Link feast

Tuck into 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

The latest issue of The Psychologist magazine, with a special focus on traffic and transport psychology, has been made entirely open access - get PDFs of all the articles, or read it via the Issuu web platform.

The Association for Psychological Science has posted a video of the opening address at their Chicago convention this year - titled Psychological Science is Important. If you're about to start studying psychology, this talk by Alan Kraut will have you raring to go.

The Moral Worldview of Babies - Sam McNerney looks at a recent challenge to the idea that babies have an innate preference for altruistic characters.

Don't delay! There are 4 days left to listen to the BBC Radio Four documentary on procrastination - can science find a cure?

A US judge has thrown out fMRI-based lie-detection evidence in a murder trial, ruling it as inadmissible. A good move I reckon. Recent research suggests the technology isn't reliable yet, that it's easy to cheat, and that jurors are seduced by the tech-wow factor.

Vaughan Bell's description of the life of anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff reads like something out of a Hollywood film.

There are 5 days left to watch the BBC Four Growing Children documentary on Dyslexia, presented by psychologist Laverne Antrobus.

In his review for the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard (author of The Brain is Wider Than the Sky) described James Flynn's book Are We Getting Smarter? as the "one of the most extraordinary science books I have ever read."

The truth about the effect of pregnancy on women's brains: "Pregnesia is the price paid for what ultimately is a maternal neuro-upgrade".

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has published an open letter outlining its reaction to the recent scandals in social psychology. Dan Simons is less than impressed.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How happiness campaigns could end up making us sadder

Founded in 2010, the Action for Happiness movement states: "What we want for our society is as much happiness as is possible and, above all, as little misery". These aims are well-intentioned, but a new study shows public campaigns like this could have an ironic effect, actually making sad people feel sadder (update: please see the comments below where the Director of Action for Happiness, Mark Williamson, gives his response to this study).

Brock Bastian and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of Australian and Japanese students and found that those people who believed more strongly that society expects us to try to be happy, also tended to evaluate their own negative emotions more negatively. In other words, believing that there's a cultural expectation to strive for happiness is associated with feeling sad about being sad. In turn, people who felt this societal expectation more keenly, also reported experiencing negative emotions more often and having poorer wellbeing (a fall-out that was mediated by these participants being more critical of their own negative emotions). Comparing across cultures, the overall pattern of results was present but weaker in Japan, where negative emotions are generally better tolerated.

These initial findings provided only a snapshot. To get a better sense of the causality of societal expectations, Bastian and his team conducted two further studies in which Australian participants were first primed with carefully prepared newspaper articles, and then prompted to feel negative emotion by reminiscing in writing about a negative event from their lives.

Reading a news article about research that claimed sadness is infectious or that sad people are disliked led participants to experience more negative emotion after they'd reminisced about a bad event in their past. It's as if a reminder of society's intolerance to negative emotion aggravated participants' own negative feelings. By contrast, reading an article that said sad people are accepted and liked, led participants to experience less negative emotion after the reminiscence exercise.

Results from the control condition in this study were particularly revealing. In this case participants were primed with a mundane article about fertiliser. They experienced just as much negative emotion after the reminiscence exercise as participants who'd read the article about sad people being disliked. This suggests the reminder about society's intolerance of negative emotions was unnecessary for aggravating the experience of sadness. "Social pressures appear to be highly normative and particularly so within Western cultures," the researchers said.

Bastian and his colleagues said their findings show how our beliefs about society's intolerance of negative emotions has downstream effects, changing how we experience our own emotions, "ironically aggravating those same emotions that are deemed to be socially undesirable or unacceptable."

"Attempts to promote the value of feeling good over the value of feeling bad by emphasising social norms for these emotions may therefore have the effect of making people feel bad more often," the researchers concluded.

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Bastian B, Kuppens P, Hornsey MJ, Park J, Koval P, and Uchida Y (2012). Feeling bad about being sad: the role of social expectancies in amplifying negative mood. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 12 (1), 69-80 PMID: 21787076

-Further reading- Other people may experience more misery than you realise.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

If your plane gets lost you'd better hope there's an orienteer on board

If you're planning on flying any time soon, you may want to look away now. A new study reports that trainee air pilots, including those with considerable experience, fell prey to an elementary mistake in a basic navigation task. Were they to commit this error whilst flying, it would endanger the plane. Indeed, such a scenario has unfolded in real-life incidents.

The task that Andrew Gilbey and Stephen Hill presented to dozens of pilots (some of whom had 160 hours flight experience) required that they choose which of three geographical features to focus on (e.g. a picnic area, bush covered hills, or an unmade road) as a way of determining their location. They were to imagine that they were lost either on a motorbike, in a plane, or on a yacht and, with time short, they needed to use one of these three geographical features to check whether they really were where they thought they were (marked as a "best guess" circle on a map), or if they were in fact located elsewhere nearby.

