Rituals bring comfort even for non-believers

People around the world often perform rituals as a way to cope with sad events. The rules can be contradictory - for instance, Tibetan Buddhists think it's disrespectful to cry near the deceased, while Catholic Latinos believe the opposite. Beneath this variety, a new paper by Michael Norton and Francesca Gino, suggests there is a shared psychological mechanism - a comforting sense of increased control. Moreover, the researchers report that even non-believers can benefit (pdf via author website).

Norton and Gino began by asking 247 participants recruited online (average age 33; 42 per cent were male) to write about a bereavement they'd experienced in the past, or a relationship that had ended. Half of them were additionally asked to write about a coping ritual they'd performed at the time. The main result here was that the participants who recalled their ritual reported feeling less grief about their loss. This was explained by their greater feelings of control, and wasn't to do with the simple fact they'd written more than the other participants.

Relying on reminiscence in this way is obviously problematic from a research perspective, so for a follow-up Norton and Gino invited 109 students to their lab. Groups of 9 to 15 students were told that one of them would win a $200 prize, and to intensify the situation they were asked to write about what it would mean to them to win, and how they'd use the cash. One student was duly awarded the money and left. Half the remaining participants were then instructed to perform a 4-stage ritual: they drew their feelings about losing on a piece of paper, sprinkled salt on the drawing, tore it up, then counted to ten. The others acted as controls and simply drew their feelings on the paper.

The key finding was that the ritual students subsequently reported experiencing less upset and anger than the controls at the fact they hadn't won the money, and this was largely explained by their greater feelings of control. Crucially, the comfort of the ritual was unaffected by how often participants reported conducting rituals in their lives or whether or not they believed in the power of rituals. It seems there's something about the process of going through a multi-stepped procedure that provokes in people feelings of control, above and beyond the role played by any associated religious or mystical beliefs.

A third and final study was similar and clarified some issues - reading that some people sit in silence after a loss, and then sitting in silence themselves, did not bring comfort to participants who lost out in a lottery for $200. Reading that some people perform rituals after a loss also brought no comfort, unless the participants then went on to perform a ritual themselves.

Norton and Gino said they did not mean to imply that human and monetary loss are equivalent, but they do think rituals may bring comfort in both situations via the shared mechanism of an increased sense of control. They added that more research was needed on the impact of specific forms of ritual in different contexts, but for now their results offered preliminary support "for Durkheim's contention that 'mourning is left behind, thanks to the mourning itself'; the rituals of mourning in which our participants engaged hastened the decline of the feeling of mourning that accompanies loss."

An important caveat the researchers mentioned is that this research was with participants who are mentally well and so it doesn't speak to the issue of rituals that become dysfunctional and all consuming, as can happen in obsessive compulsive disorder.

Norton and Gino's paper complements a study published last year that looked at people's beliefs about the factors likely to increase ritual efficacy, including repetition and number of procedural steps.

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Norton MI, and Gino F (2013). Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 23398180

--Further reading--
Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence.
Feature article in Nature "Praying, fighting, dancing, chanting — human rituals could illuminate the growth of community and the origins of civilization."

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

Link Feast

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

1. Fifteen psychology experts share their best productivity tips.

2. Last night, BBC Two's Horizon broadcast "The Creative Brain: How Insight Works" (more on creativity from the Digest archive).

3. Scientific American Mind have relaunched their blog network - long-time favourites are still there like Bering in Mind and The Scicurious Brain, but there are some new faces too, like Beautiful Minds by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, and PsySociety with Melanie Tannenbaum blogging "at the intersection of pop and psych culture."

4. Is psychology a science, can it be one, should it be? On BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves programme, cognitive psychologist Professor Keith Laws debated with philosopher of science Rupert Read [from 34.04 minutes in].

5. Creative ways researchers find to describe their non-significant results.

6. Psychologist Steven Pinker went on Reddit and invited readers to ask him anything they liked.

7. The new NeuroBol*ocks blog debunks the SPECT-based diagnostic brain scanning industry.

8. Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals - new TED talk by neurobiologist David Anderson.

9. Is it a good thing that psychological science is undergoing a form of public self-flagellation and rehabilitation? Post-doc Tal Yarkoni argues it is his blog post: "the truth is not optional: five bad reasons (and one mediocre one) for defending the status quo".

10. From the Wellcome Trust: ‘The Great Brain Experiment’ is a mobile phone app that will let you – and us – experiment on your brain!

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Looking ahead to next week, Professor Ray Miller asks “Is everybody going mad?” on Thurs at Edinburgh Skeptics in the Pub.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Embodying another person's face makes it easier to recognise their fear

An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions.

Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute video of a face being stroked with a cotton bud, while at the same time their own face is stroked in synchrony. People who experience this illusion tend to rate the face in the video as being more similar to their own, and, if they see the face cut, they show a physiological stress reaction as if the wound was theirs.

In the study, 15 female participants were challenged with identifying the emotional expression shown by a woman in a photo - either happy, fearful or disgusted. The photos had been morphed with neutral expressions to varying degrees, leading to seven different levels of task difficulty.

The key finding was that the participants were significantly better at recognising the facial expression of fear after they'd experienced the enfacement illusion for the face showing the fear. Simply watching a two-minute video of the person displaying fear didn't lead to this subsequent performance boost, neither did a "sham" version of the illusion in which the stroking of the model's and participant's face is out of synch. Another detail - the genuine version of the illusion led to enhancement of fear recognition only, with no effect on recognising happiness and disgust.

The main result is consistent with past research suggesting that we recognise emotions in other people by simulating their state in our brains. It's as if we temporarily embody the person we are empathising with. Related to this, people with a rare condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia (they experience touch when they see someone else touched) show enhanced facial expression recognition.

It's curious that the enfacement illusion only enhanced the recognition of fear, but then previous studies have suggested that this emotion, more than others, is recognised through a process of embodying the person who is afraid. This makes evolutionary sense too. There are obvious advantages in responding to the sight of a fearful ally by preparing one's own body for a threat.

"Our results suggest that the way we represent the relationship between the bodies of self and other is an important factor in the somatosensory simulation of emotions," the researchers said, "and furthermore, demonstrate that such a process is sensitive to multisensory intervention."

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Maister L, Tsiakkas E, and Tsakiris M (2013). I feel your fear: Shared touch between faces facilitates recognition of fearful facial expressions. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 13 (1), 7-13 PMID: 23356565

Image reproduced with permission of the first author.

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

Please vote for the Research Digest

Friends, please consider voting for the BPS Research Digest in the inaugural Science Seeker Awards. Science Seeker is a fantastic website that aggregates all the world's science blogs in one place and organises them by topic.

A panel of judges will select the winners from among the most nominated blog posts in different categories. Here's how you can help the Research Digest win the psychology category:

• I self-nominated the popular Digest blog post Why Do Children Hide By Covering Their Eyes?. The more nominations it gets, the more likely it will get short-listed. You can add your nomination by visiting this page and clicking the little trophy icon in the top right-hand corner (or you can click the star to recommend it). 
• If you'd like to nominate a different Digest blog post, there's an archive of Digest posts on the Science Seeker website. Find the one you like and click the little trophy icon - any posts published prior to February 1 2013 are eligible. [more details on the awards here].

Thanks so much for your support. 2013 marks ten years since the launch of the BPS Research Digest service, so it would be a wonderful anniversary present to be short-listed (or win!) a Science Seeker award. The deadline for nominations is March 31.

PS. If the Digest were lucky enough to win, as editor I would donate any potential cash prize to a mental health charity.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

It's possible to be patronised by a helpful three-year-old

Although small children love to help, you might think the support they can offer is pretty basic - you ask them to do something and they do it. In fact, a new research paper reveals a remarkable level of sophistication in the helping behaviour of three-year-olds. They take your ultimate goal into a account, and if they think they know better than you how to reach that goal, they'll help you in their own way - a skill that the researchers call "paternalistic helping".

Nineteen three-year-olds took part in an initial study in which pairs of objects were within reach, one item functional (e.g. a cup), the other broken (e.g. a cup with a hole in the bottom). Whenever an experimenter pointed to and asked for the dysfunctional object in a pair (e.g. "Could you pass me that cup so that I can pour some water?"), the key test was whether the child would ignore the specific request and instead pass the functional equivalent.

Alia Martin and Kristina Olson at Yale university found that the children passed a requested object on 97.4 per cent of trials when the experimenter asked for the functional object in a pair. In the critical test, this dropped to 31.6 per cent when the experimenter requested a dysfunctional object. Stated differently, nearly 70 per cent of the time that an experimenter specifically requested a dud tool, the little children ignored what was asked for and instead provided a working alternative (and they often provided a spontaneous explanation for their actions).

What if kids just prefer working objects and are more likely to hand those over, regardless of the circumstances? To check this, a second study with more three-year-olds involved the experimenter requesting working or dud objects in order to place them in a rubbish bin (rather than for a specific purpose). In this case, the kids tended to pass along whatever the researchers asked for, broken or not.

