Category: Psychology

Adolescent behaviour can seem very weird to adults — this basic mental process helps explain why.

The minds of teenagers are much more sensitive to rewards than adults, and this may explain why their behaviour seems so extreme to adults.

The conclusions come from a new study, published in the journal Psychological Science (Roper et al., 2014).

It reveals that teenagers find it hard to adjust their behaviour when situations change.

Dr. Jatin Vaidya, who led the study, said:

“The rewards have a strong, perceptional draw and are more enticing to the teenager.

Even when a behavior is no longer in a teenager’s best interest to continue, they will because the effect of the reward is still there and lasts much longer in adolescents than in adults.”

It’s well-known that, as a group, teenagers generally make poor, impulsive, risky decisions, which most adults immediately know are wrong (of course, there’s no point telling them!).

Psychologists have generally believed that this is down to under-development in the brain’s ‘self-control centres’: the frontal lobes.

The new research, though, suggests that it stems from a more fundamental process: the way rewards are processed in the brain.

In the study, both adolescents and adults carried out a simple computer task which involved spotting targets on the computer screen in return for small monetary rewards.

Hidden in the symbols was a sequence that people learned wholly unconsciously, which enabled them to increase their winnings.

But, when that pattern changed, and participants were told they had a new target, it was the adolescents who couldn’t adapt.

Professor Shaun Vecera, who co-authored the study, explained:

“Even though you’ve told them, ‘You have a new target,’ the adolescents can’t get rid of the association they learned before.

It’s as if that association is much more potent for the adolescent than for the adult.

The fact that the reward is gone doesn’t matter.

They will act as if the reward is still there.”

The researchers think this may explain some common teenage behaviours.

For example, sometimes they continue to make inappropriate jokes in class long after their friends have stopped laughing.

It may even help explain teenage obsessions with texting and video games which can seem out of all proportion to the rewards they are receiving.

Vaidya warned that the disproportionate attention teenagers pay to rewards may make them particularly vulnerable to the allure of modern technology:

 “I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed access to technology.

But they need help in regulating their attention so they can develop those impulse-control skills.”

Image credit: chiaralily

Messages sent from India to France, directly from one human brain to another.

An international team of roboticists and neuroscientists have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two people over the internet for the first time.

Professor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, of Harvard Medical School, explained the thinking behind the study:

“We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways.”

“One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, ‘Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'”

The scientists in France and Spain used EEG (electroencephalogram) and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) technology (Grau et al., 2014).

The EEG allows you to read brain waves, so it can do the transmitting end; while the TMS allows you to ‘inject’ the message in the brain, so it can do the receiving end.

Here’s what the two people communicating with each other looked like:

On the left one person was sitting in India with an EEG headset on, which measured their brain waves.

The messages — which were ‘hola’ and ‘ciao’ — were encoded into binary and sent to the receiver in France.

On the right, TMS was used to stimulate the brain of the receiver with the binary message.

The person receiving the message ‘saw’ a series of flashes at the edge of their peripheral vision: this is the result of the magnetic stimulation of their visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain.

The sequence of flashes allowed the receiver to decode the message.

Three different people sat under the TMS machine as receivers and successfully received the simple messages with only a 15% error rate.

Previous studies have demonstrated computer-to-brain communication over the internet, but this is the first to demonstrate human-to-human communication in this way.

Pascual-Leone continued:

“By using advanced precision neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotized TMS, we were able to directly and noninvasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write.

This in itself is a remarkable step in human communication, but being able to do so across a distance of thousands of miles is a critically important proof-of-principle for the development of brain-to-brain communications.”

Image credit: Tim Sheerman-Chase & PLoS ONE

New study finds 5 days away from electronic devices has dramatic effects on children.

Children who spend five days away from their smartphones, televisions and other screens were substantially better at reading facial emotions afterwards, a new study has found.

The UCLA study suggests that children’s social skills are hurt by spending less and less time interacting face-to-face (Uhls et al., 2014).

Professor Patricia Greenfield, who co-authored the study, said:

“Many people are looking at the benefits of digital media in education, and not many are looking at the costs.

Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues — losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people — is one of the costs.

The displacement of in-person social interaction by screen interaction seems to be reducing social skills.”

