Dr. Sabiha Alam Choudhury: November 2019

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.

A ketamine-based intervention could help heavy drinkers cut down on their alcohol consumption, reports Kelly Servick at Science. Researchers gave drinkers a single dose of ketamine, with the aim of disrupting the associations they had formed between the sights and smells of beer and the reward they got from consuming it. Months later, the participants were drinking far fewer pints.

“All humans have biases – simplified ways of thinking when we need to process our thoughts quickly. Accent is no exception: we all have automatic associations with accents based on people we’ve met during our lives. It’s only when we rely on these simple stereotypes to judge unrelated traits, like intelligence or competence, that our cultural baggage becomes discrimination.” At The Conversation, Devyani Sharma writes about her research into people’s perceptions of different British accents — and how these attitudes can lead to prejudice against those who are already marginalised.

Being hungry doesn’t automatically make us more angry, despite the popular belief in “hanger”, writes Benedict Carey at The New York Times. Research has found that people only become hangry in circumstances where they (mis)interpret the unpleasantness of huger as a feeling of annoyance towards others. And, as we reported recently, even very hungry people remain surprisingly helpful and co-operative.

A study out this week led to a bunch of outlets proclaiming that one in four teenagers are “addicted” to their phones — but the real story is much more nuanced than that. At New Scientist, Clare Wilson explores why so much of the media coverage got it wrong.

Writing lecture notes out by hand may have benefits over computer-based note-taking, writes Claudia Hammond for BBC Future. Studies have shown that students who write their notes are better at explaining the concepts they are learning about, seemingly because pen-and-paper note-taking involves a deeper form of cognitive processing than simply typing out a lecturer’s words verbatim.

Finally, it’s Black Friday today, and whatever you think about the day, there’s no denying the fact that it has become firmly established on this side of the pond in recent years. But if you want to wise up to the tricks used by retailers to get you to buy, look no further than this explainer from BBC Bitesize.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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

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.

Many past psychological studies into social media have relied on correlational data, looking at how individual differences in social media use (or “screen time” more generally) relate to well-being. That makes sense: it’s far easier to look at existing patterns of use than to conduct a controlled experiment, particularly in a world where we are all using digital media every day. But it also makes it hard to separate out cause-and-effect — even if social media use is associated with poorer well-being, how can we be sure that already unhappy people are not simply using social media more often, for instance?

So in their new study, Jeffrey Hall and colleagues at the University of Kansas decided to add to the fairly sparse experimental literature by looking at what happens when people actively avoid using social media. The researchers assigned participants to one of five groups: one was told to simply continue using social media as normal (specifically Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram), while the others were told to abstain from all four platforms for periods of 7, 14, 21 or 28 days. The researchers set up accounts to follow each participant and check that they were not posting or engaging with other people’s posts during this time.

At the end of each day for the entire four week period, participants recorded the proportion of time they had spent doing various activities (e.g. eating, working, watching TV, using the internet and so on). They also completed short questionnaires measuring well-being, quality of life and loneliness.

After excluding those who had used social media during the days they were supposed to abstain, the researchers were left with 130 participants. They then fed all of the participants’ data into statistical models, to figure out whether there were any differences in the measures of well-being between abstinence and control days, and if so, whether these effects depended on how long people abstained for.

But the team found that there were no significant effects, regardless of how many weeks participants were off social media. “[D]ays when participants were free to use four types of social media and days when they abstained from using social media were indistinguishable in terms of end of day loneliness, affective well-being, and quality of day,” they conclude.

This finding is not entirely surprising. The results of the few other experimental studies conducted so far have been mixed: abstaining from social media (or decreasing use) has resulted in small reductions in loneliness or greater “cravings” to be back online, but also a lack of significant effects on several other measures of well-being. Taken together, these findings suggest that “correlational research that reports a negative influence of social media should be interpreted with greater scrutiny,” write the authors.

The new study is not without limitations: in particular, the sample size wasn’t huge, and the authors acknowledge that they did not have enough participants to detect any small effects that might have been present. On the other hand, if abstaining from social media does produce tiny effects that are only apparent when looking across massive samples, then those effects might have little practical relevance in the real world.