A final study provided an even more impressive demonstration of three-year-olds' helping behaviour. This time, the experimenter sometimes asked for dud objects for unconventional uses - e.g. a cup to cut a circle in play dough (in which case the hole in its bottom doesn't matter). As before, the children usually ignored requests for dud objects for conventional uses, giving a working alternative instead. But if a requested dysfunctional item was perfectly useful for an unconventional task, they happily passed it over. The children seemed to be able to think in  sophisticated fashion about the adult's ultimate goal and whether or not the object they wanted could be used in the service of that goal.

"Our results demonstrate that within the first few years of life children already have a remarkably advanced understanding of helping," Martin and Olson concluded. "One that distinguishes between immediate and end goals - and can select an appropriately helpful action even when it requires overriding an explicit request."

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Martin, A., and Olson, K. (2013). When Kids Know Better: Paternalistic Helping in 3-Year-Old Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031715

--Further reading--
How to increase altruism in toddlers

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

Smiling fighters are more likely to lose

The day before mixed martial artists compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), they pose with each other in a staged face-off. A new study has analysed photographs taken at dozens of these pre-fight encounters and found that competitors who smile are more likely to lose the match the next day (pdf via author website).

Michael Kraus and Teh-Way David Chen recruited four coders (blind to the aims of the study) to assess the presence of smiles, and smile intensity, in photographs taken of 152 fighters in 76 face-offs. Fighter smiles were mostly "non-Duchenne", with little or no crinkling around the eyes. Data on the fights was then obtained from official UFC statistics. The researchers wanted to test the idea that in this context, smiles are an involuntary signal of submission and lack of aggression, just as teeth baring is in the animal kingdom.

Consistent with the researchers' predictions, fighters who smiled more intensely prior to a fight were more likely to lose, to be knocked down in the clash, to be hit more times, and to be wrestled to the ground by their opponent (statistically speaking, the effect sizes here were small to medium). On the other hand, fighters with neutral facial expressions pre-match were more likely to excel and dominate in the fight the next day, including being more likely to win by knock-out or submission.

These associations between facial expression and fighting performance held even after controlling for betting behaviour by fans, which suggests a fighter's smile reveals information about their lack of aggression beyond what is known by experts. Moreover, the psychological meaning of a pre-match smile appeared to be specific to that fight - no associations were found between pre-match smiles and performance in later, unrelated fights. Incidentally, smaller fighters smiled more often, consistent with the study's main thesis, but smiling was still linked with poorer fight performance after factoring out the role of size (in other words, smiling was more than just an indicator of physical inferiority).

If fighters' smiles are a sign of weakness, there's a chance opponents may pick up on this cue, which could boost their own performance, possibly through increased confidence or aggression. To test the plausibility that smiles are read this way, Kraus and Chen asked 178 online, non-expert participants to rate head-shots of the same fighter either smiling or pulling a neutral expression in a pre-match face-off. As expected, smiling fighters were rated by the non-expert participants as less physically dominant, and this was explained by smiling fighters being perceived as less aggressive and hostile.

Of course, the researchers are only speculating about what's going on inside the minds of the fighters pre-match. It's even possible that some of them smile in an attempt to convey insouciance. If so, Kraus and Chen said "it is clear that this nonverbal behaviour had the opposite of the desired effect - fighters were more hostile and aggressive during the match toward their more intensely smiling opponents." 

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Kraus, M., and Chen, T. (2013). A Winning Smile? Smile Intensity, Physical Dominance, and Fighter Performance. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0030745

Image reproduced with permission from the first author.

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

Link feast

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

1. Neurocomic takes readers on an adventure in the brain - In this wonderful video blog, the Guardian tells the story of the collaboration between Artist Matteo Farinella and neuroscientist Hana Ros of University College London.

2. Twitter Is an Awful Predictor of Public Opinion

3. Living with voices in your head: Eleanor Longden at TED2013

4. Psychologist Brian Nosek opens new Center for Open Science. Ed Yong reports on a commendable initiative (see also). In related good news, APS journal Perspectives in Psychological Science launches new article format to encourage more multi-lab replications.

5. Bad news - New case of research fraud in psychology

6. New Human Zoo psychology series has started on BBC Radio 4 (you can catch up on iPlayer). There's a companion website with background info and demonstrations of the experiments.

7. Also on BBC Radio 4 - What do Europe's old "mad houses" tell us about the history of mental illness?

8. The rise of gratuitous and inaccurate brain references in everyday language - Vaughan Bell wrote about what he calls "folk neuroscience" for the Observer (inspired, I posted a 5-Step Self-Defence Programme Against Neuro-nonsense over at Psychology Today).

9. Enhancing one type of math skill with brain stimulation impairs another reports Maia Szalavitz for Time. The results suggest "any attempts at cognitive enhancement — whether with drugs or electric stimulation or other methods— should be studied carefully for their potential harms as well as their promise," she wrote.

