PsyBlog

Irritating Psychobabble: Disorders Win!

2008-07-23T09:52:00.011+01:00

We're all disordered now.

Recently I asked for your (least) favourite examples of psychobabble - technical psychological terms used out of context.

You responded with many great suggestions, 30 of which I published. 750 of you (and counting) voted for your favourite and now the results are in.

There are three clear front-runners who received one-third of the votes between them. And so, without further ado...drum roll please...the most-hated psychobabble top 3 are:

I get really OCD about... (12%)
Retard (10%)
Bipolar (10%)

Thanks to everyone for voting in this poll and for the further suggestions in the comments to the vote. I think we have found a worthy winner in the misuse of the diagnosis 'obsessive-compulsive disorder'.

What struck me about the list of psychobabble phrases you suggested and voted for is that many of them are clinical diagnoses. This seems to reflect how much the modern psychiatric professions' drive to categorise mental illness has permeated our cultural lives. The names of disorders now trip off our tongues like never before - it wasn't always this way.

A short article from TIME on psychobabble from 1977 lists quite a different set of phrases as an inescapable part of the 'psychological patter of the '70s':

"Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight?"

To modern ears these phrases are redolent of a past era. It's impossible to hear them without visualising the stereotypical hippie. Talking to TIME, writer R. D. Rosen describes this language as:

"...difficult to avoid and there is often an embarrassment involved in not using it, somewhat akin to the mild humiliation experienced by American tourists in Paris who cannot speak the native tongue."

If Rosen thought things were bad in the '70s, just look at the state of psychobabble now. At least the psychobabble of the '70s was warm and fuzzy, while what we have now is clinical and cold, cynical even; driven not by the language of intellectual or emotional growth, but by the language of disorder.

[Image credit: Angel Photographer]

Jean Piaget's Four-Stage Theory: How Children Acquire Knowledge

2008-07-22T11:39:00.004+01:00

Jean Piaget: the second most-cited psychologist of all time, after Freud.

Top 10 Child Psychology Study: He has the dubious claim to fame of having produced perhaps the most criticised psychological theory of all time. His experiments and theories about how children build up their knowledge of the world have faced endless challenges, many of them justified.

But because of his immense contribution and his grand vision it is fitting to round off this series on 10 crucial child psychology studies with the work of the famous Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.

To give you a flavour of why Piaget's research has faced so much criticism and also why psychologists often regard him with such awe, I'll describe one of the observations he made of his own three children, why his conclusions are probably wrong and the central insight at the heart of his four-stage theory.

When the duck is out of sight, it's out of mind

One of Piaget's many careful observations was made when one of his daughters, Jacqueline, then 7 months old, dropped a plastic duck on the quilt and it fell behind a fold so that she couldn't see it. Piaget noticed that despite the fact that Jacqueline could clearly see where the duck had dropped, and it was within her reach, she made no attempt to grab for it.

Fascinated by this, Piaget put the duck in her view again but, then, just as she was about to reach for it, he slowly and clearly hid it under the sheet. Again, she acted as though the duck had simply disappeared, making no attempt to search for it under the sheet.

This seemed strange behaviour to Piaget as Jacqueline was clearly interested in the duck while she could see it, but seemed to forget about it the instant it disappeared from view - out of sight and, apparently, out of mind.

What Piaget deduced from these observations, along with many experiments, was that children do not initially understand the idea that objects continue to exist even when out of sight. This concept, he thought, children had to work out by themselves by interacting with and experiencing the world.

It wasn't until around 9 or 10 months of age that Piaget noticed his children began to search for a hidden object.

Piaget's four-stage theory of development

While many parents play games with their children like this, what set Piaget apart was that he used these observations along with many experiments to develop a theory of how children acquire knowledge, a theory for which he is rightly best-remembered.

This theory is a four-stage ladder up which Piaget thought children climbed as they gathered knowledge about the world:

Sensorimotor (birth to 18-24 months): infants are aware only of their sensations, fascinated by all the strange new experiences their bodies are having. They are like little scientists exploring the world by shouting at, listening to, banging and tasting everything.
Pre-operational (18-24 months to 7 years): during this stage children can process images, words and concepts but they can't do anything with them, they can't yet operate on them. It's like they've acquired the tools of thought, but don't yet know how to use them. E.g. in maths they can't understand that 2 x 3 is the same as 3 x 2.
Concrete operations (7 to 12 years): at this stage children gain the ability to manipulate symbols and objects, but only if they are concrete - abstract operations are still a challenge.
Formal operations (12 and up): from here on children are able to think in abstract terms about the world. Now they can understand concepts such as the future, values and justice. From around this age children start thinking like adults.

It's for this grand theory of development that Piaget is much admired. Unfortunately, like many an ambitious theory, over time evidence was uncovered that contradicted aspects of this neat time-line.

For example Piaget's conclusions about his daughter Jacqueline's failure to reach for the duck were probably wrong. Subsequent studies have revealed infants as young as 3.5 months appear to understand object permanence. Psychologists nowadays might explain Jacqueline's behaviour as a failure of memory or an inability to grasp something that is out of view.

Einstein on Piaget: genius

Although findings such as these have chipped away at Piaget's theory, his work has continued to attract interest and stimulate research. From observations like hiding his daughter's duck to his grand four-stage theory, Piaget's central insight was that children think in a fundamentally different way from adults. They don't just have less knowledge, less experience or less processing power; the qualitative content of their thoughts is actually different.

Even though psychologists now question many of the details of Piaget's observations and theories, this central insight remains intact. And it's this central insight that Albert Einstein once described as "so simple that only a genius could have thought of it".

