Year: 2009

A study ‘in press’ for the British Journal of Psychology sadly supports the stereotype that chicks dig men in flashy cars.

The attractiveness-boosting effect only affects women’s perceptions of men, however. Men were unmoved by chicks in hot rods, and neither sex’s attractiveness ratings for same-sex drivers was affected by the car they were in.

Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership on both sex attractiveness ratings.

Dunn MJ, Searle R.

Br J Psychol. 2009 Mar 19. [Epub ahead of print]

Previous studies have shown that male attractiveness can be enhanced by manipulation of status through, for example, the medium of costume. The present study experimentally manipulated status by seating the same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car.

A between-subjects design was used whereby the above photographic images were presented to male and female participants for attractiveness rating. Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive on a rating scale of 1-10 when presented to female participants in the high compared to the neutral status context. Males were not influenced by status manipulation, as there was no significant difference between attractiveness ratings for the female seated in the high compared to the neutral condition.

It would appear that despite a noticeable increase in female ownership of prestige/luxury cars over recent years males, unlike females, remain oblivious to such cues in matters pertaining to opposite-sex attraction. These findings support the results of previous status enhancement of attractiveness studies especially those espousing sex differences in mate preferences are due to sex-specific adaptations.

An interesting study testing a well-known stereotype, but what the world really wants to know is whether the cliché about men with flashy cars having small penises is true.

Considering the car industry and scientific psychology were born at about the same time, it’s disgraceful that such a fundamental study in the psychology of social willy waving has yet to be completed.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

I’ve just found a description of some spectacular and fantastical hallucinations from a case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, reported in a review article on the neuroscience of this curious hallucinatory state.

It’s one of the most florid cases I’ve ever come across and the experience seems both wondrous and terrifying in equal measure:

A 73-year-old woman who lived alone presented with anxiety-provoking visual hallucinations. Inch-long black ants scurried across her kitchen floor, walls and windows. In desperation, she began spraying insecticide throughout the house. Her neighbour, whose features were seemingly masked by the insects, called an ambulance. Floating seahorses and featherless chickens joined the colonies of ants in the Emergency Department.

A Roman chariot, the rider dressed in gold, flashed across the curtain several times. On the ward, tropical vines grew from the foot of her bed. A man stood with thick brown tree trunks for legs and thick green branches for arms. Nurses’ heads would shrink and then expand before melting into the floor. Brightly coloured fairies carrying wands invited her for walks around the hospital grounds.

She once caught herself telling them to get off a road at which point they donned diamond coats, jumped into a wooden carriage, and rode up to her bedside. Ants in the mirror were at times replaced by an elephant’s trunk blotting out half her face. Her hair in the reflection flowed with cobwebs and the basin was matted with hair and whiskers.

Cobwebs spilled from her cereal bowl at breakfast. The bathroom floor was covered with water that vanished whenever she tried to mop it up. The carpet in the room would lift away from the floor, roll up in the form of a snake, and slither out the door. A little girl and boy with a black and white dog stood next to the bed, as did extraterrestrial-like beings with large domed-shaped heads and slitted black eyes.

Twisted heads with grotesque faces and bulbous eyes peered out from the wall, while little red carriages, trains and push bikes disappeared into it. Further history revealed an experience of ‘ant’ hallucinations 4 months previously but the images disappeared after 2 weeks. She did not seek medical advice at that time fearing that she might be considered ‘a bit odd’.

Throughout the hospital admission she was rarely free from hallucinations and would repeatedly ask for reassurance that she was ‘not going mad’. Two months after discharge the hallucinations were still intrusive. She owned a small black dog but would see several dogs resembling oversized greyhounds with unusually long snouts in her daughter’s yard.

A man and a goat, both wearing grey hats and overcoats, often stood beside her before wandering off together down a crooked road. She grew accustomed to seeing a baby seated on the lounge chair wearing grey clothes. It smiled but made no sounds. Caterpillars and tree frogs began joining her for the evening bath.

She began to notice that distractions, such as listening to the radio and attending to household chores, dampened the hallucinations, while solitude, particularly during the evening hours, tended to heighten them.

At follow-up 1 year later, she was experiencing very much the same hallucinations but was more cognisant of their unreality and less anxious as a result. The only new hallucination that had since appeared was that of a bright kaleidoscopic array which would transiently emanate from her central field of vision.

The article has another case study which is also quite spectacular, and, curiously, also features a Roman chariot.

One of the most interestingly things about Charles Bonnet syndrome is that fact that it is typically associated with the most complex hallucinations, but usually due to damage to the retina or early visual pathway.

In other words, damage to the part of the visual system which deals with the most basic aspects of vision (detecting lines, light and dark and so on) can cause the most spectacular visual distortions.

It’s not fully clear why this is, but one of the most popular theories is that visual information gathered by the initial part of the system is used to limit the interpretations made by the perceptual processes later in the stream which are focussed on working out significance and meaning.

We can see this system breaking down a bit when we see momentary ‘pictures’ in TV static or in flames, as the fuzzy input means many interpretations can be made.

However, when we’re looking at more ordered scenes, our interpretation is usually more constrained – it’s more difficult to interpret light patterns from a pencil as something else.

The theory goes that when we can’t process light patterns very successfully, owing to damage to the early visual system, the interpretation processes go wild, so hallucinations are ‘released’ and cavort unconstrained through our conscious mind.

Link to article on the neuroscience of Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

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.