10. The curious lives of the people who feel no fear (from New Scientist - free registration required to read the text). Related Digest posts here and here.

Shoot, I couldn't fit these ones in the list: The Benefits of optimism are real. Latest Neuropod podcast is online - including memory in the courtroom. The film that reacts to your emotions.

--
Looking ahead - it's Brain Awareness Week, next week. The Dana Foundation have a list of all the events planned in the UK.

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

The Mastermind effect - psychologists boost students' general knowledge using priming placebo

Believing a treatment will work, even if in reality it is entirely inert, can lead to profound beneficial changes. This is the wonder of the placebo effect and most of us have heard it discussed in relation to helping people with physical ailments.

Less explored is the potential the effect could have in other contexts. There are some examples, such as a paper published two years ago by Sophie Parker showing that memory performance was enhanced when participants thought they'd taken a cognition-enhancing drug, even though they hadn't. However, this still has parallels with a medical placebo because of the use of a sham drug.

Now Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan have gone a step further, by showing that a drug-free placebo intervention boosted the general knowledge performance of a group of students. Pub quizzes might never be the same again!

The researchers started by showing 20 participants the answer on-screen to several multiple-choice test items, just prior to the arrival of each of the questions (examples included Pi, and the painter of La Guernica). Next, the researchers gradually reduced the time the answers were presented, until they became completely invisible. This was to demonstrate the principle of subliminal presentation and laid the ground for the experiment proper.

For the real test, involving a new set of 20 questions, Weger and Loughnan told the same participants that for each test item, the correct answer would be presented to them subliminally beforehand, just as in the earlier demonstration. "We further advised them that although they could no longer consciously recognise what was written, their unconscious would still be able to pick up the correct answer," the researchers explained, adding that they told the participants to go with their intuition because "on some level you already know the answer". In reality, however, no answers were presented subliminally, just random letter strings. The researchers call this a "bogus priming method". Participants gave their answers via a paper sheet.

The key finding is that the test performance of the placebo participants significantly outstripped the performance of a control group of twenty students who undertook the test prelims, but were not told the answers would be shown to them subliminally during the test proper (average 9.85 correct out of 20 vs. 8.37 correct; a large effect size of d=0.813). The average age of the 40 participants was 20 years and there were 32 women. The priming placebo effect held when controlling for participant age and gender.

What was going on? The placebo intervention "cannot have expanded the individual's knowledge or storage capacities," the researchers said. "What is more likely to have happened is a weakening of inhibitory mechanisms that normally impair performance on a task - for example, self-incapacitating anxieties that previously taxed cognitive resources." The placebo might also have "primed a success orientation," the researchers said, which may have affected the participants' behaviour accordingly, including increasing their persistence.

Weger and Loughnan are excited about the possibilities their placebo approach might have for testing people's performance in situations where their anxiety might otherwise interfere with achieving their true potential. The real life benefits of this new test-performance placebo will likely depend on the duration of its effect, something the researchers plan to test in future research. Another issue for applying these findings in real life is whether the effect still occurs when people know the trick (at least one previous study has documented a placebo effect that can work without deception). The researchers are optimistic - "we speculate that even the one-off realisation to have skills and resources that the participant was not previously aware of can be a significant insight that may alter the individual's self-perception and self-talk."

Skeptics will no doubt be concerned about the small size of the sample in the current study and the narrow demonstration of the effect. There's clearly a need for replications! As Weber and Loughnan acknowledged, we also need to know more about the mechanisms underlying the improved test performance.

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Weger, U., and Loughnan, S. (2013). Mobilizing unused resources: Using the placebo concept to enhance cognitive performance. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66 (1), 23-28 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.751117 

--Further reading--

Unleash the crowd within
Resilient, friendly people are more responsive to placebo treatment

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

- Thanks to Marc Brysbaert at Ghent University for the tip-off (he'd love it if you took part in this word association test). 

- The journal publishers at Psychology Press are in the process of making this paper open-access. 

- Thanks to Jon Sutton for the Mastermind moniker.

Extras

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

More clues to successful ageing from the study of "super-agers" (previous Digest post on Super-Agers).

Does Posting Facebook Status Updates Increase or Decrease Loneliness?

Being men with eating disorders: Perspectives of male eating disorder service-users

Improving multi-tasking ability through action video games

Modifying Memory: Selectively Enhancing and Updating Personal Memories for a Museum Tour by Reactivating Them

The effects of news stories on the stigma of mental illness.

The home advantage in individual sports: An augmented review

Dr. Phil and Psychology Today as Self-Help Treatments of Mental Illness: A Content Analysis of Popular Psychology Programming.

Perspective Taking With Future Humans Improves Environmental Engagement

Women more likely to share their number with a handsome stranger when it's sunny.