Perhaps more importantly, the researchers had no way of making sure people were not passively using social media on their abstinence days, scrolling through their Twitter or Instagram feeds without actually posting anything themselves, for example. And while the study indicates that quitting social media may generally be of little psychological benefit, it’s unclear whether certain individuals might get more out of abstaining than others.

Still, the research does suggest that panics linking social media use to poor mental health are overblown. Of course, there may be plenty of other reasons to go cold turkey on social media — but for now, it’s not clear that our psychological well-being is one of them.

–Experimentally manipulating social media abstinence: results of a four-week diary study

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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

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.

Disgust is thought to have evolved to aid in the detection and avoidance of pathogens before they can enter the body. It entails a feeling of revulsion as well as thoughts of potential contamination of the body. And it’s thought that moral disgust developed from this biologically-focused response: faeces and rotten meat (which could harbour disease-causing bacteria) are disgusting, but so are perceived moral transgressions (incest, for example).

Over the past ten years, studies have found that people who are more readily disgusted by a variety of triggers are more likely to be politically conservative. Researchers have suggested that this is because conservatives are more concerned with “purity”-related moral transgressions than liberals, and so are more sensitive to potential “contaminators” within this realm.

To test these ideas, Elad-Strenger and her colleagues initially studied groups of German students. These groups consisted of roughly equal numbers leftists (most liberal), centrists and rightists (most conservative). The participants completed a general disgust sensitivity questionnaire, which assessed how often and how much they felt disgusted in daily life, and were also presented with various potentially disgust-eliciting scenarios. Some of these were designed to be “liberal” disgust-elicitors (scenarios concerning tax evasion, racism, xenophobia and capitalism, for example) while others were potentially more disgusting to conservatives (those referring to homosexuality, the consumption of illegal drugs and a homeless person begging for money, for instance). The participants were asked to rate how disgusted and angry each of these scenarios made them feel.

The team found no relationship between scores on the general disgust scale and political orientation. Neither did the conservatives report more disgust overall than the liberals. However, liberals were more affected by the liberal-disgust scenarios, while conservatives were more disgusted by the conservative-disgust selection (especially those relating to homosexuality). “Taken together, these results challenge the notion that conservatives are generally more disgust-sensitive than liberals,” the researchers note.

A further study of 190 German students explored scenarios involving body-related disgust (for example, seeing dog faeces or seeing someone not washing their hands after going to the bathroom), and also “pathogen disgust” (standing close to someone with body odour, for example). Overall, there was a positive correlation between conservatism and total disgust scores, but this was small. A closer analysis revealed that it was only the scenarios involving bad personal hygiene that triggered more disgust among conservatives, suggesting conservatives aren’t generally more disgusted than liberals, but perhaps experience more disgust in a few specific cases.

In a further study, the team looked at the responses of 202 American participants. The American liberals and conservatives responded in much the same way to the various individual scenarios as the Germans — with liberals more disgusted than conservatives by xenophobia and capitalism, for example, and conservatives more disgusted by homosexuality, for instance.

This study “provides further evidence that the relation between conservatism and disgust sensitivity can be positive, negative or nonsignificant depending on the nature and content of the disgust sensitivity measure,” the researchers write. Overall, their work suggests that claims that conservatives are more easily disgusted stem from an over-generalisation of findings related to specific triggers.

– Is Disgust a “Conservative” Emotion?

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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9 Powerful pieces of expert career advice

In this age of rapid change, plotting a career path isn’t as clear cut as it used to be. Here’s some advice from 9 of the world’s most successful people.

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

By 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.

To explore the idea, Alistair Harvey and Danny Tomlinson recruited 76 students from a particularly apposite place — a university bar. Participants, all of whom had normal or corrected to normal vision, were first shown twenty-one photographs of young white adult male faces. Then five minutes later, they saw a selection of these “old” faces again, amongst a number of previously unseen “new” faces of the same demographic and description.

