1. Study suggests high-testosterone competitors more likely to choose red

    May 20, 2013 by Ashley

    From the Association for Psychological Science press release:

    marathon_runningWhy do so many sports players and athletes choose to wear the color red when they compete? A new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that it may have to do with their testosterone levels.

    The new study, conducted by psychological scientist Daniel Farrelly of the University of Sunderland and colleagues, demonstrated that males who chose red as their color in a competitive task had higher testosterone levels than other males who chose blue.

    “The research shows that there is something special about the color red in competition, and that it is associated with our underlying biological systems,” says Farrelly.

    The researchers believe that the link may explain why many sports stars wear red clothing — Tiger Woods, for example, famously chooses to wear a red shirt on the last day of a major competition.

    Choosing to wear red “may, unconsciously, signal something about their competitive nature, and it may well be something that affects how their opponents respond,” Farrelly explains.

    Farrelly and colleagues recruited 73 men to participate in the study, and they were unaware of the study’s aims. The men were told that they would be performing a competitive task and that their performances would be placed on a leaderboard. The participants then chose either a red or blue symbol to represent them in the table and completed the competitive tasks. They also answered questionnaires aimed at gauging whether various personal reasons may have affected their color choice.

    To determine participants’ testosterone levels, the researchers took saliva samples at the start of the study, before the participants knew about the competitive task, and again at the end.

    The data revealed that men who chose red had higher baseline testosterone levels, and they rated their color as having higher levels of characteristics such as dominance and aggression, than men who chose blue.

    Color choice did not, however, seem to be related to actual performance in the competitive task. The researchers believe that direct competition, in which opponents can be seen wearing red or appearing red, may be necessary for the red advantage to occur. Along these lines, previous research has shown that wearing red can be advantageous through its influence on opponents’ perceptions, leading them to view red competitors as being “high quality” competitors.

    Co-authors on the research include Rebecca Slater of the University of Sunderland, Hannah Elliott and Hannah Walden of Newcastle University, and Mark Wetherell of Northumbria University.

     

     

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  2. Study suggests poor translations may cause bias in multilingual survey research

    May 17, 2013 by Ashley

    From the University of Chicago Press Journals press release via EurekAlert!:

    ClipboardSurvey results may be biased in multilingual research if consumers are unfamiliar with translated terms, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

    “Consumers are influenced by the specific labels used to mark the endpoints of a survey response scale. This is particularly important in multilingual research. If the response category labels used in different languages are not equivalent, this could bias survey results,” write authors Bert Weijters, Maggie Geuens (both Ghent University and Vlerick Business School), and Hans Baumgartner (Pennsylvania State University).

    Many surveys use response scales asking consumers to indicate their agreement or disagreement with certain statements. These agreement rating scales are typically anchored by category labels such as “strongly (dis)agree” or “completely (dis)agree.”

    In a study with English and French speaking consumers in the US, UK, Canada, and France, differences in familiarity with labels led to different endorsement rates for the endpoints of agreement scales. In both English and French, response categories received more responses when the associated labels were more commonly used in day-to-day language (completely agree or tout à fait d’accord versus extremely agree or extrêmement d’accord).

    In another study, self-reported awareness of the cholesterol level of various foods was significantly stronger when using the Dutch equivalent of a scale ranging from “completely disagree” to “completely agree” than when using a scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

    “Survey researchers should pay more attention to the labels assigned to response categories on rating scales and make sure that the response category labels used in different languages are equivalent in terms of familiarity. Differences in the category labels used in different languages may lead to differences in responses resulting from poor translation,” the authors conclude.

     

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  3. Study suggests some types of textbook visuals can hurt learning

    by Ashley

    From the Ohio State University press release via Newswise:

    studying problemsAdding captivating visuals to a textbook lesson to attract children’s interest may sometimes make it harder for them to learn, a new study suggests.

    Researchers found that 6- to 8-year-old children best learned how to read simple bar graphs when the graphs were plain and a single color.

    Children who were taught using graphs with images (like shoes or flowers) on the bars didn’t learn the lesson as well and sometimes tried counting the images rather than relying on the height of the bars.

    “Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those without pictures. However, engagement in the task does not guarantee that children are focusing their attention on the information and procedures they need to learn. Instead, they may be focusing on superficial features,” said Jennifer Kaminski, co-author of the study and research scientist in psychology at The Ohio State University.

    Kaminski conducted the study with Vladimir Sloutsky, professor of psychology at Ohio State.

    The problem of distracting visuals is not just an academic issue. In the study, the authors cite real-life examples of colorful, engaging – and possibly confusing – bar graphs in educational materials aimed at children, as well as in the popular media.

