BPS Research Digest

Psychology X-factor

2009-11-20T09:14:00.003Z

Last time around it was a tie. You voted joint first: the study on increasing altruism in toddlers and the study showing that CCTV cameras don't reassure, they frighten.

Which was your favourite from our last seven reports:

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Want to predict a footie result? Don't even think about it

2009-11-19T09:27:00.001Z

Imagine you've just paid an expert good money for their verdict and they say to you: "Can you hang on a couple of minutes whilst I don't think about this". You'd be forgiven for thinking they've gone silly. They may have. But another possibility is that you've chosen a shrewd expert who's totally up-to-speed with the latest decision-making research: Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have just shown that people with expertise in football are better at predicting match outcomes when they spend time not consciously thinking about their predictions.

In an initial experiment, 352 Dutch undergrads were divided into football experts and non-experts, based on their self-ratings, and they were all asked to make predictions (home or away win, or draw) about four forthcoming football matches in the top Dutch league - the Eredivisie. The students were shown the four pairs of competing teams for twenty seconds, and then one third of them were asked to make immediate predictions; one third were asked to think consciously for two minutes before making their predictions; and a final third engaged in a distracting, numerical memory task for two minutes before making their predictions.

For the non-experts, it didn't make any difference to their success whether or not they were able to spend time considering their predictions - they were correct between forty and fifty per cent of the time regardless. By contrast, the experts' predictions were significantly more accurate when they were distracted for two minutes, compared with when they made an instant or a considered prediction (approx 60 vs. 50 per cent accuracy). In other words, the experts were most accurate when they spent time not consciously thinking about the problem at hand.

This may seem bizarre but it's entirely consistent with Dijksterhuis's Unconscious Thought Theory and with the folk wisdom that says it's a good idea to sleep on a problem. According to Dijksterhuis's theory, the subconscious is sometimes less prone to the biases that afflict the conscious mind, thus ensuring that an expert gives due weight to the most important factors.

This was borne out in a second experiment, much like the first, in which students predicted the outcomes of World Cup football matches. Again, distracted experts made the most accurate predictions. This time, however, the researchers also asked participants to estimate the teams' world rankings - apparently this is the most reliable predictor for the outcomes of World Cup matches. For experts who spent time consciously considering their match predictions, there was no correlation between their knowledge of team rankings and their prediction accuracy. By contrast, for the experts who spent time not thinking about their predictions, there was a correlation between their ranking knowledge and predictive accuracy. Not consciously thinking about the problem at hand seemed to ensure that experts paid due attention to the most important factor affecting match outcomes.

The researchers warned that subconscious thought is not always superior to conscious thought. But they concluded: "Our results mean that unconscious thought may well be helpful in more situations than some people currently think."
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Dijksterhuis A, Bos MW, van der Leij A, & van Baaren RB (2009). Predicting Soccer Matches After Unconscious and Conscious Thought as a Function of Expertise. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID: 19818044

How infants affect how much their carers engage with them

2009-11-18T10:27:00.002Z

Young children benefit socially and intellectually the more their carers engage and respond to them. Recognising this, we can train nursery staff to be as responsive to the children in their care as possible. But a new study by Claire Vallotton raises an interesting and under-examined issue - what if there's something about some infants that leads their carers to engage with them more, thus giving them an advantage over their peers?

Vallotton filmed interactions between 18 student caregivers and 10 infants (aged between 4 and 19 months) at the Infant and Toddler programme at the UC Davis child development lab. Carers working here were taught "baby signing" - this is a gesture-based system for pre-verbal infants and adults to communicate with each other. For example, pointing the hands inwards, towards the mid-line, with fingers touching, is the sign for "more".

The student carers interacted with their designated child one-on-one, and importantly for this research, they occasionally switched which child was under their care, thus allowing Vallotton to see if some children consistently provoked more engagement from different carers.

There were some general effects: boys and older children provoked more attentiveness from their carers. But Vallotton's more novel finding was that infants who responded more to their carers' signs, either with signs of their own or with conventional gestures such as pointing or waving, tended to provoke more engagement and responsiveness from their carers.

This carer responsiveness was measured with a scale containing items such as "follows child's gaze" and "is at the child's physical level". Crucially, it was not an infant's total amount, or variety, of signing or gesturing that was related to more carer attentiveness. It was specifically an infant's amount of gestural response to the carer's own attempts at communication. In other words, the carers engaged a lot more with babies and toddlers who responded to them. This may sound obvious but it suggests the carers were biased, probably subconsciously. They were effectively making more effort with the infants who interacted with them more.

Obviously a major factor limiting the generalisability of this research is the use of baby-signing in this care group. However, Vallotton thinks her findings probably do apply more generally. "Caregivers [were] more responsive to infants who use more gestures, regardless of whether those gestures were conventional pointing or infant signs," she said. And the take-home message, she concluded, is that "infants' communicative behaviours affect caregiver responsiveness ... Increasing infants' use of gestures and signs may be a means to enhance responsiveness in caregiver-child interaction, a possibility that should be tested experimentally."
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Vallotton, C. (2009). Do infants influence their quality of care? Infants’ communicative gestures predict caregivers’ responsiveness Infant Behavior and Development, 32 (4), 351-365 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.06.001

The Special Issue Spotter

2009-11-17T11:34:00.003Z

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

The biological basis of business (Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes).

