Dr. Sabiha Alam Choudhury: January 2021

Bad Behaviour And Rethinking Pain: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

Swearing, drinking, or making social transgressions are not behaviours we generally think of as good. But in some cases, these kinds of “bad” behaviours can have benefits, both for ourselves and others. Richard Stephens explains why at The Conversation.

In The Guardian, Margee Kerr and Linda Rodriguez McRobbie write that we need to rethink our approach to pain. We currently have a “socially dysfunctional relationship” with pain, they argue: we rely too much on painkillers, and don’t appreciate that changing the way we think about painful experiences can also have an analgesic effect.

How do you make new friends in the middle of a pandemic? Katherine Cusumano has some tips at The New York Times.

Some people have argued that public health messages should use shocking images of illness and death to drive home the importance of staying home and socially distancing. But there’s reason to doubt the effectiveness of disturbing photos in convincing people of the dangers of the pandemic, write Nathan Ballantyne, Jared Celniker and Peter Ditto at Scientific American. Their study showed that such images did little to change people’s opinion about the virus, even though participants believed they would.

In a recent study, older adults who took afternoon naps showed superior performance on certain tests of language and memory, reports Frankie Macpherson at BBC Science Focus. But there are plenty of caveats, not least that the correlational data means that no firm conclusions can be made about the direction of the relationship between taking naps and cognitive performance.

Another study has highlighted the toll of the coronavirus pandemic on mental health. The vast majority of students surveyed at seven American universities last spring reported moderate or high levels of emotional distress, reports Sujata Gupta at Science News. The psychological impact was particularly prominent among certain groups, including women, Asian participants, and those on lower incomes.

It’s common for women to experience worries and anxieties during pregnancy, and some pregnant women may end up meeting the criteria for a full-blown anxiety disorder. At Psyche, Pamela Wiegartz has written a guide with strategies for managing feelings of anxiety during pregnancy.

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

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Having Hope For the Future Could Protect Against Risky Behaviours

By Emily Reynolds

At the start of a new year it’s customary to look forward, imagining what we might want to achieve in the months to come. It’s what lies at the heart of New Year’s resolutions: they may be maligned for their persistent failure to stick, but do at least represent a great degree of hope for the future — a hope to become fitter or more productive, or to learn something new.

In the current circumstances hope is certainly in short supply. But if you can manage to stay hopeful you might be able to avoid risk-taking behaviours like drinking, taking drugs, gambling or overeating, argues a new study in the Journal of Gambling Studies from Shahriar Keshavarz and team at the University of East Anglia.

The study focuses specifically on “relative deprivation” — the belief that your lot in life is somehow worse than other people’s. Previous research has suggested that those who score highly on feelings of relative deprivation are more likely to engage in “maladaptive escape behaviours” including risk-taking. But hope could ameliorate such behaviour, the team argues, protecting people from potential harm.

In the first study, 51 participants started by filling in two measures. One looked at hope, with participants indicating how much they agreed with statements related to goal-directed energy (“I energetically pursue my goals”) and alternate routes to success (“I can think of many ways to get out of a jam”). The second looked at relative deprivation — how deprived or privileged participants felt compared to other people.

Next, the participants took part in a risk-taking task. They saw an animated cannon, which could fire balls that land anywhere between 0 and 100 metres away, and were asked to bet on where they thought the ball would land. When selecting the distance, participants had three options: a high risk option, which let them cover a five metre range (e.g. the ball landing between 20 and 25 metres away), a medium risk option, which offered a ten metre range (e.g. 20 and 30 metres) and a low risk option (e.g. 20 to 40 metres). The higher the risk, the more money participants could win.

Participants who felt relatively deprived showed an inverse relationship between goal-directed energy and risk-taking. That is, among this group risk-taking was lower for those who had a greater sense of “hope” in the form of directing energy towards achieving their goals. (Those who felt relatively privileged showed the opposite pattern, with risk taking increasing among those with greater hope).

In the second study, 50 participants again filled in measures related to hope and relative deprivation, before being shown their position on a (fake) “Comparative Discretionary Income” index, showing how deprived or privileged they were compared to others based on their income. Some participants were shown a score that indicated they were deprived, while others were told they were comparatively privileged. They then completed the risk-taking measure from the first experiment.

The team found that inducing people to feel deprived led them to take more risks — but again, those who reported more feelings of hope regarding their goals took less risks than those with low levels of hope. This suggests hope for the future may act as a protective factor against risk-taking in those who feel relatively deprived. Relatively privileged participants again showed the opposite pattern, with hope increasing risk taking.