The study tested two groups of sixth-grade students at how well they could judge facial emotions in pictures and videos.

One group then went off to the Pali institute — a nature and science camp near Los Angeles — for five days.

At the camp, the children weren’t allowed to use any electronic devices, while the other group went about their normal, everyday lives.

It was quite a change for those children who attended the Pali Institute as the usual amount of time they spent texting, watching TV and playing video games was 4.5 hours per day — and that was on a typical school day.

After five days at the Institute, the children’s ability to read facial emotions improved tremendously in comparison to those who’d had their electronic devices for the week.

The number of errors they made on the test reduced by around one-third.

Yalda Uhls, who was the study’s lead author, said:

“You can’t learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication.

If you’re not practicing face-to-face communication, you could be losing important social skills.”

We are social creatures. We need device-free time.”

Good advice for us all, I’m sure, children and adults alike.

Image credit: horizontal.integration

Genetic test predicts suicidality with 90% accuracy in people at severe risk.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University say they have uncovered a chemical change in a single human gene which could lead to a simple blood test for suicide risk.

The gene, known as SKA2, is involved in the way the brain responds to stress hormones, according to the research published in The American Journal of Psychiatry (Guintivano et al., 2014).

Zachary Kaminsky, who lead the study, explained:

“Suicide is a major preventable public health problem, but we have been stymied in our prevention efforts because we have no consistent way to predict those who are at increased risk of killing themselves.

With a test like ours, we may be able to stem suicide rates by identifying those people and intervening early enough to head off a catastrophe.”

In the research, samples were taken from those with mental illness, as well as healthy people.

Genetic analysis showed that amongst those who had died of suicide, the SKA2 gene had genetically mutated.

Although the DNA sequence remained the same, the SKA2 gene had a chemical added to it called a methyl group.

People who had killed themselves had higher levels of methylation on this gene.

Predicting suicide

The researchers tested the predictive power of the test by running it on hundreds of blood samples of people whose suicide risk was known, partly because some had already attempted it.

For those at the most severe risk of suicide, they found the test was 90% accurate.

Amongst young people, the test was 96% accurate.

The accuracy dropped to 80%, however, when people at less severe risk were included.

Kaminsky thinks the result is significant:

“We have found a gene that we think could be really important for consistently identifying a range of behaviors from suicidal thoughts to attempts to completions.

We need to study this in a larger sample but we believe that we might be able to monitor the blood to identify those at risk of suicide.”

If refined, the test could have all kinds of applications:

• Helping to predict the suicide risk of those being assessed in psychiatric emergency rooms.
• Military personnel returning from active duty who are at high risk could be carefully monitored.
• To inform the prescription of certain medications that are known to increase suicide risk.

Image credit: Chapendra

Are you on the right or the left? It could be down to this basic psychological bias.

Our position on the political spectrum — right, left or centrist — could be down to a deep-seated psychological bias in the way people think about the world.

That’s according to new research published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which tested reactions to viewing negative stimuli, like people eating worms or maggot-infested wounds (Hibbing et al., 2014).

The study found that the more conservative people’s politics was, the more intense their reaction to these pictures.

The variation between people was quite striking: some people did not seem to mind the pictures that much, while others reacted strongly, with much higher levels of skin conductance, showing they were sweating more.

This finding, combined with other research from around the world, suggests our so-called ‘negativity bias’ — an automatic orientation towards negative aspects of our environments — may be at the heart of our place on the political spectrum.

The authors explain:

“Across research methods, samples and countries, conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative, and to be more distracted by the negative.” (Hibbing et al., 2014).

A higher negativity bias may lead some people — conservatives — to lean towards creating order and promoting stability.

A lower negatively bias may lead others — liberals — to prefer innovation and progress.

One of the study’s authors, John Alford of Rice University, said:

“These natural tendencies to perceive the physical world in different ways may in turn be responsible for striking moments of political and ideological conflict throughout history.”

The researchers are quick to point out that this is not a criticism of people who lean towards the right:

• Everyone has a negativity bias: paying attention to negative events is likely to keep us alive longer.
• Some research finds conservatives are happier.

Not a controversial conclusion

Kevin Smith of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, another of the study’s authors, said:

“We see the ‘negativity bias’ as a common finding that emerges from a large body of empirical studies done not just by us, but by many other research teams around the world.

