Need a Wii? Games console found to reduce loneliness in the elderly

The marketing people would have us believe that the Nintendo Wii is unlike traditional video games. It has an intuitive controller, they say, that allows you to simulate in-game movements, thus making it an ideal platform for active, social game playing - "fun for all the family". A new study puts this idea to the test in relation to well-being among 35 older residents (average age 82; 4 men) at an independent living apartment block in Connecticut. Patricia Kahlbaugh and her team said that a psychological challenge for older people is to deal with the restrictions that old age places on their way of life. Playing the Wii could be a way for them to socialise and be more active.

Once a week for ten weeks, 16 of the participants each received a personal visit from a female, undergrad research assistant who played on the Wii console with them for one hour. All participants in this condition chose to play the bowling game. A further 12 participants acted as controls and also received weekly visits from a research assistant for ten weeks, but during these visits the assistant and participant simply watched TV together for one hour. The assistants in both conditions were instructed to be "socially responsive". There was also a second control group of 7 participants who received no visits.

The headline finding is that after the ten week period the participants in the Wii condition reported experiencing less loneliness than they had at the study start. By contrast, participants in the TV condition and no-visit condition experienced an increase in loneliness (perhaps because they'd heard about the Wii playing and felt left out). Also, for nine out the ten weeks, the participants in the Wii condition reported more positive mood than participants in the TV condition (the no-visit condition wasn't part of this analysis). On a disappointing note, the Wii group reported no more physical activity than the TV group during the study and their life satisfaction was no different.

Whilst acknowledging the small scale of their study, Kahlbaugh's team saw the findings as a promising thumbs up for the Wii: "Although students were instructed to be socially responsive in both groups, bowling with a partner may have facilitated the creation of relationships between the elderly person and the younger student in a way that passively watching television did not," they said.

This is the first experimental demonstration of the benefits of Wii playing for older individuals, adding to existing case studies showing benefits for older people with specific impairments. "Based on this study of the Wii," the researchers concluded, "programmes aimed at seniors may want to seriously consider ways to incorporate this type of technology."

But before you rush out to buy the Wii for your older friends or relatives, it's worth bearing in mind that this study hasn't really shown that the Wii per se is the critical ingredient for the observed benefits. It's possible that the extra benefits over TV could have come from playing any kind of video game; in fact, they could have come from playing any kind of game at all, such as cards, which would also have been more social than merely watching TV. Another potential problem is that it's possible that the students in the Wii group were more fun to be with than the students who took part in the TV group. It's hard to say because the study doesn't provide any detail about the students or how they behaved, other than that they were all instructed to be socially responsive.
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Kahlbaugh, P., Sperandio, A., Carlson, A., and Hauselt, J. (2011). Effects of Playing Wii on Well-Being in the Elderly: Physical Activity, Loneliness, and Mood. Activities, Adaptation and Aging, 35 (4), 331-344 DOI: 10.1080/01924788.2011.625218

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Robot prejudice

Armin or Arman

The human tendency to form groups can turn ugly when we derogate non-members and start seeing them as somehow lesser people. A new study by Friederike Eyssel and Dieta Kuchenbrandt shows how readily this instinct for prejudice extends to our perception of robots.

Seventy-eight German students volunteered for what they thought was a chance to help the researchers optimise a social robot prototype. Shown identical pictures of the robot, half the students were told the machine was called Armin (a typical German first name) and that it had been developed in Germany. The other students were told the robot was called Arman (a typical Turkish name; Turks are the largest minority group in Germany) and that it had been developed at a Turkish university.

The students evaluating the supposedly German-built robot Armin, rated it as warmer, of superior design, as having more of a mind, said they felt psychologically closer to it, and expressed more of a willingness to live with it, as compared with the students who evaluated the supposedly Turkish-built Arman. So not only did the German students show a basic preferential bias toward the robot that had a German name and provenance, they also saw it as more human. This fits with previous research showing how readily we are able to perceive out-group members, such as the homeless, as less than human.