The final study looked at 122 participants who had gambled at least once in the last year. Participants completed the hope and relative deprivation scales, as well as an index measuring how severe their gambling was on a scale from one (no problem) to four (problem gambling). Results from this measure suggested that 27% of participants had no gambling problems, 26% had low levels of problems, 38% had moderate problems and 9% were problem gamblers with possible loss of control.

As in the previous studies, among participants who reported being relatively deprived, those who showed more goal-directed energy were less likely to have problems with gambling. There was no relationship between hope and gambling severity amongst those who felt relatively privileged.

Hope may therefore be a vital tool for those experiencing difficulties in their life, buffering against risky or potentially harmful behaviours like gambling, drinking or drug-taking. The team posits that those who feel relatively deprived engage in risky behaviours in order to allay or sublimate negative feeling; understanding the importance of hope in such a situation may be a good start in developing behavioural interventions.

It can be difficult to feel satisfied with what you’ve got, especially if those around you appear to be thriving financially, socially or romantically. Looking for ways out of your situation, energetically pursuing goals and thinking of new solutions to problems may not solve all of your problems — but it could make the temptations of risk-taking easier to deal with.

– Relative Deprivation and Hope: Predictors of Risk Behavior

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Children Are Much Less Likely Than Adults To Prioritise Human Over Animal Lives

By Emma Young

“Two boats are sinking and you can save only one. One holds two dogs, the other a person. Which do you save? If you’re not sure, you can say, ‘I can’t decide.’” When I put this to my 11-year-old, his response was immediate: “Save the dogs!” In his defence, he has grown up with a pet dog, which he adores — and, according to a new study in Psychological Science, most other kids would say the same thing.

To adults, these findings might seem a little alarming. Indeed, when the team put similar questions (varying the numbers of dogs, pigs and people) to adult participants, 61% opted to save one human over 100 dogs (which does mean of course that nearly 40% didn’t), and 85% of people prioritised one human over one dog, while 93% opted to save a human rather than a single pig (3% went for the pig).

When the team asked 249 kids aged between five and nine about what they thought, though, they found that just over 70% opted to let a person die to save 100 dogs. When it came to one human vs one dog, only about a third of the children opted to save the person, 28% were clear on going for the dog, and the rest couldn’t decide.

When pigs, rather than dogs, were pitted against people, the children’s responses were also revealing. Of course, pigs are not generally kept as pets, but for many of these urban, US-based kids (whose religion, if any, was not ascertained), are rather sources of food. And yet only 57% prioritised one human over one pig, and 18% reported that they’d save the pig. The child’s age had no impact — the 9-year-olds made the same judgements as the 5-year-olds. However, both kids and adults who had regular exposure to dogs showed less of bias in favour of people over dogs; for the kids, this also extended to a lower bias in favour of people over pigs.

In a follow-up study of fresh groups of adult and child participants, the team kept the same varying human vs dog or pig ratios but altered the question to ask what “Mr X”, who “always does the right thing” would do. They did this to be very clear that they were asking for moral judgements. The results were very similar to those from the first study.

In the first study, the team had also asked the adults and kids to rate humans’, dogs’ and pigs’ intelligence and also capacity to feel pain, sadness and fear. Both adults and kids gave similar ratings for all three species, and agreed that people scored higher on these counts than dogs, who scored higher than pigs. “Yet despite this,” the team notes, “children and adults gave different moral judgements, which suggests that perceived intelligence and sentience does not fully account for moral judgements.”

So why do adults have a much stronger pro-human bias? The team suspect that this is something that is learned relatively late in childhood. “Adolescents may learn and internalise the socially held speciesist notion — or ideology — that humans are morally special and deserve full moral status, whereas animals do not,” they write.

They do note, however, that their groups of US-based, primarily white, English-speaking participants from mostly urban areas is not exactly globally representative. It would be interesting, of course, to explore whether kids who grow up on farms, say, have different ideas about the relative importance of particular animals vs humans.

Given my son’s (not unexpected) reaction to the dog vs people questions, the findings on kids are a little reassuring: he’s not unusual in feeling that way. I’m fairly sure, though, that if I’d got more personal, and asked him to choose between saving his younger brother or Dottie, our dog, he’d have gone for his brother, if only for my sake… I can tell him that he’s less “speciesist” than me, at least.

– Children Prioritize Humans Over Animals Less Than Adults Do

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

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

US Politicians Use Moral Language More Often When They Have Less Power

By Emily Reynolds

Whatever your political affiliation, making appeals to people’s morality can be a powerful rhetorical tool. Politicians frequently use language that refers to moral principles of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity, in order to defend policy positions, appeal to new voters and appease old ones. And it’s an approach that seems to work. Research suggests that people are far more likely to take action once they connect a particular issue with their own moral or ethical convictions — even to the point of committing acts of violence.

