Weekly links

Cat Whisperers And Dog Listeners: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Why do children so readily believe in someone as ridiculous as Father Christmas — a man who flies around the world climbing down millions of chimneys, all in one night? It’s not that children are simply gullible beings, argues Rohan Kapitany at The Conversation: studies have shown that they can actually be pretty sceptical. Instead, it’s the detailed and committed actions modelled by adults — putting up trees, leaving out biscuits, hanging stockings — that seem to suggest to kids that of course this jolly red gift-giver must be real.

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Cognition, Creativity, Decision making

Eureka Moments Have A “Dark Side”: They Can Make False Facts Seem True

GettyImages-493584274.jpgBy Matthew Warren

We love a puzzle here at Research Digest — so here’s a couple from a recent paper in Cognition. See whether you can unscramble the anagrams in the following sentences (read on for the answers!):

The Cocos Islands are part of idnionsea

eeebyoshn kill more people worldwide each year than all poisonous snakes combined

If you successfully solved the anagrams, you may have experienced an “Aha!” or “Eureka” moment: a flash of insight where the solution suddenly becomes clear, perhaps after you have spent a while completely stumped. Usually when we experience these moments we have indeed arrived at the correct answer — they don’t tend to occur as much when we’ve stumbled upon an incorrect solution. And in fact, researchers have suggested that we even use Aha! moments as a quick way to judge the veracity of a solution or idea — they provide a kind of gut feeling which tells us that what has just popped into our mind is probably correct.

But relying on these experiences to gauge the truth of an idea can sometimes backfire, according to the authors of the new paper. The team found that experiencing sudden moments of insight when deciphering a statement can make people more likely to believe that it is true — even when it isn’t.

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Developmental, Lying

Lying To Your Kids Could Make Them More Dishonest And Less Well-Adjusted As Adults

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By Emily Reynolds

Telling white lies to children can be somewhat par for the course when you’re a parent: “I’ve got Santa on the phone and he says he’s not coming unless you go to bed now,” is particularly useful during the festive season, for example.

It can seem like nothing: just another tool to improve your child’s behaviour. But don’t get too attached to the technique — telling too many white lies to your children may have more far-reaching consequences than you might have hoped, according to a new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

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Feature, Mental health, Money

The Psychological Impacts Of Poverty, Digested

street of long abandoned and derelict collapsing houses and commercial buildings

By Emma Young

For a “rich” country, by global standards, the UK has an awful lot of people who are not. Fourteen million people — one fifth of the population — live in poverty. Of these, four million are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are classed as destitute, unable to afford even basic life essentials.

For children who grow up in poverty, there are impacts that go way beyond the fact of material shortages. “Children experience poverty as an environment that is damaging to their mental, physical, emotional and spiritual development,” notes UNICEF. Clearly, there’s a critical role for psychological research in this area, first in revealing just what poverty does to children and adults — but also in developing strategies to ameliorate those impacts.

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Cross-cultural, Emotion

Our Ability To Recognise Dogs’ Emotions Is Shaped By Our Cultural Upbringing

GettyImages-990077336.jpgBy Emily Reynolds

As anyone who’s ever had to scold their dog for stealing food off a plate or jumping onto that oh-so-tempting forbidden sofa can attest, dogs are pretty good at understanding what we’re saying to them — at least when it suits them.

Research has also shown that dogs are able to understand some aspects of human communication, perhaps because throughout history we’ve used dogs for their ability to respond to our commands. Words, hand signs and gestures, tone of voice and facial expression — it seems that dogs have the ability to understand them all. But what about human understanding of dogs?

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Weekly links

Retail Ruses And Accent Attitudes: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) can help patients with Parkinson’s control their movement — but a new study has found that it also prevents some people from being able to swim. Nine patients — including two former competitive swimmers — were no longer able to keep afloat after receiving implants for DBS, reports Jennifer Walter for Discover. Past research has found that DBS can also disrupt other learned motor skills, such as golfing.

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Emotion, Facebook, Twitter

Abstaining From Social Media Doesn’t Improve Well-Being, Experimental Study Finds

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By Matthew Warren

From digital detoxes to the recent Silicon Valley fad of “dopamine fasting”, it seems more fashionable than ever to attempt to abstain from consuming digital media. Underlying all of these trends is the assumption that using digital devices — and being on social media in particular — is somehow unhealthy, and that if we abstain, we might become happier, more fulfilled people.

But is there any truth to this belief? When it comes to social media, at least, a new paper in Media Psychology suggests not.  In one of the few experimental studies in the field, researchers have found that quitting social media for up to four weeks does nothing to improve our well-being or quality of life.

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Emotion, Personality, Political

No, Conservatives Don’t Experience Feelings Of Disgust Any More Than Liberals

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By Emma Young

If you are left revolted by the sight of someone failing to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom, or by the idea of people engaging in sexual acts that you consider unacceptable, you’re more likely to be politically conservative than liberal, according to previous research. But now a new study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, challenges the idea that disgust is an especially conservative emotion.

Julia Elad-Strenger at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and her colleagues found that some scenarios in fact make liberals more disgusted than conservatives. “Taken together, our findings suggest that the differences between conservatives and liberals in disgust sensitivity are context-dependent rather than a stable personality difference,” the team writes.

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Alcohol, Memory

Drinking Alcohol Focuses Our Attention On The External Features Of Faces, With Implications For Eyewitness Memory

GettyImages-487464968.jpgBy Emily Reynolds

Having a bit of a fuzzy memory is not an uncommon side effect of having had too much to drink the night before — and the details we do remember are often somewhat limited. The same can also be true for our attention when drunk: we’re only able to concentrate on what’s going on in front of us and not what’s happening elsewhere.

This phenomenon has been termed “alcohol myopia”: attentional shortsightedness related to alcohol consumption. A new paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggests this shortsightedness may apply to human faces, too — and that it could have an impact on how well people can identify perpetrators of crimes they witness while drunk.

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Educational, Memory

Using Fidget Spinners May Actually Impede Learning

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By Emily Reynolds

Though fidget spinners have been around since the early 1990s, it was 2017 when they really started to make a stir, becoming a seemingly overnight sensation and starting to appear in offices, classrooms, public transport and pretty much anywhere else they were permitted. The actual provenance of the design has been debated, but many companies market the toys as a tool for concentration, particularly for those who have anxiety, ADHD or autism.

Calming — and fun — they may be, but do they actually work when it comes to keeping attention? Julia S. Soares & Benjamin C. Storm from the University of California, Santa Cruz think not. In a new paper, they look at the marketing of fidget spinners as attentional aides — and come to the conclusion that they may be actively distracting.

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