» Read other top 10 child psychology studies on the emergence of infant memory, self-concept, learning, attachment, social behaviour, theory of mind, object permanence, language and play.

6 Types of Play: How We Learn to Work Together

2008-07-15T13:47:00.010+01:00

Top 10 Child Psychology Study: Play is a serious business. The pioneering developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky thought that, in the preschool years, play is the leading source of development.

Through play children learn and practice many basic social skills. They develop a sense of self, learn to interact with other children, how to make friends, how to lie and how to role-play.

The classic study of how play develops in children was carried out by Mildred Parten in the late 1920s at the Institute of Child Development in Minnesota. She closely observed children between the ages of 2 and 5 years and categorised their play into six types.

Parten collected data by systematically sampling the children's behaviour. She observed them for pre-arranged 1 minute periods which were varied systematically (Parten, 1933).

The thing to notice is that the first four categories of play don't involve much interaction with others, while the last two do. While children shift between the types of play, what Parten noticed was that as they grew up, children participated less in the first four types and more in the last two - those which involved greater interaction.

Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary and appears to be performing random movements with no apparent purpose. A relatively infrequent style of play.
Solitary play: the child is are completely engrossed in playing and does not seem to notice other children. Most often seen in children between 2 and 3 years-old.
Onlooker play: child takes an interest in other children's play but does not join in. May ask questions or just talk to other children, but the main activity is simply to watch.
Parallel play: the child mimics other children's play but doesn't actively engage with them. For example they may use the same toy.
Associative play: now more interested in each other than the toys they are using. This is the first category that involves strong social interaction between the children while they play.
Cooperative play: some organisation enters children's play, for example the playing has some goal and children often adopt roles and act as a group.

Unlike Jean Piaget who saw children's play in primarily cognitive developmental terms, Parten emphasised the idea that learning to play is learning how to relate to others.

» Read other top 10 child psychology studies on the emergence of infant memory, self-concept, learning, attachment, social behaviour, theory of mind, object permanence and language.

[Image credit: Seema K K]

Reference

Parten, M. (1933). Social play among preschool children. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 28, 136-147.

Human-Cat Psychology: Do Cats Improve Our Mood and Become Attached to Us?

2008-07-14T13:27:00.008+01:00

"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." -- Albert Schweitzer

Last year I covered 5 unusual studies on the psychology of dogs and their owners. This kicked off a comment thread which discussed how dogs act as ice-breakers, how they might mediate the tension between couples and how long after you died they would wait to feast on your flesh.

Apparently dogs wait longer than cats although I'm pretty sure there's no experimentally controlled evidence for this.

But what about cat-lovers and research into the psychology of cats? Inspired by MindHacks, I've uncovered a small literature on cats' effects on human mood, their ability to become attached to their owners, their personalities and our relationships with them.

Can cats improve your mood?

Cats are frequently accused of being selfish, but it's humans who are often being a little selfish when they get a cat - they hope it will give them pleasure. But do cats really consistently improve mood - was Albert Schweitzer right?

Research carried out by anthrozoologists suggests he was. A recent Swiss study recruited 212 couples with cats and compared how both their cat and their partner affected their mood.

Their results showed that, in line with previous studies, cats could alleviate negative moods but were unlikely to promote positive moods. People's positive moods were more associated with their partners.

So it's a cautious thumbs-up for cats - they might not make you burst into song, but they'll take the edge off a bad day.

Is your cat really attached to you?

The reason that cats can alleviate negative moods is often attributed to attachment - the emotional bond between cat and owner. But cats are well-known for being fickle so do they really become attached to their owners?

Remarkably there's actually been a quite sophisticated study on cat attachment behaviour towards their owners.

The classic procedure for investigating attachment in humans is the 'strange situation'. It tests how infants react to their mother (or father) leaving the room and then returning.

Well, this Mexican research used a similar procedure, but on cats. Analysis of the cats' behaviour suggested they were indeed emotionally attached. While the cats were with their owners they appeared more relaxed and were more likely to explore their environment.

This is pretty good ammunition for all cat-owners who are fed up with being told by cat-haters that cats don't care about...well...anything other than food and catnip.

What is your cat's personality?

So it seems that cats can alleviate negative moods and become attached to humans, but do they actually have personalities of their own?

Most cat-owners would say yes. Indeed in this study owners were asked to rate their cats on 12 items and when these were analysed, four dimensions of cat personality emerged. These were the extent to which their cat was:

Active, clever, curious, and sociable.
Emotional, friendly and protective.
Aggressive and bad-tempered.
Timid.

Remember these aren't categories but rather dimensions, so that a cat might receive a rating on each of these four dimensions which altogether would make up their personality.

With a bit of imagination these four factors can be superimposed on the widely agreed five factors of human personality: the first factor is like extraversion, the second could be neuroticism, the third factor agreeableness and the last factor openness to experience.

Obviously the final human factor, conscientiousness, has no place in the psychology of cats - whoever heard of a conscientious cat?

One legitimate criticism of this research is that people are just imagining or projecting personalities onto their cats. But these dimensions do line up with previous research on cat personality which has been carried out by people rating cats they didn't know.

How to develop a good relationship with your cat

Like any relationship, that between a cat and a human seems to require give and take, especially since cats are so independent.

Dr Dennis Turner from the Institute for Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology has carried out a series of studies investigating how humans and cats interact (e.g. this one).

From his research Dr Turner argues that the best relationships between cats and humans are found when humans respect a cat's independence.

Of course anyone who actually owns a cat hardly needs to be told that!

