Video Games And Computer-Like Brains: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

The idea that the brain operates like a computer is the latest in a long line of metaphors that scientists have used to try and understand how the organ works. But could that comparison actually be hindering our understanding? In a longread in The Guardian, Matthew Cobb explores the limits of the brain-as-computer metaphor.

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What does it mean to “recover” from a mental illness? Although common scales used to measure recovery can determine whether someone’s symptoms have improved, research suggests that they’re not that great at gauging more general improvement in people’s everyday lives, writes Benedict Carey at The New York Times.

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More on the problem of AI emotion recognition this week, with a feature by Douglas Heaven at Nature. Psychologists argue over whether particular emotional expressions are universal, and debate how much can be read into someone’s internal state from their face alone. But there’s one thing that many agree on: there are still big question marks around the use of automated algorithms to detect people’s emotions.

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Automated surveillance and facial recognition may also affect the way we think about ourselves. When people are observed, they see themselves “as if under a magnifying glass”, writes Janina Steinmetz at The Conversation. People who are observed by cameras while eating feel like they have consumed larger portions, for instance, while people doing tests in front of others think they make more mistakes than unobserved test-takers. Cameras are becoming more and more common in public spaces,  Steinmetz writes,  but “we are only beginning to understand some of the psychological consequences of increased observation”.

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A new study has found that the brain processes the lyrics and the melody of songs in opposite hemispheres, reports Jon Hamilton for NPR.  Researchers asked participants listen to a capella songs while having their brains scanned. Some songs were manipulated to remove frequency information, so that the melody was not recognisable but the speech remained; others were changed to remove information about the way sounds changed over time, so that the melody remained but the speech was no longer recognisable. The team found that speech was processed in the left auditory cortex and melody in the right.

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What does the replication crisis mean for psychotherapy? At Aeon, Alexander Williams and John Sakaluk argue that the evidence behind many so-called “empirically supported treatments” may not be as strong as we have thought.

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Finally, when you play video games, do you invert the Y-axis? That is, when you push the stick on a controller up, do you expect your character’s head to go up or down? Players have long been divided into two camps — and psychology might be able to help explain why, writes Keith Stuart at The Guardian.

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

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Existentialism in education: encouraging students to embrace free will

Existentialism proposes that life has no predefined purpose, while education is designed to provide a sense of purpose. Here’s how...

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Liberals And Conservatives Feel Moral Outrage In Different Parts Of The Body — But There’s Also A Lot Of Overlap

By Emily Reynolds

There are lots of differences between those who express opposing political affiliations — and they may not just be ideological. Liberals and conservatives have different shopping habits, for instance, with one series of studies finding that liberals preferred products that made them feel unique, whilst conservatives picked brands that made them feel better than others. They even view health risks differently when they’re choosing what to eat.

But could there also be physiological differences between liberals and conservatives? Some evidence seems to suggest this might be the case, though as we reported earlier this month past findings, such as differences in physiological responses to fear, may not be as solid as previously thought. However, new research in Psychological Science has found that people of different political affiliations may differ in another way: where in the body they feel emotions relating to moral concerns.

It’s well established that we feel particular emotions in the body — butterflies in the stomach when we’re nervous or excited, a racing pulse or flushed cheeks when we get angry. But these physical reactions are not uniform: where one person might feel disappointment in their chest, another may feel it in their stomach.

To examine how political ideology impacts such physiological differences, Mohammad Atari and a team from the University of Southern California asked 596 participants to read a piece of writing about a violation of a particular moral foundation. Participants were assigned to either read about a violation of morals relating to care, fairness, loyalty, authority, or purity. For example, one such vignette in the care condition read “You see a woman clearly avoiding sitting next to an obese woman on the bus” or, for the purity condition, the rather more surreal statement “You see an employee at a morgue eating a pepperoni pizza off of a dead body”.

Participants rated how morally wrong they felt the action described was, and also rated the strength of their emotional response. Then, presented with a map of the body, they were asked to colour in body regions they felt had become more activated (activity becoming stronger or faster) or deactivated (activity becoming weaker or slower).

Participants were also given a political orientation score based on how they rated their affiliation with the Republican or Democratic parties as well as their self-reported conservatism on a scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative”.