Some faces were shown in full, while others showed only “external” features such as hair and face shape, or direct “internal” facial features like the eyes and mouth. Participants were asked to identify which photographs showed old faces and which showed new ones, and indicate how confident they were in their identifications on a scale of one to nine.

Surprisingly, full face recognition was not any worse in those who had been drinking alcohol compared to sober participants. But drinkers were more likely to recognise external faces than their internal facial features, and those with greater breath alcohol levels performed worse when it came to these internal faces.

Unfamiliar faces are normally encoded “holistically” — individual features and their relationship to each other are all integrated into a whole memory. But the team suggests that alcohol disrupts this process, thus making memory more feature-based than holistic.

And the finding could have implications for how intoxicated witnesses later identify criminal suspects: the encoding bias towards external features could make witnesses less likely to identify a perpetrator who has changed or disguised their hair, for example — or more likely to falsely identify an innocent line-up filler with similar external features.

How gender impacts this phenomenon is yet to be established: all photos were of men, but women tend to have more diverse hairstyles, so there may be differences in memory of male and female faces, as previous studies with sober participants have suggested. Would more diverse styles and colours of hair make external features more distinctive and therefore easier to remember, for instance?

The study is obviously limited by its design: unrecorded drug consumption may also have impacted participants’ ability to remember faces, and their history and their relationship with alcohol wasn’t examined. How much and how frequently someone drinks could be an additional influence on memory.

But the research does suggest that facial recognition is affected in subtle and often counter-intuitive ways by the consumption of alcohol. When it comes to remembering exactly who you met the night before, this might not seem like too big a deal. But when witnessing a crime, our ability to recall what we saw may not be so insignificant.

– Alcohol myopia and the distracting effects of hair in face recognition

Emily Reynolds (@rey_z) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Using Fidget Spinners May Actually Impede Learning

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.

To examine the effect of fidget spinners on attention, the team asked 98 undergraduates to watch an educational video lecture about the process of baking bread while either using a fidget spinner or not; a further half of those not using a fidget spinner watched the lecture near someone who was. They were then asked to report any lapses in attention, and took a memory test for the material.

If the logic of the marketing held, those playing with fidget spinners should have outperformed those who were not. But in fact they did not report any fewer lapses of attention than participants from the non-spinning condition, and actually performed significantly worse in the memory test (those who were only near others using them didn’t show a drop in performance).

But could this result have been because participants weren’t used to using the toys? In the second experiment, the team recruited participants who had neutral or positive views of fidget-spinners, removing any potential participants who had negative opinions in a pre-study screening.

A total of 48 participants then replicated the first experiment, this time while watching ten minute videos about Hawaiian ruler Kamehameha the Great and Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. Afterwards, they completed a fifteen-item memory test.

Results seemed to suggest that positive attitudes towards fidget spinners had no impact on how distracting they were: again, those in the spinner condition performed worse on the memory test overall than those in the no spinner condition, and reported more lapses of attention.

The team says their findings add to a growing literature on the potentially negative impact of fidget-spinners on attention. Other studies have shown increased attentional impairment due to fidget spinner use — in some cases, this was even true for those with ADHD, a group that the toy is allegedly meant to help.

Many of those involved in the study were using fidget spinners for the first time; results may be different for those who no longer attach any novelty value to the objects and who may be less likely to become distracted by their use. But parts of the second experiment, which specifically focused on those with a positive attitude towards the toys, do seem to suggest that this is not the case.

As Soares and Storm stress in the paper’s conclusion, such findings don’t mean fidget spinners have no worth, nor that they should be completely banned from the classroom. But perhaps ironically for an object often used so mindlessly, it may be worth thinking more carefully about what impact they’re having.

– Putting a negative spin on it: Using a fidget spinner can impair memory for a video lecture

Emily Reynolds (@rey_z) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Waking Dreams And Phantom Kicks: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

In an attempt to tackle the replication crisis, hundreds of psychology labs around the world are collaborating to repeat experiments at a large scale. And now this network, known as the Psychological Science Accelerator, has its first results. Dalmeet Singh Chawla reports on their findings at Undark.

