running: A field study.

Players of an American football video game suffered psychologically when they weren't allowed to engage in trash talk.

Most TED talk presenters are male non-academics. Among academic TED talkers, most are senior males with impressive publication records. But giving a TED talk doesn't benefit the impact of their academic work.

Pepsi and Coca Cola brand labels affect the brain's response to drinking cola, especially in less experienced drinkers.

More men approached a woman lying on a beach when she had a tattoo on her back, and they approached more quickly. They also thought their chances of a date or sex were greater.

Across four methodologically diverse samples, marijuana use consistently buffered people from the negative consequences associated with loneliness and social exclusion
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Arrogant, moi? Investigating narcissists' insight into their traits, behaviour and reputation

2013-06-04T10:08:00.000+01:00

Braggarts who hype their own achievements while derogating those around them can fare well in a new situation. Their confidence appeals and they may achieve high status at first. But over the longer term evidence suggests that narcissists are harmful to themselves and others. They alienate people and their work performance is scored poorly by bosses. So why do they persist? Do they have insight into their narcissism? Do they realise what other people think of them? A new study aimed to find out.

Erika Carlson surveyed two samples. One was made up of 86 undergrads, who answered questions about themselves and also provided contacts for five informers - friends, partners and family - they too answered questions about the participants' personalities and behaviour. The second sample of 234 participants was recruited online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a network of volunteers who are paid for their time online) and they answered questions about their personality, behaviour and reputation.

Carlson found that participants who scored more highly on a narcissism questionnaire also tended to describe themselves as condescending and disagreeable and as people who criticise and brag. They also realised that other people see them this way. The narcissists recognised that their traits and behaviour weren't good for other people but they believed they were good for themselves.

In other words, narcissists are arrogant and they know it, but they don't care. In fact many said they aspired to be more narcissistic. "Narcissists do have genuine insight into their narcissism," said Carlson. "[They] seem to perceive narcissism as a 'get ahead' trait that brings them personal gain ... a personal strength, and justify their narcissism in terms of the benefits it has for them."

It's an intriguing finding but there are some limitations in the study. It's important to note this was a subclinical sample - overall levels of narcissism were not that high and it's not clear if the results would apply to people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. Also, I found myself wishing for some kind of comparison. How did the narcissists' insight compare with high scorers on other personality traits? Are they unusually insightful and honest? Might that honesty be a hidden virtue of the narcissistic personality type?

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Carlson, E. (2013). Honestly Arrogant or Simply Misunderstood? Narcissists' Awareness of their Narcissism. Self and Identity, 12 (3), 259-277 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2012.659427

--Further reading--
For group creativity, two narcissists are better than one
A deadly sin for modern times - Narcissistic myopia.
A psychopath, a narcissist & a Machiavellian enter a room, who was perceived more favourably? (journal abstract)

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

Kids experience schadenfreude by age four, maybe earlier

2013-06-03T12:06:00.000+01:00

Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are of would-be thieves getting their comeuppance, either knocked-out by brave store-keepers or caught out by their own dazzling ineptitude. Seeing a person deservedly suffer this way brings a special pleasure known as schadenfreude. A new study is the first to investigate whether young children are capable of experiencing this delight.

Katrin Schulz and her colleagues presented simple picture stories to 100 children aged four to eight years (52 girls). The stories involved a child performing a good or bad deed - such as a girl climbing a tree to collect plums for her little brother, or climbing the tree so as to throw plums at her little brother - and then experiencing a misfortune, in this case falling from the tree and hurting herself.

The kids of all ages showed evidence of schadenfreude, suggesting their emotional response to another person's distress was influenced by their moral judgements about that person. That is, they were more likely to say they were pleased and that it was funny if the story character experienced a misfortune while engaging in a bad deed. They were also less likely to say they'd help a bad character. These effects were strongest for the children aged over 7. And it was only for this age group that intensity of schadenfreude mediated the link between a character's good or bad moral behaviour and the participants' willingness to help.

There is some consolation for readers who believe in the innocence of childhood. Overall the children's levels of schadenfreude were low (averaging no more than 2.37 on a scale from 0 to 8, even for a morally bad character), whereas their levels of sympathy were much higher (always averaging higher than 5 on the same scale). Moreover, the kids showed almost zero schadenfreude when morally good characters suffered a misfortune, whereas they showed plenty of sympathy even for bad characters.

A weakness of the study is in the questions and pictorial rating system which some children found complicated. This means the age-related results may have been to do with basic comprehension and not to do with development of schadenfreude specifically. In fact, the researchers originally recruited three-year-olds, whom they believed would also show schadenfreude, but they had to be excluded because they didn't understand the questions or rating scale.

