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.

Link feast

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

1. Obama is planning to spend $billions mapping the human brain, reported the New York Times this week. Science mag provided some more details. What do the experts think? The psychologists Gary Marcus and Christopher Chabris were quick to publish their reactions to the news.

2. Over at the Wall Street Journal, a diverse range of columnists, including psychiatrist Samantha Boardman, shared their thoughts on the topic of discipline. "Self-discipline reminds us we always have a choice," says Boardman. If you are willing to explore alternative behaviors, you open yourself up to possibilities that you never dreamed of."

3. Kerching! Neuroscientist Cornelia I. Bargmann is among the recipients of a new tranche of $3 million mega-awards for top researchers in the life sciences. Nature has a profile of Bargmann, describing her work "unpicking the neural circuits that drive eating, socializing and sex."

4. One of my favourite blogs, Neuroskeptic, has moved home to join the Discover magazine stable - in one first his/her posts on the new site, the Neuroskeptic highlights new research showing that some of the most prestigious journals actually have the poorest standards for reporting statistical details.

5. Forget the Mantel / Middleton gossip in the TLS, the same journal also featured philosopher-medic Ray Tallis reviewing Oliver Sacks' latest book Hallucinations. Although the book bypasses many important philosophical issues arising from hallucinations, Tallis says it is "nonetheless a superb synthesis of the literature on these arresting, disturbing and sometimes terrifying phenomena, and a profound work of humanity."

6. Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks shares his discovery of a handy online brain anatomy tool: "when you point at any part of an MRI scan it tells you which part of the brain you’re looking at in all three planes."

7. King's College, Cambridge has launched a new magazine, the Kings Review, and in one of the first articles, Dana Smith argues that the new edition of the DSM (American psychiatry's diagnostic code) is over-medicalising normal suffering.

8. Exciting new developments in brain-machine interfacing have been announced at this month's Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Boston.

9. Does Neurofeedback really work? I had a look at the evidence for my Brain Myths blog.

10. Fascinating links between language and a person's ability to save are detailed in this newly posted TED talk from Keith Chen. "languages without a concept for the future -- 'It rain tomorrow,' instead of 'It will rain tomorrow' -- correlate strongly with high savings rates."

And looking ahead to the weekend - watch out for Dame Professor Uta Frith, autism expert, on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on Sunday at 11.15am.

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

Lying is common at age two, becomes the norm by three

They're too young to need to fib about lipstick on their collar or even their unfinished homework but a new study finds the majority of three-year-olds are already practising liars. Deception in very young children has been documented before, but this is the first time it has been systematically tested in a laboratory.

Angela Evans and Kang Lee tested 65 two- and three-year-olds (28 girls) individually in a quiet room, part of which involved them being told not to peek at a toy. Despite this instruction, 80 per cent of the kids sneaked a peek. And when they were asked afterwards if they'd looked, around a quarter of two-year-olds lied about it, rising to 90 per cent of those aged over 43 months.

Although lying was rife among these young children, most of them weren't very adept at it. When asked what the toy was, 76 per cent of the liars blurted out the answer, exposing their dishonesty.

The researchers also put the toddlers through a series of mental tests to see if any particular skills went hand-in-hand with lying. One of these was a kiddies' version of the Stroop test that involved pointing to small pictures of fruits, while ignoring bigger versions. Like the adult Stroop, success at this task is thought to require a mix of inhibitory control and working memory. Evans and Lee found that the children who excelled at the kiddies' Stroop were more likely to lie, which supports the idea that the development of lying depends on a mix of inhibitory ability and remembering the desired answer.

An important implication of this last point, the researchers said, is that the greater honesty of the younger children isn't a mark of their moral purity, but simply a side-effect of their "fragile executive functioning skills."

A weakness of the study is that it doesn't look at different types of lies or tell us anything about the children's motivation for lying.

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Evans, A., and Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of Lying in Very Young Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031409

--Further reading--
Adults are unable to tell when children are lying.

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

It's not just criminals who feel unsafe when the police are around

The idea that police on our streets makes people feel safer is usually taken as a given. It's the basis of the so-called "reassurance policing" agenda, which advocates higher numbers of visible front-line police. And when increased police numbers are announced, members of the public often welcome the news. "I'm all for more police on the streets," said a Chicago resident earlier this month after the announcement of increased patrols, "It makes me feel safer seeing them around my community."