The results from this, and a second study aimed at replicating findings, suggest that liberals and conservatives do indeed feel moral outrage in different areas of their bodies — though in fairly concentrated areas. Liberals, for example, appeared to feel violations of “purity” in their groin area, whilst conservatives felt it in their stomach and heads; liberals were also more likely than conservatives to feel violations of “care” in their heart. This image shows the maps for each kind of moral concern:

Maps showing areas of the body where activation increased (red/yellow) and decreased (blue/green) to moral violations. Via Atari et al (2020)

These differences may not be as strong as they appear at first glance, however: activation was not as disparate as it might have been. Violations of “care” were felt largely in the head for both groups, “authority” in the head and chest for both, and “loyalty” in the same areas, for instance.      

The new study also comes after recent research that has seemed to debunk many claims of physiological differences between liberals and conservatives: one study found that conservatives don’t in fact experience any more disgust than liberals, while another found that physiological differences in fear response between those with different ideologies had been overstated.

This work doesn’t quite claim the opposite — as the authors note, “there are more commonalities than differences”. And it also relies on people’s self-reported perceptions, rather than actual measures of physiological change in the body. But those differences could be significant, and may be worth a further, closer look.

– Body Maps of Moral Concerns

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

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Bullies And Their Victims Show Different Patterns Of Brain Activity To Emotional Faces

By Emma Young

An estimated one quarter to one half of adolescents will at some point either be a victim of bullying, or engage in it — or both. Whether you’re on the receiving end, or dealing it out, there are all kinds of associated negative implications for mental health and well-being, including distress, depression and anxiety.  “This highlights an important need to understand the predictors of bullying and victimisation, in order to identify ways to reduce these experiences in adolescents,” write the researchers behind a new study, published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. And this research has revealed one such factor: both bullies and victims show differences in the brain’s response to angry and fearful faces.

Johnna Swartz at the University of California, Davis and her colleagues studied 49 adolescents, aged 12 to 15 years old, who were recruited from the local community. They first reported on their experiences of “relational bullying” (either as bully or victim) over the past 12 months. This is a form of non-physical bullying that involves damaging an individual’s social standing and relationships. It might entail excluding a child from social activities — like a party or a group chatting at a lunch table — or spreading gossip or rumours about them. Next, the participants were shown a series of images of faces chosen to signal fear, anger or happiness while their brains were scanned using fMRI.

The team found clear relationships between patterns of activity in the amygdala (a region of the brain involved in detecting threats) and scores on the relational bullying questionnaire.

A combination of above-average amygdala activity to angry faces and low activity to fearful faces was associated with engaging in more bullying behaviour. Meanwhile, greater amygdala responsiveness to angry faces and/or higher responsiveness to fearful faces was linked to more experiences of being a victim of this type of bullying. The scans also suggested that increased activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) in response to fearful faces was associated with less bullying behaviour.

“These results suggest that relational bullying and victimization are related to different patterns of neural activity to angry and fearful faces, which might help in understanding how patterns of social information processing predict these experiences,” the researchers write.

Exactly how those patterns may play out is not yet clear, but the researchers make some suggestions. When it comes to bullying behaviour, adolescents with a strong amygdala response to angry faces may be biased towards interpreting peers in ambiguous social situations as being hostile, they suggest. Low reactivity to fearful faces, meanwhile, may relate to a decreased ability to perceive or process someone else’s distress, which could lead to reduced empathy or perspective-taking. This combination might then make an individual more prone to bullying.

Meanwhile, adolescents with stronger responses to either fearful or angry faces, or both, may be more likely to avoid their peers, leading to increased rejection and raising the chances of victimisation, the researchers suggest.

What about the rACC findings? This region is involved in integrating social and emotional information. So perhaps, Swartz and her team speculate, heightened activity in response to fearful faces could reflect further processing of someone else’s distress, which may promote empathy, and reduce the likelihood of bullying.

The study does have several limitations. The sample size was relatively small. In fact, the results should be considered preliminary until they are replicated in a bigger sample, the researchers note. Also, as they didn’t measure levels of empathy, for example, the proposed explanations for the patterns in the data will need to be investigated in future studies. Then there’s the fact that this was a cross-sectional study. Perhaps differences in patterns of amygdala activity resulted from experiences of bullying or being bullied

More work is clearly needed to explore these questions. But given the scale of the problem, there’s an urgent need for such work. As the researchers themselves argue, “If these effects are replicated and extended to longitudinal research in the future, they will help to elucidate how biased patterns of social and emotional processing may increase risk for bullying and victimization in adolescents and could lead to more tailored intervention approaches.”

