Guide to Psychology Blogs - Part 3
Here are some blogs that look at more specific topics. Some of these blogs are also gateways to further related blogs so explore those blogrolls [updated May 2008].
Best neuromarketing blog
So this time, it's into the brain scanner but instead of tax returns it's adverts. For a considerably more informed viewpoint Neuromarketing has the facts. I'm finding the wearable brain scanner slightly disturbing. Only a matter of time before we have Minority Report vision of the future: you're in the mall (unlikely I know), lasers scan your retina and project personalised adverts directly at you. Ahhh so that's why they're always wearing sunglasses in the future.
Best neurotechnology blog
Seeing as we're doing all the blogs beginning with neuro- I should mention Brain Waves which focusses on the field of neurotechnology. Written by industry insider Zack Lynch, it covers some similar areas to the previous two blogs. Definitely worth a look.
Best schizophrenia blog
The Schizophrenia Daily News Blog is a not-for-profit source of information, support and education on schizophrenia. Written by a whole host of doctors - both MDs and PhDs - this blog is well-established and over-flowing with information you can trust.
Best panic blog
Written by Eric Wilinski, who suffers from panic disorder himself, PANIC! focusses on the experience of panic and types of treatments which are available. Highly recommended to both those suffering from this condition and to those interested in it.
Best Alzheimer's and dementia blog
The Tangled Neuron is written from the perspective of a daughter trying to better understand her father's dementia. This blog is relatively new but already bursting at the seams with great posts mainly focussing on the science. Very useful site for those with a personal interest in this subject as well as the general reader.
Best anxiety and depression blog
The Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments blog has loads of solid coverage of these subjects and more.
Best blog on the origins of speech
Babel's Dawn is a blog written by Edmund Blair Bolles exploring the origins of speech. How come chimps do all that eeeeking and we've developed blogs? Head on over to Babel's Dawn to find out.
Best social networks for psychology
Not strictly blogs, I know, but social networks can be extremely useful for discovering great writing about psychology. Three popular social networks are StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg - although Digg is more technology/hard science oriented.
Best completely inaccessible blog
I have to mention Ryohei's Neuroscience Notes which is largely concerned with the building of a 2-photon microscope. I read rather more of this than I should probably admit.
Hat tip
...to the Neurophilosopher's gargantuan list of cognitive science, psychology and psychiatry blogs from which this selection is born. Also, I found so much good stuff I may well extend this increasingly inaccurately named trilogy into a fourth post (thanks to Douglas Adams for that joke).
» Go to part 1, part 2, part 4 and part 5.
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Labels: Psychology Guides
Can You Change Your Personality? Lord of the Rings vs. Schindler's List
Self-help gurus talk as though personality change can occur as predictably as the story arc of a Hollywood hero. Psychologists fall into this trap as well. Research on student's views about intelligence implies that if we want to change ourselves, all we have to do is change our beliefs about what is possible. Similarly our culture through the media, the self-help industry and some psychologists promotes the idea that change is an easy, everyday process, if only we could really want it. In fact our culture has become obsessed with technologies of the self, our ability to easily reinvent ourselves, to become, as it where, new people.
This breezy talk about personality change is far-fetched because for most of us change only comes after prolonged effort. But to illustrate how our culture represents personality change, take two examples of movie heroes, one who was miraculously steadfast and one who was miraculously transformed. As you're reading, think firstly about which best represents the way our culture views personality and secondly about which best represents your view of your own personality.
Oskar Schindler
The modern obsession with the possibility of redeeming psychological transformation can be clearly seen in Schindler's List. Oskar Schindler - the hero as he becomes - starts out as a greedy man obsessed with profit and his own personal gain, making money using cheap Jewish labour to supply the Nazi regime. By the end of the film Schindler has undergone a miraculous transformation into a man risking his life and livelihood to smuggle Jews to freedom.
This film, which is difficult to watch, inspirational and incredibly moving all at the same time, is also totally unbelievable. And my incredulity is in no way tempered by the fact this film is based on a true story. They say fact is stranger than fiction, and they are right.
What this film does represent is a kind of movie archetype of heroic transformation. An unlikely protagonist comes face to face with a situation which demands some kind of change. He then becomes a hero by virtue of the change he undergoes.
Aragorn
The opposite message about human nature comes from a fantasy movie. Watch Lord of the Rings and find characters whose personalities are set in stone. Aragorn, greatest in its array of heroes, is a man who tries to avoid his appointed task but cannot. Boromir, meanwhile, is also a hero, but one with a fatal character flaw, one which he cannot avoid no matter how hard he tries.
Those who are flawed, like Boromir, are flawed right from the start, while those who are heroes, like Aragorn, battle on through to the bitter end. In Lord of the Rings it is personalities that remain largely unchanged, only the situations they encounter change. Aragorn cannot avoid his destiny, however much he tries. He was born to be King and he shall be King. Boromir, however, is doomed to betray his friends right from the start.
Back to reality
Part of the problem with using extreme situations such as those from movies is that they are difficult to translate into real life. Most of us have not faced, and probably never will face, the moral dilemma of Oskar Schindler. Neither will any of us save Middle Earth from hordes of orcs. In reality life is much more mundane. But just because most of us will never face the extreme situations portrayed in these movies, it doesn't mean watching them won't affect the way we think about ourselves.