A new study challenges this received wisdom. Whereas most surveys ask people to reflect on whether they'd feel safer with more visible police, Evelien van de Veer and her colleagues took a different approach, looking at how the presence of police affected people's sense of safety right at that moment.

The researchers quizzed over 200 Amsterdam residents out shopping about how safe they currently felt. For some, two to four police were currently visible patrolling the vicinity; for others no police were present. Overall, the presence of police made no difference to participants' answers. However, focusing just on the male participants - those who answered when a police patrol was nearby actually reported feeling less safe.

Next, the researchers showed 124 students pictures of a street scene and asked them to rate how safe it seemed. The photos were doctored so that some of the participants saw a police officer in the scene. The key finding here was that a graffiti-daubed alleyway was rated as safer when a policeman was in the scene, but a leafy residential street was rated as less safe when a policeman was present. This difference was found for both sexes, but was more pronounced for men.

Van de Veer and her colleagues proposed two possible explanations for what they described as this "ironic" consequence of police presence. They said the sight of a police officer could act as a warning signal, directing people's attention to potential danger in the vicinity. Or they suggested the sight of police could trigger automatic mental associations of concepts like crime or violence (this would be a social priming effect - an area of study that's currently under close scrutiny).

Why were men particularly prone to feeling unsafe in the presence of police? The researchers suggested this may be because they are more often the victim of violent crimes, and more often the cause of police needing to be called to a scene. This reasoning seems vague and van de Veer's team admitted "further exploration of this issue is required."

The researchers concluded that their findings have real-life implications for police forces and policy makers. "A general increase in the number of visibly present police officers may not have the intended effect," they said.

Past research covered on the Digest has shown that CCTV cameras can also increase feelings of insecurity; so too neighbourhood watch signs.

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van de Veer, E., de Lange, M., van der Haar, E., and Karremans, J. (2012). Feelings of Safety: Ironic Consequences of Police Patrolling. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42 (12), 3114-3125 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00967.x

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

Dieters eat just as much as others but suffer more guilt

People who self-identify as dieters are an unhappy bunch on the whole. They usually score high on measures of depression and anxiety and low on self-esteem. A new study provides a clue as to why. Jessie de Witt Huberts and her colleagues tested three groups of female students and found the "restrained eaters" (they reported dieting more often and being conscious of their food intake) ate just as much as other students. They also experienced a lot more guilt, especially in relation to eating. In essence, these are people who seem to constantly set themselves up for failure, while also robbing themselves of the pleasures of eating. "Despite their good intentions," the researchers said, "restraint eaters seem to gain nothing and lose twice."

The research took place across three studies, all following a similar procedure. Dozens of female undergrads were invited to a lab to take part in what they thought was a food-tasting session for a supermarket chain. They were left alone for ten minutes to sample high and low calorie food, like chips and apple slices. Then they were asked questions about their emotions, including their guilt, and about their attitudes towards food, including how much they diet and how often they worry about what they're eating.

Checking the food afterwards, the researchers found that the restrained eaters - those who dieted often and who fretted about their consumption - had eaten just as much as the other participants, including just as much high-calorie food. But crucially, they felt more guilty afterwards, especially in relation to their recent indulgence.

This study doesn't prove that being a restrained eater causes increased guilt. It's possible there's one or more other factors that cause a person to watch what they eat and to experience more guilt. One could also argue that the set-up was a little unfair on the restrained eaters - they'd been asked to taste the food, after all; perhaps they do exert more control over their intake in everyday life.

Nonetheless, the results are certainly intriguing, and help explain why restrained eaters tend to experience psychological problems and why they tend to develop problematic eating habits. In effect, it appears these people are locked into a vicious circle. Guilt after over-eating likely encourages them to renew their promises to eat less. And when they fail again to reduce their eating, yet more guilt ensues, this time more intense than before. Given that "45 per cent of young girls currently report dieting", the researchers said it's imperative that we learn more about why so-called restrained eaters experience such negative outcomes.

