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People’s decisions — good or bad — can be predicted by how big their pupils are moments before they even make the decision, a new study finds.

The research, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, examined the size of people’s pupils (the central dark section of the eye) before they were given a decision-making task (Murphy et al., 2014).

Twenty-six participants looked at a cloud of dots and had to decide in which direction they were moving.

This was designed to mimic the types of perceptual decisions we make in everyday life.

They found that the larger the pupil was before the task, the worse the person subsequently performed.

This is because pupil size is a measure of a person’s arousal: the more aroused they are feeling, the wider their pupils are and the worse they perform on the test.

As with many things in life, the ideal level of arousal for most tasks is somewhere in the middle: when people’s arousal levels are low they are bored and when they are too high, they can’t concentrate.

Some people seem to be permanently too aroused: the researchers found that certain people whose pupils were the largest overall were the least consistent in the decisions they made.

Dr. Peter Murphy, who led the research, said:

“We are constantly required to make decisions about the world we live in.

In this study, we show that how precise and reliable a person is in making a straightforward decision about motion can be predicted by simply measuring their pupil size.

This finding suggests that the reliability with which an individual will make an upcoming decision is at least partly determined by pupil-linked ‘arousal’ or alertness, and furthermore, can potentially be deciphered on the fly.”

You may well ask whether we can actually notice these kinds of subtle changes in other people’s pupil size.

Well, studies show we do actually pick up on these sorts of subtle changes and process them unconsciously, like other aspects of body language.

And now you know, you’ll be peering all the more intently at the size of other people’s pupils!

It's time for Western psychology to recognise that many individuals, and even entire cultures, fear happiness

It's become a mantra of the modern Western world that the ultimate aim of life is to achieve happiness. Self-help blog posts on how to be happy are almost guaranteed popularity (the Digest has its own!). Pro-happiness organisations have appeared, such as Action for Happiness, which aims to "create a happier society for everyone." Topping it all, an increasing number of governments, including in the UK, have started measuring national well-being (seen as a proxy for "happiness") - the argument being that this a potentially more important policy outcome than economic prosperity.

But hang on a minute, say Moshen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers writing in the Journal of Happiness Studies - not everyone wants to be happy. In fact, they point out that many people, including in Western cultures, deliberately dampen their positive moods. Moreover, in many nations, including Iran and New Zealand, many people are actually fearful of happiness, tending to agree with questionnaire items like "I prefer not to be too joyful, because usually joy is followed by sadness".

Looking into the reasons for happiness aversion, Joshanloo and Weijers identify four: believing that being happy will provoke bad things to happen; that happiness will make you a worse person; that expressing happiness is bad for you and others; and that pursuing happiness is bad for you and others. Let's touch on each of these.

Fear that happiness leads to bad outcomes is perhaps most strong in East Asian cultures influenced by Taoism, which posits that "things tend to revert to their opposite". A 2001 study asked participants to choose from a range of life-course graphs and found that Chinese people were more likely than Americans to choose graphs that showed periods of sadness following periods of joy. Other cultures, such as Japan and Iran, believe that happiness can bring misfortune as it causes inattentiveness. Similar fears are sometimes found in the West as reflected in adages such as "what goes up must come down."

Belief that being happy makes you a worse person is rooted in some interpretations of Islam, the reasoning being that it distracts you from God. Joshanloo and Weijers quote the Prophet Muhammad: "were you to know what I know, you would laugh little and weep much" and "avoid much laughter, for much laughter deadens the heart." Another relevant belief here is the idea that being unhappy makes people more creative. Consider this quote from Edward Munch: "They [emotional sufferings] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me ... I want to keep those sufferings."

In relation to the overt expression of happiness, a 2009 study found that Japanese participants frequently mentioned that doing so can harm others, for example by making them envious; Americans rarely held such concerns. In Ifaluk culture in Micronesia, meanwhile, Joshanloo and Weijers note that expressing happiness is "associated with showing off, overexcitement, and failure at doing one's duties."

Finally, the pursuit of happiness is believed by many cultures and philosophies to be harmful to the self and others. Take as an example this passage of Buddhist text: "And with every desire for happiness, out of delusion they destroy their own well-being as if it were their enemy." In Western thought, as far back as Epicurus, warnings are given that the direct pursuit of happiness can backfire on the self, and harm others through excessive self-interest. Also, it's been argued that joy can make the oppressed weak and less likely to fight injustice.

There's a contemporary fixation with happiness in the much of the Western world. Joshanloo and Weijers' counterpoint is that, for various reasons, not everyone wants to happy. From a practical perspective, they say this could seriously skew cross-cultural comparisons of subjective well-being. "It stands to reason," they write, "that a person with an aversion to expressing happiness ... may report lower subjective wellbeing than they would do otherwise." But their concerns go deeper: "There are risks for happiness studies in exporting Western psychology to non-Western cultures without undertaking indigenous analyses, including making invalid cross-cultural comparisons and imposing Western cultural assumptions on other cultures."
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ResearchBlogging.orgJoshanloo, M., & Weijers, D. (2013). Aversion to Happiness Across Cultures: A Review of Where and Why People are Averse to Happiness Journal of Happiness Studies, 15 (3), 717-735 DOI: 10.1007/s10902-013-9489-9

We judge our leaders on how they look, not on how they perform
Imagine if the leaders of the free world were chosen not based on their actual competence but on how competent they look. Such a scenario could be worryingly close to the truth.

John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas presented photos of pairs of competing candidates in the 2002 French parliamentary elections to hundreds of Swiss undergrads, who had no idea who the politicians were. The students were asked to indicate which candidate in each pair was the most competent, and for about 70 per cent of the pairs, the candidate rated as looking most competent was the candidate who had actually won the election. The startling implication is that the real-life voters must also have based their choice of candidate on looks, at least in part.

Moreover, a second experiment asked children aged 5 to 13 years to make the same choice, but in the context of a game in which they needed to select who they would like to captain their ship sailing from Troy to Ithaca. They tended to select for captain those candidates rated earlier as most competent by the undergrads, and again the children's choices tended to retrospectively predict which candidates went on to be victorious in the real election.

For the pair of candidates shown above, 77 per cent children who rated this pair, and 67 per cent of adults, chose Laurent Henart, on the right (the real-life winning candidate), rather than Jean-Jacques Denis on the left.

"These findings suggest that voters are not appropriately weighting performance-based information on political candidates when undertaking one of democracy's most important civic duties," the researchers said.

One possibility is that people's looks do actually correlate with their competence and it's that association that the participants in this study were tapping into. However, Antonakis and Dalgas note that past research shows there is no link between competence and appearance, at least not in terms of IQ.

Link to related Digest posts, and see here.
Link to Science podcast with study author.
Image copyright: Science/AAAS
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J. Antonakis, O. Dalgas (2009). Predicting Elections: Child's Play. Science, 323. In Press.

Workplace research through the 20th Century suggested that selecting for intelligence is the best way to identify good performers. General mental ability (GMA), a popular recruitment measure that maps closely to the colloquial meaning of "intelligence", is strongly correlated with on-the job performance, well ahead of any other single measure.

This consistent finding came from studies that mostly defined job performance as carrying out the duties expected in that role. Although intuitive, this neglects two types of "extra-role" behaviours identified and studied in more recent years: citizenship behaviours, such as volunteering time or treating colleagues with courtesy; and counter-productive work behaviours, such as spreading rumours, shirking, or theft. Now a new meta-analysis suggests that GMA isn't the best predictor of these crucial aspects of performance. In fact, intelligence may be of little use in predicting who will behave badly at work - although it may predict who can get away with it.

The meta-analysis winnowed the available literature down to 35 relevant studies that looked at citizenship and counterproductive behaviours in real organisations. Intelligence (GMA) was correlated with engaging in more citizenship behaviours, but the association was far weaker than between intelligence and traditional task-based measures of performance. The researchers led by Erik Gonzalez-Mulé then cross-compared their results with previous meta-analyses focused on personality, and concluded that personality and GMA each account for about half the variance in citizenship behaviours. Put another way, you're just as likely to do good because you're inclined that way, as you are because you're smart.

Turning to counterproductive workplace behaviours, the authors predicted a relationship here with intelligence/GMA based on evidence from criminology that’s shown helping people see the consequences of their actions has an inhibitory effect on aberrant behaviour. In fact, the new analysis found no association between intelligence and aberrant behaviour. It's possible that this discrepancy with the criminology findings is because of differences in samples: there may be low-intelligence individuals who are more disposed to malfeasance, but they are underrepresented in workplaces because of adolescent anti-social issues, such as truancy or criminal behaviour. Meanwhile, personality, particularly the trait of agreeableness (but also conscientiousness and openness to experience) was strongly associated with unhelpful behaviours at work.

An interesting footnote - when self-ratings of counterproductive behaviour were removed from the analysis (leaving only third-party ratings), the results showed a significant relationship between intelligence and (fewer) unhelpful workplace behaviours. This means that smarter people report engaging in just as much bad behaviour as the rest of us, but others, such as work supervisors, notice less of it.

In summary, while GMA is the undisputed king of predicting better task performance, it holds equal footing with personality in predicting helpful, altruistic work behaviour, and cedes the ground almost entirely to personality for bad behaviour. Looking at performance as a composite of these three areas, Mulé's team conclude that when it comes to workplace selection, GMA still has a prominent role, but a much diminished one.

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Gonzalez-Mulé E, Mount MK, & Oh IS (2014). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between General Mental Ability and Nontask Performance. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 25133304

There's a best practice guide for teachers, produced by the Association of School Psychologists in the US, that states praise is best given to pupils in private. This advice is not based on experimental research - there hasn't been any - but on surveys of student preferences, and on the rationale that pupils could be embarrassed by receiving praise in public.

Now, in the first study of its kind, John Blaze and his colleagues have systematically compared the effect of public and private praise (also known as "loud" and "quiet" praise) on classroom behaviour. They found that praise had a dramatic beneficial effect on pupils' behaviour, and it didn't matter whether the praise was private or public.

The research was conducted at four high-school public classrooms in rural south-eastern United States (the equivalent to state schools in the UK). The classes were mixed-sex, with a mixture of mostly Caucasian and African American pupils, with between 16 and 25 pupils in each class. The children were aged 14 to 16. Three of the teachers were teaching English, the other taught Transition to Algebra.

The teachers were given training in appropriate praise: it must be contingent on good behaviour; make clear to the pupil why they are being praised; immediate; and effort-based. During the test sessions of teaching, the teachers carried a buzzer on their belt that prompted them, once every two minutes, to deliver praise to one of their pupils, either loudly so the whole class could hear (in the loud condition) or discreetly, by a whisper in the ear or pat on the shoulder, so that hopefully only the child knew they were being praised (in the quiet condition). For comparison, there were also baseline teaching sessions in which the teachers simply carried out their teaching in their usual style.

Trained observers stationed for 20-minute sessions in the classrooms monitored the teachers' praise-giving and the behaviour of the pupils across the different conditions. They found that frequent praise increased pupils' on-task behaviours, such as reading or listening to the teacher, by 31 per cent compared with baseline, and this improvement didn't vary according to whether the praise was private or public. Frequent praise of either manner also reduced naughty behaviours by nearly 20 per cent.

Blaze and his team said that the debate over praise will likely continue, but they stated their results are clear: "both loud and quiet forms of praise are effective tools that can have dramatic effects at the secondary level." A weakness of the study is that the researchers didn't monitor the teachers' use of reprimands, which likely reduced as they spent more time delivering praise.

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Blaze JT, Olmi DJ, Mercer SH, Dufrene BA, & Tingstom DH (2014). Loud versus quiet praise: A direct behavioral comparison in secondary classrooms. Journal of school psychology, 52 (4), 349-60 PMID: 25107408

It's possible to "forget" unwanted habits

New research shows that we can weaken and even undo practised habits by deliberately deciding to forget them.

Gesine Dreisbach and Karl-Heinz Bäuml from Regensburg University first instilled new habits in their participants by presenting them with German words and training them over many trials to make the same response to each word - a left-handed key-press for half of them, a right-hand response for the remainder.

Later, participants had to categorise the same words by gender, with key-presses again used to make the categorisations. Crucially, half the words called for the same key-presses as had been trained for those words earlier, whereas the others required a key press that was the opposite to the earlier training. Reaction time differences between matched and mismatched trials tell us how much the earlier learned habit interfered with the current task (a similar philosophy to the well-known Stroop test).

Half the participants were run normally through this process and showed interference in the gender task – making key responses that were against the grain of the earlier training slowed them down, as you’d expect. The other half of the participants, once they'd completed the initial training, were confronted with an apparent computer crash and an apologetic experimenter told them to forget all about what they'd done so far. This group weren't held back by habits on the later task: in fact, interference from the earlier training was totally eliminated.

A second experiment was similar, but this time habits were formed in a less arbitrary way. Instead of words, participants categorised numbers from one to nine as low (left key) or high (right key) in size: this left-right, low-high mapping is how we naturally consider numbers in space. In the follow-up task, which this time involved odd/even categorisation, participants in the forgetting condition did show some interference on mismatched trials, but significantly less than the other participants. Dreisbach and Bäuml suggest that habits may be harder to forget when they are formed using meaningful constructs, whereas fully arbitrary ones can be shed more easily.

This research demonstrates an intriguing proof-of-concept, suggesting that we can decide at will to forget newly-formed habits (just as we can do to some extent with episodic memories). It’s possible that this could translate to more ingrained habits such as biting nails or picking your nose. After all, we know that our implicit memories are re-writable, making them open to interventions that weaken them. A big question for future research is whether directed forgetting will also be effective for habits that are pleasurable.

Dreisbach, G., & Bauml, K. (2014). Don't Do It Again! Directed Forgetting of Habits Psychological Science, 25 (6), 1242-1248 DOI: 10.1177/0956797614526063

It's time for Western psychology to recognise that many individuals, and even entire cultures, fear happiness

It's become a mantra of the modern Western world that the ultimate aim of life is to achieve happiness. Self-help blog posts on how to be happy are almost guaranteed popularity (the Digest has its own!). Pro-happiness organisations have appeared, such as Action for Happiness, which aims to "create a happier society for everyone." Topping it all, an increasing number of governments, including in the UK, have started measuring national well-being (seen as a proxy for "happiness") - the argument being that this a potentially more important policy outcome than economic prosperity.

But hang on a minute, say Moshen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers writing in the Journal of Happiness Studies - not everyone wants to be happy. In fact, they point out that many people, including in Western cultures, deliberately dampen their positive moods. Moreover, in many nations, including Iran and New Zealand, many people are actually fearful of happiness, tending to agree with questionnaire items like "I prefer not to be too joyful, because usually joy is followed by sadness".

Looking into the reasons for happiness aversion, Joshanloo and Weijers identify four: believing that being happy will provoke bad things to happen; that happiness will make you a worse person; that expressing happiness is bad for you and others; and that pursuing happiness is bad for you and others. Let's touch on each of these.

Fear that happiness leads to bad outcomes is perhaps most strong in East Asian cultures influenced by Taoism, which posits that "things tend to revert to their opposite". A 2001 study asked participants to choose from a range of life-course graphs and found that Chinese people were more likely than Americans to choose graphs that showed periods of sadness following periods of joy. Other cultures, such as Japan and Iran, believe that happiness can bring misfortune as it causes inattentiveness. Similar fears are sometimes found in the West as reflected in adages such as "what goes up must come down."

Belief that being happy makes you a worse person is rooted in some interpretations of Islam, the reasoning being that it distracts you from God. Joshanloo and Weijers quote the Prophet Muhammad: "were you to know what I know, you would laugh little and weep much" and "avoid much laughter, for much laughter deadens the heart." Another relevant belief here is the idea that being unhappy makes people more creative. Consider this quote from Edward Munch: "They [emotional sufferings] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me ... I want to keep those sufferings."

In relation to the overt expression of happiness, a 2009 study found that Japanese participants frequently mentioned that doing so can harm others, for example by making them envious; Americans rarely held such concerns. In Ifaluk culture in Micronesia, meanwhile, Joshanloo and Weijers note that expressing happiness is "associated with showing off, overexcitement, and failure at doing one's duties."

Finally, the pursuit of happiness is believed by many cultures and philosophies to be harmful to the self and others. Take as an example this passage of Buddhist text: "And with every desire for happiness, out of delusion they destroy their own well-being as if it were their enemy." In Western thought, as far back as Epicurus, warnings are given that the direct pursuit of happiness can backfire on the self, and harm others through excessive self-interest. Also, it's been argued that joy can make the oppressed weak and less likely to fight injustice.

There's a contemporary fixation with happiness in the much of the Western world. Joshanloo and Weijers' counterpoint is that, for various reasons, not everyone wants to happy. From a practical perspective, they say this could seriously skew cross-cultural comparisons of subjective well-being. "It stands to reason," they write, "that a person with an aversion to expressing happiness ... may report lower subjective wellbeing than they would do otherwise." But their concerns go deeper: "There are risks for happiness studies in exporting Western psychology to non-Western cultures without undertaking indigenous analyses, including making invalid cross-cultural comparisons and imposing Western cultural assumptions on other cultures." _________________________________

Joshanloo, M., & Weijers, D. (2013). Aversion to Happiness Across Cultures: A Review of Where and Why People are Averse to Happiness Journal of Happiness Studies, 15 (3), 717-735 DOI: 10.1007/s10902-013-9489-9

---------------------------------------- FADING AFFECT BIAS
1. Around the world, things look better in hindsight
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Human memory has a pervasive emotional bias – and it’s probably a good thing. That’s according to psychologists Timothy Ritchie and colleagues.

In a new study published in the journal Memory, the researchers say that people from diverse cultures experience the ‘fading affect bias’ (FAB), the tendency for negative emotions to fade away more quickly than positive ones in our memories.

The FAB has been studied previously, but the most previous research looked at the memories of American college students. Therefore, it wasn’t clear whether the FAB was a universal phenomenon, or just a peculiarity of that group.

In the new study, the authors pooled together 10 samples from different groups of people around the world, ranging from Ghanaian students, to older German citizens (who were asked to recollect the fall of the Berlin Wall). In total, 562 people were included.

The participants were asked to recall a number of events in their lives, both positive and negative. For each incident, they rated the emotions that they felt at the time it happened, and then the emotions that they felt in the present when remembering that event.

Ritchie and colleagues found that every cultural group included in the study experienced the FAB. In all of these samples, negative emotions associated with remembered events faded to a greater degree than positive emotions did. Importantly, there was no evidence that this effect changed with people’s age: it seems to be a lifelong phenomenon.

The authors conclude that our ability to look back on events with rose-tinted spectacles might be important for our mental health, as it could help us to adapt and move on from adversity: ‘We believe that this phenomenon is part of a set of cognitive processes that foster emotion regulation and enable psychological resilience.’

However, the authors admit that their study had some limitations. While the participants were diverse geographically and culturally, they all had to speak fluent English, because all of the testing was carried out in that language. In order to confirm that the FAB is truly universal, it will be important to examine it in other languages. Ritchie and colleagues also note that despite this apparent universality of the phenomenon, ‘We do not intend to imply that the FAB occurs for the same reasons around the world.’
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Ritchie TD, Batteson TJ, Bohn A, Crawford MT, Ferguson GV, Schrauf RW, Vogl RJ, & Walker WR (2014). A pancultural perspective on the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory. Memory (Hove, England) PMID: 24524255

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4. Getting to grips with implicit bias
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Implicit attitudes are one of the hottest topics in social psychology. Now a massive new study directly compares methods for changing them. The results are both good and bad for those who believe that some part of prejudice is our automatic, uncontrollable, reactions to different social groups.

The implicit association test (IAT) is a simple task you can complete online at Project Implicit which records the speed of your responses when sorting targets, such as white and black faces, into different categories, such as good and bad. Even people who disavow any prejudiced beliefs or feelings can have IAT scores which show they find it easier, for example, to associate white faces with goodness and black faces with badness – a so called 'implicit bias'.

The history of implicit bias research is controversial – with arguments over what exactly an implicit bias means, how it should be measured and whether they can be changed [see also this recent Digest item]. Now a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology reports the results of a competition which challenged researchers to design brief interventions aimed at changing people's implicit biases. The interventions had to be completed online, via the Project Implicit website, and take less than five minutes. Samples of 300-400 people were then randomly assigned to take each intervention, allow a high statistical power to estimate the effect of the intervention on IAT scores.

Overall 17 interventions were tested, and nine appeared to work, while eight had estimated effect sizes close to zero. The paper reports that interventions which focused on trying to shift the underlying attitude of the participants fared badly. Interventions such as 'instilling a sense of common humanity', 'training empathetic responding', encouraging taking the perspective of the outgroup or imagining positive interracial contact all seemed not to work.

These failures to shift IAT scores suggest that the IAT measures something which is relative stable – a real thing in our cognitive makeup, and something that can be measured in a way that can't be as easily manipulated as self-report.

The interventions which did work included a some that targeted response strategies, including a straight 'Faking the IAT' intervention, a practicing the IAT intervention and several other priming and training interventions. That these worked is also both good and bad news. That IAT scores can be shifted by faking and training is bad news for the reliability of the measure, but there is some comfort in knowing that the successful interventions all relied on sophisticated knowledge of how the IAT worked – most participants in implicit bias studies wouldn't come up with these strategies on their own.

The big unknown is how long term any of the effects are. It could turn out that sustained change on implicit biases requires longer than five minutes intervention, but with more sustained interventions it really is possible to shift the underlying attitudes, and not just people's response strategies.
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Lai CK, Marini M, Lehr SA, Cerruti C, Shin JE, Joy-Gaba JA, Ho AK, Teachman BA, Wojcik SP, Koleva SP, Frazier RS, Heiphetz L, Chen EE, Turner RN, Haidt J, Kesebir S, Hawkins CB, Schaefer HS, Rubichi S, Sartori G, Dial CM, Sriram N, Banaji MR, & Nosek BA (2014). Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: I. A Comparative Investigation of 17 Interventions. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 24661055

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4. Can cognitive training boost self-control?
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I’m someone who when sat in front of a fast food menu will always make a bee line for the most artery-clogging burger and a large fries. At the same time, I’m fascinated by those around me who will happily order “regular” or “small” servings (or even the dreaded “healthy” alternative). How do they resist temptation? What distinguishes these intriguing individuals from the rest of us – and, by the way, where can I get some more of that prized self-control?

I’m not alone. Understanding what self-control is and how it works has fascinated cognitive psychologists for decades, and more recently has led to the idea that perhaps we can harness our knowledge of cognition to temper compulsive behaviours. With over 50% of adults in Europe now either overweight or obese [http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/9789264183896-en/02/07/index.html?itemId=/content/chapter/9789264183896-26-en], and numbers rising by 1% per annum [http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/98243/E89858.pdf], even a modest effect of cognitive training could have major socioeconomic benefits. And that’s not even considering the potential it has for managing other addictions, such as alcohol dependence, smoking or gambling.

Cognitive theories tell us that one way of enhancing self-control may be to change the automatic associations we build throughout our lives between the stimuli around us and our responses. In 2011, Dr Katrijn Houben from the University of Maastricht provided support for this idea [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21450264] by showing that training people to stop simple motor actions to unhealthy foods reduced consumption of those foods in a lab setting. Other studies [http://cpx.sagepub.com/content/1/2/192] have shown how this type of training can encourage people to view ‘inhibited’ foods as more negative and less desirable.

So far so good, but there’s a problem: to date, almost all the studies on cognitive control training have relied on artificial settings, where participants do bogus taste tests or other contrived ‘eating tasks’ in the lab. This isn’t so much an oversight of existing work as it is an inevitable limitation within a budding field – before we can test interventions in the real world we need to know how they work under controlled conditions and whether they have any promise at all. But, of course, lab experiments tell us only half the picture. We won’t know if our promising, theoretically motivated interventions have the goods until we unleash them.

Now an ambitious new study by Dutch psychologist Harm Veling and colleagues has done just this, asking whether training has benefits on actual weight loss. Over a four-week period, 113 participants took part in an internet trial in which they could be exposed to different forms of training. One type, called go/no-go training, required them to respond to images of foods but to restrain those responses when they saw palatable, unhealthy foods. Another, called implementation intentions training, relied more on conscious effort, asking participants to rehearse mental rules for avoiding unhealthy eating – for instance, “When I open the refrigerator, I will think of dieting”.

Reassuringly, both methods worked when compared against various control conditions, leading to an average weight loss of about 1 kg per person. The results also revealed some interesting effects of individual differences. Go/no-go training worked best in people with a higher body mass index [http://www.nhs.uk/Tools/Pages/Healthyweightcalculator.aspx], whereas implementation intentions were most effective in people who already had strong goals about losing weight. This suggests that by tailoring the training to individual characteristics, we may be able to make it more effective.

Losing 1 kg in a month may not sound like much, but what Veling’s study contributes is a proof of principle that cognitive control training can be taken outside the lab and produce measurable benefits. That alone provides a strong motivation for continuing this line of research, both inside the lab and beyond.

Veling H, van Koningsbruggen GM, Aarts H, and Stroebe W (2014). Targeting impulsive processes of eating behavior via the internet. Effects on body weight. Appetite, doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2014.03.014.

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2. I mean, you know, I'm a conscientious person: Links between use of "speech fillers" and personality

by Christian Jarrett
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Few people are capable of speaking spontaneously without, er, you know, pausing and using filler words every now and again. However, we all differ in the extent to which we do this, and now a study by US researchers has examined how use of filler words varies according to age, gender and personality.

Charlyn Laserna and her colleagues used recordings of everyday speech collected from hundreds of participants in earlier studies performed between 2003 and 2013. They specifically looked at utterances of uh, um (known as "filled pauses") and I mean, you know, and like (known as "discourse markers").

The purpose of these kinds of words is not straightforward - they can be a sign of being tongue tied, but they can also be a way to keep hold of one's turn in a conversation, to form a bridge between phrases or sections of conversation, to seek consensus, or convey uncertainty.

Use of discourse markers was more frequent among younger people, and among women versus men. However, the gender difference was only present in teen and student participants, and had disappeared from age 23 and up. Discourse markers were also used more frequently by people with a more conscientious personality. Uhs and ums became less common with age, but their use was not related to gender or personality. This last point is somewhat surprising since such hesitations are often assumed to be a sign of anxiety.

Why should use of phrases such as "like" and "you know" be related to conscientiousness? One possibility is that this is a false positive result - the researchers performed multiple comparisons looking for links between personality and word use, and this is known to increase the risk of spurious findings. However, assuming the finding is reliable, the researchers believe the explanation is that "conscientious people are generally more thoughtful and aware of themselves and their surroundings," and their use of discourse markers shows they have a "desire to share or rephrase opinions to recipients."

Stated slightly differently, discourse fillers are a sign of more considered speech, and so it makes sense that conscientious people use them more often. This is a result that may surprise some, including the veteran actress Miriam Margoyles, who publicly castigated pop star Wil.I.Am for his overuse of "like". The researchers didn't propose any explanation for why age and gender are related to use of discourse fillers.

Laserna and her team believe their findings are useful because they suggest that people's habits of speech can be used to make inferences about their personality, age and gender. "From a methodological standpoint, the use of discourse markers can provide a quick behavioural measure of personality traits," they said. So, you know, don't be put off next time you hear someone, like, using discourse fillers. I mean, it could actually be a sign that they're conscientious.

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Laserna, C., Seih, Y., & Pennebaker, J. (2014). Um . . . Who Like Says You Know: Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33 (3), 328-338 DOI: 10.1177/0261927X14526993

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/women-young-people-and-conscientious.html

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3. What's the difference between a happy life and a meaningful one?
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For some it's lying on a sun-drenched beach sipping sangria, for others it's wallowing in a cosy cocoon munching on chocolate and playing video games. Many people will admit that these or other immediate indulgences are what makes them happy. And yet, even given the freedom and resources to live a life of hedonism, many of us find it's not enough - we want to have meaning in our lives too.

Unfortunately, what we mean by "meaning" has largely been neglected by psychologists. But now Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have conducted an in-depth online survey with 397 adults (68 per cent female; average age 36) and a follow-up with 124 students (45 per cent female; average age 21). The researchers tapped the participants' happiness levels, and their feelings of having a meaningful life, three times over a month. They also asked them a raft of other questions with the aim of identifying factors that were related to happiness but not meaningfulness, or vice versa.

Although happiness and meaningfulness tend to go together (they correlated at .63 and .70 where 1 would be a perfect match), Baumeister's team made some thought-provoking discoveries about ways they differ. People who rated their lives as easier, who had good health, enough money to buy what they wanted, were more short-term oriented, felt connected to others, and experienced low stress and worry, also tended to rate themselves as happier. Yet these same factors had either no association with meaningfulness or the opposite association.

In contrast to the findings for happiness, people who described their lives as having more meaning tended to say: that they spent more time thinking about the past and future; that they had experienced more negative events in their lives; expected to do a lot of deep thinking; engaged in activities that were true to themselves; and they reported more stress, anxiety and worry.

Some of the results were particularly telling. Being more of a taker was related to greater happiness but less meaningfulness, whereas being more of a giver was linked with less happiness but more meaningfulness. Related to that, spending time with one's children was linked with more meaningfulness but had no correlation with happiness. Arguing, if it was seen as reflecting oneself, was linked to less happiness but more meaningfulness. In fact, pursuing any activities that reflect the self was linked to more meaningfulness but not happiness. Feeling socially connected was linked with happiness and meaningfulness, but time spent with loved ones was only relevant to meaningfulness (perhaps, the researchers surmised, because "loved ones can be difficult at times.")

Baumeister's team concluded that the highly meaningful but relatively unhappy life has "received relatively little attention and even less respect" to date. "But people who sacrifice their personal pleasures in order to participate constructively in society may make substantial contributions," they said. "Cultivating and encouraging such people despite their unhappiness could be a goal worthy of positive psychology."

The researchers admitted their "tentative" study has limitations - they were not able to explore the causal roots of happiness and meaningfulness, and by studying so many possible factors there was a significant risk of associations appearing purely by chance. We could also add that the findings are culturally specific to North America, and they are based on the participants' subjective interpretation of what happiness and meaningfulness mean. It also seemed a shame that there was no cross reference to Daniel Kahneman's distinction between the "remembering self" and the "experiencing self". Nonetheless, this study certainly makes a useful starting point for discussion and future investigation. "This project was intended to generate ideas," the researchers said, "and future work would be desirable to verify and build on them."
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Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Journal of Positive Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.830764

Author weblink: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/baumeister.dp.html

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2. Does picturing yourself eating fruit increase your fruit intake?
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Health experts say we aren't eating enough fruit. Perhaps psychology can help. Try this. Picture yourself eating a portion of fruit tomorrow - an apple, say, or a couple of plums. Take your time. Focus on the colours, the consistency, the flavour. Visualise where you are at the time, and what you are doing.

Do you think this simple imagery task will have increased the likelihood you will eat fruit tomorrow? A new study led by Catherine Adams attempted to find out. Over two hundred volunteers were split into three groups. One performed the fruit imagery task, another group did the same thing but for a biscuit bar of their choice (examples they were given included flapjacks, Kellogg's Elevenses and Jaffa Cake bars), and a final group did not perform an imagery task.

Straight after, the participants answered questions about their food preferences, future consumption intentions, and they were offered a reward from a basket of fruits and biscuit bars. Two days later they were also asked by email whether they had any eaten fruit or a biscuit bar the day before (35 per cent of them answered this).

Once the researchers controlled for background factors (such as the possibility there were more fruit lovers in one condition or the other), they found that the fruit imagery task made no difference to participants' intentions to eat fruit, no difference to their choice of fruit as a reward, nor their consumption of fruit the next day, as compared with the control group who didn't perform the imagery. For the biscuit bar group, the imagery task increased their intentions to eat biscuit bars in the future, but didn't actually alter their consumption (as compared against the no-imagery control group).

"These effects suggest different effects for different visualised behaviours," the researchers said. "Further investigation is needed before recommending visualisation for increasing fruit consumption."

As the researchers' acknowledged, there are some issues with the study that mean caution is needed in interpreting the results. For instance, just one brief imagery session may well be inadequate. Also, other research suggests imagery works best when combined with other strategies, such as "if-then" implementation plans (e.g. If I am hungry, then I will snack on some fruit). The response rate to the follow-up email was also disappointing, and bear in mind that participants may have felt the food they chose immediately after the imagery was a form of reward, and therefore this behaviour may not reflect their usual eating choices. These issues show how difficult health behaviour research can be.
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Adams C, Rennie L, Uskul AK, and Appleton KM (2013). Visualising future behaviour: Effects for snacking on biscuit bars, but no effects for snacking on fruit. Journal of health psychology PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24217063

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1. It's easier than you think to get people to commit bad deeds
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When asking someone to do something unethical, we underestimate what a difficult position we've put them in. New research suggests that to avoid social discomfort, many people will agree to perform a bad deed rather than say no.

Vanessa Bohns and her colleagues first asked 52 student participants (31 women) to estimate how many people they'd have to approach on campus in order to get three people to tell a white lie. The lie was to sign a form saying the participant had given them a verbal introduction to a new university course, when really he/she had done no such thing. After making the estimate, the participants went out on campus to test their persuasiveness.

On average, the participants thought they'd have to ask 8.47 people before 3 agreed; in reality they needed on average to ask just 4.39. In all, 91 per cent of the participants overestimated how many people they'd need to approach.

A second study was similar but this time 25 participants estimated how many people they'd need to ask before 3 agreed to vandalise a library book by writing the word "pickle" inside in pen (ostensibly as part of a prank the participant was involved in). The participants' average estimate was that they'd need to ask 10.73 people on campus; in fact they needed only to approach an average of 4.7 people before 3 agreed to this task. Eighty-seven per cent of participants underestimated how compliant people would be.

The final two studies involved hundreds of people recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk online survey website. The participants were to imagine they were either the "actor," the "instigator," or a neutral party in a range of hypothetical scenarios involving such things as buying beer for underage kids, illegally downloading a movie, claiming expenses on personal dinners and so on.

The key finding was that people playing the role of actor said they'd feel a lot more uncomfortable if a friend or colleague (the instigator) nudged them toward behaving unethically (e.g. by saying it's stupid to pay for a movie you can get for free), compared with advising them to behave ethically. By contrast, those participants playing the role of instigator, or a neutral party, did not anticipate that the actor would experience this difference in social discomfort depending on the nature of the advice they received.

This result fits the researchers' belief, that the reason we underestimate how willing other people will be to comply with our unethical requests is because of a failure to take their perspective. The "truly startling" finding from this work, the researchers said, is not how many people are willing to lie or vandalise, but rather "the lack of awareness people appear to have of this tendency when they are in a position to influence someone else's ethical behaviour."

Other possible reasons for the results, Bohns and her colleagues suggested, are that recipients of unethical requests reframe them as prosocial acts - after all, they're helping someone out - or maybe their compliance is simply a way to win popularity. Future research could examine these and other possible explanations.

This new research has echoes of Stanley Milgram's classic work. His students and colleagues dramatically underestimated how many participants would be willing to obey a scientist and administer a deadly electric shock. Thankfully there's also a positive twist to the phenomena documented here: similar past research (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18605856) has shown that we also underestimate how willing people will be to comply with our requests that they help in prosocial ways - such as lending their phone, or giving money to charity.
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Bohns VK, Roghanizad MM, and Xu AZ (2013). Underestimating Our Influence Over Others' Unethical Behavior and Decisions. Personality and social psychology bulletin PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24327670

Author weblink: http://uwaterloo.ca/management-sciences/about/people/vbohns

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6. Are you more likely to click headlines that are phrased as a question?
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In the competition for readers' mouse clicks, a favoured trick is to phrase headlines as questions. This isn't an Internet innovation. As a way to grab attention, question headlines have been recommended by editors and marketeers for decades. But what is new, is the easy ability today to measure how often readers choose to click a headline. For a new paper, researchers in Norway have used Twitter to find out if question headlines really do entice more clicks.

Linda Lai and Audun Farbrot used a real science communication Twitter feed that had 6,350 followers at the time of the study. Real stories were tweeted to these followers twice, an hour apart. The first tweet used a statement headline, such as "Power corrupts". The second tweet, referring to the same story, was phrased as a question that was either self-referencing, as in "Is your boss intoxicated by power?" or non-self-referencing, as in "Are bosses intoxicated by power?"

Lai and Farbrot found that self-referencing question headlines were clicked on average 175 per cent more often than statement headlines (this advantage dropped to 150 per cent for non-self-referencing question headlines). The difference in clicks for question and statement headlines was statistically significant, but the difference between the self-referencing and non-self-referencing headlines was not.

