Cope with pain by changing how you picture it

Most people who suffer from serious pain have one or more mental images that they associate with the discomfort and what it represents to them. A new study by Clare Philips and Debbie Samsom has shown that these pain-sufferers can be taught to re-imagine this pain imagery in a more positive light, bringing them instant relief and emotional comfort.

Of 73 volunteers at an occupational rehab centre in Vancouver, 57 had pain and said they experienced imagery associated with that pain, and so they were recruited into the study (there were 24 men, the average age was 45).

After being interviewed about their baseline pain and their psychological state - including feelings of mental defeat, anxiety and depression - the participants were asked to select their most powerful and distressing pain-related mental image. "I see myself on all fours - like a dog but unable to move," said one. All participants spent time forming this "index image" in their mind before answering more questions about how they were feeling. Focusing on the unpleasant image increased pain and emotional distress. Remember, this is an image that the participants experienced spontaneously in their everyday lives (for nearly half of them, it came to mind several times a day).

Next, after a six-minute gap talking about where they grew up (as a distraction), 26 of the participants were taught to re-picture their pain. They were asked to think "how would you rather see the image?" and to describe in detail what this would entail. They then focused on this new image - for example, the participant above who'd previously described the dog-image now imagined: "I am at the start of a race….the gun goes off and the crowd cheers as I take off." The remaining participants acted as controls and spent the same time focused on their original, unpleasant index image.

After picturing a "re-scripted" pain image, the participants in that group experienced a dramatic drop in their pain levels. In fact, 49 per cent of them said they felt no pain at that time, compared with 11 per cent of them feeling no pain after imagining their index image. "The pain decrements were fast, easily produced and dramatically large," the researchers said. The re-script group also exhibited improvements in anxiety, sadness, mental defeat and beliefs about their own fragility. The control participants, by contrast, experienced none of these improvements.

There was another six-minute gap and the re-script group again pictured their positively re-imagined pain image. The controls were now also taught how to re-imagine their pain image - the local research ethics committee had insisted on this. The original re-script group continued to enjoy reduced pain and psychological benefits, which counts against the idea that the novel image had merely served as a temporary distraction. The controls now also enjoyed the benefits of re-picturing their pain.

Philips and Samsom said that the participants found it easy and pleasurable to re-script their pain images. Of course there is a need now for research to see whether these benefits of re-picturing pain can last into the long term. It would also help to have a different kind of control group - for example, one that merely visualised random positive images, to see if the effects of specifically re-picturing pain are more powerful. Where this study focused on the sensory detail of pain images, future work could also look into the re-writing the images' cognitive meaning.

The findings add to a broader literature showing that our experience of pain is affected by many psychological factors, such as our beliefs about our ability to cope. This doesn't mean the pain isn't real, but it does mean that psychological techniques can be incredibly effective at bringing relief and improvements to people's quality of life.

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Philips C, and Samson D (2012). The rescripting of pain images. Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, 40 (5), 558-76 PMID: 22950868

-Further reading-
Psychologist magazine special issue on the psychology of pain
Acceptance, not distraction, is the way to deal with pain (Digest item)
Verbal reassurance can dull the effect of pain, but only if it's from someone we identify with (Digest item)

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

In search of the super-humane (those who identify with all of humanity)

The pages of psychology's journals are filled with sorry tales of people's intolerance and prejudice towards one another. Against this darkness, Sam McFarland and his colleagues urge us not to forget the brighter stories - the heroes of the past who put themselves at risk because they felt empathy towards outsiders.

Consider the French Pastor Andre ́ Trocme ́ and his wife, who helped save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. "We don't know what a Jew is," Trocme ́ said when instructed to hand over the names of all the Jews. "We only know people."

The ability and inclination to identify with all of humanity was touched on by some of psychology's pioneers. Alfred Adler wrote about the innate potential of people to achieve "gemeinschaftsgefuhl", literally translated as "social interest", but also taken to mean "oneness with all humanity".  The founder of humanistic psychology Abraham Maslow invoked the concept of "self-actualised individuals" - people able to identify with and have a concern with all mankind.

