Psychology Blogs

Marvin

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:57:38 GMT

Back to real blogging soon, but before then, I wanted to post this. You probably saw a bit of this during NBC's Olympics coverage, but the whole thing has to be seen. It's one of the coolest things ever, though me being a huge Marvin Gaye fan might have something to do with me thinking that:

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RSS Management

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:13:47 GMT

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People more empathetic to their own race

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:25:00 GMT

July 03, 2009 BEIJING, Jul 3, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- A bystander feels more empathy for someone in pain when that person is in the same social group, researchers in China said.

TV ads make children choose more junk foods

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:25:00 GMT

July 01, 2009 LOS ANGELES, Jul 01, 2009 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Influenced by TV ads, children tend to choose more junk food, increasing the risk of weight gain, a new study suggests.

The Situation of Food: The Movie

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:24:58 GMT

From Michael Phillips' Chicago Tribune review: Several things -- too many, probably -- are going on in "Food, Inc.," all connected. Kenner begins by tracing the impact of 20th Century American fast food on industrialized food production, and notes that when McDonald's brought factory assembly-line strategies into practice, everything changed. ...

Robert Reich on the Situation of Health Care Reform

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:24:58 GMT

From Bill Moyers' Journal:? "Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich sits down with Bill Moyers to talk about the influence of lobbyists on policy, the economy, and the ongoing debate over health care."? See the interview on the video below.? From the interview, here is a bit of what Reich had ...

Eight way distortion

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:22:30 GMT

Petra's written up her barnstorming talk she gave last night at the Troublemaker's Fringe where she discussed 'eight problems with science/health journalism and what we can do about it' from her perspective as a social psychologist specialising in sex and relationships.

It's a fantastic guide to how health stories get badly spun and why sexual health material is most likely to be misrepresented as it is considered 'light' and so not worthy of serious attention.

One of the main culprits seem to be the reliance on PR surveys which are intuitively easy to understand but are specifically designed to push a certain angle.

I was interested to hear that they are often designed not with journalists so much in mind, but the picture editor - see Clairol's recent 'survey' finding that women are happiest at 28. Women like 28-year-old Jessica Alba and Gisele Bundchen by any chance? Bingo. Free celebrity tie-in reported as science in the national press.

Petra has plenty more media gems and it makes for a great insight into the thinking behind the sex and relationship stories that makes the media.

Link to Petra's on science and health reporting.

A touch from a phantom third arm

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:22:30 GMT

A 64 year old woman developed a phantom third arm after a stroke, but unusually, the patient was able to see and feel the illusory limb. A study just published online in the journal Annals of Neurology used brain scans to examine the patient. They established that the phantom sensations were accompanied by similar sorts of brain activity as you'd get from a real arm.

Unlike a classic 'phantom limb', where a patient feels sensations as if they're coming from the previously amputated body part, a 'supernumerary phantom limb' is where a phantom seems to appear additional to the already existing arm or leg.

The condition is rare but has been reported before and is known as the 'supernumerary phantom limb' in the medical literature. As we discussed last year, it is usually associated with strokes that affect the subcortical areas of the brain.

One of the reasons this new case is so interesting is because not only could the patient feel their additional limb, but they claimed to be able to see it and feel touches from it as well.

Tactile sensations in the SPL [supernumerary phantom limb] happened when she clenched her hand (she could then feel her phantom palm with her phantom fingers) and when she ?touched? certain parts of her body (in which case, the sensation was felt both in the phantom and the touched body part).

She could touch parts of her head, as well as her right shoulder. She claimed to be able to use the SPL to scratch an itch on her head (with an actual sense of relief). Moreover, she reported that the phantom could not penetrate solid obstacles (see supplementary materials for more details).

While a handful of cases of 'visible' supernumerary phantom limbs have been reported, this combination of seeing and feeling the touch of one is unique.

Importantly, the patient was not delusional - they didn't believe they had an extra limb - they knew the sensations were unrealistic, but the experience was still there.

The limb was also not permanently felt - the patient could trigger it at will - and it appeared "pale," "milk-white," and "transparent."

The researchers were keen to see if these sensations were reflected in the activity of the brain by using fMRI scans.

They found that 'moving' the phantom limb in front of the line of sight caused increased activation in the visual cortex of the brain.

