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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image reproduced with permission of the first author.

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

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.

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.

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.

Can you fake your personality in a photo?

Say you wanted your Facebook pic or Twitter avatar to convey to the world that you have a particular personality type, different from how you really are, would you be able to pose in a such a way to achieve this?

A new Finnish study led by Sointu Leikas has explored this idea by asking 60 participants (average age  27; 30 men) to pose for 11 photographs, from waist up, against a white background. The first photo was simply taken as they posed freely. Next, they posed the extremes of each of the Big Five personality traits, described to them as: stable and calm (low neuroticism); anxious and distressed (high neuroticism); extraverted and enthusiastic (high extraversion); reserved and quiet (low extraversion); intellectually curious / daydreamer (high openness); conventional / does not like change (low openness); empathic and warm (high agreeableness); critical and quarrelsome (low agreeableness); dependable and self-disciplined (high conscientiousness); and unorganised and careless (low conscientiousness). The participants weren't allowed to change their clothing or hair to create these various impressions.

The photos were subsequently shown to 401 observer participants (average age 26, 343 women). Each observer rated the personality of the person depicted in 11 photos, each showing a different posing participant in one of the various posing conditions. Attractiveness of the posers was controlled for in the analysis, given that attractiveness is known to influence perceptions of personality.

In many cases the participants succeeded in conveying specific personality impressions, even when different from their true personality scores, but this varied with the particular personality traits in question. They were most effective at portraying either high or low extraversion. Openness was also conveyed quite successfully. Past research has shown that high-scorers on Openness tend to look away from the camera, so it's possible the posing participants in the current study realised this, perhaps subconsciously.

The posers also had partial success with neuroticism and conscientiousness: they were rated as less conscientiousness when attempting to appear as unorganised, compared with their neutral photo; and they were rated as more neurotic when they attempted to appear anxious, as compared with their neutral photo. Attempts to appear stable or dependable and self-disciplined did not work so well. Another striking finding was the posers' complete failure to convey reliably either high or low agreeableness. Observer ratings were all over the place for this trait, perhaps due to a reluctance to score strangers on this dimension on the basis of such limited evidence. "From an applied perspective, this can be considered fortunate," the researchers said, "because it suggests that it is difficult to convey a false image of high Agreeableness."

Past research has largely focused on how much surprisingly accurate information we're able to garner from the briefest glimpses of other people's appearance. This new study is an interesting departure, turning the focus to how much we can control the perceptions we create. "With everyone a Google search away, first impressions of potentially important others are increasingly likely to be be based on impressions of personality in photographs," Leikas and her colleagues said. "The results suggested that it is possible to control the impressions of personality in photographs. However, success ... depends on the particular trait in question."

A weakness of the study is the fact the posing participants were unable to modify their clothing or hairstyle, or use props or backgrounds. In real life, people hoping to look friendly on a Facebook profile, or entrepreneurial on LinkedIn, would surely alter their clothes and backdrop to help achieve their desired image.

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Leikas, S., Verkasalo, M., and Lönnqvist, J. (2013). Posing personality: Is it possible to enact the Big Five traits in photographs? Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (1), 15-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.10.012

Further reading: What your Facebook picture says about your cultural background.

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

Self-esteem is catching

You've probably heard about the negative research showing how people take their work stress home, upsetting their partner's mood. Well, the good news is there's a positive equivalent. Angela Neff and her colleagues monitored the self-esteem of 102 working couples over five days (mostly German academics), getting them to answer questions about their work-related self-esteem when they got home, and then again at bed-time (e.g. they rated their agreement with statements like "I feel as smart as others"). They also completed a measure of their general self-esteem levels and their empathy.

The key finding was that a person's after-work self-esteem was positively related to their partner's self-esteem at bed-time that same day. In other words, when one person came home with a spring in their step, feeling confident about their ability at work, this seemed to infect their partner, so that by bed-time, the partner too was feeling more confident about their own work-related abilities. This transfer of positive self-esteem was more pronounced when the receiving partner tended to be of lower self-esteem more generally and was more empathic.

"This finding supports the notion that work and family do not necessarily have to be conflicting domains," the researchers said, "but can also be mutually enriching." That said, there's a negative interpretation of these results. If one person comes to depend on their partner's after-work positivity, this can backfire on those occasions that the partner has a bad day.

Neff and her colleagues said their finding was important because research shows that high work-related self-esteem tends to go hand in hand with better job performance and satisfaction. In this sense, the psychological effect of one person's success at work can filter its way through to their partner, in turn boosting his or her work performance the next day. From a practical perspective, this shows managers how important and far-reaching the effects can be of providing their employees with positive (self-esteem enhancing) feedback.