Yet despite these early ideas, there's been little subsequent research on the ability to identify with all humanity. One reason is the lack of an explicit measure. Some psychological scales come close - for example, there's the "Social Interest Scale" (measuring interest in community) and there are measures of "moral identity" (how central morality is to self-identity) and "universalism" (a oneness with the world), but none quite targets identifying with all humankind. Until now.

McFarland and his team have devised the Identification With All Humanity Scale (IWAH), consisting of 9 three-part items, including: "How much do you identify with (that is, feel a part of, feel love toward, have concern for) each of the following: a) people in my community, b) Americans, c) All humans everywhere". This version is aimed at US participants, hence the option for (b). The full version is online.

The researchers tested their new IWAH scale exhaustively across ten studies involving hundreds of participants. The researchers found:

• a high score on the IWAH was more than just a lack of in-group bias and a disposition for empathy; the IWAH also taps into something other than Shalom Shwartz's broader and more abstract concept of "universalism" (the goal of "understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and for all nature").
• high scores on IWAH correlated more strongly with people's concern for human rights than existing compassion measures
• scores on the scale were stable across 10 weeks
• close friends and family had a good idea of a person's score on the IWAH
• members of Human Rights Watch and the Church World Service scored particularly high on the scale, just as you'd expect if it's measuring what it is supposed to
• high scores on the IWAH correlated with the personality factors agreeableness, openness to experience and neuroticism (the researchers were baffled by this last association)
• high scorers on IWAH valued American and Afghani lives more equally
• high scorers had a greater knowledge of global humanitarian issues
• and finally ... research via the your morals.org website, involving thousands of participants, showed that high scores on the IWAH predicted people's willingness to donate money to international charities, beyond traditional measures, such as of ethnocentrism. 

McFarland and his colleagues concluded that their new scale has "substantial merit" and that it's now important to question why some people develop a deeper identification with all of humanity than others. They predicted that children who are neglected or spoiled will fail to develop this form of empathy for all mankind. "A lack of punitiveness coupled with affection may provide a foundation for later concern for humanity at large," they said. "Understanding how identification with all humanity develops is worthy of direct and extensive investigation." Let's hope their new scale helps inspire more research on this vital issue. 

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McFarland S, Webb M, and Brown D (2012). All Humanity Is My Ingroup: A Measure and Studies of Identification With All Humanity. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: 22708625

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them, here are 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Nobel Laureate and psychology grandee Daniel Kahneman has written an open letter to all researchers in social priming research, advising them on steps to take to avert the "train wreck" that's looming for their field.

2. The publishers SAGE are currently running a free trial of all their online content, which includes all their psychology journals (with titles like Psychological Science). Requires registration, offer runs until end of this month.

3. The moral psychology expert Jonathan Haidt was interviewed on the latest Social Science Bites podcast (the link also takes you to a handy transcript of the interview).

4. I've often wondered this - if you can't sleep, how much good does it do you to just lie there with your eyes close? (more sleep myths and facts)

5. "Fake it until you become it". Newly posted TED talk from social psychologist Amy Cuddy on how your body language and posture affects your hormone levels and how you feel about yourself (as a bonus it includes a cringe-inducing clip featuring former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown). We've covered related research on the Digest.

6. Two great minds passed away last month, RIP Thomas Szasz and Griffith Edwards.

7. How do they manage to keep on smiling at Disney World?

8. The excellent Digital Human radio programme has returned to BBC Radio 4 for a second series (see also).

9. Do people really drink more from curved glasses? Tom Stafford with a great analysis of a new study and its treatment by the media (one of the study authors also joins in the conversation via comments).

10. Was behaviourism's founder, John Watson, really fired from his university post for conducting sex research?
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why do humans walk in circles?

It's a trusted plot device of many a thriller. The lost protagonists stagger for hours through creepy forest only to end up back where they started. In fact the idea that humans walk in circles is no urban myth. This was confirmed by Jan Souman and colleagues in a 2009 study, in which participants walked for hours at night in a German forest and the Tunisian Sahara. But the question remains - why?

