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Feast
Tuck into our latest round-up of the best psych and neuro links:
Will they ever let him rest? Researchers in the USA attempt to simulate the damage suffered by Phineas Gage to the white-matter tracts of his brain (no easy feat given that Gage's brain was never preserved). Mo Costandi provides some quality coverage for The Guardian. Look out for my own report coming soon.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the brain - the Society for Neuroscience and its friends have clubbed together to create a new website of brain facts.
Ed Yong wrote an excellent Nature news feature on the recent controversies in psychology around replication, and possible solutions. Sadly no mention in there of the recent (open access) Psychologist magazine opinion special on the same subject.
BBC World Service broadcast a programme on the neuroscience and psychology of morality - you can listen to it on iPlayer.
Brain-machine interfacing has taken another step forward - this time paralysed human participants controlled a robotic arm using their thoughts alone.
Are you following our sister blog, The Occupational Digest? Check out recent posts from Alex Fradera on perfectionists and guilt-prone leaders.
How the most famous bet in the history of neuroscience was won and lost - my first Brain Myths blog post for Psychology Today.
This is the only known recording of Freud's voice.
This year's Loebner prize (chatbot competition) at Bletchley Park was a bit of a let down - maybe the competition looks at AI in the wrong way?
The APA hosted a Mental Health Month Blog Party - the Digest chipped in with a mental health links round up.
The latest edition on BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind delved into the world of Street Therapy for gang members.
Psychologist Christopher Chabris wrote a highly negative review of Jonah Lehrer's new book on creativity. Jonah defended himself and then Chabris came back for another go. Tom Bartlett looks at what we can learn from their exchange.
Can you call a 9-year-old a psychopath?
The latest episode of Hidden Talent included a search for people with extraordinary navigational skills. You can watch it on 4oD and check out blog posts from the psychologists Hugo Spiers and Tom Hartley about their work for the programme.
What is sleep for? A great overview from Neuroskeptic.
This week's Guardian Science Weekly podcast featured Claudia Hammond talking about her new book on time perception (congrats to the Guardian podcast team on their recent award).
Electroconvulsive therapy isn't brutal, it's a beneficial treatment, says one experienced patient.
Check out this new podcast series - Social Science Bites - Pinker, Kosslyn, Reicher et al lined up for future episodes.
How to remember loads ... memory champ and science journalist Joshua Foer's TED talk is now live.
That's all for now, have a great weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Smile your way to a vegetable-loving child
Maybe you've tried giving them names - Sally Sprout or Brian the Broccoli. Or perhaps you've made noises of gastronomic delight, "hmm, yummy!" Yet still your young child refuses to eat their greens. Maybe it's because of that slight, but all too visible, sneer on your face. After all, you're not wild about veggies either. Well, it's time for you to become a better actor. A new study suggests that young children are particularly sensitive to the emotional expressions of other eaters, and that these emotions are likely to affect their eating habits.
Laetitia Barthomeuf and her team presented 43 5-year-olds, 38 8-year-olds and 42 adults with photographs of two women eating various foods. As they ate, the women either looked happy, disgusted or just had a neutral expression. There were six different foods - three that the participants had earlier said they liked (chocolate, bread and cream cake) and three that they said they disliked (kidney, black pudding, cooked sausage with vegetables). Twenty-seven additional participants had been excluded earlier because their preferences didn't fit this pattern.
As they looked at each photo, the child and adult participants were asked to say how much, on a scale of 1 to 10, they desired to eat the food that the woman in the photo was eating. The take home finding - the children, especially the five-year-olds, were influenced much more by the facial expressions of the women, than were the adults.
If the woman in the photo had a look of disgust, this reduced the children's, and to a lesser extent, the adults', desire to eat foods that they liked. In contrast, if the woman had a look of pleasure on her face, this increased the children's, and to a lesser extent, the adults', desire to eat foods they didn't like (for five-year-olds only, it also increased their desire to eat foods they liked). Even a neutral facial expression in the eating women made a difference - increasing and decreasing the participants' desire for liked and disliked foods, respectively, especially in the children.