The desire for healthy limb amputation: structural brain correlates and clinical features of xenomelia.

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

How to design a street that's mentally rejuvenating

More people worldwide now live in cities than in the countryside. Combined with sprawl and the loss of urban green spaces, this means that many of us are unable to enjoy the restorative effects of a natural setting. But what's to say the built environment, designed well, can't have a rejuvenating effect too? "The built environment can be more beautiful than nature," the British planning minister said recently, "and we shouldn’t obsess about the fact that the only landscapes that are beautiful are open — sometimes buildings are better."

What's clear is we need more research on the psychological effects of urban design. Sadly, planning, architecture and psychology tend not to speak to one other. A new study takes us a step in the right direction. Pall Lindal and  Terry Hartig presented hundreds of Icelandic participants with dozens of computer-designed residential, terraced streetspaces that varied in two main ways - the degree of variety and complexity in the building design, in terms of the ornateness of the roofline and facades; and building height, which varied from one to three stories.

Participants were asked to imagine that they were walking down the street, mentally exhausted after work. They then rated each streetscape in terms of its restorative potential, how much they liked it, its "fascination" (how much it offers the chance to explore and discover), and its ability to give a break from routine (what the researchers called "being away").

Examples of streets judged to have least (left), medium, and maximum (right) restorative power. 

Greater architectural variation in the street scene and lower building height both contributed to the perception that the environment was restorative - allowing the participants to "rest and recover their abilities to focus". Greater architectural variety also tended to go hand in hand with a greater sense of fascination and with "being away" (although not with preference), factors which explained the link with perceived restorative power. In contrast, higher buildings were associated with a diminished sense of "being away" and were judged less restorative.

The findings make sense in terms of increased building intricacy and variety allowing the mind to alight on the visual scene, find interest, and therefore disengage from prior mental toils and challenges. Excess building height, on the other hand, fosters a sense of too much enclosure, which clashes with our instinctual preference for a minimal level of openness - possibly an evolutionary hang-over allowing us to notice predators.

Although this study is a welcome contribution to the psychology of architecture, it suffers from numerous limitations. Among these is the fact most of the Icelandic participants reported a lack of familiarity with urban scenes of this kind - results could be different in other countries. Also, the participants didn't experience actual streets, and only perceived, rather than actual, restorative powers were measured. Finally, the levels of architectural variety were minimal - no fewer than 50 per cent of the buildings in any scene were identical. Higher levels of variation could have an adverse effect.

Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said "their results affirm that densely built urban residential settings need not lack restorative quality, and that the design of the built environment can play a significant role in affecting perceptions regarding possibilities for restoration."

"Such information is needed in the effort to create urban environments that are sustainable in social and psychological terms," they added, "as well as in ecological terms."

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Lindal, P., and Hartig, T. (2013). Architectural variation, building height, and the restorative quality of urban residential streetscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 33, 26-36 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2012.09.003

--Further reading--

Is there a psychologist in the building?
Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?
Living in a city, or growing up in one, is associated with heightened brain sensitivity to social stress

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

Are we now blasé about brain scans?

People are so awestruck by neuroscience, the briefest mention of brain-based jargon or glimpse of a brain scan is enough to send their critical faculties into a flutter. Or so they said. But now a new study finds that in fact most people are singularly non-wowed by the technical brilliance of brain scan images.

Robert Michael and his colleagues performed ten replication attempts of a hugely influential finding published in 2008. Back then David McCabe and Alan Castel reported that undergrad students were more persuaded by a neuroscience news story when it was accompanied by a picture of a brain scan, as compared with a bar chart or no image. The result is mentioned frequently in the popular press as evidence of our neuro-enthrallment. It receives about 40 scholarly citations a year, but until now no-one has checked if the effect is real.

Seven of Michael's ten replications were performed online, three with paper materials, together involving nearly 2000 participants, including members of the public and students. As in the McCabe and Castel study, participants read a news item about brain scans being used to detect criminals. Afterwards the participants said if they agreed with the story's conclusion that brain scans can be used as a lie detector.

Combining the results from the McCabe and Castel study with the new data, overall the presence of a brain scan in the news story had only a tiny effect on participants' answers. On a 4-point response scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree with the story), this reflected a shift of just 0.07 points or 2.4 per cent in agreement. "The image of the brain exerted little to no influence," the researchers said. The effect of the brain scan image didn't vary with the format of the study - online vs. paper. Participant age and education level also made no difference.

