Minibrains And Twitter Bots: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

Psychologists are increasingly turning to Twitter and other social networking sites to learn about human behaviour — but what happens when the accounts they’re studying don’t really belong to people at all? At Nature, Heidi Ledford explores how researchers are dealing with the problem of ever-more sophisticated bots.

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“Minibrains” — lab-grown brain organoids — differ from human brains in fundamental ways, researchers have found. The cells in the lab-grown brain tissue seem to be undernourished and do not mature into the specific subtypes present in human brains, reports Jon Hamilton for NPR. The team hopes that their findings will help improve minibrain models for future research.

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How could social media be redesigned to prevent people feeling FOMO, the fear of missing out? Researchers have some suggestions over at The Conversation, including restricting the number of notifications people receive and allowing users to indicate to others that they don’t always respond to comments.

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If you could sacrifice one person to save the lives of five others, would you do it? The answer might depend on where you’re from, writes Sigal Samuel at Vox. People’s answers to the classic trolley problem seem to depend on the “relational mobility” of their society: how easy it is for a person to develop new relationships. In America, for example — where relational mobility is high — people are more likely to say they would choose to sacrifice the single individual than in Japan, where relational mobility is lower.

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Want to make a good first impression? Then look no further than this story in BBC Future, in which William Park explores the psychology of handshakes.

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Scientists have created a high-resolution map of a portion of fruit fly brain, consisting of 25,000 neurons. The 3D model took two years to put together, reports Molly Glick at Popular Science — and the result is quite beautiful.

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And if that’s not enough neuroscience for you, here’s one more: at Discover, Neuroskeptic reports on a case study of a rat whose brain was made up mainly of empty space filled with fluid — but which suffered no ill-health and otherwise behaved normally.  “This rare case can be viewed as one of nature’s miracles providing the unique opportunity to examine the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity and reorganization necessary for survival,” the researchers write in their paper.

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

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Public Wouldn’t Trust Companies To Scan Social Media Posts For Signs Of Depression, Survey Finds

By guest blogger Jack Barton

Since the exposure of Cambridge Analytica in 2018 it is no longer surprising that tech giants are using our information in ways we may not be explicitly aware of. Companies such as Facebook are already using computer algorithms to identify individuals expressing thoughts of suicide and provide targeted support, such as displaying information about mental health services or even contacting first responders.

However, the visibility of these features is poor at best — and it remains unclear if the public even wants them in the first place. Now a study in JMIR Mental Health has asked whether the general public would be happy for tech companies to use their social media posts to look for signs of depression. The study found that although the public sees the benefit of using algorithms to identify at-risk individuals, privacy concerns still surround the use of this technology.

Dr Elizabeth Ford at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and her colleagues surveyed participants (recruited via mental health charities and many of whom reported depressive symptoms) on their social media use and mental health. They then asked participants about their opinions on a hypothetical situation in which Facebook analysed their social media information to screen for depression, in order to provide targeted mental health care advice or information from charities like the Samaritans.

Out of 183 people who completed the survey, just over a fifth felt that their social media activity would highlight their low moods, and only 3% felt the specific content of these posts would betray how they were feeling.

Participants tended to acknowledge the potential positives of Facebook classifying our mental health, such as widening access to health services. But, overall, they also tended to disagree that the risks to privacy were worth the potential benefits. And although 60% supported the idea of automated algorithms providing healthcare information to users potentially experiencing depression, only 15% were happy for this to occur without their explicit consent.

Participants also had the chance to note down the benefits and risks they saw in Facebook analysing their posts. On the one hand, participants felt that this could improve access to mental health services through targeted advertising. On the other, they voiced concerns that companies tracking social media content in this way could be a risk to online privacy and security (for example, “with the number of data leaks we have by large tech companies, this is a risk too far for many people”). Respondents also thought that such algorithms may not even be particularly accurate and could lead to over-diagnosis. The stigma of being falsely identified as being distressed was a big concern.

