5 chances to win The Myth of Martyrdom

This competition is now closed and the winners contacted. We have five copies to give away of The Myth of Martyrdom What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers by Adam Lankford, kindly donated to us by Palgrave Macmillan.

From the publishers: "Drawing on an array of primary sources, including suicide notes, love letters, diary entries, and martyrdom videos, Lankford reveals the important parallels that exist between suicide bombers, airplane hijackers, cult members, and rampage shooters. The result is an astonishing account of rage and shame that will transform the way we think of terrorism forever." (Check out this review from Scientific American Mind).

For your chance to win a copy, simply post a comment to this blog entry telling us which was your favourite Research Digest blog item of 2012 and why (there's a drop-down archive menu in the right-hand column). We'll pick five winners at close of play on Friday. Please leave a way for us to contact you by email. Good luck!
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Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Rituals as social glue - In a fascinating piece for Nature, Dan Jones wrote about the role of different kinds of ritual in binding together small and large social groups.

2. Is TV better for babies than a book? Leading developmental psychologist (and former student of Piaget) Annette Karmiloff-Smith appeared on this week's The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4.

3. The BBC published a wonderful short history of the ground-breaking Shenley (mental health) Hospital in Hertfordshire.

4. New Scientist reviewed The Face of Emotion: How botox affects our mood and relationships by Eric Finzi: "The scientific debate about the regulation of the emotions is as lively as ever, and this is a provocative and insightful contribution."

5. As usual lots of psychologists have answered the Edge annual question, which this year is: "What should we be worried about?".

6. Action for Happiness has published a new report: "Increasing Happiness by Understanding What People Want"

7. A recent Wellcome Collection event on pain is now available to watch on YouTube.

8. Fundamentally speaking, are humans good or bad? asks Tom Stafford in his latest column for BBC Future.

9. Stop everything else you are doing and concentrate on reading this: People who think they're great at multi-tasking are often unusually bad at it. 

10. The Guardian published an edited extract from January First: A Child's Descent Into Madness And Her Father's Struggle To Save Her, by Michael Schofield.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Glimpsed at last - the life of neuropsychology's most important patient

Leborgne's brain

Monsieur Leborgne, nicknamed Tan Tan, for that was the only syllable he could utter (save for a swear word or two), died in the care of the neurologist Paul Broca in Paris on April 17, 1861. Arguably the most important case in the history of neuropsychology, Leborgne's death coincided with a debate raging in scholarly circles about the location of language function in the brain. When Broca autopsied Leborgne's brain, he observed a malformation on the left frontal lobe - "Broca's area" - and concluded this was the site of speech production, a moment that the historian Stanley Finger has described as a "key turning point in the history of the brain sciences".

Broca was far from being the first person to propose that speech function is located in the frontal lobes, but crucially, the evidence from Leborgne helped him persuade the academic community. For centuries experts had believed mental functions were located in the brain's hollows; that the cortex ("husk" in Latin) was little more than a rind of tissue and blood vessels. Today, problems producing language are still termed Broca's aphasia in recognition of Broca's landmark contribution, although Broca in fact named Leborgne's problems aphémie (meaning “without speech”). The Greek term “aphasia” (also meaning “speechlessness”), adopted by medicine, was coined in Broca's day by the physician Armand Trousseau.

Far more is known about Gage's life

In terms of the historical record, Leborgne is like a mirror opposite of Phineas Gage - another of neuropsychology's legendary cases. The story of Gage's life and infamous accident, in which a tamping iron shot through his brain, has been researched in-depth, inspiring books, poems, YouTube skits and snowmen makers along the way. Yet relatively little is known about the brain damage Gage suffered because no autopsy was performed when he died and his brain was never preserved (that hasn't stopped scientists from attempting to simulate the likely damage).

In contrast, Broca was careful to save Leborgne's brain for posterity. He decided against a full dissection, performing a surface examination only. Today the preserved organ is housed at the Musée Dupuytren museum in Paris, where Broca placed it. The brain has been scanned numerous times using modern methods (e.g. PDF), allowing detailed analysis of the location and nature of any lesions. We now know that the frontal lobe damage to Leborgne's brain was more extensive and deeper than Broca had realised based on his superficial examinations. But, contra the situation with Gage, while we are well-informed about Leborgne's brain, before now his identity and life story have remained largely mysterious. Broca's medical notes revealed little.

Thankfully, in a new paper, Cezary Domanski at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland has used archive registers in France to uncover hitherto unknown detailed biographical information about Monsieur Leborgne. Born in Moret-sur-Loing - the picturesque town that inspired Monet and other impressionists - "Tan's" full name was Louis Victor Leborgne. He was the son of Pierre Christophe Leborgne, a school teacher, and Margueritte Savard. He had three older siblings, Lucille, Pierre and Anne, and two younger siblings, Arsene and Louise.