We make the case in this article that negativity bias clearly and consistently separates liberals from conservatives.”

Amongst experts in the area, the findings do not appear particularly controversial.

The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences asks other academics to comment on articles it publishes.

Of 26 commentaries published for this article, only three or four seriously disputed the findings.

The others were broadly supportive of the idea that people’s negativity bias has a crucial impact on their politics.

Political scientists John Hibbing, concluded by saying:

“Conservatives are fond of saying ‘liberals just don’t get it,’ and liberals are convinced that conservatives magnify threats.

Systematic evidence suggests both are correct.”

Image credit: Thomas Hawk

The received wisdom about which gender talks more needs adjusting.

If stereotypes are to be believed, this is an open-and-shut case.

Women blab on and on while men stand around all strong and silent, producing little more than the odd grunt — and that’s only when they’re pushed.

While most people think the search for cold, hard facts will only reveal what we guessed all along; for psychologists who have done some research, it’s turned out to be a tricky little question.

Some research does indeed find that women talk more, while others finds there’s no difference between men and women, and some even finds that men talk more.

Now, new research suggests that the reason there’s no easy answer to this is that it depends on the context (Onnela et al., 2014).

Researchers at Northeastern University investigated by having various groups of people wear ‘sociometers’ (below), a device developed at MIT which measures how long people spend talking to each other, along with various other social signals.

These devices were given to men and women in two different settings:

• One group were students working together on their Masters degree group project. Their conversations and interactions were measured over 12 hours of one day.
• The other group were call-centre employees at a US bank whose interactions were measured over 12 one-hour lunch breaks across 12 separate days.

What they found was that amongst the students working together on the project, women were more likely to talk more.

This probably reflects the greater degree to which women tend to collaborate.

These findings, though, were only true when the groups were relatively small.

Once there were six or more people talking together, it was men who began to dominate the conversation.

In the call-centres there was relatively little difference between how much men and women talked.

Still, women were slightly more likely to engage in conversations.

Pro­fessor David Lazer, who led the research, said:

“In the one set­ting that is more col­lab­o­ra­tive we see the women choosing to work together, and when you work together you tend to talk more.”

So it’s a very par­tic­ular sce­nario that leads to more inter­ac­tions. The real story here is there’s an inter­play between the set­ting and gender which cre­ated this difference.”

The research doesn’t necessarily end the debate about which gender talks more — although women seem to have the slight upper hand — but does demonstrate the importance of context.

What it does show that the received wisdom about who talks more needs adjusting.

Image credit: Alex Prolmos

Your friends are as genetically related to you as your fourth cousins.

I recently wrote about research which found that people choose spouses with similar DNA.

Now, though, this finding has been generalised to include people who are friends rather than spouses.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined almost 1.5 million markers of genetic variation across almost 2,000 people (Christakis & Fowler, 2014).

From this pool of people they then compared pairs of people who were friends with pairs who were strangers.

It turns out that we’re about as genetically related to our friends as our fourth cousins.

One of the study’s authors, Professor Nicholas Christakis of Yale University, said:

“One percent may not sound like much to the layperson, but to geneticists it is a significant number.

And how remarkable: Most people don’t even know who their fourth cousins are!

Yet we are somehow, among a myriad of possibilities, managing to select as friends the people who resemble our kin.”

Oddly enough, the genes that are most likely to be similar are those which control the sense of smell.

One of the most striking findings of the study, though, is that genes which were more similar between friends are also evolving at the fastest rate.

Christakis continued:

“The paper also lends support to the view of human beings as ‘metagenomic’, not only with respect to the microbes within us but also to the people who surround us.

It seems that our fitness depends not only on our own genetic constitutions, but also on the genetic constitutions of our friends.”

The authors suggest that the social environment itself may be an evolutionary force which has increased genetic changes over the past 30,000 years.

Image credit: DG EMPL

Baby’s brains find it easier to process their native language.

Even before babies begin to speak, the areas of their brains which plan movements — like that of the mouth — are already activated by speech.

Brain scans show they are cognitively laying the groundwork for their native language.

The findings come from a University of Washington study which scanned the brains of 7- and 11-month-old infants while they listened to snatches of English and Spanish.

