What a cute car. Mrs. LaymanPsych would be the only person on my block with one. Except for everyone on the planet that owns one!

A few months ago I was exploring the idea of buying a new car with Mrs. LaymanPsych.  We had a few cars that we thought would fit the bill but she really settled on the Volkswagon Golf.  Affordable, good gas mileage, sporty enough to be fun, and gosh darn-it  was it cute (and what’s more important than cute?).  We visited a few dealerships and even found a few potential cars we figured we might consider purchasing.  We mulled over the decision, weighed in on other cars and tried to establish if it was a cost we wanted to take on.

Something strange started happening over these couple of weeks.  We really thought we had stumbled upon a unique fun little car.  Sure we’d seen a few around here and there but nothing crazy.  Seemingly out of nowhere we started seeing this thing everywhere.  Every time we went out we counted 3, 5, 10 different people driving the Golf. The car was everywhere. It seemed like everyone owned a golf.  A few weeks later we ditched the idea on the Golf. Not because we thought too many people owned them but because a Nissan Altima became available from a family member.

I was happy. Another affordable car with decent gas millage and was well taken care of.  Besides, not too many people own Altimas.  But you know what? Shortly after getting the Altima I started seeing them everywhere. New ones, old ones (like mine).  It seemed like everyone owned an Altima and no one owned anything else…like a Golf.

Obviously the rest of society isn’t changing their cars to annoy me. So what’s going on here?

Priming

This story is nothing unique to myself and I know that you’ve experienced it too.  Something that you think is novel, new or obscure suddenly seems very common once you hear about it.  What’s happening here is a simple psychological effect that healthy individuals can’t avoid called priming. When we are exposed to something enough it sort of rises to the surface of our consciousness.  The idea is that by exposing the mind to a stimuli or memory, the pathways to that memory, stimuli, or construct are reinforced.

An analogy: If the park is your memory, then the path from your house to that park is the pathway.  The number of people that use that pathway and the frequency with which it’s used determines how defined the path is.

Our memories work in much the same way.  Since I kept looking up Golf’s online, looking at them in person, thinking about them in the car (should I get a Golf?) then when I’m around them, I’m more likely to see them. Not because there are more of them (obviously) but merely because I have conditioned my mind to be more aware of them.

This is why things like cramming for tests does not work.  Although it seems like you can “prime yourself” for a test, the truth is that there simply isn’t enough time dedicated to a single topic to do well on an entire test. You might be able to cram one formula in your head the night before, but not an entire chapter.  This is also why we are very prone to hearing our name if someone says it in a group of large people (known as the cocktail party effect).

Have you ever experienced this phenomena? Share it in the comments below.

6. Identify The Cause
5. Be Properly Motivated
4. Set Yourself Up For Success
3. Allow Yourself to Fail
2. Take Small Steps
1. News Year’s Resolutions
   are Bull Shit

Packing on The Holiday Pounds

The Holidays … the name we generally throw at the “Big 4″ events starting with Halloween (ok, maybe that’s a stretch), Thanksgiving, ChristmasChanukahKwanzaaFestivus and the New Year.    Each of these is meant to commemorate something other than what they often become; a time of gluttony and disregard.  Gluttony of chocolates and commercial goods (and turkey, and stuffing, and ham and gravy. Oh my!).  Disregard to our health, personal limitations, and productivity.

Subsequently, many of us tend to gain a few pounds  around this time.  The weather is cold, we are inside being jolly with our friends and we are eating.  It’s OK though, because with the new year come the resolutions.   Anyone who is a member of a gym for more than a couple of weeks a year knows that January means that their gym is about to turn into a zoo.  Hoards of generally over-weight well-doers flock to the gym with a goal of finally losing some weight.  The new year is a seen as a sort of “reset” and makes it easy to forget all the mistakes of the past and start from scratch.  The problem with this is that for many people, being overweight doesn’t stem from a few weeks of gluttony. Most overweight people have been overweight for a while and although being overweight isn’t something that happened on a specific date, often a decision is made to try and change that bad habit or lifestyle on a specific date.

As a result, it’s common that the upsurge in post-holiday gym memberships are followed by a return to normalcy within a few weeks.  Without diving into accounting or economics, we can turn to Google  for an illustration (as with anything).  Take the image below, which represents daily search volume for the keyword “gym membership” over the past decade.

Google Trends graph of search volume for the keyword "Gym Membership"

Hazard to guess what each of those massive spikes is every year? In a word: January.

What successes have you had in your life to make dramatic change?  I’d love to hear your stories and any additional tips. Share your story below.

New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions are about making changes for the better.  This usually means making a commitment to some sort of difficult but attainable goal.  Lets analyze this for a moment.

• The New Year’s Resolution is optional: No one is forcing you to take it on.
• It’s inherently difficult: If it were easy you would already be doing it.
• Accomplishment of this goal will increase happiness: Why else would you take on goal that is difficult and optional?

Unsurprisingly, resolution trends tend to be the same from year to year and every year you know someone (if not yourself) that has made the commitment to losing weight.  It is consistently one of the top resolutions every year, and is very likely this year as well.  This fact makes obesity an excellent topic to discuss habits, addiction, and the idea that it is difficult for some to change bad habits on a whim.  Ultimately, that’s what New Year’sResolutions aim to change: Bad Habits on a whim.  The problem is that habits of any kind (good or bad) take time to develop and bad habits are usually ones that are subjectively easy while good habits tend to be more difficult.  If this were not the case, no one would have bad habits.  This is, broadly, why New Year’s resolutions tend to fail at an absurd rate (as much as 88%).   Instead of hammering out the reasons why this is the case, lets analyze six of the major reasons for failure and how they can be combated.

6.) Identify The Cause To Change The Effect

If you smoke cigarettes when you get stressed out or eat junk food because you’re bored then simply setting goals of “quit smoking” and “lose weight” really aren’t going to get you very far.  For obesity alone there are several reasons  why people overeat. Unfortunately, many people are not always very good at assessing themselves.  If you really want to make a change you have to  take a real close look at yourself and try and figure out what is causing you to do things that you ultimately don’t want to do.  Only then can long-term change occur.

REMEMBER: The manifestation of a bad habit is often what we identify as the issue. Being overweight, for example.  If you are overweight, maybe it’s because you fill your time eating junk food instead of doing something healthy. For me, I lost 30lbs in 3 months the summer I decided to take up cycling. I never made the decision to lose weight, I made the decision to be healthier and enjoy myself while I was doing it.

