Do Northerners really feel the cold less?

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

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

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

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

Here are the Digest top 5 posts for 2011:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

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

Anglo-Saxon troops confront the invaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Our Xmas special: gift psychology and psychology gifts

Psychology-themed gifts:

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

A subscription to Scientific American Mind magazine.

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

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

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

 "Connect it" brain/usb t-shirt.

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

A subscription to The Psychologist magazine.

Serotonin necklace.

Freudian slippers.

Dopamine t-shirt.

Inflatable brain.

Ramon y Cajal t-shirt.

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

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

Gift-giving research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a hard life

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

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

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

update 23 Jan: This competition is now closed.


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


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


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

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


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

Small print

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

Feast

We trawl the web for the latest and best psychology links so you don't have to:

"Teachers don't like creative students" Alex Tabarrok picks up on an intriguing review paper.

The Royal Society has released its fourth Brainwaves report, this one on neuroscience and the law. Read coverage from Alok Jha in the Guardian.

Alexander Linklater picks out his favourite psychology books of the year for the Observer. Don't forget to check out our own round-up of the best 2011 psychology books.

Alex Kraut, the executive director of the Association for Psychological Science, defends psychological science in the wake of the Stapel fraud scandal and the recent survey showing widespread questionable practices in psychology.

Eleanor Maguire, the UCL psychologist famous for her studies of the brains of London cabbies, is herself useless at wayfinding. This is just one of the revelations in Ed Yong's splendid report on her new study. This time Maguire followed trainee cabbies over time, observing how their training changed their brains.

Expertise is all about practice, right? Lots of it. We know that from books like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which have popularised the work of the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. But writing in the New York Times, David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz exhort us not to get too carried away. Yes, practice is very important for expertise and achievement. But so too are IQ and working memory, which are fairly stable characteristics.

On a related note. Neuroskeptic covers a new study that's looked at genetic associations with intelligence. "... [F]or people who do believe in the genetics of intelligence, this shows us that we have no idea what the genes are, and that everything published so far has been pretty much for naught."

Remember the astonishing Daryl Bem paper published last year that found events in the future affected psychological states in the present? Find out what happened when a group of UK psychologists tried to get their failed replication published.

" ... the scientists [located] a pattern of activity that appeared whenever a painting was deemed to be authentic, regardless of whether or not it was actually “real.” Jonah Lehrer on the way the brain responds to art (and expensive wine).

Don't tell Paul Ekman: A new paper claims that "expressions are not inborn emotional signals that are automatically expressed on the face". In related news, the Darwin Correspondence Project is recreating Darwin's classic experiment on the categorisation of facial expressions of emotion.

Leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller - reports the marvellous Mo Costandi (check out the lead author's defence of the study in the blog comments).

The Journal of Family Theory and Review gets stuck into Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

"There is no scientific evidence that boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink" - the Guardian takes another look at claims about innate differences in gender colour preferences.

"We don't have free will, in the spiritual sense. What you're seeing is the last output stage of a machine" - Patrick Haggard is interviewed in The Telegraph.

Explore your blindspot: discover how the mind hides its tracks. New free e-book from Mind Hacker Tom Stafford.

More wonderful writing from Ed Yong, this time in Nature, where he describes his visit to the body-illusion lab of Henrik Ehrsson. Might it one day be possible to create the sense of having two bodies? "We're working on it," says Ehrsson. On a similar note, David Byrne segues from discussing Ehrsson's Barbie illusion to railing against unrealistic portrayals of beauty in the magazine and entertainment industry.

Audio

New podcast from the Wellcome Collection: Mirror neuron researcher Dr Zarinah Agnew reflects on her career.

New BBC Radio 4 series on parenting and disciplining children - available on iPlayer.

Latest episode of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind, tackled neuroscience and the law; plus the new taxi driver study - available on iPlayer.

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Feast will return in the new year.

Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Inverse zombies studied using anaesthesia

Hospital medicine takes a pretty crude approach to consciousness. You're considered mentally AWOL if you don't respond to simple commands or physical prodding. But studies of post-operative patients have found that many of them recall having dreamt during anaesthesia. And in some disturbing cases they've even felt pain or heard the surgeons talking. This suggests that it's possible to be outwardly dead to the world, but conscious inside (locked-in patients and imaging studies of brain-injured patients in a persistent vegetative state also imply the same thing). Researchers have nicknamed people in this state "inverse zombies" - a play on the standard philosophical zombie concept, in which a person may appear to be outwardly conscious, but is in fact, dead inside.

A problem with much of the research into "inverse zombies" is that it's been conducted opportunistically in hospitals. The experimental set-up is messy, the patients have a variety of health complications, and they've often been given a cocktail of anaesthetic drugs. These studies have found rates of awareness during anaesthesia at around 0.023 to 1 per cent and rates of anaesthesia dreaming at rates of 6 to 53 per cent.

Now Valdas Noreika and his collaborators have performed a carefully controlled lab study of subjective (or "phenomenal") consciousness during anaesthesia, with the help of 40 healthy male university students. These brave souls were given progressively higher doses of one of four different anaesthetic drugs: dexmedetomidine; propofol (the drug that tragically killed Michael Jackson, who was using it as a sleeping aid); sevoflurane; and xenon. Dexmedetomidine and propofol are given intravenously; the other two are inhaled.

After the doping had begun, the researchers gave the participants the verbal command "Open your eyes!" at five minute intervals. Once a participant stopped responding they were considered to be unconscious in the traditional medical sense and the dose was gradually lowered until they responded again. Throughout, the researchers recorded the surface electrical activity from the front of the participants' brains using a "Bispectral Index Monitor (BIS)" - a form of electroencephalography (EEG), which provided an objective measure of the depth of sedation.

The induction phase - from the last response to "Open your eyes!" to the loss of responsiveness - lasted typically from around 5 to 10 minutes; the period of sedation or loss of responsiveness itself lasted around 10 minutes; this was followed by a 2 minute recovery phase and then 5 minutes of EEG scanning. At this point, the participants were interviewed about their subjective experiences during the time they were knocked out.

The key finding is that dreams or sensations were experienced during nearly 60 per cent of the anaesthesia sessions. These ranged from perceptual sensations (including "quick visual experiences"; out-of-body sensations; an altered sense of time); dream-like experiences (had a fragmentary dream about "a trip in Eastern Europe" said one participant); vision-based dreams related to the lab situation ("one of the nurses got suspended from her work"); and dreams with auditory content based on the lab situation ("a friend's roommate ... sitting next to me here in the lab, telling me we have to go to the city"). Sometimes these experiences were accompanied by negative emotions ("a bit anxious"); other times positive ("felt extraordinarily good"). The type of experiences didn't vary with the particular anaesthetic given.

Noreika and his team say these findings are important because they highlight the inadequacy of the standard medical definition of loss of consciousness (i.e. a loss of responsiveness), which is used in many anaesthesia-based studies into the neural correlates of consciousness. This standard definition, they argue, fails to take into account the frequent persistence of phenomenal consciousness in the absence of responsiveness. "Arguably, if one aims to explore the neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness, it would be fruitful to contrast the neural activity during dreaming anaesthesia vs. the neural activity during dreamless anaesthesia," they said.

The study is vulnerable to some obvious criticisms. The depth of sedation was shallower than is typically used in surgery, so the results may not generalise to higher doses of anaesthesia. Also, the participants were forewarned that they would be interviewed about any experiences they had whilst unconscious, which could have led them to come up with the kind of answers that they felt the researchers were after. Defending the validity of their results, Noreika's team pointed out that subjective reports of experience were more frequent when the objective BIS measure indicated shallower sedation - just as you'd expect if the experiences were real. "The results confirm that subjective experience may occur during clinically defined unresponsiveness," the researchers said.

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Noreika, V., Jylhänkangas, L., Móró, L., Valli, K., Kaskinoro, K., Aantaa, R., Scheinin, H., and Revonsuo, A. (2011). Consciousness lost and found: Subjective experiences in an unresponsive state. Brain and Cognition, 77 (3), 327-334 DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.09.002

Further reading: Check out this recent New Scientist feature article on consciousness and anaesthesia.


Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.