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de Witt Huberts, J., Evers, C., and de Ridder, D. (2012). Double trouble: restrained eaters do not eat less and feel worse. Psychology and Health, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/08870446.2012.751106

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 RSA in London has published a new report: "Divided Brain, Divided World: Why the best part of us struggles to be heard" originating from its Social Brain project. As the project's director Jonathan Rowson explained in a blog post, it's tricky to sum up the message of the report in a snappy soundbite. However, he explained: "The evidence-based case is that the abstract, articulate, instrumental world view of the left hemisphere is gradually usurping the more contextual, holistic but relatively tentative world view of the right hemisphere." [disclaimer: I wrote a related blog post last year Why the Left-Brain Right-Brain Myth Will Probably Never Die. The myth has become a powerful metaphor, but it's one we should challenge].

2.  Maria Konnikova wrote a wonderful blog post on the story of Paul Broca and his patient Monsieur Leborgne, who could only utter the syllable Tan. Maria mentioned the grand challenge issued by Jean-Baptiste Bouillard - 500 francs for a patient with language problems but no frontal lobe damage - which I wrote about last year. See also this recent Digest post, covering some newly unearthed details about Leborgne's life.

3. Slate reported on the peculiar phenomenon of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, "which refers to a particular combination of pleasurable physical and psychological affects experienced by a surprisingly large number of people when they hear things like soft whispering, quiet tapping, and gentle crinkling noises." Any Digest readers experience this?

4. Our sister blog The Occupational Digest covered an intriguing study looking at the implications of job application tests being placed online. It makes cheating easier, but it also means you cast a wider net. "This paper brings a fresh angle to the issue of test security," writes Alex Fradera.

5. Tom Stafford's always excellent column at BBC Future, this week reflected on drivers' intolerance of cyclists in terms of the game theory concept of altruistic punishment. "Deep within the human psyche, fostered there because it helps us co-ordinate with strangers and so build the global society that is a hallmark of our species, is an anger at people who break the rules, who take the benefits without contributing to the cost. And cyclists trigger this anger when they use the roads but don't follow the same rules as cars." (also see here).

6. 5 evidence-based ways to optimise your team-work. "Teamwork can lead to shrewd decisions and flourishing creativity, but only if you pay attention to the social psychology that comes into play in a group setting."

7. MPs are to be offered mental health treatment at Westminster for the first time.

8. The Daily Telegraph reported the case of a woman who has heard "How much is that doggie in the window?" playing in her head for three years straight. Doctors say it's a case of musical hallucination. A Digest blog post on this condition continues to attract comments from sufferers.

9. Of all the Valentine's-based research reports doing the rounds this week, my favourite was this one by Khalil Cassimally: Lovers' hearts beat at the same rate every day.

10. "I [took] ... an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett" - this was part of fallen writing star Jonah Lehrer's public mea culpa earlier this week. "Christian who?" was probably the audience reaction at the Knight Foundation conference where Jonah gave his speech. His full apology to "friends, family, colleagues. My wife, my parents, my editors," is online. The video of the talk was on this website, although I'm not sure it's still working. For the record, Jonah apologised to me personally a while ago. I accepted and wish him well.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Working memory training does not live up to the hype

According to CogMed, one of the larger providers of computerised working memory training, the benefits of such training is "comprehensive" and includes "being able to stay focused, resist distractions, plan activities, complete tasks, and follow and contribute to complex discussions." Similar claims are made by other providers such as Jungle Memory and Cognifit, which is endorsed by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.

Working memory describes our ability to hold relevant information in mind for use in mental tasks, while ignoring irrelevant information. If it were possible to improve our working memory capacity and discipline through training, it makes sense that this would have widespread benefits. But that's a big if.

A new meta-analysis by Monica Melby-Lervåg and Charles Hulme has just been published in the February issue of the respected APA journal Developmental Psychology, which combined the results from 23 studies of working memory training completed up to 2011 (PDF is freely available). To be included, studies had to compare outcomes for a working memory training treatment group against outcomes in a control group. Most of the studies available are on healthy adults or children, with just a few involving children with developmental conditions such as ADHD.

The results were absolutely clear. Working memory training leads to short-term gains on working memory performance on tests that are the same as, or similar to, those used in the training. "However," Melby-Lervåg and Hulme write, "there is no evidence that working memory training produces generalisable gains to the other skills that have been investigated (verbal ability, word decoding, arithmetic), even when assessments take place immediately after training."