On a more sober note, the study has several limitations, as the authors realise. This includes the fact that they have no idea of the mechanism by which self-esteem passes from one person to the other. And the sample was narrow, made up of highly-educated people who nearly all came from one field of work. It remains to be seen if the same result will be found with more diverse participants.

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Neff, A., Sonnentag, S., Niessen, C., and Unger, D. (2012). What's mine is yours: The crossover of day-specific self-esteem Journal of Vocational Behavior, 81 (3), 385-394 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2012.10.002

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

Social disapproval leads to longer lasting behaviour change than cash fines

If you want to influence people's behaviour by hitting them where it hurts, the wallet seems like a great place to aim. Say a local authority began fining litter-bugs on the spot, you can bet the streets would soon be cleaner. But there's a downside. People begin to see the behaviour in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. They stop littering not because it's wrong, but because it makes financial sense. This approach can also encourage would-be litterers to perceive other people's tidy behaviour as a financial rather than a moral choice. None of this matters too much until the litter wardens go home. Absent the financial threat, litterers are quick to start dumping their junk again.

It's not realistic to have a constant method of enforcement in place. So what approach will be more effective than the time-limited influence of fines? A new study by Rob Nelissen and Laetitia Mulder suggests that social disapproval is more effective than financial sanctions because the effects linger on even after the threat of disapproval is lifted.

The researchers invited 84 participants to sit alone at computer cubicles, to play several rounds of a public goods game in groups of four. Players started with 4 Euros each, and every round they chose how much to place into a group kitty. At the end of each round the group stash was multiplied 1.5 times and shared among the four players. The anti-social temptation is to free-load, to enjoy the proceeds from the group payout without contributing a fair share.

One third of the groups played under threat of financial sanction. Each round, these participants saw the contributions of the other players and could choose to fine others one Euro. Players were also told about any fines they'd received. Another third of the groups played under threat of social disapproval. Each round participants could choose to direct their disapproval at other players. They also learned how many players had frowned on their tactics. There was also a control group with no sanction system in place.

For the first seven rounds, both financial threats and social disapproval threats increased fair play (compared with control condition), but the effect of fines was greater. Crucially, at the seventh round, the players in the sanction conditions were told there was a computer malfunction and that the final three rounds would be played without any fining or disapproval system in place. The key test was how they'd behave once the threat of sanction was lifted.

With the sanctions gone, the cooperative play of participants in the financial condition fell away quickly, more so than in the social disapproval condition. Indeed, by the tenth and final round, players in the financial condition played the same selfish style as control condition players. In contrast, the players in the social disapproval condition continued to show signs of increased fair play.

"Clearly this has important implications for public policy," Nelissen and Mulder concluded. "Our results suggest that successful norm induction requires public communication of social (dis)approval, not only because it increases the salience and thus the effectiveness of norms in guiding behaviour, but also because it makes them stick even if people are not consistently punished for their violations."

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Nelissen, R., and Mulder, L. (2013). What makes a sanction “stick”? The effects of financial and social sanctions on norm compliance. Social Influence, 8 (1), 70-80 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.729493

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

These are the unwritten rules of Facebook

With over a billion users worldwide, Facebook has become a fundamental part of social life. Much as there are long-standing unwritten rules governing the way we behave toward each other face-to-face, today there also exist cultural expectations for how one ought to behave on Facebook. Now researchers at Trinity University in the USA have conducted focus groups and a survey of hundreds of undergrads, in one of the first attempts to find out what these rules are.

Erin Bryant and Jennifer Marmo conducted 6 focus groups with 44 students (aged 19 to 24), during which the participants were asked to brainstorm the rules governing interactions on Facebook. Merging similar-sounding rules, and only including those mentioned in two or more focus groups, the researchers were left with 36 rules.

Next, these rules were shown to 593 more participants (aged 18 to 52), who were asked to think of a particular Facebook acquaintance, causal friend or close friend, and to say how strongly they agreed that each of the 36 rules should be followed when interacting with that person.

Thirteen of the rules to emerge from the focus groups received overall endorsement by the survey participants:

I should expect a response from this person if I post on his/her profile.
I should NOT say anything disrespectful about this person on Facebook.
I should consider how a post might negatively impact this person's relationships.
If I post something that this person deletes, I should not repost it.
I should communicate with this person outside of Facebook.
I should present myself positively but honestly to this person.
I should NOT let Facebook use with this person interfere with getting my work done.
I should NOT post information on Facebook that this person could later use against me.
I should use common sense while interacting with this person on Facebook.
I should consider how a post might negatively impact this person's career path.
I should wish this person happy birthday in some way other than Facebook.
I should protect this person's image when I post on his/her profile.
I should NOT read too much into this person's Facebook motivations.