The researchers speculated that the influence of the women's facial expressions occurred because seeing their expressions led to simulations of those same emotions in the minds of the participants. They further suggested that this process is accentuated in younger children because of the immaturity of their prefrontal cortex.
The study has some obvious weaknesses, acknowledged by the researchers - they didn't measure actual eating behaviour, and the stimuli were photos, as opposed to a real-life dining situation. Nonetheless, they predicted the effects of other people's emotional expressions might be even larger in a more realistic situation and that the results therefore have important implications for the encouragement of children's healthy eating habits. "Adults may unconsciously influence children's food preferences via their facial expressions of pleasure or disgust," they said.
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Barthomeuf, L., Droit-Volet, S., and Rousset, S. (2012). How emotions expressed by adults’ faces affect the desire to eat liked and disliked foods in children compared to adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (2), 253-266 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02033.x
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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Blogging for mental health
To coincide with the Mental Health Month Blog Party organised by the APA, I've collated some highlights from our coverage of mental health issues here at the BPS Research Digest.
What is mental illness? In 2010 I reported on a Psychological Medicine editorial that dissected the definition used by the fourth edition of US psychiatry's diagnostic manual. Another post from 2006 explored differences in the way the public and experts view mental disorders. How we conceive of mental illness isn't only of theoretical interest, it can have an impact on people's lives. For example, this post showed that biological accounts of mental illness may dent patients’ hope and increase stigma.
Mental illness is normal. Several studies I've covered have illustrated just how common mental health problems are. One paper suggested that one in two of us will experience mental difficulties in our life-times. Another asked Who doesn't suffer from paranoia? Other research has shown that psychotic symptoms aren't always pathological and tried to find out how non-problematic symptoms differ from those experienced by patients. Another paper had a similar aim: The same voices, heard differently?
Drug-free treatment is often helpful. Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, there are drug-free ways to help people with schizophrenia, including using CBT. In fact, psychotherapy has a drug-like effect on the brain. In a guest post, Richard Bentall described the treatment of schizophrenia with maximum kindness and minimum medication. Elsewhere, I covered new research showing that fears could be unlearned without the use of drugs. I reported on a computer game that holds promise in helping prevent traumatic flashbacks. I've also uncovered some novel and straightforward approaches to improving mental health, including floral arrangement as a cognitive training tool for schizophrenia and Grab it, bag it, bin it - a new approach to psychological problem solving.
Self-help strategies sometimes backfire. But we shouldn't assume that all interventions, however well-intentioned, will be beneficial. Popular strategies or tools for being happier or more successful can sometimes be harmful, as these posts demonstrate: CBT-based self-help books can do more harm than good. Positive psychology exercises can be harmful for some Why positive fantasies make your dreams less likely to come true. A related feature article in The Psychologist magazine delved into the world of unscrupulous therapies: When therapy causes harm.
Research into the therapeutic process. Lots of research in psychology tries to get to the bottom of the factors that make therapy effective. For example, this paper put cognitive therapy on the couch. Another found that therapy is more effective when psychologists focus on their clients' strengths (yet another showed that successful therapists focus on their clients' strengths). This paper examined those times when clients in therapy show sudden, dramatic improvements. Other papers I've covered have asked some awkward and tricky questions about therapy - for example, is it really true that therapists don't improve with experience? Can therapists tell when their clients have deteriorated? What happens when therapists have the hots for their clients? And what should a therapist do if a client confesses to murder? Other studies looked at therapy from the clients' perspective, for example What do clients think CBT will be like and how is it really?
Mental health research isn't easy. Because mental health problems are so widespread, it's not always easy to conduct properly controlled experiments, as these posts show: Just how non-clinical are so-called non-clinical community samples? and Beware the "super well" - why the controls in psychology research are often too healthy.
