Feast

Tuck into our latest round-up of the best psych and neuro links.

The dilemma of weak neuroimaging papers - Daniel Bor explains all on his new blog and then other experts comment, including Neuroskeptic, Jon Simons, Dorothy Bishop et al.

The last of the split-brain patients.

A failed replication of one of Darly Bem's dramatic psi-effect experiments from 2010 has finally found a home to be published in - Chris French explains the background. (Check out the Digest coverage of the Bem studies from 2010). The new failed replication is here, and now features a reply from Bem and a reply back from French et al.

One for the diary - Prof. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore on the "social brain in adolescence" at the Royal Institution on March 30.

"Around 20 per cent of psychologists acting as expert witnesses for the family courts are not qualified" - Channel 4 reports on an investigation by forensic psychologist Prof. Jane Ireland.

Is neuroscience the new freakonomics?

Podcast of the latest Maudsley debate: "This house believes that psychoanalysis has a valuable place in modern mental health service"

"Saying you are fond of someone might make you actually like that person"

The story of the teenage girls in a New York town afflicted with a twitching disorder

Make your own thinking cap (requires printer and scissors).

BBC Horizon episode on the unconscious mind is available on iPlayer for 5 weeks.

360 degree hi-res view of a male human brain

Fallout from the failed replication of Bargh's 1996 classic stereotype priming study. Several psychologists have posted their views online, including Matt Lieberman and Daniel Simons.

The image of the 'creative type' is a myth - excerpt from Jonah Lehrer's new book

Memory champ Joshua Foer was a guest on this week's Guardian Science podcast.

"Every time we blink, a wave of activity sweeps through our brain - and this could be a serious problem for some fMRI researchers" - Neuroskeptic blogs on a new study.

"Big changes are proposed for the way autism is diagnosed. Two leading experts argue for and against the suggested redefinition"

Newly posted TED talk - Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? 

BBC reports on research suggesting that voters prefer candidates with a deeper voice. The Digest covered some related research recently: Want to feel powerful? Do a Barry White impression.

Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?

Why the world needs introverts

Attractive people are less shallow

The psychology of post-coital behaviours.

Why can smells unlock forgotten memories? (Related research covered by the Digest: Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?)

That's all, enjoy your weekend!


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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How killing begets more killing (of bugs)

"At first killing was obligatory; afterward we got used to it. We became naturally cruel. We no longer needed encouragement or fines to kill, or even orders or advice." Jean-Baptise Murangira, a killer from Rwanda.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that killing escalates - that the more a person kills, the easier they find it to kill again. Andy Martens and Spee Kosloff have investigated this idea experimentally using a bug killing paradigm. Undergrad participants took part in what they thought was a study looking at the ways that exterminators deal with bugs. In fact no bugs were hurt during this research and participants were debriefed "sensitively" at the end. Three participants dropped out after reading the consent form and a further three were omitted from analysis because they suspected they weren't really killing the bugs.

The fifty remaining participants (29 women) were each left in a room alone and given 12 seconds to feed as many of the 21 available woodlice as they wanted, one at a time, into an extermination machine - an adapted coffee grinder with a funnel for inserting the bugs. The woodlice had been warmed briefly with a hair dryer so that they were moving about, thereby ensuring that participants knew they were alive. After the first 12-second phase, the researcher returned to the room briefly to tell the participants that they had a further 12 seconds to repeat the exercise anew. The key test was whether the participants would kill more bugs on the second round.

Crucially, half of the participants had been told that the whole thing was merely a simulation - no bugs would die in either round because the funnel was blocked. These participants inserted the same number of bugs on the second round as they did on the first round (approximately 5.5 bugs on average). By contrast, the other participants who'd been told that the killing was real tended to insert more bugs into the exterminator during the second round (5.4 bugs on average vs. 4.6 on average during the first round).

Martens and Kosloff said this provides evidence that killing escalates. The fact that the escalation was only observed for the participants who thought they were killing shows that the effect wasn't merely due to practice. Earlier research similarly showed that participants instructed to kill more bugs in an initial phase (vs. those told to kill fewer) tended to kill more bugs voluntarily in a second phase - but only if they believed the killing was real.

Why should killing escalate in this way? Martens and Kosloff's theory is that it probably has to do with the justification of earlier actions and with desensitisation. Killing may particularly provoke these reactions in killers because unlike other unethical acts, it isn't possible to undo an earlier killing and amends can't be made to the killed. Other possible factors that lead to escalation could include increased arousal and feelings of power and excitement.

"The impetus of this work was not to develop an understanding of bug-killing per se, but to aid an understanding of situations in which people kill other people," the researchers said. "Perhaps [results like these] can inform the generation of questions necessary for developing a well-rounded understanding of real-world consequences of killing and violence."

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Martens, A., and Kosloff, S. (2012). Evidence that Killing Escalates Within-Subjects in a Bug-Killing Paradigm. Aggressive Behavior DOI: 10.1002/ab.21412

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

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

Loneliness Updated (The Journal of Psychology).