A fourteenth rule that almost achieved overall endorsement from the survey was: I should be aware the information this person posts about me can have real world consequences.

Looking again at the entire list of 36, the researchers found that these fell into five distinct categories: communication channels (e.g. I should use Facebook chat with this person); control and deception (e.g. I should block this person if he compromises my image); relational maintenance (e.g. I should use Facebook to communicate happy birthday to this person); negative consequences for the self (e.g. I should not post info this person could use against me); and negative consequences for the friend (e.g. I should protect this person's image online).

Another finding was that the categories of rule that were considered most important varied according to what type of friend a person was thinking of. Communication rules and rules governing protecting friends were rated more important when considering close friends. Detection and deception rules were thought most important when considering acquaintances. And relational maintenance rules were rated as more important when thinking of acquaintances and casual friends, perhaps because close friends already interact more outside of Facebook.

The study has obvious limitations - particularly its reliance on a student sample in the USA, and the fact that no actual Facebook behaviours were recorded. Nonetheless, Bryant and Marmo said their exploratory study "can serve as a starting point for future research regarding the subject of interaction rules as they manifest in the digital age." They added that an interesting avenue for future research would be to look at what happens when people contravene these rules.

What do you think is the most important interaction rule when using Facebook? Was it mentioned in this research?

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Bryant, E., and Marmo, J. (2012). The rules of Facebook friendship: A two-stage examination of interaction rules in close, casual, and acquaintance friendships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29 (8), 1013-1035 DOI: 10.1177/0265407512443616

--Further reading--
Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?
Shy students who use Facebook have better quality friendships
What your Facebook picture says about your cultural background
People judged as likable in the flesh also make good first impressions online

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.

Benevolent sexism puts women off asking for help

Benevolent sexism describes insidious behaviours and beliefs that reinforce the idea that women are less capable than men and need their help. It's a controversial idea. It's not always clear if an act, such as a man opening a door for a woman, is simply polite or an example of benevolent sexism. Another issue is whether or not benevolent sexism is harmful. A new study led by Juliet Wakefield claims to show that exposure to benevolent sexism can put women off asking for help. If true, it's a finding that has obvious implications for the workplace, especially in contexts where health and safety could be compromised.

Eighty-six female undergrads arrived one at a time at a psychology lab for what they thought was an investigation into sex differences in reasoning and problem-solving. A female research assistant welcomed them and explained that they'd be interacting with a remote research team via computer. She then went and sat behind a partition in the same room. The three-person remote team were either all male or all female (this was clear from their names), and they proceeded to ask some basic questions of the participant via the computer.

Next, the research assistant's mobile phone rang. It was obvious from her end of the conversation that it was her male plumber "Joe". He'd moved some items in her house without asking - an act that the research assistant blamed either on his impatience or his sexist beliefs. After her call, the research assistant apologised to the participant, either saying "Sorry about that, my plumber is so impatient" or "Sorry about that - my plumber is such a typical man - he thinks that women are incapable of doing anything on their own!".

After this, the participants began a 90-second anagram challenge on the computer. When the time was up, they had the chance to request help from the remote research team for any items they hadn't solved. They also answered questions about their mood.

The key finding is that participants exposed to the story about the sexist plumber asked for less help on average, compared with participants who were told the plumber was merely impatient (they sought help with 48 per cent vs. 56 per cent of unsolved items). This held regardless of the sex of the remote research team (the source of the help). Another finding was that for participants exposed to the sexist plumber story, the more help they sought, the worst their mood. Conforming to the stereotype of the needy female appeared to make them feel rubbish about themselves.

"All in all," the researchers concluded, "our findings underline the point that the benevolent sexism in everyday banal interactions can be consequential for women's emotions and behaviour, and is therefore anything but banal."

Critics may feel that the explicit view to which some of the participants were exposed - that "women are incapable of doing anything on their own" (emphasis added) - was not particularly subtle; that the results therefore say more about out and out sexism rather than benevolent sexism. It would also have been preferable to include a third condition in which the participants were not exposed to any overheard phone conversation.
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Wakefield, J., Hopkins, N., and Greenwood, R. (2012). Thanks, But No Thanks: Women's Avoidance of Help-Seeking in the Context of a Dependency-Related Stereotype Psychology of Women Quarterly, 36 (4), 423-431 DOI: 10.1177/0361684312457659

-Further resources-
Podcast featuring the lead author of this study discussing the findings.
"Let me help you with that" - how women suffer from benevolent sexism. 