"We demonstrated that social categorisation processes generalise to non-human agents," the researchers said. "Even small changes at a seemingly superficial level ... sufficed to bias both the mental models of the robots, and subsequent evaluations. Our results document how deeply ingrained heuristic modes of thinking about others seem to be - may they be human or even non-human."

It's a shame that the researchers didn't include a separate, standard measure of the prejudice of their participants towards Turkish people. Would people without any measurable prejudice still have exhibited these biases towards the German robot? Another important omission: there was no assessment in the paper of whether the participants were fans of the Terminator film franchise - surely Arnie fans the world over would have had a soft spot for Armin over Arman.

Eyssel and Kuchenbrandt said their findings have practical implications. Sooner or later, they predicted, robots will enter our homes. "If one and the same product shall be marketed in different countries, it might be valuable to provide the robot with a brand name that signifies in-group membership," they said.

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Eyssel, F., and Kuchenbrandt, D. (2011). Social categorization of social robots: Anthropomorphism as a function of robot group membership. British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02082.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Win a BPS-approved textbook on forensic psychology

12/3/12 update: this competition is now closed and the winners have been contacted. 


We've got two copies of the just-released "Forensic Psychology: Crime, Justice, Law, Interventions 2nd edition", edited by Graham Davies and Anthony Beech, to give away, kindly donated to us by Wiley-Blackwell.

For your chance to win, either tweet or add a comment to this post, saying which is your favourite Digest blog post of 2012 so far - with a link to the post if there's room. 

If you tweet your answer, make sure you mention @researchdigest and use the hashtag #Forensicpsychcomp

If you post your answer as a comment to this blog post, make sure you leave a way for us to contact you.

At the end of the week, we'll pick at random one answer from all entries on Twitter and one answer from the comments section of this blog post*. 

Good luck!

*Digest Facebook followers can also enter the competition via the Digest Facebook page - for the purposes of choosing a winner, their entries will be included alongside the blog comments (see the Digest Facebook page for more info). 

Feast

Ulric Neisser died aged 83

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

The New York Times published an obituary for cognitive psychology legend Ulric Neisser, who died on Feb 17. Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks blog reminds us that Neisser criticised the short-comings of the cognitive approach later in his career. And here's a report on Neisser's passing from the Cornell Daily Sun.

Why do we procrastinate at work and some ways to stop (don't worry, it's fine to wait until you've finished reading these links, really).

Great news for history of psychology fans - Christopher Green and his crew have started recording several new psych history podcasts.

BeTipul, the Israeli forerunner to the critically acclaimed psychotherapy drama In Treatment, has started screening on the UK channel Sky Arts 1.

New book that's worth a look "Memory: Fragments of a Modern History' by Alison Winter. According to Brainpickings, the book "explores how the science and understanding of memory evolved over the past century, from early metaphors that likened it to a filing cabinet to the quasi-science of the prewar era’s “truth serums” to the psychology of false confessions and the latest neuroscience breakthroughs on how remembering works."

Video interviews with Chris Frith and others about the brain basis of consciousness. The same gang appeared on this week's Guardian Science podcast. And here's Anil Seth outlining the 8 questions science must answer about consciousness.

Here's the transcript of Jonah Lehrer's live NewYorker webchat about the genetics of altruism.

Why working at home is more stressful than the office.

French neuroscientist Olivier Oullier laments the fact that his country has banned the commercial use of neuroimaging, but not its use in court.

Will we ever be able to decode our dreams using brain scanning technologies? Probably not, says Ed Yong.

The Office for National Statistics has published the initial results from its well-being survey of the UK   (pdf).

"Dinner table neuropsychology": How neuropsychology terms and knowledge are filtering down into everyday conversations and understandings.

Teller of the Penn and Teller double-act explains how magicians manipulate the human mind.

The NeuroSkeptic blog reports on an important study that used real objects in a brain scanner and found different results compared with the traditional method of presenting participants with pictures.

Brain training games as a treatment for schizophrenia.

Worth a look, new book: The Aha Moment by the chemist David Jones. His personal take on the creative process.

Childline have launched an online therapeutic game for kids called "Sky's the limit"; designed to take their mind off sad things.

One for the diary: Social psychologist Steve Reicher will be talking at LSE on March 14 about last year's English riots.