5.) Be Properly Motivated

Now wait a minute please before you go yelling at me for stating the obvious, hear me out.  Coming up with resolutions is pretty easy.  There is something in your life that you think you don’t like, and you wan’t it changed.  Easy right?  Well, not exactly.  If you are overweight (sticking to our theme here), there is a reason for this.  It’s not like you got overweight overnight. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to you.  Sure, at the end of a year you may sit back (and break a chair under your large derriere) and think, “Wow, I’ve really let myself go”, but the reality is that weight gain is often a fairly slow process as are most bad habits.

The Psychology of Motivation is a classic field in psychology and several different theories on why we do what we do have surfaced over the years.  The “Incentive Theory” of motivation, states that we act out certain behaviors because of external stimuli rather than internal drive.  That is to say that the stimuli we interact with and the rewards that they give us drive us to do much of what we do.  The stronger the reward, the sooner the reward, and the ease with which we can replicate the reward as a result of the action, the higher the likelihood that the action becomes habit.

Before changing something that has become a habit, be honest with yourself: Is this something I really want to change? If so, recognize that it is going to be difficult at first. Whatever the habit, whether it is smoking or being overweight, it is something that likely formed over many years of constant and easy reward.  With most things in life, things that take a long time to build cannot simply be reversed with the flick of a switch. Being properly motivated isn’t so much a decision, “I want to be thin”, as it is a recognition that bad habits are the results of misguided motivation. Get rid of the short-term rewards for the long-term rewards.

REMEMBER: We all enjoy desserts, some of us just allow the more instantaneous reward of the dessert to drive us to action than saying “no thanks” and enjoying the reward of happiness and health. You must be honest with yourself though. Do you really want to not eat cheesecake every night or are you being compelled by outside forces (fashion magazines, skinny friends, etc)?  Ultimately you must decide which you find more important.  Happiness is the key here.

4.) Set Yourself Up For Success

We’re going to a get a little morbid for a moment but this next scenario is so powerful that it must be put out there, even for people just looking to get a six pack.  This is very closely related to Rule #5 and the Icentive Theory.

It turns out that when you give animals a way to self-administer powerful drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, they will self administer it (Surprise!).  And if you give them unlimited access to these drugs, they will continually self administer until they kill themselves.  In an eye-opening experiment, rats were given unlimited access to cocaine for 16 or 12 hours separated by either 1 day or 10 days.  The rats that were only given access to cocaine every 10 days showed little change in their binge behaviors but the rats that were given cocaine every other day continually increased the amount of cocaine they self-administered during their binge.  Chemically, the rats that had cocaine every other day were becoming more addicted to the drug and required more of it to get the same effect.

The takehome for the human is that it’s ok to eat potato chips on very special occasions if your goal is to lose weight but if you know you can’t control yourself when they are around then maybe you shouldn’t have them around.  For those of us that only indulge every now and then, whether it’s a glass of wine or a piece of cheesecake,  a single piece of cake or glass of wine provides enough enjoyment to be satisfied.  When you surround yourself with vices, it takes more of that vice to garner the same level of enjoyment.  While drugs tend to have a stronger effect on our brains reward system than good food, the basic principles are the same. And this applies to anything that brings us joy.

REMEMBER: If you surround yourself by your bad habit, the bad habit will go never go away and will likely get worse.

3.) Allow Yourself To Fail A little Bit

Listen, you’re not going to change a bad habit overnight.  As I said earlier, these are habits that developed over many years.  The manifestation of these bad habits have as well (poor diet and lack of exercise have caused you to gain weight over several years). You’re going to have to accept that your’e going to have some bad days.  One failure shouldn’t cause you to throw your arms in the air and conclude that this is just the way you are.  After all, if habits were easy to break, no one would have a bad one.  It turns out that habit formation is a function of your brain (duh) on a neural level.  An increasing body of academia is pinpointing exactly where in the brain habits are formed.  While there are several methods for pinpointing such things, I’m always a sucker for a good lesion (damaged brain) study!  A group of really clever psychologists from the University of California, Los Angeles discovered that the relatively easy task of forming habits in lab rats become much more difficult when there was damage to a very specific part of the rat’s brain; the striatum, which is located in the basal gangila, one of the oldest parts of the brain (both ours, and the rats).

So what does this mean?  To keep it simple, habits are hard-wired into our brain much in the same way (and utilize some of the same parts of our brain) that memory is hard-wired into our brain.  Habits, like memories, can vary in intensity.  The more ingrained the memory, the less likely you are to forget it. In the same light, the more intense the habit, the harder it’s going to be to break it.

REMEMBER: You don’t just wake up one morning and say “I’m done doing all the bad things I can’t help doing” and that’s that. It takes time, and you’re going to fail every now and then. Don’t let a single failure cause you to throw in the towel. In fact, it can often be helpful to give yourself a window to fail.  When I’m trying to lose weight, I often tell myself that Friday or Saturday night’s I’m free to do whatever I want.  This makes it easier to say no the other 6 days of the week and if you’re 6-1 every week, you’re going to make it to the playoffs; you’re going to win.

2.) Take Small Steps

I’m going to now start to get (more) repetitive.  This is going to be hard!  A lot of resolutions fail because people bite off more than they can chew.  Part of this is because New Year’sResolutions are bullshit (I’m foreshadowing here).  When starting on day 1 and are putting it in terms of a new year’s resolution, there is a sense you must compare where you are today with where you want to be in 365 days.  Big goals are great, but guess what, no one accomplishes a big goal without first setting and following through with smaller goals.  Interestingly, I see smokers do this very well.  The prospect of going from smoking to not smoking is scary.  The idea of going from 10 cigarettes a day to 9 by the end of the month…that’s manageable. Manageable and realistic goals are achievable goals.  If these goals are part of something bigger, that is fine.  But be sure to set yourself up with small successes.

REMEMBER: If you want to avoid viewing your goals through a bleak dark and long tunnel, set smaller more-achievable goals (smaller and less dark tunnels).  This is easy if you frame your goal in terms of a life change rather than in terms of a New Year’sResolution.

1.) New Year’s Resolutions Are Bullshit

We talked about motivation earlier and we only touched on the motivation issue.  Lets stay with weight loss.  If I’m overweight, it’s because I eat too much and exercise too little. Exercise is hard and not usually all that fun. Eating chocolate cake is easy (as pie?) and is a damn good time.  Not only are habits hard to break but often times the habits formed because they are fun, easy, or enjoyable. To make real change you must be intrinsically motivated, if the motivation isn’t doesn’t come from within, it relies on something external.  This is fine, as long as that external motivation remains in place. The problem with New Year’sResolutions is that the motivation is centered around a date.  ”Starting on the 1st, I’m going to stop (bad habit)”.

It’s comforting to start from scratch and we have trained ourselves into thinking that an arbitrary number on a calendar is that – a reset.  The reality is that it’s just another day (January 1st, to be exact) and in the long journey of changing bad habits, you will have many ordinary days.  The glitz and fabricated hope that the New Year brings only stands as a finite and temporary motivation. Remove the motivation for change, and you remove the change.  Lastly, relying on an event to mark the start of your change sets you up for failure if (and when) you do slip. “Well, I was doing so good on this year’s resolution, then I ate that bacon-filled chocolate cake. Guess we’ll have to wait until next year.”  The one thing I will say about New Year’s Resolutions is that they can act as a “jump-start”.  If January 1st is what it takes to start making you think differently then that is great.  Hopefully  you can start to see some positive return which then turns into real intrinsically motivated action. From there, it’s smooth sailing to success.

REMEMBER: New Year’sDay is just that, a day.  If you want to make changes, start right now. If you started on January 1st and failed: START AGAIN!
RememberBad habits are easy and are often fun.  That’s the crux of life though: short-term gain’s don’t always have long-term benefit. Making changes is a hard process but it’s not impossible. To succeed you have to have the right frame of mind, the right motivation, and you have to approach it intelligently.

In the Spring of 2007 (notice NOT January 1st) I realized that I had formed some bad habits of my own and had gained a lot of weight in the first few years after college.  This is common. Some people right the ship, many remain overweight late into adulthood.  I decided to make a change.  The decision wasn’t to lose weight, it was to find a healthy outlet and adjust the way I ate.  The result was 30lbs lost by the time the Fall Semester of School started.  What successes have you had in your life to make dramatic change?  I’d love to hear your stories and any additional tips. Share your story below.

Tim at 195lbs in May 2007

Tim at 165lbs in August 2007

I can recall being in the classrooms of my youth in the Midwest. During the winter, the only things to keep the school warm were large furnaces in each room.  These were truly large and obnoxious things.  The furnaces, covered in tin, had internal fans that created a horrendous buzzing that elevated the noise of the room twofold.  An odd thing happens when you sit around these things for hours at a time though; you forget they are even there.  In fact, often the only time I would find them irritating is after they cycled off.  The new-found silence that fell upon the classroom was so dramatic that I often found myself shifting my attention away from the lesson and onto the emptiness that now filled my ears. That is to say that I often found the absence of the sound more distracting than the sound itself.

Where Has All The Stimulus Gone?

Surely you have been in a loud room, party, or restaurant where you were able to focus on the conversation you were having with the person in front of you while ignoring all other conversations in the room.  Have you ever wondered how you are able to focus on the conversation your having at a party or a busy restaurant when there are literally hundreds of other conversations occurring within ear shot?  It turns out, our brain is pretty good at filtering out unwanted stimuli.  While it is possible to manually shift our attention to one (or several) stimuli, for the most part this all occurs without any conscious effort.  Although perhaps obvious, studies indicate that this filtration of external stimuli requires a lot of brainpower.  Specifically, it seems that focused attention (which requires the filtering of stimuli not being attended to), uses a broad network of brain pathways.  This is very likely why a common characteristic of brain damage (regardless of where the brain damage occurs) is a reduced ability to filter unwanted stimuli.

The Over-Stimulation of Today’s Brains

If you’re reading this post on an iPhone or iPad, that’s really cool because frankly I don’t have a mobile following yet.  It’s also a real sign of the times.  Here is a fun task: Go to a public place and do some people watching. Airports are probably the best example while restaurants may be more depressing.   In either case, it is not uncommon to find the majority of people filling their empty time texting, browsing facebook or catching up on the day’s news.  For the millennial’s, this is just life.  The ease of sharing information has become so profound in the last two decades across various platforms (both software and hardware) that we have become accustom to constantly seeking it out and feeding the perceived need to “know”.  In short, our brains are not only being stimulated by environmental stimuli, such as the sound of other people talking, the sensation of air moving across our skin, the feeling of the chair we are sitting in but additionally with information such as news on our iPad, music on our iPod and texts on our iPhone (if you own and carry all three of these devices at once, I suppose you are rather silly).

The effects of this over-stimulation should not be ignored and recent studies indicate that there can be some significant long-term ramifications.  It may come as little surprise that there is a strong correlation between internet addiction and ADHD in children.  A responsible question to ask: Does the ADHD lead to internet addiction or does the internet addiction lead to ADHD? The difference may seem minor but is in fact rather significant.  It is very possible that the speed of today’s internet makes it very tolerable, and in fact enjoyable, for children suffering from ADHD to bounce from topic to topic with ease.  It is, of course, also very possible that this nature of the internet also facilitates the development of ADHD.

Unfortunately, the body of academia seems to indicate the former more than the latter.  For example, children exposed to television at an early age seem to demonstrate less attention span than peers not exposed to television. Additionally, children who spend more than an hour per day playing video games have more severe  cases of ADHD than those that do not play video games. It is therefore not surprising to learn that ADHD rates are increasing from year to year, and have been for the past several decades.  This coincides with the growth of cable television, video games, the internet, and mobile technology (whether it is in the form of a cellphone or a PSP).

ADHD and Brain Size

Advances in brain imaging in the past two decades have allowed researches to dig deeper into the pathology of mental disorders.  In the past 10 years, many efforts have been made to pinpoint the cause(s) of ADHD and one, perhaps unsurprising, finding is that the brain development is delayed in children with ADHD.  In fact, individuals with ADHD have smaller brains than those who do not.  And while the delayed development is thought to take the same path as the healthy brain, this difference in gray matter volume persists into adulthood.