– Amygdala activity to angry and fearful faces relates to bullying and victimization in adolescents 

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

 

 

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People Who Watch More TV Find Thinner Women More Attractive, Even In Remote Nicaraguan Communities

By Emma Young

What makes for an attractive female body? Whatever your views on this, across cultures, and socioeconomic groups in particular, there are some differences in opinion.

Western media, with its promotion of “thin ideals”, has been cited as an influence on attitudes. But the only way to really explore this is to study groups of people who are very similar, except that some have been exposed to Western media, while others have not. Needless to say, this isn’t easy. However, a team led by Lynda Boothroyd at the University of Durham has now published just such a set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their data suggests that TV exposure does indeed drive both men and women towards finding thinner female bodies more attractive.

The team studied residents of seven villages in the remote South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua. At the time of the research, these people had no access to magazines and, generally, no access to the internet. Over the past decade, the government has, though, gradually extended the electricity grid through villages in the area, making TV-viewing possible.

These people are mostly subsistence farmers and fishermen, with relatively poor food security. It has been suggested that people in such communities tend to find fleshier people more attractive — so if Western TV does have an influence, this would be a good spot to look for it.

For a first cross-sectional study, the researchers compared attitudes of people with regular TV access (Latin American soap operas, which feature thin, curvy actresses, and Hollywood movies were both popular genres) versus those who didn’t yet have it. A total of 314 men and women aged 15 to 79 gave basic details about themselves and rated the attractiveness of 50 colour photographs of women (with their faces blacked out) with Body Mass Indices that ranged from 11 to 42. (A healthy BMI is typically between 18.5 and 25.)

Two factors emerged as being associated with a preference for thinner bodies. One was a higher level of education — and this, the researchers note, implies that someone has spent time studying in a large town, which could have given them earlier access to Western media. The other was TV exposure. Though different ethnic groups had slightly different opinions, when TV viewers vs non-TV viewers of the same ethnicity were compared, the difference in the “ideal” BMI could be at least 5 points. For one group, it was about 22 among the regular TV-watchers vs 27-28 among those who had not been exposed to TV, or who had very little access to it.

The researchers also wanted to explore whether people who didn’t have access to TV and then gained it shifted towards preferring thinner bodies. For various reasons, this proved tricky. But for one village, it was possible to gather data on 31 individuals. The analysis did indeed suggest that with TV came a move towards finding a thinner female body most attractive.

For a final study, the researchers tried to mimic the immediate impact of TV exposure. They did this by showing villagers a series of photographs of either thin or plus-sized fashion models. After just 15 minutes of viewing these images, the participants changed their perceptions of the ideal female body size in the direction of the images they had just seen.

“These data strongly support the proposal that visual culture may be a critical contributory factor in the development of attraction in modern humans,” the researchers write.

There could be other implications of the work, too. The data “strongly suggests visual media may be pushing preferences below the healthy optimum in nutritionally vulnerable populations such as ours,” the researchers write. The most favoured BMI in one of the TV-watching villages was 22.5, for instance: if a woman with that BMI lost a stone of weight during a bad fish season, she would shift to 19.3. That’s still within the healthy BMI range, but only just.

And there’s another risk: exposure to Western body ideals and a more Western-style lifestyle (including a higher-calorie diet) often go hand in hand, making a thin figure even harder to attain — and promoting body dissatisfaction.

However, the work does also suggest a route to changing unhealthy body ideals: as sheer exposure seems to be so influential, altering the images people see could change perceptions in a healthier direction, too.

– Television consumption drives perceptions of female body attractiveness in a population undergoing technological transition.

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

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Knowing When A Task Is Going To End Makes Us Better At It

By Emily Reynolds

Deadlines, though stressful, can be a pretty good motivator. Knowing you have to submit some work by a particular date can make it easier to get things done; you simply have to get on with it. This also goes for non-professional deadlines — trying to get in shape by the time you run a specific race, for example, can be a lot more motivating than a more vague and nebulous desire to get fit.

