Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Association between sunshine and suicide examined in study
Lower rates of suicide are associated with more daily sunshine in the prior 14 to 60 days.
Light interacts with brain serotonin systems and possibly influences serotonin-related behaviors. Those behaviors, such as mood and impulsiveness, can play a role in suicide.
The authors examined the relationship between suicide and the duration of sunshine after mathematically removing seasonal variations in sunshine and suicide numbers. They analyzed data on 69,462 officially confirmed suicides in Austria between January 1970 and May 2010. Hours of sunshine per day were calculated from 86 representative meteorological stations.
There was a positive correlation between the number of suicides and hours of daily sunshine on the day of the suicide and up to 10 days before that seemed to facilitate suicide, while sunshine 14 to 60 days prior appeared to have a negative correlation and was associated with reduced suicides. The correlation between daily sunshine hours and suicide rates was seen largely among women, while negative correlations between the two were mainly found among men.
"Owing to the correlative nature of the data, it is impossible to directly attribute the increase in suicide to sunshine during the 10 days prior to the suicide event. … Further research is warranted to determine which patients with severe episodes of depression are more susceptible to the suicide-triggering effects of sunshine."
(Image: Shutterstock)
Don’t Underestimate Your Mind’s Eye
Take a look around, and what do you see? Much more than you think you do, thanks to your finely tuned mind’s eye, which processes images without your even knowing.
A University of Arizona study has found that objects in our visual field of which we are not consciously aware still may influence our decisions. The findings refute traditional ideas about visual perception and cognition, and they could shed light on why we sometimes make decisions — stepping into a street, choosing not to merge into a traffic lane — without really knowing why.
Laura Cacciamani, who recently earned her doctorate in psychology with a minor in neuroscience, has found supporting evidence. Cacciamani’s is the lead author on a co-authored study, published online in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, shows that the brain’s subconscious processing has an impact on behavior and decision-making.
This seems to make evolutionary sense, Cacciamani said. Early humans would have required keen awareness of their surroundings on a subliminal level in order to survive.
"Your brain is always monitoring for meaning in the world, to be aware of your general surroundings and potential predators," Cacciamani said. "You can be focused on a task, but your brain is assessing the meaning of everything around you – even objects that you’re not consciously perceiving."
The study builds on the findings of earlier research by Jay Sanguinetti, who also was a doctoral candidate in the UA Department of Psychology. Both studies go against conventional wisdom among vision scientists.
"According to the traditional view, the brain accesses the meaning – or the memory – of an object after you perceive it," Cacciamani said. "Against this view, we have now shown that the meaning of an object can be accessed before conscious perception.
"We’re showing that there’s more interplay between memory and perception than previously has been assumed," she said.
Cacciamani asked participants in her study to classify nouns that appeared on a computer screen as naming a natural object or artificial object by pressing one of two buttons labeled “natural” or “artificial.” For example, the word “leaf” indicates an object found in nature, while “anchor” indicates a man-made or artificial object.
But before each word appeared on the screen, the computer flashed a black silhouette that – unknown to participants – had portions of natural or artificial objects suggested along the white outside regions (called the “ground” regions) of the image. Participants were not told to look for anything in the silhouettes, and they were flashed so quickly – 50 milliseconds – that it would have been difficult to notice the objects in the ground regions even if someone knew what to look for. Participants never were aware that the silhouette’s grounds suggested recognizable objects.
Cacciamani measured how well study participants performed at categorizing the words as natural or artificial by recording speed and accuracy.
"We found that participants performed better on the natural/artificial word task when that word followed a silhouette whose ground contained an object of the same rather than a different category," Cacciamani said.
This indicates that the brain accessed the meaning of the objects in the silhouette’s grounds even though study participants didn’t know the objects were there, she said.
"Every day our visual systems are bombarded with more information than we can consciously be aware of," Cacciamani said. "We’re showing that your brain might still be accessing information without your conscious awareness, and that could influence your behavior."