An epileptic since his youth, it was Leborgne's loss of speech that led to him being hospitalised at age 30. Unmarried, he ended up spending the remaining 21 years of his life in hospital. Before this incapacitation through illness, Domanski tells us Leborgne was a "formier" in Paris, a kind of skilled craftsman who made the wooden forms used by shoemakers in their work.  Together with the information on Leborgne's family, this news corrects at least one historical myth. The oft-told idea that Leborgne "was an uneducated illiterate from the lower social class should once and for all be deemed erroneous," writes Domanski.

Based on his inquiries, the Polish historian offers an intriguing speculation - given that Leborgne's birthplace of Moret was home to several tanneries, Domanski wonders if his repeated utterance of Tan was somehow connected to childhood memories of the pretty town.

"One thing remains certain," Domanski concludes, "The memory of the disease and cause of death of 'Monsieur Leborgne' proved far more enduring than the story of his life, which was deemed irrelevant even when the patient was still alive. It is time for Louis Victor Leborgne to regain his identity ...".

In 2009, out of the blue, a photograph was discovered of Phineas Gage. I wonder if we will ever look upon an image of Leborgne?

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Domanski CW (2013). Mysterious "Monsieur Leborgne": The Mystery of the Famous Patient in the History of Neuropsychology is Explained. Journal of the history of the neurosciences, 22 (1), 47-52 PMID: 23323531

--Further reading-- 
500 Francs Says Language Is Housed in the Frontal Lobes!
Speaking without Broca's area
Broca’s area: Nomenclature, anatomy, typology and asymmetry

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.

Lying becomes automatic with practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time travel study shows my years take up more space than yours

We think about time in terms of space, as revealed in the way we talk about it ("looking ahead to our future"; "looking back at our past") and in the results from psychology experiments. For instance, people from countries that write right-to-left find it easier to associate future events with the right-hand side of space. This begs the question - how much space do we think time takes up, and is it always constant, or does it vary with how richly we represent particular episodes?

Brittany Christian and her colleagues have explored this question with a pair of fascinating studies. The first involved 60 participants (aged 18 to 32 years) marking the position of various birthdays on a 36cm horizontal line. The middle of the line was marked as "now". Some participants were asked to draw a mark to show the position of their 8th and 9th birthdays, their previous and next birthdays (relative to now), and their 58th and 59th birthdays, representing past, present and future periods of time, respectively. Other participants did the same for the equivalent birthdays of a best friend; others did it for a stranger who shared the same birth date as them.

The key result here was that participants indicating their own birthdays tended to leave a larger gap between their previous and next birthdays, as compared with participants who marked the birthdays of a best friend. In turn, those marking the birthdays of a best friend left a larger gap between previous and next birthdays than did participants who marked the birthday positions of a stranger. No contrasts emerged for gaps between birthdays in the further past or future (8th and 9th or 58th and 59th), perhaps because we represent such distant time more generically. The main result suggests that the more richly we encode past and future events in our minds, the more physical space we allocate to our mental representation of those periods.

A second study was similar but this time 63 participants (aged 18 to 32) controlled their passage backwards or forwards through time, an experience that was created using the optic flow of white dots on a computer screen. The contraction of the dots towards the centre creates the sensation of moving backwards, the expansion of dots outwards gives the feeling of travelling forwards. Using a keypad to control their motion, the participants were asked to move forward or backwards through time until they reached various birthdays up to ten years in the past or future. As in the first study, they did this either for their own birthdays, the birthdays of a friend, or a stranger.

Participants chose to travel through more space to reach birthday events in their own lives, compared with the space they travelled when journeying towards a friend's same birthdays. Participants traversed the least amount of space to reach those birthday dates in the life of a stranger. These differences were true for past events and future events, and they held across the full span of time that was investigated (i.e. a birthday up to ten years in the past or future).

Christian and her colleagues said their finding was consistent with construal level theory: "more space is allocated to events that feature self-relevant and episodically rich (i.e. more concrete) mental representations." Future research is needed to see if other factors also affect the amount of space allocated to temporal representations, such as factual knowledge or emotional salience. Would we allocate more space to time in the life of someone who we like but don't know well, or to someone we know well, but don't like?

The researchers said the "behavioural implications of these findings remains an important challenge for future". It's speculative for now, but they surmised that their results could help make sense of the planning fallacy - our tendency to underestimate how long things will take us, compared with others. The fact that we represent our own time with more space could tempt us to feel like we can get more done in a given period.

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Christian BM, Miles LK, and Macrae CN (2012). Your space or mine? Mapping self in time. PloS one, 7 (11) PMID: 23166617

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.