The reasons for these differences remain unknown and as with most psychological disorders, it is likely a combination of biology and environment.  That is to say that there may be a genetic predisposition that may be reinforced by environmental stimuli.  Is the recent spike in ADHD diagnoses related to the proliferation of environmental stimuli across our culture? It use to be the case that while sitting at a restaurant waiting for our food that we would speak to those we are with.  Increasingly, this time is spent reading LaymanPsych.com on our iPhones.

Isolation Tanks

Isolation Tanks were created to test the effects of sensory deprivation, and they do a very good job at depriving the brain of outside stimulation.  Ideally, an isolation tank cuts off all sound, light, and the subject floats in a mixture of saltwater kept at the same temperature as your skin. Thus, a proper isolation tank leaves the subject seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and feeling nothing.  The tank leaves the subject to float and let their brain meander through its own thoughts, completely uninterrupted by outside stimuli (ignoring taste and smell).   This dramatic shift in environment has been said to produce dramatic effects for participants.  One of the most visible proponents in recent years, Joe Rogan claims there is a hallucinogenic effect.  Recent study indicates that the isolation tanks can reduce anxiety, depression, hostility, and fatigue while increasing creativity.  With the sheer amount of brainpower dedicated filtering out unneeded stimuli, it seems logical that sensory deprivation would have dramatic effects by allowing more brain power to be dedicated to other tasks or brain development.

Filtering, Over-stimulation, ADHD, What is The Connection?

Let us pause for a moment.  The first half of this article outlined an (unqualified)* argument that perhaps the reason the attention span of society in recent years is dropping, ADHD is on the rise, as a result of the increase in information and pure stimulation that our brains must filter out in order to function properly.  This filtering takes a massive amount of brainpower and yet because it happens without any conscious effort, it is taken for granted.  A newborns brain is roughly 1/4 of the size of its adult form and grows massively into the teen years.  Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 18, the brain begins to shrink.  This is a natural process as unused pathways are pruned out.  The differences are (subjectively) small, changing no more than 10% over the course of an individual’s life (from peak brain volume to death) and unrelenting.  Once the shrinking starts, it does not stop.

And at long-lost, this is where the study at hand comes into play.

Long-term sensory deprivation prevents dendritic spine loss in primary somatosensory cortex

The sky may not be falling, but our brains certainly are shrinking.  This is a fact and it is unavoidable. In all mammals, brains peak in size shortly after birth (this is relative, in humans it is around the age of 15 plus or minus a few years) and the number of synapses continue to decrease until death.  But can the shrinkage be slowed?

Yi zuo, Guang Yang, Elaine Kown & Wen-Biao Gan of the New York University School of Medicine sought to find out by playing a prank on mice…sort of.

The role of whiskers in those lucky mammals that have them

Whiskers are an important feature of those fury little creatures that have them: cats, dogs, mice, etc.  Whiskers are simply specialized hairs that provide tactical feedback.  Cats, for example, use their whiskers to gauge the size of an opening to determine if they can fit through it or not.  Whiskers exist to provide feedback, they are in every sense of the word…stimulating.

So Zuo and his fellow researchers used this fact to help study the effects of sensory deprivation on mice by cutting the whiskers off of several mice and looking at the effects of their brains.  The whiskers were trimmed daily of the experimental group of mice while a control group was left alone. Otherwise, the two groups of mice lived the same existence over the course of the experiment.

What they found

In short, the removal of the whiskers slowed down dendritic spine loss ( the part of a neuron that receives information a synapse).  Over the course of the study, this meant that the volume of the mice who underwent the whisker-trimming had larger brains than the control group. It should be pointed out that this was not because of new dendritic spine formation but rather a slowing down of loss of dendritic spines.   Additionally, while these findings held true regardless of the age of the mice, the results were more dramatic in adolescent mice than in adult mice.

Putting it all together: What can we take from this?

Zach Davis (The Good Badger) sits alone on a cliff while completing a 5 mile journey by foot along the Appalachian Trail

Here are some facts

1. Brains shrink as we get older
2. Our society is becoming more and more stimulated as we become more and more plugged in
3. ADHD, a disorder that predominately surfaces in adolescence, is on the rise
4. Individuals with ADHD have less brain volume than healthy counterparts
5. Isolation Chambers seem to have positive benefits
6. Sensory deprivation appears to reduce the rate of natural brain loss, this is more profound in children
7. If sensory deprivation reduces brain loss, one can reason that over-stimulation can promote it

In today’s ever-stimulating world, getting some rest and tuning out is becoming rare.  It only makes sense that we are probably frying our brains away on our iPods and video games.  Perhaps it’s time that we all just take a moment and listen to nature, unplug, and hike the Appalachian trail.  Ok, that may be a tad extreme, but you may want to reconsider that end-of-the-night facebook binge before you go to bed.  It’s not that computers are bad, certainly the benefits to today’s youth far outweighs the fact that many children have internet addictions and our taste and diversity in music is strongly related to the fact that it is so easy to listen to anything with a few passes of our thumb.  No, technology is not evil, but it probably shouldn’t run our lives unchecked.

*LaymanPsych never pretends to be authoritative and thus such arguments are to be taken with a grain of salt. Feel free to disagree with any arguments made here but please post comments below if you do!

%RELATEDPOSTS%

It is probably a pretty safe bet that you have found yourself yawning after seeing someone else yawn before you. Certainly math class can be boring and nightlong marathons of fragging strangers on Call of Duty can lead to a short night’s rest. Boredom and tiredness are typically the two most commonly accepted reasons we yawn for people that don’t study the mattter. For many years it was suspected that yawning, a reflexive action in which there is little control over, is the body’s way of restoring o2 levels and flushing the system of co2, though studies have indicated for years this likely isn’t the case.

The most recent and arguably the most logical explanation comes from Andrew C. Gallupa and Gordon G. Gallup Jr. of State University of New York in their 2007 study on yawning. The comprehensive study concluded that the act of yawning is the body’s way of cooling warm brains.  Increased brain temperature is associated with many effects, several of which mimic (or perhaps even cause) of the effects also associated with feeling tired (drowsiness, for example).  It seems that yawning is nothing more than temperature regulation. Fine. Easy enough. But what the heck does temperature regulation have to do with contagious yawning? Lets dig a little deeper. But first…

In just two short paragraphs of writing on the topic, I have yawned several times (Have you? Don’t lie).  Lets try an experiment. Watch this video of a cute kitten yawning and tell me you don’t yawn as well. Is this article making you yawn? Leave a comment below and tell us how many times you yawned.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfoftiihn6s

Admit it, you yawned (or at least went “Awwwww”).