There was a modest, short-term benefit of the training on non-verbal intelligence but this disappeared when only considering the studies with a robust design (i.e. those that randomised participants across conditions and which enrolled control participants in some kind of activity). Similarly, there was a modest benefit of the training on a test of attentional control, but this disappeared at follow-up.

All of this suggests that working memory training isn't increasing people's working memory capacity in such a way that they benefit whenever they engage in any kind of task that leans on working memory. Rather, people who complete the training simply seem to have improved at the specific kinds of exercises used in the training, or possibly even just at computer tasks - effects which, anyway, wear off over time.

Overall, Melby-Lervåg and Hulme note that the studies that have looked at the benefits of working memory training have been poor in design. In particular, they tend not to bother enrolling the control group in any kind of intervention, which means any observed benefits of the working memory training could be related simply to the fun and expectations of being in a training programme, never mind the specifics of what that entails. Related to that, some dubious studies reported far-reaching benefits of the working memory training, without finding any improvements in working memory, thus supporting the notion that these benefits had to do with participant expectations and motivation.

A problem with all meta-analyses, this one included, is that they tend to rely on published studies, which means any unpublished results stuck in a filing cabinet get neglected. But of course, it's usually negative results that get left in the drawer, so if anything, the current meta-analysis presents an overly rosy view of the benefits of working memory training.

Melby-Lervåg and Hulme's ultimate conclusion was stark: "there is no evidence that these programmes are suitable as methods of treatment for children with developmental cognitive disorders or as ways of effecting general improvements in adults' or children's cognitive skills or scholastic achievements."

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Melby-Lervåg M, and Hulme C (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental psychology, 49 (2), 270-91 PMID: 22612437 Free, full PDF of the study.

--NB.--
This meta-analysis only took in reviews published up to 2011. If you know of any quality studies into the effects of working memory training published since that time, please do share the relevant links via comments. 

--Further reading--
Brain training games don't work.
Brain training for babies actually works (short term, at least)

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

Extras

Eye-catching studies that I didn't get a chance to report on in full:

After parents "friended" their undergrad children on Facebook, there was no adverse effect on privacy but there was less conflict in their relationship

"Existing evidence does not support strong causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play for development"

"Why do girls freak out?" new study on an adolescent in-patient unit.

Violence is less common in YouTube content compared with TV; & where it exists, consequences are more realistic.

Contrary to previous reports, parents say they're happier than non-parents.

Placing a zillion on a number line.

"In this review, we examine the consensus and controversy in the study of fibre pathway connectivity for language"

Participants were willing to terminate the unattractive woman more frequently than the moderate or extremely attractive women.

Feel the fear but carry on anyway; acceptance-based therapy for fear of public speaking.

"The implication is that using punitive measures to control persistent offenders is unlikely to be effective in an identifiable group of juvenile offenders."

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

Resilient, friendly people are more responsive to placebo treatment

The placebo effect is a wonderful thing. Inert treatments provoke real medical benefits simply by virtue of the patient expecting the intervention to help. But of course, a lot of times placebos don't work, and some people seem to be more responsive to their benefits than others. A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan has set about discovering if personality plays a role here, specifically in relation to placebo treatment for pain.

Marta Peciña and her colleagues provoked pain in 47 men and women by injecting hypertonic saline solution into their jaw muscle. Pain levels without treatment were then compared against the participants' experience each time they received a placebo, in the form of a 15 second intravenous delivery of harmless isotonic saline solution. All the while, the participants were scanned via PET, to see how much activity occurred at the brain's opioid receptors. This was to provide an objective measure of the activity of the brain's own pain relief system.

There was a clear relationship between participants' scores on various personality measures and their responsiveness to placebo. A mix of ego resilience (measured by statements like "I quickly get over and recover from being startled"); high agreeableness (especially altruism and honesty); and low neuroticism (especially low levels of angry hostility) accounted for 25 per cent of the variance in participants' degree of response to the placebo treatment. Moreover, the participants who matched this pattern of traits tended to show more opioid receptor activation in their brains. Surprisingly perhaps, placebo responsiveness was not related to a person's general optimism.

Why should a person's agreeableness be related to their response to placebo treatments? "In the patient-doctor relationship, agreeableness appears likely to contribute to a strong therapeutic alliance," the researchers said, "as well as to frank, collaborative feedback through the therapeutic process. Thus, it appears that individuals high upon this trait are particularly well equipped to fully engage in therapeutic efforts, and in this sense, be a good responder to treatment, even if it is placebo." Meanwhile, the finding for angry hostility fits with past research showing that angry people tend to exhibit less indigenous opioid activity in their brains.