The latest Neuropod podcast (the 50th) is now online and includes some neuro myth busting.

On a related note, the human brain may have several billion fewer neurons than previously thought (but the study does suffer from a small, all-male sample).

Last up, here's a video tour of the brain regions involved in recognising and processing other people's moods, courtesy of Scientific American Mind.

That's all - have a super duper weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Introducing "enclothed cognition" - how what we wear affects how we think

Whether donning a suit for an interview or a sexy outfit for a date, it's obvious that most of us are well aware of the power of clothing to affect how other people perceive us. But what about the power of our clothes to affect our own thoughts?

Relevant to this question is the growing "embodied cognition" literature showing that the position and state of our bodies can affect our thoughts - for example, cleaning their hands makes people feel morally purer. In a new study Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky propose that clothes can have similar effects on our thoughts - a phenomenon they call "enclothed cognition". In contrast to embodied cognition effects which are fairly direct, the researchers think enclothed cognition effects will depend on two conditions - first, the symbolic meaning of the clothing and second, the actual wearing of the clothes.

To test this idea, the researchers focused on the power of white coats, synonymous with scientists and their attention to detail. In an initial study, 58 students took part in a test of their powers of selective attention known as the Stroop Test (on critical trials, the ink colour of a word must be named whilst ignoring the colour meaning of the word, e.g. RED written in blue ink). Half the students performed the task in a scientist's white lab coat (they were told that this was to be consistent with previous participants who'd taken part during building work and worn the coat for protection). The other students just wore their own clothes. The key finding - students in the lab coats made half as many errors on the critical trials of the Stroop Test.

The researchers next wanted to test their proposal that enclothed cognition effects depend on the symbolic meaning of clothes and actually wearing them. For these studies, the participants completed sustained attention tests that involved spotting differences between two similar images. Participants who donned a lab coat performed significantly better than others who merely saw a lab coat on the desk (thus suggesting the enclothed effect is more powerful than mere priming) or others who wore the same kind of coat but were told it belonged to a painter.

Is the enclothed effect about some kind of identification with the clothing? It seems it is more than that. For a final study, participants who wore a lab coat performed better on the sustained attention task than those who wore no coat but wrote an essay about how they identified with a lab coat. In turn, those who wrote the essay performed better than participants who wore a painter's coat.

"Clothes can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioural consequences for their wearers," the researchers said. Future research, they suggested, could examine the effects of other types of clothing: might the robe of a priest make us more moral? Would a firefighter's suit make us more brave? "Although the saying goes that clothes do not make the man," the researchers concluded, "our results suggest they do hold a strange power over their wearers."

As well as building on the embodied cognition literature, these new findings also chime with recent "positive contagion" research showing that amateur golfers' performance improved, and their perception of the hole changed, when they thought they were playing with a putter that belonged to a professional.

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Adam, H., and Galinsky, A. (2012). Enclothed Cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008 (thanks to Marc Brysbaert for the tip-off). 

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling hungry? Better let your subconscious make the decisions

For optimal decision making, some studies have suggested it's best not to think too hard, that it's advantageous to let your subconscious do the creative heavy lifting. However, other studies have failed to find that unconscious thought leads to superior decisions. To begin solving this contradiction, Maarten Bos and his team have investigated one factor that could make a difference to the effectiveness of unconscious thought - a person's sugar levels. Their rationale is that conscious thought may require high levels of sugar, whereas unconscious thought might be able to operate effectively on low energy.

One hundred and fifty-six students (35 men) abstained from food and drink (except water) for three hours prior to the study. On arrival half of them enjoyed a can of the sugary drink 7-up. The others had a sweet tasting, sugar-free drink. To allow the sugar to reach the brains of those who had 7-up, all the students then watched a nine-minute wildlife film.

Next the students were presented with details about either four cars or four jobs. The items differed on 12 key aspects, which made them either more or less appealing. Whether viewing cars or jobs, there was always one optimal choice that ticked 75 per cent of the boxes; two choices that ticked half the boxes; and one choice that ticked just 25 per cent of the choices.