Past research outside of the neuroscience context has shown that images can make accompanying text more understandable and persuasive. The remarkable ineffectiveness of a brain scan in the current replications is therefore something of a puzzle. One explanation is that the impact of the image will vary according to the neuroscience training of the observer. "To people who may not understand how fMRI works, or even where the frontal lobes are, seeing an image of the brain may not be any more helpful than seeing an ink blot," the researchers said. Future research will need to test this.

Another possibility is that people have grown more sceptical of neuroscience since the 2008 McCabe and Castel finding was published. To test this possibility, Michael and his colleagues performed five online replications of another influential study - the 2008 discovery that people were more impressed by bad explanations when they contained gratuitous neuroscience language. This finding was replicated, arguing against the idea that people have become inoculated more generally against the persuasive power of neuroscience.

In the replications of McCabe and Castel, perhaps the addition of a brain scan image failed to make the lie detection news story more convincing because that story already contained persuasive neuroscience language. Regardless, this new paper adds to evidence showing the failure of brain images to sway jurors. And Michael's team said (quoting Martha Farah) it shows "the 'amazingly persistent meme of the overly influential image' has been wildly overstated." Recently, Farah and her colleague Cayce Hook described this phenomenon as the “seductive allure of ‘seductive allure’".

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Michael, R., Newman, E., Vuorre, M., Cumming, G., and Garry, M. (2013). On the (non)persuasive power of a brain image. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0391-6

--Further reading--
The power of blobs on the brain
Are Brain Scans Really So Persuasive?

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

Link feast

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

1. The great illusion of the self - mind-boggling goodness from New Scientist (free registration required to read the full articles).

2. Professor Uta Frith DBE, autism expert and a"grand dame of British science", was on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on Sunday - you can listen again on iPlayer or download the podcast.

3. In the wake of recent scandals in social psychology, Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone have written a lengthy defence of the discipline in the latest issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement. To help prevent future fraud, they note at the end that a consensus has been reached: "that psychology journals will now require the raw data for all published studies to be publicly accessible online". If true, this is a promising development, but it's the first I've heard of it. (In related news, a new psychology journal BMC Psychology has launched, promising to avoid bias towards flashy, counter-intuitive results).

4. The latest (March) issue of The Psychologist magazine is online and includes open-access articles on involuntary autobiographical memory and the globalisation of mental illness. There's a free digital preview over at Issuu.

5. I reported last week on Obama's mission to map the human brain. Some more reactions are in ... Chris Frith said on Twitter that this from Steve Fleming is the best reaction he's read. Vaughan Bell also provided his take over at Mind Hacks: "while the big sell is nonsense, the project is likely to genuinely revolutionise neuroscience in a way that could push the field light years ahead."

6. How what you think of your boss - especially whether you trust them - influences their ability to lift your performance. New research digested by Alex Fradera at our sister blog.

7. I shared a link two weeks ago about a new report from the RSA based on psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary, which explores human politics and philosophy in the context of the contrasting functional styles of the left and right brain hemispheres. Kenan Malik has provided an excellent critique of the new RSA report (and the book it's based on). McGilchrist took the criticism very badly - check out the full exchange on Malik's blog. (There's also a useful overview of the debate from Jonathan Rowson over at the RSA's Social Brain blog).

8. A new study has looked at Twitter habits associated with having more followers - Neurobonkers has the low down.

9. The Pacific Standard published an article by Ethan Watters about the researchers who are exposing psychology's bias towards WEIRD people.

10. "Happiness = marriage + money ($50-75K) + no kids, says Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert". That's according to a report by Chuck Leddy for the Harvard Gazette.

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And looking ahead, if you can make it to London this weekend - check out these brain-related events taking place at the Barbican as part of the Wonder (art and brain) programme of events. .
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Why are older people less prone to mind wandering?

Invite a group of older participants to a psychology laboratory to engage in computer-based mental tasks, and you'll find that their minds wander less often than the minds of young adults. This has been established many times by studies that interrupt participants mid-task to ask them what they're thinking about.

At first, the finding appears to be a conundrum. Older adults typically perform worse on cognitive tasks than younger people, and ageing is usually thought to have an adverse effect on concentration. So, if anything, you'd think mind wandering would increase with age.

In fact, the age-related decrease in mind wandering is consistent with an influential theory. This states that we mind wander off a primary task when we have mental capacity to spare, such as when that task is easy or well-practised. By this account, it makes sense that older adults mind wander less because they have fewer attentional resources to spare.

However, not all experts accept this resource-based theory. Jennifer McVay and her colleagues propose an opposite account of mind wandering. They think we mind wander when we lose attentional control and our focus turns away from the task toward other issues of concern. They point to research showing that the performance of young and old is harmed equally by mind wandering, a fact that doesn't make sense in terms of mind wandering only occurring when the mind has spare capacity.