Watch enough Hollywood films and you'll start to believe life is all about reaching crises, a brief period of confusion followed by triumphant discovery of new patterns of behaviour. Are human beings really capable of these kinds of transformation in short periods of time? A failure to change is frequently seen as depressing or limiting. To be considered 'life affirming' and uplifting movies and TV shows need to show people continually reinventing themselves. We worship the 'new', and that includes our new personalities as well.
Personality stability
Psychological research tells us that people's personalities are actually relatively stable over their lifetimes. What changes as we age is probably not the larger, more obvious aspects of our personality, but the little things we do. The types of things that would normally sneak under the radar of psychology studies. Our experience broadens, or narrows, our lives are struck by dizzying triumph and cavernous misfortune, and we march on, most of us, making tiny changes as we go.
As any management consultant will tell you, people are remarkably resilient to change and ultimately this inflexibility is necessary for our survival. As an evolutionary psychologist would say, it's adaptive behaviour. If we were too easily influenced to change our beliefs, our attitudes, our whole direction in life, we would never achieve anything. What our culture worship as its greatest achievements in the arts, sciences and politics, were mostly achieved by people who were remarkably stubborn in sticking to their vision.
So while Schindler's List best represents the culturally promoted view of personality as capable of transformation, Lord of the Rings better represents reality. Which is ironic considering it is a fantasy movie.
Perhaps the only way we can deal with the truth about ourselves is to hide it amongst elves, dwarves and hobbits.
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Labels: Media, Personality
Guide to Psychology Blogs - Part 2
More great blogs, stacks of fantastic content, all free. Perhaps there is hope for humanity [updated May 2008].
Best guide to new psychology research
What can the BPS Research Digest do for you? Well, it will introduce and keep you up to date with the best new psychology research being published in academic journals. It's all proper science that's been translated from academic-journal-speak into langauge we can all understand. Can't say fairer than that.
Best psychology blog carnival
Blog carnivals are a neat way to highlight great posts on related topic from different blogs. In psychology and neuroscience, Encephalon is the Daddy of blog carnivals. Coming out every two weeks and hosted by a different blogger each time, Encephalon enables you to sample new blogs and marvel at the sheer diversity of the psychology blogosphere.
Best neuroscience blog
And while I'm talking about the Daddy of psychology carnivals, I should mention Encephalon's Daddy, the Neurophilosopher. In depth but accessible, the Neurophilosopher covers neuroscience and too much else to sum up here. Head over there, but be warned - it's addictive!
Best crime psychology blog
Not just one blog, but a family of blogs about crime psychology. Most accessible of these to the general reader is the Deception Blog which will keep you up to date on the latest research on lie detection.
Update: posting has slowed up but there's still some interesting occasional posts.
Best guide to psychology sites and resources
Lost? Confused? Unsure where you're heading? PsychSplash helps alleviate existential angst by pointing you to the juiciest new psychology websites on offer. Although aimed primarily at clinical psychologists, students and researchers, many posts are of interest to a wider audience. Written in a breezy style by a clinical psychologist.
Best sex psychology blog
Dr Boynton's blog covers sex and relationship issues, but one of her missions is to improve the quality of information on these topics produced by the mainstream media. To that end, she exposes some of the more lamentable attempts to report psychology along with ways it could be improved. Unfortunately, sometimes it really is as bad as you think it is. Dr Boynton is a lecturer at a London University.
» Go to part 1, part 3, part 4 and part 5.
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Labels: Psychology Guides
Guide to Psychology Blogs - Part 1
It's a real treat to see the breadth, quality and sometimes sheer quirkiness of the psychology blogging going on out there. To help you navigate all this fabulous information, here's a list of my favourite accessible psychology blogs [updated May 2008].
Best all-round performer
Some blogs focus on quite specific areas, others are more general. Top of the accessible general blogs is MindHacks which manages to cover a wide range of areas, often in detail. This is really the best all-round performer the psychology blog-o-sphere has to offer. Largely written by a psychology PhD now training in clinical psychology - MindHacks is frequently updated, sometimes two or three times a day. This is your first stop.
Best cognitive psychology blog
Two joint winners in this category. First is Cognitive Daily which makes complicated topics in cognitive psychology look easy. Great writing, loads of content, a knowledgeable audience of commenters and graphs you can understand. It's frequently updated and wide-ranging but mostly within cognitive psychology. Co-produced by a Professor of psychology.
Second is Mixing Memory which tends towards longer less frequent articles. Written in an open conversational style, this blog tackles all kinds of subject, generally getting stuck into the details. Best for people with a background in psychology but still very accessible.
Both blogs come from the Scienceblogs stable.
Best multimedia psychology blog
Channel N has links to all kinds of audio and video files. It's only updated every now and then (who am I to talk?) but worth returning to. Here's links to an interview with Kay Redfield Jamison on suicide and V. S. Ramachandran talking about neuroaesthetics.