Over 82 per cent of the time, the pilots chose to focus on one of the three available geographical features that was present both in the best-guess location and elsewhere nearby. In other words, they sought confirmatory evidence to support where they thought they were located. They almost entirely failed to focus on the one geographical feature that was not present in the best-guess location (but was located elsewhere). That is, by failing to seek disconfirmatory evidence, they fell victim to the confirmation bias and missed the best strategy in this situation.

"It appears that having extensive experience with map reading and flight navigation does not help in and of itself [to prevent confirmation bias in lost procedures]," the researchers said.

In other experiments, a group of psychology undergrads consistently made the same error as the pilots, even though they'd just had a lecture on the confirmation bias. A short presentation on confirmation bias also failed to improve the navigation performance of another group of trainee pilots (average flight experience 55 hours). Gilbey and Hill speculated that maybe the presentation failed because it was passive and didn't require the pilots to practice seeking disconfirmatory evidence.

Intriguingly, a group of 21 orienteers performed much better at the task, choosing the disconfirmatory evidence 67 per cent of the time. Gilbey and Hill said this result could help inform future training programmes for pilots - "Although confirmation bias has been the focus of a great deal of research, the current findings suggest that further applied research, particularly in the area of applied aviation, may further improve understanding of this pervasive phenomenon."

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A Gilbey, & S Hill (2012). Confirmation bias in general aviation lost procedures Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2860

-Further reading- People don't follow their own directions when walking from A to B.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous

Gaga is unusual in sounding uptempo yet fresh

Have you heard older generations lamenting the way pop songs don't sound like they used to? There's a sense that the hits from yesteryear had an innocence and feel-good quality that's missing from today's pop offerings. Now Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous.

The researchers analysed the tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor) of the most popular 1,010 pop songs identified using year-end lists published by Billboard magazine in the USA from 1965 to 2009. Tempo was determined using the beats per minute of a song, and where this was ambiguous the researchers used the rate at which you'd clap along. The mode of the song was identified from its tonic chord - the three notes played together at the outset, in either minor or major. Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that's fast in minor, or vice versa.

Schellenberg and von Scheve found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There's also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs. The findings complement an analysis of pop lyrics from 1980-2007, published last year, that found a drop over time in references to social interactions and positive emotions, but an increase in angry and anti-social words.

Why has pop music changed like this? Schellenberg and von Scheve can only speculate. They point to the rise of consumerism and individualism, which produces a demand for more choice; increasing cultural and societal ambiguity (such as the erosion of traditional gender roles); as well as the desire among pop consumers to demonstrate distinctiveness and sophistication in their taste.

Unambiguously happy songs like Abba's Waterloo sound, to today's ears, "naive and slightly juvenile", the researchers noted. And whilst modern songs in a similar style, such as Aqua's Barbie Girl, can still enjoy huge commercial success, they're usually seen as a guilty pleasure and savaged by critics.

Schellenberg and von Scheve think emotional ambiguity in a song is a way for modern acts to convey their seriousness and complexity. Lady Gaga is highlighted as rare in her ability to produce up-tempo major-mode recordings, such as Born This Way, that "sound fresh while recalling or quoting popular music from an earlier time."

Other findings to emerge from the analysis were a general lengthening of songs, and a greater prevalence of female acts."Our study sheds light on links between long-term cultural change on a macro social scale and emotional expression, perception, and responding, at least in relation to music," the researchers concluded. "As such the findings improve our understanding of the individual in relation to society, and how culture is shaped by the emotional needs and preferences of individuals."
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  E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Christian von Scheve (2012). Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts DOI: 10.1037/a0028024

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

Ten of the best psychology links from the past fortnight:

"The digital traces left by life in the modern world are transforming social science" Fascinating feature from Nature magazine.

Developmental neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop gave a lecture recently in which she championed behavioural studies and warned against the allure of neuroscience technologies - Neurobonkers has a summary and a link to a video of the talk. (Prof Bishop has also posted a written version of her talk online. On a related note, from the APS Observer: "Four surefire ways to spot the biobunk that underlies pseudo neuroscience.")

A recent episode of James May's Things You Need To Know programme on BBC Two was focused on the brain and is now available on iPlayer.

There are three days left to hear psychologist Tanya Byron's BBC Radio 4 show about restorative justice (in which victims come face to face with perpetrators).

A modern-day Phineas Gage-type incident.

How the ad-libbing left hemisphere makes sense of the world by telling stories. A great article from Michael Gazzaniga in Discover magazine.

It's far easier to prove you're insane than to prove you're insane - thought-provoking TED talk from Jon Ronson (author of The Psychopath Test).

How to be a better procrastinator.

How forensic psychologists catch out people who fake mental illness.

The unexpected beauty of abandoned psychiatric wards.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Targets look bigger after a shot that felt good

Bigger targets are easier to hit, obviously. But did you know this relationship works backwards? That is, targets that we consider hittable look bigger as a result. The finding is consistent with James Gibson's Theory of Affordances, whereby the ways we can use our bodies to interact with the environment affects our perception of that environment.