Faces Are More Likely to Seem Alive When We Want to Feel Connected
Feeling socially disconnected may lead us to lower our threshold for determining that another being is animate or alive, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“This increased sensitivity to animacy suggests that people are casting a wide net when looking for people they can possibly relate to — which may ultimately help them maximize opportunities to renew social connections,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Katherine Powers of Dartmouth College.
These findings enhance our understanding of the factors that contribute to face perception, mind perception, and social relationships, but they could also shed light on newer types of relationships that have emerged in the modern age, Powers argues, including our relationships with pets, online avatars, and even pieces of technology, such as computers, robots, and cell phones.
Feeling socially connected is a critical part of human life that impacts both mental and physical health; when we feel disconnected from others, we try to replenish our social connections.
“As social beings, we have an intrinsic motivation to pay attention to and connect with other people,” says Powers. “We wanted to examine the influence of this social motive on one of the most basic, low-level aspects of social perception: deciding whether or not a face is alive.”
Powers and colleagues had 30 college students view images of faces, which were actually morphs created by combining inanimate faces (such as a doll’s face) with human faces. The morphs ranged from 0% human to 100% human and showed both male and female faces.
The morphs were presented in random order and the students had to decide whether each face was animate or inanimate. Afterwards, they completed a survey that gauged their desire for social connections, in which they rated their agreement with statements such as “I want other people to accept me.”
The data revealed that desire for social connections was associated with a lower threshold for animacy. In other words, participants who had high scores on the social connections measure didn’t need to see as many human-like features in a face order to decide that it was alive.
To see if there might be a causal link, Powers and colleagues conducted another study in which they experimentally manipulated feelings of social connection.
A separate group of college students completed a personality questionnaire and were provided feedback ostensibly based on the questionnaire. In reality, the feedback was determined by random assignment. Some students were told that their future lives would be isolated and lonely, while others were told their lives would contain long-lasting, stable relationships. The feedback also included personality descriptions and statements tailored to each participant to ensure believability.
The students then viewed the face morphs.
As expected, students who had been told they would be isolated and lonely showed lower thresholds for animacy than those who were told they would have long-lasting relationships.
These findings are particularly interesting, the researchers argue, because previous research has shown that people are typically cautious in determining whether a face is alive:
“What’s really interesting here is the degree of variability in this perception,” says Powers. “Even though two people may be looking at the same face, the point at which they see life and decide that person is worthy of meaningful social interaction may not be the same — our findings show that it depends on an individual’s social relationship status and motivations for future social interactions.”
“I think the fact that we can observe such a bias in the perception of basic social cues really underscores the fundamental nature of the human need for social connection,” Powers adds.
Cockatoos pick up tool use and manufacture through social learning
Two years ago, we brought you the story of Figaro, a Goffin’s cockatoo that lived at a research center in Vienna. These birds don’t use tools in the wild—Figaro’s minders even argue that the cockatoo’s curved beak makes tool use rather difficult for them.
But Figaro’s environment, which features lots of wired mesh, apparently drove him to some novel behaviors. He was observed splitting off splinters from wooden material, and the bird used them to retrieve objects (generally food or toys) that were on the wrong side of the wire. Figaro was making tools.
Chimps Outplay Humans in Brain Games
We humans assume we are the smartest of all creations. In a world with over 8.7 million species, only we have the ability to understand the inner workings of our body while also unraveling the mysteries of the universe. We are the geniuses, the philosophers, the artists, the poets and savants. We amuse at a dog playing ball, a dolphin jumping rings, or a monkey imitating man because we think of these as remarkable acts for animals that, we presume, aren’t smart as us. But what is smart? Is it just about having ideas, or being good at language and math?
Scientists have shown, time and again, that many animals have an extraordinary intellect. Unlike an average human brain that can barely recall a vivid scene from the last hour, chimps have a photographic memory and can memorize patterns they see in the blink of an eye. Sea lions and elephants can remember faces from decades ago. Animals also have a unique sense perception. Sniffer dogs can detect the first signs of colon cancer by the scents of patients, while doctors flounder in early diagnosis. So the point is animals are smart too. But that’s not the upsetting realization. What happens when, for just once, a chimp or a dog challenges man to one of their feats? Well, for one, a precarious face-off – like the one Matt Reeves conceived in the Planet of the Apes – would seem a tad less unlikely than we thought.