A follow-up study was similar but was conducted via the Norwegian equivalent of Ebay, known as Finn.no. Lai and Farbrot posted adverts for an iPhone, a couch, a TV and a washing machine using either statement headlines or question headlines (self-referencing or not), such as: "For sale: Black iPhone4 16GB"; "Anyone need a new iPhone4?"; or "Is this your new iPhone4?"

Overall, across the four products, non-self-referencing question headlines were clicked on 137 per cent more often on average than statement headlines; this rose to 257 per cent more often for self-referencing question headlines. This time the difference between the two types of question headline was statistically significant. This overall benefit of question headlines was observed despite one anomaly that the researchers were unable to explain - question headlines for washing machines actually led to fewer clicks than statement headlines.

Lai and Farbrot cautioned that they've only investigated the power of question headlines in a limited context. Another potential criticism of their work is surely that some of the question and statement headlines may have differed in other ways besides their quizzical status. In the previous example about bosses, for example, the question headlines were longer and referenced the concept of "intoxication" whereas the statement headline did not. Assuming questions really do provoke more clicks than statements do, another weakness of this paper is that it doesn't tell us anything about why this is the case.

These issues aside, the clear take-out from this research is that you should phrase your headlines as questions, especially self-referencing ones, if you want to attract more clicks. "The combined strategy [of question headlines and self-referencing] seems to represent a useful tool for practitioners in attracting readers to their Internet-based communications," the researchers said. However, an issue they don't address is what happens if headline writers heed this message and adopt question headlines universally. Perhaps then statement headlines would appear more original and distinctive and attract more clicks. What do you think?
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Linda Lai, and Audun Farbrot (2013). What makes you click? The effect of question headlines on readership in computer-mediated communication. Social Influence DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2013.847859

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5. Physical effort fuels a feeling of ownership over our movements
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When you move your body, how do you know that it was "you" who chose to move it? One answer comes from a computational perspective. Your brain builds expectations (known as a "forward model") about the outcomes of your planned movements, and when sensory information matches these predictions, this suggests your movement was internally generated. But that still leaves the mystery of how you acquire a feeling of subjective ownership. How do you know you willed the movement to happen?

A theory with roots in early nineteenth-century philosophy states that the subjective feeling of effort is crucial to this sense of agency. Toil makes a movement our own. Now a team of experimental psychologists has used modern methods to put this classic idea to the test.

Led by Jelle Demanet and Paul Muhle-Karbe at Ghent University, the clever study took advantage of an implicit marker of volition called "intentional binding". This is the way the sensory consequences of our voluntary actions are perceived as having occurred closer in time to our action than they really did. If you deliberately flick a switch to make a light come on, intentional binding reduces the delay you perceive between your action and the light onset. Importantly for this study, increased intentional binding would be an indication that a movement felt more volitional.

Thirty-six undergrads (8 men) took part. On each trial they watched a second hand rotating on a clock and pressed the space bar on a keyboard at a time of their choosing. A quarter of a second later, a beep sounded. Depending on the experimental condition, the students' task was to say what time was on the clock when they pressed the bar or when they heard the beep. Crucially, the students did all this while pulling with their other hand on either a high or low-resistance latex band of the kind that are used for gym work.

Here's the key finding: When the band was higher resistance - i.e. it took more effort to keep pulling on it - the students showed more evidence of intentional binding. That is, they either perceived the timing of their button clicks as later, or they perceived the beeps as having occurred earlier, as compared with when the band was low resistance. Both these perceptions are signs of increased intentional binding - the sense that the action and its sensory consequence occurred closer together in time. This implies that when the students were exerting more physical effort, they perceived greater wilful control over their button presses, which manifested as increased intentional binding. This is despite the fact that the extra effort was being spent on a different, task-irrelevant movement.

In contrast, the strength of the resistance bands made no difference to students' judgments about the timing of a button press or a beep when these events occurred on their own (as they did in a number of control trials). This shows the perceptual consequences of greater effort were specific to the intentional binding effect, they didn't just reduce the students' all-round accuracy.

The results provide experimental support for the nineteenth-century idea that feelings of effort fuel our sense of agency. Demanet and his colleagues said their findings also build on past research showing that our thoughts too feel more intentional when they require more effort. "In addition, this finding demonstrates the potential utility of using effort manipulations to study abnormal agency attributions in patients with schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease," they said.
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Demanet J, Muhle-Karbe PS, Lynn MT, Blotenberg I, and Brass M (2013). Power to the will: How exerting physical effort boosts the sense of agency. Cognition, 129 (3), 574-8 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24060604

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1. Low self-esteem and scared of death? Try hugging a teddy
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Teddy bears and cuddly "haptic" jackets could be the solution to existential angst for people with low self-esteem. That's according to a team of psychologists based in Amsterdam who say that people with low self-belief are unable to use meaning in their lives to protect against fear of death, as other more confident individuals do. But on the plus side, the psychologists say that touch can provide the less confident with visceral comfort.

"Although the thought of the body's mortality fuels people's existential concerns," Sander Koole and his colleagues write, "the body itself may help people come to terms with their deepest fears."

What's their evidence? For an initial study, a female experimenter passed a pair of questionnaires measuring death angst and self-esteem to each of 61 participants (35 men) who took part. If she touched a participant gently on the back for one second as she passed them the papers, then afterwards they tended to report having less fear of death, as compared with if no physical contact was made. But crucially, this was only the case for participants with low self-esteem.

The researchers said this shows touch provides existential security to people with low self-esteem. Unfortunately, other explanations were not examined. For example, no information was provided about the experimenter's attractiveness, nor about the participants' loneliness or mood. Differences in male and female participants were not explored.

A second study was a bolt-on to the first. An additional 59 participants underwent the same procedure except they were asked about their fear of dentists rather than of death. A gentle touch from the experimenter made no difference to the dental fears of any of these participants, whether they had low self-esteem or not. This helps make the case that the effect of touch in the first study was specific to existential angst.

Next, 50 participants were asked to estimate the value of a metre-high teddy bear enclosed in a box and viewed through a plexiglass panel. Those who'd first been reminded of death and who had low self-esteem put a price on the bear of €23. In contrast, participants with high self-esteem who were reminded of death, and all participants not reminded of death, valued the teddy at just €13. This shows that thoughts of death "increased the desire for touch among individuals with low self-esteem," the researchers said.

Unfortunately we can't be confident this is true. Because there were no control conditions in which participants rated the value of other objects, we can't know if low self-esteem individuals reminded of death wouldn't have placed a higher value on any product.

In the last study, Koole and his team used an indirect measure of existential angst - people's racism. Past research has shown that death angst can make us more biased towards our in-group and more prejudiced towards perceived outsiders. Consistent with this, Koole and his colleagues found that low self-esteem Dutch participants (but not those with high self-esteem) reminded of death showed more evidence of prejudice when rating a typical Dutch person or a typical Muslim. But this was not the case if the low self-esteem participants were given the chance to touch a teddy bear as opposed to just look at it.

The researchers interpret this last result as showing that touching the bear reduced the low self-esteem participants' death angst, and so they showed less prejudice towards Muslims. It's a shame that the effect of handling other objects was not examined because we can't know for sure if the effect was due to the visceral comfort of touch or to the interest and distraction of handling any new product.

Based on what they admitted were "preliminary findings", Koole and his team suggested simulated touch could be an effective intervention for people with low self-esteem who have existential worries. Sceptical readers may feel their conclusions are premature and that more robust studies are required.
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Koole SL, Tjew A Sin M, and Schneider IK (2013). Embodied Terror Management: Interpersonal Touch Alleviates Existential Concerns Among Individuals With Low Self-Esteem. Psychological science PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24190907

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5. Comparing children's sharing tendencies across diverse human societies
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Up until about the age of seven, children across the world show similar levels of sharing behaviour as revealed by their choices in a simple economic game. The finding comes courtesy of Bailey House and his colleagues who tested 326 children aged three to fourteen from six different cultural groups: urban Americans from Los Angeles; horticultural Shuar from Ecuador; horticultural and marine foraging Fijians from Yasawa Island; hunter-gathering Akas from the Central African Republic; pastoral, horticultural Himbas from Namibia; and hunter-gatherer Martus from Australia.

In one game, the children had to choose whether to take two food rewards for themselves or take one and give the other to their partner. When this partner was sat before them, a similar pattern was found across the diverse cultural groups - progressively from age three to about seven or eight the children grew more selfish. That is, the older the child, up to seven or eight, the more likely they were to keep both treats for themselves.

Intriguingly, aged eight to fourteen, the behaviour of the children varied depending on the culture they belonged to. For instance, the American children showed a sharp up-turn in making the selfless option. The Aka showed a similar increase in selflessness, but starting at a slightly later age. The Fijian children, by contrast, became even more likely to choose the selfish option right into early adolescence.

The older children's choices tended to mirror the behaviour of the adults from their culture on similar games, suggesting they were gradually acquiring the social norms around altruism and reciprocity for their specific society.

The emergence of cultural differences in the older children's choices only appeared for this costly version of the game, in which giving to another person meant sacrificing their own gain. In a different version, in which they could be generous at no cost to themselves, no such differences emerged across cultures.

Bailey House and his team said their results illustrated how cultural norms interact with children's developing sense of fairness, which is consistent with theories that emphasise the role of genes and culture in human altruism and how it varies between societies. The results also reinforce past evidence suggesting that cultural norms particularly influence how people choose to behave when altruistic choices are costly to themselves.

"Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions of the processes that underlie both uniformity and diversity in social behaviour across societies," the researchers said, "and highlight the importance of expanding the scope of developmental studies to encompass a wider range of extant human diversity." Indeed, psychology has long been criticised for focusing too much on rich, Western participants and this study is to be applauded for its cross-cultural reach.
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House BR, Silk JB, Henrich J, Barrett HC, Scelza BA, Boyette AH, Hewlett BS, McElreath R, and Laurence S (2013). Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (36), 14586-91 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23959869

Author weblink: http://www.baileyrhouse.com/

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5. Forget good cop, bad cop - here's the real psychology of two-person interrogation
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We're all familiar with the good cop, bad cop interrogation technique so often portrayed in TV and film. In reality, at least in the UK, when two officers perform a joint suspect interview, one of them asks the questions and the other simply takes notes. That doesn't mean the double-interviewer set-up can't be exploited to make it easier to spot whether a suspect is lying.

In a new study Samantha Mann and her colleagues tested the effect of the demeanour of the note-taking interviewer. Over 100 hundred students and university staff were allocated to either tell the truth in answering detailed questions about a real job they really had, or they were asked to lie and answer questions about a fictional job.

After having three days to prepare, the participants were invited to a psychology lab for questioning. A female interviewer with a neutral style asked the questions (e.g. "If you were training me to do your job for a day, what things would I need to know about it?") while a second male interviewer took notes. Crucially, this male interviewer either struck a supportive demeanour (smiling and nodding his head), a neutral demeanour, or acted as if he had suspicions (frowning and shaking his head). The participants were incentivised with the promise of a £5 reward if they fooled the interviewers.

Here's the headline result - the truth-telling participants gave more detailed answers than the liars, but only when the second interviewer provided a supportive presence. This runs entirely counter to the aggressive questioning styles so often portrayed in fiction. By creating a reassuring atmosphere, the second interviewer encouraged the honest interviewees to open up more, which made the the lack of detail given by liars stand out.

Another sign of deception was the amount of negative comments made by liars about their (fictional) boss. But again, this difference only appeared when the second note-taking interviewer acted supportive. Mann and her team said this was the first time a study had shown the beneficial lie-detecting effect of having a supportive second interviewer.

The findings weren't all as the researchers expected. They thought that liars would look more at the second interviewer than the truth-tellers did, but this didn't happen, perhaps because he seemed unimportant.

A final cue to deceit was that liars engaged in more "deliberate eye contact" - moments when they held the gaze of the first interviewer for slightly longer than seems normal. This contradicts the myth that liars avoid eye-contact, but it's not clear how useful this finding is because what counts as "longer than normal" is subjective.

Like all studies of this kind, it's important to remember the dangers of extrapolating too readily to real-life scenarios. These were low-stakes lies and no real criminals or police officers were involved.
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Samantha Mann, Aldert Vrij, Dominic J. Shaw, Sharon Leal, Sarah Ewens, Jackie Hillman, Par Anders Granhag, Ronald P. Fisher (2013). Two heads are better than one? How to effectively use two interviewers to elicit cues to deception. Legal and Criminological Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8333.2012.02055.x

---------------------------------------- 3. Seven-year-olds' beliefs about ability are associated with the way they were praised as toddlers ----------------------------------------

Laboratory research pioneered by psychologist Carol Dweck has shown the short-term benefits of praising children for their efforts rather than their inherent traits. Doing so leads children to adopt a so-called "incremental mindset" - seeing ability as malleable and challenges as an opportunity to learn.

Now a new study co-authored by Dweck and led by Elizabeth Gunderson has made the first ever attempt to monitor how parents praise their young children in real-life situations, and to see how their style of praise is related to the children's mindset five years later.

The researchers observed and recorded 53 individual parents interacting with their children in the home for 90 minutes, whether playing, having a meal or whatever. They did this when the children were aged 14, 26 and 38 months. Five years later, the researchers caught up with the kids and asked them questions about their attitudes and mindset towards ability, challenges and moral goodness.

The key finding was the more parents tended to praise their pre-school age children for effort (known as process praise, as in "good job"), the more likely it was that those children had a "incremental attitude" towards intelligence and morality when they were aged seven to eight. This mindset was revealed by their seeing intelligence and moral attributes as malleable. For example, such children tended to agree that people can get smarter if they try harder, and disagree with the idea that a naughty child with always be naughty.

This association held even after the researchers controlled for a raft of other variables such as the families' socioeconomic status, the parents' own mindset towards ability, and total amount of parental praise.

"We present the first results indicating that the process praise children hear naturalistically bears a relation to their motivational frameworks that parallels the relation between process praise and motivational frameworks found experimentally," the researchers said.

Unlike parents' early use of process praise, there was no link between parents' early tendency to praise children for their traits (known as person praise, as in "you're so smart") and children's later ability mindset. This could be because the researchers actually observed very little person praise - it accounted for less than 10 per cent of praise-related utterances.

Although Gunderson and her colleagues acknowledged the limitations of their study - including the fact that it was observational and does not prove a causal link between parents' praise style and the children's later mindset - they said the results had important real-life implications. "In particular," they said, "praise that emphasises children's effort, actions, and strategies may not only predict but also impact and shape the development of children's motivational frameworks in the cognitive and social domains."

There were some other intriguing details. Parents who themselves held an incremental mindset towards ability actually tended to use more person praise with their children - perhaps, the researchers surmised, because they believed in the need to boost their children's self-esteem as a way to increase their ability.

Also, it was noteworthy that lab research in this area has tended to use praise that is explicitly process focused, as in "you must have tried hard." However, the researchers didn't uncover a single use of that phrase, and all forms of explicit process praise were hard to come by. This goes to show just how important it is to conduct observational research in real-life settings, to make sure that lab research is realistic.

Finally, the study revealed that parents tend to use more person praise with girls and more process praise with boys, echoing similar results in earlier research. In turn, later on, boys tended to express an incremental mindset more often than girls. This tallies with the picture painted in the developmental literature that girls more than boys attribute failure to lack of ability, especially in maths and science. This study raises the possibility that this could be due in part to the way they are praised at an early age. _________________________________

Gunderson EA, Gripshover SJ, Romero C, Dweck CS, Goldin-Meadow S, and Levine SC (2013). Parent Praise to 1- to 3-Year-Olds Predicts Children's Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later. Child development, 84 (5), 1526-41 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23397904

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6. Guilt is catching
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Shaking hands with a cheat or thief, or merely sitting in a chair they used, is likely to make you experience feelings of guilt. That's according to a new study, the first to demonstrate "moral transfer" between people.

Kendall Eskine and his colleagues invited 54 university students one at a time into a room for testing and told half of them that the chair they were sitting in had recently been used by a student who'd been caught stealing from the department. All participants then completed a personality test about how they were feeling "right now". This included items relating to anger, sadness and guilt. Example guilt items included "I feel bad about something" and "I feel like apologising".

The key finding was that students sitting in a chair previously used by a cheat scored higher on feelings of guilt, but just the same on other emotions. This "suggests moral transfer" said the researchers. A second study with 48 more participants was similar but this time the students shook hands with another person who they were told afterwards had cheated in his exams. This led them to experience increased guilt of their own, especially if they scored highly on a measure of disgust sensitivity. The moral transfer was reduced if they were wearing a glove, which some of them were as part of a supposed consumer test.

These new findings build on past research that showed people preferred to avoid coming into contact with clothing or objects used by a murderer, even though they'd been washed. The new research also complements studies that reveal the way we think of objects as contaminated by the essence of their owners - hence the value of objects that belonged to dead celebrities (see: http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=26&editionID=228&ArticleID=2313).

Eskine's team said there are lots of questions yet to be answered. For instance how might moral transfer affect the source offender? Could they come to feel progressively less guilty as they touch increasing numbers of other people? Relatedly, is it possible for "good" moral emotions to pass between people? Supporting this idea, a study published in 2011 found that using a putter they thought belonged to a famous pro led participants to putt more accurately and perceive the target hole as bigger.

Eskine and co's new study is thought-provoking, no doubt, and has intriguing real-life implications especially for those working with offenders. However its impact is undermined by the use of a small student sample and what the researchers admitted were "heavy-handed" cover stories relating to the cheat and thief. There's a risk the participants gave the answers they thought the researchers were looking for.
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Eskine, K. J., Novreske, A., and Richards, M. (2013). Moral Contagion Effects in Everyday Interpersonal Encounters. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103113000954

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4. Online, an initial positive rating is surprisingly influential
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Today our opinions are shaped immediately by the reactions of others. Case in point - when the former Disney child star Miley Cyrus gyrated lasciviously on stage at a recent music awards, the outpouring of disapproval was filled with references to the way viewers had reacted negatively on social media. As the story spread, it was hard to tell if people's reactions were a direct response to Cyrus or if they were also influenced by the negative opinions of others.

A new study has examined this phenomenon in relation to the comments posted to a news-sharing website similar to Reddit.com and Digg.com. Users of the site share links to news stories and others then post their comments on the stories. In turn these comments can be rated positively or negatively, thus encouraging or deterring others from reading them. Such systems promise to martial the wisdom of the crowd. However, they could also be vulnerable to distortion if raters are influenced not only by the comment in question, but also by the ratings it has already received.

Lev Muchnik and his colleagues tested this possibility experimentally. Collaborating with a news-sharing website they randomly assigned either a positive or negative first-rating, or no rating (control condition), to 101,281 real comments posted over 5 months. This simple manipulation had a significant effect on the way other site users subsequently rated the comments.

An initial positive rating on a comment tended to have a snowball effect, encouraging further positive ratings. The first viewer of a comment rated positive by the researchers was 32 per cent more likely to add their own positive rating, as compared with the control condition. In contrast, there was no effect on the likelihood of a negative rating being given. Five months later, these effects accumulated so that comments given an initial positive rating by the researchers ended up with a 25 per cent higher average rating as compared with control comments, and they were more likely to end up with an exceptionally high average rating score. These positive herding effects were found for comments in the politics, cultural and business categories of the site, but not in economics, IT, fun or general news.

The situation was different for comments given an initial negative rating by researchers. These were more likely than control comments to receive both positive and negative ratings from other users. These effects cancelled out so that in the long run, comments given an initial negative rating ended up with average ratings that were no different from control comments. This was true across all subject categories.

Muchnik and his colleagues think the effects they observed are due to two underlying mechanisms - opinion change (users with little history of rating a given commenter were more likely than usual to give a positive rating to a comment that the researchers had rated positive), and increased turn out (i.e. seeing that a comment had already been rated tended to encourage users to add their own ratings, positive and negative). These mechanisms combined with a general trend for positivity on the site - that is, positive ratings were made more often than negative, overall. "Our findings suggest that social influence substantially biases rating dynamics in systems designed to harness collective intelligence," the researchers said.

The rating of comments on a news sharing site is a microcosm for the effects of social influence that play out constantly in the way we respond to news and culture through the prism of other people's reactions. It will be interesting to see if future research in other contexts replicates the positive snowball effect reported here, as well as the corrective response to initial negative ratings.

It will also be valuable to examine why the positive snowball effect was found for some topics but not others. In reality, of course, many comments, products and performances really are exceptional, dire or distasteful, and so another avenue of research will be to see how social influence interacts with objective quality to shape people's reactions.
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Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean J. Taylor (2013). Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment. Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1240466

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3. Is it worth hiring David Beckham to promote your brand? A psychological test
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He's probably the most famous man on the planet, but the problem is there's no chance of exclusivity. Beckham already endorses a string of products from the Emporio Armani fashion label to Burger King. So is it worth hiring him to endorse your product?

One way to answer this question is to look at the psychology behind the way people associate brands and celebrities in memory. If you pay Beckham to endorse your product in an ad, then you'd probably like to think that people who view the ad will, in the future, see Beckham in the paper or on TV and then think of your product. But how do you know that seeing him won't lead customers to think of the other brands he endorses (Armani, Burger King, Gillette, Sharpie, H&M, Samsung, Adidas or Pepsi), rather than yours? This is the question that Katie Kelting and Dan Rice have addressed in their new study.

The researchers predicted that a key factor would be the degree of fit between Beckham and the products he endorses. They presented 235 undergrad students with 8 magazine style adverts. Six of these were fillers and included non-celebrity ads for an SUV and a brand of dog food. Two of the ads were critical to the study. One was the "target ad" showing Beckham alongside a digital camera (you could imagine this is the product we've hired him to promote). The other ad showed Beckham endorsing one of his other clients. Crucially, this "interfering ad" came in one of three versions. Some students saw Beckham endorsing an energy drink (a strong fit seeing as he's a retired footballer); others saw him endorsing an MP3 player (a moderate fit); and others saw him endorsing a baseball bat (a weak fit).

Next, the students were distracted by a six-minute maths task. Finally came the crucial test. The students were asked to think back to the adverts they'd viewed a little earlier, shown a picture of Beckham, then asked to name the product he had endorsed earlier. Would they name the digital camera in the target ad?

As Kelting and Rice predicted, it all depended on the degree of fit between Beckham and the other brand he'd promoted. Among students who saw Beckham promoting the camera and an MP3 player (both deemed to be of moderate fit with Beckham's image), 88 per cent recalled that he'd endorsed the camera. By contrast, for those who saw Beckham promoting the camera and either the energy drink or the baseball bat, far fewer recalled that he had endorsed the camera (59 per cent and 57 per cent, respectively). In other words, brands that had either a strong or weak connection with Beckham seemed to have a more powerful interfering effect on people's memory for the target brand*.

This interpretation was supported by further analysis. Focusing instead on participants' recall of the interfering brands, their recollection was stronger for the energy drinks and baseball bat than for the MP3 players. Comparing levels of recall for the interfering brands and the target brand (the camera), recall was again higher for the energy drinks and baseball bat. "A brand sharing either a high or low match with the celebrity endorser will win the battle of activation and retrieval over a brand that only has a moderate match with the celebrity endorser," the researchers said.

With so many celebrities today endorsing multiple products, Kelting and Rice said their results have real-world implications for the marketing industry. On this point, one further finding is worth mentioning. The researchers also looked at attitudes towards the different ads, which is one of the most common ways that adverts are assessed in marketing. Attitudes were least positive for the ad showing Beckham endorsing a baseball bat. In a real-life situation, a marketing expert might assume that this ad is therefore not much of a threat to Beckham's other endorsements. But in fact, as we've seen, this ad was one of the most memorable and interfering precisely because of the poor fit between Beckham's profile and the product. "Making strategic decisions without considering the impact that other brands in a portfolio may have on recall could lead to suboptimal decision making," the researchers said.
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Katie Kelting, and Dan Hamilton Rice (2013). Should We Hire David Beckham to Endorse our Brand? Contextual Interference and Consumer Memory for Brands in a Celebrity's Endorsement Portfolio. Psychology and Marketing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/e621072012-150

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2. Does police contact increase or decrease the likelihood that youths will offend in the future?
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One of the main arguments for having more police is that they act as a deterrent. With more officers on the street, more would-be criminals can be stopped and questioned; more wrong-doers can be arrested. But what if police contact actually has the effect of making it more likely that young people will offend in the future? Criminologists call this theory "labelling" based on the idea that police encounters catalyse in young people a criminal identity, encouraging association with their deviant peers and estranging them from mainstream society.

To test whether police contact acts as a deterrent or a catalyst for future offending Stephanie Wiley and Finn-Age Esbensen used data gathered over several years from seven US cities as part of the Gang Resistance Education and Training Program. Data were available for 2614 school children and teenagers (aged 9 to 15; 49 per cent were male) collected at baseline (time one), again six to nine months later (time two), and then again a year after that (time three).

The researchers used the survey data to identify the children and teens' "propensity" for offending at time one based on the demographic factors age, sex and race, as well as many other risk factors including impulsivity, risk seeking, school commitment, parental monitoring, unsupervised time with peers, substance use and more. Then they looked to see which of their participants had contact with the police by time two - including being stopped for questioning (14 per cent were) or arrested (6 per cent).

The key finding is that with participants matched for propensity, those who had contact with the police said at time three that they'd feel less guilt if they committed various offences from theft to violence; they expressed more agreement with various "neutralisation" scenarios (e.g. whether it's OK to lie to keep yourself out of trouble); they were more committed to their deviant peers (e.g. they planned to continue hanging out with friends who'd been arrested); and finally, they said they'd engaged in more offending behaviour, from skipping classes to taking drugs or being violent. This pattern of results differed little between being arrested or merely being stopped.

"The current study adds to the labelling versus deterrent debate by identifying the negative impact that not only arrest but also simply being stopped by the police has on delinquent behaviour and attitudes," the researchers said. "The use of propensity score matching reduces the likelihood that our results are being driven by preexisting differences, a problem that may plague much of the existing labelling research."

The researchers acknowledged that they can't know for sure that their propensity matching was water-tight. Perhaps there was something about the kids and teens who went on to offend that wasn't picked up by the baseline propensity matching, and perhaps it was these unknown factors, rather than police contact, that had a causal part both in their receiving police contact and their later offending and attitudes.

Wiley and Esbensen also acknowledged that police contact is often unavoidable if crimes are to be prevented. Their research suggests that such police contact needs to be handled with utmost care to avoid the apparently harmful effects documented here. Also, they said: "It is important that youth are not isolated after experiencing police contact, and family members, criminal justice actors , and the community should take steps to ensure that youths' prosocial bonds are not attenuated following police contact."
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Stephanie A. Wiley, & Finn-Aage Esbensen (2013). The Effect of Police Contact: Does Official Intervention Result in Deviance Amplification? Crime and delinquency DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0011128713492496

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5. Simple fist-squeezing procedure helps athletes avoid choking under pressure
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The next time you're faced with a high-pressure situation in sport, try squeezing your left fist tight for thirty seconds. According to a team of German sports psychologists, doing so will activate your right hemisphere, aiding automatic, skilled performance and preventing choking under pressure, which they say is linked with left-hemisphere activity and conscious deliberation.

Jurgen Beckmann and his colleagues tested their intervention across three studies. In the first, 30 semi-professional footballers aimed penalty kicks at holes in a wall. They did this in a low-pressure situation then competitively in front of a crowd. The fist squeezing was described to participants as a way to boost concentration. Kickers who squeezed a soft ball in their right fist (activating the left hemisphere) for thirty seconds prior to the high-pressure situation choked - their performance dipped compared with the no pressure situation. By contrast, the competitors who squeezed their left fist showed no evidence of choking.

It was a similar story with 20 Taekwondo practitioners who performed kick combinations in a relaxed context and then again in a filmed high-pressure situation. Those fighters who squeezed a ball with their right fist prior to the high-pressure challenge showed evidence of choking. By contrast, those who squeezed a ball with their left fist actually showed improved performance.

The last study involved badminton players performing serves. This time there were three stages - relaxed context, high pressure, and high pressure plus fist tightening. All players showed evidence of choking in the first high pressure situation, but then players who squeezed their left fist prior to the second high-pressure challenge showed a return to normal performance levels while those who squeezed their right fist continued to choke.

Beckmann and his colleagues said their "hemisphere specific priming" intervention has practical applications for athletes. "Squeezing the left hand before performing a task under pressure may become a useful part of pre-performance routines in addition to imagination, deep breathing, or cue words."

These results are certainly intriguing but it seems amazing that such a simple task could have such profound effects (in statistical terms, the effect sizes were large). Scrutinising the methodology, the most serious problem seems to be a lack of blinding. It sounds from the researchers' descriptions as though the person instructing participants knew the purpose and rationale of the study, so it's possible their expectations about left-fist squeezing may have influenced the performers (a study last year showed how important these effects can be). It's also a shame there wasn't a no-squeeze control group.

There must also be question marks over the theory underlying this study. Beckmann's group said there is "a large body of research that shows enhanced right-hemisphere activity facilitates skilled performance." But I looked up a couple of references they cited - including EEG studies with archers and marksmen - and these showed correlations between hemispheric activity and performance, not causal effects. It's also important to remember this study didn't even measure brain activity, so the researchers are asking us to take quite a leap of faith in believing their explanation of the results. I think they realise this. "The exact mechanism underlying the effect of hemisphere-specific priming is still unknown," they wrote.
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Beckmann, J., Gröpel, P., and Ehrlenspiel, F. (2013). Preventing Motor Skill Failure Through Hemisphere-Specific Priming: Cases From Choking Under Pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0029852

Author weblink: http://www.professoren.tum.de/en/beckmann-juergen/

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2. Men with friends assume an aggressor is small and wimpy
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It's usually a good idea to back away from physical confrontation with an aggressor who is bigger and stronger than you. However, there are other factors to take into account. Perhaps you're a ninja? Maybe you're bigger than the nasty person, but they're armed. You're alone whereas they have a band of thugs with them, and so on.

According to Daniel Fessler and Colin Holbrook the central role of conflict in human history has led to us becoming expert at making these judgments. Rather than considering each factor in turn, our representation of the odds of a winning a fight is summarised efficiently in a sense of the physical dominance of our would-be opponent.

The researchers tested this idea on the streets of Santa Monica California. They approached 149 men who were either on their own or in a group of 2 to 7 friends. Each participant was taken to one side and shown a picture of a turbaned, bearded terrorist pointing a gun. The photo was cropped so the aggressor's physical size was hidden. The participants were asked to estimate his physical size and muscularity (the terrorist and rating scales are shown on the Digest blog).

The key finding was that participants with one or more friends tended to estimate that the terrorist was shorter by around one and a half inches, and less muscular (having more than one friend in tow didn't exaggerate this effect). In contrast, participants who were alone or smaller stature tended to guess that the terrorist was more physically formidable.

A problem with this first study is that there may be something different about men in groups compared with men who are on their own, and perhaps it's this inherent difference that explains their diverging judgments about the terrorist (e.g. maybe more confident men are more likely to hang out in groups). To get around this, Fessler and Holbrook headed for a public boardwalk by the ocean and approached only men who were in a group. Half of them were tested near their buddies, the others were tested about 100 yards away behind a tent barrier. Once again, the men tested with their friends nearby tended to estimate that the terrorist was less physically formidable, as compared with men tested on their own.

"These findings indicate that the immediate presence of allies is an important factor in men's estimations of the formidability of potential opponents," the researchers said - a result that they suggested could be relevant for "violence prevention, policing and military science". There are some obvious study limitations. The terrorist's physical proportions were kept deliberately ambiguous, which means we don't know how the presence of allies would affect the perception of an aggressor's size if that information was more readily available. Also, would the study replicate with women?
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Fessler, D., and Holbrook, C. (2013). Friends Shrink Foes: The Presence of Comrades Decreases the Envisioned Physical Formidability of an Opponent Psychological Science, 24 (5), 797-802 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797612461508

Author weblink: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fessler/

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1. How pure irrelevance turns things invisible
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There's such a blizzard of sensory information out there, the brain would be overwhelmed if it weren't for a spotlight process of selective attention that allows us to focus. This means that once we're tuned into certain aspects of the environment, we're left blind to events outside of our selective attention - a phenomenon called "inattentional blindness".

Central to this line of reasoning is the idea of attention as a finite resource. It's because our processing powers are depleted by the focus of our attention that we're left blind to that which we ignore. However, a new study challenges the finite resource element of this story. Baruch Eitam and his colleagues say that irrelevance is enough to render information invisible even if we have plenty of resources available for processing that information. It brings a new spin to our understanding of inattentional blindness that's not just about attentional load but also about salience and motivation.

The researchers presented 100 participants with a central coloured ring surrounded by a larger ring of a different colour. The rings appeared for half a second and were close enough together that they both fell on the high-acuity foveal region of the eye. Before the rings appeared the participants were first instructed to concentrate on either the inner or outer ring. After the rings disappeared, half a second passed and then they were asked to identify which of three distinct colours either the inner or outer ring had been. That is, they were either quizzed about the ring they'd concentrated on or the other one.

As you might expect, the participants achieved nearly perfect performance when identifying the colour of the ring they'd concentrated on (the error rate was just 3 per cent; not significantly different from flawless accuracy). In contrast, they were wrong 25 per cent of the time when trying to identify the colour of the "irrelevant" ring they'd ignored - this is almost seven times the error rate compared with the "relevant" ring. Participants were also less confident in their knowledge about the irrelevant ring.

A follow-up study confirmed that blindness to the ignored ring colour was induced purely by its irrelevance, not because of limitations in attentional resources. Twenty-six participants performed an identical task to before except this time they were instructed to concentrate on both coloured rings. Regardless of which ring they were subsequently quizzed on, their performance was virtually flawless (the error rate was 8 per cent: not significantly different from performance for the relevant ring in the first experiment).

Eitam and his colleagues said their research suggests there are two kinds of inattentional blindness - the first occurs through over-taxing of processing resources and is accompanied by a lack of visual awareness, so the missed information is literally not seen. The second is based on irrelevance alone and is related to not having sufficiently processed information that was seen.

"We propose that in our study the participants who failed to report the irrelevant colour were aware of it when it was displayed," the researchers explained, "but due to irrelevance, its abstract representation (of 'red' for example) was insufficiently activated, or possibly suppressed, and the participants could not report it." This an interesting extension of established psychological theory that will surely be of interest to road safety researchers, advertisers and magicians.
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Eitam, B., Yeshurun, Y., and Hassan, K. (2013). Blinded by irrelevance: Pure irrelevance induced “blindness”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39 (3), 611-615 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0032269

Author weblink: http://hevra.haifa.ac.il/~psy/index.php/en/faculty?id=88

---------------------------------------- 2. Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence ----------------------------------------

Eloquent and engaging scientific communicators in the mould of physicist Brian Cox make learning seem fun and easy. So much so that a new study says they risk breeding overconfidence. When a presenter is seen to handle complicated information effortlessly, students sense wrongly that they too have acquired a firm grasp of the material.

Shana Carpenter and her colleagues showed 42 undergrad students a one-minute video of a science lecture about calico cats. Half of them saw a version in which the female lecturer was confident, eloquent, made eye-contact and gestured with her hands. The other students saw a version in which the same lecturer communicated the same facts, but did so in a fumbling style, frequently checking her notes, making little eye contact and few gestures.

After watching the video, the students rated how well they thought they'd do on a test of its content ten minutes later. The students who'd seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent speaker breeds confidence. In fact, both groups of students fared equally well in the test. In the case of the students in the fluent lecturer condition, this wasn't as good as they'd predicted. Their greater confidence was misplaced.

A second study was similar - 70 students watched either a fluent or fumbling lecturer, but this time the students had a chance afterwards to spend as long as they wanted reviewing the script. On average, both groups of students devoted the same amount of time (perhaps out of habit). But only among the students who'd watched the fumbling lecturer was there a link between time spent on the script and subsequent performance on the test. This suggests only they used the time with the script to fill in blanks in their knowledge.

"Learning from someone else - whether it is a teacher, a peer, a tutor, or a parent - may create a kind of 'social metacognition'," the researchers said, "in which judgments are made based on the fluency with which someone else seems to be processing information. The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it. The question is, 'can I explain it clearly?'".

An obvious limitation of the study is the brevity of the science lecture and the fact it was on video. It remains to be seen whether this result would replicate in a more realistic situation after a longer lecture. Also, in real life, there may be costs to a fumbling lecture style that weren't picked up in this study, such as students mind wandering and skipping class. _________________________________

Carpenter, S., Wilford, M., Kornell, N., and Mullaney, K. (2013). Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0442-z

---------------------------------------- 4. Atheists as stressed as believers when daring God to do bad things ----------------------------------------

Why are most people in the world religious? Some say it is because we're naturally predisposed to believe in a god or gods and that religion brought evolutionary advantages to our ancestors. But if that's the case, how come there are over half a billion atheists in the world? One theory is that atheists consciously suppress their instincts for religion, with only varying degrees of success. A new study provides tentative support for this idea. Marjaana Lindeman and her colleagues report that atheists get just as stressed as religious people when they ask God to do nasty things, as in "I dare God to make someone murder my parents cruelly."

