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.

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.

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.

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.

Lying becomes automatic with practice

Forget shifty eyes or fidgety fingers, psychology research has shown that these supposed signs of lying are unreliable. Liars easily learn to make eye contact, and anxiety can make honest people squirm nervously.

A more useful foundation for lie-detection is the simple fact that lying is more cognitively demanding than telling the truth. False answers therefore usually take slightly longer than honest responses, especially when a suspect is burdened with an extra mental challenge, such as telling their story backwards.

However, a new study suggests that the cognitive demands of lying can be reduced with practice. Xiaoqing Hu and his team presented 48 participants with dates, place names and other information and asked them to indicate with one of two button presses whether the information was self-relevant or not. In real life this would be equivalent to a suspect posing as a different person. Instructed to lie, the participants took longer to respond than when they told the truth, consistent with the well-established idea that lying is cognitively demanding.

Next, a third of the participants were told about the reaction time difference and given extensive practice (360 trials) at lying more quickly about the self-relevance of information. The requirement to get faster was made explicit because past research found lying practice without such an instruction was ineffective. On retesting, the trained participants in the current study no longer took more time to answer dishonestly compared with telling the truth. "Deception is malleable and its performance index can be voluntarily controlled to be more automatic," the researchers said.

Another group had no training but were told about the reaction time difference between lying and truth telling, and encouraged to answer faster when lying. They got faster at lying compared with a control group, but still they were speedier when being honest.

The researchers admitted that their sample size was small and a replication is needed with more participants. However, they said their results suggest that to be more realistic, lie-detection research based around the cognitive demands of lying should incorporate the effects of practice.

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Hu, X., Chen, H., and Fu, G. (2012). A Repeated Lie Becomes a Truth? The Effect of Intentional Control and Training on Deception. Frontiers in Psychology, 3 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00488

Also published recently: Sorting the Liars from the Truth Tellers: The Benefits of Asking Unanticipated Questions on Lie Detection.

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

"The end of history illusion" illusion

An intriguing study was published in Science recently with the eye-catching title "The End of History Illusion". It spawned plentiful uncritical media coverage, including the You Won't Stay The Same article in the NYT, and already the effect has its own Wikipedia entry. But does it really exist or has hype and stylish presentation generated an illusory illusion?

Jordi Quoidbach, Dan Gilbert and Timothy Wilson claimed to have shown that people of all ages underestimate how much their personalities, preferences and values will change in the future. Ideally the psychologists would have asked people to predict the amount they'd change, and then followed them up later to compare the actual change with the prediction. They didn't do that.

Instead, their favoured approach was to survey over 7,000 people aged 18 to 68 and to ask some of them - "the reporters" - to recall their personality ten years ago, using a personality questionnaire, and to ask others - "the predictors" to estimate their expected personality ten years hence. All participants also answered questions about their current personality. The key contrast was the amount of difference between recalled vs. current personality (documented by reporters) and the amount of difference between predicted and current personality (documented by the predictors). Across every decade of life, the former was much larger. People thought their personality had changed more than they thought it would change.

But there are some serious problems here. First off, there's no actual data on real change. How do we know this is a delusion of prediction? Perhaps the reporters are wrong about how much they've changed. Quoidbach's team realised this so they looked at data from a separate longitudinal study that really had followed people over time (once in 95-96 and again in 04-06), allowing examination of actual personality change.

Unfortunately, this MacArthur Foundation Survey of MidLife Development in the United States (MIDUS) used a completely different measure of personality. "Direct comparison of the data was not possible," Quoidbach et al confessed. Nonetheless, after comparing the amount of personality change in the MIDUS survey with amount of change estimated by reporters in their own study, the researchers said the change was "almost identical", and "substantially larger" than the change predicted by the predictors in their study.

But there's another serious issue with the new research, which was highlighted in a recent blog post: that is, the predictors might well have believed that their personality will change, but they didn't know which direction it will change in. Take extraversion. Perhaps they will become more shy, perhaps more gregarious? Without knowing the direction of change, the most accurate prediction is to report no change in extraversion from their current score.

