The Special Issue Spotter

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

Oxytocin, vasopressin and social behaviour (Hormones and Behaviour).

The human orgasm (Sexual and Relationship Therapy).

Human conflict (Science).

Building capacity to improve student outcomes through collaboration: Current issues and innovative approaches (Psychology in the Schools).

Sports psychology virtual special issue (British Journal of Psychology).

Interpersonal Psychotherapy (Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy).

International perspectives on juvenile crime (Behavioural Sciences and the Law).

Teacher–child relationships from an attachment perspective (Attachment and Human Development).

Neuroimaging: Then, now and the future (Neuroimage).

New perspectives on developing and assessing thinking: Selected papers from the 15th International Conference on Thinking (Thinking Skills and Creativity).

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Girlie scientist role models could do more harm than good

The lack of women in science, maths and engineering (STEM) careers continues to raise concerns. One cause of the anomaly is thought to be beliefs among schoolchildren that these subjects are somehow inherently "masculine" and not for girls.

So what's needed to inspire schoolgirls, you might think, is sciencey female role models who show that you can be successful in STEM subjects and at the same time be feminine. Some attempts have already been made in that direction - the toy company Mattel brought out a "Computer Engineer Barbie" (complete with pink laptop) and mathematician Danica McKellar (pictured, right) has written a book aimed at inspiring girls: "Math Doesn't Suck: How To Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind Or Breaking A Nail". (Update: And the EU have just launched a new initiative "Science: it's a girl thing").

The trouble, according to a pair of new studies by Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa at the University of Michigan, is that girlie science role models can backfire, actually putting off girls who have little existing interest in science and maths subjects.

The first study involved 144 girls (average age 11.5 years) reading about female undergrad role models in a magazine-style interview. Some of the girls read about three female students who were successful in STEM subjects and were also overtly "girlie" (e.g. they wore make up and pink clothes, and liked reading fashion magazines). For schoolgirls who said they had little interest in science subjects, reading about these kind of role models actually diminished their plans to study maths in the future, reduced their maths interest, and lowered their belief in their own abilities and their chances of short-term success (as compared with outcomes for their like-minded peers who read about three successful STEM role-models who weren't overtly girlie - for example, they wore dark-coloured clothes).

Betz and Sekaquaptewa think this ironic effect could be because girlie female scientists seem extra-difficult to emulate. To test this, 42 more schoolgirls (average age 11.4 years) read interviews with more role models. Afterwards, girls who were uninterested in science subjects rated the success of girlie female scientists as less attainable than the success of female scientists who weren't overtly girlie. Girls not interested in science also tended to say that being good at maths and being girlie don't go together.

What does all this mean? Although there's plenty of evidence that stereotype-busting role models can be beneficial, these new results suggest that role models that take on too many stereotypic beliefs at once can actually backfire. "Young girls may see [the success of such role models] as particularly difficult to emulate," the researchers said, "given their rigid stereotypes about gender and scientists."

This research focused on girls at middle-school and it's important to note that the same findings may not apply to older teens or college students. No doubt some readers will also smart at the way femininity or girlieness was conceived in this study, potentially perpetuating unhelpful gender stereotypes. For now, Betz and Sekaquaptewa cautioned: "Submitting STEM role models to Pygmalion-style feminine makeovers may do more harm than good."

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Betz, D., and Sekaquaptewa, D. (2012). My Fair Physicist? Feminine Math and Science Role Models Demotivate Young Girls. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612440735

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Body-sensitive people are tuned into their heart and their stomach

We know from past research that some people are better than others at being able to detect their own heartbeat. There's lots of research on that topic, partly because it's so easy to compare people's estimates of their heartbeats against the true reading. But is this a characteristic that generalises? Are people who are accurate at detecting their cardiac activity also in-tune with their other internal bodily functions?

Before now, just one study from the early 80s had looked for and found an association between cardiac awareness and gastric awareness. But that study relied on an uncomfortable sounding procedure in which participants had to swallow a balloon. That necessarily ruled out a lot of potential participants who wouldn't have wanted to do such a thing, and the internal gastric sensations that the remaining participants detected were artificially induced.