Random cat psychology facts

Here are some other random cat facts I uncovered:

Fat cat facts: Owners of obese cats can't see how fat their cats really are. Also, unlike the owners of fat dogs, owners of fat cats tended not to be overweight themselves.
Cats sent off to quarantine are friendlier, more affectionate and more timid when they return home.
Cats lack a sweet taste receptor - so there's another reason, along with the fact that it can seriously harm or kill them, not to feed them chocolate.

Any other cat psychology facts you'd like to add? Please do add a comment below...

[Image credit: swanky]

How Infants Start the Journey to Their First Word

2008-07-12T13:05:00.007+01:00

Top 10 Child Psychology Study: An infant's very first step in their year-long journey to their first word is perhaps their most impressive. This first step is discriminating and categorising the basic sound components of the language they are hearing.

To get an idea how hard this might be think about listening to someone speaking a language you don't understand. Foreign languages can sound like continuous streams of noise in which it's very hard to pick up where one word starts and another word begins.

Young infants face an analogous challenge but not initially at the level of words, but at the lower level of pure noise. Their first struggle is to tell the difference between the most basic components of speech, the individual sounds we are making, the phonemes.

Noticing the difference between 'b' and 'p'

Until a classic study carried out by Peter D Eimas and colleagues from Brown University in 1971, psychologists were not sure how soon infants could discriminate phonemes.

Eimas and colleagues' study used infants aged between just 1 and 4 months old and tested their ability to discriminate between a 'b' sound and a 'p' sound (Eimas et al., 1971). To get an idea of how difficult this is, consider the fact there's only a 10ms difference in timing between the two. To be able to hear this difference, a baby has got to have a very fine-tuned ear.

The method they used for intuiting whether the infants had noticed a change from one sound to the other was pretty ingenious. They were hooked up to a fake nipple which measured their rate of sucking, the idea being that this was a proxy for how interested they were in what was going on around them. The more interested, the faster they suckled.

First, infants' suckling rates were measured while they were exposed to one repeated sound, say the 'b'. Initially infants found this interesting and sucked a bit faster. Then after a while they get bored and their suckling rate reduced.

Here's the crucial part: in some experimental conditions the sound is changed to a 'p', while in other conditions it continues with the same 'b'. The question is whether infants notice this change, as evidenced by an increased suckling rate, and thereby demonstrate that they can discriminate the tiny difference between a 'b' and a 'p' sound.

Innate ability to discriminate phonemes

What Eimas and colleagues found was that even the one-month old infants appeared to be able to tell the difference between a 'b' sound and a 'p' sound.

This findings, and more like it, suggests to many psychologists that infants are born with skills which enable them to categorise sounds that only slightly vary. This skill is one of the basic building blocks of language learning.

Most languages contain about 40 distinct phonemes and an infant's ultimate task is to master all of them. During their first three months of life infants make all kinds of sound, but none of them bear much resemblance to speech.

But, partly because of this innate ability to discriminate the components of speech, by 3 months they start producing vowel-like sounds. They've conquered their first few phonemes and are well on their way to their first words.

The first word

While infants seem to be born with an ear fine-tuned for language, this starts to subtly change at around 11 months of age. Subsequent findings have shown that adults cannot successfully distinguish as wider a range of phonemes as infants.

This is because until about 11 months of age infants are masters of discriminating phonemes used in all different types of languages. But after 11 months infants settle down with one set of phonemes for their first language, and lose the ability to discriminate the phonemes from other languages. Infants are beginning to specialise in their own language.

The specialisation at 11 months in one set of around 40 phonemes, along with other linguistic processes, is clearly crucial as it quickly brings a magical moment: the first word.

» Read other top 10 child psychology studies on the emergence of infant memory, self-concept, learning, attachment, social behaviour, theory of mind and object permanence.

[Image credit: creativesam]

Reference

Eimas, P. D., Siqueland, E. R., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech Perception in Infants. Science, 171(3968), 303-306.

Ask For Help: Why People Are Twice as Likely to Assist as You Think

2008-07-10T12:28:00.007+01:00

Psychological researchers are always asking people for help. Doing research means asking people to fill in questionnaires, press buttons in computer programs and sit in fMRI scanners - all in the name of science and usually for little or no apparent reward.

In response to these requests people are generally very co-operative, in fact unexpectedly co-operative. When psychology students carry out their first few studies they are often pleasantly surprised. Their requests for help, instead of being met with blank faces and excuses, are often met with smiles and agreements.

In everyday life asking others for help can be embarrassing, perhaps even a painful experience. Requesting help potentially shows our own weakness and also opens us up to rejection. It's a relief when people say yes.

A helping hand

Perhaps this explains the conclusion of new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that finds we grossly underestimate just how willing others are to help us out.

In a series of studies Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake of Columbia University tested people's estimation of how likely others were to help them out. They got people to ask others to fill in questionnaires, to borrow cell phones and to escort them to the gym.

Across these studies they found that people underestimated how likely others were to help them by as much as 100%.

This is such a high figure that it demands an explanation - what's going on here?

Embarrassing to say 'no'

Part of the answer is our egocentric bias - we find it difficult to understand what others are thinking and feeling because we are stuck inside our own heads.

But it's more than just that, argue Flynn and Lake, it's also the fact that we underestimate just how much social pressure there is on other people to say yes. In effect, when you ask someone to help you, it's much more awkward and embarrassing for them to say 'no' than you might think.

In two further studies Flynn and Lake supported this intuition by asking participants to put themselves in either the role of someone asking for help, or someone being asked for help.