Quoidbach's group hinted at this problem by acknowledging that participants may not "feel confident predicting specific changes". To overcome this, they asked over a thousand people to answer a non-specific question, estimating how much they felt they'd changed as a person, or how much they would change. It doesn't entirely deal with the direction of change issue, but again, "reporters" estimated more change than "predictors" predicted.

Yet another survey with thousands more participants asked them to recall or predict changes in their values over ten years - things like hedonism and security. Again, people reported more change in their values than they predicted. Recalled change was more modest in older participants, but again the difference in recall and prediction occurred at every decade. However, this survey has the same problems as before - the issues of memory distortion and predicting bi-directional change - and in this case they went unaddressed.

Gathering yet more data, the researchers surveyed thousands of people about their preferences in the past compared with now, and asked others about their likely preferences in the future, compared with now - things like favoured holidays, taste in music and food. The idea of this study was to eliminate memory bias. Quoidbach et al reasoned that people have an accurate sense of their past preferences, although they didn't reference any data to support this claim. People recalling the past again appeared to have changed more than was anticipated by those looking ahead.

A final, far smaller study attempted to address the practical implications of our failure to anticipate how much we will change in the future. One hundred and seventy adults were split in two groups. One stated their current favourite band and said how much they'd pay to see them in ten years. The other group reported their favourite band ten years ago and said how much they'd pay to see them today. There was a big difference - those looking ahead said they'd pay 61 per cent more to see their current favourite band, as compared with the price the retrospective group said they'd pay to see their former favourite band today. "Participants substantially overpaid for a further opportunity to indulge a current preference," the researchers said.

But was this a fair comparison? The retrospective group know things about their former favourite band that the future group couldn't possibly know about their current favourite band. For example, perhaps members of the retrospective group didn't like their chosen band's follow-up albums, perhaps they already saw them in concert many times over the last ten years. Maybe the future group were optimistic about the future creative output of their current favourite band. In short, there are so many other factors at play here, besides participants' beliefs about the stability of their own preferences.

Convinced by their own demonstrations of the End of History Illusion, Quoidbach et al speculated about the possible causes. One explanation, they suggested, is that the effect is a manifestation of our gilded view of ourselves: "most people believe that their personalities are attractive ....," the researchers wrote, "having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change." But this explanation seems to ignore the self-doubt and pessimism that blights many people's lives. Quoidbach's other proposal is that the End of History Illusion is a manifestation of the fluency heuristic - because it's tricky to imagine change in the future, we infer that change is unlikely.

These speculations are premature. It would be easier to believe in the End of History of Illusion if there was data on actual change, rather than a reliance on participants' memories of themselves in the past. Even if the effect is real, it's also not clear if this is a general bias about the future that extends beyond our beliefs about ourselves. What predictions would we make about the future change of other people? Or about human culture in general? Here's one thing that surely won't change - slick psychology papers with eye-catching titles getting lots of attention.

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Quoidbach J, Gilbert DT, and Wilson TD (2013). The end of history illusion. Science (New York, N.Y.), 339 (6115), 96-8 PMID: 23288539 

[thanks Thom Baguley for help with understanding some of the methodological issues]

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

Disgusted people have enhanced ability to spot dirt

The cool, calm extravert - that's the emotional profile that our culture puts on a pedestal. Prudes, introverts and scaredy-cats just aren't fashionable.

Yet there's mounting psychological research showing that unpopular emotional traits often come with advantages. The anxiously attached are quicker to detect danger, such as smoke in a room; those with trait anxiety have fewer accidents; introverts speak in a way that's perceived as more trustworthy. Now Gary Sherman and his colleagues have published research showing how prudish disgust-sensitivity is associated with a superior ability to detect impurities.