Most strikingly, they found that when asked to 'touch' her cheek with the illusory hand, activity in brain areas representing cheek sensation increased.

There is always the chance that someone with very bizarre symptoms could be lying, but it is also the case that brain disturbance can cause all sort of confusions and distortions - so in some cases a patient's description of what's happening may not always be a reliable guide to exactly what they're experiencing.

In this case, the brain imaging suggests that the 'supernumerary phantom limb' was genuinely being perceived as a visible additional arm and that its 'touches' were being processed by the sensory system in a similar way to touches from existing limbs.

Because the condition is so rare, and so conceptually bizarre, there is no good explanation of why it occurs except that it may be linked to the disturbance of our already established body and action 'maps' in the brain.

Apparently, there is more information about the case in supplementary material which can be found 'in the online version of this article', but the additional information doesn't seem to be online. Ironically, the study seems to have a phantom of its own.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

home school support

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:00:52 GMT

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Being and Nothingness

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of vacations--doing something and doing nothing.

July 4th: Meaningful Holiday or Excuse to Drink?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Heavy drinking during the summertime.

Evolutionary origins of the nervous system

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:34:37 GMT

THE HUMAN BRAIN is a true marvel of nature. This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought. How did this remarkable and extraordinarily complex structure evolve? This question poses a huge challenge to researchers; brain evolution surely involved thousands of discrete, incremental steps, which occurred in the mists of deep time across hundreds of millions of years, and which we are unlikely to ever fully understand.

Nevertheless, a number of studies published in recent years have begun to shed some light on the evolutionary origins of the nervous system, and provide clues to some of the earliest stages in the evolution of the human brain. These clues come from the most unexpected of places - from sea sponges, which lack nervous systems altogether, and from the extant descendents of a primitive worm which lived some 600 million years ago.

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6 Quick Sanity Tricks

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:02:06 GMT

Awhile back I asked you for your sanity tricks, techniques that help you fight the forces of the dark side. Here are some of the gems. 1. Learn the alphabet. Do you know why the vowel "I" comes well before the vowel "U"? Because a person must take care of herself ...

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He's Just a Frackin' Adolescent Ass

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:24:07 GMT

Way, way back in September of 2005, a Danish newspaper published some cartoons depicting Muslims and their prophet, and in response, thousands of Muslim extremists responded with varying degrees of threatened and actual violence. As you all know, this resulted in a storm of media coverage around the world, including pretty extensive coverage in the American media. This coverage resulted in several important and, it seems to me, pretty productive discussions on a wide variety of relevant issues, including self-censorship among journalists, the double standard that exists when criticizing religion (as opposed to other world-views, such as the political), anti-Arab racism xenophobia in Europe, and Denmark in particular, as well as the inappropriatess and unacceptibility of the violent reaction of tens of thousands of Muslims across the Muslim world, which resulted in death and destruction.

I think several conclusions can be and were drawn from that discussion, such as that the cartoons were inappropriate, that self-censorship isn't inherently bad, but that people shouldn't be forced to self-censor for fear of their lives or the lives of others, that religion should be open to criticism, but that such criticism shouldn't be gratuitious, racist, or trade in overgeneralizations, that anti-Arab sentiments are rampant in Europe and the U.S. (duh), and that certain Muslim extremists will use any excuse to behave violently and incite others to do so as well. In the end, Denmark, with its Dansk Folkeparti right-wing xenophobes came off looking pretty bad, but Muslims came off looking much, much worse. Their behavior, and the resulting coverage and discussion of it, was perhaps that strongest indictment of Islamic extremism and its ability to infect the minds of people throughout the Muslim world that anyone could have produced. In this case, it was difficult not to see that many Muslims -- and in this case, it wasn't just a few extremists, but huge mobs of people -- were behaving very badly in the name of their religion.

In addition to media coverage and frank discussion, there was another response in both Europe and the U.S. to the Muslim reaction to the cartoons, though. This response came almost exclusively from right wing groups (e.g., the Folkeparti's youth wing) in Europe, and right wing bloggers in the U.S. (e.g., Michelle Malkin). And as you might imagine, given who was involved, this response didn't involve discussion, but instead used one-upmanship and look-at-me tactics like holding contests to produce even more offensive anti-Muslim/Arab cartoons, or reproducing the cartoons over and over and over again to accompany xenophobic anti-Arab rhetoric. These reactions were, at best, counterproductive. They added nothing to the discussion, and repeatedly illustrated how widespread anti-Arab racism is in the west. A pretty good rule of thumb is that if you want to show that someone's being a giant ass, it's best not to try to be one yourself.