In a recent study by psychologists Colin Camerer and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, chimps and humans played a strategy game – and unexpectedly, the chimps outplayed the humans.
(Image: Shutterstock)
Scientists Find Possible Neurobiological Basis for Tradeoff Between Honesty, Self-Interest
What’s the price on your integrity? Tell the truth; everyone has a tipping point. We all want to be honest, but at some point, we’ll lie if the benefit is great enough. Now, scientists have confirmed the area of the brain in which we make that decision.
The result was published online this week in Nature Neuroscience.
(Source: newswise.com)
2-D or 3-D? That is the Question
The increased visual realism of 3-D films is believed to offer viewers a more vivid and lifelike experience—more thrilling and intense than 2-D because it more closely approximates real life. However, psychology researchers at the University of Utah, among those who use film clips routinely in the lab to study patients’ emotional conditions, have found that there is no significant difference between the two formats. The results were published recently in PLOS ONE.
The study aimed to validate the effectiveness of 3-D film, a newer technology, as compared to 2-D film that is currently widely used as a research tool. Film clips are used in psychological and neuroscience studies as a standardized method for assessing emotional development. Because it is less invasive than other methods, it is especially useful when studying the emotional responses of young people for whom emotional well-being is critical to healthy development.
Author Sheila Crowell, assistant professor of psychology at the U, says that results of the large and tightly controlled study also suggest that as an entertainment medium, 3-D may not provide a different experience from 2-D, insofar as evoking emotional responses go.
“We set out to learn whether technological advances like 3-D enhance the study of emotion, especially for young patients who are routinely exposed to high-tech devices and mediums in their daily lives,” says Crowell. “Both 2-D and 3-D are equally effective at eliciting emotional responses, which also may mean that the expense involved in producing 3-D films is not creating much more than novelty. Further studies are of course warranted, but our findings should be encouraging to researchers who cannot now afford 3-D technologies.”
How the study was conducted
Researchers looked at several measures of emotional state in 408 subjects, including palm sweat, breathing and cardiovascular responses, such as heart rate. These measures are commonly used to gauge emotional responses.
Four film clips were chosen because each prompted one discrete emotion intensely and in context without viewing the entire film. Study participants viewed a 3-D and 2-D clip of approximately five minutes of each film: “My Bloody Valentine” (fear), “Despicable Me” (amusement), “Tangled” (sadness) and “The Polar Express” (thrill or excitement). Participants were randomized to view the films in a design that balanced the pairs of films watched, in which format, and order of presentation. The complex configurations allowed the researchers to compare not only emotional responses, but effects of format and viewing order on the results.
Taken as a whole, the results showed few significant differences between physiological reactions to the films. When accounting for the large number of statistical tests, only one difference was seen between the formats—the number of electrodermal responses (palm sweat) during a thrilling scene from “The Polar Express” 3-D clip. The researchers believe that could be because the 3-D content of the film is of especially high quality, with more and a larger variety of 3-D effects than the others.
Supporting the overall finding is that participants’ individual differences in anxiety, inability to control emotional responses or “thrill seeking” did not alter the psychological or physiological responses to 3-D viewing. In other words, personality differences did not change the results: 2-D is still equally effective for emotion elicitation. According to Crowell, “this could be good news for people who would rather not wear 3-D glasses or pay the extra money to see these types of films.”
Yoga Relieves Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms
Paula Meltzer was only 38 when out of nowhere everything she looked at was blurry. For the single mother, who had a lucrative career as a gemologist and spent hours examining valuable pieces of jewelry, it seemed as if – in a split second – her life changed.
At first doctors thought Meltzer had a brain tumor. What they determined after further tests, however, was that she had multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects the brain and central nervous system and was causing optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve that can cause a partial or complete loss of vision.