The researchers tested 16 atheists and 13 religious people (Finns aged 17 to 45 recruited via a skeptics group and bible group, respectively). The participants were wired up to a skin conductance machine that records the sweatiness of the fingers - a basic marker of stress. Next the participants read aloud 36 sentences - some were requests for God to do something awful; others were offensive statements not involving God (e.g. it's okay to kick a puppy in the face); and the remainder were neutral (e.g. I hope it's not raining today).

The participants' views about this experience differed as you'd expect. The religious folk found the God-related statements more unpleasant than the atheists. However, they were no more likely than the atheists to refuse to utter the God statements, or to retract them later when given the chance. Most importantly, skin conductance was higher for both participant groups when reading the God statements compared with the neutral statements. Moreover, across both groups, skin conductance when reading the God statements did not vary according to a person's level of religious belief. The atheists seemed to get just as stressed as believers when daring God to do awful things.

An obvious flaw in this evidence is that the mention of God was confounded with horrible outcomes. Perhaps the atheists were stressed reading the God statements simply because of the ideas involved, not because of God's role per se. A second study examined this with nineteen more Finnish atheists (aged 20 to 30). The participants were wired up to the skin conductance machine while they uttered unpleasant sentences involving God (e.g. "I dare God to make me die of cancer") or not involving God (e.g. "I wish I would die of cancer"). Signs of stress were higher for the God statements, suggesting the involvement of God brings some extra stress to atheists beyond the unpleasant outcomes involved.

"The results imply that while atheists' and religious individuals' beliefs about God and explicit attitudes towards God statements are different, they become equally emotionally aroused when daring God to do unpleasant things," the researchers said.

The study has its limitations - the participant samples were very small for a start - and the findings are difficult to interpret. Certainly it would be inappropriate to conclude that the results prove atheists believe in God at a subconscious level. Other plausible explanations for the findings include atheists finding the God statements stressful because they know friends or family who do believe in God; or perhaps atheists experience stress reading the God statements because the wording implies God is real, which runs counter to their own beliefs. _________________________________

Lindeman, M., Heywood, B., Riekki, T., and Makkonen, T. (2013). Atheists become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2013.771991

---------------------------------------- 3. "Wish you were here!" - how a postcard can help attract the best talent ----------------------------------------

In 2004, in Silicon Valley, Google posted a huge billboard ad featuring a mathematical problem. The answer led to a web address with yet another puzzle to crack. People who successfully followed this intellectual treasure hunt ended up being invited in for a job interview.

This is an extreme example of a recruitment principle spelled out in a new article by psychologists in Belgium. They say that distinctive recruitment procedures are the secret to attracting more and better job applicants, especially in fields like engineering where competition for the best talent is intense.

Working with a Belgian technology company, Saartje Cromheecke and her colleagues sent out a real job opportunity to 1,997 potential applicants, around half of them via email (as is the industry standard), and half via a hand-written postcard depicting a coffee mug and a blank daily agenda. The email and postcard message featured the same layout and included the same written information and content about the job vacancy.

Sixty-two of the contacted engineers applied for the job - 82% of them had received the postcard, just 18% had received the email. Stated differently, only 1% of the engineers who were emailed actually applied for the job compared with 5% of those who received a postcard. This latter figure represents a high response rate for the field. Moreover, the respondents to the postcard tended to be better educated, consistent with the researchers' prediction that a recruitment message sent via a "strange" medium will be more likely to grab the attention of better-qualified personnel who aren't actively looking for new opportunities.

The researchers said that social cognition research has shown how we adopt mental "scripts" for different aspects of our lives. "... recruiting in a strange way that differs from what competitors are doing is likely to be inconsistent with recruitment scripts," they said, "enhancing potential applicants' attention, attraction, and intention to apply."

It's important to note, Cromheecke's team aren't saying that postcards will always be the answer. Rather, "this field experiment puts forth 'media strangeness' as a more general evidence-based principle, which recruiters might take into account when selecting media for communicating job postings." _________________________________

Cromheecke, S., Van Hoye, G., and Lievens, F. (2013). Changing things up in recruitment: Effects of a ‘strange’ recruitment medium on applicant pool quantity and quality. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/joop.12018

---------------------------------------- 1. Greater use of "I" and "me" as a mark of interpersonal distress ----------------------------------------

We each vary in how much we use first-person singular pronouns (I, Me, Myself) in our speech and writing, and how much we use first-person plural pronouns (We, Us, Ourselves). Researchers say it's a kind of habit and not something we usually have much control over. Now a study conducted in Germany claims that people who are more prolific users of "I" and "Me" tend to have more interpersonal problems and to experience more depression. "Using first-person singular pronouns highlights the self as a distinct entity," say the researchers led by Johannes Zimmermann, "whereas using first-person plural pronouns emphasises its embeddedness into social relationships."

Zimmermann and his colleagues counted pronoun use in transcripts recorded from 118 people who'd completed a 60 to 90-minute psychotherapeutic interview taking in topics including their past, their relationships and self-perception. This was an exploratory study and, knowing that these kind of interviews increase first-person singular pronoun use, the researchers thought this would be a good place to start.

The sample was made up of 99 female patients at a psychotherapy clinic and 19 "healthy" controls (across both there were 103 women). The patients had problems ranging from anxiety to eating disorder. All the participants also filled out in-depth questionnaires that asked them about depression and their interpersonal behaviour.

Frequent use of first-person singular pronouns went hand in hand with higher depression scores and with interpersonal distress characterised by what the researchers called an "intrusive style", including inappropriate self-disclosure, attention seeking, and an inability to spend time alone. "First-person singular pronoun use may be part of a ... strategy that pulls for friendly-submissive attention from others," the researchers said. A "tendency to seek attention from others rather than self-focused attention."

In contrast, greater use of first-person plural pronouns was associated with lower depression scores and lower interpersonal distress. To the researchers' surprise, this was characterised by a "cold" interpersonal style. However, they think this is a "functional" kind of coldness - the ability to help others with their needs while also remaining appropriately detached for self-protection.

These are interesting findings that build on an established evidence base relating to pronoun use - for instance, past research has linked greater use of first-person singular pronouns with more marital dissatisfaction and social anxiety. However, the study has some obvious limitations, most notably its clinical sample, which limits the ability to say if the same findings would apply to the general population, and its reliance on participants' own descriptions of their interpersonal style. It's also important to note that there's no evidence here of a causal link - Zimmermann's team aren't saying that greater use of "I" and "Me" causes interpersonal problems. More likely, this way of speaking probably reflects how people see themselves and habitually relate to others. _________________________________

Zimmermann, J., Wolf, M., Bock, A., Peham, D., and Benecke, C. (2013). The way we refer to ourselves reflects how we relate to others: Associations between first-person pronoun use and interpersonal problems. Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (3), 218-225 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2013.01.008

3. Anxiously attached people are ace at poker and lie detection

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People who worry habitually about separation and abandonment - the "anxiously attached" - tend to be highly skilled at lie detection, an attribute that means they excel at poker. That's according to Tsachi Ein-Dor and Adi Perry whose new findings build on their theory that anxiously attached people are natural sentinels - highly sensitive to threats in the environment, including, this new research suggests, social threats.

Across a pair of initial studies, dozens of men and women answered questions about their attachment style before watching video clips of two women chatting or one person telling a story. In some of the conversational clips, one of the women told a lie, a fact that could be detected through a subtle objective clue in the clip. In the story clips, the events described either happened to the story-teller or were fabricated (there no were objective clues in these clips).

People who scored high in attachment anxiety (for example, they agreed with statements like "I worry about being abandoned" and "My desire to be very close sometimes scares people away") tended to be better at spotting lies and made-up stories. This wasn't just because they were simply more liberal at labelling utterances as lies. Also, the lie detection link with attachment anxiety was specific. General state and trait anxiety did not correlate with lie detection skills. "It appears that anxiety from separation and abandonment, which relates to hyper-activation of an innate psychobiological system (i.e. the attachment system) that promotes survival, is what is driving people's ability to detect deceit," the researchers said, "and not an overall sense of tension."

To see if the lie-detection skills associated with anxious attachment have any benefit in real life, Ein-Dor and Perry recruited 35 semi-professional poker players, assessed their attachment style and then observed their performance in a local poker tournament. Each participant was allocated at random to join in with a group of seven other players at the event. As they predicted, the researchers found that the participants who scored higher in anxious attachment tended to win more money in the tournament (on average, a one-point higher score in anxious attachment was associated with winning an extra 448 chips). Social anxiety did not have this association with tournament success.

Of course, there's no direct evidence here that the anxious players' better performance was due to their superior deception detection skills, but the researchers think it's highly likely, especially given how important the spotting of bluffs and reading of "tells" is to poker (also past research suggests anxiously attached people are poorer at concealing their own emotions so their advantage is more likely to be related to reading other players' minds than camouflaging their own).

These new findings add to past research showing that anxiously attached people are quicker than average at detecting physical threats, such as smoke in a room, and are quicker to alert other people to the danger.

"Studies like the ones reported here offer a new perspective on the strengths of individuals who have long been viewed as deficient and poorly adapted," the researchers concluded.

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Ein-Dor T, & Perry A (2013). Full House of Fears: Evidence that People High in Attachment Anxiety are More Accurate in Detecting Deceit. Journal of personality PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23437786

Female political role models have an empowering effect on women

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The late Margaret Thatcher - Britain's first and, so far, only female Prime Minister - is criticised for failing to do more to help other women get ahead in politics. Supporters argue, however, that the example she set will, on its own, have been of profound benefit to women with leadership ambitions. A new study puts this principle to the test, examining the effect on women of reminders about the contemporary female political high-flyers Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton.

Ioana Latu and her colleagues recruited 149 Swiss student participants (81 women) to make a persuasive public speech against the rise in student fees. The speeches were made in a virtual reality room in front of a virtual audience of 12 men and women. Crucially, some of the participants performed their speech in a room with a poster of Hillary Clinton on the back wall; others with Merkel on the wall; a third group with Bill Clinton's poster on the back wall; and for a final group, there was no poster.

The key result is that the female students spoke for significantly longer - a sign of dominance - when Merkel or Clinton was on the back wall (as opposed to Bill or no poster) - an increase of 49 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively, making their speeches just as long as the men's. These female students' speeches were also rated as better quality by two coders blind to the experimental condition, and they also evaluated their own performance more positively. The presence of the different posters made no difference to the performance of the male students.

"We believe these findings are important because although a wealth of research has studied the effects of role models on academic and math performance, there is no research that investigates the effect of female political role models on successful leadership behaviour," the researchers concluded. "Yet, exactly such behaviour is crucial because not only is an increase in female politicians the goal of equality, it can also be (as our results show) the engine that drives it."

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Latu, I., Mast, M., Lammers, J., and Bombari, D. (2013). Successful female leaders empower women's behavior in leadership tasks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49 (3), 444-448 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.01.003

Author weblink: http://www2.unine.ch/cms/lang/fr/pid/5557

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Does the foot-in-the-door persuasion effect work when asking someone to do something anti-social?

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15534510.2012.696038

The “Foot-in-the-door” (FITD) is a compliance technique that consists of making a small initial request to a participant, then making a second, more onerous request. In this way greater compliance with the second request is obtained than under a control condition where the focal request is not preceded by the initial request. Most of the studies using this paradigm have tested prosocial requests. So the generalization of this compliance technique to other types of requests remains an open question. The authors carried out two experiments in which the FITD effect on deviant behaviors was tested. Results showed that the FITD technique increased compliance with the focal request, but only among male participants.

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6. Rituals bring comfort even for non-believers

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People around the world often perform rituals as a way to cope with sad events. The rules can be contradictory - for instance, Tibetan Buddhists think it's disrespectful to cry near the deceased, while Catholic Latinos believe the opposite. Beneath this variety, a new paper by Michael Norton and Francesca Gino, suggests there is a shared psychological mechanism - a comforting sense of increased control. Moreover, the researchers report that even non-believers can benefit (pdf via author website: http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20gino.pdf).

Norton and Gino began by asking 247 participants recruited online (average age 33; 42 per cent were male) to write about a bereavement they'd experienced in the past, or a relationship that had ended. Half of them were additionally asked to write about a coping ritual they'd performed at the time. The main result here was that the participants who recalled their ritual reported feeling less grief about their loss. This was explained by their greater feelings of control, and wasn't to do with the simple fact they'd written more than the other participants.

Relying on reminiscence in this way is obviously problematic from a research perspective, so for a follow-up Norton and Gino invited 109 students to their lab. Groups of 9 to 15 students were told that one of them would win a $200 prize, and to intensify the situation they were asked to write about what it would mean to them to win, and how they'd use the cash. One student was duly awarded the money and left. Half the remaining participants were then instructed to perform a 4-stage ritual: they drew their feelings about losing on a piece of paper, sprinkled salt on the drawing, tore it up, then counted to ten. The others acted as controls and simply drew their feelings on the paper.

The key finding was that the ritual students subsequently reported experiencing less upset and anger than the controls at the fact they hadn't won the money, and this was largely explained by their greater feelings of control. Crucially, the comfort of the ritual was unaffected by how often participants reported conducting rituals in their lives or whether or not they believed in the power of rituals. It seems there's something about the process of going through a multi-stepped procedure that provokes in people feelings of control, above and beyond the role played by any associated religious or mystical beliefs.

A third and final study was similar and clarified some issues - reading that some people sit in silence after a loss, and then sitting in silence themselves, did not bring comfort to participants who lost out in a lottery for $200. Reading that some people perform rituals after a loss also brought no comfort, unless the participants then went on to perform a ritual themselves.

Norton and Gino said they did not mean to imply that human and monetary loss are equivalent, but they do think rituals may bring comfort in both situations via the shared mechanism of an increased sense of control. They added that more research was needed on the impact of specific forms of ritual in different contexts, but for now their results offered preliminary support "for Durkheim's contention that 'mourning is left behind, thanks to the mourning itself'; the rituals of mourning in which our participants engaged hastened the decline of the feeling of mourning that accompanies loss."

An important caveat the researchers mentioned is that this research was with participants who are mentally well and so it doesn't speak to the issue of rituals that become dysfunctional and all consuming, as can happen in obsessive compulsive disorder.

Norton and Gino's paper complements a study published last year (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027712000546) that looked at people's beliefs about the factors likely to increase ritual efficacy, including repetition and number of procedural steps.

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Norton MI, and Gino F (2013). Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23398180

Author weblink: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=326229

*Visit the DIGEST BLOG: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog to comment on this research, search past items and discover more links.

Further reading. Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/07/superstitions-can-improve-performance-by-boosting-confidence/#.UUbx5qUaAg8

Feature article in Nature "Praying, fighting, dancing, chanting — human rituals could illuminate the growth of community and the origins of civilization."

http://www.nature.com/news/social-evolution-the-ritual-animal-1.12256      

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5. How to design a street that's mentally rejuvenating

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More people worldwide now live in cities than in the countryside. Combined with sprawl and the loss of urban green spaces, this means that many of us are unable to enjoy the restorative effects of a natural setting. But what's to say the built environment, designed well, can't have a rejuvenating effect too? "The built environment can be more beautiful than nature," the British planning minister said recently, "and we shouldn’t obsess about the fact that the only landscapes that are beautiful are open — sometimes buildings are better."

What's clear is we need more research on the psychological effects of urban design. Sadly, planning, architecture and psychology tend not to speak to one other. A new study takes us a step in the right direction. Pall Lindal and  Terry Hartig presented hundreds of Icelandic participants with dozens of computer-designed residential, terraced streetspaces that varied in two main ways - the degree of variety and complexity in the building design, in terms of the ornateness of the roofline and facades; and building height, which varied from one to three stories.

Participants were asked to imagine that they were walking down the street, mentally exhausted after work. They then rated each streetscape in terms of its restorative potential, how much they liked it, its "fascination" (how much it offers the chance to explore and discover), and its ability to give a break from routine (what the researchers called "being away").

Greater architectural variation in the street scene and lower building height both contributed to the perception that the environment was restorative - allowing the participants to "rest and recover their abilities to focus". Greater architectural variety also tended to go hand in hand with a greater sense of fascination and with "being away" (although not with preference), factors which explained the link with perceived restorative power. In contrast, higher buildings were associated with a diminished sense of "being away" and were judged less restorative.

The findings make sense in terms of increased building intricacy and variety allowing the mind to alight on the visual scene, find interest, and therefore disengage from prior mental toils and challenges. Excess building height, on the other hand, fosters a sense of too much enclosure, which clashes with our instinctual preference for a minimal level of openness - possibly an evolutionary hang-over allowing us to notice predators.

Although this study is a welcome contribution to the psychology of architecture, it suffers from numerous limitations. Among these is the fact most of the Icelandic participants reported a lack of familiarity with urban scenes of this kind - results could be different in other countries. Also, the participants didn't experience actual streets, and only perceived, rather than actual, restorative powers were measured. Finally, the levels of architectural variety were minimal - no fewer than 50 per cent of the buildings in any scene were identical. Higher levels of variation could have an adverse effect.

Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said "their results affirm that densely built urban residential settings need not lack restorative quality, and that the design of the built environment can play a significant role in affecting perceptions regarding possibilities for restoration."

"Such information is needed in the effort to create urban environments that are sustainable in social and psychological terms," they added, "as well as in ecological terms."

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Lindal, P., and Hartig, T. (2013). Architectural variation, building height, and the restorative quality of urban residential streetscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 33, 26-36 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2012.09.003

Author weblinks: http://www.palllindal.com/en/

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4. The Mastermind effect - Psychologists boost students' general knowledge using priming placebo

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Believing a treatment will work, even if in reality it is entirely inert, can lead to profound beneficial changes. This is the wonder of the placebo effect and most of us have heard it discussed in relation to helping people with physical ailments.

Less explored is the potential the effect could have in other contexts. There are some examples, such as a paper published two years ago by Sophie Parker showing that memory performance was enhanced when participants thought they'd taken a cognition-enhancing drug, even though they hadn't. However, this still has parallels with a medical placebo because of the use of a sham drug.

Now Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan have gone a step further, by showing that a drug-free placebo intervention boosted the general knowledge performance of a group of students. Pub quizzes might never be the same again!

The researchers started by showing 20 participants the answer on-screen to several multiple-choice test items, just prior to the arrival of each of the questions (examples included Pi, and the painter of La Guernica). Next, the researchers gradually reduced the time the answers were presented, until they became completely invisible. This was to demonstrate the principle of subliminal presentation and laid the ground for the experiment proper.

For the real test, involving a new set of 20 questions, Weger and Loughnan told the same participants that for each test item, the correct answer would be presented to them subliminally beforehand, just as in the earlier demonstration. "We further advised them that although they could no longer consciously recognise what was written, their unconscious would still be able to pick up the correct answer," the researchers explained, adding that they told the participants to go with their intuition because "on some level you already know the answer". In reality, however, no answers were presented subliminally, just random letter strings. The researchers call this a "bogus priming method". Participants gave their answers via a paper sheet.

The key finding is that the test performance of the placebo participants significantly outstripped the performance of a control group of twenty students who undertook the test prelims, but were not told the answers would be shown to them subliminally during the test proper (average 9.85 correct out of 20 vs. 8.37 correct; a large effect size of d=0.813). The average age of the 40 participants was 20 years and there were 32 women. The priming placebo effect held when controlling for participant age and gender.

What was going on? The placebo intervention "cannot have expanded the individual's knowledge or storage capacities," the researchers said. "What is more likely to have happened is a weakening of inhibitory mechanisms that normally impair performance on a task - for example, self-incapacitating anxieties that previously taxed cognitive resources." The placebo might also have "primed a success orientation," the researchers said, which may have affected the participants' behaviour accordingly, including increasing their persistence.

Weger and Loughnan are excited about the possibilities their placebo approach might have for testing people's performance in situations where their anxiety might otherwise interfere with achieving their true potential. The real life benefits of this new test-performance placebo will likely depend on the duration of its effect, something the researchers plan to test in future research. Another issue for applying these findings in real life is whether the effect still occurs when people know the trick (at least one previous study has documented a placebo effect that can work without deception http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015591). The researchers are optimistic - "we speculate that even the one-off realisation to have skills and resources that the participant was not previously aware of can be a significant insight that may alter the individual's self-perception and self-talk."

Skeptics will no doubt be concerned about the small size of the sample in the current study and the narrow demonstration of the effect. There's clearly a need for replications! As Weber and Loughnan acknowledged, we also need to know more about the mechanisms underlying the improved test performance.

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Weger, U., and Loughnan, S. (2013). Mobilizing unused resources: Using the placebo concept to enhance cognitive performance. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66 (1), 23-28 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.751117 

Author weblink: http://kangleelab.com/  

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3. Smiling fighters are more likely to lose

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The day before mixed martial artists compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), they pose with each other in a staged face-off. A new study has analysed photographs taken at dozens of these pre-fight encounters and found that competitors who smile are more likely to lose the match the next day (pdf via author website).

Michael Kraus and Teh-Way David Chen recruited four coders (blind to the aims of the study) to assess the presence of smiles, and smile intensity, in photographs taken of 152 fighters in 76 face-offs. Fighter smiles were mostly "non-Duchenne", with little or no crinkling around the eyes. Data on the fights was then obtained from official UFC statistics. The researchers wanted to test the idea that in this context, smiles are an involuntary signal of submission and lack of aggression, just as teeth baring is in the animal kingdom.

Consistent with the researchers' predictions, fighters who smiled more intensely prior to a fight were more likely to lose, to be knocked down in the clash, to be hit more times, and to be wrestled to the ground by their opponent (statistically speaking, the effect sizes here were small to medium). On the other hand, fighters with neutral facial expressions pre-match were more likely to excel and dominate in the fight the next day, including being more likely to win by knock-out or submission.

These associations between facial expression and fighting performance held even after controlling for betting behaviour by fans, which suggests a fighter's smile reveals information about their lack of aggression beyond what is known by experts. Moreover, the psychological meaning of a pre-match smile appeared to be specific to that fight - no associations were found between pre-match smiles and performance in later, unrelated fights. Incidentally, smaller fighters smiled more often, consistent with the study's main thesis, but smiling was still linked with poorer fight performance after factoring out the role of size (in other words, smiling was more than just an indicator of physical inferiority).

If fighters' smiles are a sign of weakness, there's a chance opponents may pick up on this cue, which could boost their own performance, possibly through increased confidence or aggression. To test the plausibility that smiles are read this way, Kraus and Chen asked 178 online, non-expert participants to rate head-shots of the same fighter either smiling or pulling a neutral expression in a pre-match face-off. As expected, smiling fighters were rated by the non-expert participants as less physically dominant, and this was explained by smiling fighters being perceived as less aggressive and hostile.

Of course, the researchers are only speculating about what's going on inside the minds of the fighters pre-match. It's even possible that some of them smile in an attempt to convey insouciance. If so, Kraus and Chen said "it is clear that this nonverbal behaviour had the opposite of the desired effect - fighters were more hostile and aggressive during the match toward their more intensely smiling opponents." 

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Kraus, M., and Chen, T. (2013). A Winning Smile? Smile Intensity, Physical Dominance, and Fighter Performance. Emotion DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0030745

Author weblink: https://sites.google.com/site/mwkraus/

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1. Embodying another person's face makes it easier to recognise their fear

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An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions.

Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute video of a face being stroked with a cotton bud, while at the same time their own face is stroked in synchrony. People who experience this illusion tend to rate the face in the video as being more similar to their own, and, if they see the face cut, they show a physiological stress reaction as if the wound was theirs.

In the study, 15 female participants were challenged with identifying the emotional expression shown by a woman in a photo - either happy, fearful or disgusted. The photos had been morphed with neutral expressions to varying degrees, leading to seven different levels of task difficulty.

The key finding was that the participants were significantly better at recognising the facial expression of fear after they'd experienced the enfacement illusion for the face showing the fear. Simply watching a two-minute video of the person displaying fear didn't lead to this subsequent performance boost, neither did a "sham" version of the illusion in which the stroking of the model's and participant's face is out of synch. Another detail - the genuine version of the illusion led to enhancement of fear recognition only, with no effect on recognising happiness and disgust.

The main result is consistent with past research suggesting that we recognise emotions in other people by simulating their state in our brains. It's as if we temporarily embody the person we are empathising with. Related to this, people with a rare condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia (they experience touch when they see someone else touched) show enhanced facial expression recognition.

It's curious that the enfacement illusion only enhanced the recognition of fear, but then previous studies have suggested that this emotion, more than others, is recognised through a process of embodying the person who is afraid. This makes evolutionary sense too. There are obvious advantages in responding to the sight of a fearful ally by preparing one's own body for a threat.

"Our results suggest that the way we represent the relationship between the bodies of self and other is an important factor in the somatosensory simulation of emotions," the researchers said, "and furthermore, demonstrate that such a process is sensitive to multisensory intervention."

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Maister L, Tsiakkas E, and Tsakiris M (2013). I feel your fear: Shared touch between faces facilitates recognition of fearful facial expressions. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 13 (1), 7-13 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23356565

Author weblink: http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/lab/?page_id=193

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5. Can you fake your personality in a photo?

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Say you wanted your Facebook pic or Twitter avatar to convey to the world that you have a particular personality type, different from how you really are, would you be able to pose in a such a way to achieve this?

A new Finnish study led by Sointu Leikas has explored this idea by asking 60 participants (average age  27; 30 men) to pose for 11 photographs, from waist up, against a white background. The first photo was simply taken as they posed freely. Next, they posed the extremes of each of the Big Five personality traits, described to them as: stable and calm (low neuroticism); anxious and distressed (high neuroticism); extraverted and enthusiastic (high extraversion); reserved and quiet (low extraversion); intellectually curious / daydreamer (high openness); conventional / does not like change (low openness); empathic and warm (high agreeableness); critical and quarrelsome (low agreeableness); dependable and self-disciplined (high conscientiousness); and unorganised and careless (low conscientiousness). The participants weren't allowed to change their clothing or hair to create these various impressions.

The photos were subsequently shown to 401 observer participants (average age 26, 343 women). Each observer rated the personality of the person depicted in 11 photos, each showing a different posing participant in one of the various posing conditions. Attractiveness of the posers was controlled for in the analysis, given that attractiveness is known to influence perceptions of personality.

In many cases the participants succeeded in conveying specific personality impressions, even when different from their true personality scores, but this varied with the particular personality traits in question. They were most effective at portraying either high or low extraversion. Openness was also conveyed quite successfully. Past research has shown that high-scorers on Openness tend to look away from the camera, so it's possible the posing participants in the current study realised this, perhaps subconsciously.

The posers also had partial success with neuroticism and conscientiousness: they were rated as less conscientiousness when attempting to appear as unorganised, compared with their neutral photo; and they were rated as more neurotic when they attempted to appear anxious, as compared with their neutral photo. Attempts to appear stable or dependable and self-disciplined did not work so well. Another striking finding was the posers' complete failure to convey reliably either high or low agreeableness. Observer ratings were all over the place for this trait, perhaps due to a reluctance to score strangers on this dimension on the basis of such limited evidence. "From an applied perspective, this can be considered fortunate," the researchers said, "because it suggests that it is difficult to convey a false image of high Agreeableness."

Past research has largely focused on how much surprisingly accurate information we're able to garner from the briefest glimpses of other people's appearance. This new study is an interesting departure, turning the focus to how much we can control the perceptions we create. "With everyone a Google search away, first impressions of potentially important others are increasingly likely to be be based on impressions of personality in photographs," Leikas and her colleagues said. "The results suggested that it is possible to control the impressions of personality in photographs. However, success ... depends on the particular trait in question."

A weakness of the study is the fact the posing participants were unable to modify their clothing or hairstyle, or use props or backgrounds. In real life, people hoping to look friendly on a Facebook profile, or entrepreneurial on LinkedIn, would surely alter their clothes and backdrop to help achieve their desired image.

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Leikas, S., Verkasalo, M., and Lönnqvist, J. (2013). Posing personality: Is it possible to enact the Big Five traits in photographs? Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (1), 15-21 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.10.012

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3. Boost your memory for names by making a game of it

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People often apologise for being useless at remembering names, as if it's some idiosyncratic quirk of theirs. In fact, with the exception of memory champs and their fancy mnemonics, plenty of research shows that most of the rest of us are especially hopeless at remembering people's names, as compared with other items of information, such as professions.

Names are arbitrary tags, and so we struggle to embed them in a web of meaningful connections. Research has even shown that people are poorer at remembering names than occupations when the same word is used (e.g. "Mr Carpenter" vs. "a carpenter"), presumably because treating the word as a name robs it of its wider semantic associations.

But that's not to say we can't do a better job of remembering names if we make more effort. And a new study suggests a way to untap this potential - turn the task of memorising names into a game.

Say you're off to a business lunch. You and a colleague could allocate points for any names you remember successfully afterwards. For example, you get 10 points for the boss, 5 points for her assistant, and a point a piece for the remainder of her team. The new research suggests that incentivising the memory challenge in this way will give you a far better chance of recalling the most important names. This could prove handy, helping you make a good impression in future meetings.

Sara Festini and her colleagues put this idea to the test in a study with 32 undergrads. Participants were presented with pictures of 28 male faces, each paired either with a name (e.g. "Mr Fisher") or an occupation ("fisher"). Each face-word pair had a designated point value - either 10 points or 1 point and participants had two chances to study the series of faces and their attached information. A 3-minute filler task came next before the memory test began. The participants were shown the faces and had to recall the relevant name or occupation.

Overall, participants were much better at recalling occupations than names (47 per cent correct vs. 27 per cent), consistent with past research. But crucially, participants did a superior job at remembering high value (10-point) names, than low value names (33 per cent vs. 21 per cent). It's as if the extra incentive prompted participants to go to greater lengths to process the names and encode them more deeply. In contrast, point values made no difference to success with recalling occupations, perhaps because they had already been embedded automatically into a web of semantic connections.

When the experiment was repeated with nonsense words used for names and occupations (e.g. "monid" for occupation and "Mr Monid" for a name), performance was equivalent for names and occupations because the occupations had now been stripped of their automatic meaningful connotations. This time, higher point values improved people's memory for both names and occupations, presumably because both were now able to benefit from the effort of extra processing and encoding.

For a third and final experiment, faces were again paired with standard names and occupations (carpenter / Mr Carpenter) but this time participants were required to rehearse the information for each face out loud, eight times. This was intended to interfere with any attempts at deeper processing, to see if that was the mechanism by which higher points led to better memory. And that's exactly what happened, with high-value names now recalled no more effectively than low-value names.

The researchers said their study revealed "a method to improve proper name learning", although they were cautious about how it might be applied in real life. "Future experiments are needed to determine if deliberately assigning high value to important names in everyday situations similarly boosts name recall as it did in a controlled lab setting."

But their main message remains upbeat: "Although names are difficult to remember," the researchers concluded, "actions can be taken to facilitate their recall."

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Festini, S., Hartley, A., Tauber, S., and Rhodes, M. (2012). Assigned value improves memory of proper names. Memory, 1-11 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2012.747613 

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2. Can you will yourself happier?

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"Happiness is as a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

A key question for people hoping to improve their well-being is whether it is counter-productive to focus too hard on the end goal of being happier. Philosophers like John Stuart Mill have proposed that it is - he wrote that happiness comes to those who "have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness." A pertinent study published in 2003 by Jonathan Schooler and his colleagues supported this idea: participants who listened to music with the intention of feeling happier actually ended up feeling less happy than others who merely listened to the music with no happiness goal.

But now a new study has come along which purports to show that trying deliberately to be happier is beneficial after all. Yuna Ferguson and Kennon Sheldon criticise the Schooler study on the basis that the music used - Stravinsky's Rite of Spring - is not conducive to happiness, and that's why it interfered with deliberate attempts to feel happier.

Ferguson and Sheldon had 167 participants spend 12 minutes listening either to Rite of Spring or an upbeat section from Rodeo by Copland. Crucially, half the participants were instructed to relax and observe their natural reactions to the music. "It is important that you do not try to consciously improve your mood," they were told. The other participants received the opposite instructions - "really focus on improving your mood".

Afterwards, two measures of mood were taken - one based on six words like "joyful"; the other a continuous measure of positive feelings. The participants who'd listened to the cheery music, and simultaneously tried to improve their mood, reported feeling in a more positive mood than the participants who'd merely listened to the upbeat music, and the participants who'd listened to the down-beat music, whether they strived to feel happier or not. This was despite the fact that the groups did not differ in how much they'd enjoyed the activity, or how "pressured" they'd felt to complete it.

A second study was similar, but this time 68 participants visited a psych lab five times over two weeks to spend 15 minutes each time listening to music they'd chosen from a pre-selected list covering various genres from folk to hip-hop. Again, half the participants were instructed to focus on the music and not their own happiness (they were told that doing so could backfire); the other half were told to think a lot about their happiness and to try to feel happier (they were told that doing so is beneficial).

At the end of the two weeks, the group who'd deliberately tried to feel happier showed an improvement in their happiness levels compared with baseline; in contrast, the participants who'd merely focused on the music did not enjoy this benefit. This was despite both groups believing to the same degree that the intervention would make them happier, and both groups enjoying their music the same amount.

"The results suggest that without trying, individuals may not experience higher positive changes in their well-being," Ferguson and Sheldon concluded. "Thus practitioners and individuals interested in happiness interventions might consider the motivational mindset as an important facet of improving well-being."

Sceptical readers may not be so easily persuaded. Because there was no attempt to measure the participants' thought-processes, it's difficult to know how they interpreted and acted on the two forms of instruction. In the second study in particular, even though they were told there was no need, how do we know the participants didn't go to lengths outside of the lab to boost their happiness? From a statistical point of view, the first study lacks any measure of change in mood.

The second study is also complicated by the music-focus group starting out with, and ending up with, a slightly higher average happiness score than the happiness-focus group (albeit these differences were not statistically significant). This raises the possibility of a ceiling effect for the music-focus group - perhaps they were already too happy for the intervention to make a difference.

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Ferguson, Y., and Sheldon, K. (2013). Trying to be happier really can work: Two experimental studies. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8 (1), 23-33 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2012.747000

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6. The psychology of online reviews

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We used to rely on word-of-mouth or expert critics to help us choose our purchases, be that a planned holiday or a movie rental. Today that's all changed. A few mouse clicks and sites like Trip Advisor and Amazon offer us an abundance of reviews written by strangers. Yet, how they affect our judgements has been little researched.

Now Brent Coker has conducted a pair of studies and his main finding suggests that we remain impressed after reading early positive reviews, even if negative reviews come later. It's a finding that could help us be more objective when reading review pages, and it will surely also be of interest to marketeers and PR professionals hoping to give their products an advantage.

Seventy-six undergrads were told all positive facts about one fictional coffee brand and all negative facts about another, along the lines of: "the company has put green policies in place" and "the company has tried to cover up exploitation of its workers". Pictures illustrated the facts.

Next a research assistant told the participants that a mistake had been made - the fact sheets had been wrongly labelled, so that the positive statements actually applied to other coffee brand and vice versa. They were asked to imagine the sheets had been labelled correctly and then say how they felt about the two companies. Their responses were compared against the ratings of a control group for whom the reversal wasn't made.

The key finding here was that the impact of the early positive facts lingered, leading to enhanced ratings for the brand that was originally misdescribed in glowing terms. In contrast, the stain of negative facts wore off. The brand originally misdescribed in negative terms was given fair ratings by the participants, as if they were able to forget the mistaken negative associations.

A second study tested this principle with online reviews for an LA hotel. Two hundred and eighty undergrads read five Trip Advisor reviews for the hotel, either ordered so that they went from positive to negative, or from negative to positive. The participants showed more favour for the hotel when they read the more positive reviews first, again showing how the impact of early positive reviews appears to linger. This remained the case even when the reviews were labelled such that they appeared to have been written over the course of a year (so giving the impression that the hotel had deteriorated during that time).

"This research documented evidence of asymmetrical affective perseverance when consumers form attitudes towards brands," Coker concluded. "... Consumers may overshoot their judgments towards brands when positive information is replaced with negative information."

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Coker, B. (2012). Seeking the opinions of others online: Evidence of evaluation overshoot. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33 (6), 1033-1042 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2012.06.005

---------------------------------------- 3. How to kill an earworm ----------------------------------------

If earworms - songs that play in your head - drive you crazy, you'll welcome clues for how to eradicate them that come from a new study by psychologists at Western Washington University, USA.