The psychedelic drug DMT produces brain activity that looks like a “waking dream”, reports Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo. After participants received an intravenous injection of the drug, EEG recordings showed a drop in alpha and beta activity — normally seen during wakefulness — and spikes of delta and theta activity, associated with sleep and dreaming.

Positive psychology promises to help people live better, more fulfilling lives — but some say the movement has become almost like a religion. Happiness researcher Joseph Smith explores some of the criticisms at Vox.

“Nature and nurture are traditionally set in opposition to each other. But in truth, the effects of environment and experience often tend to amplify our innate predispositions.” At The Conversation, Kevin Mitchell and Uta Frith explain why we should stop thinking of nature and nurture as “adversaries”.

Many women feel “phantom” fetal kicks long after they’ve given birth, reports Grace Browne at New Scientist. Researchers in Australia found that 40% of women surveyed had experienced these kicks, which continued for around 7 years on average.

After childhood surgery to remove one side of the brain, many patients recover surprisingly well — and now scientists have a better idea why. Researchers found that patients who’d had a hemispherectomy — which is performed to treat rare neurological conditions — showed stronger connectivity within brain networks than controls, writes Knvul Sheikh at The New York Times. The study suggests that these surviving brain regions are compensating for the parts that have been removed.

Finally, if you recoil when you see bubbling batter or an empty wasps’ nest, perhaps you have trypophobia — the fear of clusters of holes and cracks. But is it a “proper” phobia? Or is the experience better described as a manifestation of disgust, or even a “social contagion”? Chrissie Giles has the answers at The Guardian.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Ontology: The tool that helps you survive in the modern world

We explain ontology, the practice of self-observation, and how it can be of benefit to us in an increasingly complex world.

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A Lack Of Sleep Causes Anxiety — But Don’t Worry About It

Man having problems/ insomnia, laying in bed

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.

To investigate this link, Eti Ben Simon and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, ran a series of experiments. First, the team recruited 18 students to come into the lab: once for a full night of shut eye, and again for a night of no sleep. In the evening and the following morning, participants filled in a questionnaire to measure their anxiety levels. And in the morning they also viewed emotionally-charged, aversive videos while the researchers looked at brain activity using functional MRI.

In contrast to a night of sleep, after the all-nighter scans revealed reduced activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), typically responsible for emotional regulation, whereas deeper emotional centres of the limbic system, such as the amygdala, appeared hyperactive. That, suggests senior author Matthew Walker, is akin to the brain pressing “heavy on the emotional accelerator pedal, without enough brake”.

Quite remarkably, half of these sleep-deprived students reported anxiety scores that would normally signal a clinical anxiety disorder. In fact, these scores were directly related to changes in brain activity: those with the steepest drop in mPFC activity reported the greatest spike in anxiety.

How was sleep protecting against these changes? In the video-watching session where participants slept beforehand, those who had managed more slow-wave sleep had greater activity in the mPFC, and less in the limbic system. It thus appears that deep sleep had restored the brain’s prefrontal capacity to regulate emotions and prevent the escalation of anxiety.

It doesn’t end there. The team also conducted an online study in which 154 people of all ages recorded their sleep and anxiety levels over four days. Respondents’ data showed that the quality of sleep predicted anxiety levels the following day, with even subtle disruptions during sleep elevating feelings of anxiety.

Given the high prevalence of poor sleep and anxiety disorders in much of the Western world, understanding the mechanisms that link the two is important. By implication the authors support strategies to improve sleep quality in anxious and sleep deprived populations, and suggest sleep could be an overlooked “non-pharmacological intervention for anxiety”. It’s certainly an admirable agenda.

But the knowledge that a lack of sleep worsens anxiety is hardly soporific. Indeed, having read Walker’s eye-opening book Why We Sleep, by passing it to my mother I had unknowingly triggered her own worries about sleep. Regrettably, she now finds it more difficult.