They found that when people were help-seekers they reliably played down the social costs of saying no. But when they were the potential helper they realised how difficult it was to say no.

Ask for help, but don't ask for too much

There's two very practical messages coming out of this research:

If you want help, just ask. People are much more likely to help than you think, especially if the request is relatively small. Most people take pleasure in helping others out from time-to-time.
Make it easy for others to say no. The other side of the coin is that most of us don't realise just how hard it is to say no to a request for help. Other people feel much more pressure to say yes to our requests than we realise. If the help you need is likely to be burdensome then think about ways of making it easier to say no.

[Image credit: LiminalMike]

Reference

Flynn, F. J., & Lake, V. K. B. (2008) If You Need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance With Direct Requests for Help. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 128-143.

Better Golfers See Bigger Hole

2008-07-08T09:24:00.005+01:00

Which hole is the same size as the golf cup?

A new study demonstrates that imagination can have a direct effect on our perception of the world. This may help explain why more accomplished sports-players describe perceiving the ball, or target such as a golf cup, as bigger.

Jessica K. Witt, an assistant professor at Purdue University, found that golfers who play well are more likely to actually see a bigger hole.

Witt's research team conducted three experiments. In the first, 46 golfers were asked to estimate the size of the hole after they played a round of golf. The diameter of a golf hole is 10.8 centimeters. The golfers selected one of nine black holes from a poster that ranged in size from 9-13 centimeters. Those who selected larger holes were the same players who had better scores on the course that day.

These findings matched up with previous research by Witt and Proffitt which found that people who were successful at hitting a ball remembered it as larger.

The question all golfers, and other athletes, will be asking is: how can I change my perception to increase my performance? Unfortunately this study can't tell us what causes what. The big question is whether playing better causes the hole to appear larger, or imagining the hole is larger causes better play.

Imagination instantly influences perception

Although Witt's research doesn't tell us, a second new study does show how easy it is for imagination to directly influence our perception of the world. Joel Pearson from Vanderbilt University and colleagues found that people's imagination influences both how they currently see something and how they see it in the future.

In their experiment participants imagined a pattern of either vertical or horizontal stripes. They were then presented with a horizontal pattern to one eye and a vertical pattern to the other eye. The effects of binocular rivalry mean that most people see the two patterns alternating. But subjects in this experiment were more likely to see the pattern they had been imagining.

"You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact," says Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right."

Pearson and colleagues found strong individual differences in the influence of imagination on perception. While imagination influenced everyone's perception, some people were much more influenced than others. This might suggest that some sports-people have a better developed talent for effective visualisation than others.

Why Our Ideal Self Seems Further Away For Us Than Others

2008-07-02T16:17:00.012+01:00

Is everyone else reaching their true potential quicker than you?

Understanding ourselves is partly about understanding who it is we want to become.

Because each of us is a perpetual work in progress, we live our lives with one eye on the future. In that future we see ourselves transformed into our true, ideal self - just as we would like to be.

While we take this for granted in ourselves, research finds we are much less likely to see other people's good intentions and hopes for the future as part of their selves. Instead we are likely to judge them just as they appear to us - defined by their past and present, stuck in the moment, unlikely to change and ultimately knowable.

Future selves: our own and others

This is the conclusion reached by Elanor Williams and Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University in a new study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They devised a series of experiments examining how we see our future selves in comparison to others.

In the first study 50 students were asked to assess how much their past, present and future selves contributed to their overall conception of themselves. Williams and Gilovich found that participants ascribed an average of 30.6% of their overall sense of self to their future selves¹. Almost one-third of their self-concept, therefore, was future-oriented.

But when they thought about another person this went down to 21.6%. This suggested participants believed that more of their future plans were included in their own selves than in other people's selves.

Can I know myself?

The proportion of the self that people ascribe to the future is effectively unknowable, unlike the past and the present. Because people ascribe around one-third of their self to the future, but less to other people, this suggests people consider themselves fundamentally more mysterious than others.

To test this theory a second study invited 68 students to think about the self as though it were an iceberg. Part of an iceberg, like a person's future self, lurks below the surface and so can't be seen. The students were asked to indicate for both themselves, and other people, how much of the future self lurks below the surface.

The results showed that people thought that more of themselves was hidden below the surface than for other people. This suggested people saw themselves as being more mysterious and mutable, while other people were more likely to be just who they appeared to be.

How far away is your ideal self?

Williams and Gilovich's research heads towards a somewhat downbeat conclusion: most of us feel we have further to reach than others to attain our ideal selves². The researchers tested this conclusion in a final study where participants indicated how far advanced they were on 'life's journey' towards 'self-actualisation' both for themselves and for the 'average Cornell student'.

When thinking about themselves students thought they were about 30% to where they wanted to be, while they thought the average student was about 50% towards becoming who they wanted to be. This confirmed their earlier studies which suggested we really do think other people are further towards fulfilling their potential than we are.

Future obsession

What Williams and Gilovich suggest is that the reason we feel others are doing better than us in the 'project of the self' is partly that we fail to take into account other people's dreams and aspirations⁴. Our own future intentions are only too clear to us, and they often serve to remind us just how far we are from our goals. But when thinking about others we often fail to acknowledge their goals and aspirations and wrongly assume how they are is how they want to be.

As Williams and Gilovich put it:

"Understanding ourselves is largely an effort to understand where we are headed; understanding others is more of an effort to understand where they are."

Unfortunately for us understanding our own hopes and dreams can be a source of considerable pain when we realise how far we have to go³. This pain may be made worse when we compare ourselves to others who may appear so much closer to realising their full potential.