Yang Lee at Gyeongsang National University in South Korea, and his colleagues, began their study by asking nine experienced archers to fire at targets of five different sizes located 50 meters away. After they released each arrow, the participants were instructed to turn their heads so that they couldn't see the path of their shot. Upon each arrow hitting home, a screen was also pulled across to prevent the archers from seeing how successful they'd been.

After each shot, the archers chose which of 18 miniature targets on a card most closely matched the size of the target they'd just fired at. The size of the miniatures went from 10mm diameter to 27mm, designed to represent the apparent size of the real target, as seen from a 50m distance.

Although they couldn't see the success of the shots they'd fired, the archers' judgements of the size of the targets was related to the accuracy of their shots. In fact, their size judgments were more strongly related to their accuracy than they were to the actual size of the targets. Specifically, targets were perceived as bigger after a more accurate shot, even though the archers had no access to objective feedback about their performance.

Lee and his colleagues think that archers are able to tell how hittable a shot is based on bodily feedback about their form and chances of success. If a target is hittable then it is adaptive (i.e. useful in an evolutionary sense) that it should be perceived as larger. To test this idea, a second study involved 20 novices preparing to shoot arrows at targets located 50m away. In this study, the participants didn't actually fire the arrows. After each drawing of an arrow, they stopped and estimated the size of the distant target. The crucial twist was that some arrows were drawn back with the aid of a stabilising tripod and some weren't. The aim of the stabiliser was to provoke the sense in the archers, based on bodily feedback, that they had a better chance of hitting the target. In turn this was expected to affect their perception of the targets. That's exactly what was found - targets were perceived to be larger after they'd been viewed in the context of a stabilised draw back.

These intriguing new findings add to a growing literature linking performance with size estimations - for example, it's also been shown that golf putters perceive holes as bigger after a successful putt.

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Lee Y, Lee S, Carello C, & Turvey MT (2012). An Archer's Perceived Form Scales the "Hitableness" of Archery Targets. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance PMID: 22731994

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The psychology behind the appeal of original artwork

Why do we place such value on original works of art? Consider The Disciples at Emmaus - believed to be an original Vermeer, it was held in high esteem and sold in 1937 for £1.8 million. Later exposed as a piece by master forger Van Meegeren, however, and its value plummeted overnight.

You could say that we covet originals because of the value that wider society places on them. But that just pushes the question back - why does anyone value originals in the first place? And why with art so much more than other manufactured items?

In a new study, George Newman and Paul Bloom have tested at least two possible explanations - one is that we value original art work because of the originality of the creative performance that led to it; the other is that we feel an original piece is somehow infused with the unique essence of the artist, much like we cherish mundane items that once belonged to a rock star or other celebrity.

In one of Newman and Bloom's five experiments, 180 participants were asked to estimate the value of two paintings they hadn't seen before, both depicting the same scene (one was Son of a Covered Bridge, the other was A Covered Bridge, both by Jim Rilko). Half the participants were told that two different artists had painted the same scene by coincidence. The other participants were told that one artist had produced one of the paintings, and that another artist had seen it and decided to make a copy. All participants were told that there was only one of each painting in existence.

Participants who thought that two paintings had been produced of the same scene by coincidence tended to rate them as having a similar value. By contrast, participants who thought one painting was a copy of the other, tended to value that second painting especially low, and to value the first version of the scene especially high. This shows how we appreciate the originality of the creative performance behind a painting.

In the final experiment, 256 participants read about either a sculptor or a craftsman and their work creating either a bronze sculpture or a piece of furniture, respectively. For the participants who read about the sculptor, those who heard that the process was very hands-on tended to rate the value of the sculpture much more highly than those who read that the creative process was hands-off (involving machinery). By contrast, this distinction made far less difference to the valuations made by the participants who read about the craftsman's work.

In other words, participants placed more value on the bronze sculpture when they thought the artist had touched it more with his own hands, almost as though infusing it with his essence. This effect was enhanced further for participants who read a version of the vignette in which the sculptor made just one copy of his sculpture.

So when we cherish an original piece of art, it seems we do so partly because we value, not just the end product, but the originality of the performance that created it. Moreover, we believe that the work has a special quality about it because it came from the very hand of a particular artist. Copies and forgeries, no matter how close to the original, fall down on both these counts.

"We hope that the research here will engender interest on the broad topic of art within psychology," the researchers said, "as well as more specific questions regarding the role of authenticity in judgments of value."

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Newman GE, & Bloom P (2012). Art and authenticity: The importance of originals in judgments of value. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 141 (3), 558-69 PMID: 22082113

-Further reading- A brain-imaging paper published last year reported that the same works of art triggered different brain activity depending on whether they were labelled as authentic or as copies.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.