    And when the authors asked 16 kindergarten and elementary school teachers whether they would use the visually appealing graphs featured in this study, all of them said they would. Intuitively, most of these teachers felt that the graphs with the pictures would be more effective for instruction than the graphs without, according to the researchers.

    The findings apply beyond learning graphs and mathematics, the authors said.

    “When designing instructional material, we need to consider children’s developing ability to focus their attention and make sure that the material helps them focus on the right things,” Kaminski said.

    “Any unnecessary visual information may distract children from the very procedures we want them to learn.”

    The study appears online in the Journal of Educational Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.

    The main study involved 122 students in kindergarten, first and second grade. All were tested individually.

    The experiment began with a training phase where a researcher showed each child a graph on a computer screen and taught him or her how to read it. The children were then tested on three graphs to see if they could accurately interpret them.

    The graphs in the training phase involved how many shoes were in a lost and found for each of five weeks. Half the students were presented with graphs in which the bars were a solid color. The other students were shown graphs in which the bars contained pictures of shoes. The number of shoes in the bars was equal to the corresponding y-value on the graph. In other words, if there were five shoes in the lost and found, there were five shoes pictured in the bar.

    After the training phase, the children were tested on new graphs in which the bars were either solid-colored or contained pictures of objects such as flowers. However, the number of objects pictured did not equal the correct y-value for the bar. In other words, the bar value could equal 14 flowers, but only seven flowers were pictured.

    “This allowed us to clearly identify which students learned the correct way to read a bar graph from those who simply counted the number of objects in each bar,” Sloutsky said.

    Sure enough, children who trained with the pictures on the graph were more likely than others to get the answers wrong by simply counting the objects in each bar.

    All of the first- and second-graders and 75 percent of the kindergarten children who learned on the solid-bar graphs appropriately read the new graphs.

    However, those who learned with the more visually appealing shoe graphs did not do nearly as well. In this case, 90 percent of kindergarteners and 72 percent of first-graders responded by counting the number of flowers pictured. Second-graders did better, but still about 30 percent responded by counting.

    All the children were then tested again with graphs that featured patterned bars, with either stripes or polka dots within each bar.

    Again, those who learned from the more visually appealing graphs did worse at interpreting these patterned graphs.

    “To our surprise, some children tried to count all the tiny polka dots or stripes in the bars. They clearly didn’t learn the correct way to read the graphs,” Kaminski said.

    The researchers conducted several other related experiments to confirm the results and make sure there weren’t other explanations for the findings. In one experiment, some children were trained on graphs with pictures of objects. But in this case, the number of objects pictured was not even close to the correct value of the bar, so the students could not use counting as a strategy.

    Still, these children did not do as well on subsequent tests as did those who learned on the graphs with single-colored bars.

    “When teaching children new math concepts, keeping material simple is very important,” Sloutsky said.

    “Any extraneous information we provide, even with the best of intentions, to make the lesson more interesting may actually hurt learning because it may be misinterpreted,” he said.

    The researchers said these results don’t mean that textbook authors or others can never use interesting visuals or other techniques to capture the interest of students.

    “But they need to study how such material will affect students’ attention. You can’t assume that it is beneficial just because it is colorful; in can affect learning by distracting attention from what is relevant,” Sloutsky said.

    The study was funded in part from grants by the federal Institute of Educational Sciences and the National Science Foundation.

     

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  4. Study examines effect of personality trait changes on weight

    by Ashley

    From the Association for Psychological Science press release:

    choicesPeople who gain weight are more likely to give in to temptations but also are more thoughtful about their actions, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

    To understand how fluctuations in body weight might relate to personality changes, psychological scientist Angelina Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) examined data from two large-scale longitudinal studies of Baltimore residents.

    “We know a great deal about how personality traits contribute to weight gain,” said Sutin. “What we don’t know is whether significant changes in weight are associated with changes in our core personality traits. Weight can be such an emotional issue; we thought that weight gain may lead to long-term changes in psychological functioning.”

    The studies, NIH’s Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) and the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study, included more than 1,900 people in total, of all ages and socioeconomic levels. Data about participants’ personality traits and their body weight were collected at two time points separated by nearly a decade. In one study, a clinician measured participants’ weight at the two time points; in the other study, the participants reported their weight at baseline and had it measured by a clinician at follow-up.

    Sutin and colleagues found that participants who had at least a 10 percent increase in body weight showed an increase in impulsiveness — with a greater tendency to give in to temptations — compared to those whose weight was stable. The data don’t reveal whether increased impulsiveness was a cause or an effect of gaining weight, but they do suggest an intimate relationship between a person’s physiology and his or her psychology.