Souman's team rejected past theories, including the idea that people have one leg that's stronger or longer than the other. If that were true you'd expect people to systematically veer off in the same direction, but their participants varied in their circling direction.

Now a team in France has made a bold attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. Emma Bestaven and her colleagues hired out a huge indoor exhibition space in Bordeaux (90m x 150m) and blindfolded their participants, thus ensuring that there was no way any environmental sounds or bumps on the ground could interfere with the results.

Another innovation was that the researchers used EMG to monitor the participants' muscle activity in their legs whilst they walked; they had them stand on a force plate to check how their balance was distributed; and they assessed their subjective sense of the vertical, via their placement of a vertical bar.

Given six attempts to walk in a straight line, the fifteen blindfolded participants (7 women) in fact frequently veered off in one direction or the other, just as expected based on past research. Half the time they deviated off to the left, 39 per cent of the time to the right, and the remainder of the walks they managed to go straight. Six of the participants always veered in the same direction, the others mixed it up. There was no evidence of participants getting straighter with each attempt, but a faster walking speed was associated with a straighter trajectory.

Many past theories for why humans walk in circles were ruled out - walking deviation was unrelated to hand, eye or leg dominance. The recordings of muscle activity drew a blank. But there was one clue. The participants' "centre of pressure" score obtained when they stood on the force plate, which reflects their postural balance, was correlated with how much they deviated from a straight line when they walked. In turn, this "centre of pressure" score was correlated with participants' subjective sense of a straight vertical line.

Taken together, Bestaven's team said this suggests that our propensity to walk in circles is related in some way to slight irregularities in the vestibular system. Located in inner ear, the vestibular system guides our balance and minor disturbances here could skew our sense of the direction of "straight ahead" just enough to make us go around in circles.

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Emma Bestaven, Etienne Guillaud, and Jean-René Cazalets (2012). Is “Circling” Behavior in Humans Related to Postural Asymmetry? PLoS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043861

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Extras

10 Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

A case of maths synaesthesia (seeing formulas as geometric shapes).

In a new survey, females spent more time on Facebook, had more FB friends, and were more likely than men to use their profile pics for impression management.

It backfires when students sacrifice sleep time for extra study.

Another form of the Macbeth effect - students unfamiliar with video games were more attracted to hygiene products after playing a violent game.

Signing at the start of a form, rather than at the end, boosts people's honesty.

Gossiping in the office catalyses friendships, but don't over do it.

A possible explanation for why we enjoy watching sad films?

Taller football referees were better able to keep control of the game.

There are fewer gender differences in mate preferences in countries where there is greater gender equality.

Is pretend play really as important for children's development as everyone usually claims?

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Anonymity may spoil the accuracy of data collected through questionnaires

Thousands of psychology papers are based on data derived from questionnaires that were filled out anonymously. That's because most psychologists have reasoned that the way to get people to be honest about their practice of undesirable behaviours is to promise them anonymity. But in a new analysis, Yphtach Lelkes and his colleagues point out that anonymity comes with a price. Participants will feel less accountable and may be less motivated to answer questions accurately.

To test this, Lelkes' team devised a cunning methodology in which dozens of undergrads conducted internet research for what they thought was a study into the way that people search for information on the web.

After each student had spent 45 minutes researching the mountain pygmy-possum, a researcher made a show of deleting the student's search history before their eyes, ostensibly to prevent the next participant from accessing the browser's archives. In fact, a spyware programme was installed on the computer and kept track of all the sites visited. After the research session, each student answered a questionnaire about their use of the internet in general and their experience of the internet research task, including which sites they'd searched. Crucially, half the students were instructed to fill out their name and other personal details at the top of the questionnaire; the others were told to leave it blank to ensure anonymity.

Students who answered the questionnaire anonymously admitted to more embarrassing internet behaviours in general, such as looking at porn, but regards their searches specifically during the research task, they answered with less accuracy. There was also evidence of a lack of variety in many of the anonymous students' later answers, consistent with the idea that they were putting less thought and effort into the questionnaires as they grew tired.