Lunacy’s last rites: dying insane in Britain, c. 1629–1939 (History of Psychiatry).

Neuroscience & Education (Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience).

Where do we go from here in Political Psychology? (Political Psychology).

Beyond the Comparator Model (Consciousness and Cognition).

Positive Psychology in Higher Education (The Journal of Positive Psychology).

Multistability in perception: binding sensory modalities (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B).

Social and Motivational Compensatory Mechanisms for Age-related Cognitive Decline (Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition).

Framing Politics: An Integrative Approach (American Behavioural Scientist).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Thinking about our hourly wage stops us from smelling the roses

Thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from being able to enjoy those moments when we're not working. That's the implication of new research by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House. Once we think about our time in monetary terms, they say, any time not working becomes lost revenue. This makes us impatient to get back to work and stops us from savouring the moment.

In an initial study, fifty-three students at a Canadian University answered questions about how much they expected to work and earn in their first year after graduating. Crucially, half of them answered a further question about how that would translate into an hourly wage. Next, the students were given ten minutes free time to browse the web. The key finding is that the students who hadn't thought about their hourly wage were happier after the web browsing than they were before - they'd obviously made the most of the chance to surf the internet. By contrast, the students who'd thought about their post-graduation hourly wage were no happier after the web browsing than they were before. "Their experience of this leisure period lost some of its hedonic value and failed to bring about any improvement in their happiness," the researchers said.

A second study tested if thinking about the monetary value of time has this adverse effect because it makes us impatient. This time hundreds of participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a site for recruiting people to work on problems at their computers). The participants listened to 86 seconds of "the Flower Duet" from the opera Lakmé after answering some work-related questions, which either did or didn't involve thinking about their hourly pay. After the music, the participants who'd previously worked out their hourly rate for the past year were less happy than other participants. What's more, this difference in happiness was entirely mediated by their impatience. The participants who'd worked out their hourly rate tended to agree with statements like "I was impatient for the music to end" and to disagree with statements like "I felt the music was a relaxing break".

If thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from savouring the moment, what if we're compensated for that time? A final study tested this idea. Again, some participants worked out their hourly wage before listening to a short piece of music. However, this time some of them were given a small additional participation fee for the time spent listening to the music. With this payment, the participants who'd thought about their hourly wage were able to appreciate the music just as much as the other participants who hadn't thought about their hourly pay.

The researchers said these new results show how modern working practices could affect the way we choose to spend our free time and how much we're able to enjoy it. In particular, with more people in part-time, flexi-time and freelance roles, time more than ever is likely to be perceived as having a monetary value. "Thinking about time in terms of money is poised to affect our ability to smell the proverbial roses," the researchers concluded.

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DeVoe, S., and House, J. (2012). Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (2), 466-474 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.11.012

Further reading: Being paid by the hour changes the way we think about time.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The woman who grew phantom fingers that she'd never physically had

Inside the human brain there is a map of the body drawn in neural tissue. When a person loses a limb, the neural representation of that body part still exists in the map, and more often than not, it continues to give rise to "phantom" sensations. Sometimes neurons in adjacent areas of the body map invade the tissue that represents the missing limb. This can lead to the curious situation where stimulation of a person's face (or other areas) provokes feelings in their phantom limb, as documented by the great neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. Cases like this are often cited as evidence for the brain's plasticity.

Now Ramachandran and his colleague Paul McGeoch have reported a phantom limb case that illustrates how aspects of the body map are apparently hard-wired. The case is a 57-year-old woman (known as R.N.) who was born with a deformed right hand consisting of only three fingers and a rudimentary thumb. After a car crash at age 18, R.N.'s deformed hand was amputated, which gave rise to feelings of a phantom hand. Curiously, R.N. experienced her phantom hand as having a full complement of five fingers, albeit that some of the digits were foreshortened. In other words, she was experiencing the sensation of having fingers that she'd never physically possessed.

R.N. was referred to the researchers more than 35 years after her accident, after her phantom hand had become unbearably painful and uncomfortable, including two of the fingers feeling as if they'd become twisted and bent until their tips touched. McGeoch and Ramachandran trained R.N. in using "mirror visual feedback", in which the reflection of her healthy left-hand was seen as superimposed onto where she felt her phantom right hand to be. After two weeks of 30-minutes daily feedback, R.N. was able to move her phantom fingers and was relieved of pain. Crucially, she also experienced that all five of her phantom fingers were now normal length.

McGeoch and Ramachandran said this case provides evidence that the brain has an innate template of a fully-formed hand. Freed from the visual, proprioceptive and tactile sensations of her deformed hand, and aided by the mirror training, R.N.s brain re-instated its innate map of a normal hand. "There appears to be a 'hard-wired' innately specified scaffold for body image," the researchers said. This account also helps explain the occurrence of phantom limbs in people born with missing limbs.

The researchers conceded that they were taking R.N.s account of her feelings on trust. It's possible she was confabulating - although they think this unlikely. If she were, McGeoch and Ramachandran think it more likely that R.N. would have claimed to have had normal length fingers prior to the mirror training.