Best psychiatrist's blog
While the tag line of The Last Psychiatrist is 'depression, bipolar, suicide, drug companies and medications', this blog certainly won't cause any of these conditions. Well, at worst you'll want to start your own drug company. This provides a much needed critical approach to all the above topics and more. Less frequent but longer posting. Recommended.
Best humorous (but still scientific) psychology blog
Of Two Minds is the successful result of a daring experiment to fuse two PhD student bloggers into one (they were previously OmniBrain and Retrospectacle).
Each have their foibles of course: Steve Higgins is more of a pigeons playing ping-pong kind of guy, while Shelley has a parrot called Pepper and can't resist the parrot-based posts. But they're both obsessed with brains, which is just how we like it - check out this anatomically correct brain cake.
It's another funky offering from the ScienceBlogs stable.
» Now read part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.
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Labels: Psychology Guides
Education Reduces Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding of Nonverbal Behaviour
When nonverbal behaviour varies across cultures, it's easy to misunderstand someone from a different culture to your own. Despite this, when learning a foreign language, there's not much focus on nonverbal behaviour. Perhaps there should be. I came across a nice example of a cross-cultural misunderstanding from Will Baker writing in the EFL Professional's Written Forum:
"Languages and cultures use non verbal communication which conveys meaning. Although many gestures are similar in Thai and English such as nodding for affirmation many others are not shared. A good example of this is the ubiquitous 'Thai smile'. The 'smile' carries a far wider range of meanings in Thai than it does in English culture. This can sometimes lead to serious communication breakdowns between Thais and English speakers.
An example from my own early experience in Thailand illustrates the point. When confronting the Thai owner of a language school with administrative problems, complaints regarding student numbers in the class were met by a beaming smile and little else. I took this to mean lack of concern or an attempt to trivialise or ignore the problem. I left the discussion upset and angry by what appeared to be the owner's offhand attitude to my problems.
It was only later when another native speaking English teacher, with considerably more experience of Thailand, explained that a smile meant an apology and the fact that the following day all my complaints had been addressed, that I fully understood the situation."
Explicit or implicit teaching?
The question becomes, then, how should nonverbal behaviour be taught? Is it something that can be picked up by simple exposure to people from that culture or does it need to be specifically taught?
A new study by Damnet & Borland (2007) suggests it may be better to explicitly teach nonverbal behaviour. This study examined Thai university students learning English as a foreign language.
One group were shown videos of native English speakers along with being taught the meaning of the words. In this way, while they were not explicitly taught about the nonverbal communication, they were implicitly exposed to it.
A second group, meanwhile, were explicitly taught about nonverbal communication in addition to learning the grammar and vocabulary. It was this second group that showed the best understanding of nonverbal communication.
Unfortunately, I can't gain access to the full text of this article so this study is difficult to evaluate. Nevertheless, explicitly teaching nonverbal behaviour would probably be very useful, and if nothing else very interesting!
Actually it's a real shame when cultural factors get ignored in language teaching. And all of these cultural factors can be just as important to communication as learning the vocabulary and the grammar.
Will Baker's article provides a few more examples. For one it's important to know which topics are taboo. Thai people do not consider criticism of their Royal Family polite conversation - something both the British and Australians find unusual.
On the other hand Thai speakers are much more likely to ask you about your family and why someone isn't married, than native English speakers. Certainly between relative strangers, directly asking why someone isn't married in British culture would be considered mildly insulting.
Your examples
If you've got any examples of cross-cultural misunderstandings, nonverbal or otherwise I'd love to hear them. Comment away...
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityLabels: Nonverbal
Achieving Rapport: Expressivity, Coordination and Flow
Rapport is important. We need rapport to influence others, to teach and learn, to achieve difficult tasks in groups and even to mate. The latest research reveals gaining rapport is not just about matching body language and being positive, the picture is actually much more complicated. Studies have shown that expressivity is actually one of the most important factors in rapport. An expressive person displays their emotions nonverbally to those around them. Those who are more expressive have been found to elicit greater levels of liking and rapport from others.
Expressivity
The interesting thing is that much research argues that it is not just the expression of positive emotions and states that is related to liking, but also the negative. There are, however, some conflicting findings in the research. Some find negative expressivity is related to liking, others not. This apparent confusion is explained by Tickle-Degnen (2006) in terms of the situation. For example, when talking with someone new it builds rapport to hide negative emotion. But when talking with a good friend, showing negative emotion builds rapport.
This also opens up the question of the dynamic nature of expressivity: how do changes in expressivity across time affect rapport? One effect discussed earlier in this series on nonverbal behaviour is synchrony. This study finds it's not so much copying each others body language that predicts rapport as whether it's in synchronisation. Patterns of synchronisation are actually set within rhythmic structures that interact and coordinate.
Coordination
While this research is interesting, the analysis from that study is extremely complicated - too complicated to provide a rule of thumb. Luckily other research suggests there's a shortcut for spotting nonverbal rhythms associated with rapport. This is based on how 'tight' the coordination is between individuals.
High 'tightness' in nonverbal behaviour can be seen when one person matches another very quickly. Studies have shown this is associated with anxiety and a forced attempt to gain rapport with someone else. This is the type of behaviour people often display when first meeting.