Over one hundred students had to judge repeatedly which of four squares on a computer screen was the odd-one-out in terms of its shading. The squares were either light grey against a white background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others (akin to spotting dirt against a white background); or they were dark grey against a black background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others.

Students more prone to disgust (they agreed with statements like "it would bother me to see a rat run across my path") tended to have heightened sensitivity for spotting grey shades against a white background, similar to spotting dirt on a clean surface. They displayed no such heightened sensitivity at the other end of light spectrum - grey on black.

A second study was similar, but this time students more prone to disgust had heightened sensitivity when identifying digits written in light grey against a white background (yet they were no better at spotting grey digits against a mid-grey background).

In a final study, looking at disgusting pictures (e.g. maggots on meat) boosted the ability of disgust-sensitive participants to spot grey digits against a white background. Participants low in disgust sensitivity didn't show this response to the pictures, perhaps because they were unmoved by them.

The effect documented here is a form of perceptual tuning, like the way in infancy we gradually lose our ability to hear sounds that feature in foreign languages. It's not clear if being disgust prone leads to more exposure to clean white surfaces, and so more practice and superior ability at seeing darker shades against a light background. Or if instead, some people have heightened sensitivity at this end of the colour spectrum, which has the effect of making them more prone to disgust. Or both, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

"Disgust not only makes people want to avoid impurities," the researchers said, "but also makes people better able to see them."

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Sherman, G., Haidt, J., and Clore, G. (2012). The Faintest Speck of Dirt: Disgust Enhances the Detection of Impurity. Psychological Science, 23 (12), 1506-1514 DOI: 10.1177/0956797612445318

--Further reading--
More research items on disgust.

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

How to kill an earworm

If earworms - songs that play in your head - drive you crazy, you'll welcome clues for how to eradicate them that come from a new study by psychologists at Western Washington University, USA.

First - and I realise this doesn't sound appealing - try to avoid songs that you like. The new research suggests they are most likely to become lodged in your head (contrary to the myth that it's obnoxious songs with most earworm potential). If you must listen to a favoured song, check to see if it starts playing in your head right afterwards. If it does, then it's well on its way to becoming an earworm. This is a particular risk is you find that only a part of the song plays in your head.

Ira Hyman Jr. and his colleagues believe this last detail may be a manifestation of the classic Zeigarnik Effect, whereby incomplete tasks remain in memory but evaporate once completed. In the case of earworms, the researchers propose that the playing of only a part of a song in your head leaves it incomplete and thereby increases the likelihood that it will return against your will as an earworm. This insight suggests that one way to squash a developing earworm is to make sure, once a song starts playing in your head, that you see it all the way through (perhaps you will need to listen to the track again to ensure this is possible).

Finally, after listening to music, try to avoid mental tasks that are either too easy or too difficult. Any kind of activity that increases your mind-wandering will also provide fertile ground for an earworm to develop. In the same vein, engaging in an absorbing task will tie up your mental resources and deny the earworm the chance to grow.

These insights are based on a survey and several lab experiments conducted by Hyman Jr. and his team. The survey of 299 students revealed that enjoyable, recently heard songs were more likely to become earworms; that a huge variety of songs become earworms; that musicians experience them more often and re-experience more aspects of songs.

In the experiments, dozens of students listened to and rated three songs by the Beatles and by more contemporary acts like Gaga (ostensibly as part of a completely different research study), then they completed a puzzle task. Afterwards they revealed whether any of the songs had started playing in their heads, and 24 hours later they reported whether the songs had returned as earworms.

Overly challenging sudoku or anagram tasks helped breed more earworms (the former more so than the latter). Beatles songs were just as likely to become earworms as modern hits. Songs played later in the experimental session (therefore more recently heard) were more likely to become earworms; and a song that started playing in the head soon after listening was more likely to become an earworm over the next 24 hours. Only playing part of songs to students, as opposed to the whole track, did not increase the risk of earworms.