The neural basis of timing and anticipatory behaviours (European Journal of Neuroscience).

Psychological functioning of international missionaries (Mental Health, Religion and Culture).

Reinforcement learning and higher cognition (Cognition).

New methodologies for intervention and outcome measurement (Neuropsychological Rehabilitation).

Dissemination and implementation of cognitive behavioural therapy (Behavioural Research and Therapy).

Testosterone-status mismatch in a group is linked with reduced collective confidence

2009-11-16T10:24:00.002Z

Men and women with more testosterone like to be in charge. Indeed, they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave. Similarly, people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority. An intriguing new study has built on these earlier findings, showing a mismatch between testosterone-level and status is associated with group functioning. Groups made up of people whose status in the group doesn't match their testosterone level tend to have less collective confidence (or "collective efficacy" in the psychological jargon). This could be important given that prior investigations have shown that groups with higher collective efficacy perform better.

Michael Zyphur and colleagues assigned 92 groups of between 4 and 7 undergrads to an on-going task that involved meeting twice a week for 12 weeks, and included creating a professional management-training video. Six weeks into the project the researchers measured the participants' testosterone levels via saliva samples. They also asked all members in each group to vote on each others' status. Then six weeks after that, at the end of the project, the researchers measured each group's collective efficacy by summing members' confidence in their group's ability to succeed.

The key finding was that groups made up of members whose status was out of synch with their testosterone level tended to have the lowest collective efficacy. The researchers think that testosterone-status mismatch within a group probably has a detrimental effect on that group's collective confidence. However, another possibility, which they acknowledge, is that a lack of group confidence leads to a mismatch between testosterone levels and status among group members.

Co-author Jayanth Narayanan told the Digest that his team need to replicate their finding in a work setting. "Perhaps workplace settings might enhance these effects. Perhaps some types of work environments might attenuate these effects. These are open questions at this stage," he said.
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Zyphur, M., Narayanan, J., Koh, G., & Koh, D. (2009). Testosterone–status mismatch lowers collective efficacy in groups: Evidence from a slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110 (2), 70-79 DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.05.004

Patients with empathic, attentive doctors recover more quickly from the common cold

2009-11-13T09:35:00.000Z

The amount of empathy and attentiveness shown by doctors to their patients really does matter. David Rakel and colleagues have found that patients who rate their doctor as highly empathic recover more quickly from a cold. Their illness is shortened by about a day - the same effect shown by the most promising anti-viral drugs. But a doctor's empathy, unlike the anti-viral, doesn't trigger nausea and diarrhoea.

Three hundred and fifty participants were asked to contact the researchers as soon as they noticed the first sign of a cold, at which point they were invited in for a consultation with a doctor. The doctors had received special training from actors in how to come across as sympathetic and understanding and for half the participants they turned on the charm, whereas they gave others a less warm, standard consultation.

The research programme is ongoing and which participants received which kind of consultation is still under-wraps so as not to bias future results (to keep the trial "blind" in the official jargon). However, all the participants rated their doctors empathy and attentiveness and it's from these scores that the key finding emerged.

The 84 participants who gave their doctors a perfect score for empathy and attentiveness recovered from their colds about a day earlier on average; showed a trend towards less severe symptoms; and exhibited double the rise in a marker for immune system activity (biomarker IL-8), as sampled from their noses.

Rather curiously, there was no gradual, "dose-response" effect of doctors' empathy on the participants' recovery. It was only those participants who gave their doctors a perfect empathy score who showed improved recovery. "This may suggest that the perception of empathy by patients may be more of an 'on or off' phenomenon than a graduated response," the researchers said. "We either feel empathy or we don't."

Of course, one possible explanation for the results is that there is something distinct about people who give their doctors perfect empathy ratings, and it's this key trait that's the true cause of their speedier recovery. However, the researchers checked, and the link between a perfect empathy score and recovery still held even after controlling for the effects of participants' age, race, education, stress, optimism, self-reported poorliness and quality of life.

"This finding is in need of replication," the researchers concluded. "Until then, including empathy in the clinical encounter has little potential for harm and has positive influences that extend beyond the medical consultation."
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Rakel DP, Hoeft TJ, Barrett BP, Chewning BA, Craig BM, & Niu M (2009). Practitioner empathy and the duration of the common cold. Family medicine, 41 (7), 494-501 PMID: 19582635

Brands leave their mark on children's brains

2009-11-12T12:05:00.005Z

The idea may be "unpalatable", but companies seeking an edge over their rivals should ensure that children are exposed to their brands as early in life as possible. That's according to Andrew Ellis and colleagues, whose new research shows that the classic "age-of-acquisition" effect in psychology applies to brand names as much as it does to everyday words.