Now Beate Herbert and her colleagues have used a more natural test of gastric awareness. Forty-nine healthy women fasted for four hours before arriving at the lab where they were instructed to drink water until they felt full. The container they drank from was opaque and re-filled after each swig, so that there was no way for the women to judge visually how much they'd drunk. The participants also completed a test of their heartbeat awareness. For both tasks, medical equipment in the form of electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrogastrogram (EGG) provided objective measures of heart and stomach activity.

The key finding is that women who were more accurate in detecting their own heartbeats also tended to stop drinking earlier, as if they were more sensitive to internal feelings of fullness. The EGG provided objective confirmation that they experienced less gastric activity than the other participants before stopping drinking, so it wasn't the case that their stomachs were actually more full or issuing more powerful signals. Rather the heartbeat sensitive women seemed to be particularly sensitive to signals arising from their stomachs. There were no links between either cardio or gastric awareness and anxiety.

Herbert and her team concluded: "'Interoceptive awareness' as assessed by heartbeat perception seems to represent a better ability to focus, to perceive and to process internal bodily information across visceral modalities, such as gastric signals, with cardiac and gastric signals both representing bodily cues that show perceivable activity changes during situations of everyday life."
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Herbert, B., Muth, E., Pollatos, O., and Herbert, C. (2012). Interoception across Modalities: On the Relationship between Cardiac Awareness and the Sensitivity for Gastric Functions. PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036646

Previously on the Digest: People who are more aware of their own heart-beat have superior time perception skills.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Race and foul judgments in football - it's not black and white

Racism continues to cast its ugly shadow over football. As the European Football Championships kick-off today, the British government has advised fans of Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent to "take extra care" when in Ukraine, host nation with Poland. Meanwhile, England defender and ex-captain John Terry awaits his trial for alleged racism. Against this background, a team of Swiss psychologists has just published a preliminary investigation into the potential effect of racial prejudice on fans', players' and referees' judgements about the severity of fouls by Black and White players.

Pascal Gygax and his colleagues presented 43 White football players, 17 White referees and 22 White football fans with 64 challenge sequences created with the Xbox 360 console game Fifa 2005. Each sequence featured one player tackling another, and the clips had been rated by independent judges as ambiguous as regards the legality of the challenge. Players in the clips were White or Black and wore either green or white shirts. After watching each clip (between one and two minutes in length), the participants had to say whether a foul had been committed, and if so, rate its severity.

Based on previous evidence of racial prejudice towards Black athletes, the researchers anticipated that challenges by Black players would be judged harshly, particularly if they were challenges against a White player. Although the results did uncover evidence that race affects people's judgements of fouls, the pattern of results was complicated.

There were signs the participants were sensitive to the risk of appearing biased, in that they were less likely to judge a foul had occurred whenever a sequence involved two players of different skin colour. Referees specifically were less likely to judge that a foul had occurred when a challenge was by a Black player. Paradoxically, participants overall were quicker to decide that a foul had occurred when a challenge was by a Black player, possibly because they harboured implicit expectations that Black players will be more likely to commit fouls.

When it came to the severity ratings, there was evidence for bias against White players - fouls by them were always judged as more serious, perhaps a consequence of compensatory efforts by the participants to appear non-biased. On the other hand, challenges on Black players were rated as less severe than challenges on White players, perhaps indicative of prejudice by the White participants.

"In essence," the researchers explained, "participants have conflicting sources of information which result in differential treatments of White and Black players, at times discriminatory to Black players, and at times to White players." An alternative, more pessimistic explanation put forward by Gygax and his team is that the participants expected Black players to be more aggressive and so raised the threshold for what they considered to be severe when judging their challenges.

The researchers acknowledged the limitations of their study - most obviously that they'd relied on video game clips rather than real-life footage. However, they said they'd uncovered evidence of discrimination in the judgement of football challenges, and that crucially, "those were not always against Black players: thus, differentiation judgments in soccer based on skin colour may not be a black or white judgment."