First - and I realise this doesn't sound appealing - try to avoid songs that you like. The new research suggests they are most likely to become lodged in your head (contrary to the myth that it's obnoxious songs with most earworm potential). If you must listen to a favoured song, check to see if it starts playing in your head right afterwards. If it does, then it's well on its way to becoming an earworm. This is a particular risk is you find that only a part of the song plays in your head.

Ira Hyman Jr. and her colleagues believe this last detail may be a manifestation of the classic Zeigarnik Effect, whereby incomplete tasks remain in memory but evaporate once completed. In the case of earworms, the researchers propose that the playing of only a part of a song in your head leaves it incomplete and thereby increases the likelihood that it will return against your will as an earworm. This insight suggests that one way to squash a developing earworm is to make sure, once a song starts playing in your head, that you see it all the way through (perhaps you will need to listen to the track again to ensure this is possible).

Finally, after listening to music, try to avoid mental tasks that are either too easy or too difficult. Any kind of activity that increases your mind-wandering will also provide fertile ground for an earworm to develop. In the same vein, engaging in an absorbing task will tie up your mental resources and deny the earworm the chance to grow.

These insights are based on a survey and several lab experiments conducted by Hyman Jr. and her team. The survey of 299 students revealed that enjoyable, recently heard songs were more likely to become earworms; that a huge variety of songs become earworms; that musicians experience them more often and re-experience more aspects of songs.

In the experiments, dozens of students listened to and rated three songs by the Beatles and by more contemporary acts like Gaga (ostensibly as part of a completely different research study), then they completed a puzzle task. Afterwards they revealed whether any of the songs had started playing in their heads, and 24 hours later they reported whether the songs had returned as earworms.

Overly challenging sudoku or anagram tasks helped breed more earworms (the former more so than the latter). Beatles songs were just as likely to become earworms as modern hits. Songs played later in the experimental session (therefore more recently heard) were more likely to become earworms; and a song that started playing in the head soon after listening was more likely to become an earworm over the next 24 hours. Only playing part of songs to students, as opposed to the whole track, did not increase the risk of earworms.

"Songs frequently come to mind as intrusive thoughts, and intrusive song cycles are easy to start in both naturalistic and laboratory situations," the researchers said. "In our experimental studies, we have documented that intrusive song cycles are easy to start and manipulate. Therefore, songs may provide a valuable tool for examining why intrusive thoughts occur and how to control intrusive thought cycles." _________________________________

Hyman, I., Burland, N., Duskin, H., Cook, M., Roy, C., McGrath, J., and Roundhill, R. (2012). Going Gaga: Investigating, Creating, and Manipulating the Song Stuck in My Head. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.2897

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2. When parents lie to their children

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We teach our kids that it is wrong to lie, even though most of us do it everyday. In fact, it is often our children who we are lying to. A new study, involving participants in the USA and China, is one of the first to investigate parental lies, finding that the majority of parents tell their children lies as a way to control their behaviour.

Gail Heyman and her colleagues presented 114 parents in the USA and 85 in China with 16 so-called "instrumental lies" in four categories - lies intended to influence the kids' eating habits (e.g. "you need to finish all your food or you will get pimples all over your face"); lies to get the children to leave or stay put (e.g. "If you don't come with me now, I will leave you here by yourself); lies to control misbehaviour (e.g. "If you don't behave I will call the police"); and finally, lies to do with shopping and money (e.g. "I did not bring any money with me today. We can come back another day.").

Eighty-four per cent of US parents and 98 per cent of Chinese parents admitted telling at least one of the 16 lies to their children, and a majority of parents in both countries admitted to telling lies from three of the four categories. The exception was the misbehaviour category - just under half the US parents said they told lies to make their children behaviour better, compared with 80 per cent of Chinese parents.

The lie that the greatest proportion of parents said they told was threatening to leave a child behind if he/she refused to follow the parent. Rates of lying by parents were higher in China than in the US, especially in relation to misbehaviour and eating. The Chinese parents also viewed instrumental lying by parents with more approval than the US parents did; at the same time, they (the Chinese) viewed lying by children with more disapproval. "This cross-cultural difference may reflect greater concern with social cohesiveness and a greater emphasis on respect and obedience," the researchers said.

Asked why they told instrumental lies to their children, parents across both countries talked in terms of a cost-benefit trade-off and the stress of getting children to comply. Other times it was felt children would struggle to understand the truth, such as the complexities of the family budget.

As well as looking at instrumental lies, the study also asked parents about untruths they told their children regarding fantasy characters like the tooth-fairy, or to make their children feel better, for example praising a poor piano performance. Here there were no cultural differences in rates of lie-telling, although the Chinese parents showed less approval toward lying about the existence of fictional characters.

The study has limitations, as acknowledged by the researchers. The two samples differed in other ways besides their culture - the US parents being more highly educated, for example. And of course there was a reliance on self-report rather than an observation or record of actual lies told. Despite these issues, Heyman said their study "helps fill a void in an understudied area that may have strong implications for children's social and moral development."

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Heyman, G., Hsu, A., Fu, G., & Lee, K. (2012). Instrumental lying by parents in the US and China. International Journal of Psychology, 1-9 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207594.2012.746463

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1. Easily disgusted people are better at spotting impurities

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The cool, calm extravert - that's the emotional profile that our culture puts on a pedestal. Prudes, introverts and scaredy-cats just aren't fashionable.

Yet there's mounting psychological research showing that unpopular emotional traits often come with advantages. The anxiously attached are quicker to detect danger, such as smoke in a room; those with trait anxiety have fewer accidents; introverts speak in a way that's perceived as more trustworthy. Now Gary Sherman and his colleagues have published research showing how prudish disgust-sensitivity is associated with a superior ability to detect impurities.

Over one hundred students had to judge repeatedly which of four squares on a computer screen was the odd-one-out in terms of its shading. The squares were either light grey against a white background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others (akin to spotting dirt against a white background); or they were dark grey against a black background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others.

Students more prone to disgust (they agreed with statements like "it would bother me to see a rat run across my path") tended to have heightened sensitivity for spotting grey shades against a white background, similar to spotting dirt on a clean surface. They displayed no such heightened sensitivity at the other end of light spectrum - grey on black.

A second study was similar, but this time students more prone to disgust had heightened sensitivity when identifying digits written in light grey against a white background (yet they were no better at spotting grey digits against a mid-grey background).

In a final study, looking at disgusting pictures (e.g. maggots on meat) boosted the ability of disgust-sensitive participants to spot grey digits against a white background. Participants low in disgust sensitivity didn't show this response to the pictures, perhaps because they were unmoved by them.

The effect documented here is a form of perceptual tuning, like the way in infancy we gradually lose our ability to hear sounds that feature in foreign languages. It's not clear if being disgust prone leads to more exposure to clean white surfaces, and so more practice and superior ability at seeing darker shades against a light background. Or if instead, some people have heightened sensitivity at this end of the colour spectrum, which has the effect of making them more prone to disgust. Or both, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

"Disgust not only makes people want to avoid impurities," the researchers said, "but also makes people better able to see them."

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Sherman, G., Haidt, J., and Clore, G. (2012). The Faintest Speck of Dirt: Disgust Enhances the Detection of Impurity. Psychological Science, 23 (12), 1506-1514 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797612445318

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4. Benevolent sexism puts women off asking for help

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Benevolent sexism describes insidious behaviours and beliefs that reinforce the idea that women are less capable than men and need their help. It's a controversial idea. It's not always clear if an act, such as a man opening a door for a woman, is simply polite or an example of benevolent sexism. Another issue is whether or not benevolent sexism is harmful. A new study led by Juliet Wakefield claims to show that exposure to benevolent sexism can put women off asking for help. If true, it's a finding that has obvious implications for the workplace, especially in contexts where health and safety could be compromised.

Eighty-six female undergrads arrived one at a time at a psychology lab for what they thought was an investigation into sex differences in reasoning and problem-solving. A female research assistant welcomed them and explained that they'd be interacting with a remote research team via computer. She then went and sat behind a partition in the same room. The three-person remote team were either all male or all female (this was clear from their names), and they proceeded to ask some basic questions of the participant via the computer.

Next, the research assistant's mobile phone rang. It was obvious from her end of the conversation that it was her male plumber "Joe". He'd obviously moved some items in her house without asking - an act that the researcher blamed either on his impatience or his sexist beliefs. After her call, the research assistant apologised to the participant, either saying "Sorry about that, my plumber is so impatient" or "Sorry about that - my plumber is such a typical man - he thinks that women are incapable of doing anything on their own!".

After this, the participants began a 90-second anagram challenge on the computer. When the time was up, they had the chance to request help from the remote research team for any items they hadn't solved. They also answered questions about their mood.

The key finding is that participants exposed to the story about the sexist plumber asked for less help on average, compared with participants who were told the plumber was merely impatient (they sought help with 48 per cent vs. 56 per cent of unsolved items). This held regardless of the sex of the remote research team (the source of the help). Another finding was that for participants exposed to the sexist plumber story, the more help they sought, the worst their mood. Conforming to the stereotype of the needy female appeared to make them feel rubbish about themselves.

"All in all," the researchers concluded, "our findings underline the point that the benevolent sexism in everyday banal interactions can be consequential for women's emotions and behaviour, and is therefore anything but banal."

Critics may feel that the explicit view to which some of the participants were exposed - that "women are incapable of doing anything on their own" - was not particularly subtle; that the results therefore say more about out and out sexism rather than benevolent sexism.

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Wakefield, J., Hopkins, N., and Greenwood, R. (2012). Thanks, But No Thanks: Women's Avoidance of Help-Seeking in the Context of a Dependency-Related Stereotype Psychology of Women Quarterly, 36 (4), 423-431 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0361684312457659

---------------------------------------- 3. For mimicry to flatter, it's all about the body part, not the action ----------------------------------------

We like people more when they mimic us. But only up to a point. If mimicry becomes too obvious, it can backfire, becoming mockery. A new study asks just how much imitation is enough to trigger benefits. Does the mimicker need to copy every action, or merely to move the same body parts?

Peggy Sparenberg and her colleagues conducted three experiments in all. In the first two, 126 participants performed movements while at the same time watching videos of human-like avatars performing various movements of their own.

The avatars either moved their arms in a straight line, up and down, or they moved their legs in a linear fashion. Meanwhile, the participants turned a crank in a circular motion, either with their arms, or with their legs. The idea was that the movement type performed by the participants was always completely different from the type of movements performed by the avatars, while the limb used matched for some participants but not others. Asked to rate the pleasantness of the avatars afterwards, there was a clear effect of matching limbs. Participants who'd watched an avatar moving the same limb type that they'd been moving tended to give their avatars higher ratings.

For the final study, 96 seated participants were trained in different types of movements with their arms or legs (e.g. holding the elbows steady near the body, and swinging the arms outwards to the side and back again). They then performed these trained movements while watching a video of a person in a chair performing movements of their own. The character in the video either performed the exact same kind of movements; different movements but with the same limb type; or different movements with different limbs.

After the videos, the participants rated their feelings towards the video character. The key finding here was that participants gave higher ratings when the person in the video moved the same limb as they did, regardless of whether they performed the same kind of movement. In fact, seeing the video character perform the same kind of movement added nothing to the preference ratings.

Mimicry is thought to make a good impression because it increases what's called "sensorimotor fluency". As mimicry researcher Rick van Baaren told The Psychologist, when you're mimicked, "What you perceive is the same as what you do. It’s easier for the brain to process, it takes less energy and leads to positive affect." These new results suggest that merely seeing the same limb moved as the limb you are moving, is enough to trigger this fluency effect. "To our knowledge," Sparenberg and her team concluded, "our results are the first to demonstrate that an incidental and minimal structural overlap in body part moved is sufficient to establish a mimicry-preference link." _________________________________

Sparenberg, P., Topolinski, S., Springer, A., and Prinz, W. (2012). Minimal mimicry: Mere effector matching induces preference. Brain and Cognition, 80 (3), 291-300 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2012.08.004

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2. Putting a price on emotions

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Would you pay more cash to experience intense happiness or to avoid intense embarrassment? Your answer may depend on the culture you live in.

A team led by Hi Lau at the University of Hong Kong used this "willingness to pay" approach to find out how students in Britain and Hong Kong value different emotions. For the first study, 97 British students chose how much they'd be willing to spend (from £10 to £150, in £10 increments) to enjoy various positive emotions intensely for an hour, or to to avoid various negative emotions for an hour.

Overall, the students were willing to pay more to experience positive emotions than to avoid negative ones. An hour's worth of love was the most valued, followed by an hour's worth of happiness and then an hour without sadness. Bottom of the list was disgust - the students were only prepared to pay an average of £43 to avoid an hour of disgust (compared with £95 to have an hour of love).

Next, the research took in the choices of 46 students in Hong Kong as well as 41 Brits, and the range of emotions was expanded. The findings for the British students was largely a replication of the first study, with a greater willingness to pay for positive emotions than to avoid negative ones. The Hong Kong students showed a more balanced set of responses, being just as willing to pay to avoid negative emotions as to experience positive ones. Focusing on specific emotions, the Brits said they'd pay more than the Hong Kong students for happiness, delight and calm; the Hong Kong students meanwhile said they'd pay more than the Brits to avoid regret, embarrassment and frustration.

Lau's team, including University of Cambridge researcher Simone Schnall, said their approach offers a new, advantageous way to gauge people's attitudes towards emotions. The findings complement questionnaire-based research on people's beliefs about which emotions matter most to them, and their beliefs about which emotions will have more of an impact on their long-term wellbeing. There's some evidence that an absence of negative emotion is more important for wellbeing than positive emotion, in which case the British participants in the current study may have been unwise in their choices. "By putting price-tags on emotions we might come closer to understanding the value of human experience in order to aid policies at enhancing well-being," the researchers said.

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Lau, H., White, M., and Schnall, S. (2012). Quantifying the Value of Emotions Using a Willingness to Pay Approach. Journal of Happiness Studies DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10902-012-9394-7

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2. The new psychology of awkward moments

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The fascination of socially awkward moments certainly hasn't been missed by comedy writers. Millions of us have cringed our way through series like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. In contrast, psychology before now has largely neglected to study this fundamental part of social life.

In a new exploratory study, Johsua Clegg proposes a model. Social awkwardness, he posits, is what we feel when the situation threatens our goal of being accepted by others. The feeling prompts us to direct our attention inwards, to monitor our behaviour and attempt to behave in a way that will improve our chances of achieving acceptance. There's been a lot of research before on embarrassment, but that's tended to focus on embarrassed individuals, their feelings and dispositions. This new study is less personal, being more about the situations that reliably trigger everyday feelings of social awkwardness in most people.

Clegg invited 30 undergrad participants (13 men) into a carefully prepared room in groups of three. Each trio sat facing each other on chairs arranged in a triangle. They knew they were being filmed through a two-way mirror. There was also a table with a microphone and five cookies on it.

For the first three minutes, the participants were given no instructions. Then another participant (actually a stooge working for Clegg) arrived with a chair and sat down with them. Three more minutes passed, a researcher appeared and instructed the trio to begin an ice-breaker task (the stooge exited at this point). After three minutes discussion he would ask each of them to introduce each other to the group. Once this was done, the participants left the room and moved to another where they watched back the footage of themselves. They used a slider box, like the kind used in audience research, to indicate how awkward they were feeling during the social interactions on a moment by moment basis.

Clegg noted those moments that participants recorded a dramatic increase in social awkwardness and he cross-checked with the videos to see what was happening at the time. Moments of feeling awkward fell into distinct situational categories, which we can probably all relate to. These included times when participants didn't know what was expected of them or what the social rules were (such as when they first sat down in the room without instructions); when a social norm was broken (e.g. one person interrupted another; someone infringed on another's personal space); a social standard wasn't obtained (e.g. a person stumbled with their speech, there was a long silence); norms around eating were broken (e.g. spilling food from mouth while eating); negative social judgements were made by one person towards another, either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. by pulling a face); when names were forgotten or people weren't recognised; and when social processes were made explicit, such as during the ice-breaker task.

There were also five kinds of moment when social awkwardness plunged. This included: when people were sharing common interests, when one person helped another, when one person was positive about another, and humour. It's notable that a lot of the humour was actually about social awkwardness - joking about it seemed to make it go away.

The study is a tentative first step towards cataloguing when and why people feel socially awkward. It has obvious limitations, foremost that the participants were being filmed and the study is US-centric. But as Clegg argues, it raises all sorts of interesting avenues for future investigation. Perhaps most significant is the similarity of participants' descriptions of social awkwardness to typical accounts of full-blown social anxiety - they talked about feeling "pressured", "anxious", "nervous" and "crazy". In attempting to understand problematic social anxiety, Clegg said psychology has tended to focus on the individual, on traits like shyness and attention to the self. His new psychology of awkward moments focuses attention on the situations that trigger social discomfort in all of us. Understanding more about everyday social awkwardness, and how people deal with it, could provide new insight into why and how socially anxious people come to feel awkward nearly all of the time.

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Clegg, J. (2012). Stranger situations: Examining a self-regulatory model of socially awkward encounters. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 15 (6), 693-712 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368430212441637

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3. When not to pat someone on the shoulder
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Physical touch can be surprisingly persuasive. From diners giving larger tips to waiters who touch them, to people being more helpful to strangers who pat them lightly on the arm, the literature has tended to paint a positive picture of the emotional influence of social touch. But now a study out of Belgium has documented what you might call the dark side of social touching. This isn't about unwanted groping, which is always inappropriate. It's about the fact that context is everything for light social touches, with the new research showing that even a friendly pat on the shoulder can have an adverse effect if it's performed in the wrong situation.

Jeroen Camps and his colleagues had 74 student participants perform a maze challenge in a race against a partner. The outcome was fixed so the participant won by a tiny margin, and then, as the pair left the room, the partner (actually a male or female stooge planted by the researchers) patted the participant on the shoulder lightly three times, smiled gently and wished them good luck for the next task. For participants in the control condition, all this was the same but without the shoulder patting. Next, the participants and their partner went to another room and completed "the dictator game", a simple economic game that involved the participant choosing how many movie-prize credits to share with their partner.

The revealing finding was that participants who'd been patted on the shoulder shared fewer credits with their partner, suggesting that touch can backfire when it's performed in a competitive context, perhaps because it's interpreted as a gesture of dominance. Interestingly, there was no link between participants' awareness of whether they'd been touched and their sharing behaviour; participants who remembered the touch rated it as neutral; and the partner wasn't rated as more unpleasant in the touch condition. All of which suggests the adverse effect of touch on later cooperation was probably non-conscious.

A second study was similar but this time participants and their partner (another stooge, always female) either competed against each other on a puzzle or they cooperated. Again, afterwards, the partner wished them luck, smiled, and either did or didn't pat them on the shoulder at the end, before they both moved to another room to play the dictator game. The results were clear - in a competitive context, touched participants subsequently shared fewer movie-prize credits with their partner, compared with those participants who weren't touched. By contrast, in the cooperative context, touched participants went on to be more generous with their partner, as compared with participants who weren't touched.

"Despite what some people might think, touching someone else may thus not always have desirable social consequences," the researchers said. "A simple tap on the shoulder, even with the best intent, will do nothing but harm when used in the wrong place at the wrong time."

A limitation of the research is the use of a shoulder pat. It could be argued that this is a form of touch with specific connotations, depending on the context. For instance, maybe it is construed as condescending in a competitive situation. By contrast, a lot of the earlier research on the benefits of touch have tended to use a simple, light touch on the arm, which is perhaps a more neutral gesture.
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Camps, J., Tuteleers, C., Stouten, J., and Nelissen, J. (2012). A situational touch: How touch affects people's decision behaviour. Social Influence, 1-14 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2012.719479

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1. Introverts use more concrete language than extraverts

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Your personality is revealed in the way you speak, according to new research. Introverts tend to use more concrete words and are more precise, in contrast to extraverts, whose words are more abstract and vague.

Many previous studies have looked at the links between personality and language, but usually this has been about the content of what different personalities choose to talk about. It's been shown, for example, that extraverts are more likely to talk about family and friends, and to use words like "drinks" and "dancing", which makes intuitive sense given that people matching that personality type are expected to spend more time socialising.

Camiel Beukeboom and his co-workers took a different tack, asking 40 employees (19 women; average age 34 years) at a large company in Amsterdam to describe out loud the same five photos depicting ambiguous social situations. Participants were told that "there are no right or wrong answers" and given as long as they wanted to describe each photo. Their answers were recorded and transcribed for later coding. Three days later, the participants also completed a personality questionnaire.

Participants who scored higher in extraversion tended to describe the photos in terms that were rated by an independent coder as more abstract. For example, they used more "state verbs" (e.g. Jack loves Sue) and adjectives, and they admitted to engaging in more interpretation - describing things that were not directly visible in the pictures. On the other hand, the higher a person scored in introversion, the more concrete and precise their speech tended to be, including more use of articles (i.e. "a", "the"), more mentions of numbers and specific people, and making more distinctions (i.e. use of words like "but" and "except").

The differences make sense in terms of what we know about social behaviour and the introvert-extravert personality dimension, with the introverted linguistic style being more cautious, and the extravert style being more casual and vague.

The researchers said their results have far-reaching implications because we know based on past research that the contrasting speech styles are interpreted differently. For instance, they said behaviour described in abstract terms, in the style of an extravert (e.g. Camiel is unfriendly), is usually attributed to personality, as opposed to the situation, and therefore interpreted as enduring, more likely to occur again, yet harder to verify. By contrast, behaviour described in more concrete terms, in the characteristic style of an introvert (e.g. Camiel yells at Martin), tends to be interpreted as situation-specific, and as more believable.

"Thus an introvert's linguistic style would induce more situational attributions and a higher perception of trustworthiness than an extravert's style," the researchers said.

The findings also complement past research showing how conversations between two introverts usually involve discussing one topic in more depth whereas two extraverts dance around more topics in less detail.

"By talking at different levels of abstraction, extraverts and introverts report information differently," the researchers concluded, "and induce different recipient inferences, memories, and subsequent representations of the information exchanged."

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Beukeboom, C., Tanis, M., and Vermeulen, I. (2012). The Language of Extraversion: Extraverted People Talk More Abstractly, Introverts Are More Concrete. Journal of Language and Social Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0261927X12460844

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6. In search of the super-humane (those who identify with all of humanity)

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The pages of psychology's journals are filled with sorry tales of people's intolerance and prejudice towards one another. Against this darkness, Sam McFarland and his colleagues urge us not to forget the brighter stories - the heroes of the past who put themselves at risk because they felt empathy towards outsiders.

Consider the French Pastor Andre ́ Trocme ́ and his wife, who helped save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. "We don't know what a Jew is," Trocme ́ said when instructed to hand over the names of all the Jews. "We only know people."

The ability and inclination to identify with all of humanity was touched on by some of psychology's pioneers. Alfred Adler wrote about the innate potential of people to achieve "gemeinschaftsgefuhl", literally translated as "social interest", but also taken to mean "oneness with all humanity". The founder of humanistic psychology Abraham Maslow invoked the concept of "self-actualised individuals" - people able to identify with and have a concern with all mankind.

Yet despite these early ideas, there's been little subsequent research on the ability to identify with all humanity. One reason is the lack of an explicit measure. Some psychological scales come close - for example, there's the "Social Interest Scale" (measuring interest in community) and there are measures of "moral identity" (how central morality is to self-identity) and "universalism" (a oneness with the world), but none quite targets identifying with all humankind. Until now.

McFarland and his team have devised the Identification With All Humanity Scale (IWAH), consisting of 9 three-part items, including: "How much do you identify with (that is, feel a part of, feel love toward, have concern for) each of the following: a) people in my community, b) Americans, c) All humans everywhere". This version is aimed at US participants, hence the option for (b). The full version is online: http://www.ravansanji.ir/?Escale7003IWAHS.

The researchers tested their new IWAH scale exhaustively across ten studies involving hundreds of participants. The researchers found:

- a high score on the IWAH was more than just a lack of in-group bias and a disposition for empathy; the IWAH also taps into something other than Shalom Shwartz's broader and more abstract concept of "universalism" (the goal of "understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and for all nature").

- high scores on IWAH correlated more strongly with people's concern for human rights than existing compassion measures

- scores on the scale were stable across 10 weeks

- close friends and family had a good idea of a person's score on the IWAH

- members of Human Rights Watch and the Church World Service scored particularly high on the scale, just as you'd expect if it's measuring what it is supposed to

- high scores on the IWAH correlated with the personality factors agreeableness, openness to experience and neuroticism (the researchers were baffled by this last association)

- high scorers on IWAH valued American and Afghani lives more equally

- high scorers had a greater knowledge of global humanitarian issues

- and finally ... research via the your morals.org website (http://www.yourmorals.org/), involving thousands of participants, showed that high scores on the IWAH predicted people's willingness to donate money to international charities, beyond traditional measures, such as of ethnocentrism.

McFarland and his colleagues concluded that their new scale has "substantial merit" and that it's now important to question why some people develop a deeper identification with all of humanity than others. They predicted that children who are neglected or spoiled will fail to develop this form of empathy for all mankind. "A lack of punitiveness coupled with affection may provide a foundation for later concern for humanity at large," they said. "Understanding how identification with all humanity develops is worthy of direct and extensive investigation." Let's hope their new scale helps inspire more research on this vital issue.

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McFarland S, Webb M, and Brown D (2012). All Humanity Is My Ingroup: A Measure and Studies of Identification With All Humanity. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22708625

Author weblink: http://www.wku.edu/psychology/staff/sam_mcfarland

*Visit the DIGEST BLOG: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog to comment on this research, search past items and discover more links.

Further reading. Journal special issue on empathy: http://emr.sagepub.com/content/4/1.toc?etoc

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5. Cope with pain by changing how you picture it

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Most people who suffer from serious pain have one or more mental images that they associate with the discomfort and what it represents to them. A new study by Clare Philips and Debbie Samsom has shown that these pain-sufferers can be taught to re-imagine this pain imagery in a more positive light, bringing them instant relief and emotional comfort.

Of 73 volunteers at an occupational rehab centre in Vancouver, 57 had pain and said they experienced imagery associated with that pain, and so they were recruited into the study (there were 24 men, the average age was 45).

After being interviewed about their baseline pain and their psychological state - including feelings of mental defeat, anxiety and depression - the participants were asked to select their most powerful and distressing pain-related mental image. "I see myself on all fours - like a dog but unable to move," said one. All participants spent time forming this "index image" in their mind before answering more questions about how they were feeling. Focusing on the unpleasant image increased pain and emotional distress. Remember, this is an image that the participants experienced spontaneously in their everyday lives (for nearly half of them, it came to mind several times a day).

Next, after a six-minute gap talking about where they grew up (as a distraction), 26 of the participants were taught to re-picture their pain. They were asked to think "how would you rather see the image?" and to describe in detail what this would entail. They then focused on this new image - for example, the participant above who'd previously described the dog-image now imagined: "I am at the start of a race….the gun goes off and the crowd cheers as I take off." The remaining participants acted as controls and spent the same time focused on their original, unpleasant index image.

After picturing a "re-scripted" pain image, the participants in that group experienced a dramatic drop in their pain levels. In fact, 49 per cent of them said they felt no pain at that time, compared with 11 per cent of them feeling no pain after imagining their index image. "The pain decrements were fast, easily produced and dramatically large," the researchers said. The re-script group also exhibited improvements in anxiety, sadness, mental defeat and beliefs about their own fragility. The control participants, by contrast, experienced none of these improvements.

There was another six-minute gap and the re-script group again pictured their positively re-imagined pain image. The controls were now also taught how to re-imagine their pain image - the local research ethics committee had insisted on this. The original re-script group continued to enjoy reduced pain and psychological benefits, which counts against the idea that the novel image had merely served as a temporary distraction. The controls now also enjoyed the benefits of re-picturing their pain.

Philips and Samsom said that the participants found it easy and pleasurable to re-script their pain images. Of course there is a need now for research to see whether these benefits of re-picturing pain can last into the long term. It would also help to have a different kind of control group - for example, one that merely visualised random positive images, to see if the effects of specifically re-picturing pain are more powerful. Where this study focused on the sensory detail of pain images, future work could also look into the re-writing the images' cognitive meaning.

The findings add to a broader literature showing that our experience of pain is affected by many psychological factors, such as our beliefs about our ability to cope. This doesn't mean the pain isn't real, but it does mean that psychological techniques can be incredibly effective at bringing relief and improvements to people's quality of life.

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Philips C, and Samson D (2012). The rescripting of pain images. Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, 40 (5), 558-76 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22950868

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4. People make more ethical decisions when they think their heart is racing

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Why did the proverbial Good Samaritan cross the road to help the injured stranger? Perhaps he listened to his heart. Not in the poetic sense, but literally. A new study by Jun Gu and his colleagues has highlighted the way cardiac feedback influences people's moral decisions. When students were fed false feedback, leading them to think their heart was racing, they were more likely to volunteer for a good cause and less likely to lie to gain more money.

Eighty-six undergrads arrived at a psychology lab and were asked if they could quickly test out some heart-recording equipment that was needed for a separate study. A wrist monitor was attached to a headset though which false normal (60 beats per minute) or fast (96 beats per minute) heartbeat sounds were played. While the students test-drove the equipment, they were asked to read a recruitment letter, seeking their time for another study into the negative consequences of homophobic discrimination. Forty per cent of students who heard their heart beating fast agreed to volunteer their time, as compared with 17 per cent of students who heard their heart beating at a normal speed.

A second study with 65 more students was similar, but this time as the students tested the heart-monitoring equipment, they played a quick money-sharing game. They simply had to decide whether to instruct their partner, located in another room, to pick option A (which was actually more lucrative for the participant him or herself) or option B (more lucrative for the partner). Participants who heard their heart beating fast were less likely to lie and tell their partner that he or she would be better off choosing option A (31 per cent of them did so, compared with 58 per cent of participants who heard their heart beat at normal speed). A handful of participants were suspicious about the false heart feedback so they were excluded from the analysis, though the general pattern of results was the same with their data included or omitted.

Gu and his colleagues think that a fast heart beat is interpreted by people as a sign they are stressed and that they should adhere to moral conventions as a way to escape that stress. The new finding is consistent with Antonio Damasio's influential Somatic Marker hypothesis, which is based on the idea that bodily feedback guides our decisions, often at a non-conscious level. For example, people playing a card game sweat more when picking from the wrong, costly pile, even before they've realised at a conscious level that it's the wrong choice. The new research also complements recent research showing how bodily perceptions can influence the moral conscience. In one study, participants were less likely to volunteer their time after being given the chance to wash their hands - as if the process of physical cleansing left them feeling less need to compensate for past transgressions.

Cardiac feedback doesn't affect everyone in the same way. In further experiments, Gu and his colleagues demonstrated that the moral decision-making of people who are more mindful (for example, they agreed with statements like: "I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them") was unaffected by the false cardiac feedback. The researchers also found that telling participants that the financial game was a "decision-making" task led to immunity from the false heart feedback, relative to being told the game was an "intuitive task".

This last result is particularly intriguing since we usually assume that thinking more deliberatively helps rein in the wild horses of our emotions, allowing us to behave more morally. The finding of Gu's team suggests that in some circumstances at least, thinking more deliberately can undermine the influence of the heart, actually making it less likely that we'll make a more moral decision.

"The current research reveals that perceived physiological experiences play an important role in influencing moral behaviours," the researchers said. "Listening to your heart may indeed shape ethical behaviours."

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Gu J, Zhong CB, and Page-Gould E (2012). Listen to Your Heart: When False Somatic Feedback Shapes Moral Behavior. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22889162

Author weblink: http://immoralitylab.webs.com/ourlab.htm

*Visit the DIGEST BLOG: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog to comment on this research, search past items and discover more links.

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2. Eye-movement training helps penalty-takers in football feel more in control

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Ties in international football tournaments are decided by penalties, in which a series of kickers attempt to get the ball past the keeper in a one-on-one situation. It's a high stress situation and missing a penalty is the low point of many a career.

Some coaches believe it's impossible to recreate the pressure of the penalty situation. England manager Glenn Hoddle in 1998 admitted his team hadn't practiced because it was a waste of time. The last manager, Fabio Capello, described penalties as a "lottery." Psychologists would beg to differ.

Research by Greg Wood and Mark Wilson at the University of Exeter shows that penalty takers have more success when they shoot for either of the top two corners of the goal, and more importantly, that accuracy is improved when the kicker focuses for a moment on the spot they want to hit. Where the eyes look, the ball tends to go and the pause is thought to allow pre-programming of the kick to occur. This may sound obvious, but many penalty takers often focus on the goalkeeper, rather than on their intended target.

Now in their latest research into what's known as "the Quiet Eye" method, Wood and Wilson have tested whether, as well as linking the visual and motor systems, the training has a psychological benefit too, helping strikers feel more in control, thus preventing them from choking in a high-pressure situation.

Twenty university-level football players were split into two groups. One group underwent Quiet Eye training for three weeks, taking 10 kicks a week, each time calling out the corner they were aiming for, staring momentarily at their target (for about a second), and then beginning their run up and executing the kick. The other group merely practised the same number of kicks each week (the only advice they received was to aim for the top corners of the goal). All participants wore an eye-tracker while training and the same goalkeeper was used throughout.

Next there was a "retention week" when the players filled-out psych questionnaires after practising the same approach to penalty kicks as before. Then the following week a competitive penalty shoot-out between the two groups provided the crucial test. A £100 prize for the best team helped ramp up the stress levels, and a new goal keeper arrived and was described to them as a specialist at saving penalties. Eye-movements were recorded throughout and more psych questionnaires completed.

The researchers were particularly interested in the players' feelings of control, their expectations of success, and confidence in coping with pressure. The key finding is that all groups showed increases in these measures during the "retention week", but only the Quiet Eye group exhibited these benefits in the competitive situation. Moreover, increases in these feelings of control correlated with the aiming behaviour that Quiet Eye training encourages. The more the players focused on their target, the more in control they felt. Although these feelings of control didn't correlate with performance, only the Quiet Eye training group showed improvements in performance during the competitive situation compared with baseline.

The study has its limitations, as the authors acknowledged. For example, it's possible the Quiet Eye training led to more feelings of control and confidence under pressure simply because it was a more detailed training format than the simple practice routines that the other group went through. Also, the Quiet Eye group didn't actually report less anxiety than the other group (that said, the eye movement training increased feelings of control, and players who felt more in control generally felt less anxious). Finally, can we be sure that the Quiet-Eye group's calling out of their targets during training didn't play any part in their later feelings of control?

These issues notwithstanding, the researchers concluded: "the results of this study show that the benefits of Quiet Eye-training transcend visuomotor control adaptations, and can have a positive impact on the control beliefs of the performer."

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Greg Wood, and Mark R. Wilson (2012). Quiet-eye training, perceived control and performing under pressure. Psychology of Sport and Exercise DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2012.05.003

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5. Another look at the "magical" benefit of frequent family meals

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"The statistics are clear," Nancy Gibbs wrote in her article for Time magazine in 2006 entitled the Magic of the Family Meal: "Kids who dine with the folks are healthier, happier and better students". She's right, there is lots of evidence showing these positive associations, and there are plausible explanations for the benefits, such as a chance for children and parents to talk, and the sense of structure that the ritual provides.

But as Daniel Miller and his colleagues point out in their new study, the supposed benefit of frequent family meals is based on research with limitations. Many studies have been cross-sectional snap-shots in time - so it's possible that frequent family meals are merely a proxy for other relevant factors, such as warmer family relations or parental wealth and education. And the causal direction could run backwards. Maybe parents are more inclined to dine with children who are happier and better behaved.

Miller's team have conducted a comprehensive, longitudinal study using data that was collected from 1998 - when 21,400 participating US children were aged 5 years - to 2007, by which time the average age of the remaining 9,700 participants was 13.6. At five time points during that period, the children's parents were surveyed about how often they ate as a family at breakfast and dinner; the children's reading and maths abilities were assessed; and teachers were surveyed about the children's behaviour.

The results were clear - there was little or no evidence (depending on the precise analysis used) of any association between more family meals at earlier time points and better outcomes later, in terms of the children's academic abilities or good behaviour. "Our results suggest that the findings of previous work regarding frequency of family meals and adolescent outcomes should be viewed with some caution," the researchers said.