Ellis's team found that student participants were quicker to recognise brand names they had encountered from birth. This was demonstrated by presenting students with a range of real and fictional brand names and asking them to indicate as quickly as possible whether a brand was real. If a brand had been experienced from birth, the students were quicker to recognise it as real than if it had been encountered from age five and up. A second experiment showed that students were also quicker at accessing information about early encountered brands compared with late-encountered brands, as indicated by the speed with which they said a product was or was not made by a given brand.

These findings resemble classic "age-of-acquisition" effects, in which people are more proficient at processing words they encountered earlier in life. Research has shown that this effect is not explainable purely in terms of greater cumulative exposure to early encountered words. One alternative proposal is that words (and presumably brands too) encountered early in life shape the maturing brain in such a way that a life-long advantage is maintained for processing those early words.

Ellis's team's final experiment was perhaps the most striking. In this case, participants aged between 50 and 83 years were quicker to recognise early brands over newer, current brands, even if the early brands were long since defunct.

Combined with prior research showing that people generally feel more favourable towards words and pictures that they find easier to process - a phenomenon called the "fluency effect" - Ellis and his colleagues said their findings have serious implications for brand success. "The evidence suggests that mere exposure to brands in childhood will make for more fluent recognition of those brand names in adulthood that will persist through to old age," they said.
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Ellis, A., Holmes, S., & Wright, R. (2009). Age of acquisition and the recognition of brand names: On the importance of being early. Journal of Consumer Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jcps.2009.08.001

Extras

2009-11-12T10:15:00.004Z

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

The bright side of being blue: "The analytical rumination hypothesis proposes that depression is an evolved response to complex problems, whose function is to minimize disruption and sustain analysis of those problems by (a) giving the triggering problem prioritized access to processing resources, (b) reducing the desire to engage in distracting activities (anhedonia), and (c) producing psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to distracting stimuli."

Foreign accent syndrome with a psychological cause?

Nature special on technological advances in neuroscience.

Placebo reduced sadness just as much as alcohol.

Exploring the extent of the deficits associated with congenital amusia (a life-long disorder of music processing).

Vicarious sunk-cost fallacy - or why I keep investing in your failed project.

Female sexual orientation discerned from just 40ms glimpse of the face.

Pregnancy massage reduces prematurity, low birthweight and postpartum depression.

Alternatives to randomised experiments.

Are referees more lenient towards female handball players?

Ten statisticians every psychologist should know about

2009-11-10T17:05:00.003Z

As psychology students past and present will be only too aware, statistics are a key part of every psychology undergrad course and they also appear in nearly every published journal article. And yet have we ever stopped to recognise the statisticians who have brought us these wonderful mathematical tools? As psychologist Daniel Wright puts it: "Statistical techniques are often taught as if they were brought down from some statistical mount only to magically appear in [the software package] SPSS."

To help address this oversight, Wright has compiled a list of ten statisticians he thinks every psychologist should know about. The list is strict in the sense that it only includes statisticians, whilst omitting psychologists, such as Jacob Cohen and Lee Cronbach, who have made significant contributions to statistical science in psychology.

Wright divides his list in three, beginning with three founding fathers of modern statistics. First up is Karl Pearson (pictured), best known to psychologists for the Pearson Correlation and Pearson's chi-square test. He was a socialist who turned down a knighthood in 1935. His first momentous achievement was his 1932 book The Grammar of Science and he also founded the world's first university statistics department at UCL in 1911.

Ronald Fisher was the author of Statistical Methods for Research Workers, which Wright describes as "one of the most important books of science." Fisher was also instrumental in the development of p values in null hypothesis significance testing.

Together with Pearson's son, Egon, Jerzy Neyman produced the framework of null and alternative hypothesis testing that dominates stats to this day. He also created the notion of confidence intervals. Neyman and Fisher were big critics of each other's theories. After a brief spell at UCL with Fisher, Neyman moved later to Berkeley where he set up the stats department - now one of the top such departments in the world.

Wright also lists three of his statistical heroes: John Tukey of post-hoc test fame, who made major contributions in robust methods and graphing (and who coined the terms ANOVA, software and bit); Donald Rubin who has conducted influential work on effect sizes and meta-analyses; and Brad Efron who developed the computer-intensive bootstrap resampling technique.

Wright devotes the last section of his list to four statisticians who have gifted psychology particular statistical techniques: David Cox and the Box-Cox transformation; Leo Goodman and categorical data analysis; John Nelder and the Generalised Linear Model; and Robert Tibshirani and the lasso data reduction technique.

"The list is meant to introduce some of the main statistical pioneers and their important achievements in psychology," Wright concludes. "It is hoped learning about the people behind the statistical procedures will make the procedures seem more humane than many psychologists perceive them to be."

What do you think of Wright's list? Is there anyone he's overlooked?
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Daniel B Wright (2009). Ten Statisticians and Their Impacts for Psychologists. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4 (6), 587-597. [Draft pdf via author website].

Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity

2009-11-08T18:20:00.002Z

There have been prior clues that creativity benefits from ample cross-talk between the brain hemispheres. For example, patients who've had a commissurotomy - the severing of the thick bundle of nerve fibres that joins the two hemispheres - show deficits on creative tasks. Now Elizabeth Shobe and colleagues have provided the first evidence that creativity is boosted by an intervention designed to increase hemispheric cross-talk.

Shobe's team tested 62 participants on a version of the "Alternative Uses Test", a divergent thinking challenge that involves dreaming up unconventional uses for everyday objects such as bricks and newspapers.

An important factor that the researchers took note of was the participants' handedness. Prior research has suggested that people who have one hand that is particularly dominant, so-called "strong-handers", have less cross-talk between their brain hemispheres compared with people who are more ambidextrous or "mixed handed".

After an initial attempt at the creativity task, half the participants spent thirty seconds shifting their eyes horizontally back and forth. This exercise is thought to help increase inter-hemispheric communication. The remaining participants acted as controls and just stared straight ahead for 30 seconds.

The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who'd performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use. Staring straight ahead, by contrast, had no effect on creativity.

Another finding was that, overall, the mixed-handed participants performed better on the creativity task than the strong-handers, thus providing further evidence for a link between inter-hemispheric interaction, which mixed-handers have more of, and creativity. But it also turned out that mixed-handers didn't benefit from the horizontal eye movement task. It's as if they already have an optimum amount of hemispheric cross-talk so that the eye movements make no difference. This meant that after the strong-handers had performed the horizontal eye movements, their performance matched that of the mixed-handed participants.

The researchers also showed that, for strong-handers, the beneficial effects of the eye movement exercise lasted nine minutes for originality, but just three to six minutes in terms of coming up with more categories of use.

"Our findings may not apply to more unique populations who are characterised as 'highly creative'," the researchers said, "nor can we conclude ... that the thirty seconds bilateral eye movement task will turn an average individual into an artist, poet, scientist, philosopher, actor or sculptor. However, we certainly do propose that the ... eye movement task will result in a temporary increase in strong-hander's ability to think of creative uses for various house-hold objects."

These new findings complement research published in 2008 showing that horizontal eye movements aid memory performance for strongly-right handed people, but impair the performance of left-handers and mixed-handers.
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Shobe ER, Ross NM, & Fleck JI (2009). Influence of handedness and bilateral eye movements on creativity. Brain and cognition, 71 (3), 204-14 PMID: 19800726

Psychology X-factor

2009-11-06T10:37:00.001Z

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How to increase altruism in toddlers

2009-11-05T09:50:00.000Z

Surely one of the most charming sights is of an adult struggling to reach an object, only for a toddler to pick up that object and hand it to the adult, as research has shown they so often will. Psychologists think such ingrained altruism has evolved as a consequence of our species' dependence on group living for survival. Supporting this account, Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter have shown that subtle exposure to the sight of two apparently companionable dolls, stood side by side, is enough to increase the likelihood that an 18-month-old will help an adult pick up some dropped sticks.

Sixty 18-month-old infants were shown eight photos of household objects, such as teapots, books or shoes. Crucially, infants were divided into four groups, with each group shown one of four versions of these photos. One "affiliated" version featured in the background two dolls standing together side by side; another version featured a doll in the background on its own; the third version featured two dolls facing away from each other; and the final version merely had toy bricks in the background.

After they'd been shown these photos, another experimenter walked over to the infants and dropped a bunch of pens on route. Amazingly, the infants who'd seen the photos with the companionable dolls in the background were three times as likely as the other infants to help the experimenter by spontaneously picking up one or more sticks and handing it to the experimenter.

Further analysis showed it's not that the infants who'd seen the photos with companionable dolls were caused to be in a better mood, nor that they spent longer looking at the photos, than the other infants. Rather, according to the researchers, "the connections between affiliation to the group and prosocial behaviour are ... so fundamental that, even in infancy, a mere hint of affiliation is sufficient to increase helping."

Over and Carpenter said their finding has important implications for research - paving the way for future investigations of other non-verbal social influences on infants' behaviour - and also for real life. "Our data suggest that surprisingly subtle changes to our social environment may promote prosocial behaviour in our children."
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Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2009). Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Show Increased Helping Following Priming With Affiliation. Psychological Science, 20 (10), 1189-1193 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02419.x

CCTV cameras don't reassure, they frighten

2009-11-04T09:48:00.002Z

People are no more fearful of crossing a street with a young male skinhead in it than they are a street with a smartly dressed woman present, unless, that is, a CCTV camera is overhead. The new finding appears to undermine one of the key justifications for Britain's network of 4.2 million surveillance cameras: that they provide reassurance to the public. It seems that the sight of a CCTV camera can have the opposite effect, cueing the perception of a threat.

Dave Williams and Jobuda Ahmed presented 120 participants - shoppers in Hatfield - with pictures of a fictional town centre street scene. When the scene contained both a skinhead and a CCTV camera, the participants, aged between 18 to 70 years, reported raised concern about walking in the scene, compared with when the same scene was either empty, contained a woman with or without a CCTV camera, or a skinhead without a camera. In other words, it was specifically the combination of a skinhead and CCTV that provoked fear - neither had any effect on their own.

