By guest blogger David Robson
When you have a disagreement with your boss, how do you respond? Do you consider that you might be at fault and try to consider the other’s viewpoint? Or do you dig in your heels and demand that other people come around to your way of thinking? In other words, do you make wise, practical decisions, or are you prone to being stubborn and petty in the face of criticism? Continue reading “Why Fear Of Rejection Prevents Us From Making Wise Decisions”
By guest blogger Freddy Parker
How did you sleep last night? If the answer is “badly” followed by an uninvited pang of anxiety, look no further for an explanation than a study published this month in Nature Human Behaviour.
A lack of sleep is known to lead to feelings of anxiety, even among healthy people. But the new paper reveals that the amount of “deep” or slow-wave sleep is most pertinent to this relationship. That, the authors conclude, is because slow-wave brain oscillations offer an “ameliorating, anxiolytic benefit” on brain networks associated with emotional regulation.
Continue reading “A Lack Of Sleep Causes Anxiety — But Don’t Worry About It”
By guest blogger Rhi Willmot
Is your mental library a haven of accurate and well-informed facts, or are there mistruths hiding on the shelves? It’s natural to assume that we update our beliefs in line with the most recent and well-established evidence. But what really happens to our views when a celebrity endorses a product that becomes discredited by science, or when a newspaper publishes a story which is later retracted?
A recent paper from the Journal of Consumer Psychology presents a novel take on this topic, by investigating the continued influence effect. Anne Hamby and colleagues suggest that our likelihood of continuing to believe retracted information depends on whether or not it helps us to understand the cause-and-effect structure of an event. Crucially, the team proposes, we would rather have a complete understanding of why things happen than a perspective which is more accurate, but less complete.
By guest blogger Louisa Lyon
In many countries, the proportion of girls opting to pursue careers in lucrative fields such as engineering and computer science has stagnated. Despite the best efforts of schools, universities and governments, women remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called “STEM” subjects. The shortage of women is particularly acute in professions with a heavy focus on maths. But why?
A recent study in PNAS suggests that the answer may lie in differences in ability between boys and girls. But surprisingly, the ability in question is not maths, but reading. In a nutshell, girls who are good at maths tend to be even better at reading, and as a result, many turn away from maths and opt instead to pursue careers that utilise their even stronger language skills. By contrast, boys who are good at maths tend not to show this same advantage in reading, making their decision to stick with STEM subjects much more straightforward.
By guest blogger Rhi Willmot
Can a lie still be harmful if it’s never found out? New research on the relationship between dishonesty and social understanding may unsettle the fibbers amongst us. In a multi-study investigation with a total of 2,588 participants, scientists have found Pinocchio isn’t the only one to experience a few personal problems after telling lies.
Continue reading “Acting Dishonestly Impairs Our Ability To Read Other People’s Emotions”
By guest blogger Freddy Parker
Fast food chains are not exactly renowned for encouraging healthy eating. But in a new study a team of psychologists, eager to turn that assumption on its head, chose McDonald’s as their target for a somewhat unconventional, psychologically-informed health intervention. Writing in Psychology & Marketing, the researchers report successfully “nudging” a group of Coca-Cola-guzzling customers into opting for its sugar-free counterpart, Coke Zero — simply by changing the order of options on the menu.
By guest blogger Bradley Busch
As father to an 18-month-old toddler, I would love to know exactly what my son is thinking. Along with many parents, one of the ways I try to find out is to ask him questions of the variety “Do you want X or Y?” But does his answer to this type of question actually reveal his preference or is it a more a reflection of a quirky cognitive bias that is more powerful in children than adults?
Two competing effects influence how adults respond to binary choices. The first is called “The Primary Effect” which describes the way that the first option we hear tends to stick in our minds. For example, one study found that adults are more likely to choose “heads” when asked if a coin toss is going to be “heads or tails”. The second effect, which sometimes contrasts with the Primary Effect, is called “The Recency Effect”. This captures the way that the last thing we hear or experience can also have more weight in our memory (this is why popstars end their concerts on their best songs, so that everyone leaves thinking the whole gig was great). In adults, neither the Primary Effect or the Recency Effect is always the more pronounced, with evidence suggesting that one’s personality type, familiarity of the information, and how controversial the topic is, all play a mediating role.