At the other extreme, very loose matching of nonverbal behaviour is associated with little rapport. It's at that intermediate level of nonverbal coordination where rapport is highest, when rhythms are neither too loose nor too tight.
Flow
One fascinating question Tickle-Degnen (2006) asks is what aspects of a situation make for high levels of rapport building between individuals? This question is interesting because instead of focussing on individual nonverbal behaviour, this puts the focus on the situation and which aspects of it lead to higher levels of rapport.
To get some purchase on this problem, Tickle-Degnen (2006) uses Csikszentmihalyi's idea of 'flow' - a state when we are operating at our peak, when we feel 'in the zone' (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). When playing sport this means the ball always goes exactly where we want, and in nonverbal behaviour it means we can establish rapport very quickly.
Csikszentmihalyi finds that reaching a 'flow' state tends to happen when people are involved in tasks that push them somewhat, but not beyond their abilities. Also, structured rather than unstructured tasks seem to support flow. What this suggests for flow in rapport is that it will develop more quickly when we are engaged in ability-stretching structured tasks with others.
Perhaps this explains why individuals involved in complicated tasks for which they are trained - say, two people at work - are able to establish rapport very quickly. In contrast, those in an unstructured situation not pushing their abilities - say, two people at a party - can take much longer to achieve rapport.
Achieving rapport
These are, of course, only a few of the factors involved in developing rapport. There are still many, many questions to be answered. For example, how does rapport building relate to our motivations in particular encounters? What effect do different cultural contexts (cf. with cultural differences in nonverbal behaviour) or even computer mediated communication have on rapport building (cf. research on emoticons and capitalisation)?
All these questions and more remain to be answered, but the conclusion we can draw from the latest research is that rapport is not all down to slavishly copying body language and being positive. The picture is much more complicated.
Not only can the communication of negative emotion be important in rapport building, but nonverbal behaviour needs to be coordinated to just the right degree. Finally, there are certain situations in which we can get into the 'rapport zone' when we are at the top of our interpersonal games.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityLabels: Nonverbal, Persuasion
Frown and the Net Frowns With You, But Smile and You Smile Alone
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That's according to a study which assessed the effects of smileys :) and frownies :( as I'm now calling them. Walther and D'Addario (2001) found that while smileys had no effect on the way a message was interpreted, frowns did reduce the positivity of positive messages. Overall, though, the effect of emoticons was relatively small. These results don't seem to tie up with a study I reported recently about the effects of emoticons and capitalisation on how email is perceived which did find a positive effect for smileys. But this study used different measures along with taking into account personality variables. Plus it compared a smiley emoticon with no emoticon, rather than with a frowny emoticon as did Walther and D'Addario (2001).
Time of day and delay
But emoticons and capitalisation are not the only nonverbal cues that have been studied in 'computer mediated communication'. Time of day and delay before replying are two key nonverbal cues in email.
Walther and Tidwell (1995) looked at both of these. Work emails sent at night received the higher ratings for dominance when compared with the same email sent during the day. The opposite was seen for social emails, where more dominance was attributed to emails sent during the day.
Looking at the delay in replying to emails, affection towards work email replies was highest when quick during the day, while lowest when they were quick at night. The reverse findings were seen for social messages with quick replies at night attracting the most affection.
Avatars
A few studies have also examined choice of avatars. These are images people chose to represent themselves in online chat or in online games. Contrary to expectations, one study found that generally the more abstract and less human-like an avatar was, the more likely it was to provoke interest (Nowak & Biocca, 2003).
Another study has found that when avatars with facial expressions are used, these are communicated to humans, although only to a limited extent (Ku et al., 2005).
Masters of meaning
All this research shows it's amazing how much we can infer from so little information. You'd be forgiven for thinking that nonverbal behaviour in emails or instant messaging or even avatar choice was non-existent, and what there was didn't make much difference. But this research just goes to show humans are masters at squeezing every last ounce of meaning from everything we're presented with, even it's only a colon followed by a left bracket.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityOld Posts Appearing as New in RSS feed
For people reading the RSS feed, you'll see lots of old posts appearing as new. Apologies for this - I'm just doing some housekeeping on old posts and it seems there's no way to avoid them popping up again as new in the RSS feed. Just so you don't think I'm trying to fob you off with old stuff!
Labels: Site News
Which Culture Most Controls Their Facial Emotions?
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According to some research it's Russians! And the least control over facial emotions? Americans. These are just two relatively new findings to emerge from studying cultural differences in nonverbal behaviour. Perhaps the best known findings about differences between cultures relate to interpersonal space. Arab males sit closer than American males. Indonesians interact more closely than Australians. Italians more closely than Americans or Germans, Columbians closer than Puerto Ricans. Despite these differences, there are also surprising commonalities.In fact some major aspects of nonverbal behaviour are stable across cultures (Matsumoto, 2006). Facial expression of emotion is a good example. Painstaking work by researchers like Paul Ekman has brought solid evidence for the universality of basic facial expressions. But out of studying these commonalities has come a greater understanding of the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences between cultures.
Cultural display rules
Differences in facial expressions between cultures have been termed cultural display rules. We learn these types of rules as we grow up from those around us. Different cultures have developed subtly different rules.