The presence of a CCTV camera seemed to cue participants' prejudices about skinheads, thus inducing fear. This supposition was supported when participants were asked to write a paragraph on a "day in the life of" either the male skinhead or the smartly dressed woman. When a CCTV camera was present in the scene, but not otherwise, participants wrote an account of the skinhead's day that betrayed their prejudices, for example one account stated that he had "outstayed his welcome in the cafe".

"Defending the modern urban landscape from a sense of undulating moral crisis and corresponding crime with visible technological crime deterrence measures may not always reduce fear of crime," the researchers said. "[CCTV] is partly designed to reduce fear of crime ... this study demonstrates that in certain contexts it can have the opposite effect."

CCTV cameras may not be the only form of crime-fighting paraphernalia that can backfire by cueing a sense of threat. In a North American study conducted in the late 90's John Schweitzer and colleagues found that a plethora of "Neighbourhood Watch" signs increased people's fear of crime.
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Williams, D., & Ahmed, J. (2009). The relationship between antisocial stereotypes and public CCTV systems: exploring fear of crime in the modern surveillance society. Psychology, Crime & Law, 15 (8), 743-758 DOI: 10.1080/10683160802612882

[Note: Psychology Press will be making this article temporarily free-to-access from around 6 Nov]

The Special Issue Spotter

2009-11-03T09:59:00.003Z

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

Precursors and diverse pathways to personality disorder in children and adolescents (Development and Psychopathology).

The Society for Neuroscience, forty-year anniversary retrospective (Journal of Neuroscience).

Motivational interviewing and psychotherapy (Journal of Clinical Psychology).

Environmental psychology on the move (Journal of Environmental Psychology).

Spatial working memory and imagery: From eye movements to grounded cognition (Acta Psychologica).

Individual differences in emotion components and dynamics (Cognition and Emotion).

Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific

2009-11-02T05:00:00.000Z

Earlier this year a piece of emotion research provoked a rather heated reaction in some quarters after it claimed to show that, contrary to the writings of Charles Darwin, Paul Ekman and others, facial emotional expressions are not universal after all. "Seriously, is this all that it takes to be published in Current Biology? Sheesh," was the verdict of one incredulous online commenter to Reddit (a more considered critical reaction is here). Now, with a diplomat's tact, David Matsumoto and colleagues have presented new findings showing that facial emotional expressions start out universal, but then become culturally differentiated. We're all correct, everyone wins, big smiles all round, or maybe little ones, depending on where you were brought up.

Matsumoto's team studied thousands of photographs taken of jūdōka at the Athens Olympics in 2004 just after matches had ended. The researchers were particularly interested in whether, and how quickly, competitors' altered their initial facial emotional expressions after winning or losing.

The key finding was that cultural differences emerged, with athletes from collectivist cultures, such as China, tending to mask their emotional expressions more than athletes from individualistic cultures like the UK. The research also showed that jūdōka from more wealthy, densely populated countries tended to be less concerned to mask their emotional expressions than competitors from rural, less populated countries.

"These findings demonstrate that, across time, a given individual's emotional expressions in a single context can be both universal and culture-specific," the researchers said.

Further analysis showed that cultural influences on emotional expressions tended to kick in within one to two seconds of the initial appearance of a facial emotional display. Matsumoto and his colleagues believe that the initial facial reaction is triggered automatically by subcortical brain structures, before more culturally specific modification is applied by the motor cortex. Dampening down an emotional expression appeared to take less time than completely masking an initial emotional display with another expression, consistent with the idea that masking requires more neurocognitive resources.

"These findings open the door to future research and theory on the temporal dynamics of culturally moderated facial expressions," the researchers said.
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Matsumoto D, Willingham B, & Olide A (2009). Sequential dynamics of culturally moderated facial expressions of emotion. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20 (10), 1269-75 PMID: 19754526

Spontaneous panic attack caught on brain imaging scan

2009-10-30T07:40:00.001Z

Researchers from Germany, Scotland and Switzerland have notched up a brain imaging first by capturing a participant in the full throes of a spontaneous panic attack, whilst also having a concurrent recording of her heart rate.

Kai Spiegelhalder and colleagues were able to use the woman's elevated heart rate to provide an objective marker for the course of her panic attack. The 59-year-old was unmedicated and had no prior history of panic attacks. She did have restless legs syndrome - a condition characterised by an comfortable urge to move the legs.

Inspection of the woman's brain activity during the panic episode showed that her heart-rate was positively correlated with activity in her left amygdala - the walnut-shaped brain structure known to be involved in emotional learning. There was also some association between panic and activity in the woman's left insula. This brain region is involved in the detection and processing of bodily states. These observations are consistent with research conducted with panic disorder patients who have been provoked into having an attack with the use of drugs. "It appears likely that the insula may be involved early in the onset of panic, acting as an 'internal alarm'," the researchers said.