Finally, half the participants in each drink group then spent four minutes thinking about the jobs or cars before rating the four options in terms of preference - this was the conscious thought condition. The other half of the participants watched a second wildlife film for the same duration of time (to prevent conscious thought about the cars or jobs) before rating the various options - this was the unconscious thought condition.

For the participants with low sugar, their ratings were more astute if they were in the unconscious thought condition, distracted by the second nature film. By contrast, the participants who'd had the benefit of the sugar hit showed more astute ratings if they were in the conscious thought condition and had had the chance to think deliberately for four minutes. "We found that when we have enough energy, conscious deliberation enables us to make good decisions," the researchers said. "The unconscious on the other hand seems to operate fine with low energy."

The study has some shortcomings as the researchers acknowledged. For example, the decision-making was artificial - the participants weren't really choosing a car or job; they were merely rating the various choices in a contrived task. Another thing is that it's far from certain that the participants who watched the second nature film weren't thinking about the cars or jobs at the same time. Nonetheless, the researchers concluded: "Our data show that when we are low on energy we can employ another decision strategy than thinking consciously: we can trust our unconscious."

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Bos, M., Dijksterhuis, A., and van Baaren, R. (2012). Food for Thought? Trust Your Unconscious When Energy Is Low. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics DOI: 10.1037/a0027388

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

What do kids know about wisdom?

A wise person once said that intelligence is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put them in fruit salad. You might have a different idea about what constitutes wisdom. When adults are asked what wisdom is, their answers tend to fall into five recurring categories: a cognitive component based around intelligence; insight (the ability to find original solutions); a reflective attitude; concern for others; and real-world problem-solving skills.

But before now, no-one has investigated what children understand by wisdom and how this changes as they get older. Judith Glück and her colleagues have surveyed 461 children (aged six to ten years) at two schools in rural Austria. Ideas about wisdom are obviously prone to cultural variation, but these new findings provide us with some useful initial clues as to how children think about this slippery concept.

The children were asked a mixture of closed and open-ended questions. For example, they were asked to write a few lines on what a wise person is like and they also read a list of 23 adjectives, indicating which ones applied to a typical wise person.

Overall, just over 70 per cent of the kids said they knew the term "wisdom", rising from 43 per cent of the youngest to 92 per cent of the oldest year group. The majority of the children said they'd encountered the term in books, in conversations at home and in TV shows or films.

In contrast to adults, these children tended to focus mostly on the outward aspects of wisdom - especially cleverness (fluid intelligence, rather than concrete knowledge), and concern for others. There was an association with age here - all the children tended to mention the social aspect of wisdom, but a far greater proportion of the older than younger children mentioned the intelligent aspect. Older children were also more likely to link wisdom with older-age. Unfortunately the paper provides few examples of the kind of open-ended answers given by the children, despite the teasing title of the article.

More internal or abstract aspects of wisdom were apparently rarely mentioned by the children, including: having a reflective attitude, solving problems with original insight; having real-world problem-solving skills; and perspective taking. "Presumably such aspects are not yet part of the spontaneous 'psychological repertoire' of children at this age," the researchers said.

Unsurprisingly, given that it prompted them, the children's understanding of wisdom was more precocious when using the adjective list, with the children tending to tick items like "pensive" and "sensitive", as well as terms like "friendly" and "clever", which they'd mentioned in their open-ended answers.

Asked to name a wise person, the children were extremely generous, most often mentioning a grand-parent or a parent. Religious figures or figures from the media were rarely mentioned. The children showed a gender bias in their nominations, with boys being more likely to name male figures and girls being more likely to name females. Boys were also more likely to identify wise people as "astute" and girls to identify them as "beautiful" - perhaps a consequence of gender-stereotypes in the kind of media they were exposed to.

"We conclude from our findings that a basic understanding of the concept of wisdom is developed in and even before the elementary school years," the researchers said. "However, especially the more complex aspects of the concept get much more differentiated in subsequent development."

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Glück, J., Bischof, B., and Siebenhüner, L. (2012). “Knows what is good and bad”, “Can teach you things”, “Does lots of crosswords”: Children's knowledge about wisdom. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-18 DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2011.631376

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.