But we shouldn't be too hasty about dismissing the value of family meals. This study comes with its own caveats. Chief among these is that the children were younger than in most other studies on this issue. Relevant here is that past research has linked frequent family meals with outcomes such as less substance abuse among older teenagers - a potential benefit that was not addressed in this study given the younger sample. Another problem, acknowledged by the researchers, was the reliance on parental reports about the frequency of family meal times. A suspiciously high number of parents reported having family meals every day of the week. If they were lying it could have affected the trustworthiness of the results, although the researchers think this is unlikely based on some checks they made of their data.

Taken altogether, Miller and his colleagues said their study should be seen as "an extension rather than a repudiation of previous work". Their cautious conclusion is that "the magnitude of the effect of family meal frequency may be less than suggested by previous work."

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Daniel Miller, Jame Waldfogel, and Wen-Jui Han (2012). Family meals and child academic and behavioural outcomes. Child Development, DOI: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01825.x/abstract

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4. How happiness campaigns could end up making us sadder

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Founded in 2010, the Action for Happiness* movement states: "What we want for our society is as much happiness as is possible and, above all, as little misery". These aims are well-intentioned, but a new study shows public campaigns like this could have an ironic effect, actually making sad people feel sadder.

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

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

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

It's revealing that a control condition, in which participants were primed with a mundane article about fertiliser, led to just as much negative emotion after the writing exercise (as compared with when the priming article was about sad people being disliked). This suggests the reminder about society's intolerance of negative emotions was unnecessary. "Social pressures appear to be highly normative and particularly so within Western cultures," the researchers said.

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

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

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

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3. Tipping is more prevalent in countries that are more corrupt

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"I don't tip because society says I have to. Alright, I tip when somebody really deserves a tip. If they put forth an effort, I'll give them something extra. But I mean, this tipping automatically, that's for the birds." Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs.

Mr Pink's approach to tipping is that it should be a reward for past good service. Another way to view tipping is as a payment to ensure superior service in the future. It's this latter, future-oriented motivation for tipping that Magnus Torfason and his colleagues say explains their curious observation.

Using data on tipping behaviour in 32 countries (collected from The International Guide to Tipping) and comparing this against the Corruption Perception Index, the researchers found that rates of corruption are higher in countries that tip more (the correlation was .6 were 1 would be a perfect match). This may strike some as odd - tipping is often seen as altruistic, whereas corruption is immoral. Yet, the researchers propose that tipping to ensure future good service is comparable to a bribe and this could explain the puzzling association.

To test these ideas further, Torfason's team focused on two countries with similar rates of tipping, but different rates of corruption - India (with high tipping and high corruption) and Canada (high tipping, low corruption). A survey of 95 Canadians and 157 Indians revealed that the Indians were more likely than Canadians to say they tipped as a way to ensure good service in the future, and this motivation was correlated with their more positive attitudes towards bribery.

In a final study, the researchers primed 40 US undergrads with either a future-oriented or past-oriented approach to tipping. For this they used two versions of text ostensibly taken from the Emily Post etiquette guide. After reading that tipping should be performed as a way to ensure good service in the future (as opposed to rewarding past good service), the students tended to view two accounts of political and legal bribery more leniently.

"The studies reported here highlight a psychological mechanism that may help explain the surprising association between tipping and bribery both within and across countries," the researchers said. They added that the findings raise some intriguing possibilities - for example, might encouraging people to give tips specifically as a reward for past good service act to reduce the tolerance of bribery in society?

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Magnus Thor Torfason, Francis J. Flynn, and Daniella Kupor (2012). Here Is a Tip: Prosocial Gratuities Are Linked to Corruption. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550612454888

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2. Why teens should have their music and sports lessons in the evening

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While you sleep your brain learns. Research with rats has shown how they rehearse maze-routes in their brains whilst they're dozing. And human research has demonstrated that learned material is better recalled after a sound sleep as opposed to a disturbed night. But what hasn't been looked at before now is the optimum time to leave between learning and sleeping.

A team led by Johannes Holz has done just that, finding that "procedural learning" (practice at the kind of skill that you do, rather than talk about) is more effective right before sleep. Learning factual material, by contrast, (dependent on "declarative memory"), was found to be more effective when done in the afternoon, seven and a half hours before sleep, although the evidence for this was less convincing and should be treated with caution.

The researchers recruited 50 teenage girls (aged 16-17) to learn a series of word pairs and a finger-tapping task, either at 3pm in the afternoon or 9pm at night. The performance level of the afternoon and night groups was equivalent at the end of these initial learning tasks.

With the tapping task, it was the girls who learned right before sleep who showed the greatest gains in performance when they were re-tested after 24 hours and again 7 days later. Holz and his colleagues can't be sure why procedural learning is more effective just before sleep, but they think it probably has to do with the effect of sleep on protein synthesis and gene expression.

In contrast to the tapping task, performance on the word pairs after 24 hours was better in the afternoon-learning group. At the 7 day word-pairs test there was no difference in afternoon or evening learners. The fact that declarative learning was more effective in the afternoon suggests that this type of hippocampus-dependent memory has a different time course from procedural learning.

The findings, though preliminary, have obvious practical implications. "We propose that declarative memories, such as vocabulary words, should be studied in the afternoon and motor skills, like playing soccer or piano, should be trained in the late evening," the researchers said. "Most parents among us would have preferred the opposite results."

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Holz J, Piosczyk H, Landmann N, Feige B, Spiegelhalder K, Riemann D, Nissen C, and Voderholzer U (2012). The Timing of Learning before Night-Time Sleep Differentially Affects Declarative and Procedural Long-Term Memory Consolidation in Adolescents. PloS one, 7 (7) PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22808287

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1. When sales staff smile everyone wins

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Serving customers with a smile must be tough if you're not in the mood. In the end, though, sales employees who are more smiley may end up reaping the benefit. A new study has looked at the way an employee's positive emotion infects their customers, and how this in turn feeds back to the employee, boosting their own mood.

Eugene Kim and David Yoon observed 117 interactions between staff and customers at clothing and accessory stores at a large shopping mall in Seoul, South Korea. The emotional behaviour of the employees was observed, then the way their customers responded, and finally, right afterwards, both employee and customer were quizzed about their mood and personality.

The more positive the employee, the more positive the customer tended to be. Moreover, employees who were more positive tended to be in a better mood afterwards, an association that was fully explained by the positive emotions displayed by the customer. In other words, smiley and polite staff initiated a virtuous interactive circle in which customers tended to respond in kind, thus benefiting the worker's own mood.

Of course not all customers are made equal. Kim and Young found that customers who scored lower in agreeableness and lower in emotional stability were more influenced by the positive emotion of the staff. More agreeable customers would be friendly anyway and highly stable customers are less prone to outside influences on their emotions.

A weakness of the study is that the researchers didn't assess staff mood at the outset, prior to each customer interaction. Though unlikely, they admitted this means that they couldn't completely rule out the possibility that interaction had nothing to do with the results - that an employee's mood at the outset had simply affected both their own emotional display, the customer's response and their own mood at the end.

Notwithstanding the need for more longitudinal research, Kim and Yoon said a key message for managers was to see customers as "coproducers of a positive service interaction". As well as "recruiting and hiring employees who are adept at displaying positive emotions," they said that managers should also consider reminding customers of the part they have to play by saying thank you and being civil.

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Kim E, and Yoon DJ (2012). Why Does Service With a Smile Make Employees Happy? A Social Interaction Model. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22800188

Author weblink: http://www.csom.umn.edu/faculty-research/kimx0897/Eugene_Kim.aspx

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6. Beat anger by imagining you're a fly on the wall

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Anger is "the elephant in the room in mental health" according to The Mental Health Foundation. In a survey they conducted in 2008, a third of respondents said they knew someone with an anger problem. Anger is often made worse by misguided folk wisdom that says it's a good idea to reflect on your feelings and vent them. In fact, past research has shown that ruminating and venting anger make it worse.

A new study tests the idea that anger can be dissipated by mentally distancing oneself from the situation - as if viewing proceedings from the perspective of a fly on the wall. There's evidence that this is beneficial, but before now this was derived from studies that merely asked people to imagine frustrating scenarios. Now Dominik Mischkowski and his colleagues have ramped up the realism levels, deliberately winding up their participants in the lab.

Ninety-four undergrads signed up for what they thought was an investigation into the effects of music on problem solving and creativity. They listened to some intense classical music and attempted to solve a series of anagrams against the clock. Part of the procedure involved them reading back the correct answer to the researchers over an intercom. This is where the wind up began - the experimenter repeatedly said that they weren't speaking loudly enough. After the twelfth anagram he went as far as saying "Look this is the third time I have to say this! Can't you follow directions? Speak louder!"

Immediately after the wind up, the participants were told a second experiment (on the effects of music on feelings) required that they reflect on the previous anagram task - either seeing the situation unfold again through their own eyes, or as if they were watching the situation from a distance, "as if it were happening to the distant to you all over again." A third of the participants acted as controls and were told to reflect on the anagram task without any specific instructions. Afterwards, all the participants rated their anger levels. The key finding was that the participants in the distancing condition reported feeling less angry and having fewer aggressive thoughts compared with participants in the self-immersion and control conditions.

A second study was similar but this time a new set of participants were given the chance to actually vent their anger. After the wind up and the reflection phase (from a distance vs. immersed in their own perspective) the participants were invited to take part in a competitive anagram task with a partner located in another room. Part of this involved the chance to blast their opponent with loud noise when he/she got answers wrong - taken as a sign of aggressive behaviour. The important result here - participants who reflected on the initial, frustrating anagram task as if from the perspective of a fly on the wall showed less aggression compared with the other participants.

Mischkowski and his team said their findings showed "how people can neutralize aggression while focusing on their emotions and the situation at hand—by adopting a self-distanced perspective." They added that this is important given that distraction is often not possible in real life situations, for example when it's necessary to carry on interacting with the provocateur.

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Dominik Mischkowskia, Ethan Kross, and Brad J. Bushmana (2012). Flies on the wall are less aggressive: Self-distancing "in the heat of the moment" reduces aggressive thoughts, angry feelings and aggressive behaviour. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.012

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5. Using yuk! and weird! to teach children new morals

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Some morals - such as it being wrong to hurt others - children learn because they see the distress a particular behaviour causes others, or the harm it can bring upon themselves. But other immoral behaviours don't necessarily have obvious victims. These relate to so-called purity-based morals, such as taboo sexual relations, sacrilegious acts or inappropriate eating behaviours. How do kids learn that these things are wrong, especially if they've never actually encountered them?

A new study shows that children are primed to recognise the immorality of certain behaviours by feelings of disgust and beliefs about unnaturalness, especially when these factors are combined. Joshua Rottman and Deborah Kelemen at Boston University manipulated these factors to provoke 7-year-olds into judging novel behaviours by alien characters as immoral.

"This is the first experimental investigation of a clear-cut case of moral acquisition," Rottman and Kelemen said, "one involving morally naive subjects ... and entirely novel and superficially amoral situations."

Sixty-four 7-year-olds were introduced to the faraway planet "Glinhondo" and its alien occupants. The children were then split into four groups and shown pictures of 12 different scenarios, each accompanied by a short spoken description. The scenarios involved several aliens engaging in behaviours directed at their own bodies (e.g. covering their heads with sticks) or at the environment (e.g. sprinkling blue water into a big puddle). After seeing each scenario, the kids had to say whether the depicted behaviour was "wrong" or if it was "OK".

Children in the "disgust" condition viewed the pictures in a room sprayed with the stinky but harmless joke-shop product "Liquid ASS", and the description of the scenarios also highlighted that the alien behaviours were disgusting. Children in the "unnatural" condition viewed the scenarios in a fresh room, but they saw pictures in which only a minority of aliens performed the behaviours and the description highlighted that what they were doing was "unnatural". Kids in a third group experienced a combination of the disgust and unnaturalness - the room stank and it was a minority of aliens performing the behaviour, which was described as unnatural. Finally, some of the kids formed a control group - the room was fresh, all the aliens performed the behaviours and the description merely said that what they were doing was boring.

Children in the combined disgust and unnaturalness condition judged 65 per cent of alien behaviours as "wrong", compared with just 19 per cent of behaviours judged that way by the control group. "This demonstrates that moral acquisition can occur rapidly and in the absence of direct experience with moralised behaviour," the researchers said. "This also speaks against the idea that the primary mechanism guiding moral acquisition is children's active reasoning about harmful or unjust consequences."

The children in the disgust-only or the unnatural-only conditions also judged more alien behaviours as wrong, compared with kids in the control condition, but in both cases they tended to answer "wrong" about half the time, so there's a possibility they were just alternating their answers at random.

The findings show how visceral feelings of disgust combine with intellectual thoughts about what's "natural" to invoke in children a sense of moral wrongness. Another finding was that environmentally directed actions were more often judged as wrong than self-directed actions. "Ultimately, the degree of plasticity inherent within a young child’s moral repertoire is a crucial area of future exploration, and one that is currently under explored," Rottman and Kelemen concluded. "The implications of such research will be substantial, promising to answer fundamental questions about the horizons of our moral nature."

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Rottman J, and Kelemen D (2012). Aliens behaving badly: Children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals. Cognition, 124 (3), 356-60 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22743053

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1. Encouraging students into science by targeting their parents

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Whereas most previous research has focused on ways to make school science lessons more engaging and inclusive, Judith Marackiewicz and her colleagues took a different approach and sent two glossy brochures and a web-site password to the parents of 81 boys and girls (aged approximately 16) at 108 schools in the Wisconsin area. The first brochure "Making Connections: Helping Your Teen Find Value in School" was delivered when the school pupils were in their 10th grade (aged about 16 years), and the second about six months later.

The researchers were guided by psychological theory that says students are motivated by a mix of factors: their expectations about how well they'll do, how much they think they'll enjoy a subject, and how useful they think it will be to them. The brochures and website particularly targeted the last factor. The materials contained information educating parents about the usefulness of maths and science to their children's careers, and advising them on ways to discuss this with their children. This included ways to personalise the discussion of the subjects, as well showcasing the relevance of the subjects to real-life activities, such as video games and driving.

The intervention had a powerful effect. Compared to 100 students in a control group, the children of targeted parents reported at follow-up that they'd had more discussions with their parents about the value of science and maths courses, and they also opted to take more of these subjects at high-school (this averaged out as the equivalent of an extra semester of maths or science during the final two years of school). Mothers in the intervention group also reported being more aware of the value of maths and science to their children's careers.

Time and again past research has shown that one of the strongest predictors of children's choice of science and maths is their parents' level of education. This was replicated in the current study, and impressively enough, the influence of the intervention was the same size as this oft-studied parental factor. Targeting parents may be particularly shrewd, the researchers said, since they have a privileged insight into their children's personalities and histories, and are therefore uniquely placed to help them realise the advantages to studying maths, science, technology and and/or engineering (STEM).

"Parents are an untapped resource for promoting STEM motivation," Marackiewicz and her team concluded, "and the results of our study demonstrate that a modest intervention aimed at parents can produce significant changes in their children's academic choices."

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Harackiewicz JM, Rozek CS, Hulleman CS, and Hyde JS (2012). Helping Parents to Motivate Adolescents in Mathematics and Science: An Experimental Test of a Utility-Value Intervention. Psychological science PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22760887

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6. Just good friends? Attraction to opposite-sex friends is common but burdensome

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They were virtually unheard of for most of human history, but today, in many cultures, friendships between men and women are common place. Still, that niggling doubt never seems to go away - is the relationship really entirely platonic?

A new study by April Bleske-Rechek and her colleagues has investigated cross-sex friendships between heterosexual men and women through the prism of evolutionary theory. From a survey of 88 pairs of college students in cross-sex friendships (averaging two years' duration), the researchers found that: men felt more attraction to their female friend than vice versa; that men overestimated how much their friend was attracted to them; and that men's desire to date their female friend was unaffected by whether they (the men) were in a romantic relationship with someone else, whereas females tended to report less desire to date their male friend, if they (the women) were already in a romantic relationship. Male attraction for a female friend was undimmed by the fact their friend had a partner. By contrast women tended to report less attraction for male friends who had partners.

The participants gave their answers after being reassured they'd be kept anonymous, and after agreeing publicly with their friend not to discuss the study afterwards (I bet they stuck to that!).

The pattern of results makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective on mating strategies, the researchers said, whereby men have more to gain from short-term sexual encounters, whereas women, who invest more in their offspring (in terms of gestation and child-birth), are more selective.

What about the way people deal with their sexual desires for opposite-sex friends? For a second study, over a hundred heterosexual young men and women (average age 19), and an older sample of 142 men and women (average age 37), answered questions about their cross-sex friendships, including listing the costs and benefits. Among the younger sample, 38 per cent were in a (non-marital) romantic relationship; around 90 per cent of the older sample were married.

Again, the researchers said the findings made sense in terms of evolutionary theory. The older sample, most of whom were immersed in a serious long-term relationship, reported less attraction to their opposite-sex friends than the younger sample did. However, this wasn't case for the older single people - they reported just as much attraction to their opposite-sex friends as the younger participants.

Overall, attraction to an opposite-sex friend was more often seen as a burden rather than a benefit of the friendship. Averaged across both samples, attraction was listed as a cost or complication by 32 per cent of participants - five times more often than it was listed as a benefit or enhancement. For young women, and men and women in the older sample, more attraction to their closest friend was associated with feeling less satisfied with their romantic partner.

Zooming in on gender differences, men more often than women, listed attraction to their female friends as a benefit of the friendship, and they were less likely than women to list it as a cost.

"Our findings offer preliminary support for the proposal that men's and women's experiences in cross-sex friendship reflect their evolved mating strategies," Bleske-Rechek and her team concluded. "Attraction between cross-sex friends is common, and it is perceived more often as a burden than as a benefit." Looking ahead, the researchers said it would be interesting to investigate attraction between homosexual same-sex friends, and whether it's seen by them as a burden or benefit of the friendship.

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Bleske-Rechek A.,, Somers, E., Micke, C., Erickson, L., Matteson, L., Stocco, C., Schumacher, B., and Ritchie, L. (2012). Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0265407512443611

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5. Prepared to wait? New research challenges the idea that we favour small rewards now over bigger later

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The old idea that we make decisions like rational agents has given way over the last few decades to a more realistic, psychologically informed picture that recognises the biases and mental short-cuts that sway our thinking. Supposedly one of these is hyperbolic discounting - our tendency to place disproportionate value on immediate rewards, whilst progressively undervaluing distant rewards the further in the future they stand. But not so fast, say Daniel Read at Warwick Business School and his colleagues with a new paper that fails to find any evidence for the phenomenon.

Studies of hyperbolic discounting have often involved participants choosing between a smaller sooner reward and a later larger reward at two time points. When both rewards are in the distant future, people will pick the larger reward, but when the smaller reward is imminent then it's the one that's favoured.

Read's team criticise these kinds of studies on several counts, including the fact that participants often know that the first decision is hypothetical (thus increasing the chance they'll give the socially desirable answer), and the fact that participants often get to interact between the two decision points, which can lead to social influences.

For the new research, Read and his colleagues tested 128 participants from the LSE and Leeds Business School, sending them four weekly emails each containing several choices. The first Tuesday, the participants indicated in an email whether they'd prefer £20 immediately or £21 in one week; £21 in one week or £22 in two weeks; £22 in three weeks or £23 in four weeks; £23 in five weeks or £24 in six weeks. The following Tuesday they made the same choices, but updated for the progress of time, beginning with £21 immediately or £22 in one week, and ditto for the next two Tuesdays. The participants were told that a random selection of them would receive one of their choices, with the reward coming at the appropriate time, thus lending some reality to the task.

If hyperbolic discounting is real, there should have been evidence of the participants showing a greater preference for smaller sooner rewards the more imminent they became. No such effect was found. The researchers also looked at the ratio of choice switches - when participants favoured one option at one time point, but changed their mind later on - in terms of whether they changed to being more patient or to being more impatient. Contrary to hyperbolic discounting, switches to greater patience (favouring larger rewards later) were just as common as the other way around.

A second study built on these findings with 201 US citizens first making a choice between $20 three weeks from today vs. $21 five weeks from today; and then making the choice again three weeks later, so that the smaller reward was imminent and the slightly larger reward was two weeks hence. Some of the participants were told they were making the choice for real (and they were - the researchers even took turns sleeping so that they could fire back vouchers in timely fashion); others were told there was a chance of their choices being acted on for real.

Once again, no evidence was found for hyperbolic discounting. Just as many participants switched to greater patience at the second choice. And the smaller sooner reward was actually chosen slightly less often at the second choice, when it was immediate.

Read's team recognise that there is widespread evidence for myopic decision making - just think of the times you've vowed that your future self will eat healthy food, but when the choice is imminent you go for short-term flavour over long-term health. But they think there's a big question mark over hyperbolic discounting per se as the explanation for these effects. More promising theories, Read and his colleagues believe, are "visceral arousal theory", in which we're motivated to prioritise our primary needs over longer term aims; and "temporal construal theory", in which we represent distant events more abstractly in terms of superordinate (lofty) goals, whilst seeing the short-term more concretely, in terms of our more basic needs.

If hyperbolic discounting is such a fundamental feature of human thinking, Read and his team conclude, then how come research on regret finds that most people rue, not their overindulgence, but their past failures to indulge?

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Read D, Frederick S, and Airoldi M (2012). Four days later in Cincinnati: Longitudinal tests of hyperbolic discounting. Acta Psychologica, 140 (2), 177-85 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22634266

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4. Humour reduces our resistance to aggressive marketing

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Whether it's messages on smartphone Apps or the old fashioned way on billboards, radio and TV, advertisers bombard us relentlessly. Fortunately, our brains have an inbuilt BS-detector that shields us from the onslaught - a mental phenomenon that psychologists call simply "resistance". Ads from dodgy companies, our own pre-existing preferences, and a forewarning of a marketing attack can all marshal greater psychological resistance within us. However, a new study suggests that funny adverts lower our guard, leaving us vulnerable to aggressive marketing.

Madelijn Strick and her team exposed 86 Dutch university students to pictures of 12 foreign peppermint brands, each of which appeared together with one of four types of text: funny; positive but unfunny; distracting neutral (simple maths problems); and non-distracting neutral. Crucially, before they saw the brands and text, half the students were primed to be resistant. They were told that the experiment was being conducted in collaboration with a cunning local supermarket manager who was planning to bombard university students with email and text ads, and that he was even willing to use subliminal messages to make more money.

Three minutes after seeing the brands (during which they completed irrelevant filler tasks), the students completed tests designed to gauge the impact the brands had made on them. They were shown pictures of peppermint brands, some new, and had to say as quickly and accurately as possible whether they'd seen them earlier or not. Another test involved pictures of one of the original brands being flashed on-screen before a positive or negative word, and participants had to categorise the words. Brands with positive connotations would be expected to speed up the recognition of positive words.

As expected, those students who were primed to be resistant tended to perceive the brands as having more negative connotations ... unless that is, the brands were accompanied by distracting text, be that humorous or neutral. The distracting text appeared to interfere with the automatic processes that usually underlie our resistance to aggressive marketing. Separately from nullifying resistance, positive text (humorous or not) led to the brands acquiring positive connotations.

Another study tested whether these effects had any bearing on actual consumer behaviour. A similar procedure was followed but this time the brands were energy drinks and accompanying pictures were used rather than text (as before, these were: humorous; positive but unfunny; neutral non-distracting; and neural distracting). A new batch of students, as well as completing the post-presentation tests, also indicated how many discount coupons they wanted for each brand.

Regardless of whether they were primed to be resistant, students generally preferred brands that had been accompanied by positive images (funny or not). For students primed to be resistant, it was specifically brands accompanied by funny and neutral-distracting images that were more popular. The more resistance the students said they felt, the more they tended to show a favourable bias towards the brands accompanied by a humorous picture.

Strick and her team said that humour has a double effect - because it's distracting, it prevents the formation of negative brand associations, and separately it engenders positive connotations for the brand because of the pleasure of mirth. These effects were implicit in the sense that they occurred regardless of whether participants remembered that a brand had been paired earlier with humour. There was also a cost (to advertisers) of humour - brands were remembered less well if they were accompanied by funny text or pictures, presumably because of their distracting effect.

Taken altogether, the results paint a nuanced picture. "The main contribution of this research is not the overall conclusion that humour in ads 'works'," the researchers said, "but that it sheds light into when and why humour should be preferred over non humorous positive emotions and neutral distractions." For brands that expect to meet resistance in their target audience, humour can help prevent the formation of negative associations. But distraction should be used in moderation - too much and the brand won't be remembered. From the consumers' perspective, beware advertisers bearing jokes - they could be using them to lower your guard.

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Strick M, Holland RW, van Baaren RB, and van Knippenberg A (2012). Those who laugh are defenseless: How humor breaks resistance to influence. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Applied, 18 (2), 213-23 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22564085

Author weblink: http://www.unconsciouslab.com/index.php?page=People&subpage=Madelijn%20Strick

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6. "Beauty in the eyes of the beer holder" - people who think they're drunk, think they're hot

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The beer-goggle effect is well-documented - the way that being drunk makes everyone look wonderfully attractive. A new study asks whether the goggles work backwards. Does being drunk affect how we judge our own appeal?

Laurent Bègue and her team asked 19 patrons at a French bar to rate their own attractiveness and to puff into a breathalyser. The two measures correlated - the participants who were more drunk tended to rate themselves as more attractive. But maybe that was nothing to do with the effect of alcohol. Perhaps better-looking people like getting more drunk?

To find out, Bègue and her colleagues conducted a balanced placebo test with 86 Frenchmen. Half drank the equivalent of five to six shots of vodka, and in this group, half were told truthfully the minty lemon drink was alcoholic, whilst the other half were told it was a new, non-alcoholic beverage that tasted like alcohol. The remaining men drank an alcohol-free version of the minty, lemon drink - half of them were told it was alcoholic (alcohol was sprayed on the glass to make this more believable) and half were told truthfully that it was not. After a short break to allow the alcohol to work its effects, they all recorded an advertising message for the fictional beverage company that they'd been told had produced the drink. Right after, they then watched back the film they'd made and rated their own attractiveness.

The take-home finding - participants who thought they were drunk rated themselves as more attractive than did other participants, regardless of whether they'd really had any alcohol or not. In other words, it's not the chemical content of alcohol that makes us think we're more attractive, it's merely the belief that we're drunk that inflates our self-perceived appeal (up to a point - in fact the average self-judged attractiveness rating for the group who though they'd had alcohol still wasn't that high).

Maybe people who thought they were drunk really were more attractive than those who thought they were sober? A panel of 22 university students also watched the videos and rated the attractiveness of the men. There was no evidence in their ratings to suggest the participants who thought they were drunk were more attractive, so the inflated self-perceived appeal of these men was illusory.

Why should thinking we're drunk have this effect? The researchers believe it must have to do with implicit beliefs people hold about alcohol. If people associate alcohol and attractiveness in their minds, then thinking they've had alcohol could make thoughts about their own attractiveness more accessible. This would fit with past research showing that drinkers in films are usually portrayed as more attractive than non-drinkers.

Coincidentally, another study has just been published that asked a group of 100 young men to answer questions about how they think a typical young man's personality is affected by being drunk. They then said how they thought being drunk affected their own personality. There was a lot of agreement about the effect of being drunk on a typical young man - reduced conscientiousness, increased neuroticism, elevated extraversion, reduced openness and reduced agreeableness. When the young men then said how alcohol changed their own personalities, they again highlighted reduced conscientiousness, increased neuroticism and extraversion, but they thought their own agreeableness was unchanged and that they were actually more open to experience when intoxicated.

So, not only do people who think they're drunk find themselves more attractive, people (well, young men) also think that, whereas you are less agreeable when you're drunk, their own personality when drunk remains as likeable and friendly as ever!

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Uusberg, Andero, Mõttus, René, Kreegipuu, Kairi, and Allik, Jüri (2012). Beliefs about the effects of alcohol on the personality of oneself and others Journal of Individual Differences DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000084

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4. Threaten a man's masculinity and he becomes a short-sighted risk taker

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With Britain embroiled in yet another banking scandal, commentators are once again pointing their fingers at the macho culture of the City. "Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks," Ian Leslie wrote, "and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam."

Now a study has cast new light on the role that masculinity may have played in past and present financial crises. Jonathan Weaver and his colleagues at the University of South Florida report that threatening a man's sense of manhood makes him myopic and more prone to take risks, particularly in a public situation. The findings suggest that being surrounded by their sweaty, swaggering alpha-male peers may have provided just the kind of threatening environment to encourage bankers to become short-sighted risk-takers.

For an initial study, the masculinity of 19 heterosexual male university students was threatened by having them product test a pink bottle of "Sweet Pea" fruit-scented hand lotion; 19 others acted as a comparison group and tested a power drill. Ostensibly as part of a separate study, all the men were then filmed playing a gambling game. They started with $5 and had five chances to bet between $0 and $1 on whether a die roll would turn up odds or evens, with the potential to win or lose the amount they gambled. Over the course of the first four bets, the men who'd had their masculinity challenged tended to bet larger amounts; they also bet the maximum possible amount more often.

A second study was similar but this time the masculinity of half of 73 more men was threatened by having them recall 10 examples of times they'd behaved like a "real man". Chuck Norris aside, because it's difficult for most men to think of 10 examples off the cuff, this challenge has an undermining effect on their sense of masculinity. By contrast, thinking of 2 examples (as the remainder of the participants did) is easy for most men, and has the opposite, manhood enhancing effect. Next, all the men made a series of choices between smaller financial rewards now or larger rewards later. Half of the men in both groups thought they'd have to justify their choices publicly. The take-home finding here was that men who'd had their masculinity challenged, and thought their decisions would be public, tended to make more short-term choices, forfeiting about three times the amount of money available, as compared with men in the other conditions. Presumably acting impetuously in front of a crowd helped the men feel more manly.

Weaver and his colleagues acknowledged that the way they threatened the manhood of their participants was not a close simulation of the way that masculinity is threatened in a macho banking environment. However, they said that both their interventions had "the psychological consequence of reminding men that manhood is a precarious social status."

"Whether manhood threats were directly implicated in the recent financial crises that continue to plague the US [and UK] economy, the current findings are at least consistent with such an interpretation," they said. "Certainly, they are suggestive enough to warrant further investigation into this critically important question."

A weakness of the studies was the lack of a genuine control group, in which masculinity was neither threatened nor strengthened. As mentioned by the researchers, it would also be useful for further investigations to observe the effect of gender threats on women's risk-taking behaviour.

This new paper builds on several related findings that are pertinent to the role of a macho culture in the recent banking crises; for example: it's been shown that men, but not women, take higher-risk financial bets when surrounded by same-sex peers of similar status (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19255605); men make more myopic decisions in competitive all-male situations (http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/102/1/69/); and male stock traders in London made higher gains on days that their testosterone levels were higher (probably because they took more risks; http://www.pnas.org/content/105/16/6167).

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Jonathan R. Weaver, Joseph A. Vandello, & Jennifer K. Bosson (2012). Intrepid, Imprudent, or Impetuous?: The Effects of Gender Threats on Men's Financial Decisions. Psychology of Men &; Masculinity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027087

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6. People with high emotional intelligence are more easily duped by fakers

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Although research has shown that most of us are hopeless at spotting lies, there's been speculation in the literature that a minority of people might be unusually talented fib-detectors. The evidence for these "wizards", as they've been called, remains controversial. Now a new study has tested the relevance of a key psychological construct that one might imagine wizards would score highly on - emotional intelligence.

If liars betray their true emotions in early, rapid, automatic facial expressions, as some experts have claimed, it would make sense that people who are particularly adept at recognising and processing emotions (one of the hall-marks of emotional intelligence) would therefore have an advantage at spotting deception.

To test this, Alysha Baker and her team at the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law at the University of British Columbia presented 116 undergrad participants with 20 clips of real-life press conferences featuring anguished people pleading for the return of their missing relative(s). Half the clips featured a person who was in fact later identified as the perpetrator of the crime against their missing relative. The student participants had to say whether the anxious person in each clip was genuine or being deceptive; how confident they were in their judgment; and how they'd been affected by the clip emotionally.

Overall, the the participants performed no better than chance at identifying which clips featured a liar - consistent with past research showing the difficulty of accurate lie detection. However, there was a further paradoxical finding: participants who scored highly on the "emotionality" component of emotional intelligence (pertaining to emotional expression, perception and empathy) were significantly less accurate than average at judging which of the anxious relatives was being genuine. This association was mediated by how upset the students felt about the clips, perhaps indicating that their emotional state was affecting their ability to scrutinise the videos effectively.

Moreover, higher scorers on emotionality tended to sympathise more than low scorers specifically with the people featured in the deceptive videos, suggesting they were misreading deceptive cues (such as emotional turbulence, decreased plea length and tentative word use) as signs of increased distress, rather than as signs of deception.

All the participants, but especially the high emotionality scorers, expressed misplaced confidence in their judgments about the video clips. "The present findings suggest that a reliance on erroneous information about deception, combined with unfounded sympathy for deceptive pleaders leads to a highly confident, but incorrect assessment that crocodile tears are a reflection of genuine distress," the researchers said.

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Baker, A., ten Brinke, L., and Porter, S. (2012). Will get fooled again: Emotionally intelligent people are easily duped by high-stakes deceivers. Legal and Criminological Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8333.2012.02054.x

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5. What your choice of shoe says about you

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When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes (from Good Advices by REM)

The UK's fashionistas are abuzz after the Duchess of Cambridge was pictured recently sporting a £300 pair of Le Chameau wellington boots. Does her shoe choice tell us anything about her? In a culture where so much attention is paid to the material we strap to our feet, a new study asks this very question more generally - how is shoe choice associated with personality and what assumptions do onlookers make about people based on their shoes?

The new research builds on an existing literature that's shown we form impressions of strangers incredibly quickly, discerning a surprising amount of information about their sexuality, background and personality. However, much of the past research on these thin-slicing abilities has involved participants looking at the faces of strangers, not their shoes.

Omri Gillath started by getting 208 undergrads (aged 18 to 55) to fill out numerous questionnaires about their personality and background, as well as submitting a photograph of "the pair of shoes they wear most often." Next, a separate group of 63 undergrads each looked at a sample of these shoes and gave their best guess as to the personality and background of the wearers.

The participants in the role of observer tended to agree with each other in their judgments, suggesting that we make consistent assumptions about wearers based on their shoes, regardless of whether those assumptions are accurate or not.

In decreasing order, observers were most accurate in identifying the shoe-wearers': age, gender, income, attachment anxiety (as measured by the wearers' agreement with statements like "I worry that romantic partners won't care about me as much as I care about them") and their agreeableness. Observers were unsuccessful at identifying other aspects of personality such as political ideology, extraversion and conscientiousness, despite tending to agree with each other in their ratings of these traits.

So what cues did the observers use to make their judgments? First off, let's look at some of their mistakes. The observers assumed that colourful and bright shoes belonged to an extravert person. In fact, the only shoe characteristics that correlated with wearers' extraversion were being worn out and being of greater height (the top part, rather than the heel). Observers thought that attractive shoes in a good condition probably belonged to a conscientious person. In fact, the only relevant factors here were that conscientious people tended to have higher-topped shoes and to photograph them against a colourful background. And they assumed wrongly that less attractiveness shoes, with less pointy toes, in relatively poor repair, and low value price, probably belonged to someone with liberal political views. In fact there were no significant associations between political ideology and choice of shoe.

On the other hand, the observers discerned correctly that more agreeable people tended to wear shoes that were practical and affordable (pointy toes, price and brand visibility were negatively correlated with agreeableness); that anxiously attached people tended to wear shoes that look brand new and in good repair (perhaps in an attempt to make a good impression and avoid rejection); that wealthier people wear more stylish shoes; and that women wear more expensive-looking, branded shoes.

The study is obviously limited by its use of a narrow sample of Western university students. The assumptions observers make from shoes could be completely different in another culture, as could the links between shoe features and the traits of wearers. Another shortcoming is the reliance on the self-report ratings of the shoe wearers. Perhaps, for some of the personality factors, the observers were "seeing through" the shoe wearers' idealised selves. "Do people buy and wear shoes strategically to portray an image, and can observers detect the 'acquired image'?" the researchers asked. "These are fundamental questions in personality and social psychology, and they play out in many domains - shoes are merely one attractive alternative to research."

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Omri Gillatha, Angela J. Bahnsb, Fiona Gea, & Christian S. Crandalla (2012). Shoes as a source of first impressions. Journal of Research in Personality DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.04.003

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2. How to reverse the Bystander Effect

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You see a shopper trip over in a busy street. Someone else can help. That's what you tell your conscience. This is the Bystander Effect in action - the dilution of our sense of responsibility in the presence of other people - and it's been demonstrated in numerous studies over many years.