The lesson I'm trying to convey is that in cases like that of the Danish cartoons and the response to them, there are two paths one can take: frank, reasoned discussion, or circus-like attention-whoring, and only one is truly effective. While the former causes people to actually think about what's going on, in all its complexity (and let's face it, the Danish cartoon situation was very complex, raising all sorts of social, political, ethical, and religious issues), whereas the latter may preach to the choir but is harmful more broadly.

Which brings us to 2008. Last month, as you all know, a student at the University of Central Florida got into a bit of trouble because he took a communion wafer, first back to his seat, and then back to his apartment. Catholics were none too happy about this, and at first responded by filing formal complaints with UCF, and then, once that piece of pond scum Bill Donahue got involved, harassing the poor kid and even issuing death threats. The reaction of Catholics in this case hasn't been as extreme as the reactions of Muslims in the case of the Danish cartoons, obviously, but if it hasn't been of the same magnitude, it has turned out to be of the same type: a violent reaction to perceived religious insults. This is unacceptable, and we'd have done well to display their reaction far and wide, and make it clear what Bill Donahue's role in it was, because inevitably, while the kid may have come off looking like a bit of a naive jerk, the Catholics would have come off looking much, much worse, and we might actually have been able to rationally discuss some of the issues that this case raises (like that double standard mentioned earlier in the post). Once again, we had a choice: rational discussion, or the juvenile attention-whoring characteristic of right-wing xenophobes.

Let's go back to 2006 for a minute. That's when I joined ScienceBlogs which, at the time, billed itself as the "world's largest conversation about science." Granted, at the time there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of science on ScienceBlogs (science comprised something like 30% of SB's content), but ScienceBlogs was (and is) a product of Seed Media Group, whose motto is "Science is Culture," and apparently many of the early ScienceBloggers just forgot the science part and focused on the culture (in the form of politics and religion). Now, Seed has been great over the last year and a half or so, more than doubling their blog total, and many of the blogs they've added are almost exclusively science-oriented. But Seed's biggest blog, the one to which everyone else in the network is inclined to link if they want a traffic boost, and which therefore can have a big influence on the content of the entire network, long ago ceased to be about either science or conversation. Instead, it became a prolonged self-aggrandizing, attention-whoring rant (it's likely not a coincidence that the proportion of rant to science, and the tone of that rant, grew in proportion to the blog's traffic).

Now, if we were to take ScienceBlog's self-description as a conversation about science seriously, we might be inclined to believe that ScienceBlogs would be the home of a rational discussion what happened with the UCF student and the idiot Catholics who harassed him. But in all likelihood, before we started to believe that, we'd be reminded that ScienceBlog's biggest name is not interested in conversation or rational discussion, and so we would not be surprised that instead of taking the broadly effective route, that blogger chose instead the juvenile tactics of right-wing xenophobes, in order to show that he is, in fact, the biggest, baddest, most anti-religious atheist in all of the intertubes, and to get all sorts of attention both from his loyal epigones and from religious nuts (it's probably not a coincidence, as well, that the blogger in question is planning on publishing a book sometime soon). There has been a resulting discussion, of course, but instead of focusing on the Catholics and their abominable behavior, the discussion has been about our biggest blogger and his nonsense.

There are dozens of reasons to criticize the behavior of that blogger, perhaps the most salient of which is that it's never OK to gratuitously attempt to hurt the feelings of large groups of people, with no other reasonable end but to hurt their feelings, but I think the most tragic consequence of said blogger's behavior is that it pretty much cuts off any discussion of the real issues, and diverts the attention to him. And I find it sad any time the opportuntity for rational discussion of important issues is undercut by adolescent nonsense. And I also find it sad that ScienceBlogs, supposedly a bastion of reason, "the world's largest conversation about science," long criticized for being overly liberal in its political orientation, is dominated by an illiberal, anti-intellectual ass whose idea of a rational response is to emulate Michelle Malkin or the Dansk Folkeparti's youth movement. I feel ashamed to be associated with it, and him.

