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Wed, 16 May 2012 Damaged connections in Phineas Gage's brain: Famous 1848 case of man who survived accident has modern parallel
In 1848, Phineas Gage survived an accident that drove an iron rod through his head. Researchers, for the first time, used images of Gage’s skull combined with modern-day brain images to suggest there was extensive damage to the white matter “pathways” that connected various regions of his brain.
Wed, 16 May 2012 Head impacts in contact sports may reduce learning in college athletes
A new study suggests that head impacts experienced during contact sports such as football and hockey may worsen some college athletes’ ability to acquire new information.
Wed, 16 May 2012 Trusting Tiger Woods: How do facial cues affect preference and trust?
People respond to facial cues and this affects their level of trust, according to a new study that looks at the way consumers react to morphed photo images.
Wed, 16 May 2012 Can consumers 'fit in' yet remain unique?
Most consumers want to fit in while still asserting their individuality -- and they balance these conflicting desires when choosing products, according to a new study.
Wed, 16 May 2012 Internet usage patterns may signify depression
In a new study analyzing Internet usage among college students, researchers have found that students who show signs of depression tend to use the Internet differently than those who show no symptoms of depression.
BPS Research Digest Blog
Smile your way to a vegetable-loving child
Laetitia Barthomeuf and her team presented 43 5-year-olds, 38 8-year-olds and 42 adults with photographs of two women eating various foods. As they ate, the women either looked happy, disgusted or just had a neutral expression. There were six different foods - three that the participants had earlier said they liked (chocolate, bread and cream cake) and three that they said they disliked (kidney, black pudding, cooked sausage with vegetables). Twenty-seven additional participants had been excluded earlier because their preferences didn't fit this pattern.
As they looked at each photo, the child and adult participants were asked to say how much, on a scale of 1 to 10, they desired to eat the food that the woman in the photo was eating. The take home finding - the children, especially the five-year-olds, were influenced much more by the facial expressions of the women, than were the adults.
If the woman in the photo had a look of disgust, this reduced the children's, and to a lesser extent, the adults', desire to eat foods that they liked. In contrast, if the woman had a look of pleasure on her face, this increased the children's, and to a lesser extent, the adults', desire to eat foods they didn't like (for five-year-olds only, it also increased their desire to eat foods they liked). Even a neutral facial expression in the eating women made a difference - increasing and decreasing the participants' desire for liked and disliked foods, respectively, especially in the children.
The researchers speculated that the influence of the women's facial expressions occurred because seeing their expressions led to simulations of those same emotions in the minds of the participants. They further suggested that this process is accentuated in younger children because of the immaturity of their prefrontal cortex.
The study has some obvious weaknesses, acknowledged by the researchers - they didn't measure actual eating behaviour, and the stimuli were photos, as opposed to a real-life dining situation. Nonetheless, they predicted the effects of other people's emotional expressions might be even larger in a more realistic situation and that the results therefore have important implications for the encouragement of children's healthy eating habits. "Adults may unconsciously influence children's food preferences via their facial expressions of pleasure or disgust," they said.
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Barthomeuf, L., Droit-Volet, S., and Rousset, S. (2012). How emotions expressed by adults’ faces affect the desire to eat liked and disliked foods in children compared to adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (2), 253-266 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02033.x
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
2012-05-16 Blogging for mental health
What is mental illness? In 2010 I reported on a Psychological Medicine editorial that dissected the definition used by the fourth edition of US psychiatry's diagnostic manual. Another post from 2006 explored differences in the way the public and experts view mental disorders. How we conceive of mental illness isn't only of theoretical interest, it can have an impact on people's lives. For example, this post showed that biological accounts of mental illness may dent patients’ hope and increase stigma.
Mental illness is normal. Several studies I've covered have illustrated just how common mental health problems are. One paper suggested that one in two of us will experience mental difficulties in our life-times. Another asked Who doesn't suffer from paranoia? Other research has shown that psychotic symptoms aren't always pathological and tried to find out how non-problematic symptoms differ from those experienced by patients. Another paper had a similar aim: The same voices, heard differently?
Drug-free treatment is often helpful. Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, there are drug-free ways to help people with schizophrenia, including using CBT. In fact, psychotherapy has a drug-like effect on the brain. In a guest post, Richard Bentall described the treatment of schizophrenia with maximum kindness and minimum medication. Elsewhere, I covered new research showing that fears could be unlearned without the use of drugs. I reported on a computer game that holds promise in helping prevent traumatic flashbacks. I've also uncovered some novel and straightforward approaches to improving mental health, including floral arrangement as a cognitive training tool for schizophrenia and Grab it, bag it, bin it - a new approach to psychological problem solving.