“I was living independently, doing my job, taking care of my child – and then I had to look to my parents to take care of me,” Meltzer said.
Almost two decades later, Meltzer, out of a wheelchair and walking without a cane, was one of 14 women with moderate disability due to MS who participated in a pilot trial conducted by the Rutgers School of Health Related Professions. A specially-designed yoga program for these MS patients not only improved their physical and mental well-being but also enhanced their overall quality of life.
“I felt like I became steadier and stronger in my core,” Meltzer said. Prior to yoga, she described herself as a “wall walker,” someone who felt safer holding onto the wall in order to get around. “To be able to stand on one leg and feel balanced is amazing.”
Susan Gould Fogerite, director of research for the Institute for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the School of Health Related Professions, said that although there is widespread evidence that yoga is being used as a form of exercise by those with MS, much of the feedback has been anecdotal and there isn’t much empirical data regarding its safety and efficacy.
This is why she and her colleagues, Evan Cohen and David Kietrys, physical therapists and associate professors in the School of Health Related Professions at Stratford, decided to undertake the small pilot study, believing that a specialized yoga program for MS patients – which incorporates mind, body and spirit – would be beneficial to everyday living.
What they discovered at the end of the eight-week trial was that those who participated were better able to walk for short distances and longer periods of time, had better balance while reaching backwards, fine motor coordination, and were better able to go from sitting to standing. Their quality of life also improved in perceived mental health, concentration, bladder control, walking, and vision, with a decrease in pain and fatigue.
“Yoga is not just exercise, it is a whole system of living,” said Fogerite, an associate professor, who, along with Kietrys, will present the results on September 26 at the Symposium on Yoga Research at the Kripalu Institute in Massachusetts. “The panel of experts who advised us on the trial wanted to make sure that we provided a fully integrated program that included philosophy, breathing practices, postures, relaxation and meditation.”
The yoga pilot trial was held at Still Point Yoga Center in Laurel Springs, a southern New Jersey town close to Philadelphia. Of the 72 individuals who were interested in participating, only 16 were eligible based on medical and other criteria and availability. Of those, 15 were enrolled and 14 completed the program after one person had to withdraw because of an unrelated health problem.
Meltzer and the other women who participated in the trial ranged in age from 34 to 64. Some had been diagnosed with MS within the last two years while others had been living with the illness for up to 26 years. For 90 minutes, twice a week for two months, they practiced techniques and exercises that would improve their posture, help to increase stamina, and teach them how to relax and focus.
“This study, I hope, is one of many that will give us the clinical information we need,” said Fogerite. “Yoga is not currently being widely prescribed for people with MS, although it might turn out to be a very helpful treatment.”
The yoga practices were done by the women in the study sitting, standing, or lying on yoga mats, and using metal folding chairs situated close to the wall to provide them with more support.
“What was so nice about this experience was that although everyone was at a different level of the disease, we felt like we were all together, so I think the camaraderie helped,” said Meltzer. “And it wasn’t just about gaining more mobility and balance in our legs but our arms and necks felt stronger as well.”
Fogerite said a larger randomized controlled trial would be needed to determine whether yoga could be used as a prescribed treatment for individuals with moderate disability due to MS. More than 2.3 million people – two to three times more women than men – throughout the world are diagnosed with this disease which can cause poor coordination, loss of balance, slurred speech, tremors, numbness, extreme fatigue and problems with memory and concentration.
“When I was first diagnosed I no longer felt safe in my own body,” Meltzer said. “I didn’t trust my body at all. What the program did was really bring that trust back.”
(Source: news.rutgers.edu)
Nature or nurture? It’s all about the message
Were Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci born brilliant or did they acquire their intelligence through effort?
No one knows for sure, but telling people the latter – that hard work trumps genes – causes instant changes in the brain and may make them more willing to strive for success, indicates a new study from Michigan State University.
The findings suggest the human brain is more receptive to the message that intelligence comes from the environment, regardless of whether it’s true. And this simple message, said lead investigator Hans Schroder, may ultimately prompt us to work harder.