Who contagious yawns?

Watch out for those teeth! A Macaques monkey yawning.

Stumptail macaques yawn in responses to other macaques on video 
A 2006 study by Anika Paukner and James Anderson (University of Stirling) discovered that macaques demonstrate a significant increase  in yawning of after the chimps were shown videos of other chimpanzees yawning.

How they did it
22 macaques were shown videos of other macaques yawning and videos of other macaques making non-yawning facial expressions (control).

The results
The results showed an increase of nearly double (4.7 vs 10 yawns, on average) when macaques were shown the yawn videos demonstrating that contagious yawning is not environment-related (as the yawns were on video) but instead must something psychological.

What do The Animal Studies Tell Us?

Domestic dogs yawn in response to a human yawn and tortoises don’t respond to their own kind’s yawns.  Neither are primates but domestic dogs do demonstrate a very high level of social interaction with humans.  Could this be why dogs are likely to yawn in response to a human yawn?  It is widely accepted that dogs have co-evolved alongside humans.  Interestingly, wolves are not as socially responsive to humans as dogs are and this is likely because dogs and wolves have evolved separately for many thousands of years. It’s also worth pointing out that the video studies indicate that contagious yawning is not environmentally driven.  Therefore, contagious yawning is not merely an illusion caused by a warm room (which would cause several individuals to have warmer brains and need cooling via a yawn).

These facts indicate that the act of contagious yawning is a socially driven-response, but what social skill is at play here?

Empathy as an Explanation for Contagious Yawning

One of the few positives that can come from disorders of the brain is that they can give us insight into how a normal functioning brain works.  For example, brain lesion studies have been one of the most useful ways of studying brain functions.  Perhaps the most famous example of this is the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a traumatic work accident in which a 4in diameter rod was forced through his skull.  The damage to his frontal cortex along with a dramatic change in his social inhibitions and odd behavior in the years following the accident resulted in some of the first and to this day most useful insights into the connection between the frontal cortex and human behavior.

In the same sense, we can look at human behavior disorders as a window to the psychological relationships behind related-behaviors.  In the case of contagious yawning, many studies are leading us down a road in which empathy appears to be the cause.  Some of the most insightful work to this end are studies related to childhood development and autism.

Autism and Empathy

Of the several symptoms of autism, the hallmarks are impaired non-verbal social interaction and a lack of social-awareness/empathy towards others. Given that this is a widely studied and overwhelmingly accepted fact, let us now explore contagious yawning among autistic patients.

Conclusions

One of the differences between humans and most other species is the advance social skills that develop in adults.  This development does take some time and it has been suggested that advance empathy does not begin to really take shape until the age of 6 or 7.  Additionally, it is well documented that autistic children lack basic empathetic skills.  These facts alongside the above contagious yawning studies seem to indicate that contagious yawning is directly related to empathy.  Since empathy is an advanced social skill, of which few animals in the kingdom have (that is both empathy and advance social skills), it is also not a surprise then that contagious yawning is lacking in the animal kingdom outside of a specific set of highly-advanced animals (humans included).

The only logical conclusion to draw at this time is that we yawn in response to other’s yawns simply because we are empathetic.  The reason that we are empathetic to other individuals yawns has yet to be explained but there are other behaviors that seem to also be contagious such as itching, smiling, and several other behaviors.  Empathy is an important skill for physically weak (relatively) highly social animals that rely on each other.  Without empathy, bad things can happen.

So, simply put, we are contagious to other people’s yawns because we are empathetic.  If your wife doesn’t yawn when you do, you’ve been warned.

Understanding Human Reaction to Sudden Tragedy

The unfortunate reality of most human tragedies is that in the chaos that they create is the predictability that is human nature. As much diversity in our behavior that our (massive) frontal cortex allows for, at the base of our brain is an ancient structure that we share with every vertebrate on the planet. The brainstem, not surprisingly, is thusly the center of our most simple behaviors and bodily functions.

Many (women) may argue that men are mostly “brainstem” for it is the simple things that are required for life that are controlled by the brainstem. The beating of your heart, the rhythmic breathing of your lungs, arousal, and our alertness are all functions of the brainstem (among others).

There is more than irony in Disney's personification of the animal stampede

Human Emotion in The Brain

Additionally, it has been hypothesized that our emotions are largely controlled by areas of the brainstem.  A PET study (conducted by Antonio R. Damasio, Thomas J. Grabowski, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Laura L.B. Ponto, Josef Parvizi & Richard D. Hichwa) in 2000 demonstrated that when humans think of emotional historical events in their lives, activity in the regions of the brainstem increased, indicating that the brainstem plays an important role in the creation and reaction of emotional stimuli.

So what does it matter if the brainstem controls all of these simple functions?

The point is that although the rest of our brain has evolved significantly from our early ancestors, ultimately the very basic functions of our being are shared with the rest of the animal kingdom.  This is no more visible than in times of sudden and unexpected tragedy, specifically in large groups of people.

Human Reaction to Disaster

As natural as it seems to run from disaster, as can be seen in many clips of the earthquake it’s easy to take for granted the lack of control we actually have when the brainstem is in high gear.  Many refer to the brainstem as the brain’s “auto pilot” because the functions it is mostly responsible for are also the ones that we take without thought.  This is not by accident but rather by design.

If we were tasked to assess and react accordingly to every experience in our lives, our survival rate would be more similar to Layman Psych’s Call of Duty score.

Every time you slam on the brakes because of a car you didn’t see, every time you duck from a soccer-ball that grazes your head, and every time you see a mass of people running like a herd of cattle, the brainstem is at work.  The masses of people running from ground zero on 9/11 were not thinking about getting away, it was an automatic response.  And while many would likely tell you later “We were just trying to get out of there” the truth is that this was more likely something that they became conscious of after they had already started running.

How do we know this?

As mentioned previously, there have been many studies that point to evidence that suggests our brain stems play a significant role in emotional responses. Such suggestions are nice on their own, but how can we further make this claim concrete?  What if we studied an emotional disorder–the mental disorder–and examined the cause of that disorder–the physical or biological reason the disorder exists?