But why is this the case? Maayan Katzir and colleagues at Tel Aviv University have investigated the phenomenon in a new paper, recently published in Cognition — and they suggest it may be down to how we conserve and use effort.

In an initial experiment, 64 undergraduate students were asked to perform a complex task, completing a series of trials in which they had to switch between four different activities: two Stroop tasks, in which participants were asked to name colours or read words, and two spatial tasks, in which they had to indicate the direction of arrows. In each trial, they also had to ignore distracting stimuli. Participants were told that those scoring in the top 25% on accuracy would receive a monetary reward.

Participants completed 10 blocks of 240 trials, making a total of 2400 trials. Importantly, one group was told that the experiment was split into blocks, and were given information about how many blocks of the total they had completed as they went along, while the other was not. Neither group received feedback on how well they were performing. After the third, sixth and ninth blocks, participants were also asked how tired, bored and energetic they felt, the answers to which were used to calculate a fatigue score.

Participants in the feedback condition — those who were aware of how far they had progressed through the experiment — had a higher level of performance, as measured by their speed and accuracy; this was particularly pronounced towards the end of the experiment, suggesting that knowing when a task is going to end does indeed make it easier to complete. Participants receiving feedback also spent less time taking breaks towards the end than their non-feedback peers, though they didn’t report feeling any less fatigued.

A second experiment replicated the design of the first — except, this time, there were even more blocks. Participants were asked to complete twelve blocks of 240 trials, bringing the total to 2880. And as in the first experiment, feedback on progress had a positive impact on performance. Participants in the no feedback condition also reported feeling more fatigued — but only towards the end of the experiment. This group also spent more time on breaks than those aware of how many blocks they had left.

So why do we perform better when we know a task is going to end? Our desire to engage in more interesting activities may have something to do with it. If we’re aware of the fact a tedious task is nearly finished, we also know that leisure activities are within our reach: remaining engaged in our task and taking fewer breaks means that those more tantalising opportunities are closer to hand.

It may also be to do with how much effort we allocate to particular activities, the team suggests. If we have no idea how much longer we’re going to be engaging in a particular task, we’re unlikely to put all of our energy into it; if we know the end is near, we feel more able to try our hardest without fear of running out of energy.

This could relate to how we conceptualise willpower, too: another recent study found that those who believe they possess a limited and finite amount of energy are less likely to motivate themselves to get to bed on time. So people who believe that our willpower is a limited resource may be particularly likely to try and conserve effort when they don’t know how much longer a task will last.

Those in the feedback condition did indeed perform better than their counterparts — but that doesn’t mean their performances were as high as they could be. It would be interesting to look at the timing of progress feedback — could introducing progress feedback only towards the end of a task push performance even higher?

What is clear, however, is that knowledge of how a task is progressing can have a significant impact both on how much effort you expend on it and how well you perform. So if you really want to get that boring bit of work out of the way? You may well benefit from setting yourself a deadline.

– Cognitive performance is enhanced if one knows when the task will end

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

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Study online with these 5 accredited courses by SACAP

The digital age brings exciting new opportunities in the area of education, with students now having the option to study...

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Brainy Bumblebees And The Uncanny Valley: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

When creating cute creatures for movies, designers and animators must walk a fine line to avoid falling into the uncanny valley. Baby-like features — big eyes, large heads, round faces — can be appealing, writes Allyssia Alleyne at Wired. But make your character too human and it can look horrific, because we start to see it as one of our own kind, flaws and all.

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Psychologists have criticised the use of AI systems to analyse people’s facial expressions, reports Hannah Devlin for The Guardian. Organisations claim that such systems can help with everything from job recruitment to border security — but researchers point out that emotional expressions vary between cultures.

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Many of the psychological assessments used in American courts are not backed up by evidence, Clare Wilson reports for New Scientist. Only two-thirds of the tools are generally accepted by experts, leaving courts often reliant on evidence from suspect tests such as Rorschach inkblots. Yet the validity of these tests is rarely challenged, researchers found.

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The strategies we use to learn new skills or information are not always as effective as they could be. Learn how to learn better with these psychologically-informed tips from David Robson in The Observer.