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McGeoch, P., and Ramachandran, V. (2012). The appearance of new phantom fingers post-amputation in a phocomelus. Neurocase, 18 (2), 95-97 DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2011.556128



Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why you should watch a horror film before going to the art gallery

A proun by El Lissitsky

If you're looking to enhance your experience of abstract art, you may want to consider spending some pre-gallery time watching a horror film. Kendall Eskine and his colleagues Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz have investigated how different emotions, as well as physiological arousal, influence people's sublime experiences whilst viewing abstract art. Their finding is that fear, but not happiness or general arousal, makes art seem more sublime.

Eighty-five participants were allocated to one of five conditions prior to looking at the art work. Some of them watched a 14-second scary video clip; others watched a 14-second happy video clip; some did 30 jumping jack exercises (designed to induce high physiological arousal); some did 15 jumping jacks (low arousal); whilst the remainder acted as controls and simply looked at the art without any preceding activity or intervention. The participants were questioned later and the different conditions had the desired effect - for example, the scary film left the participants in that condition feeling scared, and the happy film left others feeling equally happy.

The art work was four paintings by the Russian abstract artist El Lissitsky, each made up of simple geometric shapes and lines. Each painting was shown for thirty seconds and participants rated their experience of the art in terms of how inspiring it was, stimulating, dull, exciting, moving, boring, uninteresting, rousing/stirring, imposing, and forgetful. These factors were intended to tap into Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime: "that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended ... so entirely filled with its object."

The main result is that participants who'd watched the scary video clip tended to rate the art as more sublime than did participants in all the other conditions. By contrast, ratings given by participants in the other conditions didn't differ from each other. This suggests fear plays a special role in the sublime experience of art. Arousal may have played a lesser part - across conditions, participants' arousal scores correlated with their sublime ratings of the art.

Why should feeling afraid enhance the sublime power of art? "The capacity for a work of art to grab our interest and attention, to remove us from daily life, may stem from its ability to trigger our evolved mechanisms for coping with danger," the researchers said. "Art is not typically described as scary, but it can be surprising, elicit goose bumps, and inspire awe. Like discovering a grand vista in nature, artwork presents new horizons that pose challenges as well as opportunities." They added that future research is needed to explore the aesthetic effects of other emotions and to test emotional effects on different types of art.
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Eskine, K., Kacinik, N., and Prinz, J. (2012). Stirring images: Fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0027200

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

Tuck into our round-up of the latest and best psych and neuro links:

" up to one-third of patients who consult with neurologists typically have symptoms that are not fully explained by neurological damage" Vaughan Bell with a fascinating overview of what we do and don't know about hysteria or "conversion disorder".

Newly posted TED talk - Susan Cain on the power of introverts.

Why do we sometimes get songs (earworms) stuck in our heads? Check here for our earlier coverage of earworm research.

After a replication failure in another lab, John Bargh defends his 1996 study that showed non-conscious exposure to the concept of ageing led participants to walk more slowly.

Sleep less and waste more time online: the temptations of cyberloafing - from our sister blog, The Occupational Digest.

James Flynn previews his forthcoming book "Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ and the Twenty-First Century.”

" ... the neural basis of metacognitive behaviour: what happens in the brain when we think about our thoughts and decisions or assess how well we know something?"

Why we have cumulative culture but chimps and monkeys don't. Ed Yong reports on a study that compared how groups of children, chimps and capuchins attempted to complete the same puzzle-based task (it's the first time researchers have compared the performance of three species on the same task).

Free sample chapter from new edition of BPS-approved social psych textbook.

Jonah Lehrer and Charles Fernyhough discuss what novelists can learn from neuroscience.

Why The Future of Neuroscience Will Be Emotionless - interesting blog post by Sam McNerney on the neuroscience of emotions.

Wiley-Blackwell have brought out a psychology app for iPhones and iPads - keep up to date with psychology blogs, new articles, special issues, conferences etc.

How Much of the Neuroimaging Literature Should We Discard?

"On average, autistic brains had many more neurons in some regions than normal brains. In the prefrontal cortex, autistic children had 67 percent more neurons than average." Carl Zimmer on the The Troublesome Bloom of Autism.

Autism Matters free podcast series.

Beautiful - a hand-painted phrenology bike helmet.

What is emotional intelligence and can you improve it?

Do dating algorithms for finding the perfect partner really work?

Welcome to Stanford University's Love Competition: The contestant who generates the greatest level of love-related brain activity wins.

With adolescence getting longer and middle age becoming elastic, is it time to redefine the stages of life?

Just what is "middle age"? - BBC magazine feature. BBC Radio 4's Start the Week explored this question and featured psychologist Claudia Hammond among the guests (her new book is called Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception).

What drives some fathers to kill their children and partners before committing suicide. BBC Radio 4's File on Four  investigated (now on iPlayer).

That's it, y'all have yourselves a lovely weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.