Intriguing case studies. I've covered a few of these, such as the boy who thought 9/11 was his fault and the time that a spontaneous panic attack was caught during a brain imaging scan.
Be happy. There's reason for hope. Sometimes mental health problems can have an upside, for example this post suggested that anxiety has benefits. Remember too that most people with a mental disorder are happy If you want to be happier than you are, this study suggested that frequent, mundane positive activities will make you happier, rather than rare, profound events.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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When are two heads better than one?
The Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched invasion of Iraq ... all these historical calamities have in common that they've been blamed on dud group decision making. Bang heads together, it seems, and you dull people's minds. And yet there's the almost-magic "Wisdom of Crowds" effect - average people's verdicts together and you'll arrive at a more accurate answer than any one person would have achieved on their own. How to solve this paradox? A new series of intriguing studies by Asher Koriat provides part of the answer, highlighting the roles played by people's confidence and the type of problem they're tackling.
Across five studies Koriat tasked dozens of participants with answering a mix of forced-choice questions - some were to do with visual attention (e.g. which of two displays of patterns includes an odd-one-out?); others were general knowledge (e.g. which of two European cities has the larger population?); and there were visual judgement questions (e.g. which of two squiggly lines is longer?). The participants were asked to say how how confident they were in each of their answers.
For each round of questions, Koriat paired up the participants "virtually". That is, the partners in a pair didn't have anything to do with each other. But for each pair, Koriat followed the same rule, always taking the answer from the partner who was more confident.
Over a series of questions, Koriat found that always taking the answer from the most confident partner in a pair led to superior performance for that series (69.88 per cent correct on average in one study) compared with always taking the answer from whichever individual had the most impressive overall performance (67.82 per cent correct). In other words, the more confident of two heads working together nearly always outperformed the most proficient individual working on their own. In the first study using visual patterns, this was true for 18 of the 19 dyads. In further analysis, taking the most confident answer from a virtual group of three led to even more impressive performance.
The strategy even worked for people working alone if they were given two chances, a week apart, to provide answers to a series of questions, as well as rating their confidence. Always taking the more confident of their answers led to superior performance overall and was more effective than simply averaging their two answers (see earlier Digest item: Unleash the crowd within).
But here's the all-important caveat. This strategy of taking the answer of the most confident partner only worked for questions for which most people, "the crowd", tend to get the answer right. When the questions were tricky and wrong-footed most people, then the rule was reversed. Take the example of "Which city has the larger population - Zurich or Bern?". Most people get this question wrong - they think it's Bern because that's the capital city, but the correct answer is Zurich. For questions like this, the most effective strategy is actually to always take the answer of the dyad partner who is least confident (doing so beats the average score of the individual with the overall best performance).
Reflecting on these new results, Ralph Hertwig at the University of Basel said there were two important, tantalising questions for future research - is it possible to categorise problems somehow into those that tend to wrong-foot the crowd, and those that don't? Similarly, are there any cues that can be used to recognise in advance whether a problem is of the kind that the crowd gets right (in which case it's best to go with the most confident team member) or wrong (if so, go with the least confident member)?
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Koriat, A. (2012). When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why? Science, 336 (6079), 360-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549
Further reading: The much maligned group brainstorm can aid the combining of ideas.
Three-person groups best for problem-solving.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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The Special Issue Spotter
We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:
Focus on social neuroscience (Nature Neuroscience).
Complexities of mild traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder (virtual issue of Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society).
Spatial neglect and attention (Neuropsychologia).
Neuropsychiatric disorders (Trends in Neurosciences).
Neuropsychiatric disorders (Trends in Cognitive Sciences).
World Autism Awareness Day (virtual special issue from Wiley).
Metacognition: computation, neurobiology and function (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B).
Why has the neuroscientific revolution been so popular? (Australian Journal of Psychology)
Social technologies (Theory and Psychology).
Personality and information processing (European Journal of Personality).
The social signal value of emotions (Cognition and Emotion).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
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