Peciña and her team said their findings, if replicated, could help with future pain research. "Simple to administer measures may aid in the interpretation of clinical trials and the stratification of clinical research volunteers to reduce variability in therapeutic responses," they said.

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Peciña, M., Azhar, H., Love, T., Lu, T., Fredrickson, B., Stohler, C., and Zubieta, J. (2012). Personality Trait Predictors of Placebo Analgesia and Neurobiological Correlates Neuropsychopharmacology DOI: 10.1038/npp.2012.227

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

Emotion research gets real - Was this person just told a joke or told they have great hair?

How accurately could you tell from a person's display of behaviour and emotions what just happened to them?  Dhanya Pillai and her colleagues call this "retrodictive mindreading" and they say it's a more realistic example of how we perceive emotions in everyday life, as compared with the approach taken by traditional psychological research, in which volunteers name the emotions displayed in static photos of people's faces.

In Pillai's study, the task of a group of 35 male and female participants wasn't to look at pictures and name the facial expression. Instead, the participants watched clips of people reacting to a real-life social scenario and they had to deduce what scenario had led to that emotional display.

Half the challenge Pillai and her colleagues faced was to create the stimuli for this research. They recruited 40 men and women who thought they were going to be doing the usual thing and categorising emotional facial expressions. In fact, it was their own responses that were to become the stimuli for the study proper.

While these volunteers were sitting down ready for the "study" to start, one of four scenarios unfolded. The female researcher either told them a joke ("why did the woman wear a helmet at the dinner table? She was on a crash diet"); told them a story about a series of misfortunes she'd encountered on the way to work; paid them a compliment (e.g. "you've got really great hair, what shampoo do you use?"); or made them wait 5 minutes while she had a drink and did some texting. In each case the volunteers' emotional responses were recorded on film and formed the stimuli for the real experiment.

The researchers ended up with 40 silent clips, lasting 3 to 9 seconds each, comprising ten clips for each of the four scenarios. The real participants for the study proper were first shown footage of the researcher in the four scenarios and how these were categorised as joke, story, compliment or waiting. Then these observer participants watched the 40 clips of the earlier volunteers, and their task in each case was to say which scenario the person in the video was responding to.

The observing participants' performance was far from perfect - they averaged 60 per cent accuracy - but it was far better than the 25 per cent level you'd expect if they were merely guessing. By far, they were most skilled at recognising when a person was responding to the waiting scenario (90 per cent accuracy). Their accuracy was even for the other scenarios at around 50 per cent. They achieved this success level despite the huge amount of variety in the way the different volunteers responded to the different scenarios. "From observing just a few seconds of a person's reaction, it appears we can gauge what kind of event might have happened to that individual with considerable success," the researchers said.

A surprise detail came from the recordings of the observing participants' eye movements. They focused more on the mouth region rather than the eyes. Based on past research (much of it using static facial displays), Pillai and her colleagues thought that better accuracy would go hand-in-hand with more attention paid to the eye region of the targets' faces. In fact, for three of the scenarios (all except the joke), the opposite was true. This may be because focusing on the eye region is more beneficial when naming specific mental states, as opposed to the "retrodictive mindreading"challenge involved in the current study.

In contrast to much of the existing psychology literature, Pillia and her team concluded that theirs was an important step towards devising tasks "that closely approximate how we understand other people's behaviour in real life situations."

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Pillai, D., Sheppard, E., and Mitchell, P. (2012). Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions? PLoS ONE, 7 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049859

Note: the picture above is for illustrative purposes only and was not used in the study.

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. Channel 4 broadcast an astonishing documentary "How to build a bionic man", in which psychologist Bertolt Meyer (who has a bionic hand) explored advances in prosthetics, and the psychological implications as they become ever more sophisticated and ubiquitous. The programme is now available on-demand.

2. After a Guardian blog post spread the most ridiculous gender neuromyths in its advice for encouraging more girls into science, thankfully balance was restored through Dean Burnett's Brain Flapping blog, in a satirical riposte Boys and science: The gender gap and how to maintain it. (see also: this on why pseudoscience won't help, and myths and facts about gender brain differences).