Another observation was that as the woman's heart rate increased, activity decreased in her left middle temporal gyrus - a bulge in the part of the cortex near the ear. Some previous studies have actually made the opposite observation with panic disorder patients. "...[D]ecreased temporal lobe activity is perhaps specific to healthy individuals experiencing their first attack," the researchers said.

Spiegelhalder's team warned their results should be treated with caution, especially since they involved a single case study. However, they said their data "do suggest, to some extent, that the neural mechanisms involved in a spontaneous panic attack share some similarity with those proposed to play a role in patients with panic-related disorder."
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Spiegelhalder, K., Hornyak, M., Kyle, S., Paul, D., Blechert, J., Seifritz, E., Hennig, J., Tebartz van Elst, L., Riemann, D., & Feige, B. (2009). Cerebral correlates of heart rate variations during a spontaneous panic attack in the fMRI scanner. Neurocase, 15 (6), 527-534 DOI: 10.1080/13554790903066909

[Note: Psychology Press will be making this article temporarily free-to-access from around 6 Nov]

Extras

2009-10-29T10:26:00.008Z

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

Wooah ... how babies learn to walk down slopes.

They may have come in for some recent criticism regarding their carbon pawprints, but elsewhere yet another previously untapped canine skill has been revealed - the ability to understand that iconic replicas stand for real objects.

In the psychiatrist's chair: in-depth interviews reveal how 22 neurologists understand conversion disorder.

Psychoanalysis for kids - does it work?

Neuroculture: neuroscientific knowledge is not solely constrained within laboratories, but readily captures the attention of the public at large.

People's attitudes explain their willingness, or not, to seek help for depression.

Rethinking NIMBYism: The role of place attachment and place identity in explaining place-protective action.

What ever became of Little Albert?

What does having a fertility problem mean for couples?

What happens to neurology patients with symptoms "unexplained"?

2009-10-28T07:38:00.002Z

To be told that your symptoms have no identifiable physical cause can be at once both a relief and a curse. In one sense the doctor is giving you a clean bill of health. But there's the chance they have made a mistake. What's more, if the symptoms persist without explanation, you face the stigma and frustration of people suspecting your problems are "merely" psychological or, worse still, made up. A new study has investigated neurology patients who were told that their symptoms had no identifiable physical cause, following them for a year and a half to see if and how their diagnoses changed.

Jon Stone and his colleagues recruited the help of 36 consultant neurologists working in Scotland's main neurology clinics. Besides a minority of patients who were excluded for being too young or ill, records were kept from nearly all new neurology cases in Scotland between December 2002 and February 2004.

Of the 3781 available patients, around a third were diagnosed as having symptoms that were either "somewhat" or "not at all" explained by physical disease, as opposed to being "largely" or "completely" explained. Of these unexplained cases, the majority were told by their neurologists either simply that their symptoms were unexplained or that they had a headache or that they had conversion symptoms (the physical manifestation of an emotional problem). In a minority of cases, patients were given vague diagnoses such as "pain symptoms" or "fatigue".

Had the story changed much 19 months later? Through contact with the patients' GPs (their primary physicians), Stone's team found just four cases where the neurologist had confidently declared the patient's symptoms as unexplainable, but where an organic illness had subsequently been diagnosed - these were multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's Disease and two forms of brain lesion.

About 100 other patients had also subsequently received a change of diagnosis, but in most of these cases it was simply that an organic cause that had previously been identified as "somewhat explaining" the symptoms was now seen as the sole cause. In other cases, the initial neurological diagnosis had allowed for the possibility that a physical diagnosis might later be found; a genuinely new condition had emerged; or in some cases, the first neurologist still disputed the subsequent organic diagnosis made by another doctor. There were also five deaths, although these were apparently unrelated to the patients' earlier symptoms.

"New diagnoses that explained the original symptoms rarely emerged over the following 18 months in this study," the researchers said. "Whilst the diagnoses of 'symptoms unexplained by organic disease' must continue to be made with care, the data presented here suggest that serious diagnostic change after an initial clinical assessment by a consultant neurologist is unusual."
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Stone J, Carson A, Duncan R, Coleman R, Roberts R, Warlow C, Hibberd C, Murray G, Cull R, Pelosi A, Cavanagh J, Matthews K, Goldbeck R, Smyth R, Walker J, Macmahon AD, & Sharpe M (2009). Symptoms 'unexplained by organic disease' in 1144 new neurology out-patients: how often does the diagnosis change at follow-up? Brain : a journal of neurology, 132 (Pt 10), 2878-88 PMID: 19737842

Young children's moral understanding more sophisticated than previously thought

2009-10-26T08:41:00.005Z

When her Daily Mail column about Stephen Gately's death provoked an avalanche of complaints, the disgraced Jan Moir issued a press statement in which she said "it was never [her] intention" to upset people. Defensively speaking, Moir's choice of words was astute. In judging moral responsibility, we adults focus almost exclusively on intention rather than outcome. Stated starkly, the person who deliberately attempts to kill an innocent, but fails, is judged as more evil than the person who accidentally kills an innocent. Now researchers have a taken a fresh look at how these moral processes develop in children. Classic studies by Piaget and others claimed to show that, in contrast to adults, young children focus on outcomes, not intentions. However, in their new work, Gavin Nobes and colleagues argue that children do focus on intentions, and that Piaget and others failed to take account of the influence of perceived negligence - that is, unintended actions that really ought to have been foreseen.