    In a surprising twist, people who gained weight also reported an increase in deliberation, with a greater tendency to think through their decisions. Deliberation tends to increase for everyone in adulthood, but the increase was almost double for participants who gained weight compared to those whose weight stayed the same.

    “If mind and body are intertwined, then if one changes the other should change too,” Sutin said. “That’s what our findings suggest.”

    Sutin and colleagues speculate that this increase in deliberation could be the result of negative feedback from family or friends — people are likely to think twice about grabbing a second slice of cake if they feel that everyone is watching them take it.

    These findings suggest that even though people who gain weight are more conscious of their decision-making, they may still have difficulty resisting temptations.

    “The inability to control cravings may reinforce a vicious cycle that weakens the self-control muscle,” the researchers note. “Yielding to temptation today may reduce the ability to resist cravings tomorrow. Thus, individuals who gain weight may have increased risk for additional weight gain through changes in their personality.”

    Co-authors are National Institute on Aging researchers Paul Costa, Wayne Chan, Yuri Milaneschi, Alan Zonderman, Luigi Ferrucci, and Antonio Terracciano, also at Florida State University College of Medicine; and William Eaton of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

    The research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging and a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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  5. Study suggests smoking prevention in schools is effective

    by Ashley

    From the Wiley press release via EurekAlert!:

    smokingSmoking prevention in schools reduces the number of young people who will later become smokers, according to a new systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. For young people who have never smoked, these programmes appear to be effective at least one year after implementation.

    Smoking causes five million preventable deaths every year, a number predicted to rise to eight million by 2030. It is thought that around a quarter of young people may smoke by age 13-15. With a history spanning four decades, prevention programmes in schools try to tackle smoking at an early age before the habit becomes difficult to break. The systematic review aimed to resolve the uncertainty of whether the programmes are effective in preventing smoking.

    The researchers analysed data from 134 studies, in 25 different countries, which involved a total of 428,293 young people aged 5-18. Of these, 49 studies reported smoking behaviour in those who had never previously smoked. The researchers focused on this group because it offered the clearest indication of whether smoking interventions prevent smoking. Although there were no significant effects within the first year, in studies with longer follow up the number of smokers was significantly lower in the groups targeted by smoking interventions than in the control group. In 15 studies which reported on changes in smoking behaviour in a mixed group of never smokers, previous experimenters and quitters, there was no overall long term effect, but within the first year the number smoking was slightly lower in the control group.

    “This review is important because there are no other comprehensive reviews of world literature on school-based smoking prevention programmes,” said Julie McLellan, one of the authors of the review based at the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford in Oxford, UK. “The main strength of the review is that it includes a large number of trials and participants. However, over half were from the US, so we need to see studies across all areas of the world, as well as further studies analysing the effects of interventions by gender.”

    Some smoking interventions aimed to develop social skills and competency or teach students to resist social pressure to smoke. In the longer term, subgroups of programmes that used a social competence approach or a combined social competence and resistance training approach had a significant effect on preventing smoking in young people who had never smoked at the time of the intervention. No effect was shown in studies that used resistance training alone. Equally, no significant effects were detected in those programmes that used information only or that combined tobacco education with wider school and community initiatives.

    Booster sessions did not make any difference to the number of young people who went on to smoke. “We might expect booster sessions to reinforce the effects of the original programmes, but our review didn’t find any evidence for this overall,” said co-author Rafael Perera, also from the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. “The exception was in studies focusing on general social competence and resistance training, which suggests that the way the curriculum is designed is more important than whether or not booster sessions are provided.”

     

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  6. Study suggests dopamine regulates the motivation to act

    by Ashley

    From the Asociacion RUVID press release via MedicalXpress:

    mental healthThe widespread belief that dopamine regulates pleasure could go down in history with the latest research results on the role of this neurotransmitter. Researchers have proved that it regulates motivation, causing individuals to initiate and persevere to obtain something either positive or negative.

    The neuroscience journal Neuron publishes an article by researchers at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón that reviews the prevailing theory on dopamine and poses a major paradigm shift with applications in diseases related to lack of motivation and mental fatigue and depression, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, etc. and diseases where there is excessive motivation and persistence as in the case of addictions.

    “It was believed that dopamine regulated pleasure and reward and that we release it when we obtain something that satisfies us, but in fact the latest scientific evidence shows that this neurotransmitter acts before that, it actually encourages us to act. In other words, dopamine is released in order to achieve something good or to avoid something evil”, explains Mercè Correa.