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

How the threat of violence can make us nice to each other

Under threat of violence, we have a natural instinct to stick together. Researchers say this basic urge explains their seemingly odd observation that feeling threatened, rather than making people bristle, can actually increase their agreeableness.

Andrew White and his colleagues conducted five studies in all. First off, they analysed data from 54 nations around the world showing that the higher a country's spend on their military (a proxy for feeling threatened), the higher their citizens' average score on the personality dimension of agreeableness. The association held even after controlling for a host of potential confounds including a nation's wealth and population density.

Second, White's team surveyed 54 undergrads and found that those who generally felt more threatened in life also tended to report being more agreeable and extravert (scores on conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism were not associated with feeling threatened).

Next, the researchers prompted some of a new group of participants to feel threatened by having them read a story about an intruder entering their house. The remaining participants acted as controls and read a story about losing keys. The threatened participants scored higher in agreeableness (not other traits), but only when they thought about their personality in the context of how they act with people they know well. Moreover, this apparent effect of threat on agreeableness was larger for people who'd grown up in a big family.

Taken together these initial findings support the idea that we have an evolved adaptive response to threat of violence that leads us to affiliate to family and friends, especially if we grow up in a context where this would be useful. This idea complements previous research that suggests we have an evolved instinct to avoid other people when we're under threat of contamination.

A fourth study took things further by testing real-world behaviour. Two kinds of poster were pinned up around campus - one was a threatening reminder about the issue of guns on campus and it featured a pistol pointing out at the reader; the other was about construction on campus. Next to these posters were one of two fund-raising requests, either framed as being for local students or for an out-group of Ethiopian students. The fund-raising notices had pull-off tabs for people to take contact details away. The result here - the gun poster increased students' interest in helping their fellow students, but not outsiders.

Finally, the researchers returned to international data and found that countries that spent more on their military tended to have citizens who score more highly in trusting their family and neighbours, and lower in trusting members of other religions.

"These findings help develop a deeper understanding of one of the ways in which humans respond to threats of violence from others," the researchers said. "Although disagreeableness and mistrust may often seem to arise from violence, it is not always the case. Sometimes nasty breeds nice."

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White, A., Kenrick, D., Li, Y., Mortensen, C., Neuberg, S., and Cohen, A. (2012). When nasty breeds nice: Threats of violence amplify agreeableness at national, individual, and situational levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103 (4), 622-634 DOI: 10.1037/a0029140

--Further reading--
Reminder of disease primes the body and mind to repel other people.

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

The new psychology of awkward moments

The fascination of socially awkward moments certainly hasn't been missed by comedy writers. Millions of us have cringed our way through series like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. In contrast, psychology before now has largely neglected to study this fundamental part of social life.

In a new exploratory study, Johsua Clegg proposes a model. Social awkwardness, he posits, is what we feel when the situation threatens our goal of being accepted by others. The feeling prompts us to direct our attention inwards, to monitor our behaviour and attempt to behave in a way that will improve our chances of achieving acceptance. There's been a lot of research before on embarrassment, but that's tended to focus on embarrassed individuals, their feelings and dispositions. This new study is less personal, being more about the situations that reliably trigger everyday feelings of social awkwardness in most people.

Clegg invited 30 undergrad participants (13 men) into a carefully prepared room in groups of three. Each trio sat facing each other on chairs arranged in a triangle. They knew they were being filmed through a two-way mirror. There was also a table with a microphone and five cookies on it.

For the first three minutes, the participants were given no instructions. Then another participant (actually a stooge working for Clegg) arrived with a chair and sat down with them. Three more minutes passed, a researcher appeared and instructed the trio to begin an ice-breaker task (the stooge exited at this point). After three minutes discussion he would ask each of them to introduce each other to the group. Once this was done, the participants left the room and moved to another where they watched back the footage of themselves. They used a slider box, like the kind used in audience research, to indicate how awkward they were feeling during the social interactions on a moment by moment basis.

Clegg noted those moments that participants recorded a dramatic increase in social awkwardness and he cross-checked with the videos to see what was happening at the time. Moments of feeling awkward fell into distinct situational categories, which we can probably all relate to. These included times when participants didn't know what was expected of them or what the social rules were (such as when they first sat down in the room without instructions); when a social norm was broken (e.g. one person interrupted another; someone infringed on another's personal space); a social standard wasn't obtained (e.g. a person stumbled with their speech, there was a long silence); norms around eating were broken (e.g. spilling food from mouth while eating); negative social judgements were made by one person towards another, either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. by pulling a face); when names were forgotten or people weren't recognised; and when social processes were made explicit, such as during the ice-breaker task.