"Songs frequently come to mind as intrusive thoughts, and intrusive song cycles are easy to start in both naturalistic and laboratory situations," the researchers said. "In our experimental studies, we have documented that intrusive song cycles are easy to start and manipulate. Therefore, songs may provide a valuable tool for examining why intrusive thoughts occur and how to control intrusive thought cycles."

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Hyman, I., Burland, N., Duskin, H., Cook, M., Roy, C., McGrath, J., and Roundhill, R. (2012). Going Gaga: Investigating, Creating, and Manipulating the Song Stuck in My Head. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2897

--Further reading--
Hearing music that isn't there
A natural history of the Earworm - the song that won't get out of your head
What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?


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

What's it like to be face-blind?

Most of us take the ability to recognise each other for granted. What must it be like to go through life unable to identify and distinguish people based on their facial appearance?

Some idea comes from a new, candid first-person account written for the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology by a doctor about his life-long face-blindness (known formally as prosopagnosia). It's a problem he didn't even realise he had for 30 years, and which he only discovered was a neuropsychological condition in 2006, when he was diagnosed for the first time. "It now seems remarkable that I lived at least half my life with a socially disabling condition of which not only myself, but also those around me, seemed unaware," writes Dr David Roger Fine, a gastroenterologist at the University of Southampton.

Looking back at his childhood, Fine realises that he can remember school buildings with detail, the clothes worn by his male friends, the hairstyles of the girls - but no faces. He got into difficulties in the playground confusing "high- and low- status boys", and was admonished for not raising his cap to his form teacher when he encountered her out of context and so failed to recognise her.

At senior school he made friends with a close-knit group, all of whom were physically distinctive and so easy to distinguish. In his professional life, Fine describes how there are some situations where his condition doesn't matter - such as committee meetings, where everyone keeps the same seat, and when he's giving a conference presentation. His job as a hospital doctor also involves distinct spatial areas of work and he uses these environmental contexts to help him judge who he is likely to encounter at any given time. Nonetheless, he often walks right past colleagues, earning him a reputation as capricious and aloof. More than once he's been accused of having Asperger's.

In his personal life, before marriage, romantic liaisons were especially problematic. Although women often dress in more distinctive ways than men, they also vary their appearance more often, for example changing their hair style and make-up after work. "It seemed to me that girls popped out of the Ether in one place then disappeared perhaps for months or even years before reappearing in another place, often disgruntled," he says.

Before his wife became his companion and minder, parties were particularly awkward and stressful. "I once met and had a long conversation with a man at a Christmas party," Fine recalls. "We circulated until we met again at the other side of the room and I introduced myself [again]. He looked puzzled until my wife came to my rescue." Making friends is nigh on impossible. "Recognising" strangers is a constant embarrassing risk.

Fine has had a successful career in spite of his prosopagnosia, but he feels his success was "blunted" by the condition. Now aged 60 he has highly developed strategies for coping - he has a better sense of people's age, which is one of the criteria he uses to distinguish people. The ethnic mix of modern Britain also helps. And he tries to focus on distinct items of jewellery, such as people's rings, that tend to be worn at all times. The increased popularity of tattoos is another help, although it can cause problems too - one female colleague with a tattoo low on her chest visible in summer clothes "caused consternation in the corridor [one winter] as she unbuttoned her blouse by way of identification."

Looking to the future, Fine is worried that his confusion about people's identity could lead to him being misdiagnosed with dementia. "During a recent hospital stay I asked the nurses to introduce themselves every time, as I was concerned that I might be misdiagnosed as confused if I muddled them up."

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Experts used to think that the inability to recognise faces was a problem that nearly always arose after brain injury. In recent years, however, it's become apparent that many people are born with face-blindness (or develop it early in life), with the prevalence estimated at two per cent of the population. Do you have the condition or know anyone who has? How do you/they cope?

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Fine, D. (2012). A life with prosopagnosia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1-6 DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2012.736377

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

Are young people really addicted to their phones?