The Brainstem’s role in Panic Disorder

It just so happens that by studying panic disorders, we can begin to understand what part of the brain is responsible for eliciting this emotion.  A now outdated, but oft cited study from 1994 (by V J Knott, D Bakish, and J Barkley) found that stimulation of the brainstem elicits panic attacks.  Since then, a vast amount of scholarship has been written that supports these claims.  Additionally, a recent study found that not only is there a correlation to panic (and panic attacks) and regions of the brainstem, but an abnormally large area of brainstem is correlated with an increased chance of an individual having panic (attack) disorders.

The Take Home

Every vertebrate on the planet has a few things in common. They eat, they breath, they sleep, they panic, they have a brain stem.  While many animals lack the vast majority of structures and/or size of the human brain, we all share the ability to panic and react in auto mode.

Underneath the sadness of loss of human life is pure horror and animal-like reaction in the form of panic

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nNkuig1l8s

There is nothing like a psychotic train-wreck to awake Laymanpsych out of its winter hibernation. Charlie Sheen, as we’re sure you’re well aware, has been making headlines for the past couple of months because of hospitalization-leading porn-star-laden coke binges.  Most recently the news has centered around the highest paid television actor’s feuds with his employers at CBS who have halted production of Two and Half Men as a result of these off-the-set troubles.

Sheen, no stranger to controversy, has been making the rounds on radio and TV shows with a ferocity that rivals the Tea Party Express in November.  The defensiveness of his appearances (which seem to serve no purpose but call out his employers who have essentially fired him) is overshadowed by his behavior which can only be labeled as bizarre.

Many have been left wondering if he is, in fact, mentally ill.  Famous celebrity mental health specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky stated that he feels Sheen “is clearly manic“.

What’s going on with the man?

Having watched the interviews on The Today Show and Good Morning America, LaymanPsych wanted to bring these labels to the masses with some better understanding.

Aside from falling back on decades of experience (and wads of student loan debt), psychologists and psychiatrists rely on a bible of sorts; the DSM-IV.  So what does the DSM-IV say about manic episodes?

Manic Episode

During the period of mood disturbance, three (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted (four if the mood is only irritable) and have been present to a significant degree:
1.) inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
2.) decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep)
3.) more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking
4.) flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
5.) distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli)
6.) increase in goal-directed activity (at work, at school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation
7.) excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments)

Having seen all of the interviews to date (and if you haven’t, they are worth watching in much the same way that a wreck at a race track is), LaymanPsych is also left to wonder if Sheen is also suffering from a mood disorder.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

1.) Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
2.) Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
3.)Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
4.) Requires excessive admiration
5.) Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
6.) Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
7.)Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8.)Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her
9.)Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

These are just lists of required symptoms of the disorders and it’s not our place to state what’s going on with Charlie. Clearly something is wrong though. Is Charlie Sheen dealing with a mental illness? We’ll let you be the judge, and hope that Charlie gets some help from medical professionals to judge for themselves.

More Reading…

DSM-IV Manic Episode criteria
DSM-IV Narcissistic Personality Disorder criteria

You and your friend rob a bank and make out like bandits with $10,000,000. Everything is going great, until you’re both caught. The police throw you and your friend into separate interrogation rooms and begin to berate you. They make you an offer you seemingly can’t refuse: rat out your friend in exchange for a lighter sentence. Hey, who hasn’t been there before?

Hopefully not you but if you’ve watched any crime show (real or fake) you’re familiar with the scenario. The premise is a fairly simple one: Two people caught in a pickle, forced to make a decision that results in the best outcome for themselves. The question is: which decision is in the individual’s best interest?

On one hand, you can tell the cops how your friend was behind everything in hopes that they only send you to jail for a few months instead of a few years. On the other hand, you can play it cool and give them nothing. It sounds pretty simple, if you rat them out then how does that not help you? Well, what’s going on in the other room? The cops are giving your friend the same offer. So what happens if you both rat each other out? What happens if you both play it cool? What happens if you play it cool and your friend rats you out? What happens if you rat your friend out who plays it cool? This is a classic “Prisoners Dilemma“.

Four possible outcomes with varying degrees of benefit for the individuals involved.

Human Nature of the Prisoners Dilemma

With all of this knowledge it seems easy to figure out what is best to do. But  when individuals don’t know how their decision will impact the end result, human nature fails us.  In fact, a recent study indicates that when presented with this general scenario (and it can be applied to literally anything, it does not always have to involve the law) humans only chose to cooperate 40% of the time.  This means that more than half the time the decisions made by the individual hurts the group.

The Bachelor Pad

ABC managed to produce a surprisingly riveting finale to what can only be described as a vastly interesting commentary on human nature in The Bachelor Pad. For those that don’t already know, the series threw a group of single men and women into a house together and let them live. In essence, that was the show, with the exception that based on nothing at all (such as an academic or athletic competition), each week a man and a woman was voted off the show by their gender counterparts.  It became advantageous for the individuals to align themselves with someone of the opposite sex so that person could fight for them at the end of each show in trying to get their peers to not vote their mate off the show.   At the end of the tunnel? $250,000 to the last one standing.

The final two (which was designed to be a man and a woman, and therefore a couple) were voted into position by the peers (the cast of the show) but only one could win the prize, so they thought.

The final two contestants Natalie and Dave, learned that the strength of their relationship would ultimately determine who won the money.   They were presented with a classic “prisoners dilemma” and sent into separate rooms to make their final decision.

In the end both decided to share the money, in contrast to typical human behavior. One flaw in the design of ABC’s ending was that the contestants knew the outcome, often not the case in a typical prisoners dilemma. Furthermore, it is possible that the two did in fact have a relationship that helped guide their decision, or perhaps they merely fell under the 40% of humans who chose to cooperate.  In any case, they both walked away with a cool $125,000

A final interesting caviet to the human nature of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

The setup of The Bachelor Pad’s Prisoners Dilemma was unique in that the contestants were privy to the ramifications of the wrong decision. As previously mentioned, this often isn’t how the Dilemma is designed, which helps fuel the natural human tendency for greed.  Ultimately, whatever an individuals decision in such a scenario, it is based purely on greed: The best possible outcome for me.

We know that 60% of humans will make chose to not cooperate with their partner, thus 60% of the time they both lose.  But what happens if you individuals to replay the dilemma over and over but not specifically tell them how they can win?  This can be setup in a game that rewards each player with points for their decision and playing the game an unknown or random number of times.  What we discover in such scenarios is that humans learn to work together to maximize their points.