So could it be that, in some cases, research like this inadvertently exacerbates the problems scientists set out to resolve? Reviews suggest that worrying about sleep can do more harm than a lack of sleep itself — so it’s important to consider how we communicate these sorts of findings. As a start, it might be wise to bear in mind the bigger picture: sometimes poor sleep is inevitable and does not necessarily signal disaster. It’s also worth remembering that there are individual differences that buffer against the negative effects of sleep deprivation, while others even have a genetic propensity to need less sleep.

However, these arguments shouldn’t let people, or societies, off the hook. Good sleep serves myriad vital functions, not least keeping anxiety at bay. And future research will doubtless continue to highlight the need to teach people about healthy sleep. It just might also be important to figure out how best to do so.

– Overanxious and underslept

Post written by Freddy Parker for the BPS Research Digest. Freddy is a long-standing reader of the Research Digest and student at the University of Bath, studying for his final undergraduate year in Psychology.

At Research Digest we’re proud to showcase the expertise and writing talent of our community. Click here for more about our guest posts.

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Simply Imagining Other People Can Change Our Own Sense Of Self

By Emma Young

“The sense of self is a hallmark of human experience. Each of us maintains a constellation of personal memories and personality traits that collectively define ‘who we really are'”.

So begins a new paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, which reveals that who you “are” can easily be manipulated. Just imagining somebody else can alter all kinds of aspects of how you see yourself, even including your personality and memories.

Meghan Meyer at Dartmouth College and colleagues first asked 185 adults to recall a series of personal memories — a time they received good news or helped a friend in need, for example — and rate how they had felt during that event (on a scale ranging from completely negative to completely positive). Using the same scale, participants were prompted to imagine how others would have felt in reaction to the same events: both an “average American” and also a genuine friend who was similar to them in in personality, temperament, major likes and dislikes, beliefs and values.

The participants were then given the original prompts again and asked to rate for a second time their own feelings at the time of the events. The team found these ratings had changed, to become closer to each participant’s assessments of how the others would feel. This effect was particularly strong when the other person was more similar to them — a friend, rather than an “average American”.

For the next study, a fresh group of participants rated themselves on 60 character traits (such as “charming” and “unreliable”), then rated both a friend who was similar to them and also an actual other person — in this case, Walter Cronkite, a former US news anchor — on a subset of 20 of these traits. Next, they rated themselves again. As in the previous study, the participants’ self-ratings changed, becoming closer to those for their friend in particular.

In a second, remarkable part to this study, a very similar result was found when people were asked to imagine the characteristics of something radically different to themselves: the Empire State Building. The participants first rated themselves on various physical traits, such as being “clean” and “asymmetrical”, and then rated a similar friend and the Empire State Building. Finally, they rated themselves again — and as before, their own ratings had become more similar to those given for the two targets (and especially the friend). The team then went on to find that these “simulation-induced” changes in self-knowledge can still be in place 24 hours on.

How might thinking about other people, or even buildings, reshape your own self-knowledge? The researchers suspect that it happens because when you imagine how someone else looks or would feel and act in a given situation, you’re simultaneously retrieving memories about how you look and how you have felt and behaved in such situations in the past. When your own memories are retrieved, they become vulnerable to modification, which means those imagined reactions can influence your own real ones.

For example, in thinking about how a friend might respond to being dumped, you may find yourself thinking, “Claire tends to be pretty thick-skinned”. When that knowledge and your relevant self-knowledge (eg. “I was embarrassed when I got dumped last year”) are retrieved simultaneously, considering your friend’s predicted response can tweak your own pre-existing self-knowledge. You might then recollect being less embarrassed about your own experience.

The effect might be especially potent when you’re considering someone who is similar (rather than different) to you, because thinking about such a person should trigger more self-related memories, which would then be vulnerable to being altered, the researchers suggest.

So far, the researchers have only checked whether the changes they observed were still in place after a day. It’s not clear yet how long they might last, or whether they would result in any meaningful differences in behaviour.

But the work does suggest that self-knowledge is just as susceptible to misinformation effects as other types of knowledge, the researchers conclude, adding: “Such findings offer a qualification to the argument that the self is ‘special’.”

– Simulating other people changes the self

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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