“Giving people messages that encourage learning and motivation may promote more efficient performance,” said Schroder, a doctoral student in clinical psychology whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation. “In contrast, telling people that intelligence is genetically fixed may inadvertently hamper learning.”
In past research by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, elementary students performing a task were either praised for their intelligence (“You’re so smart!”) or for their effort (“You worked really hard!”) after correct responses. As the task became harder, children in the first group performed worse after their mistakes compared to the group that had heard effort was important.
The MSU study, which appears online in the journal Biological Psychology, offers what could be the first physiological evidence to support those findings, in the form of a positive brain response. “These subtle messages seem to have a big impact, and now we can see they have an immediate impact on how the brain handles information about performance,” Schroder said.
For the study, two groups of participants read different articles. One article reported that intelligence is largely genetic, while the other said the brilliance of da Vinci and Einstein was “probably due to a challenging environment. Their genius had little to do with genetic structure.”
Participants were instructed to remember the main points of the article and completed a simple computer task while their brain activity was recorded. The findings, in a nutshell:
- The group that read intelligence was primarily genetic paid more attention to their responses, as if they were more concerned with their performance. This extra attention, however, did not relate to performance on trials after errors, suggesting a disconnect between brain and behavior.
- In contrast, those who had read that intelligence was due to a challenging environment showed a more efficient brain response after they made a mistake, possibly because they believed they could do better on the next trial. The more attention these participants paid to mistakes, the faster their responses were on the next trial.
The study does not weigh in on the age-old “nature vs. nurture” debate, Schroder noted. Rather, it investigates the messages about the nature of abilities people are exposed to on a regular basis, from a teacher comforting a student (“It’s OK, not everyone can be a math person.”) to the sports announcer commenting on a player’s skill (“Wow, what a natural!”). These messages are thought to contribute to the attitudes or “mindsets” people hold about their intelligence and abilities.
The research started as part of Schroder’s honors thesis as an undergraduate at MSU working in the Clinical Psychophysiology Lab directed by Jason Moser, MSU assistant professor. Moser co-authored the study along with Tim Moran, an MSU graduate student in cognitive psychology, and Brent Donnellan, a former MSU professor who now works at Texas A&M University.
As an undergraduate and graduate student, Schroder has already co-written nine papers that have appeared in academic journals, including five as lead author. His work is supported by a three-year grant from the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Learning to read: tricking the brain
While reading, children and adults alike must avoid confusing mirror-image letters (like b/d or p/q). Why is it difficult to differentiate these letters? When learning to read, our brain must be able to inhibit the mirror-generalization process, a mechanism that facilitates the recognition of identical objects regardless of their orientation, but also prevents the brain from differentiating letters that are different but symmetrical. A study conducted by the researchers of the Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l’Education de l’Enfant (CNRS / Université Paris Descartes / Université de Caen Basse-Normandie) is available on the website of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Online First Articles).
In recent years, many studies on the process of learning to read have been based on the neuronal recycling hypothesis: the reuse of old brain mechanisms in a new adaptive role —a kind of “biological trick.” Specifically, neurons that are originally dedicated to the rapid identification of objects in the environment, through the mirror-generalization process, are “repurposed” during childhood to specialize in the visual recognition of letters and words.
In this study, the researchers showed 80 young adults pairs of images, first two letters and then two animals, asking them to determine whether they were identical. The readers consistently spent more time determining that two animal images, when preceded by mirror-image letters, were indeed identical. This increase in response time is called “negative priming”: the readers had to inhibit the mirror-generalization process in order to distinguish letters like b/d or p/q. They then needed a little more time to reactivate this strategy when it became useful again to quickly identify animals.
These results show that even adults need to inhibit the mirror-generalization process to avoid reading errors. Children must therefore learn to inhibit this strategy when learning to read. A failure of cognitive inhibition during the recycling of visual neurons in the brain could thus be a factor in dyslexia— a direction worth exploring, in light of these findings.
(Source: www2.cnrs.fr)