In a new study, McVay and her colleagues tested the idea that past research has underestimated how often older adults mind wander. They think this mind wandering tends to be toward performance-related concerns that previous research has probably miscategorised as on-task focus. Older adults are more anxious about doing well, McVay says, and so a lot of their mid-task thoughts are about their performance, which is not the same as being focused on the actual task.

An initial study involved 108 young adults (aged 18-28) and 99 older adults (aged 60 to 75) completing two computer tasks. One was a test of inhibitory control; the other a test of sustained vigilance. During these tasks, the participants were periodically prompted to say what they were thinking about. McVay's crucial innovation was to present participants with a response category that related to performance concerns, alongside the categories of completely off-topic thoughts or pure task focus.

As predicted, the older adults reported more thoughts that were about task-related concerns (thoughts that may have been mis-categorised by earlier research as task focus). But even taking these extra performance-related thoughts into account, the older adults still mind wandered far less often than the younger adults (31 per cent vs. 48 per cent). Or, put differently, the older adults still spent more time focused on the actual tasks.

A second study with a new batch of older and younger participants was similar but this time the task was harder - requiring participants to report whenever the current item in a stream of digits or letters was the same as one that occurred one or two positions previously. The results were similar - older adults reported more task-related concerns for the harder version of this task, but altogether they again actually had fewer moments of lost focus compared with younger participants.

As in previous research, instances of mind wandering were equally harmful to the performance of young and old participants, which McVay's team reiterated was inconsistent with the idea that mind wandering occurs when spare capacity is available. The fact that older adults found the mental capacity to dwell on performance-related concerns more than young people also seems to count against the reserve capacity explanation for why they mind wander less.

So where does this leave us? McVay's group stand by their theory that mind wandering reflects a loss of attentional focus combined with a shift of attention to other concerns. These non-task concerns vary in their salience depending on the context. McVay's team believe that in a laboratory environment older adults are less distracted by off-task concerns, such as their relationships and well-being, and that's why they mind wander less in these kinds of experiments:

"the college campus setting," they explained, "with bustling hallways, high-tech computer workstations, and young student experimenters, is more likely related to the goals and current concerns of the undergraduate population, and so the typical context for aging studies is less likely to trigger current-concern-related TUTs [task unrelated thoughts] in older subjects."

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  McVay, J., Meier, M., Touron, D., and Kane, M. (2013). Aging ebbs the flow of thought: Adult age differences in mind wandering, executive control, and self-evaluation Acta Psychologica, 142 (1), 136-147 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.11.006

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

The Special Issue Spotter

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

Psychology of Crime (Journal of Criminal Justice).

Mental Health and Challenging Behaviour (Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities).

How Does the Brain Process Time? (Neuropsychologia).

Developmental Delay (Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews).

The Costs and Benefits of Finding Meaning in the Past (Memory).

Atypical Development (Journal of Child Language).

Parenting for an Early Head Start (Parenting Science and Practice).

Social Dilemmas (Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes).

Special Section on Genomics (Child Development).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Was Proust really a neuroscientist?

Psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough calls it "one of the most famous passages in modern literature" - the scene when the narrator in Marcel Proust's À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu sips on tea thick with crumbs from a madeleine cake, and memories from his childhood come flooding back. It has become the archetypal depiction of what psychologists refer to as an "involuntary memory".

This capacity for sensory experiences to trigger powerful memories, seemingly beyond our wilful control, has come to be known as a "Proustian moment" or a "Proustian memory". Based on the madeleine episode and other scenes, Evelyne Ender wrote that Proust "anticipat[ed] later discoveries" in memory research. Jonah Lehrer, in Proust was a Neuroscientist, wrote that "We now know that Proust was right about memory."

But how realistic was Proust's depiction of involuntary memory really? A new paper by Emily Troscianko compares the portrayal of the madeleine episode against the latest findings from the cognitive neuroscience of memory.

Here's what Troscianko says Proust got right. One reason smells and tastes can be so evocative is because they are paired with a particular situation, often repeatedly (and also often outside of awareness), and then not experienced again for many years. This fits with the fact the Proustian narrator tasted a tea-soaked cake that he used to enjoy regularly at his aunt's in Combray as a child, but which he hadn't tasted for a long time.

Another fact about memories that wash over us is that they tend to arrive when we're tired or distracted. Again, this matches the madeleine episode, in which the narrator is "dispirited after a dreary day".

Troscianko also credits the madeleine episode for its realistic portrayal of the unusual emotional power of smell-triggered memories. Unlike the other sensory modalities, Troscianko explains how olfaction bypasses the thalamus and heads straight for the hippocampus and amygdala - brain regions involved in emotional memory.