Overall, the study showed that the public understood the potential benefits of analysing social media posts to detect and intervene for depression — but believed concerns around individual privacy outweighed these positives. It’s important to note that this study was conducted at the same time as Cambridge Analytica were exposed, and the survey responses may have been influenced by this, as one participant’s quote suggests: “In light of recent revelations about the questionable ethics of Facebook I would find it extremely disturbing if they were using my data”. Still, it’s clear that public trust in tech giants as gatekeepers of our personal data is low, and even campaigns championed by trusted mental health charities have been met with considerable backlash when people’s privacy was intruded upon.

Moreover, it could be argued that analysing the public’s data for signs of depression or suicidal ideation is premature. There are concerns about the scientific rigour of the data used to support algorithms to predict mental health difficulties. For a start, informed consent is notably absent for “participants” online. Moreover, the unwillingness of tech companies to share their algorithms makes it hard for independent scientists to show that said algorithms are accurately detecting mental health difficulties. Some researchers have also raised questions about whether the content of social media posts is actually predictive of emotion.

For now, it seems that privacy is paramount to a public who are eager to post content online but who also, understandably, want to know how this information is being used. Until trust can be re-built by large tech companies such as Facebook, their attempts to intervene in our lives will likely have to be limited to targeted ads for those cat socks you mentioned once to your friend.

– Public Opinions on Using Social Media Content to Identify Users With Depression and Target Mental Health Care Advertising: Mixed Methods Survey

Post written by Dr Jack Barton (@Jack_bartonUK) for BPS Research Digest. Jack is a freelance science writer based in Manchester, UK, whose research focuses on understanding the link between sleep and mental health.

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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Researchers Asked Older Adults About The Strategies They Use For Combatting Loneliness. Here’s What They Said

By Emily Reynolds

In an ever-more connected world, it would be easy to assume that loneliness was on its way out — after all, we now have unlimited opportunity to communicate with almost anyone we want at any time we please.

But, in fact, it’s still rife: according to the Campaign To End Loneliness, over nine million people in the UK describe themselves as “always or often lonely”. Age has an impact here, too: an Age UK report suggested that the number of over-50s experiencing loneliness will reach two million by 2025 — a 49% increase from 2016.

And with researchers suggesting that loneliness can be seen as a disease that changes the brain’s structure and function, this is a significant public health issue, too. You are more likely to have high blood pressure, depression and even face an early death if you’re lonely, so finding strategies with which to combat the experience is vital.

New research in Aging & Mental Health by Alejandra Morlett Paredes from the University of California, San Diego and colleagues may have some tentative answers. The team interviewed 30 adults aged between 65 and 92, all of whom lived in a senior housing community in San Diego. The community is busy: there are nearly 300 residential units, as well as a tennis court, small golf course and allotment plots. Activities like quilting and sewing sessions, card games, and theatre performances are frequently held for residents.

First, residents were asked to complete a quantitative loneliness assessment. The word “lonely” is not used explicitly in the test; rather, participants were asked to rate how frequently they felt in tune with others around them or how often they felt left out, on a scale of one to four.

They were then interviewed by the team about their experiences of loneliness. Four primary areas were explored: whether participants felt lonely, and how they’d describe those feelings; why they think others feel lonely; how they feel ageing plays a role in loneliness; and what strategies they have for combatting feeling isolated.

Ageing, as you might expect, had a big impact on participants’ feelings of loneliness. The deaths of partners and loved ones was particularly difficult, while participants also commented on how loss of mobility restricted their social activities. Social skills were also identified as a risk factor: one participant noted that those without strong social skills may be more likely to suffer.

Emotionally, loneliness was (unsurprisingly) connected to feelings of emptiness, sadness and lack of meaning. One participant described herself as feeling “lost… and not having control, and sometimes it can lead you to not be able to make decisions and then it just gets worse”, whilst another described loneliness as “the feeling of nothing”.

But many participants also commented on strategies they used to protect against loneliness. Though ageing was a risk factor, acceptance of ageing had more positive outcomes. As one participant put it: “I used to mountain climb… If I can’t walk anymore, I’ll crawl. You have to learn how to be realistic and not brood about it. I know I’m getting older, but I consider life a transition.” Compassion was also useful: being proactive about helping others, for example, helped some participants prevent being lonely.