The irony is that actually most people feel like this. Contrary to what we might imagine, other people are just as obsessed with the future as we are, and just as worried that everyone else is getting there faster than us.

--

Notes

1. Like me, you may have baulked at the idea that the self can be sliced and diced into percentages for past, present and future. This assumes that if part of ourselves is yet to be revealed in the future then the rest is necessarily already exposed in the past and present. But this is a strange way of thinking about the self and may be unrepresentative.

Williams and Gilovich, therefore, used an alternative method which didn't rely on absolute percentages but accessed the same ideas. They got the same pattern of results again, suggesting the conclusion from their percentage-based studies was correct.

2.The alternative, that we set higher standards for ourselves, they claim is ruled out by another completed, but as yet unpublished study.

3. People who are in very close relationships with others are more likely to understand the other person's aspirations. This may mean that the effect seen in this study is reduced in the case of close relationships.

4. Williams and Gilovich suggest that as people get older they may see their current selves as closer to their full potential. The findings in the current study may not, therefore, apply so strongly to older people.

[Image credit: javYliz]

Improve Your Mind-Reading: Focus on the Big Picture You

2008-07-01T09:22:00.005+01:00

Don't sweat the small stuff - instead focus on the big picture you.

We are surprisingly poor at working out what others think of us. Experiments suggest we rarely do better than chance at rating how likeable, intelligent or attractive others think we are.

So how can we be so bad at reading other people's minds and what can we do about it?

Writing in the latest edition of Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Dr Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago argues that the biggest obstacle to our understanding how we are viewed by others is our egocentric bias. We are all stuck inside our own heads.

The egocentric bias means that when we try to imagine how we are seen by others, we can't help but be biased by the way in which we see ourselves. Effectively to read others' minds, we first read our own minds.

Unfortunately it turns out that we often don't see ourselves as other people see us. Here are two major reasons why:

Attentional bias: we assume others are paying much more attention to us than they really are. People usually don't notice the details we think they do.
Construal bias: We see everything filtered through our own beliefs, attitudes and intentions, especially when situations are ambiguous or when our own beliefs, attitudes and intentions are very different from our mind-reading target.

How can we improve our mind-reading?

The time-honoured approach for finding out what others think of us has been to try and take their perspective. In a series of unpublished studies, though, Tal Eyal and Nick Epley found that this was not effective in increasing people's accuracy.

Instead three experiments they conducted suggested the answer was to think about yourself at a higher level of abstraction. Participants in one condition were asked to focus on central and defining features of the self rather than low level details. They were then able to judge what others thought of them more accurately.

Dr Epley explains: "You can look at yourself from the street level or you can look at yourself from the satellite level. Other people see you from the satellite level, so if you think of yourself from that big picture perspective, you'll tend to be more accurate."

"While we live our own lives under a microscope and we are present all the time when we do things, other people are not there with us," notes Epley. "That's a problem for intuiting other people's thoughts because we tend to evaluate ourselves in much finer detail. We look at ourselves from the street view, whereas other people are looking at us from space."

» There's a video with Dr Epley explaining the research and more details here.

[Image credit: nataliej]

30 Psychobabble Phrases - Which Do You Hate Most?

2008-06-25T10:47:00.015+01:00

Perhaps it's time to 'get really OCD' about cleaning the fridge?

Thanks to everyone for the great response to my request for psychobabble you love to hate. Here are the best 30 submissions (including a few of my own).

Have a read and then vote below so we can crown our most hated piece of psychobabble!

1. "My pet peeve is the use of OCD in, I get really OCD about cleaning my kitchen. What's really offensive about the usage is that it suggests one can spontaneously develop and un-develop a disorder. This is offensive to people who actually live with mental illness daily. Unless it's interfering with your functioning, it's not a disorder."
Erika

2. "Using fetish to mean 'a fascination with' rather than its true meaning (causing sexual arousal)."
Whistler

3. "Hands down, my biggest peeve is: reptilian brain. I heard two doctors on Oprah talk endlessly about how past life regression therapy works (!) because it bypasses your 'normal functioning brain' and goes straight for the 'reptilian brain', garnering knowing nods from the studio audience. I nearly chucked a shoe at my TV set."
Allison

4. "Every time I hear someone misuse the term acting out, I begin experiencing homicidal ideation. Of course 'acting out' is a psychoanalytic term denoting the enactment of an internal dynamic in the external world. You can't recognize the internal feeling states and so it is necessary to 'act it out.' But even among fully trained, licensed clinical psychologists this term has come to mean 'behaving badly' -- which of course makes it a useless term."
David Godot

5. "Unfortunately, retard has become a word of choice as far as insults go. The words moron, cretin and idiot began as medical terms that got absorbed into common use over time."
Romeo Vitelli

6. "I'm not a drug addict, I've been self-medicating."
Ron Frederickson

7. "Talk it out or talk it through. I understand why the therapist wants one to endlessly relive the moment, the rape, the abuse, the arguments with mommy, but I fail to see how the constant repetition does much of anything but reinforce it. Repressed feelings, if there is such a thing, don't automatically turn into mental bogeymen. In other places, it's called forgetting."
Troy Sumrall

8. "My favorites: He's totally projecting. She's definitely OCD/NPD/some other diagnosis."
Sara

9. "I'm stuck at denial (without a paddle, ha ha). A reference to Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' 'five stages of grief' which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. Dr. Kubler-Ross never suggested one stage had to be completed before the next and there's little evidence for these stages anyway."
Me