But how and when politicians use moral language shifts with changes in the political landscape, according to a new study from the University of Toronto’s Sze-Yuh Nina Wang and Yoel Inbar, published in Psychological Science. Looking at Democrat and Republican politicians in the US, they found that moral language increased as political power decreased, suggesting that its use is not fixed.

The first study looked at public tweets posted by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives; some, like Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, had millions of followers, while others had thousands. Using a text-analysis technique, the team coded nearly 700,000 tweets posted between January 2016 and January 2018 from 578 politicians in Congress (385,206 from Democrats and 302,154 from Republicans).

The team focused on five moral foundations — harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity — and their positive and negative aspects (“virtues” and “vices”). For the analysis, the tweets were compared to a dictionary containing words related to each virtue and vice, to see how close the language in each tweet was to these words.

Overall, Democrats used moral language more frequently than Republicans. And while moral language was used more by both parties after the 2016 Presidential election, this increase was greater for Democrats, who were more likely to go on using moral language. This was also the case for those moral foundations more traditionally associated with Republicans (loyalty, authority and purity).

A second study looked at transcripts of all debates and proceedings in Congress between 1981 and 2017, utilising the same text-analysis technique as in the first study. In both the House and the Senate, the minority party was far more likely to use moral language related to almost all of the foundations (a notable exception was language related to authority, which was sometimes used more frequently by the majority party).

Overall, the results suggest that the use of moral language is dynamic rather than static, and likely to change over time depending on context. This makes sense — moral language is often ramped up during national crises, perhaps because there is more at stake.

Future research could look at what subjects are being discussed using moral language — is it being used on specific issues, or more broadly to condemn the opposing party? Who is using such language also seems relevant. There are a huge range of divergent views even within a political party itself — a left wing politician like Bernie Sanders or Ilhan Omar is unlikely to share the exact moral values of the more centrist Nancy Pelosi, for example, even though they all belong to the Democratic Party.

– Moral-Language Use by U.S. Political Elites

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Why Do Basketball Teams Have a Home-Court Advantage? Natural Experiment During Pandemic Provides Some Answers

By Emma Young

When the US National Basketball Association (NBA) was forced to pause the season due to Covid-19 on March 11 last year, the fans were naturally devastated. When the season resumed five months later, with the top 22 teams bubbled together and playing every game in Orlando, Florida, this was great news for the sport, and the fans — and a pair of US researchers. Andrew McHill at Oregon Health and Science University and Evan Chinoy at Leidos Inc, in San Diego, realised that the restart provided a perfect natural experiment to explore the effects of travel on play. Their study, published in Scientific Reports, reveals some insights into causes of the well-documented sporting home-side advantage.

The “home-court” advantage, as it’s known in basketball, is apparent in the results tables: teams win more often at home than away. In normal circumstances, it’s hard, though, to disentangle all the possible variables that might underlie it. These include home-crowd noise, the discomfort of air travel, and time zone changes. In regular seasons, NBA teams do regularly travel long distances across the US, through one, two or even three time zones, to play away games. Many NBA players report resulting sleep loss and fatigue, and harmful effects on their performance, recovery and mood, the researchers note. Disruption to circadian rhythms has been considered the mostly likely culprit, though the rigours of travel and sleeping away from home have also been highlighted as potentially play a role.

To explore just how travel affects play, the researchers looked at the results of the 22 teams’ games before the pause, compared with their results while none were travelling and all were playing in one location, in Orlando. The pair also considered various aspects of the teams’ performances in each game.

In the first portion of the season, teams won 63.8% of their home games, and 50.8 % of their away games. McHill and Chinoy found, though, that there was only a disadvantage to playing away when a team had to travel across time zones, and not when they played away within the same time zone (the detrimental effects of travelling across time zones mostly occurred when teams travelled westwards, rather than eastward). When the teams were later all playing in Florida, with no travel (and only virtual fans), though a “home” and “away” team was designated for each game, there was no “home” advantage.

The researchers then looked more closely at various aspects of play. They found that when teams travelled across time zones, their shooting accuracy suffered. They also lost more possessions and scored fewer points per 100 possessions (indicating that they were playing more defensively). But even when a team played away and didn’t cross time zones, they played a more defensive game, and they got a lower percentage of the offensive rebounds (an event that gives the offensive team another opportunity to score).