One useful distinction in these rules is made between cultures which are considered generally 'collectivist' such as the Japanese and cultures considered 'individualist' such as Americans. Collectivist cultures tend to prize 'fitting in' and homogeneity and getting along with others, while individualist cultures tend to emphasise the importance of individual autonomy and power. Studies have found that those from collectivist cultures are more likely to mask negative emotions with smiles - but only do this when in the presence of others, not when they are alone.
Controlling facial emotion
Recent work has looked at the levels of control exerted over different emotions across different cultures (Matsumoto, 2006). This has found it is Russians who most tightly control the display of their emotions, closely followed by the Japanese and South Koreans. On these measures, Americans displayed the least control over their facial expressions. The same study also uncovered significant sex differences. Men are more likely to hide surprise and fear while women control disgust, contempt and anger and many other emotions.
But it's not just the type of expression we display that differs across cultures, it's also the way these expressions are interpreted. In the intensity of emotions, for example, it has been found that Asians tend to judge displayed emotions as less intense than non-Asians.
So, given these differences, what happens when we interpret the facial expressions of someone who isn't from our culture? Are we more likely to hash it up? Recent, still relatively controversial findings, suggest people are actually better at understanding facial expressions of those from their own culture.
Overall, then, the basic nonverbal behaviours are surprisingly similar across cultures. There are, however, many differences which research has only just begun to uncover. Facial expression of emotion is just the tip of the iceberg.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityMatsumoto, D. (2006). Culture and nonverbal behaviour. In: V. L. Manusov & M. L. Patterson (Eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Nonverbal Communication. SAGE.
Detecting Lies: Top 3 Myths, Top 5 Proven Factors
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Lies are extremely difficult to detect. Research shows the average person barely does any better than chance. Part of the reason may be there's so much misinformation about how to detect lies floating around. Years of work in psychology, including research from real police interviews conducted by Aldert Vrij and colleagues, provides guidance on which nonverbal signals do and which don't signal lying (Vrij, 2006).First we've got to dump the misconceptions:
- People don't actually fidget and look away when they're lying. Even some police forces still have this in the manual even though it's just plain wrong.
- Even classic highly researched signs of lying are not that good. Less blinking, more pauses in talking, vocal tension, pupil dilation, chin raise and nervousness don't consistently (across different people) mean someone is lying.
- It may be particularly difficult to detect lies in close friends or partners as we have come to trust them and don't expect them to lie to us.
So, with those misconceptions dealt with, what can psychology research tell us about how to detect lies?
- Individual differences are key. Some people's natural behaviour looks honest while others' natural behaviour doesn't. This won't tell you whether each is lying. E.g. introverts or socially nervous people tend to look as though they're lying when they're not. The way to do it is using comparisons. It's possible to spot falsehoods when they are compared with truthful statements.
- Micro-expressions. Good lie detectors can pick up on tiny facial movements that give away lies. The problem is that they're 'micro' so they're difficult to detect.
- Vocal inflection can be vital. There's evidence it's easier to detect lies just from the voice. The eyes are relatively easy to control and it can be better if we can't see them.
- Rely on intuition. People may be better at detecting lies with their intuition. Implicit or broadly unconscious processes can be more effective than conscious directed thought.
- Lying is hard work. Lying can place high cognitive demands on an individual - putting more pressure on a suspected liar can help with detection.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityMeaning and Memory in Gesture
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A strange thing happens when talking we usually don't notice - our hands move. They draw precise shapes, caress invisible objects, punch the air and quiver. What is the point of all this hand waving?The popular assumption has generally been that nonverbal behaviour communicates emotion. This idea goes back more than two thousand years to the time of Cicero who thought that each emotion had a particular bearing associated with it (Knapp, 2006). While emotions are certainly part of the mix, modern approaches to nonverbal behaviour have examined all kinds of factors like dominance, intimacy, deception and influence.
Explaining gestures - the movements we make with our hands, arms, body, head or face - has been a particularly controversial area of nonverbal behaviour. Some have argued that gestures communicate vital aspects of meaning while others have argued they play a role in word retrieval.
Gesture as thought
Those who argue gesture is filled with meaning say the evidence is very strong. Supporting research comes from studies where people are asked to tell the story of a cartoon with which they are presented (e.g. Hadar and Pinchas-Zamir, 2004). They are surreptitiously video-recorded narrating the story. This video is then shown to participants with either just video or audio, or both together. These participants are then asked to answer a series of questions about the original story. The results show those who have seen the video along with the audio are better at answering questions about the story.
On top of this, researchers have found people gesture more when they can see the person they are talking to compared with, for example, when they are on the telephone. There is even evidence gestures used while telling a story become encoded into memory such that they affect later retellings of the story.
What some argue from evidence like this is firstly that gestures and speech are too highly connected to be separate channels of communication. Each channel informs the other, and to remove gestures is to remove information. Following on from that, it is argued, people are actually thinking with their hands and so, by watching the hands move you can effectively see people's inner thoughts.
Gesture as memory
Not everyone is so sure this type of evidence is really that strong. While it would be foolish to argue gestures have no communicative function, some argue the case has been overstated. Instead, perhaps gestures do aid communication but by helping us form our own speech rather than with the communicative properties they have in themselves.