"Our data revealed first evidence that schadenfreude might have an important impact on social (i.e. helping) behaviour even among young children," Schulz and her colleagues concluded. "Thus, it is highly important to further analyse the determinants and consequences of schadenfreude. Right now, we are standing at the beginning of the understanding of this emotion."

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Schulz, K., Rudolph, A., Tscharaktschiew, N., and Rudolph, U. (2013). Daniel has fallen into a muddy puddle - Schadenfreude or sympathy? British Journal of Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjdp.12013

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

Link feast

2013-05-31T09:27:00.000+01:00

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

1. Sally Satel on the limits of neuroscience: "While the scans are dazzling and the technology an unqualified marvel, we can always keep our bearings by remembering that the brain and the mind are two different frameworks". (more from the Brain Myths blog).

2. The paradox of knowing. Why do we have greater insight into others than ourselves? Open access in the new issue of The Psychologist magazine. (more from the Digest archives)

3. Are babies conscious?

4. "introverted employees ... underutilized because managers inaccurately assume they will be less effective team members" - from our Occupational Digest blog. (related link - networking tips for introverts)

5. BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind featured Suzanne Corkin on amnesiac HM, and the persistence of neuromyths in the classroom. (more: teachers believe one in two neuromyths)

6. Google Glass ignores lessons from cognitive psychology: "inattentional blindness" makes it dangerous.

7. New paper from the Behavioural Insight Team: "Applying behavioural insights to charitable giving" (pdf):

8. The philosophical and political roots of the massive expansion of talking therapies (mainly CBT) on the NHS.

9. People with Alzheimer's Disease are more prone to emotional contagion. (more from the Digest).

10. Paul Bloom: "Why I no longer believe psych studies with sexy findings" (from Blogging heads TV).

Looking ahead to next week: Tues 4 June, Motivation and procrastination, Psychology in the Pub event, London SW1W 8EZ.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

What motivates Chinese "Tiger Mums"?

2013-05-30T09:12:00.000+01:00

US law professor Amy Chua attracted controversy in 2011 when she published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. The traditional Chinese parenting style that Chua described was strict and authoritarian - an approach now referred to popularly as Tiger Parenting, thanks to Chua's later book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Past research supports the idea that parents of Chinese descent, whether in the US or China, tend to be more controlling and authoritarian in their parenting style than parents of European descent. Now a study has made the first direct attempt to examine why this might be. It's a controversial topic because Chua and others claimed Tiger parenting cultivates successful children, while other research suggests children raised in this way experience more psychological and emotional problems.

Florrie Fei-Yin Ng at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and her colleagues twice, one year apart, surveyed 215 mothers and their 13-year-old sons and daughters. Seventy-one of the mothers were Chinese and living on the east coast of mainland China. One hundred and forty-four of the mothers were American, living in the Mid-West: 84 of European descent, 60 African American.

Consistent with past research, Chinese mothers agreed more often than the American mothers with statements of psychological control like "If my daughter does something I do not like, I sometimes act less friendly to her so that she knows I am disappointed." The children's testimony on their parents' control showed the European American mothers were less controlling than the Chinese, but that the African American mothers were not. Perhaps children in the latter group rated their parents as more controlling because they were comparing against the parents of their White peers (and in fact African American mothers did admit to exerting more psychological control than their European American counterparts, but still less than the Chinese mothers).

The novel finding is that Chinese mothers more often than the Americans said their self-worth was tied to the success of their children, agreeing with statements like "When my daughter fails, I feel badly about myself". Basing their self-worth on their children's success accounted for 25 per cent of the between-country variance in mothers' psychological control of their children. The researchers speculated other relevant factors could be: the Chinese notion of guan - according to which parents must dedicate themselves to their offspring, with their children's success in the eyes of society taken as a sign of good parenting; and the Chinese focus on a "face" culture - the idea that one's sense of worth is measured by the respect gained from others.

The study doesn't prove that basing their own self worth in their children's success causes Chinese mothers to exert greater psychological control over their children. It's possible the causal direction runs the other way, or both ways. The study is also limited in only focusing on psychological control while neglecting behavioural control. Nonetheless, Ng and her colleagues said their study "provides the first evidence as to one reason why Chinese parents are more controlling with children than are American parents."

_________________________________

Ng, F., Pomerantz, E., and Deng, C. (2013). Why Are Chinese Mothers More Controlling Than American Mothers? “My Child Is My Report Card”. Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12102

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

Should you help a person with OCD do their checks?

2013-05-29T08:43:00.001+01:00

Imagine you and your partner are about to enjoy a meal together. They have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and get incredibly anxious until they've completed a time-consuming sequence of checks and rituals involving their cutlery. Do you offer to help with the checks in the hope of assuaging their anxiety?