McHill and Chinoy also found that when the teams did not travel, while bubbled, the typical home-court advantages for shooting accuracy and rebounding were reduced. “Thus, home-court advantage in professional basketball appears to be linked with the away team’s impaired shooting accuracy and rebounding,” the pair writes. They add that these “may be separately influenced by either circadian disruption or the general effect of travel, as these differences manifest differently when teams travel within or across multiple time zones.”

Athletes in other major sports, including baseball, also travel regularly across time zones. If basketball shooting accuracy is taken as a measure of movement precision, and this is worsened by such travel, this could help to explain the home-side advantage — or the away-side disadvantage — in these sports, too. As the researchers also note: “Future work is needed to explore other athletic events where travel schedules can impact performance to further elucidate travel and circadian factors.”

– Utilizing the National Basketball Association’s COVID-19 restart “bubble” to uncover the impact of travel and circadian disruption on athletic performance

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

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Doomscrolling And Psychological Vaccines: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

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

Humans process and recognise faces as a whole, rather than by examining individual features. Now new work suggests that some species of wasp also process faces in this “holistic” fashion, reports Cathleen O’Grady at Science Magazine. Golden paper wasps were better at recognising other wasps when shown pictures of the whole face rather than just part of it, the researchers found.

When we lie to someone, we may end up mimicking their body language. That’s according to a study in which participants cheated while solving a puzzle, and then either told the truth or lied about their cheating to another participant. When the participant lied, pairs’ movements were more similar than when the participant told the truth, reports Christa Lesté-Lasserre at New Scientist.

In the past year, have you found yourself endlessly scrolling through social media as the world falls apart? If so, you’re not alone — “doomscrolling” seems to be pretty common. At Cosmic Shambles, Dean Burnett explains just why this seemingly stressful activity is so appealing.

Non-invasive brain stimulation might help to alleviate symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, reports Diana Kwon at Scientific American. Researchers found that transcranial alternating current stimulation delivered over the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex reduced compulsive behaviours in people who had OCD symptoms. But it remains to be seen whether similar results are found in people with a formal OCD diagnosis.

The COVID-19 vaccine is being rolled out across the country — but can we also inoculate people against misinformation about the virus? At The Conversation, Sander van der Linden and Jon Roozenbeek explain their approach to proactively protecting people from fake news.

Teenagers “catch” moods from their peers — and this is particularly the case for bad moods, reports Sally Weale at The Guardian. To figure out how moods were transmitted within teens’ social networks, researchers asked young musicians to keep diaries of their mood and social interactions during concert tours. The team also found the participants’ popularity wasn’t related to their mood.

The storming of the US Capitol earlier this month marked the low point of a troubling few months in American politics. But what can psychology tell us about the factors involved in this kind of “mass mobilisation” — and how can we make sure it doesn’t happen again? Jennifer Ouellette takes a look at Ars Technica.

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

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Episode 23: Whose Psychology Is It Anyway? Making Psychological Research More Representative

This is Episode 23 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. Download here.

In this episode, Emily Reynolds, staff writer at Research Digest, explores modern psychology’s relationship with race and representation. It’s well-known that psychology has a generalisability problem, with studies overwhelmingly using so-called “WEIRD” participants: those who are Western and educated and from industrialised, rich and democratic societies. But how does that shape the assumptions we make about participants of different racial identities or cultures? And how can top-tier psychology journals improve diversity among not only participants but also authors and editors?

Our guests, in order of appearance, are Dr Bobby Cheon, Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Dr Steven O. Roberts, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.

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Episode credits: Presented and produced by Emily Reynolds. Script edits by Matthew Warren. Mixing and editing by Jeff Knowler. PsychCrunch theme music by Catherine Loveday and Jeff Knowler. Art work by Tim Grimshaw.

Background reading for this episode

Research mentioned in this episode includes:

Other relevant posts from the Research Digest and The Psychologist archives include:

Researchers Assume White Americans Are More Representative Of Humankind Than Other Groups, According To Analysis Of Psychology Paper Titles
Psychology research is still fixated on a tiny fraction of humans – here’s how to fix that
Which human experiences are universal?
‘We need to broaden the conversation to institutional bias’
‘We don’t just need warm words, we need actions’
WEIRD science… Priya Maharaj responds to a piece from our Research Digest blog
‘I understood when I listened to people’s stories’
‘Without positive action, we risk living in a world that has potential to rob people of their dignity and sense of agency’: A collection of articles from recent years on racism in psychology and the psychology of racism

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
Episode nineteen: Should We Worry About Screen Time?
Episode twenty: How to cope with pain
Episode twenty-one: How To Stay Connected In The “New Normal”

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com