10. "Since I am not a native English speaker I didn't come across someone calling me anal until I started to study in England. At first I was shocked, since I didn't immediately understand my friend was not referring to my anus, but to my personality. I don't think many people realize that they are referring to one of the personality traits emerging from the failure to successfully complete one of Freud's developmental stages."
Anon

11. "Indigo Children. Bah. Humbug."
the mad LOLscientist

12. "Two terms that I think are way over used and misapplied are introvert and extrovert. Contrary to what people seem to believe, you're not one or the other, and the huge lists of attributes that get attached to each term are by no means accurate for everyone."
Stu

13. "When people claim they are bipolar when they're really just moody. Saying you're bipolar abdicates all responsibility for the control of your emotions."
bigstevec

14. "Their brains lit up in the scanner. Parts of the brain are said to 'light up' when we remember, lie, do our taxes and, probably, go to the toilet. Surely everyone knows this is just short-hand for increased blood-flow in a certain part of the brain? Do they hell.
Me

15. "In every mental health job I have worked, the real pain in the ass clients are referred to as borderline. Borderline has now ceased to be a disorder; it's psychobabble for 'this client is so annoying and needy I would gladly chew off my own foot to escape'."
Danny

16. "What annoys me most is conversational psychoanalysing - when someone you know (outside of a therapeutic context) frequently tells you that you don't really mean what you're saying, that you're in denial about your true feelings or ignoring what is going on at a subconscious level. Particularly annoying is when they then go on to tell you what you're really feeling!"
Lirone

17. "The most irritating one is the word schizophrenia which is wrongly used whenever someone refer to split personalities. I just can't hold myself back from being a besserwisser and telling them that they have no idea what schizophrenia is."
Violette

18. "Being addicted to...anything. If you do something more than twice a week it's an addiction: from sex, to video games to the internet. Are you a marketer with something to promote? Just use the word addiction and watch those headlines flood in."
Me

19. "When people describe themselves or others as being Type A, when in fact they're nothing like what Type A is supposed to be. Never mind the ridiculous dichotomy of dividing all human beings into 'having these collection of traits' and 'not having these collection of traits'."
Ruaidhri

20-22. "One of the richest sources of psychobabble is educational psychology, particularly in the area of giftedness. So we have every child is gifted. My favorite is the reduction of Dabrowski's overexcitabilities (in themselves a bit dubious) to OEs, as in 'I know I'm gifted because I'm an OE.' And we mustn't forget Gardner's 'intelligences,' which fertilized the ground for the creation of emotional intelligence."
Catana

23. "One of my most hated expressions is retail therapy."
Gary Brandon

24. "People don't talk about their emotions anymore, they vent. Contrary to the psychobabble, though, people are not like steam engines."
Me

25-26. "Here are two glorious examples of psychobabble from the world of business... socialize, as in, 'let's socialize that idea around the group and get some feedback' (translation: let's let people know what our idea is and see if they like it), and institutionalize, as in, 'once we've socialized our strategy and have gotten buy-in from our sponsors, let's make sure it gets institutionalized throughout the organization'."
Anon

27-28. "After a traumatic event (say, the VA Tech shootings) 'grief counselors' parachute in to help the survivors/witnesses get closure and move on. My father died over 20 years ago; I still don't have 'closure', though I stopped grieving after what apparently was an appropriate interval. His absence is an ongoing part of my life that I don't think will 'close'."
Gregory Luce

29. "When people confuse psychologists with psychiatrists. The general public seems to have a very rudimentary understanding of two very different professions."
kelligirly

30. "Hardwired is surely one of the most abused terms in both science journalism and everyday language. According to even usually quite reliable sources, we're 'hardwired' for money, risky behaviour, religion, feeling others' pain, art, fraud, oh, and liking pink, if you're a girl of course."
Vaughan at MindHacks

Now vote for the psychobabble that annoys you the most!

[Image credit: Erik]

Would You Ask Someone to Pick up Their Dog's Poop?

2008-06-25T09:00:00.001+01:00

Which public incivilities do you hate the most?

Whenever I see someone drop litter in a public place I feel bad not once, but twice. First all sorts of angry questions surge through my mind: didn't your family teach you any manners? Who do you think has to clear that up? Don't you care about your environment?

Second I feel guilty because I don't say any of these things out loud, instead wandering off grumbling impotently to myself.

Most irritating incivilities

Many of us, especially city dwellers, will turn a blind eye to all sorts of uncivil behaviour which falls short of a crime. And yet if this French research is any guide, I'm not the only one whose blood frequently boils over these sorts of minor events. Apparently urban dwellers cite incivility as their top urban stressor.

New research published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology looked at the types of uncivil behaviours that provoked the most anger (Chaurand & Brauer, 2008). Here are the top five:

Failure to pick up after one's dog
Littering
Illegally parked car
Graffiti
Aggressiveness towards others

Using social control to curb incivilities

Unfortunately law-makers face a nigh-on impossible task with so many other apparently more important issues clamouring for attention. That usually leaves it up to individuals - you and me - to exercise social control to try and reduce these behaviours.

But you only have to walk out of the door and down the street to see, especially in the city, that many of us are not exercising any sort of control.

To try and understand why we tend to do nothing, Nadine Chaurand and Markus Brauer from the University of Clermont-Ferrand, examined what factors affected whether people thought they would intervene in uncivil acts. Their results suggested three factors:

Responsibility: People who feel they have a responsibility to a particular area are more likely to intervene.
Legitimacy: We need to feel we have a legitimate reason to intervene. Once challenged, a litterer may ask: what's it got to do with you, buddy? People who do intervene are more likely to reply that they are personally inconvenienced by the uncivil act. Cleaning up their mess costs money and we pay our taxes, plus an untidy environment is unpleasant.
Getting angry: Feeling anger and disdain were strong predictors that people would intervene. It is when people feel angry that they are most able to overcome the natural tendency to remain passive and avoid attracting attention.