There's all sorts of alarmist chatter in the media about people becoming ever more addicted to their mobile phones, especially youngsters. The fact that many young people text while driving, even though they know it's dangerous, is cited as one demonstration of their mobile phone addiction. It's as if they literally can't help themselves. They have to text back now. Or do they?

Paul Atchley and Amelia Warden took a novel approach to this question by seeing how much the opportunity of texting now changed the perceived value of a smaller cash reward now over a larger reward later. Thirty-five students answered questions like "You receive a text from a significant other. You can have $5.00 now if you choose to reply immediately, or you can have $100 in 60 minutes if you wait and reply then." Different choices involved a shorter or longer wait (from 1 minute to 480 minutes). The students also chose between options that involved money only - less now or more later - with the decisions framed over a longer time-span (between 1 and 150 days).

Now vs. later choices like this have been used to demonstrate the impulsivity of people addicted to alcohol or drugs. They will typically favour a small hit now over a larger hit later, no matter how enticing the later offer. If drugs were paired with money in the manner that texts were paired with money in the current study, you'd expect addicts to show a massively skewed preference for smaller cash plus drug rewards now.

Atchley and Warden found that the students' decisions for texts plus money followed the same pattern as for money only, but over a significantly shorter time-scale. For example, $100 in two weeks was valued at 25 per cent lower than $100 now; 100$ in 142 days had just 50 per cent of its immediate value. When money was combined with texts, this discounting speeded up. It took just a 10 minute wait for $100 plus text to lose 25 per cent of its value, and 5 hours to lose 50 per cent of its value. In other words, students seemed to think about the reward of texting in the same considered way they thought about money, except that the rate of decline in perceived value happened over an accelerated time scale. But crucially, the prospect of immediate reward was not overwhelming as you find with addiction. This contradicts the notion that students make decisions about texting in the way an addict makes decisions about drugs.

A second study with 61 students was similar but this time the texts were said to have come from a significant other, a friend or a casual acquaintance. The way that students valued money paired with less important texts was different from the way they made decisions about texts from significant others - the former had less immediate reward value. This is more evidence that their text-based decision making is thoughtful rather than impulsive.

The take-home message from this research is that young people aren't addicted to their phones like an addict to a drug. However, they view texts from close relations as losing their value very quickly, which makes responding fast a priority. "Understanding this underlying motivation is important for understanding how to overcome inappropriate use of the technology," the researchers said, "and will help us overcome dangerous practices among the next generation of drivers."

Atchley and Warden urged caution in the interpretation of their findings, pointing out that this is the first time anyone has tried to apply the methodology of "delay discounting" to information-based rewards that are difficult to quantify. However, they didn't acknowledge what is surely an even more important limitation in their research - the fact that the students were making hypothetical decisions. There were instances where they said they'd wait to answer their phone, but would they have done if it were for real?

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Atchley, P., and Warden, A. (2012). The need of young adults to text now: Using delay discounting to assess informational choice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 1 (4), 229-234 DOI: 10.1016/j.jarmac.2012.09.001

--Further reading--
How the mere presence of a mobile phone harms face-to-face conversations.
Talking on a mobile phone, you're less likely to notice the unicycling clown.

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

You think your first name is rarer than other people do

You think you're so special, you probably think this post is about you. And maybe it is, if you too succumb to what US researcher John Kulig calls the "name uniqueness effect" - believing that your first name is more unusual than other people do.

Kulig asked 153 female students and 94 male students to rate how common their first name was on a scale from 0 to 100. The scale featured nine "anchor" names placed at the appropriate places as a guide, based on actual name frequencies obtained from the university's registrar.

For comparison, a control group of the same number of men and women each provided an estimate of the popularity of one of the names from the first group (women rated a female name, and men rated one of the male names).

Participants consistently rated their own first name as rarer than the estimates provided by participants in the control group (and as rarer than they really were, although this wasn't tested statistically). This was the case for names that were common and rare, according to university records, although slightly exaggerated for rare names. "People are motivated to be different from others," Kulig said. The phenomenon wasn't explained by the fact that some people spell their names in unusual ways.