The process of helping an OCD patient in this way is called "accommodation" and though it may be motivated by compassion and empathy, the authors of a new paper say that it can be a barrier to recovery and puts a strain on relationships. Accommodation is thought to be counter-productive because it prevents a key component of CBT for OCD, which is learning that everything will be okay even if checks and rituals are not completed (known as "exposure and response prevention").

Sara Boeding and her colleagues investigated 20 heterosexual couples, each including one person with OCD, as they embarked on 16 joint sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy. Accommodation was measured at baseline and after the course of treatment was over, as were the symptoms of the partner with OCD, and relationship satisfaction.

The researchers found that accommodation was commonplace - all partners of someone with OCD reported doing at least some of their checking for them. Higher rates of accommodation went hand in hand with more serious OCD symptoms, both at the study start and after treatment was complete. This study is unable to show that accommodation by one partner caused the other partner's worse symptoms - the causal direction could run either way. However, past longitudinal research in a family setting has shown that reductions in accommodation precede patient improvement.

In the current study, Boeding's team also found that individuals who performed more of their partner's OCD checks tended to report less relationship satisfaction, consistent with past research suggesting the process of accommodation can be "taxing and frustrating" for care-givers. In turn, patients with a partner who performed more accommodation tended to report that their partner was more critical of their OCD. "Although accommodation might serve to alleviate patient distress momentarily, it does not do so within the framework of a positive, satisfying relationship," warned Boeding and her colleagues.

This is a pilot study with a small sample size, and in 19 of the couples, the patient was the woman. This limits how much we can take larger lessons from these results. However, it's the first time that OCD accommodation has been studied in a couple context and this marks an important first step towards understanding the role of relationship context in recovery from OCD. Although it is tempting to help a person with OCD complete their checks and rituals, Boeding's team advised that it is more beneficial in the long run "to provide esteem support and encourage the patient to 'get through' the anxiety until it habituates, rather than trying to avoid or neutralize it for the patient."

_________________________________

Boeding, S., Paprocki, C., Baucom, D., Abramowitz, J., Wheaton, M., Fabricant, L., & Fischer, M. (2013). Let me check that for you: Symptom accommodation in romantic partners of adults with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 51 (6), 316-322 DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2013.03.002

--Further reading--
What is it like to have OCD?

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

Men feel more physically attractive after becoming a father

2013-05-28T09:38:00.001+01:00

Hey good looking!

Never mind the sleepless nights and domestic disarray, new fathers think they're hot stuff. The finding comes from a survey of 182 heterosexual couples by Alicia Cast and her colleagues. The couples were quizzed three times - just after they got married, a year later, and again a year after that.

Whereas women who had a baby in the first year of marriage experienced a subsequent dip in their feelings of physical attractiveness, new fathers showed the opposite pattern. The feel-good effect was short-lived, however, as the men's raised feelings of physical attractiveness returned to normal levels by the end of the study.

For some reason, men who became a father for the first time in their second year of marriage did not enjoy a spike in physical self-appreciation, although there was a slight trend in that direction. New mothers in the second year did however experience a dip in their self-perceived beauty, just the same as the women who became mothers in the first year.

"Our research indicates that women believe that they are less physically attractive after the birth of a child," said the researchers, "but that men believe they are more physically attractive."

Unfortunately the study provides little evidence for why the participants felt differently about their appearance after having a baby. The researchers speculated that mothers may feel less attractive because of physical changes to their body, or because they have less time to pay attention to their appearance. Perhaps fathers feel more attractive because of an increased sense of masculinity. The researchers were able to rule out another suggestion - that participants' changed feelings of attractiveness were due to any change in their spouse's view of them.

Although this new research has only just been published, the data were actually collected in the early 90s, which places a question mark over whether the findings would replicate today. Moreover, the sample was predominantly White, US middle class and the results may only speak to that group. Indeed, Cast and her colleagues highlighted past research that suggested African American women perceive their bodies more positively after childbirth than White women.

_________________________________

Cast, A., Stewart, S., and Erickson, M. (2013). Why do men feel more attractive after childbirth? Journal of Gender Studies, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2012.750239

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

--
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 defusion", 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 defusion" 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.

_________________________________

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--
Video of the mindbus technique.
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).
_________________________________

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.

_________________________________

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."

_________________________________

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.

_________________________________

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.

_________________________________

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.

_________________________________

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--
Is it time to rethink the way university lectures are delivered?
Lecturers should provide PowerPoint handouts before the lecture
Harder-to-read fonts boost student learning
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.