This theory has the great advantage that it's relatively easy to test. Simply tie someone's hands behind their back, then see how it affects their talk. Indeed, this is what has been done in experimentally controlled conditions and there is some support that people's talk does become less fluent when they're not allowed to gesture. In addition to these, studies on the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon have shown that people unable to gesture find it harder to retrieve the right word.
Other evidence comes from brain damaged patients suffering from aphasia - a partial or total loss of the ability to speak. Aphasics have been shown to gesture much more when unable to retrieve a particular word.
What are gestures for?
Intuitively it seems likely gestures have some sort of function - they aren't just for exercising our arms and hands. For psychologists, working out their exact function has long surpassed Cicero's ideas about the communication of emotion. Perhaps gestures contain meaning, displaying the mind at work or perhaps they help us produce speech more effectively. Either way gestures are not just useless by-products of some other process, but provide vital support for our communicative abilities.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityBusting The Myth 93% of Communication is Nonverbal
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The idea the vast majority of communication occurs nonverbally is quoted everywhere from advertising to popular psychology articles. In fact the original experiments from which these findings derive only applied to communicating attitudes and feelings. That hasn't stopped them being applied universally. Even just considering attitudes and feelings though, these studies have been questioned.53% face, 38% voice, 7% words?
Some of the most influential studies to claim high importance for the nonverbal component of communication were carried out by Albert Mehrabian (Mehrabian, 1972). In one study participants had to judge the positive, negative or neutral content of various words. Three were chosen to be positive - 'dear', 'thanks' and 'honey' - three neutral - 'oh', 'maybe' and 'really' - and three negative - 'brute', 'don't' and 'terrible'. Each was then read in either a positive, neutral or negative tone of voice.
In a second study participants had to judge if the word 'maybe' was positive, negative or neutral from looking at a photograph of a person with a positive, negative or neutral face. From these, and similar experiments, Mehrabian claimed the face conveyed 55% of the information, the voice 38% and the words just 7%.
The criticism of these experiments is pretty obvious. Although they are interesting, they don't provide an effective analogue for real social situations. This is what psychologists call a lack of ecological validity. It's not often we use just one word on its own (unless you count swearing).
12.5 times more powerful?
A social psychologist, Michael Argyle, tried to address the problems with Mehrabian's work. In his studies whole passages of text were acted out in positive, negative and neutral tones. The actual methodology was more complicated than Mehrabian's work but also led to the conclusion that nonverbal channels are 12.5 times more powerful in communicating interpersonal attitudes and feelings than the verbal channel.
The same criticism comes to mind again. Why should the reading of a paragraph be considered an analogue for spontaneous forms of speech?
Demand characteristics
Perhaps an even stronger criticism of these studies relates to their 'demand characteristics'. Demand characteristics is a term psychologists use when they are referring to participants in an experiment acting in ways they think the experimenter wants them to act. People generally want to please, they want to go with the flow. So if they can work out what the experimenter is after, they'll often try and give it to them.
So, when watching videos in these experiments it will be obvious to participants the speeches are acted, not spontaneous. Participants pick up on what the experimenter wants from the social cues provided. Indeed, one study has found that when the purpose of the experiment is actually well-camouflaged from the participants, the dominance of nonverbal communication disappears (Trimboli & Walker, 1987).
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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The Nonverbal Symphony of Attraction
[Photo by hendriko]
Glossy magazine articles on the body language of attraction often quote two vital nonverbal factors: posture mirroring and movement echo. The first is where the other person has adopted the same position as you and the second is where they copy your movement. While they both play a role, research suggests it's not in fact the individual movements, but the patterns of movements that tell the story of attraction between two people.In a study of nonverbal behaviour, Grammer, Kruck and Magnusson (1998) analysed videos of people meeting for the first time. Interactions were videotaped from behind a one-way screen and participants were asked afterwards how likely they would be to go on a date with the person they'd met.
The videos were analysed by categorising movements of the head, shoulders, arms, hands, trunk and legs. This information was then run through software to search for patterns. Overall, around 4,000 patterns of nonverbal behaviour were analysed.
Results
Contrary to many previous findings, attraction was predicted by patterns of synchronisation and not simple mirroring of body language. What emerged were rhythmic structures of movement synchrony - patterns of bodily movement people adopted. In common with previous research, Grammer et al. (1998) found it was women who tended to start and control these patterns. Indeed, the more interested a woman was in a man, the more complicated these patterns became.
Effectively, then, potential couples test their compatibility nonverbally by constructing symphonies of body language, with women as conductors. Considering the complexity of this description, it's clear why 'movement synchrony' never makes it to the glossies, although it's probably much closer to the truth of how nonverbal attraction is negotiated.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityLabels: Nonverbal, Relationships
How do Emoticons and Capitalisation Affect Perception of Email?