A follow-up study was similar with 86 women and 57 men rating the frequency of their own first names, and a control group of men and women rating the names that belonged to that first group. As before, the participants estimated their names to be rarer than members of the control group did.

A clue as to the cause of the effect came from the fact that participants with (genuinely) rarer names tended to be happier with their names, consistent with Kulig's idea that we have a subconscious motivation to feel special. Also, of those who'd contemplated changing their names, the most popular reason was to obtain a rarer name. Finally, participants seemed completely unaware of "the name uniqueness effect". When participants were asked to estimate how rare other people would rate their (i.e. the participant's) name, they guessed that other people would come up with just the same rating as they had.

The new results complement a study from 2004, in which Danny Oppenheimer found that people underestimate the frequency of their own and famous people's last names. He put this down to a "discounting heuristic". Usually we overestimate the frequency of phenomena that we're familiar with (known as the availability heuristic), but Oppenheimer thinks we cancel out this bias when we're aware of a single, obvious cause of the familiarity, as we are with our own names or famous names. It's over-compensation by this process that he suggested leads us to an underestimation of the frequency of our last names.

The way we overestimate the prevalence of our names actually represents an anomaly when considered against findings showing that we tend to assume other people indulge in behaviours with a similar frequency as we do - known as "the false consensus effect." Kulig said more research is needed to find out if the "name uniqueness effect is itself a unique finding."

More generally, these new findings add to a growing literature on the psychology of our names. For example, past research has shown that we have a bias towards liking our own name and initials, and related to that, there's evidence for "nominative determinism", whereby our names influence our life opportunities and choices. A study published earlier this year, for example, claimed that people with unpopular names suffer life-long prejudice.

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Kulig, J. (2012). What's in a name? Our false uniqueness! British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12001

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Paranormal believers and religious people are more prone to seeing faces that aren't really there

Our brains are so adept at detecting faces that we often see them in random patterns, such as clouds or the gnarled bark of a tree. Occasionally one of these illusory faces comes along that resembles a celebrity and the story ends up in the news - like when Michael Jackson's face appeared on the surface of a piece of toast. A new study asks whether some people are more prone than others to perceiving these illusory faces.

Tapani Riekki and his team collected dozens of photos that judges in pilot work agreed did or did not have the appearance of faces in them (this included pictures of furniture, places, and natural scenes, such as a rock-face). The researchers then used two adverts to recruit their participants - they were identical except that one requested people who "view the paranormal positively or believe that there is an invisible spiritual world," while the other requested people who are "sceptical about paranormal phenomena".

Forty-seven people were eventually selected to take part, based on their being particularly paranormal-believing, religious, sceptical or atheist (there was a lot of overlap in membership between the first two and final two categories). The participants were shown the photos and had to indicate whether a "face-like area" was present, where it was in the image, and they had to say how face-like the image was, and how emotional.

The key finding is that people who scored high in paranormal belief or religiosity were more likely to see face-like areas in the pictures compared with the sceptics and atheists. They weren't more sensitive to the illusory faces as such, because they also scored a lot of false alarms - saying there was a face when there wasn't. However, when they spotted a face-like pattern correctly, they were more accurate than sceptics and atheists at saying where exactly in the pictures the illusory faces were located. Finally, the paranormal believers rated the illusory faces as more face-like and emotional than the sceptics.

The researchers said their findings are consistent with past research showing that belief in the paranormal tends to go hand-in-hand with a tendency to jump to conclusions based on inadequate evidence. They added that the results support the idea that religious people and paranormal believers have the habit of seeing human-like attributes, including mental states, in "inappropriate realms."

"We may all be biased to perceive human characteristics where none exist," Riekki and his team concluded, "but religious and paranormal believers perceive them even more than do others."

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Riekki, T., Lindeman, M., Aleneff, M., Halme, A., and Nuortimo, A. (2012). Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2874

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.