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WAGNER-EGGER, P., GYGAX, P., and RIBORDY, F. (2012). RACISM IN SOCCER? PERCEPTION OF CHALLENGES OF BLACK AND WHITE PLAYERS BY WHITE REFEREES, SOCCER PLAYERS, AND FANS. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 114 (1), 275-289 DOI: 10.2466/05.07.17.PMS.114.1.275-289

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

You can't resist the pull of another person's gaze

At just the moment the magician swaps the position of two cards in her left hand, she looks across deliberately and misleadingly to her right hand and your attention follows. You can't help it. You see where she's looking and your attention is sent automatically in the same direction. Magicians have known this power for centuries and now psychologists are confirming and measuring the effect under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. More surprising, perhaps, is their finding that the directing effect of arrows is also impossible to resist.

Giovanni Galfano and his colleagues in Italy instructed dozens of participants to look out for a small target that would appear on-screen, each trial, either on the left-hand side or the right-hand side. When it appeared, the participants' task was to press the space-bar key on a keyboard as quickly as possible.

To make things even easier, a word,"left" or "right" (in Italian), appeared in the middle of the screen giving the participants advance warning, with 100 per cent accuracy, as to which side the target would appear. In another run of trials, there was no need for advance warning from a directional word because the target always appeared on the same side.

The only complicating factor in this arrangement - but it's a crucial one - is that after the directional word had gone (on those trials where there was one), and before the target had appeared, a cartoon face popped up in the middle of the screen, looking either in the direction of where the target would appear, or the opposite direction. In other versions of the experiment, rather than a face, an arrow appeared, pointing either towards the side where the target would appear, or towards the opposite side.

The participants were told explicitly to ignore these faces and arrows. But they couldn't. When the cartoon face was looking in the opposite direction to the side the target appeared on, participants were significantly slower to spot the target and press the space key. And it was the same with arrows that pointed in the wrong direction. It's as if the faces and arrows had irresistibly grabbed the participants' attention and sent it momentarily in the wrong direction.

The slowing effect of the gaze and arrows was only a few milliseconds, but it was statistically significant. "The finding that the information conveyed by distractors interfered with the task indicates that orienting of attention mediated by both gaze and arrows resists suppression and can be defined as strongly automatic," the researchers said.

Galfano's team added that the processes underlying the pulling power of gaze and arrows are not necessarily the same. The pull of another's gaze is apparent in the looking behaviour of new-born babies aged just two days, suggestive of an innate mechanism. The power of arrows, by contrast, is obviously based on learned symbolism.

The researchers conceded that different results may have emerged in a more complicated environment more akin to the real world, something they plan to investigate in the future. Related to this, it's been shown that the social identity of a gazer influences the attention-grabbing power of their gaze. A study published last year found that right-wing participants were more affected by the gaze direction of Silvio Berlusconi than were left-wing participants.

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Galfano, G., Dalmaso, M., Marzoli, D., Pavan, G., Coricelli, C., and Castelli, L. (2012). Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-16 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.663765

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The new science of "Phew!"

There's a childish prank I never tire of. As soon as we've left the house and the front-door has slammed shut, I pat down all my pockets and say nervously to my companion "Er, you've got the keys, right?". Then, just when their dismay at the prospect of being locked out has peaked, I say "Only joking!" and watch with pleasure as relief washes over them.

I say "relief", but what exactly is that emotion my companion has just experienced? As Kate Sweeny and Kathleen Vohs write in a new journal article, "Although relief is readily identified and frequently experienced, it is not understood well from the perspective of psychological science." Investigations into the emotion, they observe, "are sparse".

Now Sweeny and Vohs have attempted to make a start at mapping out this uncharted emotional territory. They began with a pilot study asking 91 people to provide a personal example of relief. Roughly half the group described a "near-miss" kind of relief - rather like fearing that you've locked yourself out and then realising that you haven't. The other half described a kind of "task-completion" relief, in which a negative experience had come to an end. A second pilot study with dozens of American and Dutch participants established similarly that half their relief experiences in the preceding week were of the "near-miss" category and half were of the "task completion" kind.