    Studies had shown that dopamine is released by pleasurable sensations but also by stress, pain or loss. These research results however had been skewed to only highlight the positive influence, according to Correa. The new article is a review of the paradigm based on the data from several investigations, including those conducted over the past two decades by the Castellón group in collaboration with the John Salamone of the University of Connecticut (USA), on the role of dopamine in the motivated behaviour in animals.

    The level of dopamine depends on individuals, so some people are more persistent than others to achieve a goal. “Dopamine leads to maintain the level of activity to achieve what is intended. This in principle is positive, however, it will always depend on the stimuli that are sought: whether the goal is to be a good student or to abuse of drugs” says Correa. High levels of dopamine could also explain the behaviour of the so-called sensation seekers as they are more motivated to act.

    Application for depression and addiction

    To know the neurobiological parameters that make people be motivated by something is important to many areas such as work, education or health. Dopamine is now seen as a core neurotransmitter to address symptoms such as the lack of energy that occurs in diseases such as depression. “Depressed people do not feel like doing anything and that’s because of low dopamine levels,” explains Correa. Lack of energy and motivation is also related to other syndromes with mental fatigue such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or fibromyalgia, among others.

    In the opposite case, dopamine may be involved in addictive behaviour problems, leading to an attitude of compulsive perseverance. In this sense, Correa indicates that dopamine antagonists which have been applied so far in addiction problems probably have not worked because of inadequate treatments based on a misunderstanding of the function of dopamine.

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  7. Study suggests proximity of images affects perception of product effectiveness

    May 16, 2013 by Ashley

    From the University of Chicago Press Journals press release via EurekAlert!:

    senior_asian_manConsumers believe a product is more effective when images of the product and its desired outcome are placed closer together in advertisements, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

    “Merely changing the spatial proximity between the image of a product and its desired effect in an advertisement influences judgment of product effectiveness. Consumers tend to judge the product to be more effective when the two images are closer versus farther apart,” write authors Boyoun (Grace) Chae (University of British Columbia), Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore), and Rui (Juliet) Zhu (University of British Columbia).

    Many advertisements promoting the effectiveness of a product show both a product image (anti-wrinkle cream) and an image of the promised results (a face without wrinkles). Objectively, the distance between the two images should not affect how consumers judge the product’s quality.

    In a series of studies, consumers were asked to judge the effectiveness of a variety of products promising specific results (acne cream, pain reliever, nasal allergy spray, bug spray, fabric softener). Consumers tended to assume a product was more effective when its image was placed closer to that of its promised effect. The proximity of the images was more influential when consumers were less knowledgeable about a product category or when the results were expected sooner rather than later.

    Companies should understand the subtle effect that spatial proximity between images has on consumer judgment of product effectiveness. When companies want to promote the immediate effects of their products, images of the product and its desired effect should be put closer to each other in an advertisement.

    “The spatial proximity between visual representations of cause and effect in an advertisement can influence consumer judgments of product effectiveness. The closer the distance between an image of a product (an acne treatment) and that of its potential effect (a smooth face), the more effective consumers will judge the product to be,” the authors conclude.

     

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  8. Study links pathological gambling to excessive optimism

    by Ashley

    From the CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) press release via AlphaGalileo:

    gambling toolsCompulsive gamblers suffer from an optimism bias that modifies their subjective representation of probability and affects their decisions in situations involving high-risk monetary wagers.

    This is the conclusion drawn by Jean-Claude Dreher’s research team at the CNC (Centre de Neurosciences Cognitives, CNRS / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1). These findings, published in the May print edition of Psychological Medicine, could help explain and anticipate certain individuals’ vulnerability to gambling, and could lead to new therapeutic approaches.

    A growing number of gamblers suffer from pathological gambling, a disease that is usually characterized as either a loss of impulse control or a behavioral addiction. It results in an inability to limit the frequency of gambling and the amount of money wagered. This increasingly common psychiatric disorder creates financial, professional and personal hardships that can have severe consequences for the patients and the people around them. The mechanisms responsible for its emergence and development remain largely unknown, which limits the clinician’s ability to proceed with a diagnosis, prognosis or effective treatment for this condition.

    In this study, the researchers set out to test and verify the hypothesis that links pathological gambling to an alteration of probabilistic reasoning. The capacity to reason in probabilistic terms appears only at an advanced stage of human intellectual development (in fact, the basic concept of probability is not fully understood until the age of 11 or 12). Pioneering research in the late 1970s had already shed light on the difficulties that people experience in situations involving risk or uncertainty. These difficulties are reflected in the development and perpetuation in adults of cognitive biases1 specific to probabilistic decision-making, one of the most common being probability distortion (2).