Spirituality also emerged as a potentially protective trait: for some older people, faith helped them get through the losses of loved ones, and attending religious ceremonies within the community also provided them with strong social connections.

Perhaps most useful on a practical level were participants’ thoughts on environments that facilitate social interaction. Numerous residents mentioned the activities and opportunities for socialising offered by their community — perhaps a good insight into the kind of social structures that need to be developed and embedded within communities to help older people connect with others.

Participants were largely middle or upper-middle class, and the vast majority were white, which means these findings may not bear out across different socioeconomic groups. Those experiencing poverty or racism, or who don’t live in similar assisted living communities, are unlikely to have the same experiences

But working on both structural changes and learning about protective psychological factors may be a crucial weapon in the fight against loneliness.

– Qualitative study of loneliness in a senior housing community: the importance of wisdom and other coping strategies

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

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How to develop healthy self-esteem in children – SACAP

Every parent wants to prepare their child adequately for the world ahead, but the question of how to develop self-esteem in a child does not have a straightforward answer. All children have different requirements as their personalities develop.

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Episode 19: Should We Worry About Screen Time?

This is Episode 19 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here.

 

Do we worry too much about screen time? The issue of screen use by children and teenagers is rarely out of the headlines, and institutions including the World Health Organization have recommended specific limits on screen time for the youngest age groups. But what does the science actually say about the effects of screen time?

To find out, our presenter Ella Rhodes talks to Dr Amy Orben, Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and winner of the 2019 BPS award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, who has explored the psychological effects of screen time in her research. 

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Episode credits: Presented and produced by Ella Rhodes, journalist for The Psychologist, with help from the Research Digest and Psychologist teams. Mixing and editing by Jeff Knowler. PsychCrunch theme music by Catherine Loveday and Jeff Knowler; additional music by Ketsa. Artwork by Tim Grimshaw.

Background resources for this episode: 

Screen Time, Laptop Bans, and the Fears that Shape the Use of Technology for Learning, a paper by Dr Torrey Trust in the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, is free to access thanks to our sponsors Routledge Psychology.

The work by Amy Orben and her colleagues discussed in this episode includes:

• The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use
• Screens, Teens, and Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From Three Time-Use-Diary Studies
• How Much Is Too Much? Examining the Relationship Between Digital Screen Engagement and Psychosocial Functioning in a Confirmatory Cohort Study
• Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction

Here are the WHO guidelines on screen time mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.

Both The Psychologist and Research Digest have a number of articles on screen time and media effects, including:

The Psychologist Presents… Screen time debunked
A transcript of Professor Andrew Przybylski’s session with editor Jon Sutton at Latitude Festival in summer 2019.

Seeing screen time differently
Jon Sutton reports from a one-day event on research, policy and communication in a digital era, held out the Wellcome Collection in London in 2018.

‘There are wolves in the forest…’
Professor Andrew Przybylski picks three myths around screen time – and how science, and some common sense, can help.

What is actually behind the screen?
Ella Rhodes reports on last year’s parliamentary report from the Science and Technology Committee.

‘Games have helped me a lot throughout my life’
Annie Brookman-Byrne interviews Dr Pete Etchells, Reader in Psychology and Science Communication at Bath Spa University, about his book Lost in a Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do For Us.

Amy Orben honoured
Dr Orben wins the British Psychological Society’s Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research.

Link Between Teens’ Time On Digital Devices And Lower Wellbeing Is “Too Small To Merit Substantial Scientific Discussion”

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

These Violent Delights Don’t Have Violent Ends: Study Finds No link Between Violent Video Games And Teen Aggression

Hard-core players of violent video games do not have emotionally blunted brains

Past PsychCrunch episodes:

Episode one: Dating and Attraction
Episode two: Breaking Bad Habits
Episode three: How to Win an Argument
Episode four: The Psychology of Gift Giving
Episode five: How To Learn a New Language
Episode six: How To Be Sarcastic 
Episode seven: Use Psychology To Compete Like an Olympian.
Episode eight: Can We Trust Psychological Studies?
Episode nine: How To Get The Best From Your Team
Episode ten: How To Stop Procrastinating
Episode eleven: How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Episode twelve: How To Be Funnier
Episode thirteen: How to Study and Learn More Effectively
Episode fourteen: Psychological Tricks To Make Your Cooking Taste Better
Episode fifteen: Is Mindfulness A Panacea Or Overhyped And Potentially Problematic?
Bonus episode (sixteen): What’s It Like To Have No Mind’s Eye?
Episode seventeen: How To Make Running Less Painful And More Fun
Episode eighteen: How To Boost Your Creativity

PsychCrunch is sponsored by Routledge Psychology.

Routledge interviewed PsychCrunch presenter Christian Jarrett about the aims of the podcast and engaging with the public about psychology research.

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Cold Days Can Make Us Long For Social Contact — But Warming Up Our Bodies Eliminates This Desire

By Emma Young

From our earliest moments, our awareness of being physically close to someone else is tied up with perceptions of actual warmth. It’s been suggested that this relationship becomes deeply ingrained, with temperature in turn affecting our social perceptions on into adulthood. However, some of the most-publicised results in this field have failed to replicate, leading critics to query whether the relationship really exists.

Now a new paper, published in Social Psychology, provides an apparently compelling explanation for at least some inconsistencies in the results, and supports the idea that our temperature does indeed affect our social judgements.

An earlier study found, for example, that lonelier people take warmer, more frequent baths, presumably to alleviate their loneliness. But the results of replications of this work were mixed — some supported the original findings, while others didn’t.

Adam Fay at the State University of New York and Jon Maner at Florida State University realised that neither the original temperature/social feelings studies, nor the replications, considered the ambient temperature when the research was done. In theory, though, this might affect the results.

So Fay and Maner ran their experiment on days that ranged from 8°C all the way to 28°C, and noted this temperature each time. A pair of research assistants standing in busy areas of a university campus recruited a total of 78 participants for the study, which was ostensibly to test attitudes to a heated back wrap. After the battery-powered wrap was strapped around a participant’s waist, they were asked about the pleasantness of the product, but then also how likely they were, over the next week, to engage in various social behaviours, such as catching up with an old friend or making a phone call to someone they cared about. For some of the participants, the strap wasn’t turned on. For others, it was, and it produced a mild heat.

Asking people how likely they think they are to do something in the future isn’t a great way to explore actual future behaviour. But that wasn’t the point of this study. The researchers just wanted to know whether there was an interplay between the ambient temperature and the heat or absence of heat from the back wrap on the participants’ answers — and there was.

When the back wrap was not switched on, people reported a greater intention to socialise over the next week when questioned on colder days, compared with warmer days. This could be seen as consistent with the idea that feeling cold physically is also perceived as feeling “colder” socially, driving a desire for more contact with other people. When the back wrap was switched on, however, this effect was eliminated, further supporting the link.

The new findings “suggest that seemingly subtle changes in temperature can have important implications for the psychology of social affiliation, and such findings apply in real-world contexts outside the laboratory,” the researchers write.

– Interactive effects of tactile warmth and ambient temperature on the search for social affiliation

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

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WEIRD Studies And Psychedelic Experiences: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

Psychologists have long recognised that the field has a bias towards studying people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies. But how much is actually being done to correct this bias? Not enough, according to the experts interviewed by Michael Schulson in a story for Undark.

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This week the government announced plans to use lie-detector tests with convicted terrorists who have been released from prison. There’s just one problem, reports Hannah Devlin in The Guardian — they don’t work. While polygraphs can reveal when someone is physiologically aroused — when they’re stressed, for example — research has shown that they do not provide a reliable indication that someone is lying.

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Procrastination isn’t a failure of time management — it’s an issue with managing our emotions, writes Christian Jarrett at BBC Worklife. Researchers have found that we procrastinate because there is something aversive about the task we should be working on (perhaps it’s just boring, for example), so by doing something else we get a fleeting boost to our mood — though it’s clearly not a useful long-term strategy.