The silver lining in the human nature of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

The ultimate goal in these scenarios is always driven by greed.  The Dilemma is set up to work on that greed so that each individual loses. The proof of this comes from the study of the topic: More often than not, individuals do not chose to cooperate with their counterpart because on the surface it seems the most likely way to win.  Since the odds are that each individual will not cooperate, the most common outcome is that both individuals lose.  Thus, human nature (greed) is used against the individual so that they inevitably fail.

The silver lining in this though is that humans can learn through experience.  Typically, with enough experience, both individuals learn to work together to maximize their gains.

This basic concept is known as the Nash Equilibrium, named after John Nash, the mathematician made famous (to non-math nerds) by the biographical movie A Beautiful Mind (depicting the schizophrenic academic’s life).

In short, an individual or entity (such as a nation, or business) can maximize returns (monetary or otherwise) by making the best decision for thyself but accounting for the decision of thy counterpart.

Most likely what happened on last night’s Bacheler Pad was that Natalie and Dave, being privy to the likelihood that they could walk away with nothing after otherwise winning the game, accounted for each others decision and ultimately chose wisely by sharing the money so that they each won.

As much as it pains LaymanPsych to say this, ABC managed to create a fascinating, albeit somewhat trashy, case study of human nature. And that is that.

More Reading

Preference, Belief, and Similarity: Selected Writings
Play out the prisoner dilemma with the computer

The prevalence of text message usage has increased dramatically in the last decade.

I’m not sure if you noticed but there are a lot of people using cell phones these days. In fact, today’s cell phone is probably inaccurately named.  Cell phones do still make phone calls of course but they are  increasingly becoming more like portable computers than merely phones.  This dramatically improved functionality of cell phones has not necessarily made texting more prevalent per se but it has opened the door to less costly plans and more text-friendly telephones.  As a result, the prevalence of text message usage has increased dramatically in the last decade.

What started as a novelty nearly 20 years ago has since grown into somewhat of a cultural fixture.  With all of the texting lingo, it is easy to understand why there is debate about whether or not texting is harming today’s children. It seems a little unlikely that the new linguistic patterns found in texting is negatively impacting today’s youth but one has to wonder: What exactly are kids saying?  More directly, what types of things are today’s youth using text messages for?

Who Are They

Crispin Thurlow and Alex Brown of the University of Washington-Department of Communication

What They Did

Thurlow and Brown utilized 159 first year college students from Cardiff University (Wales, UK) and analyzed 544 individual text messages for 1.) Message Length 2.) Main linguistic content, such as actual text (like this), or emoticons  ( :-p ), and abbreviations (Laymanpsych is Gr8).

What They Found

As is perhaps expected, Thurlow’s findings seem to indicate that users are often brief.  The technology limits the length of the messages to (typically) 160 characters, most users used around 65 characters (though there was a lot of variation; some used much more, some used less).   This size limit seems to explain the need for abbreviations; the findings reveal that of the 544 examples, there were 1401 abbreviations (or about 3 per message). Interestingly, this only accounts for roughly 20% of the content.

Each message was then categorized by content (of the 544 examples, 121 were eligible for categorization) into one of eight categories as follows:

*Informational-Practical: Exchanges of practical details or requests (14%)

*Informational-Relational: Exchanges for requests or personal favors (8%)

*Practical Arrangement: Plans to meet (15%)

*Social Arrangement: Plans for recreational meetings (9%)

* Salutary: Greetings. Often very brief and non-specific (17%)

*Friendship Maintenance: Apologies, support, thanks, etc. (23%)

*Romantic: Maintenance of romantic relationships (9%)

*Sexual: Explicitly sexual overtones. (3%)

*Chain Messages: Long messages passed from user to user (2%)

Separating these eight categories into two groups, “low-intimacy, high transactional” and “High intimacy, high relational”, further reveals that the majority of text messages were to set up or maintain relationships (roughly 61%).

Other themes of note were a large level of humor and general “joy” as well as what Thurlow has described as “Hyper-coordination” in which users updated others with information about looming plans. For example: M25 “C u in 5 min x” or M27 “Where r u? We r by the bar at the back on the left”.  Lastly, texts were frequently used to have separate personal conversations between individuals while within a larger group.  Many, for example, were texts to fellow classmates about the lecture at hand, or about individuals within the group.

What does it all mean?

The study at hand is rather simplistic and on a certain level, one could argue, somewhat foreseeable.  This study seems to make it clear that text messaging has become an imperative communication tool for younger individuals. In the context of a hyper-active world in which people are often running in many directions at once, text messaging appears to be a viable way for people to not just remain in touch with each other but actually increase their social productivity.   Although one could argue that the content of these messages is an abomination to the English language, it’s also a possibility that there is simply a new communication paradigm that has formed.  In areas where speed is not an overly important aspect of the interaction, whether it’s on a term paper or even on Facebook, language appears to remain in tact.

Perhaps for a new form of communication (text messaging), for it to be as efficient as possible for its intended use, requires a new language of its own.  It seems likely that English remains safe and text messaging will continue to facilitate an ever-busy society that still has a strong urge to remain in touch.

Further Reading

Generation Txt? The sociolinguistics of young people’s text-messaging (link to article)

The Psychology of Twitter, Facebook, and Other Social Networking Devices

Although the findings are not firm, it seems likely that violent video games lead to more successful in-game advertising.

The Real World Example

For those who play video games, a completely new world has opened up over the last decade as these gamers (and their games) become increasingly connected to the internet.  No longer are gamers stuck with playing against the computer, no longer are sports rosters outdated, no longer is the game you purchase the final version of the game.  Many video games are played strictly on the internet.

Beyond the entertainment value of incorporating the internet into gaming, there is a monetary value.  In-game advertising is certainly nothing new. However, the addition of the internet to in-game advertising allows for a dynamic experience. The ability to use the internet to target and change in-game advertisements has created a completely new opportunity to capitalize on ads in ways that has never before allowed.  And with this comes an increased desire to spend money on in-game advertising, which will certainly lead to more of it.