Self-help strategies sometimes backfire. But we shouldn't assume that all interventions, however well-intentioned, will be beneficial. Popular strategies or tools for being happier or more successful can sometimes be harmful, as these posts demonstrate: CBT-based self-help books can do more harm than good. Positive psychology exercises can be harmful for some Why positive fantasies make your dreams less likely to come true. A related feature article in The Psychologist magazine delved into the world of unscrupulous therapies: When therapy causes harm.
Research into the therapeutic process. Lots of research in psychology tries to get to the bottom of the factors that make therapy effective. For example, this paper put cognitive therapy on the couch. Another found that therapy is more effective when psychologists focus on their clients' strengths (yet another showed that successful therapists focus on their clients' strengths). This paper examined those times when clients in therapy show sudden, dramatic improvements. Other papers I've covered have asked some awkward and tricky questions about therapy - for example, is it really true that therapists don't improve with experience? Can therapists tell when their clients have deteriorated? What happens when therapists have the hots for their clients? And what should a therapist do if a client confesses to murder? Other studies looked at therapy from the clients' perspective, for example What do clients think CBT will be like and how is it really?
Mental health research isn't easy. Because mental health problems are so widespread, it's not always easy to conduct properly controlled experiments, as these posts show: Just how non-clinical are so-called non-clinical community samples? and Beware the "super well" - why the controls in psychology research are often too healthy.
Intriguing case studies. I've covered a few of these, such as the boy who thought 9/11 was his fault and the time that a spontaneous panic attack was caught during a brain imaging scan.
Be happy. There's reason for hope. Sometimes mental health problems can have an upside, for example this post suggested that anxiety has benefits. Remember too that most people with a mental disorder are happy If you want to be happier than you are, this study suggested that frequent, mundane positive activities will make you happier, rather than rare, profound events.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
2012-05-16 When are two heads better than one?
Across five studies Koriat tasked dozens of participants with answering a mix of forced-choice questions - some were to do with visual attention (e.g. which of two displays of patterns includes an odd-one-out?); others were general knowledge (e.g. which of two European cities has the larger population?); and there were visual judgement questions (e.g. which of two squiggly lines is longer?). The participants were asked to say how how confident they were in each of their answers.
For each round of questions, Koriat paired up the participants "virtually". That is, the partners in a pair didn't have anything to do with each other. But for each pair, Koriat followed the same rule, always taking the answer from the partner who was more confident.
Over a series of questions, Koriat found that always taking the answer from the most confident partner in a pair led to superior performance for that series (69.88 per cent correct on average in one study) compared with always taking the answer from whichever individual had the most impressive overall performance (67.82 per cent correct). In other words, the more confident of two heads working together nearly always outperformed the most proficient individual working on their own. In the first study using visual patterns, this was true for 18 of the 19 dyads. In further analysis, taking the most confident answer from a virtual group of three led to even more impressive performance.
The strategy even worked for people working alone if they were given two chances, a week apart, to provide answers to a series of questions, as well as rating their confidence. Always taking the more confident of their answers led to superior performance overall and was more effective than simply averaging their two answers (see earlier Digest item: Unleash the crowd within).
But here's the all-important caveat. This strategy of taking the answer of the most confident partner only worked for questions for which most people, "the crowd", tend to get the answer right. When the questions were tricky and wrong-footed most people, then the rule was reversed. Take the example of "Which city has the larger population - Zurich or Bern?". Most people get this question wrong - they think it's Bern because that's the capital city, but the correct answer is Zurich. For questions like this, the most effective strategy is actually to always take the answer of the dyad partner who is least confident (doing so beats the average score of the individual with the overall best performance).
Reflecting on these new results, Ralph Hertwig at the University of Basel said there were two important, tantalising questions for future research - is it possible to categorise problems somehow into those that tend to wrong-foot the crowd, and those that don't? Similarly, are there any cues that can be used to recognise in advance whether a problem is of the kind that the crowd gets right (in which case it's best to go with the most confident team member) or wrong (if so, go with the least confident member)?
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Koriat, A. (2012). When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why? Science, 336 (6079), 360-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549
Further reading: The much maligned group brainstorm can aid the combining of ideas.
Three-person groups best for problem-solving.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
Cognitive Daily
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 Cognitive Daily Closes Shop after a Fantastic Five-Year Run
Five years ago today, we made the first post that would eventually make its way onto a blog called Cognitive Daily. We thought we were keeping notes for a book, but in reality we were helping build a network that represented a new way of sharing psychology with the world. Cognitive Daily wasn't the first psychology blog, but clearly it filled an important niche, because within a year, we were receiving over 30,000 page views a month. Now we often get over 100,000 page views a month, and we've totaled over four million. We reach many more people than would ever have bought our book, and we've made many people aware that psychology is much more than Sigmund Freud.
Now, it's time to say goodbye to that. We are permanently closing Cognitive Daily, and this will be our last post.