Chaurand and Brauer argue that these three factors suggest ways in which we might all be encouraged to exert social control over our less civilised citizenry. Authorities can remind citizens that removing litter and cleaning up dog poop all costs money - money that comes straight out of our taxes; money that is better spent on schools, hospitals and other public services.

A nudge in the right direction

If you think all of this is pie in the sky, then just look at what Singapore has managed. Singaporeans who litter or spit in the street now face stiff, rigidly enforced penalties, making them one of the most litter-conscious countries in the world. Singapore is now rightly famous for its clean streets.

Although many would consider a system of rigidly enforced fines control-freakery, at least the Singaporean experience shows that change is possible. It's the method that needs tweaking.

The Times reports that politicians in both the US and the UK are taking an interest in how social norms can be used to influence the public's behaviour. This interest has been catalysed by a new book from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called 'Nudge'. The idea is that people can be 'nudged' towards better choices through social norms and small adjustments.

This new French research provides a strong hint as to how societies can be nudged towards enforcing more civil behaviour through exercising subtle social control. Then perhaps we'll be able to enjoy cleaner streets, graffiti-free walls and altogether more pleasant public environments.

[Image credit: Leo Reynolds]

Reference

Chaurand, N., & Brauer, M. (2008). What Determines Social Control? People's Reactions to Counternormative Behaviors in Urban Environments. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 1689-1715.

Infants are Intuitive Physicists: Object Permanence

2008-06-20T14:19:00.005+01:00

Professor Renee Baillargeon from the University of Illinois.

Top 10 child psychology study: You know you're in a dream world when the physical laws of the universe appear to have changed. When gravity has been turned off at the socket, objects seem to have no inertia and vanish when they are out of view. Dreams can be surprising and unsettling precisely because we're so used to how the waking world works.

Perhaps young infants, brand new in the world, experience their environment as a kind of nonsensical dream in which even the simplest properties of objects surprise them. Wow, they wonder, where does the world go to when I close my eyes?

Or perhaps they do have some intuitive understanding that objects continue to exist even when they can't be directly experienced? This is the question psychologists have been trying to answer while researching what infants in their first year of life understand about 'object permanence'.

Object permanence

Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when we can't actually see them. Famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget thought that children couldn't properly grasp this concept until they were at least 12 months of age.

This idea was challenged by a series of studies carried out by Professor Renee Baillargeon from the University of Illinois and colleagues. These studies used children's apparent surprise at 'impossible' events to try and work out whether they understood object permanence.

A blocked road

In one study infants as young as 6.5 months watched a toy car travelling down a ramp. Half way through its journey, though, it went behind a screen out of the baby's view before exiting the other side, once more visible.

In one condition the infants saw a block placed behind the screen in the way of the toy car. And yet when the car was released, experimental trickery was used so that the block didn't stop the car's progress. Miraculously it still appeared from the other side of the screen.

This 'impossible' condition was compared with another condition where the block was placed near, but not in the way of, the car's progress - the 'possible' condition.

Baillargeon found that the infants looked reliably longer at the seemingly impossible scenario. This suggested they understood that the block continued to exist despite the fact they couldn't actually see it. They also must have understood that the car could not pass through the block. This seems like reasonable evidence that infants can understand object permanence.

Simple explanation

In further studies Professor Baillargeon tested all sorts of variations on this theme. Toy rabbits, toy mice and carrots were all used, with some defying the laws of nature in the 'impossible' conditions and others studiously following them in the 'possible' conditions. Each time, though, infants looked longer at the apparently impossible events, perhaps wondering if they were dreaming.

These studies have now shown that infants as young as 3.5 months seem to have a basic grasp of object permanence. While others have argued for alternative explanations and interpretations, when all these studies are taken together the idea that children understand object permanence is arguably the simplest explanation.

Intuitive physicists

Using these results Baillargeon and others have argued that young infants are not necessarily trapped in a world of shapes which have little meaning for them. Instead they seem to be intuitive physicists who can carry out rudimentary reasoning about physical concepts like gravity, inertia and object permanence.

So, perhaps infants don't perceive the world as a completely nonsensical dream. Sure, they have many new things to learn and many things surprise them, but they do seem to understand some fundamentals about how the world works from very early on.

» Thanks to everyone who has sent in great suggestions of psychobabble you love to hate so far. I'm really enjoying reading them and I'll have fun sharing them with you in a definitive psychobabble post next week. Please keep them coming!

» Read other top 10 child psychology studies on the emergence of infant memory, self-concept, learning, attachment, social behaviour and theory of mind.

Psychobabble: Which Expressions Do You Love to Hate?

2008-06-19T14:38:00.003+01:00

Do you have issues with your dysfunctional inner child?

Send me your favourite examples of psychobabble and I will publish them here on PsyBlog.

My first experience of 'psychobabble' was at school. Kids used to shout an abusive epithet across the playground and when some poor soul turned around to look they all cried in unison, "Complex!", as in the Freudian term 'Oedipus complex'.

As is usually the case with psychobabble it was a technical psychological term used out of context - not that I was sufficiently well-read (or stupid enough) to point that out at the time.

While this example is pretty lowbrow, psychobabble permeates all intellectual strata. Psychological discussions on the street, in print, on TV and online are filled with psychobabble, usually delivered with a straight face.