[Photo by Violator3]
Compared with face-to-face communication, nonverbal cues in email are lacking. But humans are fabulous at generating meaning even when cues are sparse. Psychologists have theorised our motivation for generating meaning is reducing levels of uncertainty and helping predict other people's behaviour. This might explain how, in emails, even two simple things like capitalisation and emoticons can have important effects on reader's perceptions. People want to predict our behaviour, and we theirs. Personality, emoticons and capitalisation in email
The research on nonverbal behaviour in emails is not as simple as emoticons are good while capitalisation is bad. It seems both capitalisation and emoticons can evoke polarised responses. Perhaps less polarised for capitalisation which is normally considered a no-no in emails. Although capitalisation can also communicate excitement and not just senseless shouting.
For emoticons, there is some research finding they can take the sting out of a flame (a message with negative content), while others find it doesn't. Perhaps some of this variability in the perception of capitalisation and emoticons comes down to personality?
The study
Byron and Baldridge (2007) researched this by asking college students to fill in a personality questionnaire and then read emails from an unknown person. These were simple requests for copies of academic papers or information about the university. Each student was randomly assigned to read two of four differently presented emails. Some of the emails were all capitalised, others included emoticons and the rest neither, so the researchers could compare responses. The students then rated the sender's likeability.
They found that, sure enough, using correct capitalisation and emoticons tended to make a better impression on readers. The reader's personality also influenced how emoticons and capitalisation were perceived. Readers high in both extroversion and emotional stability were likely to rate sender's emails as more likeable if they had correct capitalisation. As for emoticons, readers higher in emotional stability were likely to rate sender's emails more likeable if they used emoticons.
The opposite was also true. This meant that for the introverted and emotionally unstable, correct capitalisation tended not to affect the sender's likeability, perhaps even lowering it. Similarly, emoticons had little effect on the emotionally unstable.
More questions than answers
These results are interesting but they also raise loads more questions. Emoticons may make the sender appear more likeable, but do they also make them seem less professional? Can emoticons really take the sting out of a flame? In this study, they only used a smiley face :-) but what about all the other emoticons? And what if you're using emoticons other people don't understand?
These questions are multiplied if more advanced ways of communicating emotion in email become a reality. Researchers are currently working on electronic mail systems which involve expressive typography, graphical components as well as old fashioned words to convey emotion. Whether this will provide a significant and useable step forward in email over punctuation, italicisation and capitalisation, we shall have to wait and see. Until then, WE'VE GOT QUITE ENOUGH QUESTIONS TO ANSWER ABOUT EMAIL JUST AS IT IS :-)
Sorry.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityLabels: Email, Emotion, Nonverbal, Personality
Gender Differences in Reading Nonverbal Behaviour
[Photo by Katie Tegtmeyer]
Here's a simple exercise to test your skill at reading nonverbal behaviour: watch some 'reality' TV with the sound turned off and try to work out the subtext of what's going on. Who likes who? Who has something to hide? Who is everyone afraid of? Some psychologists, in testing understanding of nonverbal behaviour, have found that women fare better than men. While this might be explained by some experiential, or even intrinsic, failing in men, new research suggests it might have more to do with interpersonal goals.Interpersonal perception
In Horgan and Smith's (2006) study, participants were given an 'interpersonal perception task'. They watched a video which shows people's naturally occurring behaviour in different scenarios. These cover situations of competition, deception, kinship, status and intimate relationships. For each video they have to try and work what is going on. In the deception situation, for example, they decide whether someone is lying. Each of these answers is then compared with what was actually going on.
People watching the videos are split into three groups and the experimental manipulation is this. One group is told, before they watch the videos, that this test is designed to discover whether potential job applicants would make good social workers. Here the researchers are trying to cue participants to think women, stereotypically, should be better at this task than men.
In contrast, the second group are told this test is for uncovering potential interrogators rather than social workers. This is aimed at activating the stereotype that men should perform better than women. The final (control) group is given no specific information about the context of the task. Despite these initial instructions, everyone watches and rates the same video sequences.
Results
The results showed that people performed worse when they were in the condition that was incongruent with the stereotypical expectations of their gender. So, when women were told it was a test for interrogators, they didn't perform as well as when they were told nothing. Similarly men performed worse when they thought it was a test for social workers.
Conversely, when the conditions were congruent with stereotypical expectations, performance wasn't improved compared to the control. It seems, then, that gender expectations tend to reduce performance in understanding nonverbal behaviour rather than enhancing it.
This evidence does not support the idea that women are better at understanding body language across the board, rather that it depends on the context. It might be that findings showing women are better at understanding nonverbal behaviour than men are down to interpersonal goals.
Interpersonal goals
These results can be explained by thinking in terms of people's interpersonal goals. Imagine a man who is fantastic at reading nonverbal signals when playing poker but terrible when he turns away from his chips to speak to his wife. This might be because when the goal - beat the other guy - is more congruent with his interpersonal aim - establish control - he does it well. When the goal - sweet-talk wife - is incongruent with his aim - establish control - he fails.