While we won't be here, we've seen a number of exceptional psychology blogs join us in sharing the science of psychology with the world, and we encourage you to visit them. Rather than single any of these blogs out, we ask that you visit Dave's ongoing project, ResearchBlogging.org. There, by clicking on the "Psychology" and "Neuroscience" channels, you can find nearly 100 blogs that regularly discuss peer-reviewed research in the same fields we've been covering here. You can also follow dedicated psychology and neuroscience RSS feeds, or the @researchblogs twitter feed, to get an even broader view of what's going on in the world of science.
We're grateful to many, many people who have helped make Cognitive Daily great. There are too many to mention by name, but without the many scientists who provided the raw materials, the bloggers who've helped share ideas, and the administrators and techies who've made it all work, this blog simply couldn't exist. And, of course, without our readers and commenters, Cognitive Daily probably wouldn't have been around for more than a few months. You've inspired us, motivated us, corrected us, disputed us, informed us, and responded to more polls and surveys than we ever imagined possible. We hope you'll continue to find Cognitive Daily useful; the archives will remain here for all to see.
What will we do with all that time we've freed up? Greta plans to continue her work as Professor of Psychology at Davidson College, teaching and mentoring students, conducting research, and sharing her love of music, literature, and art. Dave will continue as editor of ResearchBlogging.org and weekly columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, and he'll maintain his personal blog, Word Munger and his obsessively-updated Twitter account. In addition, Dave's planning a new project, to be unveiled within the next few weeks. Look for more information about it on Twitter and Word Munger. In addition, Dave's now launched a new blog, The Daily Monthly. Check there for a new post every day, a new topic each month.
Thanks again for being a part of Cognitive Daily. It's been an amazing ride.
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality
Take a listen to this brief audio clip of "Unforgettable."
Aside from the fact that it's a computer-generated MIDI performance, do you hear anything unusual?
If you're a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn't nearly as pleasing as the familiar Nat King Cole version of the song. But most trained musicians can't listen to a song like this without cringing. Why? Because the music has been made "bitonal" by moving the accompanying piano part up two semitones (a semitone is the difference between a "natural" note and a sharp or flat). Here's the original, unaltered piece:
Can you tell the difference? A 2000 study led by R.S. Wolpert found that non-musicians couldn't distinguish between monotonal and bitonal music played side-by-side. Meanwhile musicians found artificially-created bitonal music to be almost unlistenable. For most non-musicians, if they heard anything wrong with the clips, they typically said they were being played too fast, or mentioned some other unrelated concept.
But Mayumi Hamamoto, Mauro Bothelo, and Margaret Munger (AKA Greta) wondered if years of musical training were really necessary for non-musicians to hear bitonal music. Bitonality is actually a bit controversial in the world of music, and it can be a little hard to define. In principle, there's a difference between bitonality and just playing or singing off-key, but in practice, the difference may not even exist. Advocates of bitonality like to point to the works of composers like Milhaud, Bartók, Prokofiev, and Strauss. These composers deliberately wrote in two different musical keys. But how is that different from occasionally or regularly writing dissonant chords? After all, all the same notes can be written using any musical key. To be truly bitonal, advocates say the two separate parts must unfold independently in different keys. This results in a distinctive "crunch" when the music is played. The separate question is, is this noticeable? Wolpert's work shows that it is, at least for trained musicians.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Thu, 14 Jan 2010 Synesthesia and the McGurk effect
We've discussed synesthesia many times before on Cognitive Daily -- it's the seemingly bizarre phenomenon when one stimulus (e.g. a sight or a sound) is experienced in multiple modalities (e.g. taste, vision, or colors). For example, a person might experience a particular smell whenever a given word or letter is seen or heard. Sometimes particular faces are associated with specific colors or auras. Synesthesia is relatively rare, but the people who experience it are genuine: their perceptions are consistent and replicable.
But one question researchers haven't been able to nail down is exactly how synesthesia occurs. Consider the relatively common form of synesthesia, where colors are perceived along with words. One synesthete consistently sees the color green when she hears someone say "neat." Does the synesthetic experience occur when she first detects the word, or only after she understands its meaning?
A team led by Gary Bargary has figured out a new way to test when a synesthetic experience occurs by relying on the McGurk Effect. In the McGurk effect, the word you "hear" someone saying changes depending on what you see. This movie gives a quick demonstration of the phenomenon:
In the first clip, I superimposed the sound of myself saying "neat neat peat peat" over video of myself saying "neat peat neat peat". What most people think they hear is "neat meat peat peat." You can see the actual recording of what I said in the second part of the clip. Because my mouth makes a similar movement when I say "p" and "m", the combination of the audio "neat" with a video "peat" makes viewers think they heard "meat." Listeners use both the audio and video information to decide what I'm saying, and they get it wrong! Did you experience the illusion? Let's make this a poll:
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...