Dozens of children aged between three and eight years, as well as adults, were presented with short, illustrated stories in which intentions and outcomes were systematically varied, being either positive or negative. To give you an idea, the stories involved bicycle crashes, dropped cups, and games of catch. Crucially, half the participants were told that the key protagonist had taken great care, whereas the other half were told that he or she had been careless - for example, stacking cups in one hand and not paying attention.

When judging the acceptability of a protagonist's actions and the punishment they deserved, both children and adults were principally influenced by the person's intention. Intentions to commit bad actions were judged harshly regardless of the outcome. This contradicts Piaget's classic work, which claimed to show that children focus on outcomes.

Nobes team think the reason for the conflicting results has to do with negligence. They found that children tended to interpret bad outcomes as betraying negligence even when they'd been told that a person had been careful. It's as if young children haven't yet fully grasped that accidents can happen even when a person has been careful (the researchers point out this is an issue of the children's practical, not moral, understanding). Therefore, when a bad outcome was combined with what they assumed was perceived negligence, the children tended to judge a person harshly, just as adults do when they think a person has failed to take due care. In Piaget's and other earlier work there was no measure of negligence so such patterns would have just appeared as though the children were focusing on outcomes and ignoring intentions.

"The findings indicate that the moral judgements of young children are influenced neither principally by outcome (as Piaget claimed) nor only by outcome and intention (as many subsequent researchers have assumed)," Nobes team concluded. "The intention-outcome dichotomy should be expanded at least to the intention-negligence-outcome trichotomy."

"Children demonstrate surprisingly sophisticated and differentiated moral reasoning," they added.
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Nobes G, Panagiotaki G, & Pawson C (2009). The influence of negligence, intention, and outcome on children's moral judgments. Journal of experimental child psychology, 104 (4), 382-97 PMID: 19740483

Free access to PsyPress articles covered by Digest

2009-10-23T12:39:00.004+01:00

Psychology Press have just told Digest that from now on they're going to give away temporary free access to any of their articles that we report on. I'll make sure from today that I indicate when a research paper is published by PsyPress so that you can look out for the free access (it may take a few days to come through). For the next week or so, you can gain free access to these articles recently covered right here on the Digest blog:

The Speed of Free Will
[Digest report here].

The latest verdict on using brain imaging for lie detection
[Digest report here].

Mimicry improves women's speed dating success
[Digest report here].

Thanks Psychology Press!

A warm room makes people feel socially closer

2009-10-23T09:32:00.000+01:00

Last year, the psychologists Lawrence Williams and John Bargh gave participants a cup of coffee to hold and showed that the temperature of the coffee affected the way those participants rated a stranger's character. A hot coffee led them to rate him as more good natured and generous, whilst holding an iced coffee had the opposite effect. The finding was touted as an example of embodied cognition - the idea that the way we think about the world is grounded in, and affected by, physical metaphors. Now Hans Ijzerman and Gun Semin have built on this work, showing not only that the ambient temperature of a room affects how socially close people feel to another, but also the type of language they use and the way they see relations between shapes.

Fifty-two participants were shown an animated film featuring chess pieces. Crucially, half the participants were seated in a cool room (15 to 18 degrees Celsius) whereas the others sat in a warm room (22 to 24 degrees Celsius). Afterwards participants in the warm room used more concrete, physical language to describe the film and reported feeling socially closer to the experimenter than did the participants in a cold room.

Another experiment looked at the effect of room temperature on the way participants perceived similarities between arrays of shapes - particularly whether they would focus on the way the shapes were arranged in relation to each other, as opposed to focusing on their actual shape. This time, participants in a warm room were more likely to recognise the "relational similarity" between objects. For example, when presented with three triangles arranged in a triangular formation, participants in a warm room were more likely to say this arrangement was similar to an array of squares arranged in a triangular formation, rather than to a square formation of triangles.

Taken altogether the findings support the idea that the way we think about relations, whether between people or shapes, is grounded in, and therefore affected by, temperature. It suggests that if you want to encourage a team of people to bond, you should make sure everyone is feeling warm.