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The latest findings of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study have been published. The survey of more than 3,000 11-, 13- and 15-year olds in England — part of a larger international collaboration run by the World Health Organization — found that most children reported having high life satisfaction. But there were also some worrying trends, the authors write in The Conversation: more than a third reported feeling low at least once a week, while 22% appeared to experience a high level of emotional problems.

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Researchers have tested the effects of psychedelic drugs “in the wild” by going around music festivals and asking attendees about their experiences. The team found that those who had recently taken psychedelic substances showed an increase in mood, which seemed to be the result of feeling a greater sense of connectedness with others, and of “transformational experiences” brought on by the drugs, reports Ali Pattillo at Inverse.

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A 1990 paper by Hans Eysenck on the role of “attitudes to achievement” in sporting success has been retracted, Retraction Watch reports. The paper was one of many determined to be “unsafe” in an investigation into Eysenck’s work by Kings College London. These included several long-criticised studies that claimed there is a strong link between personality and cancer risk.

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The natural world contains a disturbingly large number of parasitic organisms that take over their hosts’ minds — and that number has just got a little bigger. At Discover, Leslie Nemo reports that researchers have found 15 new species of mind-controlling Polysphincta wasps, the larvae of which parasitize spiders. Before they eat their victims, these larvae force the spiders to spin a cocoon for them so that they can pupate.

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

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Most Of Us Think We’re More Environmentally Friendly Than Our Peers

By Emily Reynolds

How environmentally friendly am I really? It’s a question we ask ourselves more and more frequently as the climate emergency remains firmly at the top of the political agenda. So we dutifully eschew single-use purchases, lug our tote bags to the supermarket instead of using plastic bags, and take part in Veganuary, safe in the knowledge we’re doing our bit.

But, as it turns out, we may be overestimating how well we’re actually doing at being green. According to new research published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, most of us tend to magnify our own environmental efforts, believing we’re doing more than others even when that isn’t the case. The finding is the latest in a number of studies to demonstrate the “better-than-average” effect: we also believe we are more intelligent than others, for example, and that we work harder.

To examine self-image and environmentalism, author Magnus Bergquist from the University of Gothenburg first asked 2,635 Swedes one question: compared to other Swedes, how often/how much do you engage in pro-environmental behaviours? Participants responded via a 7 point scale, running from 1 (much less than others) to 7 (much more than others).

In a second study, 513 participants located in the UK, India and the United States were asked the same question, rating themselves compared to their own compatriots and their friends. In addition, Indian participants were given an open-ended question about the kinds of pro-environmental behaviour they performed, whilst those in the UK and US were asked how frequently they engaged in 10 predefined behaviours (turning the tap off whilst brushing teeth, for example, or turning lights off when leaving a room).

Both studies suggested that most people perceive themselves to be more pro-environmental than others. In the first study, 51.3% of Swedish participants felt they were more green than others; only 8.6% felt they were below average. The second bore similar results: 75.3% of the total sample felt they were above average (85.7% in India, 72% in the UK, and 63.7% in the US).

Participants also felt that they were better than average when it came to most of the individual behaviours in the survey — but these results might not hold across all pro-environmental behaviours. Most of those listed in survey questions were easy — putting something in the recycling bin, for example, or turning off lights. More difficult pro-environmental behaviour — perhaps making a more fundamental life change like completely overhauling a diet — may not provoke such high self-opinion. Bergquist points to research that suggests people think of themselves as worse than average when tasks appear difficult: one study showed 70% of people felt they could win a trivia contest with easy questions, whilst only 6% felt they could win when things were more tricky.

There was some good news, though. In a final study, Bergquist didn’t find much evidence that believing you are better-than-average prevents you from engaging in pro-environmental behaviours — so the effect may be more psychological than it is practical.

Finding out how we feel about more profound behavioural change could be interesting, as could a more comprehensive study into the impact of under- and overestimation of ability on the way we act — and may also prove to be a good avenue through which to stimulate positive, pro-environmental behaviour.

– Most People Think They Are More Pro-Environmental than Others: A Demonstration of the Better-than-Average Effect in Perceived Pro-Environmental Behavioral Engagement

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

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