Next, in a study in which 114 more participants reflected on recent relief experiences, the researchers found that near-miss relief was associated with having more thoughts about how much worse things could have been and feeling more socially isolated (regardless of whether they were on their own or not).  Sweeny and Vohs said this is consistent with past research showing how excessive rumination can be harmful to close relationships. Experience of task-completion relief, by contrast, was associated with more thoughts about how things could have been even better.

Lastly the researchers had a go at inducing relief. They invited 79 participants to a lab and told them they'd have to sing a song into an audio recorder. Half the participants were then told the recorder was broken, thus prompting them to experience near-miss relief. The other half of the participants did the singing, which it was presumed would be followed by the experience of task-completion relief. Quizzed afterwards, it was again found that near-miss relief, more than task-completion relief, was associated with feelings of social isolation and thoughts about how things could have been worse. The negative counterfactual thinking mediated the social isolation - that is, the more thoughts about how bad things could have been, the more socially isolated people felt.

What does all this tell us about what relief is for? "Experiencing near-miss relief could increase the likelihood that people will act to avert an unfavourable fate in the future" Sweeny and Vohs said. "In contrast, task-completion relief allows people to focus on the positive emotional experience with minimal distraction from downward counterfactual thoughts. This process might reinforce satisfaction in the completion of a job well done ... and therefore increase the likelihood that people will repeat the unpleasant experience."

"Our aim is to bring the neglect of relief to an end," the researchers' concluded, "for it is an emotion that deserves study."

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Sweeny, K., and Vohs, K. (2012). On Near Misses and Completed Tasks: The Nature of Relief. Psychological Science, 23 (5), 464-468 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611434590

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

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

In an open-access feature on Toilet Psychology for The Psychologist, Nick Haslam argues that psychologists should stop averting their eyes from the bathroom. "In 30 years of studying the field I rarely came across any recognition that human beings are creatures who excrete," he writes.

How Mark Changizi turned Japanese (perceptually) in just one week.

The science and ethics of voluntary amputation, the latest from Mo Costandi's Neurophilosophy blog.

Crowdsourcing is transforming the science of psychology.

The latest Neuropod podcast is online, including a feature on a paralysed woman able to control a robot arm with her thoughts.

MPs in the UK have published a new report into the causes and consequences of body image dissatisfaction.

How close are we to a forgetting pill (Amy Milton with a guest post on Jon Simons' blog).

Latest Psychfiles podcast - protect yourself from the persuasive techniques of the car salesman.

The 85-plus generation are much happier than perceived.

One for the diary - can you become musical at any age? Gary Marcus in London on June 11 discussing his new book Guitar Zero, the Science of Learning to Be Musical.

Will there one day be a vaccination against depression? Just one of the topics covered on the latest episode of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind.

Interested in becoming a sports psychologist? Here's a video showing a day in the life of sports psych Dr John Mathers.

An amusing conversation between an evolutionary psychologist and a biologist.

Why it's important to tackle brain myths head-on.

Lots of great interviews published online in the last week:

- Ian Leslie (author of Born Liars, Why We Can't Live Without Deceit) interviewed Jonah Lehrer (author of Imagine, How Creativity Works).

- Jonah Lehrer interviewed Bruce Hood (author of the Self Illusion).

- On BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific, Jim Al-Khalili met Cambridge psychologist Barbara Sahakian.

Vaughan Bell for the Observer wrote about the beguiling nature of brain scans and the complexities involved in how to interpret them. (He followed up with some more detail on the Mind Hacks blog).

The latest episode of Digital Human on BBC Radio 4 explored online relationships.

Some new books worth checking out: What A Plant Knows, a field guide to the senses; The Winner Effect, how power affects your brain; How To Stay Sane; From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression.

What is empathy? A question explored in a new docu-film "Love, hate & everything in between".

Finally, I was lucky enough to be inspired by succeedology guru L Vaughan Spencer last Saturday. Here he is explaining why thinking is the enemy of innovation.

That's all, have a great Jubilee weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.