This example assumes, of course, that a man's aim is always to establish control, rather than build relationships, which it isn't. Despite this, it's incredible how powerful stereotypes can be. Indeed, this study demonstrates the power gender stereotypes have to affect our own skills in reading nonverbal behaviour.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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A Slow Smile Attracts
[Photo by kalandrakas]
Psychology research is not generally very good at capturing change. Measurements tend to be fairly static, either looking at one slice of time or asking participants to average over a period. Which is why this research on smiling is so unusual. Some of the best known research on smiling is about how people judge an authentic smile - the so-called 'Duchenne smile' or the 'crinkly-eyed smile'. What this research asks, though, is how does a smile's speed in combination with head-tilt and gender affect its perception.In this experiment, one hundred participants, half men half women, were sat in front of a monitor to judge the smiles of synthetic faces (Krumhuber, Manstead & Kappas, 2007). They watched the faces smiling - some whose smile appeared in just over 0.1 of a second, and some whose smile appeared in just over 0.5 of a second. At the same time, some of the heads were tilted to the left and some to the right. Participants then had to judge the smiles on how trustworthy, attractive, dominant, fake and flirtatious they made the faces seem.
Results
The study replicated a previous finding that a long-onset smile (0.5s onset) is seen as more authentic and flirtatious. On top of this, the researchers found long-onset smiles were perceived as more attractive, more trustworthy and less dominant. Head tilting also increased attractiveness and trustworthiness but only if the head was tilted in the right direction. In this case, the right direction was the same way as eye orientation or towards a partner.
Gender
There was also evidence that smiles are perceived in different ways depending on the gender of both the target and the observer. Previous research has found that smiling is associated with attractiveness in women, but dominance in men. These are probably a result of gender stereotypes. One finding in the present study was that women's smiles were judged less authentic than men's. Krumhuber et al. (2007) speculate that this is because women tend to smile more than men, so their behaviour is seen as more usual and therefore less informative. The reverse may be true for men.
While women's smile were more likely to be discounted, it seemed women were generally better at detecting the difference between short- and long-onset smiles. The differences found in this study, therefore, were mostly due to female participants rather than the men. Krumhuber et al. (2007) suggest this ties in with findings men are more likely to interpret ambiguous or inauthentic signals (short-onset smiles) as flirtatious behaviour. They can't (or won't) tell the difference.
And finally...
I've discovered that psychologists studying nonverbal behaviour have the most fantastic terminology. This study is about the 'Temporal Dynamics of Smiling' and I also came across one titled 'Spontaneous vs. posed facial behavior: automatic analysis of brow actions' (think Groucho Marx). This one is particularly intriguing: 'Head Canting in Paintings: An Historical Study' - I may just give that a read.
Perhaps I'm weird, but those titles really tickle me.
» This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour.
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References - Click here to toggle visibilityLabels: Emotion, Nonverbal, Relationships
Nonverbal Behaviour
[Photo by Darwin Bell]
Nonverbal behaviour is an area of psychology that receives stacks of media attention. There are endless popular psychology pieces claiming to teach you how to tell if someone is lying or whether they like you or not. All well and good, these things are really useful to know. But where popular accounts often fail is they tend to be simplistic. This series takes a look at some of the more novel and sophisticated approaches to research in non-verbal communication. We start with a study on the 'temporal dynamics of smiling' followed by an investigation of gender differences in reading nonverbal behaviour.
"Some of the best known research on smiling is about how people judge an authentic smile - the so-called 'Duchenne smile' or the 'crinkly-eyed smile'. What this research asks, though, is how does a smile's speed in combination with head-tilt and gender affect its perception."
"Some psychologists, in testing understanding of nonverbal behaviour, have found that women fare better than men. While this might be explained by some experiential, or even intrinsic, failing in men, new research suggests it might have more to do with interpersonal goals."
"Psychologists have theorised our motivation for generating meaning is reducing levels of uncertainty and helping predict other people's behaviour. This might explain how, in emails, even two simple things like capitalisation and emoticons can have important effects on reader's perceptions."
"Glossy magazine articles on the body language of attraction often quote two vital nonverbal factors: posture mirroring and movement echo. While they both play a role, research suggests it's not the individual movements that tell the story of attraction between two people, but the emerging patterns."
"The idea the vast majority of communication occurs nonverbally is quoted everywhere from advertising to popular psychology articles. In fact the original experiments from which these findings derive have been seriously questioned."
"A strange thing happens when talking we usually don't notice - our hands move. They draw precise shapes, caress invisible objects, punch the air and quiver. What is the point of all this hand waving?"
"Lies are extremely difficult to detect. Research shows the average person barely does any better than chance. Part of the reason may be there's so much misinformation about how to detect lies floating around."
"According to some research it's Russians! And the least control over facial emotions? Americans. These are just two relatively new findings to emerge from studying cultural differences in nonverbal behaviour."
"That's according to a study which assessed the effects of smileys :) and frownies :( as I'm now calling them. Walther and D'Addario (2001) found that while smileys had no effect on the way a message was interpreted, frowns did reduce the positivity of positive messages."
"There are any number of reasons why rapport is important: we need rapport to influence others, to teach and learn, to achieve difficult tasks in groups and even to mate. The latest research reveals gaining rapport is not just about matching body language and being positive..."
"When nonverbal behaviour varies across cultures, it's easy to misunderstand someone from a different culture to your own. Despite this, when learning a foreign language, there's not much focus on nonverbal behaviour. Perhaps there should be."
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Labels: Nonverbal