3. Vaughan Bell can't resist getting to the bottom of "the Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters" - dopamine. Is it really the brain's pleasure chemical?

4. Mark Changizi had a theory that colour vision evolved for us to sense each other's emotions. I09 tells the amazing story of how this led to his development of glasses that solve the problem of colour blindness.

5. "you’d probably be better off learning the piano, or Japanese, or even playing the latest Call of Duty" - Matt Wall takes a sceptical look at the multi-million dollar brain training industry.

6. Neuroscientist David Eagleman (author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain) appeared on the latest Connectome Podcast.

7. Just how clever is your dog? Laurie Santos (Yale University) chatted with Brian Hare (Duke University, author of The Genius of Dogs) on BloggingHeads.TV.

8. "It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else" - Oliver Sacks wrote on the distortions of memory for the New York Review of Books.

9. BBC magazine published an interesting analysis of whether anti-drugs ads actually work, including the long-running Talk To Frank campaign in the UK.

10. Beware, stalking the land is a new breed of rapists with three brain lobes.

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

Short-term exercise boosts body image without making any physical difference

Many people find exercise adherence difficult after the first few weeks because the fun of something new has worn off, and yet their programme has yet to deliver any tangible changes in terms of body shape and weight. A new study offers a potential way to galvanise people's motivation during this tricky spell. Katherine Appleton reports that people's body image improves after just two weeks of moderate exercise, even though no physical change has yet materialised. The finding suggests a focus on body image changes could help novice exercisers enjoy early rewards during the early stages of a new programme.

Appleton recruited 34 people (16 men) to take part, all of whom led sedentary lifestyles prior to the study. The effects of two two-week programmes were compared. One involved 3 sessions of 40 minutes reading in a gym per week; the other involved the same time spent exercising in a gym at moderate intensity (getting sweaty and out of breath). Some participants did the reading fortnight first, others did the exercise fortnight first. There was a two-week gap between the intervention fortnights.

The participants filled out body image questionnaires and had their body weight and shape measured at the start and end of the exercise and reading fortnights (the results were hidden from them). The key result is that neither two weeks' exercise or reading made any difference to body weight and shape, but a fortnight of thrice weekly exercise did improve the participants' perceptions of their body. This was true for men and women.

Specifically, despite the lack of any objective change, both men and women reported feeling more satisfied with their looks; feeling more fit, toned and active; healthier; and happier with specific parts of their body (paradoxically, fat anxiety and weight vigilance did not change). In contrast, body image satisfaction dipped slightly after the reading fortnight.

Appleton believes this is the first time body image effects such as this have been documented in the absence of any physical changes. She said this suggests "a focus on body image [rather than other goals] ... may be more rewarding for those embarking on an exercise programme," although she stressed that this needs to be tested. It's a complex issue, she explained, because people can vary in their body image ideals, and in some cases an excess focus on body image can backfire, especially if exercise newbies start comparing themselves to trim regulars at the gym.

There are also some issues with the study methodology. The sample was small and the researcher can't be 100 per cent sure that the participants didn't exercise outside of the allotted gym time (although this wouldn't undermine the main finding of body image change in the absence of physical change). More problematic are the potential effects of researcher contact, and the possibility the participants were giving the answers they thought were expected of them after the exercise fortnight, especially as they were told the study was about the effects of exercise on "various body-related parameters."

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Appleton, K. (2012). 6 x 40 mins exercise improves body image, even though body weight and shape do not change. Journal of Health Psychology, 18 (1), 110-120 DOI: 10.1177/1359105311434756

--Further reading--
Is the benefit of exercise a placebo effect?

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:

Inventing the Psychosocial: Stress and Social Psychiatry (History of the Human Sciences).

Sibling relationships (open-access virtual special issue from Wiley).

Organisational Psychology (Journal of Applied Social Psychology).

Assessment in clinical practice and research (open-access virtual issue of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology).

Cyberbullying research: new perspectives and alternative methodologies (Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology).

Facial Expressions (Emotion Review).

Advanced Human-Computer Interaction (Computers in Human Behaviour).

Poverty and Mental Health (Journal of Clinical Psychology).

How Does the Brain Process Time? (Neuropsychologia).

Men's Health: Masculinity and Other Influences on Male Health Behaviors (Health Psychology).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.