These ideas about the embodiment of our thoughts and language have been most powerfully advocated by George Lakoff, the author of Metaphors We Live By. However, before we swallow these ideas hook, line and sinker, so to speak, it's worth mentioning some reservations spelt out by Steve Pinker in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Pinker points out that whilst metaphors clearly play an important role in language and thought, they are based ultimately on a separate conceptual foundation. This is revealed graphically by our ability to "see through" metaphors (the source of wit as in Steven Wright's "If the world's a stage, where is the audience sitting") and, in the case of the "time-as-space" metaphor, by the existence of brain damaged patients who no longer understand prepositions for space (as in "she's at her desk") but do still understand prepositions for time (as in "he daydreamed through the meeting").
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Ijzerman H, & Semin GR (2009). The Thermometer of Social Relations: Mapping Social Proximity on Temperature. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID: 19732385

Psychology X-factor

2009-10-23T09:10:00.001+01:00

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Young girls particularly prone to getting stuck in role of bullying victim

2009-10-22T09:22:00.000+01:00

Young girls are far more prone than boys to getting stuck in the role of bullying victim. That's according to a new investigation by psychologists who studied hundreds of children at 17 primary schools in Hertfordshire and North London.

Dieter Wolke and his colleagues interviewed the children when they were aged between six and nine years and then surveyed them again two or four years later once the children had reached year six. The researchers were interested in the individual and situational factors predictive of whether a child would remain or become a bulling victim.

Of the 663 children who initially took part, 432 were available at the follow-up session. Among the girls, the 44 who were victims of so-called "direct bullying" (physical and verbal abuse) at baseline, were two and a half times more likely than their classmates to also be a victim of direct bullying at follow up. By contrast, boys who were victims of direct bullying at baseline were no more likely than their classmates to be a victim at follow up. In other words, young girls seem particularly prone to getting stuck in the victim role. The researchers said that girls' "tightly knit" friendship networks could make it difficult for them to "escape the victimisation role". Unsurprisingly perhaps, boys and girls with fewer friends were also at greater risk of direct bullying.

Wolke's team also looked at so-called "relational bullying", when children deliberately outcast a class mate. Although rates of relational bullying had increased by the follow up session (probably reflecting the children's growing skills of manipulation), neither boys nor girls who were victims of this kind of bullying at baseline were more likely than their peers to still be a victim at follow up. The researchers said this could be because friendship groups are still in flux at primary school, thus making it possible to escape earlier social exclusion. However, caution is needed here because the children who dropped out of the study, mostly because they had changed schools, were disproportionately likely to have been the victim of relational bullying at baseline, so it's possible their absence skewed the results. Overall, children with emotional problems and children in classes with rigid social hierarchies were at greater risk of relational bullying.

Whilst cautioning that their reliance on children's self-report was a weakness of the study, Wolke's team said their findings had important implications for teachers and other professionals. "These findings call for the development and implementation of intervention programmes that tackle victimisation at an early age in primary school," they said.
_________________________________

Wolke, D., Woods, S., & Samara, M. (2009). Who escapes or remains a victim of bullying in primary school? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27 (4), 835-851 DOI: 10.1348/026151008X383003

Competition between nostrils

2009-10-21T09:30:00.000+01:00

Show one image exclusively to one eye and a different image exclusively to the other eye and rather than experiencing a merging of the images, an observer's percept will flit backwards and forwards randomly and endlessly between the two. This "binocular rivalry", as it's known, has been of particular interest to psychologists because it shows how the same incoming sensory information can give rise to two very different conscious experiences. Now, in a research first, psychologists have shown that a similar process occurs with our sense of smell. If one odour is presented to one nostril and another odour is presented to the other nostril, a person will experience "binaral rivalry" - sensing one smell and then the other, backwards and forwards, rather than a blending of the two.

Wen Zhou and Denise Chen presented twelve participants with the smell of rose to one of their nostrils and the smell of a marker pen to their other nostril. The odours were presented intermittently, every twenty to thirty seconds, to prevent "adaptation", which is the tendency for brain cells to gradually reduce their response to a continuous stimulus. After each break in the smells, the participants indicated on a visual scale whether they had detected the scent of rose or of marker pen. Just as with binocular rivalry, the participants' perceptual experience fluctuated back and forth randomly between the two scents.

The researchers believe this nostril rivalry is related in some way to the process of adaptation, both in the receptor cells in the nose and in the part of the brain that processes smells. For example, when repeatedly presented with a balanced mix of both smells, the participants' sensory experience fluctuated between rose and marker pen, presumably because of adaptation in the brain: as central neurons tired of one odour, their response to the other became more dominant and back again. The researchers also showed that adaptation occurs in the nose: swapping the bottles of odour around from one nostril to the other reinstated participants' experience of a given smell after it had previously faded through continuous sniffing.

"Our work sets the stage for future studies of this phenomenon," the researchers said.
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Zhou, W., & Chen, D. (2009). Binaral Rivalry between the Nostrils and in the Cortex. Current Biology, 19 (18), 1561-1565 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.052

The Special Issue Spotter

2009-10-21T09:18:00.003+01:00

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

Burnout and Health (Stress and Health).

Baddeley Revisited: The Functional Approach to Autobiographical Memory (Applied Cognitive Psychology).

Interviewing Behaviour (Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling).

Cognitive Hearing Science: the view from hearing impairment and deafness (Scandinavian Journal of Psychology).

Evidentiality: A Window Into Language and Cognitive Development (New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development).