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Do you feel pain as something that happens in the mind or in the body? It turns out that people vary in whether they see pain as a “mental” or “bodily” experience  — and now researchers want to figure out whether these views can also influence the effectiveness of psychological treatments for pain, write Rich Harrison and Tim Salomons in The Conversation. If you want to learn more, the next episode of our podcast, PsychCrunch, will be all about the psychology of pain — so why not subscribe.

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The two hemispheres of the human brain are not exactly identical: some bits are bigger or smaller on one side than on the other. And now researchers have found that the same is true for other great apes, reports James Urquhart at New Scientist. This suggests that our pattern of brain asymmetry evolved far earlier than scientists previously thought, challenging the assumption that these differences emerged when we developed cognitive skills like language.

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Finally, the latest in bee news: scientists have discovered that bumblebees are able to recognise objects they’ve previously seen by using only their sense of touch. The researchers trained the furry insects to recognise spheres and cubes either by sight (no touching allowed), or in darkness, by feeling them. Then, the bees swapped conditions — and those that had seen the objects were able to recognise them by touch and vice versa, Alexander McNamara reports for BBC Science Focus.

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

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4 career choices in the South African mental health industry

Key takeaways South Africa’s mental health system does not meet the needs of most South Africans, suffering from lack of...

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Speaking “Parentese” With Young Children Can Boost Their Language Development

By Emily Reynolds

Language learning can be a matter of much concern for new parents, who often worry about what their baby is saying, how they’re saying it, and when. With previous research suggesting that frequent verbal engagement with babies can boost vocabulary and reading comprehension, this preoccupation is not without merit. But even those parents who aren’t too fixated on baby’s first word may in fact be improving their offspring’s language, even if they’re not aware of it.

A form of speech dubbed “parentese” may be a key factor in improving language learning in infants, a new study in PNAS has suggested. Naja Ferjan Ramírez and colleagues from the University of Washington examined the distinctive form of sing-song speech often aimed at babies, finding that it improved conversation between parents and their children and even boosted language development.

It’s important to note that parentese is not the same as baby talk: it’s less “googoo gaga” and more an exaggerated form of normal speech. So rather than the nonsense noises that usually characterise baby talk, parentese is defined by the higher pitch, slower tempo and exaggerated intonation of the speaker, a tone many of us have adopted around children without even realising it.

The researchers assigned 71 families with typically-developing six month old babies to one of two conditions. In the coaching condition, parents were given feedback on their use of language, speaking style, volume of speech and parent-child turn-taking by a linguistic coach. These families were explicitly told about parentese and how to use it to engage children, and were played audio samples from recordings of their own interactions with their children to highlight particularly good uses of parentese and turn-taking. Language milestones were also discussed: when to expect infants to say their first word or use word combinations, for example.

The coach also gave the families “Vroom cards”, which give information about how to promote language during normal social interactions, and age-appropriate books. Families in the other condition received no coaching.

Families provided recordings of themselves talking to and with their children at six, ten, fourteen and eighteen months of age, and at the eighteen month mark filled in a survey designed to assess language and communication development.

As expected, the coaching made a big difference. Parents who had been given extra guidance both significantly increased their use of parentese and their level of conversational turn-taking compared to those who had not. Their children also saw the benefit, showing a greater increase in vocalisations between six and eighteen months than the control group. They also had larger vocabularies overall at eighteen months than kids in the control group, suggesting that positive changes in the way parents communicate with their children are not temporary but durable and long-lasting.

So why is parentese such a successful mode of communication? A dramatic change in pitch may have something to do with it, as may the exaggerated facial expressions that often accompanies such speech. These “make the speaker sound happy”, the team says, holding infants’ attention and allowing them to take in more words and meanings than if they were distracted.

Understanding the benefit of taking turns in conversation was also a large part of the coaching condition, and this social element may be a thus-far neglected explanation for the success of parentese. Social context is a crucial part of language learning — and if parentese increases social interaction, it follows that language learning may also improve.

The results also have some pleasing practical ramifications. Parentese was used by all of the families in the study — it was a basic feature of child-parent communication, which will come as no surprise to anybody who’s spent much time with small children.

But the majority of the parents involved in the study had no idea what exactly parentese did for their infants’ language development, and were not aware of when they were using it or in what contexts. Being aware of parentese and its multiple positive qualities may be very useful indeed for families who are hoping to improve their children’s language development.

– Parent coaching increases conversational turns and advances infant language development

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

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