Two follow-up studies involved dozens more students having the opportunity to eat M&M sweets and jelly beans while they completed questionnaires. A question at the end asked them to report how many they'd eaten and once again, students who answered anonymously were less accurate about how much they'd indulged. This was the case whether anonymity was promised before or after the opportunity to eat the snacks.

Lelkes and his colleagues were cautious about how far these findings can be generalised. For example, the same problems might not apply when people are interviewed face-to-face but promised confidentiality. However, they warned researchers against assuming that promising participants anonymity means that they will provide better quality answers. "Particularly among college students who often complete questionnaires to fulfil course requirements, such a guarantee may serve to sanction half-hearted survey completion rather than freeing students up to respond with greater honesty."

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Yphtach Lelkes, Jon A. Krosnick, David M. Marx, Charles M. Judd, and Bernadette Park (2012). Complete anonymity compromises the accuracy of self-reports. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.07.002

--Further reading-- Another recent study found that anonymous web participants provided quality data for psychological experiments.
Our bias for the left-hand side of space could be distorting large-scale surveys.
Is a taste for extreme answers distorting cross-cultural comparisons of personality?

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Are eating disorders the manifestation of an "Extreme Female Brain"?

According to an influential and controversial theory, autism is the manifestation of an "Extreme Male Brain". The reasoning goes something like this - the condition is far more prevalent in males than females; people with autism think in a distinctive style that's more commonly observed in men than women (that is, high in systematising and low in empathising); and greater testosterone exposure in the womb appears to go hand in hand with an infant exhibiting more autism-like traits in later childhood.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the psychologist who first proposed the theory, always conjectured that there may also be such a thing as an "Extreme Female Brain". Now in a new paper, a pair of researchers in the USA have made the case that the Extreme Female Brain exists, it's highly empathic, and it comes with its own problematic consequences, in terms of a fear of negative evaluation by others, and related to that, a greater risk of eating disorders (which are known to be far more prevalent in women than men).

Supporting their claims, Jennifer Bremser and Gordon Gallup Jr surveyed hundreds of male and female undergrads and found that men and women with more dysfunctional attitudes towards eating, and more fears of being negatively evaluated by others, also tended to score more highly on self-reported measures of empathising. A fear of being negatively evaluated was also associated with lower scores in systematic thinking.

In other words, people with a thinking style more often observed in women, and opposite to that seen in people with autism (high in empathising, low in systematising), tended to be at greater risk for eating disorders and social anxiety.

The results got a bit messier with objective measures. Among female participants, dysfunctional attitudes towards eating were associated with higher scores on an objective measure of empathising, one that involved interpreting emotions from pictures of people's eyes. But for males, dysfunctional attitudes to eating actually predicted lower scores on the test.

The researchers surmised that perhaps these men were over-interpreting the pictures - "hyper-mentalising" - and seeing emotions that weren't there, which would be consistent with their central thesis about the Extreme Female Brain. Supporting this, further studies found that dysfunctional attitudes towards eating and fear of negative evaluation by others also tended to go hand in hand with higher self-reported scores on schizotypy, including exaggerated suspiciousness, magical thinking and paranoia - arguably all signs of "hyper-mentalising", and the opposite of what's seen in autism.

What about objective measures of systematising? Dysfunctional attitudes toward eating and fear of negative evaluation weren't associated with understanding the laws of physics, but they were associated with poorer mental rotation performance scores.

"Evidence from all four studies converge to show that a combination of disordered eating and negative evaluation anxiety are associated with a cognitive style that Baron-Cohen predicted for the Extreme Female Brain," the researchers concluded.

One last thing - Bremser and Gordon Gallup Jr said their ideas suggested a novel explanation for why vegetarianism is particularly prevalent among people with eating disorders. Previously it's been assumed that vegetarianism is popular for this group as a means of calorie restriction. However, if eating disorders are part of the manifestation of an Extreme Female Brain, one that's associated with exaggerated empathy, then vegetarianism may be a natural consequence of having enhanced empathy for animals.

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Bremser JA, and Gallup GG Jr (2012). From one extreme to the other: Negative evaluation anxiety and disordered eating as candidates for the extreme female brain. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10 (3), 457-86 PMID: 22947672

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.