This seems harmless to all but the gaming purests whom are bothered by advertisements fudging with their gaming experience.  This begs to question whether or not an in-game advertisement can even be effective if the individual who is suppose to see the ad is too busy killing Nazi’s.  One must also consider whether or not an advertisement in a game where you kill Nazi’s is going to be as effective as say, Sonic the Hedgehog.  It turns out, that such questions are beginning to be answered by researchers.

Who Are They?

Andre Melzer, Brad Bushman and Ulrich Hoffman, The University of Michigan The University of Amsterdam and University of Luebeck

What They Did

Melzer, Bushman and Hoffman developed a 3D driving simulator that allows for researchers to manipulate the scenery (specifically, though not exclusively, billboards) in the game.

Users were split into two groups. The first group played a non-violent version of the game in which they were rewarded for running over geometric shapes.  A second group played the violent version of the game. The only change in the game was that users were rewarded for running over innocent pedestrians (it may be worth noting that when an individual ran over a pedestrian, a loud screaming sound reinforced the act).

Throughout the game billboards were placed in the scenery which displayed 64 corporate brands which were proven (through prior testing) to be well-recognized brands by the general public. Following completion of the simulation, users were given a surprise memory (consisting of two parts) test as well as a questionnaire.

The Memory Test

The first aspect of the memory test presented users with blurred versions of real brands, some of which were in the game, and some were not.  The second aspect was a “free recall” test in which users listed as many of the brands they saw while playing the game as they could.

The Questionnaire

The questionnaire served a few purposes but the most significant question asked the user whether or not the game was violent.

The Results

As expected, most users correctly identified whether or not their version of the game was violent (as per the questionnaire).  There was no difference in the amount of brands that were recalled by users in either version of the game (that is to say that on average, non-violent game players recalled an equal amount of brands as the violent game players). Interestingly though, users who played the violent version of the game were quicker to identify which brands were actually in the game compared to the non-violent game players.

What Does It Mean?

Truthfully, the study is somewhat lacking, and this is recognized by the researchers who intend on further developing the study.  For example, they set up an eye-tracking system in the game but unfortunately it malfunctioned for most of the trials.  Having said that, it appears that violent video games may lead to an increase in awareness of advertisements presented in-game.  When the users played the violent game they appeared more ready to identify brands that they saw while playing the game.

Violence sells but many fear it may negatively impact those who partake in watching violent movies, television shows, and especially video games.  It seems plausible that if violence in fact increases brand awareness when combined with video games that we will see more violent video games capitalizing on in-game advertisement.
Is this a bad thing? That is for you to decide.

More Reading

When Items Become Victims: Brand Memory in Violent and Nonviolent Games (link to article)

Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill : A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence

Danny from the Biggest Loser lost an incredible 239 pounds

The Real Life Example

Here is a task for you:  Go to Wal-Mart and look around.   America. Is. Fat.  In fact, America is only getting fatter.  There are, of course, many reasons for this and you’ve heard them all before so we shall spare you that story.  As America gets fatter, nighttime television is consumed by the latest and greatest weight loss schemes.  They do not work of course, which is (perhaps) one of the reasons the industry continues to grow.

The reality is that obesity is costing America a fortune while at the same time Washington debates healthcare reform.  An easy solution to both the obesity and health-care problem would be to lose weight. Simple as it sounds, most know that losing weight is far from it.  But why?  As you might imagine, psychologists are on the front lines in trying to find out why.   Recently the winner of a popular reality show lost 239 pounds in less than a year.  Turns out he also won $250,000.  As you might expect, it seems money is one of the best motivators to for weight loss.

Who Are They

Kevin G. Volpp, MD, PhD; Leslie K. John, MS; Andrea B. Troxel, ScD; Laurie Norton, MA; Jennifer Fassbender, MS; George Loewenstein, PhD

What They Did

Volpp et. al. gathered 57 overweight (though otherwise healthy) individuals between the ages of 30 and 70 years old.  The participants were then randomly placed in one of three different groups.  The first group was placed in a lottery system where those who met or exceeded weight-loss goals would have a chance at winning money.  The second group was part of a “deposit-contract arrangement” in which they pooled together their own money.  The money in this group was then split up among the top weight losers within the group.  The final group was given no cash incentive to lose weight.
The groups were all given 16 weeks to lose weight with a goal of losing one pound per week.

What They Found

Volp et al. discovered that those individuals who were given a cash incentive to lose weight performed significantly better than those given no incentive other than their good health.  By the numbers:  53% of the “lotto” group met or exceeded the 16 pound weight-loss goal, 47% of the deposit-contract group met or exceeded the 16 pound goal, and only 11% of the group with no cash incentive met or exceeded the 16 pound goal.  A follow up study revealed that not only did the weight loss end as soon as the cash incentives did for most of the participants, but the weight actually begin to come back.

What it Means

Unfortunately it looks like a random group of American’s isn’t very intrinsically motivated to be healthy.  In fact, by and large it required cold hard cash for individuals to lose weight. Sadly, once that extrinsic incentive was taken away, so was the motivation to lose weight.  What’s scary is that other findings about financial based incentives may mean that those who once lost weight as a result of a cash incentive, may now have even less motivation to be healthier on their own accord.

So is money the answer to a healthier America?  Early indications suggest not, at least not for the long term.  There is some hope, however, in that it is possible to motivate otherwise unmotivated people to do something with a little bit of money.  But for those of us who work every day, this isn’t news at all.  Volpp et. al. do wonder if a longer-term incentive program would begin to actually change the way the participants think by suggesting that a 12-18 month program would result in such drastic weight loss that the extrinsic motivation of cash would begin subside to an intrinsic desire to remain healthy.  Perhaps we should follow up with Danny in a few months to see how he’s doing…

Layman Psych Definitions

Intrinsic Motivation: Intrinsic motivation can be thought of as the internal desire to accomplish something for the sake of accomplishing it.  Intrinsically motivated tasks are still accomplished due to a reward but the reward exists within the task itself.  An example is listening to a song because an individual likes how the song sounds.

Extrinsic Motivation: Extrinsic motivation refers to “external” motivation to drive us to finishing something.  With extrinsically motivated tasks, the desire to complete the task has less to do with the rewards within the task itself and more to do with the rewards that come as a result of the completion of the task.  For example, you go to work to get paid. The work is the task, the motivation is the money you get from the job (this is, of course, unless you love your work).

Further Reading

Financial Incentive–Based Approaches for Weight Loss (link to study)