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Breakthrough for Schizophrenia and Bipolar

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:00:34 GMT

Earlier today, we reported that NIMH-funded researchers at three different genetic research institutes from around the world collaborated and published three new studies yesterday in the journal, Nature, that suggested a true breakthrough in our understanding of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. And to think that just earlier ...

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When are highly-anxious women most anxious? When you least expect it

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:04:19 GMT

Take a group of 18- and 19-year-old women, college freshmen and sophomores. Then test them to find out who has the most social anxiety: who's most nervous about dealing with other people, particularly in public situations. What would be the most difficult thing you could ask these high-social-anxiety women to do? How about this:

I would like you to prepare and deliver a four-minute talk. This talk will be videotaped and viewed later by several professors and graduate students.... It is extremely important that you do the best job that you can with this talk.... Your talk should be about the most difficult time in your life and how you coped with it.

Now, give them five minutes to prepare, and allow their boyfriends to "help."

That's what a team led by J. Gayle Beck did; their goal was to see how socially anxious women and their romantic partners handled a difficult social situation. They asked women with low social anxiety and their partners to do the same task; 45 women in all participated. Of course, what the researchers were really interested was to see how the couples interacted while they prepared the speeches; in the end none of the women had to give a speech, and they were told their preparation session had been videotaped and would be analyzed for insights into how their relationship worked.

You might think that highly socially anxious women (which I'll abbreviate as HSA) would be more distressed about this than women with low social anxiety (which I'll abbreviate as LSA). You might also think that HSA women who weren't satisfied with their relationships would show more have more negative interactions with their partners than HSA women who were satisfied. And you'd probably speculate that if the boyfriends of HSA women made negative comments or behaved negatively during the preparations, that HSA women would show even more distress.

Beck's team predicted all three of these results, and were surprised to find that none of the predictions were supported by the study. They studied all the videos and rated the women along three dimensions:

Positive: Specific analysis of the problem, statement of feelings, asking for help, positive response to helper
Negative: Demanding help, criticizing, blaming, accusing, rejecting helper, whining, complaining
On Task: Staying focused on the assignment.

The boyfriends were rated on a similar scale.

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Schools Using Money for Incentives

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:30:55 GMT

Recent articles in the front page of the Washington Post 8/22/2008 and the Business Day section of the New York Times 8/20/2008 both are talking about paying students to perform. So results so far in NY to incentivize performance on AP exams are mixed. I suspect there is not too much surprise there. It looks like the incentives were offered after students had chosen to take the classes and they get paid once. I remember this was an old debate when I was in graduate school between economists and psychologists on this topic. Economists want to design incentive compatible mechanisms that either use selection or shift goals to improve performance. Psychologists wonder how this affects the incentives that are already in play. Well recently there has been a lot of attention on this using contingent management mechanisms to treat addictions. A nice article by Higgins and Petry looks at alcoholism. In these contexts paying people to stay sober and attend meetings seems to work. I thank Warren Bickel for introducing me to this research a few years back. In some ways the DC program looks more like contingent management paying students for attendance as an attempt to reinforce good behavior. This is an important element that has been mostly lost on economists. That frequency of reward matters. They get the contingency part. But more important, once you get kids in school what do you do with them? If they aren't engaged how has this helped much? In fact they may quickly learn in school strategies that are more rewarding than paying attention. I like the quote by Benjamin Franklin that sits in my office. "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." So this raises a nice question how is involvement reinforcing? So in the end I think both economists and psychologists need to work together on this one. Contingent management, or monetary incentives, can help fix incentives in the short run, but involvement fixes them in the long run.

The end of Cognitive Monthly

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:04:08 GMT

Due to exciting new career developments, I've decided to shelve Cognitive Monthly. I still think this sort of thing is a good idea, and CogMonthly was selling about as well as I expected. But I'm in the process of making a major career change (which should not affect Cognitive Daily), and something needed to be done to free up the time to do it. Expect another announcement here soon!

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10 Rules That Govern Groups

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:28:16 GMT

Much of our lives are spent in groups with other people: we form groups to socialise, earn money, play sport, make music, even to change the world. But although groups are diverse, many of the psychological processes involved are remarkably similar. Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about [...]