Consistent with Proust, there's also research showing that odour-cued memories tend to originate from earlier in life than memories cued by other means, and that they tend to be emotionally charged but difficult to verbalise. This matches the narrator's description of how tasting the madeleine triggered an "all-powerful joy" alongside a sustained difficulty tracing the source of the memory.

So what did Proust get wrong? First off, Proust's narrator makes out that taste and smell are uniquely evocative. But Troscianko points out this contradicts research on involuntary memories showing that many more are triggered by verbal cues and by the other senses.

Another thing - the detail and accuracy in the recalled memories in Proust go far beyond what is experienced in real life. In fact, research shows smell triggers emotional, vivid memories, but they're not  unusually detailed or specific.

So, all in all, is the madeleine episode an accurate portrayal of an involuntary memory? Here's where things get more complicated. According to Troscianko, the madeleine episode isn't actually an example of an involuntary memory at all. In psychology, involuntary memories are usually thought of as those instances when a cue brings a memory immediately to mind, without any need for conscious reflection or interpretation. By contrast, Proust's narrator tries and tries again, ten times, to retrieve the memories responsible for the emotion stirred in him by the cake. It's a process that takes "at least many seconds" Troscianko estimates, "and probably many minutes".

In an interview in 1913 Proust cited the madeleine episode as an example of an involuntary memory and he said the whole book was about the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory.  Troscianko doubts the usefulness of the voluntary/involuntary memory distinction and, more important for our discussion, she concludes that Proust mislabeled the madeleine episode. "Literature's most famous example of involuntary memory turns out not to be involuntary after all," she says. Writing in Pieces of Light, The New Science of Memory, Fernyhough agrees: "... Proust's moment is not a 'Proustian moment'."

Proust - a literary genius for certain, but maybe not a neuroscientist after all.

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Troscianko, E. (2013). Cognitive realism and memory in Proust's madeleine episode. Memory Studies DOI: 10.1177/1750698012468000

--Further reading--
Involuntary autobiographical memories (open-access article from The Psychologist).
Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?

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

Witty people considered particularly suitable for a fling

What is humour for? Of all the explanations, among the better supported is the idea that it acts as a mating signal. Research with heterosexuals suggests that men, in particular, use humour to show-off their intelligence and good genes to women. A similar but alternative proposal is that wit is used by a male or female joker to convey their sexual interest to a person they find attractive. A new study finds some support for the latter theory, in that wittier people were seen as particularly attractive for a short-term fling.

In a departure from the field's reliance on questionnaires, Mary Cowan and Anthony Little used real spontaneous humour, which they created by recording 40 undergrad psychology students (20 men) as they explained to camera which two items they'd take to a desert island, and why, choosing from: chocolate, hairspray, or a plastic bag. These "actor" participants weren't told that the study was about humour, but nonetheless 19 of them gave the appearance of trying to be funny in their answers.

Next, 11 "rater" participants (5 men) were played audio recordings of the actors' explanations, and their task was to rate them for funniness, and to rate the attractiveness of each actor for a short-term relationship (dates and one-night stands) and for a long-term relationship. After scoring the audio, the rater participants did the same for a simple head-shot photo of each actor, and then again for the full video version of their explanations.

A key result is that attractive actors (based on the rating of their photo) were judged to be funnier in the video than in the audio, which suggests their physical attractiveness led them to be considered more funny.

Wit also boosted attractiveness. Across audio, photo and video, men who were considered funnier also tended to be considered more attractive for both short and long-term relationships, but especially short term. The link between perceived funniness and attractiveness was not so strong for the female actors, although funniness did still go together with higher perceived attractiveness for short-term relationships. A follow-up study found that funniness ratings were very similar to ratings for perceived flirtatiousness, and that this perceived flirtatiousness explained the link between funniness and appeal for a fling.

Male wit may be more attractive for shorter rather than longer relationships, the researchers surmised, "because it nurtures an impression of not being serious or willing to invest in a mate." Female wit, on the other hand, may be perceived by men as attractive for short-term relationships because it is taken as a sign that "that she will be receptive to his advances."

The use of authentic humorous displays is to be applauded, but the study is hamstrung by several weaknesses. Above all, the sample of rater participants was tiny. Also, the attractiveness ratings all tended to be low. This may be because the male and female raters (no information about their sexual orientation is given) were asked to judge the attractiveness of both men and women. For a study about people's judgements of attractiveness in a relationship context, it also seemed strange that no information was given about the gender and attractiveness of the researchers, who may have inadvertently influenced the participants' behaviour and judgments.

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Cowan, M., and Little, A. (2013). The effects of relationship context and modality on ratings of funniness. Personality and Individual Differences, 54 (4), 496-500 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.10.020

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