Sometimes respectable psychological terms escape from their cosy, sheltered academic homes and develop their 'babble' out in the wide world where they're ravaged by the uncultured masses and left almost unrecognisable. Other times the 'babble' is born fully-formed of various gurus, cultists, celebrities, columnists and others.

Here are a few pieces of psychobabble I currently love to hate:

"Their brains lit up in the scanner." Parts of the brain are said to 'light up' when we remember, lie, do our taxes and, probably, go to the toilet. Surely everyone knows this is just short-hand for increased blood-flow in a certain part of the brain? Do they hell.
"I'm alive so I must be addicted to breathing." If you do something more than twice a week it's an addiction: from sex, to video games to the internet. Are you a marketer with something to promote? Just use the word addiction and watch those headlines flood in.
"Thank you for letting me vent." People don't talk about their emotions anymore, they 'vent'. Contrary to the psychobabble, though, people are not like steam engines.
"You need to engage your right-brain". Refers to the purported importance of the right-side of the brain in creativity. I've moaned about this before.
"I'm stuck at denial" (without a paddle, ha ha). A reference to Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' 'five stages of grief' which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. Dr. Kubler-Ross never suggested one stage had to be completed before the next and there's little evidence for these stages anyway.

Send in your favourite psychobabble

These are just a few to get your bile flowing. Once you've worked yourself up sufficiently please send in your personal favourite(s). It could be psychobabble from any context: work, home, school, childhood, sport, TV - anything you like as long as it has some connection to psychology.

Then I'll publish them here as a list and we'll vote for our favourite bit of psychobabble!

Don't forget to include your name, or if you would prefer to submit anonymously then just let me know.

» You can post a comment below or email me directly. Look forward to reading them!

[Image credit: Ozyman]

When Children Begin to Simulate Other Minds

2008-06-18T11:22:00.007+01:00

What is he thinking?

Top 10 child psychology study: One superpower all psychologists would kill for is the ability to read minds. Not only would it make psychology research a lot easier, we would be able to experience what it is like to be someone else - a fascinating prospect.

Although telepathy is still science fiction most of us can do something clever that, while only a pale imitation, does allow us to step inside other people's minds in a limited way.

We can do this because our brains are fantastic simulators - we can, for example, predict the paths objects will take through space and the decisions we should make now to cause a future event. Similarly, we can put ourselves in other people's shoes to try and imagine their thoughts, intentions and possible actions. In fact without the ability to simulate what other people are thinking we would be lost in the social world.

Theory of mind

Psychologists call this ability to simulate or work out what others are thinking 'theory of mind'. The emergence of theory of mind in children is a vital developmental milestone; some psychologists think that a failure to develop a theory of mind is a central component of autism.

The first experiment to provide evidence about when theory of mind emerges using a test of false beliefs was carried out by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner from the University of Salzburg (Wimmer & Perner, 1983).

To test the emergence of 'theory of mind' the researchers wanted to find out whether children could pass a false belief test. To pass the test children have to understand that it's possible for other people to hold beliefs that are different to their own. This is a surprisingly tricky task when your brain is so new it's still under warrantee.

Test of false belief

Wimmer and Perner tested children between 3 and 9-years-old by telling them a story about a boy called Maxi whose mother had brought home some chocolate to make a cake. When she gets home Maxi sees her put the chocolate into a blue cupboard. Then Maxi goes out to play.

Meanwhile his mother uses the chocolate for the cake but happens to put it back in the green cupboard. When Maxi comes back in he feels hungry and wants some chocolate. The children in the experiment are then asked, not where the chocolate is, but which cupboard Maxi will look in.

In the experiment the story is also acted out using dolls and matchboxes to make the story explicit for the children.

Results

The results showed that 3 to 4-year-olds tended to fail the test by pointing to the actual position of the chocolate rather than where Maxi thought it was. They seemed unable to understand that although they knew where it was, Maxi didn't.

Wimmer and Perner (1983) argued that this was because they could not construct a separate mental model of the world that represented Maxi's experience - they weren't capable of a theory of mind.

From about 4 to 5-years-old the situation changed dramatically. Suddenly the children tended to point to the cupboard where Maxi thought the chocolate was, rather than where they knew it was. However in some variations of the experiment children up to 5-years-old still had problems understanding someone else's false belief.

Finally, at 6-years-old, the children did consistently understand that another person can hold a false belief about the world.

End of innocence

This experiment suggested that at about 4 to 6-years old a range of remarkable skills start to emerge in young children that are vital for their successful functioning in society. They begin to understand that others can hold false beliefs, they themselves can lie, and that others can lie to them.

From one perspective it is a sad end to innocence, but from another it is a necessary base for a skill required for social success. At around 4-years-old children are starting to understand that we don't live out there in the world, we actually create a model of the world in our heads, a model that can easily be wrong.

Criticisms and alternative explanations

Like many child psychology studies, this experiment has sparked much debate about what its results mean. Here are some of the alternative explanations addressed by the experimenters:

Were the kids concentrating? Yes, they correctly answered questions that showed they were concentrating.
Had the younger children forgotten the story? No, they were given a memory test which they passed.
Were the younger children just pointing at where the chocolate was without thinking about the question? In another experiment children were specifically told to stop and think - this didn't help the younger children.

While this experiment has been criticised, and other methods have been developed for examining theory of mind in children, tasks like this one are still in use around the world to this day, helping to uncover how and when we first develop the ability to understand other people's thoughts.

» Read other top 10 child psychology studies on the emergence of infant memory, self-concept, learning, attachment and social behaviour.

[Image credit: Thomas Hawk]

References

Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103-28.