Keen to test if the same is true in young children, or if one of the effects is more dominant, a team led by Emily Sumner conducted two experiments and published their findings in a recent paper in PLOS One fantastically titled “Cake or Broccoli: Recency Biases Children’s Verbal Responses”.
By guest blogger Tim Lomas
The novelist David Foster Wallace famously told a story of two young fish swimming in the sea, whereby an older fish glides by and asks, “how’s the water?”, to which they look at each other in puzzlement and say, “What’s water?” The central point of the parable is that we are constantly immersed in contexts to which we give little thought or consideration, but which nevertheless influence us profoundly. Among the most powerful of such contexts is language. A century of research on the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LHR; also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has shown that the language we speak profoundly affects our experience and understanding of life, impacting everything from our perception of time and space to the construction of our self-identity.
What might the implications of the LHR be for psychology itself? As a science, the field generally aims to be neutral and objective, and to discover universal truths about the human mind. Yet it is surely consequential that the field mostly conducts its business in English, this being the default language in international journals and conferences. For instance, if a phenomenon has not been identified in English – even if it has in other languages – it is unlikely to be a topic of concern, and may not even “exist” for English-speaking scholars at all.
One way that the field has sought to address this limitation is by “borrowing” words from other languages and cultures. To ascertain the extent of this cross-cultural borrowing, I analysed a sample of words in psychology and recently published my results in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
By guest blogger David Robson
Socrates famously declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and that “knowing thyself” was the path to true wisdom. But is there a right and a wrong way to go about such self-reflection?
Simple rumination – the process of churning your concerns around in your head – isn’t the answer. It’s likely to cause you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and immersed in the emotions that might be leading you astray. Certainly, research has shown that people who are prone to rumination also often suffer from impaired decision-making under pressure and are at substantially increased risk of depression.
Instead, the scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as “illeism” – or speaking about yourself in the third person (the term was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning “he, that”). If I was considering an argument that I’d had with a friend, for instance, I may start by silently thinking to myself “David felt frustrated that…” The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.
A bulk of research has already shown that this kind of third-person thinking can temporarily improve decision making. Now a preprint at PsyArxiv finds that it can also bring long-term benefits to thinking and emotional regulation. It is, according to the authors, “the first evidence that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in daily life and of how to do so.”
Continue reading “A New Trial Of An Ancient Rhetorical Trick Finds It Can Make You Wiser”
By guest blogger Tomasz Witkowski
Looking at the latest epidemiological data, it could be argued that we are in the midst of a pandemic of mental illness, of dimensions never before seen in human history. The WHO estimates that over 350 million people around the world are presently suffering from depression, which constitutes almost 5-6 per cent of the population. At its extreme, depression may lead to suicide, by which it is estimated that around 1 million people die every year. And the numbers continue growing. Faced with this rising tide of illness, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of hard facts and data indicating the paths researchers and clinicians may follow in search of ways to help. Sometimes, as suggested by a meta-analysis of 50 years of studies on indicators that help predict suicide attempts, we are entirely helpless. In other cases, like with the recent meta-analysis of the neural correlates of the changes brought about by psychotherapy in depressed brains, study results do bring us hope.
The results of the first systematic review and meta-analysis of biological markers evaluated in randomized trials of psychological treatments for depression in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews are another attempt at understanding methods of treating this terrifying illness. The authors – Ioana A. Cristea, Eirini Karyotaki, Steven D. Hollon, Pim Cuijpers and Claudio Gentili – quite rightly point out that understanding how psychological interventions impact or are impacted by biological variables has important implications. For many people, their depression co-occurs with a bodily illness, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and immune system and neurological disorders, and at times is a consequence of that illness. Although we still know little about the reciprocal cause-and-effect mechanisms between psychic and somatic symptoms, some studies have suggested that psychological interventions not only change mood, but also normalise the functioning of the autonomic nervous system, with a therapeutic effect on physical conditions, such as heart disease. But is this really true?