But life is complicated and psychologists have begun looking at the circumstances that can nullify or even reverse the effect. For a new paper, Marco van Bommel and his team tested the idea that the presence of others could in fact increase our proclivity for helping if we're nudged into a self-aware mindset and thereby reminded of our social reputation.

Two experiments were conducted using an online chat room for people with extreme emotional problems. Eighty-six students were logged into the forum and shown five messages posted by troubled forum users - for example, one was written by a person who wanted to commit suicide. The participants were told they could write a reply if they wanted, but it was entirely up to them.

In the baseline condition, each participant could see his or her name in the top left-hand side of the screen alongside other users' names. A counter also told them if the forum was quiet, with just one other person logged-in, or if it was busy, with 30 others online.

This basic arrangement replicated the classic Bystander Effect - participants were less likely to post replies when there were more people logged into the forum. However, when the researchers cued self-awareness by highlighting the participant's name in red on the screen, the Bystander Effect was reversed - they now posted more replies when the forum was busy compared with when it was quiet.

A second study built on these findings, but this time self-awareness was cued by the presence, or not, of a web-cam on the computer. Over one hundred participants took part. For those in the web-cam condition, their attention was drawn to the device by having them check that its LED indicator light was on, although they were told that the camera wouldn't be used until a later task. In the absence of a web-cam, the Bystander Effect was again replicated - participants on a busy forum, compared to a quiet forum, posted fewer replies to users in need. By contrast, participants cued to be self-aware by the presence of a web-cam actually wrote more replies when the forum was busy, compared with when it was quiet.

"The Bystander Effect can be reversed by means of cues that raise public self-awareness in social settings," the researchers said.

van Bommel and his team acknowledged the limitations of using an online arrangement for testing their ideas, but they also defended its relevance to modern life, in which our social activities are increasingly taking place online. Their results also have interesting implications for the debate around the proliferation of security cameras in public places. "While certain forms of self-awareness may not always be welcomed by people, the present findings do underscore their power to promote helping one another," the researchers said.

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Marco van Bommel, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Henk Elffers, and Paul A.M. Van Langea (2012). Be aware to care: Public self-awareness leads to a reversal of the bystander effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.011

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5. You can't resist the pull of another person's gaze

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At just the moment the magician swaps the position of two cards in her left hand, she looks across deliberately and misleadingly to her right hand and your attention follows. You can't help it. You see where she's looking and your attention is sent automatically in the same direction. Magicians have known this power for centuries and now psychologists are confirming and measuring the effect under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. More surprising, perhaps, is their finding that the directing effect of arrows is also impossible to resist.

Giovanni Galfano and his colleagues in Italy instructed dozens of participants to look out for a small target that would appear on-screen, each trial, either on the left-hand side or the right-hand side. When it appeared, the participants' task was to press the space-bar key on a keyboard as quickly as possible.

To make things even easier, a word,"left" or "right" (in Italian), appeared in the middle of the screen giving the participants advance warning, with 100 per cent accuracy, as to which side the target would appear. In another run of trials, there was no need for advance warning from a directional word because the target always appeared on the same side.

The only complicating factor in this arrangement - but it's a crucial one - is that after the directional word had gone (on those trials where there was one), and before the target had appeared, a cartoon face popped up in the middle of the screen, looking either in the direction of where the target would appear, or the opposite direction. In other versions of the experiment, rather than a face, an arrow appeared, pointing either towards the side where the target would appear, or towards the opposite side.

The participants were told explicitly to ignore these faces and arrows. But they couldn't. When the cartoon face was looking in the opposite direction to the side the target appeared on, participants were significantly slower to spot the target and press the space key. And it was the same with arrows that pointed in the wrong direction. It's as if the faces and arrows had irresistibly grabbed the participants' attention and sent it momentarily in the wrong direction.

The slowing effect of the gaze and arrows was only a few milliseconds, but it was statistically significant. "The finding that the information conveyed by distractors interfered with the task indicates that orienting of attention mediated by both gaze and arrows resists suppression and can be defined as strongly automatic," the researchers said.

Galfano's team added that the processes underlying the pulling power of gaze and arrows are not necessarily the same. The pull of another's gaze is apparent in the looking behaviour of new-born babies aged just two days, suggestive of an innate mechanism. The power of arrows, by contrast, is obviously based on learned symbolism.

The researchers conceded that different results may have emerged in a more complicated environment more akin to the real world, something they plan to investigate in the future. Related to this, it's been shown that the social identity of a gazer influences the attention-grabbing power of their gaze. A study published last year found that right-wing participants were more affected by the gaze direction of Silvio Berlusconi than were left-wing participants.

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Galfano, G., Dalmaso, M., Marzoli, D., Pavan, G., Coricelli, C., and Castelli, L. (2012). Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-16 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.663765

Author weblinks: http://colab.psy.unipd.it/people-detail.php?ID=99

*Visit the DIGEST BLOG: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog to comment on this research, search past items and discover more links.

In the A-level syllabus: AQA spec A, A2, cognitive psychology, attention and pattern recognition. AQA spec B, AS, cognitive psychology, perception and attention. SQA adv higher, cognitive psychology, attention.

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6. The new science of "Phew!"

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There's a childish prank I never tire of. As soon as we've left the house and the front-door has slammed shut, I pat down all my pockets and say nervously to my companion "Er, you've got the keys, right?". Then, just when their dismay at the prospect of being locked out has peaked, I say "Only joking!" and watch with pleasure as relief washes over them.

I say "relief", but what exactly is that emotion my companion has just experienced? As Kate Sweeny and Kathleen Vohs write in a new journal article, "Although relief is readily identified and frequently experienced, it is not understood well from the perspective of psychological science." Investigations into the emotion, they observe, "are sparse".

Now Sweeny and Vohs have attempted to make a start at mapping out this uncharted emotional territory. They began with a pilot study asking 91 people to provide a personal example of relief. Roughly half the group described a "near-miss" kind of relief - rather like fearing that you've locked yourself out and then realising that you haven't. The other half described a kind of "task-completion" relief, in which a negative experience had come to an end. A second pilot study with dozens of American and Dutch participants established similarly that half their relief experiences in the preceding week were of the "near-miss" category and half were of the "task completion" kind.

Next, in a study in which 114 more participants reflected on recent relief experiences, the researchers found that near-miss relief was associated with having more thoughts about how much worse things could have been and feeling more socially isolated (regardless of whether they were on their own or not). Sweeny and Vohs said this is consistent with past research showing how excessive rumination can be harmful to close relationships. Experience of task-completion relief, by contrast, was associated with more thoughts about how things could have been even better.

Lastly the researchers had a go at inducing relief. They invited 79 participants to a lab and told them they'd have to sing a song into an audio recorder. Half the participants were then told the recorder was broken, thus prompting them to experience near-miss relief. The other half of the participants did the singing, which it was presumed would be followed by the experience of task-completion relief. Quizzed afterwards, it was again found that near-miss relief, more than task-completion relief, was associated with feelings of social isolation and thoughts about how things could have been worse. The negative counterfactual thinking mediated the social isolation - that is, the more thoughts about how bad things could have been, the more socially isolated people felt.

What does all this tell us about what relief is for? "Experiencing near-miss relief could increase the likelihood that people will act to avert an unfavourable fate in the future" Sweeny and Vohs said. "In contrast, task-completion relief allows people to focus on the positive emotional experience with minimal distraction from downward counterfactual thoughts. This process might reinforce satisfaction in the completion of a job well done ... and therefore increase the likelihood that people will repeat the unpleasant experience."

"Our aim is to bring the neglect of relief to an end," the researchers' concluded, "for it is an emotion that deserves study."

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Sweeny, K., and Vohs, K. (2012). On Near Misses and Completed Tasks: The Nature of Relief. Psychological Science, 23 (5), 464-468 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611434590

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5. You can't resist the pull of another person's gaze

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At just the moment the magician swaps the position of two cards in her left hand, she looks across deliberately and misleadingly to her right hand and your attention follows. You can't help it. You see where she's looking and your attention is sent automatically in the same direction. Magicians have known this power for centuries and now psychologists are confirming and measuring the effect under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. More surprising, perhaps, is their finding that the directing effect of arrows is also impossible to resist.

Giovanni Galfano and his colleagues in Italy instructed dozens of participants to look out for a small target that would appear on-screen, each trial, either on the left-hand side or the right-hand side. When it appeared, the participants' task was to press the space-bar key on a keyboard as quickly as possible.

To make things even easier, a word,"left" or "right" (in Italian), appeared in the middle of the screen giving the participants advance warning, with 100 per cent accuracy, as to which side the target would appear. In another run of trials, there was no need for advance warning from a directional word because the target always appeared on the same side.

The only complicating factor in this arrangement - but it's a crucial one - is that after the directional word had gone (on those trials where there was one), and before the target had appeared, a cartoon face popped up in the middle of the screen, looking either in the direction of where the target would appear, or the opposite direction. In other versions of the experiment, rather than a face, an arrow appeared, pointing either towards the side where the target would appear, or towards the opposite side.

The participants were told explicitly to ignore these faces and arrows. But they couldn't. When the cartoon face was looking in the opposite direction to the side the target appeared on, participants were significantly slower to spot the target and press the space key. And it was the same with arrows that pointed in the wrong direction. It's as if the faces and arrows had irresistibly grabbed the participants' attention and sent it momentarily in the wrong direction.

The slowing effect of the gaze and arrows was only a few milliseconds, but it was statistically significant. "The finding that the information conveyed by distractors interfered with the task indicates that orienting of attention mediated by both gaze and arrows resists suppression and can be defined as strongly automatic," the researchers said.

Galfano's team added that the processes underlying the pulling power of gaze and arrows are not necessarily the same. The pull of another's gaze is apparent in the looking behaviour of new-born babies aged just two days, suggestive of an innate mechanism. The power of arrows, by contrast, is obviously based on learned symbolism.

The researchers conceded that different results may have emerged in a more complicated environment more akin to the real world, something they plan to investigate in the future. Related to this, it's been shown that the social identity of a gazer influences the attention-grabbing power of their gaze. A study published last year found that right-wing participants were more affected by the gaze direction of Silvio Berlusconi than were left-wing participants.

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Galfano, G., Dalmaso, M., Marzoli, D., Pavan, G., Coricelli, C., and Castelli, L. (2012). Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-16 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.663765

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4. Be careful when comforting struggling students

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Previous research tells us that students who see intelligence and ability as fixed will tend to give up when confronted by a difficult problem, whereas those who see intelligence as growable will persevere. But how do teachers' beliefs about ability affect the way they perceive and respond to their students' performance?

A new investigation led by Aneeta Rattan, together with Carol Dweck, the doyenne of this area, and Catherine Good, began by asking 41 undergrads about their beliefs regarding maths ability (e.g. did they agree that "You have a certain amount of math intelligence and you can't really do much to change it"?). Asked to imagine they were a maths teacher responding to a student's initial poor maths exam result, those undergrads who endorsed this fixed "entity" theory of maths ability tended to jump to conclusions - assuming that their student had struggled because he or she lacked maths ability.

A second study was similar but went further and showed that undergrad participants who believed ability is fixed were more likely to say that they'd comfort their student for his or her poor maths ability (e.g. they said they'd "explain that not everyone has maths talent"), and that they'd pursue strategies such as setting the student less maths homework.

A third study elevated the realism levels a little by recruiting postgrads who worked as teachers or research demonstrators in their university departments. The same findings emerged - participants who saw maths ability as fixed were more likely (than those who saw ability as malleable) to make premature, ability-based assumptions about the reasons why a student was struggling, and they were more likely to respond by comforting the student for their poor ability and by pursuing counter-productive teaching strategies, such as encouraging the student's withdrawal from the subject.

So, what's it like for a struggling student to receive this kind of treatment from their teacher? A final study with 54 students asked them to imagine they'd struggled at an initial maths test. Some of them then received comforting feedback ("I want to assure you that I know you're a talented student in general, it's just the case that not everyone is a maths person. I'm going to give you some easier tasks ... etc"); others received constructive strategy tips (e.g "I'm going to call on you more in class and I want you to work with a maths tutor"); and others received neutral, control feedback. The key finding here was that the students who received the comforting feedback felt their teacher had low expectations for them and felt less encouraged and optimistic about their future prospects in the subject.

Rattan and her colleagues said their findings pointed to some important real-world implications. University teachers who form fixed-ability judgements about their students and who provide comfort may be well-intentioned, but they risk derailing their students' chances before they've even had the opportunity to get going. "As upsetting as poor performance may be to a student," the researchers concluded, "receiving comfort that is oriented toward helping them to accept their presumed lack of ability (rather than comfort that is oriented toward helping them to improve) may be even more disturbing."

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Rattan, A., Good, C., and Dweck, C. (2012). "It's ok — Not everyone can be good at math": Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (3), 731-737 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.012

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3. Skilled liars make great lie detectors

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Frank Abagnale Jr, the confidence trickster whose escapades inspired the hit film "Catch Me If You Can", later became a security consultant for the FBI. There's intuitive logic to the agency's recruitment strategy - if you want to catch con artists, who better to spot them than a master con artist. But does this logic apply at a more basic level? Do skilled liars really make skilled lie detectors?

Surprisingly, psychologists haven't investigated this idea before. Dozens of studies have shown that most people are very poor at detecting lies, and other research has shown that the propensity to lie is partly inherited, but no-one's looked to see if good liars make good lie spotters.

Now Gordon Wright and his colleagues have done just that, recruiting 51 participants (27 women; mean age 25) to take part in a competitive group task. None of them had met before. Arranged in groups of 5 or 6, the participants took turns to spend about 20 seconds telling the group their position on a social issue, such as whether smoking should be allowed in public places or whether they were in favour of reality TV. Their true opinions had been reported in private to the researchers earlier. On each round, cards handed to the participants told them which opinion to share with the group and whether to tell the truth or lie. The task of the rest of the group was to judge whether the speaker was lying or not. Fifty pounds was up for grabs for the best liar and the best lie spotter.

The key finding was that participants whose lies were harder to spot tended to do better at spotting whether other participants were lying (the correlation was -0.35, with an effect size of 0.7, which is usually considered large). "As far as we are aware," the researchers said, "this study is the first to provide evidence that the capacity to detect lies and the ability to deceive others are associated."

This result begs the question - what underlying psychological processes grant a person skill at lying and lie spotting? It wasn't IQ or emotional intelligence - the researchers tested for that, but they don't yet know much more. "It is clear," they said, "that identification of the precise nature of the proposed 'deception-general' ability is an important aim for deception research, and that further research should be devoted to this question."

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Wright, G., Berry, C., and Bird, G. (2012). "You can't kid a kidder": association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00087

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2. When are two heads better than one?

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The Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched invasion of Iraq ... all these 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 role 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 judgment 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) 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 http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/unleash-crowd-within.html).

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, 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 performance 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: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1216549

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1. Smile your way to a vegetable-loving child

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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: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02033.x

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4. Secrets leave us physically encumbered

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We talk metaphorically of secrets as great weights that must be carried through life like a heavy burden. Consistent with the ever-growing literature on embodied cognition, a new study shows how secrets affect perception and action, as if their keepers are encumbered, literally.

A first study used participants recruited online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk website. Those asked to write a recollection about a big secret rated a hill, depicted head-on, as being steeper than participants who wrote about a trivial secret. This matches previous research showing that people who are physically encumbered tend to rate hills as steeper. By contrast, the big secret vs. small secret groups didn't differ on other measures, such as their rating of the sturdiness of a table.

Next, 36 undergrads threw a small beanbag at a target located just over two and a half meters away. Those who'd been asked to recall a meaningful secret threw their beanbag further, on average, than those asked to recall a trivial secret. It's as if they perceived the target to be further away, consistent with prior research showing that people who are physically encumbered tend to overestimate spatial distances.

In a penultimate study, forty participants who'd recently been unfaithful to their partners were recruited via Amazon. Those who said the secret of their infidelity was a burden (it bothered them, affected them and they thought about it a lot) tended to rate physical tasks, such as carrying shopping upstairs, as requiring more physical effort and energy than those who were unburdened by their infidelity. Ratings of non-physical tasks, by contrast, did not vary between the groups.

Finally, keeping a significant secret (in this case not revealing one's homosexuality whilst being video-interviewed) led gay male participants to be less likely to agree to help the researchers move some books; keeping a trivial secret (concealing one's extraversion) had no such effect.

Michael Slepian and his colleagues said their findings showed how carrying a secret leads to the experience of being weighed down. They don't think the findings can be explained by the mental effort of keeping a secret - for example, past research has shown that cognitive load prompts people to underestimate, not overestimate, physical distances. The researchers warned about the health implications of their findings. "We suggest that concealment ... leads to greater physical burden and perhaps eventually physical overexertion, exhaustion, and stress," they said.

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Slepian, M., Masicampo, E., Toosi, N., and Ambady, N. (2012). The Physical Burdens of Secrecy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027598

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3. People prefer the middle option

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When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item jumps up and down and calls out to you "Pick me, pick me!" Well, not literally, but in a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what's called the "Centre Stage effect" - our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.

Paul Rodway and his colleagues showed 100 participants (65 women) a questionnaire consisting of 17 questions, wherein each question featured five different pictures of the same item or type of item (e.g. five scenic views or five border terriers). Each set of five pictures was arranged in a horizontal row and the task for participants, depending on the question, was either to pick their most preferred or least preferred item. When picking out their favourite, the participants showed a clear preference for the central items; by contrast, no position bias was found when selecting their least favoured items.

The size of the preferential bias for central items was statistically significant but relatively modest in percentage terms. Central items were selected approximately 23 per cent of the time compared with the 20 per cent you'd expect if choices were random. The selection rate for items in other locations averaged below 20 per cent.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time each array of five items was arranged vertically - once again there was a bias for the central item. A final study used real objects - five pairs of identical white socks - pinned in a vertical array on a large piece of cardboard. Again, participants were asked to pick out their preferred option and again they showed a bias for the middle choice. Additionally, they showed a bias against picking the lower two options. The fact that the Centre Stage effect occurred for vertical arrays argues against explanations for the effect related to the brain's hemispheres biasing attention either to the left or right. Perhaps the cause has to do with cultural beliefs linking importance or prestige with being centrally located.

Rodway's team pondered the real-world implications of their findings. '"If item location influences preference during the millions of purchasing choices that occur every day, it will be exerting a substantial influence on consumer behaviour," they said. "Moreover, choices from a range of options are made in many other contexts (e.g. legal and occupational), and it remains to be investigated whether the central preference remains with other formats and whether it extends to other types of decision."

The new findings build on previous research showing that observers tended to overestimate the performance of quiz show contestants located in central positions, and tended to favour job candidates located centrally in a photograph.

Complicating matters, other research that's looked at items presented in a sequence or one at a time, has found that people show a bias towards items located in extreme positions in the sequence. For example, Wandi de Bruin in a 2005 study found that ice-skating competitors and Eurovision singers tended to receive higher scores if they performed later. On the other hand, if a choice array is perceived as a continuum - as in a questionnaire rating scale - there's evidence for a left-ward bias, perhaps caused by the dominance of the right hemisphere, which directs attention to the left-hand side of space.

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Rodway, P., Schepman, A., and Lambert, J. (2012). Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26 (2), 215-222

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2. Who are you protecting when you praise a dud performance?

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Most of us have done it - told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.

Some participants were told they'd be providing the feedback face-to-face, others were told their feedback would be provided anonymously, and a third group were told their ratings of the essay would not be fed back to the writer. Additionally, the participants answered questions about their own self-esteem and they were given information about the writer's self-esteem, which was presented as either low, medium or high.

The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we're judging. If people's motives were selfless then arguably the feedback provided should have been just as positive regardless of how it was delivered. In fact, students in the face-to-face condition provided the most positive feedback, but only if they had low self-esteem (specifically low self-liking, as opposed to low feelings of self competence). "If one accepts that people with relatively low self-esteem are expected to place greater emphasis on wanting to be perceived as likeable or attractive to others, then this lends support for the self-protection motive," said the researchers, led by Carla Jeffries. By contrast, undergrad participants with high self-esteem gave the same kind of feedback regardless of whether it was delivered anonymously, face-to-face, or not at all.

There was further evidence of a self-serving motive. Students with low self-esteem who were told their ratings would not be fed back to the writer tended to give particularly critical ratings - it's as if judging the essay harshly made them feel better about themselves. "A particularly harsh assessment creates a downward social comparison and, in turn, a gain for one's self-esteem," the researchers said.

The results did throw up some modest evidence of altruistic motives. Ratings by low self-esteem students were more generous in the anonymous condition versus the undelivered feedback condition. Seeing as their identity would be concealed in both cases, this suggests they gave inflated feedback in the anonymous condition purely to protect the feelings of the writer. However, this empathy only went so far - none of the participants moderated the tone of their feedback in line with the writer's self-esteem scores.

Jeffries and her team said their findings could have implications for organisations. For example, bolstering people's self-esteem prior to their rating another person's performance could help them to be more honest. "The data ... speak to the importance of developing cultures that encourage frank and fearless feedback giving and non-defensive feedback receiving," the researchers said. "Strong and positive feedback cultures might help overcome some of the fears of feedback-givers, and reduce the tendency for feedback to be adjusted as a function of who is watching."

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Jeffries, C., and Hornsey, M. (2012). Withholding negative feedback: Is it about protecting the self or protecting others? British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02098.x

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1. Strong reassurances about vaccines can backfire

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Unwarranted public anxiety about vaccinations can have deadly consequences. Unfortunately, the challenge of communicating health risks is full of psychological complexity. A new German study brings this home, showing how messages that deny vaccination health risks in unequivocal terms can backfire, actually increasing concern among parents.

Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse recruited 115 participants online (mean age 34; 34 per cent were male; 43 per cent had one or more children). The participants were asked to imagine they were a parent of an 8-month-old and to read an account of a fictitious illness Phyxolitis pulmonis. They were further told that their paediatrician had advised vaccinating their child against this condition. Next, the participants were presented with anti-vaccine statements that they'd ostensibly found on the internet (e.g. "Multiple vaccines overwhelm the infant's immune system"). Finally, they read statements of reassurance about the vaccine, which claimed any risks were low - half the participants read weak versions (e.g. "There is only sporadic evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system") and half read strong versions of these statements (e.g. "there is no evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system").

The key finding here was that participants who read the strong statements of reassurance actually reported greater perceptions of risk afterwards, and lower intentions to vaccinate their child. This effect was heightened among participants who had a preference for complementary medicine. Results didn't vary according to whether participants were a parent in real life or not.

A second study with a further 119 participants was similar but this time the source of the reassuring statements was varied, either being from a pharmaceutical company (untrusted) or from a government health department (a trusted source). Again, strong statements of reassurance backfired, increasing risk perception and reducing vaccination intentions, but only if those statements came from an untrusted source. Again, this paradoxical effect was stronger among participants who favoured complementary medicine.

This study can't reveal why the paradoxical effect occurs. However, one possibility proposed by Betsch and Sachse is that an extreme statement of no risk is more attention-grabbing, which only serves to highlight the possibility that risk is an issue. Another potential explanation is that people look for ways to combat claims they disagree with, and if those claims are stated more strongly then that encourages people to marshal even stronger counter-claims of their own.

The results have obvious implications for real-life risk communication. "Especially when organisations lack complete knowledge about how much trust the public puts in them, optimal risk negation is likely to profit from moderate rather than extreme formulations," the researchers said.

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Betsch, C., and Sachse, K. (2012). Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived Vaccination Risks. Health Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027387

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6. Think less and become more conservative

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The less time or mental effort a person puts into thinking about an issue, the more likely they are to espouse a politically conservative perspective. That's according to a new study by Scott Eidelman and his team, who stress that their point is "not that conservatives rely on low effort thought" but that "low effort thinking promotes political conservatism".

Across four studies, the researchers examined the effects on political attitudes of four different ways of reducing mental effort. This included: surveying drinkers at varying degrees of intoxication at a local bar; allocating some participants to a dual-task condition where they had to keep track of auditory tones at the same time as registering their political attitudes; allocating some participants to a time-pressured situation, in which they had to rate their agreement with different political statements at fast as possible; and finally, giving some participants the simple instruction to respond to political statements without thinking too hard.

The results were consistent across the studies - being more drunk, being distracted by a secondary task, answering under time pressure and answering without thinking, all led participants to agree more strongly with politically conservative beliefs, such as "A first consideration of any society is the protection of property rights" and "Production and trade should be free of government interference." Agreement with liberal beliefs were either reduced or unaffected by the measures. The researchers checked and the effects they observed were not due to differences in the complexity of the statements used to measure political conservatism and liberalism, nor were they due to changes in mood or frustration associated with the interventions.

The finding that reduced mental effort encourages more conservative beliefs fits with prior research suggesting that attributions of personal responsibility (versus recognising the influence of situational factors), acceptance of hierarchy and preference for the status quo - all of which may be considered hallmarks of conservative belief - come naturally and automatically to most people, at least in western societies.

"Our findings suggest that conservative ways of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural," the researchers concluded. "Motivational factors are crucial determinants of ideology, aiding or correcting initial responses depending on one's goals, beliefs, and values. Our perspective suggests that these initial and uncorrected responses lean conservative."

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Eidelman, S., Crandall, C., Goodman, J., and Blanchar, J. (2012). Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167212439213

Author weblink: http://psyc.uark.edu/4070.php

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4. Would you cheat for charity?

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Financial dishonesty was one of the contributing factors that caused the recent global economic crisis. Against this backdrop, a new study led by Alan Lewis at the University of Bath has provided an elegant lab demonstration of the way that for most people, right and wrong aren't clear cut. Instead, the research shows people look for ways to justify their financial cheating, probably to maintain their perception of themselves as essentially good. Oh, and the research also suggested that economics students are more dishonest than psychology students - not great news for the future of the financial world!

The first part of the study involved 94 psychology and economics undergrads rolling a die under a cup, and then looking through a hole in the cup so that they alone could see the number. They then reported that number to a researcher on the understanding that it would be translated into a cash donation by the researchers for Cancer Research UK (1 on the die would equal a 10p donation; 6 would equal 60p and so on). Afterward the researcher gave this amount to the participants, who inserted it into a donation box.

The key finding here is that the students tended to report higher numbers than you'd expect from a fair die. So, for example, 24.5 per cent of participants said they'd rolled a six whereas a fair die should have produced a figure of 17 per cent. The researchers estimated that this means 9 per cent of participants lied about rolling a six. This is substantially higher than the figure obtained in a previous study when participants were playing for their own cash reward and it therefore shows how people indulge in moral relativism. More people seem to think it's okay to cheat if it's for charity, than if it's for their own gain.

The second part of the study involved a thought experiment. The same students were asked to imagine rolling a die three times (each time for their eyes only), over and over. They were given twenty hypothetical sequences of the numbers they produced (e.g. 1, 1, 1). In each case, the first number represented the cash reward they would get, where a 1 would equal £1 and so on. The second two numbers represented two further rolls, to establish that the die was fair and to make the sure the die was left in a re-set position. The hypothetical question for each sequence - what first number would the participant tell the researcher they'd obtained? Would they tell the truth, or lie to claim a higher cash reward?

The main finding for this part of the study is that the proportion of lies varied according to the numbers produced in the second and third rolls. For example, if a person (hypothetically) produced a six in either the second or third rolls, they were far more likely to lie and say the first roll produced a six when it didn't. It's as if getting a six in one of the later, irrelevant rolls somehow made it easier to justify lying about getting that number in the first roll. Overall, 73 per cent of the participants' hypothetical responses were honest, 16 per cent were "justified" lies of this kind, and 9 per cent were out-and-out lies (it's intriguing that so many participants were willing to be honest about the fact that they would have lied, but that's a whole other story).

Lewis and his colleagues also used the data from the second part of the study to compare rates of (self-confessed) hypothetical lying between psychology graduates and economics grads. Economists were much more likely to lie (for example, their rate of outright lying was 13 per cent vs. 6 per cent for psychologists). This was only partly explained by there being more male economists than male psychologists, with men being the more dishonest sex across both disciplines. Of course, another way to look at these data is that the economists were more honest about the fact that they would lie, but again that's another story and an issue not addressed here by the researchers.

"At the level of individual differences it has been demonstrated that economists are more willing to cheat," the researchers said. "This is of some concern given that people with economics degrees hold prominent positions in financial institutions."

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Lewis, A., Bardis, A., Flint, C., Mason, C., Smith, N., Tickle, C., and Zinser, J. (2012). Drawing the line somewhere: An experimental study of moral compromise. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33 (4), 718-725 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2012.01.005

Author weblink: http://people.bath.ac.uk/hssal/

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2. People assume it's hillier up north

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Give people a choice of two cross-country routes to the same destination, one more northerly, the other more southerly, but both covering similar terrain, and they'll tend to favour the southerly route, and to anticipate it being quicker and easier going. According to a new study, this is true for people who've been tested from regions such as Southern New England in the USA, where the north is more mountainous, but it's true too for people who live in regions such as Sofia in Bulgaria, where the south is mountainous and the north is flat. Tad Brunyé and his colleagues think this spatial bias may have to do with our life-long association of north with up (with additional connotations of being uphill) and south as down - as is the convention on maps.

Brunyé's team tested this idea with a series of implicit association tasks. Student participants from Tufts University in Boston looked at pictures of landscapes and categorised them as either flat or mountainous. They also saw aerial shots of geographic areas and had to indicate whether a star on the picture was located north or south. The main finding here is that the participants were quicker to respond during experimental blocks when the same keyboard response key was used for answering "north" or "mountainous" (and another key was for answering "south" or "flat") compared to the contrasting situation where the same key was used for indicating "north" or "flat" (and another key was for "south" or "mountainous").

This finding suggests that the participants implicitly associated the concepts of "north" and "mountainous" in their minds. The same result was obtained when the images for north vs. south consisted of a large compass in the middle of the screen (with a large N in the centre denoting north or a large S denoting south). Although most Tufts students are from areas outside of Southern New England, where the university is based, the researchers also repeated the study with a student sample based in Ohio, where there are mountains to the south east. Again, despite living in an area where the south is more hilly, the same implicit association of north with hills and mountains was exhibited by the students.

A final study measured participants' implicit associations and their more explicit associations. This latter task came in the form of a free association test - participants were given a word such as "north" or "south" and they had to write the first five words that came to mind (the researchers were interested to see if they'd mention words like "up" or "hilly"; past research has generally found that most people don't explicitly associate the north with a mountainous landscape). This study also involved the participants choosing between pairs of routes through similar terrain to the same destination - one more northerly, one more southerly. Once again the usual bias for southern routes was obtained (these were picked 62 per cent of the time); participants who showed a stronger implicit association of north with mountainous terrain, as revealed on the implicit association test, were more likely to pick the more southerly route.

"Given physical experiences associating upward mobility with relative difficulty, the north-south canonical axis becomes misperceived as indicative of physical effort," the researchers said. "Thus if participants misperceive northward areas as higher elevation (or 'uphill') then it logically follows that they would strategically avoid travelling through what they perceive as relatively demanding areas. Indeed, everyday colloquialisms such as heading down south or going up north may reflect how pervasive such associations are throughout cognition." The researchers added that their finding could have practical implications - for example, affecting driving behaviour within towns and cities and also over greater distances, which could be of interest to city planners and civil engineers.

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Tad T. Brunyé, Stephanie A. Gagnon, David Waller, et al (2012). Up north and down south: Implicit associations between topography and cardinal direction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2012.663393

Author weblink:

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5. Easily embarrassed people are more altruistic, and onlookers can tell as much

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Social interactions can feel like walking a tight-rope, an excruciating pit of embarrassment always just one tiny misstep away. Well, here is some comforting news for the easily embarrassed. A new study claims that people prone to embarrassment are better citizens - more selfless and cooperative (more "prosocial" in the psychological jargon). What's more, onlookers interpret expressions of embarrassment as a sign that a person is prosocial, and as a consequence are more likely to cooperate with and trust them. This makes sense if you consider that signs of embarrassment signal to onlookers that you're sensitive to social rules and concerned that you've transgressed. Therefore, although it feels excruciating, claim the study authors, embarrassment "can also function in our favour, helping to advertise some of our better, more desirable qualities."

Matthew Feinberg and his colleagues at University California, Berkeley conducted five experiments in total, involving hundreds of undergrad participants. The first two studies were designed to test whether people who experience more embarrassment are more prosocial. In the first, participants were video recorded as they recounted a time they'd been embarrassed. The videos were coded and it was found that the students who displayed more signs of embarrassment (e.g. gaze aversion, nervous face touching and laughter) also tended to endorse values of fairness more, and they were actually more generous with money in an economic game. In the second study, participants were asked to say how much embarrassment they'd experience in a range of hypothetical social scenarios. The participants who said they'd be more embarrassed tended to be more generous in an economic game and they also scored more highly on a questionnaire measure of their pro-sociality.

The remaining three studies were designed to test whether people who display signs of embarrassment are perceived as more prosocial. In one, participants were shown clips of the videos from the first study. Individuals who'd appeared more embarrassed in these videos were rated as more prosocial by the participants. In another study, participants looked at static pictures of actors displaying an expression of either embarrassment, pride or a neutral expression. Embarrassed people were again rated as more prosocial. A follow-up study was similar, but this time participants agreed to cooperate more fully in an economic game with people who they'd seen pictured looking embarrassed.

A fifth and final study was the most realistic. Participants saw their research partner praised for his or her superb performance on a mental performance test. Unbeknown to the participants, their partner wasn't another volunteer but was in fact an accomplice of the researchers. On being praised, this actor either responded with embarrassment or with pride. Crucially, later on, the participants tended to cooperate more with their partner if he or she had shown embarrassment earlier, as opposed to pride. What's more, the greater the intensity of their partner's earlier display of embarrassment, the more participants tended to trust and cooperate with him or her. The researchers also ruled out the possibility that the actor was displaying shame, rather than embarrassment. One final important detail: the researchers checked and these effects of embarrassment weren't because the participants saw their embarrassed partner as weak, liked them more, or because they felt compassion towards them.

"Our data are the first to reveal that people who feel and show intense embarrassment are indeed more prosocial," the researchers concluded, "and that this display triggers prosocial inferences and actions." The new results chime with earlier work on blushing, showing that onlookers make positive assumptions about blushers. However, the new data show that blushing isn't necessary for these positive effects.

The researchers acknowledged the limits of their study, including the fact that they were reading a lot into the behaviour shown by participants during economic games, and that the findings could be different in different cultures. They also said there was a need for more research - for example, to find out whether it's possible for people to feign embarrassment and thereby benefit from the flattering assumptions onlookers make about easily embarrassed people.

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Feinberg, M., Willer, R., and Keltner, D. (2012). Flustered and faithful: Embarrassment as a signal of prosociality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (1), 81-97 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025403

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4. The life-long curse of an unpopular name

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Making assumptions about someone based on their name is ridiculous. A few attention-seeking celebrities aside, most of us were given our names, rather than choosing them, so why should they be any indicator of the kind of person we are? And yet a new European study claims that people with unfashionable first names suffer from prejudice, with life-long implications for their self-esteem and well-being.

Jochen Gebauer and his team used data collected from the German eDarling dating website. With the consent of hundreds of registered users, they looked to see how people with unfashionable first names were treated.

In the first study, the researchers identified hundreds of users of the dating site who had names that had been rated positively (e.g. Alexander) or negatively (e.g. Kevin) by 500 teachers as part of a different project. The eDarling website sends emails to users suggesting contacts in the form of a person's name, age and region. Users specify their preferences for age and region, so a suggested contact's name is the only information daters can really use in choosing whether to purse a contact. The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin).

An obvious criticism is that this online dating is an artificial situation - perhaps in real life we use other information to overcome any potential prejudice we might have against unpopular names. However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What's more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site - as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they'd suffered in life.

A further two studies replicated these results with a wider range of names and different methods of measuring name popularity. For example, the final study simply used name frequency as a measure of popularity. This again showed that people with less popular names experienced more rejection in online dating and had lower self-esteem and other adverse outcomes. This was the case even if their name had once been popular. So it's not the case that the negative correlates of having an unpopular name can be traced back somehow to having had the kind of parents who choose unpopular names.

These new results echo earlier research in the USA that found racial prejudice could affect the way people are treated based on their name. Identical CVs were dramatically more likely to attract job interviews if they were attributed to a person with a White-sounding name than if they were attributed to a person with an African-American sounding name. However race prejudice wasn't the cause of the harmful correlates of unpopular names in the current study - nearly all the names were White-sounding. Aside from racial prejudice, what causes names to acquire negative connotations is for another research paper. No doubt the names of celebrities, fictional characters and other high profile people play a role.