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Episode 97: Stanley Milgram Obedience Study Finally Replicated

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:46:55 GMT

The obedience studies originally conducted by Stanley Milgram (sometimes referred to as the Milgram Shock studies) have finally been replicated in a university setting. Will people obey an authority...

Show notes and more available at http://www.thepsychfiles.com

Book Review

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:29:35 GMT

Book Review

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:29:35 GMT

Brain mechanisms of hypnotic paralysis

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:37:24 GMT

THE TERM 'HYPNOSIS' was coined by the Scottish physician James Braid in his 1853 book Neurypnology. Braid defined hypnosis as "a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye". He argued that hypnosis was a form of "nervous sleep", and tried to distinguish his theory from that of the mesmerists, who believed that the effects of hypnosis were mediated by a vital force, or animal magnetism.

Because of mesmerism, and its association with stage entertainment and charlatanry, hypnosis was regarded with skepticism for much of its history. In recent years, though, it has come under the scrutiny of cognitive neuroscientists, and is now thought of as an altered state of consciousness - sometimes referred to as being trance-like - which is associated with increased suggestibility, enhanced imagery and reduced reality testing. We know that hypnosis can profoundly affect the mind and behaviour, so that thought processes and perceptions can be easily manipulated, but the underlying neural mechanisms are poorly understood.

According to a new study of the neural mechanisms of hypnosis-induced paralysis, Braid's definition was remarkably accurate. The study, published in the journal Neuron, demonstrates that hypnosis does indeed lead to increased activity in areas of the brain involved in attention, as well as in other areas involved in mental imagery and self-awareness. Hypnosis can therefore exert control over bodily movements by enhancing mental representations of the self (or self-imagery) and focusing attention on them.

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Persuasion: The Right-Ear Advantage

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:17:24 GMT

If you want someone to comply with a random request for a cigarette, you should speak into their right ear, according to a new study by researchers in Italy. Marzoli & Tommasi (2009) had a female confederate visit a disco and approach 176 random people asking for a smoke. Clubbers were about twice as likely to [...]

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The coordination of problem solving strategies: When low competence sources exert more influence on task processing than high competence sources

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:00:15 GMT

Illusion of control by proxy: Placing one's fate in the hands of another

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:00:15 GMT

Perceived risk of medicine side effects in users of a patient information website: A study of the use of verbal descriptors, percentages and natural frequencies

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:46:54 GMT

Sustaining self-regulatory efficacy and psychological outcome expectations for postnatal exercise: Effects of a group-mediated cognitive behavioural intervention

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:46:54 GMT

free-form writing frenzy #6: try softer!

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:58:53 GMT

elizabeth?s writing prompt #6 “when you try too hard, it doesn?t work.” when you try hard, period, never mind ?too?. makes me think of trying to eat an old piece of dark rye bread, back in my grandparent?s place. they had the bread guy come buy once every two weeks. yes, every two weeks. [...]

Episode 98: Evolutionary Psychology - An Interview with Dr. David Buss

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:53:19 GMT

Do you know your own mate value in the dating world? Curious about evolutionary psychology? In this interview with Dr. David Buss we discuss a number of interesting and controversial topics, such...

Show notes and more available at http://www.thepsychfiles.com

taking responsibility: constance barnes and the braidwood enquiry

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:23:43 GMT

i was going to offer you another poem of sarah?s in this post but there?s something i need to say before we move on to that. the braidwood enquiry into robert dziekanski?s death, the polish immigrant who was tasered at the vancouver airport in the fall of 2007. and constance barnes. right from the very beginning, the RCMP [...]

A personal note

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:05:36 GMT

I’m taking a break. It isn’t clear to me that a blog is the optimal format for a weekly or fortnightly 1000+ words on technical matters. It’s too much, too seldom for most readers. In any case, blogging has mainly been about entertaining myself, and it doesn’t do that for me anymore. I may be [...]

Domain specificity follows from interactions between overlapping maps

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:09:21 GMT

Object-face by Multitude I can’t simplify the title beyond that, but don’t run away yet, the idea itself is straight forward once the terminology is explained. Skip ahead two paragraphs if you know what domain specificity means. Recognition of objects in the visual scene is thought to arise in inferior temporal and occipital cortex, along the ventral [...]