Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
How fear skews our spatial perception
That snake heading towards you may be further away than it appears. Fear can skew our perception of approaching objects, causing us to underestimate the distance of a threatening one, finds a study published in Current Biology.
“Our results show that emotion and perception are not fully dissociable in the mind,” says Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco, co-author of the study. “Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us. This has clear implications for understanding clinical phobias.”
Lourenco conducted the research with Matthew Longo, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London.
People generally have a well-developed sense for when objects heading towards them will make contact, including a split-second cushion for dodging or blocking the object, if necessary. The researchers set up an experiment to test the effect of fear on the accuracy of that skill.
The Power of Music: Mind Control by Rhythmic Sound
You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental processes?
The mystery runs deeper than previously thought, according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound “not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the group become synchronized.”
This finding extends the well-known power of music to tap into brain circuits controlling emotion and movement, to actually control the brain circuitry of sensory perception. This discovery helps explain how drums unite tribes in ceremony, why armies march to bugle and drum into battle, why worship and ceremonies are infused by song, why speech is rhythmic, punctuated by rhythms of emphasis on particular syllables and words, and perhaps why we dance.
The Neuroscience Of Music
Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”
We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A paper in Nature Neuroscience by a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.
Attention, Learning, and the Value of Information
Despite many studies on selective attention, fundamental questions remain about its nature and neural mechanisms. Here I draw from the animal and machine learning fields that describe attention as a mechanism for active learning and uncertainty reduction and explore the implications of this view for understanding visual attention and eye movement control. I propose that a closer integration of these different views has the potential greatly to expand our understanding of oculomotor control and our ability to use this system as a window into high level but poorly understood cognitive functions, including the capacity for curiosity and exploration and for inferring internal models of the external world.
Survival reflex sparks male perception bias, study finds
You glimpse a stranger standing in the street. The light is hazy and the person’s face and clothing are indistinct. Who is it? Chances are you will think it is a man—and the reason for this is a survival reflex, according to an unusual study published on Wednesday.
Psychologists at the University of California at Los Angeles delved into our quest for visual clues when we assess other people.
They asked male and female students to look at 21 human silhouettes, all of them the same height, but with a progressively changing waist-to-hip ratio. The figures began with an obviously female “hourglass” figure and, after incremental changes, ended with an obviously male “hunk” figure. The volunteers were asked to say whether each of the 21 silhouettes was male or female, the idea being to identify the point where they saw a shift in gender.
What was striking, said researcher Kerri Johnson, was a preference for the volunteers to deem a shape to be a man whenever it was ambiguous—or could readily have been taken for a woman. “I was surprised by the size of the effect. It was a much stronger effect than I ever imagined,” Johnson said in a phone interview.
In the natural world, the demarcation between a woman’s shape and man’s shape comes when the ratio of the waist and hip circumferences is 0.8. But the volunteers, on average, placed the boundary at 0.68. In other words, an identifiable female shape for them was close to the idealised curves of a pinup.
Johnson’s team carried out three further studies, using a slightly different methods to see whether their approach had been skewed, and found that the bias in favour of men was unchanged. Are these errors in perception? Not so, said Johnson, who believes it to be an ancestral survival mechanism.
A man is likelier than a woman to be a bigger physical threat and our default perception is to prepare for risk: it’s better to be safe than sorry. “We suspect that this might be for a self-protective reason,” she said. “If you are walking down a dark alley at night, a woman poses no great physical threat to you in general, but if you encounter an unknown man, he’s more likely to have a physical formidability that could pose some risks.”
Johnson conceded that there could be cultural or ethnic factors which influence judgement but argued that the same kind of bias would prevail anywhere. “I think it’s entirely likely that if we were to test this in different populations we would probably have the same basic effect, the same pattern of judgement, although the strength of the judgement might vary,” she said.
The findings show how gender stereotypes can be reinforced, sometimes dangerously so, said the study. A woman could struggle if she has a body shape that is perceived as masculine and thus unattractive. “Consistent with other research, this is likely to produce preferences for extreme body shapes, particularly for women,” said the study.
The paper appears in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B
(Source: medicalxpress.com)
Our eyes adapt to screens
The time most of us spend looking at a screen has rapidly increased over the past decade. If we’re not at work on the computer, we’re likely to stay tuned into the online sphere via a smart phone or tablet. Shelves of books are being replaced by a single e-book reader; and television shows and movies are available anywhere, any time.
So what does all this extra screen time mean for our eyes?
Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that like many good eye myths, there is simply no evidence to support this old wives’ tale.