    The researchers conducted an experiment on compulsive gambling patients using a standard experimental economics task and a mathematical model for measuring both probability distortion and a more general optimism bias in relation to high-risk bets. The primary result obtained confirms the general hypothesis of a distortion, associated with pathological gambling, in the subjective representation of probabilities. The results also show that the compulsion to gamble is not explained by an exaggerated distortion of probability, but rather by an increased optimism bias. In other words, regardless of the objective probability of winning a high-risk bet, gamblers tend to act as though this probability were greater than it actually is. The researchers also observed that in the patient population under study, the intensity of this bias was significantly correlated to the severity of the symptoms.

    For clinical psychiatrists, the simplicity of the procedure used to reach this conclusion could offer a rapid and reliable way of measuring the representation of probability, thus allowing them to refine both their diagnoses and therapeutic decisions.

    This study raises many new questions for researchers in the cognitive neurosciences: how does the brain represent the probability of winning? How do the cerebral structures responsible for this representation interact with the structures involved in the development and perpetuation of an addiction? Is a pathological gambler’s particular relationship to probability accompanied by an increased sensitivity to reward and/or insensitivity to monetary loss? These important questions are now being investigated at the CNC.

    (1) Internal or external influence causing an alteration of human judgment or perception.
    (2) Identified by the Nobel laureates Kahneman and Tversky in 1979, probability distortion is characterized by the overestimation of low probabilities and underestimation of high probabilities.

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  9. Study suggests ways to spot liars in interviews

    by Ashley

    interview

    From the Lancaster University press release via AlphaGalileo:

    A way to improve detection rates in police interviews has been discovered by researchers following a mock terrorism scenario where suspects plotted to blow up a building.

    They found that dripfeeding evidence to the suspect boosted the detection rate to 68 per cent compared with 50 per cent – no better than chance – for the existing methods where all the information is revealed either early or late in the interview.

    Their discovery has implications for any official interviews such as benefit fraud investigations, medical negligence and inland revenue cases.

    The researchers say that revealing information gradually “exploits gaps in a deceiver’s account immediately inconsistencies begin to emerge, while at the same time providing innocent interviewees an early opportunity to convey their honesty”.

    The study published in Legal and Criminal Psychology was carried out by Dr Coral Dando of the University of Wolverhampton, Professor Tom Ormerod and Alexandra Sandham from Lancaster University, and Professor Ray Bull from Derby University.

    The research involved a total of 151 people who were all asked to build part of a virtual Olympic stadium in an interactive computer game.  But some of the participants were also assigned the identity of deceivers or “terrorists” plotting to blow up the stadium and they had to hide their intentions by, for example, covering up the purchase of large amounts of “explosive” from virtual shops.

    They were then interviewed about the game by a trained police interviewer who revealed relevant information either early on, at the end of the interview, or gradually.

    Thirty laypersons viewed a random selection of interviews and then judged whether the interviewees were telling the truth or not.

    Their judgements were most accurate in the interviews when information had been revealed gradually and the laypersons were more confident about their judgements.

    In addition, the so-called “terrorists” said that the gradual disclosure of information  by the interviewer was much more mentally taxing, making it harder for them to sustain the deception.

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lcrp.12016/abstract

     

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  10. Study suggests workplace injustice may affect sense of taste

    by Ashley

    From the UBC press release via HealthCanal:

    bad bossA new UBC study from the Sauder School of Business reveals that experiencing unfair treatment at work can sharpen the taste buds, providing evidence that stress has a physiological effect on people.

    “Our perception of the world is altered by stress – and we show how significant the mistreatment of our fellow humans impacts us, physiologically,” says lead author and UBC Sauder School of Business Professor Daniel Skarlicki. “This is just a glimpse into the kinds of physical effects workplace stress has on us. Managers really need to foster fair environments for employees.”

    The study, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, involved a number of experiments. The first had participants recalling fair or unfair workplace events, followed by a test in which they rated how strong a food tasted.

    Those who recounted a situation of injustice rated the taste as much as 10 per cent stronger compared to those who recounted an act of fairness.

    In a second experiment, participants watched scenes from the UK version of the TV show The Office involving clearly unjust and neutral situations. Participants who viewed the unjust treatment again reported food tasting as much as 10 per cent stronger.

    The authors found that experiencing or observing injustice led to feelings of moral disgust, which subsequently related to a stronger sense of taste.

    “For example, if patrons see a chef abusing staff, a la Gordon Ramsey, their senses will become heightened, and their food will taste more intense,” says Skarlicki. “I’m not recommending abuse as a form of seasoning, of course – but this study shows just how strongly workplace abuse affects us.”

     

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