There were also five kinds of moment when social awkwardness plunged. This included: when people were sharing common interests, when one person helped another, when one person was positive about another, and humour. It's notable that a lot of the humour was actually about social awkwardness - joking about it seemed to make it go away.

The study is a tentative first step towards cataloguing when and why people feel socially awkward. It has obvious limitations, foremost that the participants were being filmed and the study is US-centric. But as Clegg argues, it raises all sorts of interesting avenues for future investigation. Perhaps most significant is the similarity of participants'  descriptions of social awkwardness to typical accounts of full-blown social anxiety - they talked about feeling "pressured", "anxious", "nervous" and "crazy". In attempting to understand problematic social anxiety, Clegg said psychology has tended to focus on the individual, on traits like shyness and attention to the self. His new psychology of awkward moments focuses attention on the situations that trigger social discomfort in all of us. Understanding more about everyday social awkwardness, and how people deal with it, could provide new insight into why and how socially anxious people come to feel awkward nearly all of the time.

How often do you experience social awkwardness? Are there any specific social situations that trigger the feeling for you?
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  Clegg, J. (2012). Stranger situations: Examining a self-regulatory model of socially awkward encounters. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 15 (6), 693-712 DOI: 10.1177/1368430212441637

--Further reading--
The new science of "Phew!"
The new psychology of everyday playing cards

Post written by Christian Jarrett 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.

When not to pat someone on the shoulder

Physical touch can be surprisingly persuasive. From diners giving larger tips to waiters who touch them, to people being more helpful to strangers who pat them lightly on the arm, the literature has tended to paint a positive picture of the emotional influence of social touch. But now a study out of Belgium has documented what you might call the dark side of social touching. This isn't about unwanted groping, which is always inappropriate. It's about the fact that context is everything for light social touches, with the new research showing that even a friendly pat on the shoulder can have an adverse effect if it's performed in the wrong situation.

Jeroen Camps and his colleagues had 74 student participants perform a maze challenge in a race against a partner. The outcome was fixed so the participant won by a tiny margin, and then, as the pair left the room, the partner (actually a male or female stooge planted by the researchers) patted the participant on the shoulder lightly three times, smiled gently and wished them good luck for the next task. For participants in the control condition, all this was the same but without the shoulder patting. Next, the participants and their partner went to another room and completed "the dictator game", a simple economic game that involved the participant choosing how many movie-prize credits to share with their partner.

The revealing finding was that participants who'd been patted on the shoulder shared fewer credits with their partner, suggesting that touch can backfire when it's performed in a competitive context, perhaps because it's interpreted as a gesture of dominance. Interestingly, there was no link between participants' awareness of whether they'd been touched and their sharing behaviour; participants who remembered the touch rated it as neutral; and the partner wasn't rated as more unpleasant in the touch condition. All of which suggests the adverse effect of touch on later cooperation was probably non-conscious.

A second study was similar but this time participants and their partner (another stooge, always female) either competed against each other on a puzzle or they cooperated. Again, afterwards, the partner wished them luck, smiled, and either did or didn't pat them on the shoulder at the end, before they both moved to another room to play the dictator game. The results were clear - in a competitive context, touched participants subsequently shared fewer movie-prize credits with their partner, compared with those participants who weren't touched. By contrast, in the cooperative context, touched participants went on to be more generous with their partner, as compared with participants who weren't touched.

"Despite what some people might think, touching someone else may thus not always have desirable social consequences," the researchers said. "A simple tap on the shoulder, even with the best intent, will do nothing but harm when used in the wrong place at the wrong time."

A limitation of the research is the use of a shoulder pat. It could be argued that this is a form of touch with specific connotations, depending on the context. For instance, maybe it is construed as condescending in a competitive situation. By contrast, a lot of the earlier research on the benefits of touch have tended to use a simple, light touch on the arm, which is perhaps a more neutral gesture.

What do you think? Are there any instances when you've been touched lightly (in a non-sexual way) and it's irritated you? Or times that it's endeared you to the toucher? Was it the context that made the difference?

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Camps, J., Tuteleers, C., Stouten, J., and Nelissen, J. (2012). A situational touch: How touch affects people's decision behaviour. Social Influence, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.719479

--Further reading--
The power of a light touch on the arm
Why is a touch on the arm so persuasive?

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.