Once we reach the age of ten years or so, it is practically impossible to injure the eyes by looking at something – the exception, of course, being staring at the Sun or similarly bright objects. Earlier in life, what we look at – or rather, how clearly we see – can affect our vision because the neural pathways between the eye and brain are still developing.
When we read off a piece of paper, light from the ambient environment is reflected off the surface of the paper and into our eyes. The retina at the back of the eye captures the light and begins the process of converting it into a signal that the brain understands.
The process of reading from screens is similar, except that the light is emitted directly by the screen, rather than being reflected.
Scientists read dreams: Brain scans during sleep can decode visual content of dreams
A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG).
The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep.
This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams six or seven times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports.
Why crying babies are so hard to ignore: Study suggests the sound of a baby crying activates primitive parts of the brain involved in fight-or-flight responses
Ever wondered why it is so difficult to ignore the sound of a crying baby when you are trapped aboard a train or aeroplane? Scientists have found that our brains are hard-wired to respond strongly to the sound, making us more attentive and priming our bodies to help whenever we hear it – even if we’re not the baby’s parents.
"The sound of a baby cry captures your attention in a way that few other sounds in the environment generally do," said Katie Young of the University of Oxford, who led the study looking at how the brain processes a baby’s cries.
She scanned the brains of 28 people while they listened to the sound of babies and adults crying and sounds of animal distress including cats meowing and dogs whining.
Using a very fast scanning technique, called magnetoencephalography, Young found an early burst of activity in the brain in response to the sound of a baby cry, followed by an intense reaction after about 100 milliseconds. The reaction to other sounds was not as intense. “This was primarily in two regions of the brain,” said Young. “One is the middle temporal gyrus, an area previously implicated in emotional processing and speech; the other area is the orbitofrontal cortex, an area well-known for its role in reward and emotion processing.”
Young and her colleague, Christine Parsons, presented their findings this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans.
Science Confirms The Obvious: Rejection Can Make You More Creative
There’s a reason genius and solitude seem to go hand in hand, a new study says. Social rejection leads to creative problem solving.
Don’t let rejection get you down—it might be the ticket to creativity, science says. That’s right: If regular rejection doesn’t cause you to lose all self-confidence and withdraw from the world entirely, it just might boost your ability to think outside of the mainstream and draw upon a unique worldview, suggesting that the kind of people society considers “geniuses” might tend to have a go-it-alone, loner mentality.
Research conducted by Cornell and Johns Hopkins University researchers has shown that people who are able to handle rejection in the proper manner—by shrugging it off and blazing their own, independent trails—can experience heightened creativity and even commercial success through an ability to eschew mainstream thought and groupthink and instead pursue their own creative solutions to problems. They tested their hypothesis through a series of experiments in which they manipulated the experience of social rejection; subjects in the study were led to believe that everyone in a group exercise could choose whom to work with on a team project, only to be told later that no one had selected them for a team.
For people with an independent mindset, this rejection inspired them to go on and complete the exercise in a way that was deemed more creative (we’re not exactly sure how “creativity” was measured). For people without an independent mindset—well, we’re not really sure what kind of impact this exclusion had on them (hopefully someone later told them it was just an experiment, it was all in good fun, and really, everyone here thinks you’re great).
The researchers acknowledge that for some, the consequences of rejection can be quite negative. Their research is only intended to show that for those of a certain mindset, social rejection can have a silver lining, driving home something that we more or less already knew: it’s not easy being a genius.
(Source: popsci.com)
Science supports sex addiction as a legitimate disorder
The idea that an individual might suffer from a sexual addiction is great fodder for radio talk shows, comedians and late night TV. But a sex addiction is no laughing matter. Relationships are destroyed, jobs are lost, lives ruined.
Yet psychiatrists have been reluctant to accept the idea of out-of-control sexual behavior as a mental health disorder because of the lack of scientific evidence.
Now a UCLA-led team of experts has tested a proposed set of criteria to define “hypersexual disorder,” also known as sexual addiction, as a new mental health condition.
Rory Reid, a research psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, led a team of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family therapists that found the proposed criteria to be reliable and valid in helping mental health professionals accurately diagnose hypersexual disorder.
The results of this study — reported in the current edition of the Journal of Sexual Medicine — will influence whether hypersexual disorder should be included in the forthcoming revised fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), considered the “bible” of psychiatry.
The importance of the study, Reid said, is that it suggests evidence in support of hypersexual disorder as a legitimate mental health condition.
"The criteria for hypersexual disorder that have been proposed, and now tested, will allow researchers and clinicians to study, treat and develop prevention strategies for individuals at risk for developing hypersexual behavior," he said.
(Source: newsroom.ucla.edu)