"Seemingly benign factors, such as first names, add up in real life, gaining considerable collective power in predicting feeling, thought, and behaviour," the researchers said. "The results also highlight the self-presentational value of first names and underscore the importance for parents to choose positively valenced first names for their children."

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Gebauer, J., Leary, M., and Neberich, W. (2011). Unfortunate First Names: Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal Neglect. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550611431644

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2. When your hands are tied, your eyes are tied up too

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Our eyes and hands operate in wonderful balletic synchrony. When we reach for an object, our eyes jump first, grabbing our intended target visually. Something similar also happens when we watch another person reaching. Our eyes jump ahead to their intended target, as if we were making the same grasping movement ourselves.

In an intriguing new study, Ettore Ambrosini and his team tested whether these anticipatory, vicarious eye movements still occur if our hands are tied up, literally. The researchers reasoned that watching another person's reaching movement triggers the same motor programme in our own brain and it's this programme that guides our anticipatory eye movements. But if our hands are tied, they predicted, the motor programme will stall and the eye movements won't occur so much.

Fifteen participants had their eye movements recorded whilst they watched short videos of a man reaching for one of two tomatoes. Sometimes the man clenched his fist and merely touched one of the tomatoes. This fist hand-shape doesn't provide much predictive information about the kind of movement that's being planned and so participants weren't expected to show much anticipatory gaze behaviour.

In other videos, the man either made a precise, preparatory grasping shape with his fingers, as if he were going to pick up the small tomato, which is what he then did; or he made a whole-hand grasp shape, as if he were reaching for the larger tomato, which is what he went on to do. These two hand-shapes provide clues as to the reaching movement that's underway and were expected to trigger more vicarious, anticipatory eye movements in the participants.

So what actually happened? The man's hand-shapes had just the effect that the researchers predicted. When he formed a precision-shape with his fingers, or a whole-hand grabbing shape, the participants tended to glance ahead towards his intended target, more often and sooner than they did when the man formed a fist. Crucially - and this is the intriguing result - this proactive, vicarious looking behaviour was significantly diminished when the participants had their hands tied behind their backs compared with when their hands were loose in front of them. Having their hands tied seemed to somehow tie up their eyes too.

"... having tied or somehow constrained hands does not allow one to take full advantage of specific motor cues, if any, to grab [with the eyes] the target of the observed action," the researchers said. "This suggests that actions of others are processed most efficiently when we are specifically able to perform the same actions."

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Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., and Costantini, M. (2011). Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026570

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5. Your memory of events is distorted within seconds

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Memory isn't etched in neural stone. It's a creative process, sketched in sand. In one of the most dramatic demonstrations of this yet, Brent Strickland and Frank Keil have shown how people's memory for a video clip was distorted within seconds, to form a coherent episode "package". They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses "sophisticated compression routines ... for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory."

Fifty-eight uni students watched three types of 30-second video clip, each featuring a person kicking, throwing, putting or hitting a ball or shuttlecock. All videos were silent. One type of video ended with the consequences of the athletic action implied in the clip - for example, a football flying off into the distance. Another type lacked that final scene and ended instead with an irrelevant shot, for example of a linesman jogging down the line. The final video type was scrambled, with events unfolding in a jumbled order. Crucially, regardless of the video type, sometimes the moment of contact - for example, the kicker actually striking the ball - was shown and sometimes it wasn't.

After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn't featured in the video they'd just watched. Here's the main finding. Participants who watched the video type that climaxed with the ball (or shuttlecock etc) flying off into the distance were prone to saying they'd seen the causal moment of contact in the video, even when that particular image had in fact been missing.

In other words, because seeing the ball fly off implied that the kicker (or other protagonist) had struck the ball, the participants tended to invent a memory for having seen that causal action happen, even when they hadn't. This memory distortion happened within seconds, sometimes as soon as a second after the relevant part of the video had been seen.

This memory invention didn't happen for the videos that had an irrelevant ending, or that were scrambled. So memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence (e.g. a ball flying off into the distance) that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. In this case, the participants appeared to have "filled in" the missing moment of contact from the video, thus creating a causally coherent episode package for their memories. A similar level of memory invention didn't occur for other missing screen shots that had nothing to do with the implied causal action in the clip.

A second study replicated these memory distortion effects with 58 more participants and with new contexts involving kicking, throwing and bowling.

The researchers said their findings have obvious implications for crime scene witnesses. Imagine a witness sees a man wielding a gun, and imagine seconds later they also see a person nearby falling from a gunshot wound - these new results show how easily the mind of the witness could invent a memory of having seen the moment the trigger was actually pulled. "In some circumstances," the researchers said, "conceptual packaging can induce the perceiver to insert unseen information in order to fulfil structural requirements. This was the case in the present study."

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Strickland, B., and Keil, F. (2011). Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121 (3), 409-415 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.007

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2. You're most creative when you're at your groggiest

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Are you an evening person? Guess what? Early in the day, when you're bleary eyed, stumbling about in the fog of sleepiness, you're probably at your creative peak. In contrast, if you're a morning person, then for you, the evening is the best time for musing.

How come? Insight-based problem-solving requires a broad, unfocused approach. You're more likely to achieve that Aha! revelatory moment when your inhibitory brain processes are at their weakest and your thoughts are meandering.

Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks recruited 428 undergrads and had them complete a questionnaire to identify whether they were night owls or morning larks. As you might expect, based on factors like preferred time of day and peak performance, most of the students - 195 of them - were owls and just 28 were larks. The rest came out as neutral.

Next, the students tried to solve six problem-solving tasks - half of them were insight-type tasks (e.g. a prisoner in a tower finds a piece of rope that's half the length of the distance to the ground. He escapes by using scissors to divide the rope in half and then tying the two ends together. How could he have done this?*), and half were analytic questions that require a narrow focus (e.g. Bob's father is 3 times as old as Bob. They were both born in October. Four years ago, he was four times older. How old are Bob and his father?). Students had 4 minutes to solve each problem.

Crucially, half the students were tested first thing in the morning (between 8.30am and 9.30am), the others were tested late afternoon (between 4 and 5.30pm). Here's the headline result: the students were much more successful at solving the insight problems when the time of testing coincided with their least optimal time of functioning. When larks were tested in the evening and owls were tested in the morning, they achieved an average success rate of 56, 22 and 49 per cent, for the three insight tasks, compared with success rates of 51, 16, and 31 per cent achieved by students tested at their preferred time of day. By contrast, performance on the analytic tasks was unaffected by time of day.

A potential weakness in the findings is that there were so many more evening people among the student participants (who therefore excelled at the creative tasks in the morning). So perhaps the results were skewed and the creative advantage has to do with the morning, not to do with performing at your least favoured time of day. To test this possibility, Wieth and Zacks looked at the data for the students with a neutral disposition (no favoured time of day). They didn't perform the insight tasks any better in the morning than evening, thus suggesting the creative advantage specifically comes from operating at your least optimal time of day.

The researchers recommended that students consider designing their class schedules so that they take art and creative writing at their non-optimal time of day. "Previous research has shown that students tend to get higher grades when classes are in sync with their circadian arousal; however, the interaction between time of day and type of class has not been investigated. The results of this study suggest that the relationship between time of day and grades needs to be investigated and may not simply follow a uniform pattern."

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Wieth, M., and Zacks, R. (2011). Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal. Thinking and Reasoning, 17 (4), 387-401 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2011.625663

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4. The first detailed study of daily temptation and resistance

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There it is, posing. A small, perfectly formed chocolate. The diminutive trouble-maker causes you angst. You adore chocolate, but you're battling to lose weight. Immediate longing clashes against a longer-term goal. Just how often are we torn in this way? And how often are we able to resist?

To find out, Wilhelm Hofmann and his colleagues equipped 205 participants (66 per cent female, average age 25; mostly students, but also the general public) in Würzburg, Germany with Blackberry smartphones. For seven days, the participants were beeped seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a desire now or in the preceding 30 minutes. The participants noted what their desire(s) was, how keenly it was felt, whether it caused internal conflict, whether they attempted to resist it, their success, as well as who they were with and where they were. Data was also collected on the participants' personalities.

"To our knowledge," the researchers said, "this study is the first one that has used experience sampling methods to map the course of desire and self-control in everyday life."

Here are some of the basic findings. The participants were experiencing a desire on about half the times they were beeped. Most often (28 per cent) this was hunger. Other common urges were related to: sleep (10 per cent), thirst (9 per cent), media use (8 per cent), social contact (7 per cent), sex (5 per cent), and coffee (3 per cent). About half of these desires were described as causing internal conflict, and an attempt was made to actively resist about 40 per cent of them. Desires that caused conflict were more likely to prompt an attempt at active self-constraint. Such resistance was often effective. In the absence of resistance, 70 per cent of desires were consummated; with resistance this fell to 17 per cent.

"Inner conflict is a frequent feature of daily life," the researchers said. "The findings suggest that self-regulation is needed many times in a typical day, because conflicts are frequent."

Strong desires and weak desires were just as likely to provoke an attempt at self-restaint, but as you'd expect, it was strong desires that were least likely to be constrained. However, even desires rated by participants as "irresistible" were often successfully controlled.

Broadly speaking, personality traits were related to participants' experience of desire and conflict, whereas environmental factors, such as the company of others, had a bearing on whether those desires were enacted and/or resisted.

For example, people who scored highly on a measure of trait self-control had just as many desires, but they were less likely to report experiencing internal conflict; their desires were generally weaker; and they attempted to resist them less often. These findings are revealing. It's not that people with high self-control have saintly willpower, it seems. Rather, they seem to avoid putting themselves in situations in which they are exposed to problematic temptations. "The result is not a desire-free life," the researchers said. "Au contraire, the result appears to be that they mainly have desires that they can satisfy."

Other relevant personality factors included perfectionism (associated with strong desires, high conflict and frequent resistance) and narcissism, which was associated with less conflict - these people felt they were entitled to their desires.

As for environmental factors: being highly inebriated weakened resistance to desires; desires were felt more strongly; and they also led to more internal conflict. The presence of other people, meanwhile, increased people's ability to resist conflict-inducing desires - perhaps because of the fear of disapproval, or maybe other people's help was sought to fight temptation. Company also led to fewer desires being consummated, even ones that weren't resisted. But there was an exception to this - if other people were engaging in the desired behaviour, then this had the effect of weakening resistance and made it more likely that the desire would be fulfilled. Finally, when at work, desire provoked inner conflict more than it did in any other context.

"Our findings suggest that desire is a common, recurrent theme in the daily lives of modern citizens," Hofmann and his team concluded. " ... everyday life may be an ongoing drama in which inner factors set the stage for motivation and conflict, while external factors contribute to how well people manage to resist and enact their current wants and longings."

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Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R., Förster, G., and Vohs, K. (2011). Everyday temptations: An experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026545

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2. Want to feel more powerful? Do a Barry White impression

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As a rule, big beasts tend to make deep noises, whereas little creatures squeak. Perhaps it's little wonder then that we tend to rate human speakers with deeper voices as seeming more powerful. Another finding is that if you put a person in a position of power they will tend to lower their voice. These previous results prompted Mariëlle Stel and her fellow researchers to find out if speaking with a deeper pitch than usual would lead people to feel more powerful.

In an initial study, 81 student participants were split into three groups. Participants in the control group read a passage of geography text silently to themselves. The other two groups read the text out loud, either in a deeper or higher pitch than usual (by three tones). To make sure the participants didn't guess the true aims of the study, the students were next asked some filler questions about the text. The final stage of the experiment was then presented to them as being unrelated to the reading exercise. This involved the students answering seven questions about how powerful they felt (for example, indicating how much they felt dominant versus submissive). None of the students guessed the purpose of the study.

Reading the text with a deep voice didn't affect the students' answers to the questions about the text, but it did appear to affect their feelings of power. Students in the deep voice condition rated themselves as more powerful than students in the other two groups.

A second study was similar, but this time students read some text in a high or low pitch, or they heard someone else doing the reading with a high or low pitch. Only reading the pitch oneself affected feelings of power, with students who read in a low voice rating themselves as more powerful than students who read in a high voice.

One last study involved reading out loud in a deep or high voice, and then the participants completed a memory task that's designed to reveal abstract thinking (mistakenly believing a word was seen in an earlier to-be-remembered list, just because it's got a similar meaning to one of those earlier words, is taken as a sign of more abstract thinking). This time, reading out loud in a deep voice led to more abstract thinking. Stel and her colleagues said this makes sense when considered alongside an earlier study that found people in power tend to think more abstractly than low power people, perhaps because power makes people feel more "psychologically distant".

Throughout these experiments, the effects of lowering one's voice pitch on feelings of power were presumably subconscious. After all, the students weren't able to guess the aims of the study. The researchers said it would be interesting for the future to see if it's possible to deliberately lower your voice in order to feel more powerful. "If so," they concluded, "this would add a simple and generally available instrument to your strategic arsenal: your own voice. The lowering of your own voice could then be used not only to influence others but also to influence yourself."

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Stel, M., van Dijk, E., Smith, P., van Dijk, W., and Djalal, F. (2011). Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550611427610

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1. Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own

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Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists.

Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various scenarios. This included whether or not they or others would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or boring videos); having anonymity. Whilst some of the students predicted how they and others would behave in these situations, other students were actually placed in these circumstances and their behaviour was recorded. The predictions were then compared against the reality.

When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd "lay psychologists" and took situational factors into account. For example, in reality, people were 27 per cent less likely to help clear up the jigsaw when in a group than when alone. When predicting other people's beahviour, the students anticipated this: they said their peers would be 22 per cent less likely to help when in a group. When predicting their own behaviour, however, they didn't think it would make any difference whether they were in a group or alone.

It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating. In reality, students provoked into a bad mood gave 23 per cent less money to charity. And students given the cloak of anonymity cheated more. The students in the predicting role anticipated these situational effects (although they underestimated them) when considering the behaviour of their peers, yet they imagined that their own behaviour would be immune. They thought they'd give just as much money whether in a good or bad mood, and be just as likely to cheat, or not, regardless of whether they had the benefit of anonymity.

Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own altruism (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people's altruism more reliably. This is consonant with a mountain of past research showing that we tend to assess ourselves in an unrealistically favourable light.

"The good news," Balcetis and Dunning concluded, "is that people display some level of insight into the ability of situational variations to shape potential actions that their peers will choose. The bad news is that people fail to reaslise, or choose not to realise, that this knowledge should be applied to predictions of their own behaviour as well."

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Balcetis, E., and Dunning, D. (2011). Considering the situation: Why people are better social psychologists than self-psychologists. Self and Identity, 1-15 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2011.617886

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6. Feeling socially excluded? Try touching a teddy bear (seriously)
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Feeling as though we belong is important for our mental and physical wellbeing. Social exclusion hurts and it darkens our mood. Unfortunately, this sets up a vicious circle because we're then less likely to engage in friendly, prosocial acts, and so less likely to form new bonds with others. A new study documents an effective way to break this cycle - excluded people should touch a teddy bear. Seriously.

Across two studies Kenneth Tai and his colleagues prompted some of their participants to feel socially excluded, either by giving them false feedback on a personality questionnaire ("You're the type who will end up alone later in life") or by contriving an uncomfortable situation in a group task with other participants ("I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with"). Other participants were given more heartening feedback (e.g. lots of people chose you to be in their group) and acted as a comparison.

Next, all the participants had to rate a "consumer product" - a 80cm, furry teddy bear. Some of the participants were given the teddy bear to hold; others evaluated him from a distance.

The researchers were interested in how being socially excluded would influence the participants' willingness to volunteer for more experiments in the future, and their willingness to share money with another person in an economic game (both taken to be signs of pro-social behaviour). And most of all, the researchers wanted to know if touching a teddy first would make any difference to these behaviours.

It did. Socially excluded participants who had the chance to touch the teddy bear were more likely to volunteer for future experiments and they shared money more generously with another participant. By contrast, touching the teddy made no difference to the behaviour of participants who weren't socially excluded.

Touching a teddy increased the prosocial behaviour of excluded participants by increasing their experience of positive emotion. The researchers tested this by asking participants to explain their decision about sharing money in the economic game. Excluded participants who touched the teddy were more likely to give answers like this one, featuring mentions of positive emotions: "There is no urgent need for myself to have the money and it is always comforting to be pleasantly surprised by others, even if it's from a stranger. So I just hope the money can be useful for the person who receives it."

Why on earth would touching a teddy bear have these effects on grown adults? Part of it could have to do with the links between emotional and physical warmth. Past research has shown that socially excluded people rated a room's temperature as colder, and people who feel more lonely tend to take more hot baths. There are also obvious links with past research showing the emotional and physical benefits of contact with pets. Finally, it could also be to do with people anthropomorphising the teddy (i.e. seeing it as human). Touch from another human can boost oxytocin levels - a hormone involved in feelings of trust and social closeness - perhaps touching the teddy had a similar effect.

Tai and his colleagues said there are lots of avenues for future research to explore - would touching a soft blanket have the same benefits observed in this study, or what about touching a plastic teddy? Would the results be replicated in a culture that tends not to anthropomorphise teddies?

"Often times, it may be hard to renew affiliative bonds with other people when one has been socially excluded by others," the researchers concluded. "During situations that may be hard for people to regain social connection with others after being rejected, one can choose to seek solace in the comfort of a teddy bear."
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Tai, K., Zheng, X., and Narayanan, J. (2011). Touching a Teddy Bear Mitigates Negative Effects of Social Exclusion to Increase Prosocial Behavior. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2 (6), 618-626 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550611404707

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4. The taste for competition peaks at age 50
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No wonder parents' races at school sports days are such fraught affairs. A new study finds that far from us mellowing as we age, our inclination for competition increases through life, peaking around the age of 50.

Prior to their data collection, Ulrich Mayr and his colleagues had several reasons for expecting that preference to compete would peak in youth and fade thereafter. They cited reductions in testosterone with age; the documented shift with age to a more prosocial orientation (older people give more money to charity); an age-related shift to a mastery (rather than comparison) approach to skills; and age-related falls in confidence, perhaps based on actual cognitive declines with age.

The researchers set up a stall at a shopping mall and invited volunteers to solve mental arithmetic equations (e.g. "true or false: 7 + 2 + 3 - 6 = 5") as quickly as possible in return for points. Points were exchanged for modest cash prizes. The 543 participants (aged 25 to 75), in private booths, completed one round lasting 30-seconds in which they earned more points the more equations they solved. They then completed a second "competitive" round, in which they only earned points for solving more equations than a randomly chosen rival. Participants didn't get feedback on their performance until the experiment was over. Finally - and this was the crucial round - the participants could choose for the final round whether to play solo (known as "piece-rate"), like they had in the first round, or whether to compete once again against another randomly chosen participant. Afterwards participants estimated how well they thought they'd done, as a measure of their confidence.

There were some clear gender effects, consistent with past research. Women were far less likely than men to opt for the competitive version in the final round (35 per cent vs. 73 per cent). And there were clear age effects across both genders: the taste for competition against others increased with age, levelling off at about the age of 50. For example, nearly 70 per cent of men aged 45 to 54 opted to compete versus just over 50 per cent of men aged 25 to 34.

What lies behind the gender effects? Men and women performed equally well at the task under piece-rate conditions, but the women's performance did drop slightly in the competitive version. Women were also less confident than men. Women's confidence, unlike men's, was also related to their choice of whether to compete or not (men chose to compete without consideration of their likelihood of winning!). However, none of these factors was sizeable enough to explain the size of the gender difference in choice to compete.

What about the effects of age on preference for competition? There was no difference in actual performance with age. Changes in confidence also couldn't explain the age-related change. A potential explanation comes from a recent meta-analysis, which found that the trait of "social dominance" increases with age until the 50s. Said Mayr and his team: "Successfully engaging in competitions is critical for establishing social dominance and therefore it is plausible to assume that with such an increased interest in social dominance comes an increased 'taste for competition."

One important caveat needs to be mentioned. Because this was a cross-sectional study, it's possible that it's not age that's related to competitiveness but rather the era that the participants grew up in - or something else to do with their particular generation. To get around this problem, participants would need to be followed up throughout their lives, to see if their taste for competition changes as they age. However, the researchers can't see any reason why the fifty-somethings' upbringing should have led them to be more competitive than the 30-somethings. Yes, Baby Boomers are known for their competitiveness but 30-year-olds grew up in a prolonged economic downturn that might have increased their competitive tendencies.

What about you - have you found that your taste for competition has altered as you've aged? Or looking at your friends and family, do these results fit with your own experiences of their competitiveness? Please use comments on the Digest blog to let us know.
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Mayr, U., Wozniak, D., Davidson, C., Kuhns, D., and Harbaugh, W. (2011). Competitiveness across the life span: The feisty fifties. Psychology and Aging DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025655

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3. Recovering patients describe their battles with an "anorexia voice"
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People with anorexia find comfort in their illness at first, but then it becomes over-powering and they end up battling for control of their own minds. That's according to Sarah Williams and Marie Reid, who conducted an online focus group and email interviews with 14 people recovering from anorexia nervosa, aged 21 to 50 and including two men.

A consistent theme to emerge was that anorexia at first provided a sense of control and identity. The participants recalled enjoying striving for perfection. They saw thinness as an ideal that was within their means to reach. "Anorexia became a friend," said Natalie*. "When I was alone ... I knew that at least I had A." Jon said: "It was a way to control what was happening to me on a day to day basis, and also my weight."

Eventually though, rather than being a solution, anorexia became a problem all of its own. Said Lisa: "I call my anorexia 'the demon' who controls my thoughts, feelings, emotions and actions." Jon: "It's like there are two people in my head: the part that knows what needs to be done and the part of me that is trying to lead me astray. Ana is the part that is leading me astray and dominates me."

"Having developed the anorexic voice, participants came to feel that it was to an extent split from their authentic selves," said Williams and Reid. The research pair explained how their findings, placed in the context of similar results from past studies, provided useful ideas for therapeutic intervention. In particular, they suggested the need for recovering anorexia clients to acknowledge other positions beyond the anorexia voice and their own authentic self. "Wellness cannot simply be the absence of anorexia nervosa symptoms because this can intensify the inner battle with the anorexic voice," they said.

Williams and Reid advised using therapy to help build clients' sense of self. "This study suggests that this means developing the self beyond an ambivalent conflict between the authentic self and the anorexic voice," they said. "This would allow a new more positive dominant position to develop."

One approach that may be particularly suitable, according to Williams and Reid, is emotion-focused therapy (EFT). A technique used in EFT is for clients to address an empty chair, which represents their critical "anorexia voice". With the aid of the therapist, this can lead to a softening of the anorexic critic and the fostering of a new dominant position in the self. However, the researchers cautioned that there are "as yet ... no studies investigating the efficacy of externalisation techniques such as those used in EFT and this warrants further attention."
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Williams, S., and Reid, M. (2011). ‘It's like there are two people in my head’: A phenomenological exploration of anorexia nervosa and its relationship to the self. Psychology and; Health, 1-18 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2011.595488

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2. How to make the ceiling of your room seem higher
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If you've ever witnessed would-be buyers looking around a house, you'll have noticed their observations about each room are usually limited to: "hmm, it's a good size" or "hmm, it's rather small". Little wonder then that home-improvers are so often fixated on making their rooms appear as spacious as possible. Design lore will tell them that to do so, they should paint their ceilings as light as possible, and in particular make the ceiling lighter than the walls. This contrast between ceilings and walls, so the advice goes, will increase the perceived room height. Does it really?

The answer, until recently, would have remained elusive. Interior design and architecture are strangely disconnected from psychology research. But a new study by Daniel Oberfeld and his team has defied this tradition. Across two experiments they had 32 participants don 3-D glasses and use a sliding scale to judge the ceiling height of dozens of virtual rooms. The rooms were empty and the colours were in shades of grey so that only lightness was varied. In particular, the ceiling, walls and floor were varied to be either low, medium or high in lightness. The depth (6m) and width (4.5m) of the rooms were fixed, whilst the actual ceiling height varied between 2.9 to 3.1m.

Increasing the lightness of the ceiling did increase its perceived height, so that aspect of design lore was supported. However, contrary to the traditional advice, the rooms also appeared higher when the walls were lighter. Moreover, the effect of ceiling lightness and wall lightness was additive. So the contrast effect endorsed by traditional design lore was refuted. Floor lightness made no difference to estimates of ceiling height, so it can't be overall room lightness that's crucial, but only the combination of wall and ceiling lightness.

Oberfeld and his colleagues said that practical guidelines for increasing perceived room height should be modified in light of their findings. "A rule of thumb consistent with our data," they wrote, "would be: 'If you intend to make the room appear higher, paint both the ceiling and the walls in a light colour. You are free to choose the colour of the floor because it has no effect on the perceived height."

From a theoretical perspective the new results are somewhat puzzling. Traditional research in psychophysics has shown that brighter objects usually appear closer. If people judge the height of a room by estimating the distance between their eyes and the ceiling, you'd think a lighter ceiling would appear lower. The present results suggest people must use some other means to judge ceiling height. Another possibility is that people look at the angles in the corner of the room, where the walls meet the ceiling. Perhaps increased lightness alters the angles via a geometric illusion to make the room seem taller. No, that isn't it either: Oberfeld's team said ceiling and wall lightness should have opposite effects on those crucial angles, which is inconsistent with the finding that both lead to an increase in perceived height.

So, thanks to this research, we now know how to make our rooms seem higher, but we don't yet know why the technique works!
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Oberfeld, D., Hecht, H., and Gamer, M. (2010). Surface lightness influences perceived room height. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63 (10), 1999-2011 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470211003646161

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6. The brain basis of "unrealistic optimism"
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Life is a little like going for a walk in the rain. Sooner or later you're going to get wet - be that in the form of bad health, unrequited love or job redundancy. It's remarkable that we ever venture out. We do so sheltered under the umbrella of "unrealistic optimism". Depressed people aside, the rest of us underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us and overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes. Asked to imagine positive scenarios, we do so with greater vividness and more immediacy than when asked to picture negative occurrences - our images of those are hazy and distant.

Now Tali Sharot (author of the forthcoming book The Optimism Bias) and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. Sharot had participants estimate their likelihood of experiencing 80 adverse life events from developing Alzheimer's to being robbed. After they gave each estimate, the participants were given the correct average probability for a person in their socio-economic circumstances. In a subsequent testing session, participants had a second chance to forecast their risk of experiencing the same 80 misfortunes. Throughout this process, Sharot scanned the activity of the participants' brains.

One key finding is that the participants showed a bias in the way that they updated their estimates, being much more likely to revise an original estimate that was overly pessimistic than to revise an original estimate that was unduly optimistic (79 per cent of participants showed this pattern). The researchers checked and this difference wasn't to do with the positive feedback being remembered better, but purely to do with it being taken account of more than negative feedback.

There were some intriguing neural insights. Discovering that an initial estimate was unduly pessimistic was associated with increased activity across the frontal lobes, in left inferior frontal gyrus, left and right medial frontal cortex/superior frontal gyrus, and also in the right cerebellum - and this increased activity correlated with the participants' subsequent updating of their estimate in the second round of predictions. By contrast, discovering that they'd been overly optimistic was associated with reduced activity in the inferior frontal gyrus extending into precentral gyrus and insula, and again this activity change was related to the likelihood that the participants would revise their estimate in the second round of predictions.

The researchers also compared the brain activity between the most and least optimistic participants. High scorers in trait optimism showed less of the activity drop in inferior frontal gyrus when they discovered they'd been overly optimistic. That is, their brains seemed to ignore information educating them about the depressing reality of their chances of experiencing adversity later in life. In contrast, the brains of the high and low optimists responded to desirable feedback (in which they learned they'd been unduly pessimistic) in exactly the same way.

"Our findings offer a mechanistic account of how unrealistic optimism persists in the face of challenging information," said Sharot and her team. "We found that optimism was related to diminished coding of undesirable information about the future in a region of the frontal cortex (right inferior frontal gyrus) that has been identified as being sensitive to negative estimation errors."

The researchers also reflected on the wider implications of their research. They said that unrealistic optimism likely evolved to enhance exploratory behaviour and has the benefit of reducing stress and anxiety. However, they said that this rosy view comes at a cost. "For example," they said, "unrealistic assessment of financial risk is widely seen as a contributing factor in the 2008 global economic collapse."
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Sharot, T., Korn, C., and Dolan, R. (2011). How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality. Nature Neuroscience, 14 (11), 1475-1479 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.2949

Author weblink: http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~tsharot/

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3. Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?
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To focus on details or the whole? This is one of the major ways that people differ in their style of mental processing. Past research has shown that people on the autism spectrum tend to focus more on details. Other studies reveal cross-cultural differences. People from collectivist cultures like Japan show a bias for focusing more on the bigger picture, known as "global processing", whilst citizens in individualist cultures like Britain show a comparatively greater bias for detail or "local processing". Now a study, led by Serge Caparos at Goldsmiths, of a remote African society, makes the case that this cultural difference is caused, not so much by degrees of collectivism or individualism, but rather by exposure to varying levels of urbanisation.

Caparos and his team used two kinds of stimuli presented on-screen to measure processing bias. The first is known as the Ebbinghaus illusion, in which the perceived size of a central circle is affected by the relative size of the circles surrounding it. A circle surrounded by bigger circles will generally be perceived as smaller, especially by people with a bias towards more global processing.

The second stimuli involved large letters comprised of little letters or shapes. Participants had to make a similarity judgement - for example, they were presented with a large X made up of little x's and had to say whether it was more similar to a large circle made up of little x's or a large X made up of little squares. People with a bias towards global processing would be expected to say the two large X's are more similar (check the Digest blog for examples of the stimuli).

To gauge the effect of urbanisation, the researchers tested dozens of people from the remote Himba society of Namibia, as well as dozens of undergrads from Japan and Britain. Crucially, some of the Himba lived traditionally in village huts and homesteads whereas others had moved to, and lived for several years in, Opuwo, the Himba's only permanent, urban settlement. Also, some of the traditional Himba had visited Opuwo, either once, twice or three times.

The Japanese were more sensitive to the Ebbinghaus illusion than the Brits (indicative of a greater global processing bias, consistent with past research); the Brits, in turn, were more sensitive to it than the traditional Himba. Critically, though, the urban Himba were just as sensitive to the illusion as the British. Visits to the town Opuwo made no difference to the performance of the traditional Himba on this task.

On the similarity judgement task, the Japanese and Brits showed the most global choices, more than both groups of Himba. However, the urban Himba made more global choices than the traditional Himba and, moreover, global choices were made more often by traditional Himba who'd visited the town than those who hadn't. Indeed, just two visits to Opuwo increased global choices by ten per cent.

Age and levels of schooling made no difference to any of these results and past research has confirmed that the Himba are unfazed by testing with a computer monitor.

The more established theory for cross-cultural differences in local/global processing bias would predict that the Himba should show even more of a global processing bias than the Japanese, given the highly collectivist nature of their society. Also, this social orientation account would predict that experience of more individualistic urban living should lead to more local processing bias, not the greater global processing that was observed.

"Our proposal," the researchers said, "is that exposure to the urban environment investigated here introduced visual clutter with consequent changes in global/local processing." Their claim tallies with past research showing the opposite effect - that exposing townies to natural environments increases their bias for details.

"Further research will need to determine the processes by which cluttered visual input and/or other aspects of the urban environment come to change perceptual foci of interest in the dramatic way observed here," the researchers concluded.
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Caparos, S., Ahmed, L., Bremner, A., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K., & Davidoff, J. (2012). Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture Cognition, 122 (1), 80-85 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.08.013

Author weblink: http://cms.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/caparos/

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2. Mention of the word "loving" doubles charitable donations
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French researchers say that adding the text "donating=loving" to a charitable collection box almost doubled the amount of money they raised.

Nicolas Guéguen and Lubomir Lamy placed opaque collection boxes in 14 bakeries in Brittany for two weeks. All the boxes featured the following text in French: "Women students in business trying to organise a humanitarian action in Togo. We are relying on your support", together with a picture of a young African woman with an infant in her arms. Some boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: "DONATING=LOVING"; others had the text "DONATING=HELPING"; whilst others had no further text below the slot. Different box types were placed in different bakeries on different days and the amount of money collected each day was recorded.

The text on the donation boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in boxes with the "donating=loving" text, as compared with the "donating=helping" boxes and the boxes with no additional text (€1.04 per day vs. €0.62 and €0.54; the effect size was d=2.09). "Given the high effect-size ... we can conclude that evoking love is a powerful technique to enhance people's altruistic behaviour," the researchers said. In contrast, the difference in the amount of money left in "donating=helping" boxes and boxes without additional text was not statistically significant.

Guéguen and Lamy think that the word "loving" acts as a prime, activating related concepts such as compassion, support and solidarity, and thereby encourages behaviour consistent with those ideas. Such an explanation would fit the wider literature showing how our motivations and attitudes can be influenced by words and objects without us realising it. For example, one previous study showed how exposure to ageing-related words like "retired" led participants to walk away more slowly after an experiment. Other research found a poster of a pair of eyes on a wall led to greater use of an honesty box in a university canteen. Previous research by Guéguen and Lamy has further shown how asking a male passerby for directions to "Saint Valentine Street" as opposed to "Saint Martin Street" makes them subsequently more likely to help a nearby woman who's had her phone stolen, presumably because of the automatic activation of romance-related concepts.

Why should the text "donating=helping" not have had a similar beneficial effect on giving behaviour? Guéguen and Lamy think this might be due to a compensatory counter-reaction against words that are perceived as too much like a command. Indeed, in French, the verb "donner" to donate is also used to order someone to do something. However, why this reactance should have happened with "donating=helping" and not with "donating=loving" isn't entirely clear. Another reason for the impotence of the word "helping", the researchers said, is its redundancy - it was really just repeating the plea for support in the main text.

The measure of giving was crude, which is a weakness of the study. We don't know if the "donating=loving" text led more people to donate, or to more generous giving among those people who donated.

"Despite the shortcomings of our study, the results will no doubt be of interest to those involved in philanthropic planning and support assessment in the aresas of corporate giving, nonprofit organisations, charitable foundations, and grants," the researchers said. "Conducted in a field setting, the experiment demonstrates how a simple, low-cost intervention can increase charitable giving."
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Guéguen, N., and Lamy, L. (2011). The effect of the word “love” on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting. Social Influence, 6 (4), 249-258 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2011.627771

Author weblink: http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/

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7. What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?

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The brain has its own jukebox. A personal sound system for your private listening pleasure. The downside is that it has a mind of its own. It often chooses the songs and it frequently gets stuck, playing a particular tune over and over until you're sick of it. Psychologists have nicknamed these mental tunes "earworms" (from the German Ohrwurm). A study from 2009 found that they can last anywhere between minutes to hours, but that they're only unpleasant in a minority of cases. Now a team led by Victoria Williamson, in partnership with BBC 6 Music and other international radio stations, has surveyed thousands of people to try to find out the various triggers that cause earworms to start playing. Radio listeners and web visitors were invited to fill in an online form or email the station about their latest earworm experience and the circumstances that preceded it.

Just over 600 participants provided all the information that was needed for a detailed analysis. Predictably, the most frequently cited circumstance was recent exposure to a particular song. "My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday," one 6 Music listener wrote in. "Woke at 4.30 this morning with it going round me head. PLEASE DON'T EVER PLAY IT AGAIN." In relation to this kind of earworm-inducing exposure, the survey revealed the manifold ways that we come into contact with music in modern life, including: music in public places, in gyms, restaurants and shops; radio music; live music; ring tones; another person's humming or singing; and music played in visual media on TV and on the Internet.

However, a song doesn't have to be heard to worm its way inside your head. Many listeners described how earworms had been triggered by association - contact with certain people, rhythms, situations, sounds or words - sometimes with quite obscure links. "On my journey, I read a number plate on a car that ended in the letters 'EYC' which is NOTHING LIKE 'PYT' (by Michael Jackson)," said another listener, "but for some unknown reason, there it was - the song was in my head."

Memories also triggered earworms - for example, driving along the same stretch of road that a song was first heard. And also anticipation. Another listener had "Alive" by Pearl Jam stuck in their head in the days before attending a Pearl Jam concert.

Mood and stress were other triggers. "Prokofiev 'Montagues and Capulets' opening theme. I was writing an email about a distressing subject. I suspect the mood of the piece matched my mood at the time," said an amateur musician. Another listener had Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror playing in her mind ever since she'd been thinking about the star non-stop and feeling sad (the survey coincided with his death in 2009).

A final theme to emerge from the survey was the way that earworms start playing when we're in a "low attention state", bored or even asleep. "My earworm is 'Mulder and Scully' by Catatonia. In fact I dreamt about running through woods and this was the sound track in my head," said a 6 Music listener. Another survey respondent experienced K'naan "Waving Flag" when mind wandering through a monotonous lab task.

