Month: March 2009

The new edition of Scientific American Mind is out an it has an excellent cover article on the psychological effects of humour and laughter.

It’s a remarkably wide-ranging article, covering everything from the effect on the immune system, to laughter’s pain killing properties to its beneficial effect on mental health.

There’s also an interesting aside on the role of humour in attraction:

In 2006 psychologists Eric R. Bressler of Westfield State College and Sigal Balshine of McMaster University in Ontario reported that women are more likely to consider a man in a photograph a desirable relationship partner if the picture is accompanied by a funny quote attributed to the man. In fact, the women preferred the funny men despite rating them, on average, less intelligent and less trustworthy.

Although the men in Bressler and Balshine’s study did not prefer witty women as partners, other research indicates that both men and women value a “sense of humor” when choosing a partner. Either way, males do seem to like ladies who laugh at their jokes. A 1990 study suggests that when women and men chat, the amount of laughing by the woman indicates both her interest in dating the man and her sexual appeal to the man. (The man’s laughter did not relate to attraction in either direction.)

The issue also has freely available online articles on ‘brain training’, the psychological effect of architecture and personality disorder with many more in the print edition.

Link to April’s SciAmMind.

Bad Science has a great article on the ‘copycat suicide’ effect, where media reporting of suicide can increase the chances of suicide in other people.

Copycat suicide is sometimes called the ‘Werther Effect’, after Goethe published his 1774 novel ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ which depicted Werther’s suicide and was reportedly followed by people imitating the same method to end their lives.

It’s an interesting effect because it shows the influence on the media on what people usually think of the most extreme of decisions.

An excellent 2003 review article on the subject found that the effect holds for all media reports of suicides (including fictional ones) but celebrity suicide is most associated with subsequent deaths. Interestingly, it notes that the largest known increase followed the death of Marilyn Monroe.

The review also found found that the greater the coverage of the suicide, and the more details in the reporting, the larger the increase in subsequent deaths.

Because of this, there are now media guidelines for reporting suicide, and the Bad Science article reports on a particularly bad example where the journalist reported exactly the sort of thing most associated with increased risk in a single story – virtually nothing except details of the suicide method.

One of the most interesting bits of the Bad Science piece doesn’t appear in the print version. However, it discusses research that found the majority of people who attempt suicide and survive are pleased they did some years later:

There is a literature which I think is extremely powerful, and yet unanimously ignored by mainstream media, and that is the follow-up data on what happens later in life to people who have felt so suicidal that they have made serious attempts on their own lives.

In extremis Pajonk et al followed up a large number of people who they picked up in intensive care after very serious suicide attempts. Amongst those who survived, and did not have serious psychotic illnesses, six years later, the majority were happy and well, living productive family lives, and were – we might reasonably interpolate Рglad to be alive.

Link to Bad Science article on media reporting of suicide.
Link to review article on media and suicide (with open-access link).

The Journal of Sex Research has a fascinating article on the role of attention in sexual arousal and how we use our mental focus to explore and control excitement during sex.

We can see from our everyday lives that attention is important for sex. We can distract ourselves to avoid sexual arousal when our mind has wandered onto sexual topics and we don’t want to get aroused, or we want to prolong sexual enjoyment without getting over-aroused.

We also can do the reverse and focus strongly on sexual fantasises or our partner to dispel other thoughts and lose ourselves in the sexual moment.

However, the article looks at the scientific research on attention during sex and discusses how this can help us understand and treat sexual problems.

The drug industry has a lot invested in telling people that sexual difficulties are almost entirely due to problems with the genitals.

For example, the website for Viagra promotes the line that erectile dysfunction is a problem with your cock, saying that “It happens when not enough blood flows to the penis”.

Which is a bit like saying poverty is when not enough money gets to poor people. It describes the outcome but not the cause.

The article makes clear that many sexual problems can be best understood in terms of how the mind is working and many sexual problems can be equally well treated with psychological methods.

In other words, it’s often not that the genitals are ‘not working’, but that we’ve got into a situation where it’s hard to achieve the necessary level of sexual arousal because of, for example, distraction, anxiety or low self-confidence which cause a negative feedback loop that takes our focus away from making love and onto other non-arousing things.

Based on such findings, Barlow (1986) posited a model of erectile dysfunction, central to which is the idea that increased autonomic arousal results in a narrowing of attentional focus (Wiegel, Scepkowski, & Barlow, 2007). The model outlines a process whereby a male focuses his attention on either erotic cues or nonerotic, self-evaluative cues (e.g., fears over performance). In both cases, autonomic arousal (due to sexual arousal in functional men and anxiety in dysfunctional men) creates a feedback loop, further narrowing the man’s attentional focus on the information to which he is already attending.

In sexually functional men, attention becomes increasingly focused on erotic information, creating a positive feedback loop. This feedback loop facilitates sexual response and erection, which in turn leads to approach behavior. In the case of sexually dysfunctional men, attention becomes more focused on nonsexual, task-irrelevant material, creating a negative feedback loop.

In clinical psychology, many problems, particularly with anxiety, are understood as malfunctioning feedback loops, where the person’s attempt to control their anxiety actually serve to maintain it in the long-term.

Interestingly, the article touches on the use of mindfulness meditation, known to cause attention changes and anxiety reduction, in the treatment of sexual problems.

For example, some preliminary studies have been completed by psychologist Lori Brotto and colleagues with promising results.

Link to ‘The Role of Attention in Sexual Arousal’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The Psychologist has a counter-intuitive article on research that indicates, contrary to popular belief, that having children tends not to make people happier. In fact, parents reliably report that they feel less happy than in their child free days, and less happy when compared to childless couples.

Over the past few decades, social scientists like me have found consistent evidence that there is an almost zero association between having children and happiness. My analysis in the Journal of Socio-economics (Powdthavee, 2008) is a recent British example of parents and non-parents reporting the same levels of life satisfaction, on average.

But the warnings for prospective parents are even more stark than ‘it’s not going to make you happier’. Using data sets from Europe and America, numerous scholars have found some evidence that, on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness (Alesina et al., 2004), life satisfaction (Di Tella et al., 2003), marital satisfaction (Twenge et al., 2003), and mental well-being (Clark & Oswald, 2002) compared with non-parents.

It’s an interesting article as it tackles not only why having children tends not to make us happier, but also why we think it does in cultures across the world.

Link to ‘Think having children will make you happy?’.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist.