Category: Togetherness

Revenge may be a dish best served cold but it will probably leave you with a nasty aftertaste, at least according to an article in the latest edition of the American Psychological Society’s Monitor magazine.

The piece looks at some of the growing number of studies on the psychology of retribution, examining cultural differences in triggers for revenge and explanations for why it is so common.

One of the most interesting bits is where it covers a study finding that while we think revenge will make us feel better after an injustice, it seems to have the opposite effect and makes us feel more unhappy.

The study in question involved participants taking part in a group investment game where, when it came to the crunch, one of the participants deliberately acted selfishly and took a whole lot of the money at the others’ expense.

Then Carlsmith offered some groups a way to get back at the free rider: They could spend some of their own earnings to financially punish the group’s defector.

“Virtually everybody was angry over what happened to them,” Carlsmith says, “and everyone given the opportunity [for revenge] took it.”

He then gave the students a survey to measure their feelings after the experiment. He also asked the groups who’d been allowed to punish the free rider to predict how they’d feel if they hadn’t been allowed to, and he asked the non-punishing groups how they thought they’d feel if they had.

In the feelings survey, the punishers reported feeling worse than the non-punishers, but predicted they would have felt even worse had they not been given the opportunity to punish. The non-punishers said they thought they would feel better if they’d had that opportunity for revenge‚Äîeven though the survey identified them as the happier group.

Link to article ‘Revenge and the people who seek it’.

The New York Times has a short-but-sweet article on the social function of blushing, looking at several studies that have found that a flushed face has a placating and cohesive effect on those around us.

The article reports on studies where blushing has been found to soften other people’s judgements of bad or clumsy behaviour and subsequently reinforces social ties.

Interestingly, it’s not just when someone makes a mistake, one study looked the effect of blushing on friendliness after a blokey bout of name calling and piss-taking:

In a 2001 paper that contrasts teasing and bullying, an act of aggressive isolation, Dr. Keltner and colleagues from Berkeley discuss one experiment in which members of a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin came into his lab, four at a time, to tease one another, using barbed nicknames. Each group included two senior house members and two recent pledges.

The young men ripped each other with abandon, calling each other “little impotent,” “heifer fetcher” and “another drunk,” among many other names that cannot be printed. The researchers carefully recorded the interactions and measured how well individuals got along by the end. The newer members were all but strangers to the more senior ones when the study began.

“It was a subtle effect, but we found that the frequency of blushing predicted how well these guys were getting along at the end,” Dr. Keltner said. Blushing seemed to accelerate the formation of a possible friendship rather than delay it.

Link to NYT piece on blushing.

There’s good evidence that media reporting of suicide can have an influence on the likelihood of further suicides, something known as the ‘copycat suicide effect’. In light of this, a new study examined what makes a suicide likely to newsworthy and whether media reporting reflects the actual demographics of people who kill themselves.

The researchers, led by psychologist Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, looked at all 2005 press reports of suicides in the Austria and compared them to the national suicide statistics.

Additionally, the details of all Austrian suicides are recorded in a national database but not all get reported in the media. This allowed the researchers to see which characteristics of a suicide made it most likely that it would get written about in the press.

It turns out that suicides involving murder or murder attempt were over-represented in the media whereas reporting on mental disorders was under-represented.

In terms of which attributes made a media report more likely, younger people who killed themselves were more likely to hit the headlines, as were foreign citizens.

While hanging is the most common method of suicide in Austria, these cases were under-reported, while drowning, jumping, shooting and unusual methods were more likely to make the papers.

Media reporting of suicide is a serious public health issue because numerous studies, most recently in 2006, have found that these news reports are likely to increase the suicide rate.

For this reason, there are guidelines for journalists writing about suicide, although I sure you can remember cases high profile cases where the guidelines get ditched and the more sensationalist angles get the media focus.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

There’s a brief but interesting article in The New York Times about how we use consumer goods to ‘send signals’ to other people. It illustrates this with a fantastic example and then misses the point. Luckily another recent study on unconscious influences on doctors hits the punchline.

The idea that each product has a meaning and that we use our purchases to construct an identity from the ‘language of brands’ is not completely new, indeed, we’ve covered it before on Mind Hacks, but there’s a nice illustration of this in the most recent NYT article:

Most of us will insist there are other reasons for going to Harvard or buying a BMW or an iPhone — and there are, of course. The education and the products can yield many kinds of rewards. But Dr. Miller says that much of the pleasure we derive from products stems from the unconscious instinct that they will either enhance or signal our fitness by demonstrating intelligence or some of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

In a series of experiments [pdf], Dr. Miller and other researchers found that people were more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they were first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.

After this priming, men were more willing to splurge on designer sunglasses, expensive watches and European vacations. Women became more willing to do volunteer work and perform other acts of conspicuous charity — a signal of high conscientiousness and agreeableness, like demonstrating your concern for third world farmers by spending extra for Starbucks’s “fair trade” coffee.

Unfortunately, the article then goes on to say that we may do these things because we try and send signals to others but that people don’t notice because who can really remember whether the guy we met the other day was wearing a designer shirt or not?

The reason this misses the point is that the influence can be both dramatic and entirely conscious as nicely demonstrated by a recent study on doctors that was also reported in the NYT and, ironically, seems to have done unnoticed.

Researchers asked medical students about their attitudes to two blockbuster anticholesterol drugs: Lipitor and it’s competitor, Zocor.

The students were tested in two groups, but in one the researchers incidentally used Lipitor branded pens, clipboards and the like – the typical sort of banal junk that drug companies leave scattered around a typical doctor’s office.

The researchers then tested unconscious associations using the IAT and found that students in the condition where researchers used the branded promotional material had much stronger positive associations with Lipitor.

Interestingly, the students reported no explicit preference for the drug, suggesting that the effect of the branding slipped in under the radar of consciousness. The message got through despite it being not being held as a conscious memory.

Social psychology has taught us that we are more much complex than we can understand at any one moment, but many of those messages still get through.

Link to NYT piece on consumer signalling.
Link to NYT piece on small gifts influencing doctors.
Link to full-text of study.

Dr Petra has alerted me to an excellent article in The Boston Globe about a new campaign to get the ‘doctor out of the bedroom’ and de-medicalise sex and sexual problems.

The piece is particularly focused on how sex is being increasingly portrayed in terms of physiology, bodily mechanics and disorders while ignoring the role of psychology and relationships.

This is particularly pertinent at the moment, owing to millions being pumped into the so-far fruitless search for a ‘female Viagra’ intended to increase sexual desire in women.

Eager to replicate the outsized profits that erectile dysfunction drugs have brought, several pharmaceutical firms are in hot pursuit of a women’s version. Because female sexual desire is far less straightforward than men’s, success has been thus far elusive, but there are several candidates in the pipeline. Whether any of them will work well enough – and without significant adverse health effects – to gain FDA approval remains to be seen. (In Europe, a testosterone patch to boost sex drive in post-menopausal women has been approved, but its efficacy is debated.)

For critics, the problem is not whether a women’s Viagra will work, but what happens if it does. They argue that the very concept of “female sexual dysfunction,” the condition that such drugs would be targeting, is not an actual medical condition so much as a creation of the pharmaceutical industry. While surveys show that 20 to 40 percent of women describe themselves as having a lack of interest in sex (the higher figures tend to come from studies funded by pharmaceutical companies), only about a quarter of those women describe that as a problem. It’s hard to call something a disorder or a dysfunction, some sex researchers argue, if the people who experience it don’t tend to see it that way.

The piece looks at a group of sex researchers and clinicians who are arguing for a ‘New View’ that doesn’t think of all sexual difficulties as medical disorders and focuses upon the important role of psychology in sexual arousal, motivation and exploration.

As Petra notes, it’s unusual to see a mainstream article straying from the now well-worn path so get it while it’s, er, hot.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘The New Romantics’.
Link to Dr Petra on the piece.

I’ve just found Steven Okazaki’s 1999 documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street on YouTube that follows the chaotic lives of heroin addicts in Southern California.

It’s not polemic and tries as much as possible to simply document, but it’s a dark journey into the void with many of the people involved in the 1990s heroin scene.

It’s not easy to watch, but it is a rare insight into the lives of people who are often hidden in plain sight.

Link to Part 1 (links to other parts on right).

If you’re all aflutter over the recent news reports that ’emotionally intelligent women have more orgasms’ you may be interested to know that these sexual adventures have been exaggerated in the re-telling.

I really recommend Petra Boyton’s analysis of the study which picks up on what was actually done and where its drawbacks were. As it turns out it was a postal survey of over 2,000 female twins, with a fairly low response rate and not particularly well-pitched questions on sexual experiences.

It also included an emotional intelligence measure, and found a small but statistically reliable link between ‘EQ’ and orgasm frequency during masturbation and sex.

And this is where it gets a bit over-the-top. The authors suggest, rather cautiously in the research article and, rather more strongly in the press reports, that higher emotional intelligence may help women communicate what they want in the bedroom and hence lead to more orgasms.

I shall now present the correlations between EQ and orgasm frequency as reported in the study:

EQ and frequency of orgasm during intercourse 0.13
EQ and frequency of orgasm during masturbation 0.23

If you’re familiar with how to read correlations, you’ll notice that the link is very small.

The correlation was done using a Spearman correlation that ranks everyone by EQ and then ranks everyone by orgasm frequency, and then sees how the rankings match.

A result of 1 mean the rankings are identical, a result of -1 means that one ranking is in exactly the opposite order to the other, and a result of 0 means there is no link at all between the two rankings. So in this case, the relationship is very minor.

And here’s a neat trick you can do with the results of correlations. If you square them, you get the amount of variability or change in one value accounted for by change in the other as a percentage.

This means EQ accounts for 1.7% of self-estimated intercourse orgasm frequency and 5.3% of self-estimated masturbation orgasm frequency.

It’s also worth noting that the relationship is stronger for masturbation than orgasm during intercourse, which kinda pours cold water on the ‘asking for what you want in bed’ angle.

Interesting, these results are statistically reliable, and the small but reliable effect was confirmed by a regression analysis, meaning that they are reasonably unlikely to have occurred by chance.

As Petra notes, it’s an interesting preliminary study that merits further investigation, but even if we could be completely confident in the methods, the effect is nothing to shout about.

Link to Dr Petra on ‘Do high EQ women have better sex?’
Link to study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

It is not often that articles on psychology studies are described as beautiful, but a piece in The Atlantic on the Harvard Study of Adult Development is quite sublime.

The project has followed two groups of men for almost seventy years, tracking physical and emotional health, opinions and attitudes, successes and failures, all in the hope of understanding what makes us happy.

It weaves the staccato train of numerical data with reflections and insights from the men themselves to attempt the impossible – it hopes to record lives.

From their brash early adulthood to their deaths or dotage the stories are brief but profound, sometimes tragic, sometimes joyful, sometimes mundane.

The study itself has generated some remarkable findings, such as the massive impact of relationships, the fading long-term effects of childhood experiences, or the role of defences in managing emotional well-being, but the piece is as much about the life of the project as its conclusions.

It serves as a meditation on the tension between meaning and measurement when trying to understand the individual, and on the potentially futile attempt to extrapolate an experience of a generation to a world of other times, people and places.

But the article also about psychiatrist George Valliant, who has been coordinating the study for over 40 years, and whose life is intricately woven into the project.

The ending of the article is both surprising and poignant, because it questions what we can truly learn from the lives of others.

Link to Atlantic article ‘What Makes Us Happy?’

There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In a period of public hand wringing over ‘binge drinking culture’, our understanding of the ‘culture bit’ usually merits no more than an admission that people do it in groups and this is often implicit in the work of psychologists.

In a recent Psychological Bulletin review on the determinants of binge drinking, psychologists Kelly Courtney and John Polich devote only a few sparse paragraphs to the social issues in an otherwise impressive review, despite the fact that drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in our culture.

In the UK at least, the social meaning of booze is often hidden behind the ordinariness of day-to-day consumption. If you can’t quite see past the barrier of banality, try buying one of your male colleagues a Babycham in public view and the symbolism of alcohol will quickly be made apparent.

But it is not just the meaning of drinks which determine the role alcohol plays in our lives, it is the meaning of drinking as well. Sociologists have been exploring this territory for years and we would do well to read their maps, because it shows us how culture influences not only our views on drunkenness, but the experience of being intoxicated itself.

In their classic 1969 book Drunken Comportment, MacAndrew and Edgerton compared alcohol use in cultures around the world, finding that what concerns us most today, drunken disorderliness, is not an inevitable result of getting pissed. A striking example was the Papago people of Mexico, who, during their traditional cactus-wine ceremonies, would imbibe so much as to become “falling-down drunk”.

Despite the large scale community boozing, the events were exclusively peaceful, harmonious and good tempered. Later, the availability of whisky brought with it the cultural connotations of European-style drinking, meaning it ‘produced’ an aggressive, anti-social drunkenness, despite it being the same chemical in a different style.

Recent research on binge-drinking in Western youth has indicated that the negative effects, both personally toxic and anti-social, have been reframed as an adventure and bonding experience.

While health campaigns are focusing on risk reduction, research by Sheehan and Ridge with teenage girls in Australia found that any harm encountered along the way tends to be “filtered through a ‘good story,’ brimming with tales of fun, adventure, bonding, sex, gender transgressions, and relationships”.

Puking in the gutter has been turned into Sex and the City. Not the complete story, of course, but we neglect the culture of alcohol at the cost of failing to understand why binge drinking is in fashion.

This is one of the occasional columns I write for The Psychologist and the editor, Jon Sutton, has kindly agreed for them to be posted on Mind Hacks as long as I include the following text:

The Psychologist is sent free to all members of the British Psychological Society (you can join here), or you can subscribe as a non-member by emailing sarsta[at]bps.org.uk.

He’s also said that he might print particularly good or insightful comments in the magazine, after which fame and fine living will surely follow. If he’s interested in publishing your comment, he’ll contact you first to get permission.

The staff at Link√∂ping University joke that the cognitive science students have kogvet-sjukan, Swedish for ‘cognitive science disorder’, because they have an incurable enthusiasm for anything related to understanding the mind. After two fantastic days at a conference there, I can see why.

I’ve been to a fair few conferences in my time, but few have been as friendly, interesting and well-organised as KVIT, and it is all the more impressive that it is entirely organised by students.

One of the most bits for me was linguist Jens Allwood’s talk on intercultural communication, where he described cultural differences in how people manage conversation flow.

I’ve always been fascinated by why people from some cultures make sounds during conversations that, to my English-attuned ears, sound unusual. For example, Japanese speakers often make expressions of surprise or interest that seem quite colourful.

These ‘yes, I’m listening’ or ‘yes, continue’ vocal prompts and noises that we make are known as ‘back channelling’, and can also include movements such as nods, or the use of eye-contact.

In some cultures, such as in Japan, eye contact is used far less during conversation, because it might be considered too intense, or it’s considered disrespectful, or even threatening.

So people from cultures that use less eye contact need to signal that they’re following the conversation in other ways, and hence they rely much more on vocal noises, which, to many English speakers, sounds a little odd.

In contrast, people from cultures where eye-contact is frequently used during conversations, like in Latino countries, speakers typically use much less vocal back channelling.

There’s a great review of some of this research in one of Allwood’s papers that’s available online as a pdf.

The others speakers at the conference included an art curator, a primate researcher, an AI consciousness engineer, a psychologist, an interaction designer and an emergency response co-ordinator, all of whom apply cognitive science to their work. Can you think of a more interesting line-up?

However, despite it being attended by people from Holland, Germany, and countries across Scandanavia, I was surprised to see few people from the rest of Europe.

As perhaps one of the best kept secrets in cognitive science, you should seriously consider going next year. The kogvet-sjukan affected Swedes will give you a warm welcome, stimulate your brain and put on impressive dinners with a tradition of raucous and risqué cognitive science sketches and songs.

Link to KVIT conference page.
pdf of Allwood’s chapter on intercultural communication.

Newsweek has a good article on the ‘Mad Pride’ movement in the US, a British import where those diagnosed with mental illness reject the medical view of their experiences and decide to live with ‘extreme mental states’ both good and bad.

It makes a good complement to last year’s New York Times article on ‘mad pride’ although this focuses on the impressive The Icarus Project, a group of activists who campaign for mental health reform and work to support those who decide to forego psychiatric treatment.

After all, aren’t we all more odd than we are normal? And aren’t so many of us one bad experience away from a mental-health diagnosis that could potentially limit us? Aren’t “normal” minds now struggling with questions of competence, consistency or sincerity? Icarus is likewise asking why we are so keen to correct every little deficit‚Äîit argues that we instead need to embrace the range of human existence.

While some critics might view Icaristas as irresponsible, their skepticism about drugs isn’t entirely unfounded. Lately, a number of antipsychotic drugs have been found to cause some troubling side effects.

There are, of course, questions as to whether mad pride and Icarus have gone too far. While to his knowledge no members have gravely harmed themselves (or others), Hall acknowledges that not everyone can handle the Icarus approach. “People can go too fast and get too excited about not using medication, and we warn people against throwing their meds away, being too ambitious and doing it alone,” he says.

Link to Newsweek article ‘Listening to Madness’.

Newsweek has an article on human good and evil that trots out the usual Milgram-fuelled moral pondering before morphing into a fascinating piece on the psychology of compassion.

The most interesting part is where it discusses which psychological traits predict compassionate behaviour:

A specific cluster of emotional traits seem to go along with compassion. People who are emotionally secure, who view life’s problems as manageable and who feel safe and protected tend to show the greatest empathy for strangers and to act altruistically and compassionately.

In contrast, people who are anxious about their own worth and competence, who avoid close relationships or are clingy in those they have tend to be less altruistic and less generous, psychologists Philip Shaver of the University of California, Davis, and Mario Mikulincer of Bar-Ilan University in Israel have found in a series of experiments. Such people are less likely to care for the elderly, for instance, or to donate blood.

The Newsweek article labels these characteristics ’emotional traits’ but the researchers are actually using the psychological concept of attachment – an approach to relationships and human interaction style that can be seen throughout the lifespan.

The same research team has completed studies showing that increasing people’s perceived security increases altruistic behaviour.

Link to Newsweek on ‘Adventures In Good And Evil’.

We covered Christian Nold’s brilliant project to create emotion maps of cities before, and I had the pleasure of going to the launch of his new book on Emotional Cartography on Friday. It’s awesome for lots of reasons, but one of the best ones is that you can download it free from the project website.

Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities.

The biomapping website has some of the fantastic maps from the project.

His book, called Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self contains some of the wonderful maps images, but also chapters by artists, psychogeographers, designers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists who examine the relationship between space and the self.

One of the chapters is written by our very own Tom Stafford who explores the neuroscience of the self through a case study of an amnesic patient from the scientific literature called SS, who seemed to be unaware of his own depression because of his profound memory problems. Tom also gave a great talk at the launch, which you can also read online.

If you want to read the books, and I highly recommend it, you can download the book as a screen quality or print quality PDF, and its released under a Creative Commons license so you can take it to your nearest copy shop if you want a hard copy.

Link to Emotional Cartography website.
Link to Biomapping website.

I’ve just found this morbidly fascinating article from a 2003 edition of The New Yorker that discusses the attraction of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to people who are suicidal.

It’s full of interesting snippets, like the fact that suicidal people tend to ignore the nearby and equally fatal Bay Bridge in favour of its more famous and more attractive cousin.

It also has quotes from some of the very few people who have ever jumped off the bridge and survived, and describes exactly what impact such a jump has on the body.

The article also touches on the debates over the erection of a suicide barrier on the landmark (it was finally decided in 2008 to put one in place) and the people-based suicide prevention methods.

It also has this lovely snippet about one of the police patrolmen, who has a wonderfully gentle way of talking to suicidal people:

Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol’s Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year.

Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, “How are you feeling today?‚” Then, “What’s your plan for tomorrow?‚” If the person doesn’t have a plan, Briggs says, “Well, let’s make one. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.”

Apparently the article was the inspiration for the 2006 documentary film The Bridge which covered similar territory.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Jumpers’.

I’ve just re-read the fantastic Social Issues Research Centre article on social and cultural aspects of drinking and it has an amusing section illustrating the difference between British and French drinking cultures which helps to explain why the British have a reputation for drunkenness when they visit the continent.

The article discusses the link between alcohol and the marking of celebrations in different cultures, noting that in the UK, serving alcohol socially is usually associated with marking the occasion as ‘special’ or ‘different’ in some way whereas in France, booze has a more neutral meaning, so social drink doesn’t so strongly imply something is being celebrated.

The British visit France. Hilarity ensues.

McDonald (1994) provides an amusing illustration of the different perceptions of the drinking/festivity connection in different European cultures, and the misunderstandings that can result:

“Many modern visitors from Britain on a first visit to France have had experience of this for themselves. Drinks may be offered at ten o‚Äôclock in the morning, for example. This is obviously going to be one of those days. What are we celebrating? During the midday meal, wine is served. What fun! What are we celebrating? The bars are open all afternoon, and people seem to be drinking. What a riot! What are we celebrating?

Pastis is served at six o‚Äôclock. Whoopee! These people certainly know how to celebrate. More wine is served with dinner. And so on. Wine has different meanings, different realities, in the two contexts, and a festive and episodic drinking culture meets a daily drinking culture, generating a tendency to celebrate all day. This has often happened to groups of young British tourists, now renowned in France and elsewhere in Europe for their drinking and drunkenness.”

Link to SIRC article ‘Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking’.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the psychology of pride and how it has an impact on ourselves and others.

The piece starts with the predictable ‘credit crunch’ hook, but goes on to discuss some of the few studies that have investigated the effects of pride.

Considering that it’s supposedly one of the ‘deadly sins’, one study struck me as particularly interesting. The researchers asked participants to take a test and then gave them rigged scores…

The researchers manipulated the amount of pride each participant felt in his or her score. They either said nothing about the score; remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, that it was one of the best scores they had seen; or gushed that the person’s performance was wonderful, about as good as they had ever seen.

The participants then sat down in a group to solve similar puzzles. Sure enough, the students who had been warmly encouraged reported feeling more pride than the others. But they also struck their partners in the group exercise as being both more dominant and more likable than those who did not have the inner glow of self-approval. The participants, whether they had been buttered up or not, were completely unaware of this effect on the group dynamics.

“We wondered at the beginning whether these people were going to come across as arrogant jerks,” Dr. DeSteno said. “Well, no, just the opposite; they were seen as dominant but also likable. That’s not a combination we expected.”

The article also makes the interesting point that pride is one of those psychological concepts we discuss on a day-to-day basis but which has been largely neglect by research psychologists.

Wisdom is another, and probably by this measure, one of the most neglected psychological areas.

However, I noticed this week that the Archives of General Psychiatry published a review article entitled ‘Neurobiology of wisdom: a literature overview’ which seemed very commendable if not a little over-enthusiastic.

I’ve no idea why it was published in a psychiatry journal. Presumably, a drug company will shortly try and market one of their medications as a treatment for ‘judgement deficit disorder’ or ‘experience-based reasoning fatigue’.

You laugh now, but just wait six months.

Link to NYT article ‘When All You Have Left Is Your Pride’.
Link to summary of wisdom article.