Theoretically, Williamson and her colleagues said earworms can be understood as another manifestation of what Ebbinghaus in the nineteenth century identified as "involuntary memory retrieval". They could even provide a new window through which to study that phenomenon.

"While musical imagery is a skill that many (especially musicians) can utilise to their advantage, involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is an involuntary, spontaneous, cognitive intrusion that, while not necessarily unpleasant or worrying, can prove hard to control," the researchers concluded. "The present study has classified the breadth of circumstances associated with the onset of an INMI episode in everyday life and provided insights into the origins of the pervasive phenomenon, as well as an illustration of how these different contexts might interact."

What about you? What earworms have you experienced lately and what was the context? Please use comments on the Digest blog to share your earworm experiences.

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Williamson, V., Jilka, S., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Mullensiefen, D., and Stewart, L. (2011). How do "earworms" start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery Psychology of Music DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0305735611418553

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7. Wine tastes like the music you're listening to

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We often think of our sensory modalities as like separate channels. In fact, there's a lot of cross-talk and interference between them. Consider how the prick of a needle is more painful if you watch it go in. Under-researched in this respect is the way that sound can affect our taste of food and drink. We know that such interactions occur. For instance, crisps taste fresher when they make a louder crunching noise. In a new study, Adrian North has shown that when people drink wine to the accompaniment of music, they perceive the wine to have taste characteristics that reflect the nature of that concurrent music. If you want your Merlot to taste earthy and full-bodied, try savouring it to the tune of Tom Jones. To add a little zing to your Pinot, perhaps try some Gaga?

North tested out the taste perceptions of 250 university students as they drank either Montes Alpha 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon (red wine) or Chardonnay (white wine) - both are Chilean. Crucially, some of the participants sampled their glass to the tune of music previously identified by a separate group of people as powerful and heavy (Carmina Burana by Orff); others drank their wine to music rated earlier as subtle and refined (Waltz of the Flowers from Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker'); others to the tune of zingy and refreshing music (Just Can't Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague); and lastly, the remaining participants drank their wine with mellow and soft music in the background (Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook). There was also a control group who drank the wine with no music.

After they'd savoured their wine for five minutes, the participants were asked to rate how much they felt the wine was powerful and heavy; subtle and refined; mellow and soft; and zingy and refreshing. The results showed that the music had a consistent effect on the participants' perception of the wine. They tended to think their wine had the qualities of the music they were listening to. So, for example, both the red and white wines were given the highest ratings for being powerful and heavy by those participants who drank them to the tune of Carmina Burana.

It remains for future research to establish whether these effects would hold among participants who had a greater knowledge of wine (a factor not assessed in the current study). Also, it's not clear how much it's the cultural connotations of the music that influences the perception of the wine, or how much it's the physical properties of that music. Finally, it perhaps would have been better if the music had stopped whilst the wines were rated.

This research builds on some earlier, related findings. People buy more French wine when French music is playing (and ditto for German music and wine). Past research has also shown that people eat and drink their way to a higher dinner bill when the restaurant plays classical music as opposed to pop, presumably because of the "upmarket" connotations of the classical accompaniment.

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North, A. (2011). The effect of background music on the taste of wine. British Journal of Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02072.x

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3. How walking through a doorway increases forgetting

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Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into these discrete episodes? A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that's just been left behind.

Dozens of participants used computer keys to navigate through a virtual reality environment presented on a TV screen. The virtual world contained 55 rooms, some large, some small. Small rooms contained one table; large rooms contained two at each end. When participants first encountered a table, there was an object on it that they picked up (once carried, objects could no longer be seen). At the next table, they deposited the object they were carrying at one end and picked up a new object at the other. And on the participants went. Frequent tests of memory came either on entering a new room through an open doorway, or after crossing halfway through a large room. An object was named on-screen and the participants had to recall if it was either the object they were currently carrying or the one they'd just set down.

The key finding is that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]" the researchers said.

But what if this result was only found because of the simplistic virtual reality environment? In a second study, Radvansky and his collaborators created a real-life network of rooms with tables and objects. Participants passed through this real environment picking up and depositing objects as they went, and again their memory was tested occasionally for what they were carrying (hidden from view in a box) or had most recently deposited. The effect of doorways was replicated. Participants were more likely to make memory errors after they'd passed through a doorway than after they'd travelled the same distance in a single room.

Another interpretation of the findings is that they have nothing to do with the boundary effect of a doorway, but more to do with the memory enhancing effect of context (the basic idea being that we find it easier to recall memories in the context that we first stored them). By this account, memory is superior when participants remain in the same room because that room is the same place that their memory for the objects was first encoded.

Radvansky and his team tested this possibility with a virtual reality study in which memory was probed after passing through a doorway into a second room, passing through two doorways into a third unfamiliar room, or through two doorways back to the original room - the one where they'd first encountered the relevant objects. Performance was no better when back in the original room compared with being tested in the second room, thus undermining the idea that this is all about context effects on memory. Performance was worst of all when in the third, unfamiliar room, supporting the account based on new memory episodes being created on entering each new area.

These findings show how a physical feature of the environment can trigger a new memory episode. They concur with a study published earlier this year which focused on episode markers in memories for stories. Presented with a passage of narrative text, participants later found it more difficult to remember which sentence followed a target sentence, if the two were separated by an implied temporal boundary, such as "a while later ...". It's as if information within a temporal episode was somehow bound together, whereas a memory divide was placed between information spanning two episodes.

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Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (8), 1632-1645 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2011.571267

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7. Sweet-toothed and sweet natured - how people who like sweet things are sweet

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"Honey", "Sweetheart", "Sugar": how come so many terms of endearment pertain to sweetness? Might the metaphor be grounded in a real link between sweet taste and pleasing personality traits and behaviour?

Brian Meier and his team had dozens of students rate the agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism of 100 people, based on pictures of their faces and a strap-line identifying each person's preference for a particular food, such as "I like grapefruit". People who said they liked a sweet food were judged by the students as more agreeable, suggesting that we implicitly recognise that a taste for sweet things is grounded in a sweet personality.

Are people right to make this implicit assumption? Further studies suggested so. Students who rated their own personality as more agreeable also tended to have a stronger preference (than their less agreeable peers) for sweet foods and drinks. Among a different set of students, a stronger preference for sweet foods correlated positively with their willingness to volunteer their time, unpaid, for a separate unrelated study - considered by the researchers as a sign of prosocial behaviour.

So, we assume that people who like sweet foods are nice people, and it turns out they are. Can this link be exploited? What if you give someone a sweet food to eat - will they feel more agreeable? Will they actually become more helpful? In two further studies, students given chocolate to eat (either a Hershey's Kiss or a piece of Dove Silky Smooth chocolate), rated themselves as more agreeable and actually volunteered more of their time to help an unknown researcher, as compared with students given a sour sweet or a water cracker.

"We are unaware of any studies showing that taste metaphors are consequential in predicting social functioning, and thus the findings are unique," the researchers said. Why is there this link between sweet taste and personality and behaviour? Meier and his team think one possible root cause may lie in breast-feeding. "... [H]uman breast milk is decidedly sweet in taste and chemical composition and feeding episodes are marked by a close bond of mother and child," they observed. "Thus, one of the earliest bases for later emotional attachments is also marked by a sweet-tasting ingested food."

The psychologists added that future research is needed to explore other potential links between tastes and personality. Might lovers of spicy foods have spicy personalities, for instance? Also, we need to find out if the same links pertain in languages other than English. "The general point is that taste-related metaphors may be useful in understanding other personality processes than those examined," they said.

Meanwhile, if wind of these results gets out, romantic liaisons could become a little more complicated. Has your partner given you that box of chocolates to make you "sweet", literally because they're after something and want you to be more amenable? On the other hand: maybe it's a test. If you turn your nose up at a chocolate, what will that tell them about your personality?

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Meier, B., Moeller, S., Riemer-Peltz, M., and Robinson, M. (2011). Sweet taste preferences and experiences predict prosocial inferences, personalities, and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025253

Author weblink: http://public.gettysburg.edu/~bmeier/Index.htm

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4. Are we really blind to Internet banners?

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It's a line of research that Google doesn't want you to know about. Many studies suggest people have a habit of simply ignoring web banners on Internet sites - a phenomenon known as banner blindness. The evidence for this ad avoidance is based largely on tests of people's explicit memory of ads after they've browsed a site. Of course that doesn't mean that the participants hadn't looked at the ads, nor does it mean that the ads hadn't lodged their message subconsciously.

Now Guillaume Hervet and his team have attempted to address these points in an eye-tracking study. Thirty-two participants read eight web-pages about choosing a digital camera. On the third, fourth, seventh and eighth pages, a Google-style rectangular text ad (180 x 150 pixels) was embedded in the right-hand side of the editorial content. The second ad was different from the first, and then the same two ads appeared on the seventh and eighth pages, respectively. Also, half the participants were exposed to ads that were congruent with the camera topic of the web-pages; the other half to incongruent ads. All advertised brands were fictitious.

The results may be of some consolation to Google and their advertisers. Eighty-two per cent of the participants did actually look at one or more of the ads. Or put another way: of the 128 ad exposures, 37 per cent were looked at once or more. Had the ad content made a lasting impression? To test this, after the browsing phase, the participants attempted to read the same ads presented in varying degrees of blurry degradation. Their performance was compared to a new group of control participants who hadn't done the earlier web browsing. If performance was superior among the participants who'd earlier been exposed to the ads, this would suggest they had a lasting memory of the ad content. In fact, performance was only superior for web-browsing participants who'd earlier been exposed to ads in a congruent context.

Another aspect to the results is how the participants' behaviour changed over the course of the web browsing. The first and third ads were looked at for longer than the second and fourth ads. This is probably because the second and fourth ads appeared on pages that had been preceded by a page with an ad on it in the same location - the participants seemed to have learned to ignore that area of the page. On the other hand, it seems a couple of pages without ads was enough to restore ad-looking behaviour.

The lessons for web advertisers are clear: don't advertise on every page, vary ad location, and make sure the ad topic is congruent with the web-site content.

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Hervet, G., Guérard, K., Tremblay, S., & Chtourou, M. (2011). Is banner blindness genuine? Eye tracking internet text advertising. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (5), 708-716 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1742

Author weblink: http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/guillaume-hervet/4/18a/ba1

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4. How not to spot personality test fakers

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Personality tests are an effective recruitment tool: higher scorers on conscientiousness and lower scorers on neuroticism tend to perform better in the job. But a major weakness of such tests is people's tendency to answer dishonestly. A study now shows that a popular approach to spotting cheaters is likely to be ineffective.

This approach, which has gained momentum in the research literature, is to focus on applicants' response times. Honest test-takers show an inverted U-shaped response profile, being fast when they strongly agree or disagree with test items (these come in the form of statements about the self, such as "I pay attention to details"), and slower when they answer more equivocally. This is thought to reflect a process whereby test takers refer to their self-schema and find it easier to answer when statements clearly conform or contradict this schema.

At least two theories predict that fakers won't show this inverted U-shape, and that response times therefore offer a way to expose those who are cheating. One theory has it that fakers refer to their self-schema and then exaggerate the truth on key statements. This has the effect of extending answer times for unequivocal answers, flattening out the inverted U-shape response time profile shown by honest answerers. Another theory says that fakers don't refer to a self-schema at all - they simply assess the social desirability of each item and exaggerate answers where necessary. This is a cognitively simpler task than referral to a self-schema, and again the inverted U-shaped response profile is predicted to flatten.

To test these predictions, Mindy Shoss and Michael Strube had 60 undergrads (38 women) complete a personality test (the Revised NEO Personality inventory) three times: once honestly, once to create a general good impression, and lastly, either to create a good impression specifically for a public relations role, or specifically for an accountant role.

The key finding is that participants showed the inverted U-shaped response time profile regardless of whether they were answering honestly or not. Response times were faster overall for the fakery conditions, and the inverted U-shape was actually accentuated in the specific public relations fakery condition. Shoss and Strube said these results are consistent with the idea that fakers form, and refer to, an idealised personality schema in their mind when completing a personality test, and so their answers show a similar response time profile to an honest test-taker. The accentuated inverted U-shape for the PR-role condition comes from the fact that the schema for such a role is like a caricature, making unequivocal answers for certain items even easier to provide than usual.

Digging deeper, the researchers found that when striving to make a good impression, participants scored higher on extraversion, agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism. The inverted U-shape in response times was greater for agreeableness and conscientiousness in the fake conditions than when answering honestly.

"This study casts doubt on the validity of response times for detecting faking in general," the researchers said. "... it seems that researchers and practitioners interested in detecting and reducing faking would do well to focus on other strategies."

An alternative approach to reducing test fakery is to force applicants to choose between pairs of equally appealing statements about themselves, as reported previously on the Digest: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/10/personality-test-that-cant-be-faked.html.

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Shoss, M., and Strube, M. (2011). How do you fake a personality test? An investigation of cognitive models of impression-managed responding. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116 (1), 163-171 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.05.003

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2. Money makes mimicry backfire

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It's one of the first rules of persuasion: mimic subtly your conversation partner's movements and body language (with a slight delay), and they'll perceive you to be more attractive and trustworthy. Being mimicked, so long as it's not too blatant, apparently leaves us in a better mood and more likely to be helpful to others.

It all sounds so easy, but now Jia Liu and her colleagues have thrown a spanner in the works. They've demonstrated that reminders of money reverse the benefits of mimicry - leading mimics to be liked less, and the mimicked to feel threatened. It all has to do with the selfish, egocentric mindset triggered by money. And in that context, the researchers say, being mimicked is uncomfortable because it gives people the sense that "their autonomy is being threatened."

Liu's team had 72 undergrads complete some irrelevant questions on a computer on which the screen background was either filled with shells or currency signs. Next, each participant chatted for ten minutes with a stranger who either did or didn't mimic them. Finally, the participants rated how much they liked that person and they completed an implicit measure of threat. Words were flashed subliminally on a screen and, after each one, participants had to try to guess the word from a subsequent list. Choosing more threat-related words was taken as a sign that they were feeling more threatened.

Without the initial reminder of money on the computer screen, mimicry had its usual beneficial effects - participants in this condition who were mimicked felt less threatened and liked their conversation partner more. By contrast, mimicked participants reminded of money at the outset, liked their partner less and felt more threatened (compared with participants in the money condition who were not mimicked). Feelings of threat were found to mediate the links (positive or negative, depending on the condition) between mimicry and liking.

"Being mimicked typically leaves people with positive feelings," the researchers concluded, "but this experiment showed that mimicry can diminish liking of the mimicker if people have been reminded of money.

"... The findings take the psychology of money in a new direction," they added, "by demonstrating money's ability to stimulate a longing for freedom."

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Liu, J., Vohs, K., and Smeesters, D. (2011). Money and Mimicry: When Being Mimicked Makes People Feel Threatened. Psychological Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611418348

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5. Investigating the personality of companies

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When we think about other people, we do so in terms that can be boiled down to five discrete personality dimensions: extraversion, introversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness (known as the Big Five factors). A new study suggests that a similar process is at work in our perception of companies and corporations. Google and Apple have personalities too, it seems.

Philipp Otto, Nick Chater and Henry Stott quizzed thousands of people about their perception of hundreds of companies and they've found that our view of companies is encapsulated by four fundamental dimensions: honesty, prestige, innovation and power. These perceived characteristics correlate with traditional economic measures of company performance, but they offer something more.

"With the introduction of personality factors for companies, a new way of describing companies is provided," the trio said, "which directly reflects the public understanding of companies ... Tracking measures of corporate personality might add important dimensions to economic measures of company performance and could be used both in shaping marketing and brand strategy, and potentially also in evaluating and predicting company success."

Otto's team kicked off its investigation by using George Kelly's Repertory Grid technique. Six participants named nine well-known companies and then, taking three at a time, they identified an adjective on which two companies in that group differed from the third (a process known as "triadic elicitation"). The idea of this approach is to cultivate responses from participants without putting ideas into their heads. Named companies included Tesco, BT and Chanel, and popular themes were quality, price, general appearance and experiences with the companies.

For a second study, the adjectives from the first were combined with adjectives taken from the existing literature on categorising objects, giving a total of 118. Twenty students then rated 20 companies on all these 118 adjectives. Any inconsistency or instability was weeded out. So, adjectives were retained if they distinguished between companies (an adjective is useless if all companies score the same on it), and if different participants tended to give the same company a similar rating on the same measure. This whittling led to a list of 31 adjectives. In turn, these 31 were analysed for clustering so that highly correlated adjectives like "luxurious" and "upper class" were part of the "prestige" dimension.

Next, thousands of participants recruited via the I-points web-service rated sixty-four companies along four of the 31 adjectives, and 10 more social adjectives like "friendly" and "helpful". Again, the superordinate factors of honesty, prestige, innovation and power fitted the results well and were found to correlate with traditional economic factors: for example, prestige correlated with company size and profit; innovation correlated with company growth. The final phase of the study repeated this exercise precisely a year later (in 2006) with many of the same companies, to investigate the stability of the measures. There was a high correlation in the factor scores the companies achieved, although there were also some interesting changes in the relative rankings of the companies on these measures - for example, German car manufacturers showed gains in perceived innovativeness.

"The proposed methodology not only has substantial commercial value in helping companies understand and track their public perception, but scales of this type can potentially guide and manage the decision-making of individuals or groups inside and outside rated organizations, thus influencing their organizational culture," the researchers said.

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Otto, P., Chater, N., and Stott, H. (2011). The psychological representation of corporate ‘personality’. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (4), 605-614 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1729

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4. Prolific gossipers are disliked and seen as weak

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Gossip might be the social glue that binds us, but prolific proponents of tittle-tattle should beware - gossipers are perceived not just as unlikeable but also as lacking social influence.

Sally Farley made her finding after asking 128 participants (mostly female students) to think of someone they knew, who either did or didn't gossip a lot, and to rate that person for likeability and social influence, plus there were 21 other distractor items. To further conceal the true aims of the study, the actual word "gossip" was never used. Instead, participants were told the research was about "informal communication" and the specific instruction was to think of someone who "spent a lot of time (or little time) talking about other people when they were not around". Among those participants asked to imagine a gossiper, a further detail was to imagine someone who either said negative things or positive things about people in their absence.

Prolific gossipers were liked less than non-gossipers, and negative gossipers were liked least of all. On a 13-item liking scale, with each item scored between 1 and 9, the negative gossipers averaged 37 points, the non-gossipers averaged 47. Moreover, prolific gossipers were perceived as less socially powerful than non-gossipers, especially if they were negative gossipers.

These findings actually contradict some prior research showing, for example, that it is girls with more friends who are more likely to gossip. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has even likened gossiping to the mutual grooming performed by non-human primates, with both activities serving to enhance social bonds. "Perhaps high gossipers are individuals who we welcome into our social networks for fear of losing the opportunity to learn information, but we tend to keep them at arms length," Farley said, attempting to reconcile her results with this earlier research. Another possibility is that the relationship between gossiping and social power is curvilinear, with low and high levels harming one's social status, but the act of moderate gossiping attracting more favourable judgements. Unfortunately, the current study only asked participants to imagine high and low gossipers.

Another related line of research has documented a common-sense effect known as "the transfer of attitudes recursively", which simply put has found that people who say nice things about others in their absence are judged as more likeable, whereas those who slag people off behind their backs are judged more harshly. The current study effectively extends this to show that negative gossipers are not only disliked, but also seen as socially weak.

"Despite the shortcomings of the present study, it represents one of a few empirical investigations into how gossipers are perceived by others," Farley concluded. "Future research should consider other important moderators of gossip such as inclusion in the gossip, topic of the gossip, and motivations for gossip (group-serving versus self-serving)."

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Farley, S. (2011). Is gossip power? The inverse relationships between gossip, power, and likability. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41 (5), 574-579 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.821

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1. At what age do girls prefer pink?

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Crudely speaking, the psychological field of gender development is split between those who see gender differences as learned via socially constructed ideas about gender, and those who believe many gender differences are actually "sex differences", innate and biologically driven.

In Western cultures, girls consistently prefer pink, boys prefer blue. Which academic camp lays claim to this difference? Past research has made a case, in terms of the evolutionary advantage of finding fruit, for why females might be biologically predisposed to prefer pink and other bright colours. But a new study purports to show that girls only acquire their preference for pink, and boys their aversion to it, at around the age of two to three, just as they’re beginning to talk about and become aware of gender. Vannessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache say their finding undermines the notion of innate sex differences in colour preference. "If females have a biological predisposition to favour colours such as pink, this preference should be evident regardless of experience of the acquisition of gender concepts," they said.

LoBue and DeLoache presented 192 boys and girls aged between seven months and five years with pairs of small objects (e.g. coasters and plastic clips) and invited them to reach for one. Each item in a pair was identical to the other except for its colour: one was always pink, the other either green, blue, yellow or orange. The key test was whether boys and girls would show a preference for choosing pink objects and at what age such a bias might arise.

At the age of two, but not before, girls chose pink objects more often than boys did, and by age two and a half they demonstrated a clear preference for pink, picking the pink-coloured object more often than you’d expect based on random choice. By the age of four, this was just under 80 per cent of the time – however there was evidence of this bias falling away at age five.

Boys showed the opposite pattern to girls. At the ages of two, four and five, they chose pink less often than you’d expect based on random choices. In fact, their selection of the pink object became progressively more rare, reaching about 20 per cent at age five. Analysis from one trial to the next showed this wasn't simply due to boys growing bored of the pink choice - they avoided pink items from the beginning of their participation.

A second experiment zoomed in on the age period of two to three years, to see how colour preferences changed during this crucial year. The same procedure as before was repeated with 64 boys and girls in this age group. Among the children aged under two and a half, both boys and girls chose pink objects around 50 per cent of the time, just as you’d expect if they were choosing randomly and had no real colour preference. Among those aged between two and a half to three years, by contrast, the boys showed a bias against choosing pink and the girls showed a bias in favour of pink.

"This research lends important information to when children develop gender-stereotyped colour preferences …" the researchers said. "Knowing exactly when children begin to demonstrate these tendencies can help lead to fuller understanding of the development of gender-stereotyped behaviour more generally and can be an important marker for future research in this domain."

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LoBue, V., and DeLoache, J. (2011). Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29 (3), 656-667 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02027.x

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5. Why you should go for a brisk walk before revising

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The exam season may be over, but here's a simple piece of advice for next semester. Go for a brisk walk before studying and your memory of the material is likely to benefit.

Carlos Salas and his colleagues had dozens of students study 30 nouns, each displayed for 6 seconds. Some of the students went for a ten-minute walk before being presented with the words. They were told to adopt "the walking speed one would use when late to an appointment, but without the anxiety caused by such a scenario". Other students spent the same time sitting quietly looking at pictures of natural landscapes. After the study phase, some of the students went for another ten-minute walk before attempting to recall as many of the words as they could; other students sat quietly for ten minutes before their recall attempt. This meant there were four experimental groups (walk-walk, walk-sit, sit-sit, and sit-walk, depending on how the participants behaved before the study and recall phases).

The key finding is that those students who went for a walk before the study period recalled 25 per cent more words correctly compared with students who sat still before the study period. By contrast, walking versus sitting before the attempt at recall made no difference to the students' performance.

Past research has shown context-dependent effects on memory. For example, if you chew gum while learning, your recall performance will benefit if you also chew gum when attempting to retrieve memories. No evidence for this was found in this study in the sense that the students' performance was no better when their pre-recall activity (walk vs. sit) matched their pre-learning activity, perhaps because the recall test followed too soon after the learning phase, so that the effects of the earlier walk or sitting period were still ongoing.

Another detail of this study is that the researchers asked the students to report their levels of arousal and tension after the periods of sitting or walking. Arousal was higher after walking than sitting, but tension was no different. So increased arousal is a possible physiological mechanism underlying the benefits of a pre-study walk (see earlier Digest item: "Memory performance boosted while walking" http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/06/memory-performance-boosted-while.html).

Salas and his team also looked at meta-memory: this is people's insight into their own memory processes. During the study phase, after each word appeared, the participants were asked to indicate their likelihood of recalling it correctly. Students who sat for ten minutes before studying tended to significantly overestimate their later performance. By contrast, the walkers were much more accurate. However, there was no absolute difference in the predictions made by the two groups. In other words, it seems the walkers only had superior meta-memory because walking boosted their performance to match their confidence.

"Overall, these results suggest that individuals can gain a memory advantage from a ten-minute walk before studying," the researchers said. "Given [these] positive results ... and [their] potentially important practical applications, we hope that researchers will continue to explore the relationship between walking, memory, and meta-memory."

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Salas, C., Minakata, K., and Kelemen, W. (2011). Walking before study enhances free recall but not judgement-of-learning magnitude. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23 (4), 507-513 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2011.532207

Author weblink: http://www2.uic.edu/~salas5/

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4. It doesn't always pay to be pretty

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The beautiful people have it all, or so we're usually told. According to research, they're seen as friendlier, more intelligent, and they earn more. But a pair of new journal articles tells a different story, outlining some contexts in which being pretty doesn't pay.

Maria Agthe and her team had 400 students appraise one of four job candidates based on his or her CV, with their photo attached. Although the detailed CVs suggested all the candidates were equally qualified for the job, appearances affected the results. Participants judging a candidate of the opposite sex showed the positive bias you'd expect for highly attractive candidates, being more likely to recommend them for the job. By contrast, participants judging a same-sex candidate showed the opposite pattern, exhibiting a negative bias towards same-sex good lookers. This pattern was mediated partially by the desire for social contact with the candidates - that is, participants were more likely to say they wanted to work with and be friends with opposite-sex beauties, but showed the opposite pattern for good-looking, same-sex candidates. Men and women were similarly prone to negative bias against attractive specimens of their own sex (the effect size was -.5 and -.39, respectively).

The investigation continued with another set of participants appraising candidates shown in a video interview, and again there was a negative bias against attractive same-sex candidates. A final study with yet more participants included a measure of their self-esteem. This showed that high self-esteem participants displayed a positive bias not only towards attractive opposite-sex candidates but also towards attractive candidates of their own sex. Agthe and her colleagues said this suggests the usual negative bias against same-sex beautiful people is all to do with the threat they represent, a threat that those with high self-esteem are immune to.

What are the practical implications of all this? Agthe's team said that the practice of including photos with CVs should be discouraged (it's standard practice to include a photo in several countries including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Slovakia and Switzerland), and that assessment panels should be comprised of a mix of men and women, to help cancel out any beauty-based biases.

Coincidentally, another new journal paper has looked at the interaction between attractiveness, gender and forgiveness. April Phillips and Cassandra Hranek had dozens of heterosexual college students imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they were let down by a female student with whom they were meant to be giving a joint class presentation. Participants were shown a picture of this "offender" and told that she either had or hadn't apologised. So long as she apologised, male participants were more likely to forgive an attractive female offender than an apologetic unattractive one. But female participants showed the opposite pattern, being more likely to forgive an apologetic unattractive female student. A follow-up study replicated this result and found that women were more forgiving of an unattractive female student because they found her apology more sincere, whilst men thought the same thing about the attractive offender's apology.

"For female offenders, being attractive can be an asset or a hindrance, depending on the gender of the victim," the researchers said. "A male victim, who might want to pursue a relationship with her in the future, can preserve this possibility if he is willing to offer forgiveness in some circumstances, whereas a female victim who perceives the offender to be a potential rival might be less likely to offer forgiveness."

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Agthe, M., Sporrle, M., and Maner, J. (2011). Does Being Attractive Always Help? Positive and Negative Effects of Attractiveness on Social Decision Making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37 (8), 1042-1054 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167211410355

PHILLIPS, A. and HRANEK, C. (2011). Is beauty a gift or a curse? The influence of an offender's physical attractiveness on forgiveness. Personal Relationships DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01370.x

Author weblinks: http://www.cas.uni-muenchen.de/fellowship_programm/junior_rir/aktuelle_junior_rir/aghte_maria/index.html

http://psyc.columbusstate.edu/phillips/

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1. Empathy breeds altruism, unless a person feels they have low status.

A brain-scan study with a lesson for riot-hit England

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In a defining image of the recent English riots, a man helped an injured youngster to his feet while an accomplice stole from the same victim's bag. This sheer lack of empathy on the part of the perpetrators has shaken observers to their core. How could humans display such a lack of altruism toward their fellow man?

A possible clue comes from a new brain imaging study that has examined links between the neural correlates of empathy, an act of altruism, and participants' subjective sense of their social status. Among people who feel they have low status, the study finds, increased neural markers of empathy are actually related to reduced altruism. The researchers surmised this is because any feelings of empathy are quashed by a grudging sense of low status. This could be a kind of defence mechanism whereby self-interest dominates over empathy for others. A possible lesson is that by reversing people's feelings of low status, through educational opportunities and other interventions, we all gain, by reinstating the usual link between empathy and altruism.

Yina Ma and her team at Peking University scanned the brains of 33 student participants while they watched numerous video clips of people being pricked painfully in the face or hand by a needle, or touched on those same parts by a cotton bud (referred to as a Q-tip in the US). Extra activity in the brain, in response to the needle clips versus cotton bud clips, was taken to be a neural marker for empathy (seeing someone else in pain is known to trigger activity in the pain matrix of one's own brain).

The participants also rated their own empathy levels and their subjective sense of their socio-economic status. They were shown a ladder with ten rungs, with the top rung representing people with the best jobs and education and most money; participants then indicated which rung they saw themselves as occupying. Although the participants were students at the same university they varied in their subjective sense of status. Finally, the participants were left alone in a room with an anonymous donation box, labelled as raising money to help impoverished patients with cataracts.

Among patients who considered themselves privileged in terms of socio-economic status, there was a positive relationship between empathy and altruism. The more neural signs of empathy they displayed in the scanner (based on extra activity in the left somatosensory cortex when viewing needle clips), the more empathy they said they had, and the more money they chose to donate to charity. By contrast, among participants who considered themselves lower in socio-economic status, the opposite pattern was observed. The greater their empathy-related brain activity in the scanner (based on extra right somatosensory cortex and inferior frontal cortex activity in response to needle clips), the less empathy they said they had, and the less money they chose to donate to charity. The researchers said the empathy-related inferior frontal cortex activity observed in these participants could be a sign of inhibitory processes quashing the emotional impact of seeing another person in pain.

Note, there was no absolute difference in the amount of money donated by participants who self-identified as low or high socio-economic status. The finding is more subtle and suggests empathy has a differential effect on our altruistic behaviour depending on how we see our standing in the world.

"Our findings have significant implications to the social domain," the researchers said, "in that, besides improving objective socio-economic status, raising subjective socio-economic status via education may possibly manifold altruistic behaviours in human society."

The findings add to a complex literature that suggests lower socio-economic status is sometimes associated with more empathy and altruism (http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/99/5/771/), but sometimes associated with reduced empathy (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140197105001090).

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Ma, Y., Wang, C., and Han, S. (2011). Neural responses to perceived pain in others predict real-life monetary donations in different socioeconomic contexts NeuroImage, 57 (3), 1273-1280 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.003

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3. The psychology of gift giving - just give them what they want

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By spending days hunting for that special gift for your friend or partner, you'll show them just how much you care, and also what incredible insight you have into their needs and interests. Right? Not exactly. A new study by a pair of researchers at Harvard and Stanford suggests that most people, at least in North American culture, would prefer that you simply buy them something that they've told you they want. They said romance was dead, it is now.

Francesca Gino and Francis Flynn demonstrated this phenomenon across three studies. First off, nearly two hundred participants were asked to recall a time they'd either received or given a wedding gift. Those who were specifically asked to recall receiving a gift from their set list reported being more appreciative than those who recalled receiving a surprise gift that they hadn't asked for. By contrast, participants who recalled giving a gift, thought it was probably appreciated just as much whether it was selected from a list or chosen independently.

A second study required 160 participants to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they'd either bought a birthday gift for a significant other, or received one. Gift-givers didn't think it would make any difference, in terms of appreciation levels, whether they bought a surprise gift or something explicitly asked for. By contrast, those participants who imagined receiving a gift said they'd appreciate more a gift they'd asked for, than a surprise gift. What's more, this extra appreciation for an asked-for gift was mediated by their feeling that the gift-giver had been extra thoughtful.

So far, the results are based on thought experiments or memories. The third study involved 90 participants creating Amazon wish-lists and half of them playing gift-givers and half gift-receivers. Among the gift-givers, half were asked to choose a listed item to give to a recipient; the other half saw the list, but were instructed to choose a surprise item. Consistent with the first two studies, participants in a giving role didn't anticipate that it would make any difference to appreciation levels whether a gift was a surprise or selected from the wish-list. By contrast, participants in a receiving role were more appreciative of gifts selected from their wish-list and they perceived these gifts to be more thoughtful and more personal.

It seems gift-givers and receivers are at odds with each other. Gift-recipients prefer to receive items they've asked for, and they think givers who fulfil this ideal are more thoughtful. Yet when we're the one who is doing the giving, we suffer a temporary blind-spot and fail to realise that people tend to prefer receiving what they told us they want.

Are there any exceptions to this odd state of affairs? Yet another study found that if a recipient only mentions one desired gift, as opposed to a list of desirables, then gift-givers are able to see the value in offering what's asked for. Money also changes the results. A final study with 107 student participants found that gift-givers thought money wouldn't be appreciated as much as an asked-for gift, but recipients expressed the opposite opinion and said they'd actually appreciate money more than items they'd asked for.

Gino and Flynn said their results fit into a larger literature showing people's relative inability to take other people's perspectives into account. For example, in buying and selling it's been shown that we tend to overestimate how much other people will share our own views. The researchers also noted the practical lessons to take from their findings: "Gift givers would be wise to pay attention to gift registries, wish lists, and explicit requests from friends and significant others," they said. "Conversely gift recipients can facilitate the gift-giving process by not only being more direct about making suggestions for gifts, but being more specific as well. Rather than putting together one big 'wish list', they should instead list one big wish."

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Gino, F., and Flynn, F. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (5), 915-922 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.015

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3. We sit near people who look like us

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The next time you're in an audience, turn to the person sat next to you and take a good look. That's what you look like, that is. Scary eh? Sean Mackinnon and his research team have shown that people sit next to people who resemble themselves. The effect is more than just people of the same sex or ethnicity tending to aggregate - a phenomenon well documented by earlier research. The new finding could help explain why it is that people so often resemble physically their friends and romantic partners (known as "homophily") - if physically similar people choose to sit near each other, they will have more opportunities to forge friendships and romances.

Mackinnon's team first noted the seating positions of hundreds of different students in a 31-seat computer lab 21 times over 3 months, and whether or not they were wearing glasses - a simple proxy for physical similarity. The students, it was found, sat next to someone who matched them on glass-wearing status far more often than would be expected if they were randomly distributed (the effect size was .63).

A second study of 18 university classes involving over two thousand students expanded this finding to show people were more likely to sit next to someone who matched them on glass-wearing, hair colour and hair length, than would be expected by chance. This held true even focusing just on females or just on Caucasians, thus showing the physical similarity effect is more than mere aggregation by sex or race.

But what if people sit next to physically similar others simply as a side-effect of tending to sit near to friends or partners who, as prior research has shown, tend to be physically similar? A third study addressed this concern by seeing how close participants sat to a stranger. Seventy-two participants took part in what they thought was a study into non-verbal behaviours, part of which involved pulling a chair up to an unfamiliar co-participant (a role played by an actor) so as to interview each other. As expected, participants who more closely resembled the young lady (a 20-year-old brown-haired Caucasian) tended to choose to sit closer to her.

Why do we choose to sit near people who look like ourselves? Clues come from Mackinnon's final study. One hundred and seventy-four participants looked at photos of eight individuals and rated how much they liked them, how much they perceived them to have similar attitudes, and thought they would be accepted by them. They also said how close they would choose to sit near each person. Consistent with the earlier studies, participants said they'd sit nearer those individuals who resembled them (based on similarity ratings provided by independent judges). They also thought these physically similar individuals would share their attitudes, they liked them more, and they expected to be accepted by them, as compared with their judgments about physically dissimilar others. The shared attitudes factor was the strongest. A further possibility is that seeking proximity to physically similar others is an evolutionary hang-over - an instinct for staying close to genetically similar kin.

"Though perhaps appearing innocuous on the surface, the simple process of choosing to sit beside people who are similar to us can have broad implications at the macro level," the researchers said. " ... [S]egregation may occur, which can result in myriad prejudices and misunderstandings. Of course, this tendency is merely one portion of the overall processes that contribute to segregation and homophily more generally, but given the implications for racial and ethnic segregation, it is certainly a phenomenon with profound implications worthy of further pursuit."

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