The study’s lead author, Patricia Kuhl, explained the significance of the findings:

“Most babies babble by 7 months, but don’t utter their first words until after their first birthdays.

Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby’s brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start and suggests that 7-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words.”

It’s likely that this process of mentally trying to say words contributes to how babies zero in on what will become their native language.

By contrast, before around the age of 8-months, babies respond to all languages in a similar way.

Then, a transition starts to occur as their brains notice that there are particular sounds that are used more often.

In the study, one group of babies was approaching the 8-month cut-off.

For these infants both English and Spanish were equally interesting to the baby’s brains, with the auditory and motor areas springing into action to try and listen to and prepare to reproduce both languages.

In the older group who had reached around 1-year-old, though, the pattern was different.

By this age they have got used to their native language (either English or Spanish in this study), so the brain doesn’t have to work so hard when listening.

In contrast, when the baby hears what has become a non-native language, its brain has to work harder to reproduce it.

Image credit: Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington

Three reasons good people do bad things.

When people are in a group they are more disconnected from their moral beliefs, according to new neuroscientific research.

The results come from a study which compared how people’s brains work when they are alone compared with when they are in a group (Cikara et al., 2014).

The study was inspired by a trip to Yankee Stadium in New York made by Dr Mina Cikara, now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

On the trip her husband was wearing a Red Sox cap (for non-US readers: the Red Sox are a rival team from Boston).

He was continuously heckled by Yankee fans, so Mina took the cap from her husband and wore it herself:

“What I decided to do was take the hat from him, thinking I would be a lesser target by virtue of the fact that I was a woman.

I was so wrong. I have never been called names like that in my entire life.

It was a really amazing experience because what I realized was I had gone from being an individual to being seen as a member of ‘Red Sox Nation.’

And the way that people responded to me, and the way I felt myself responding back, had changed, by virtue of this visual cue — the baseball hat.

Once you start feeling attacked on behalf of your group, however arbitrary, it changes your psychology.”

When ‘me versus you’ becomes ‘us versus them’

Two reasons why people behave differently in groups are that:

1. they feel more anonymous,
2. and that they feel less likely to be caught behaving badly.

But Cikara and colleagues wanted to examine a further factor: whether people’s moral compass also goes awry when they are in a group.

They did this by asking a group of participants to answer question which gave an insight into their personal morality.

This enabled the researchers to create personalised statements for each of them, such as:

• “I have stolen food from shared refrigerators.”
• “I always apologize after bumping into someone.”

Participants then played a game while inside a brain scanner: once as part of a team and once on their own.

When people played on their own, and saw moral statements related to themselves, their brains showed more activity in a part of the medial prefrontal cortex — an area associated with thinking about the self.

This is normal, suggesting a strong identification with their own morals.

But, when some people playing in group saw moral statement about themselves, they reacted much less intensely, suggesting weaker identification with their own beliefs and moral ideals.

Forgotten morals

In a follow-up test, these people were also much more likely to try and harm members of the other group.

Not only that, but they even seemed to conveniently forget the moral statements they’d heard beforehand.

One of the study’s authors, Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, said:

“Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people’s priorities change when there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.

A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into ‘mobs’ that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality.”

Image credit: A Lads Club Escapette

The deadly meteorological consequences of gender stereotypes.

Hurricanes with female names are likely to cause more deaths than those with male names, finds new research from the University of Illinois.

The study examined over 60 years of hurricanes which hit have the US, excluding Katrina (2005) and Audrey (1957), because individually they caused so much damage and loss of life (Jung et al., 2014).

The results showed there were higher death tolls, on average, when the hurricanes were given a female name.

This wasn’t because female-named hurricanes were any more severe; rather that people’s behaviour changed.

Sharon Shavitt, one of authors of the report, explained:

“In judging the intensity of a storm, people appear to be applying their beliefs about how men and women behave.

This makes a female-named hurricane, especially one with a very feminine name such as Belle or Cindy, seem gentler and less violent.”

People unconsciously say to themselves: how could I be killed by a hurricane called Cindy?

In fact, hurricanes are named arbitrarily, alternating between male and female names, and the names tell you nothing about the severity of the storm.

But, if people in the path of the storm are letting its name affect whether they take shelter, what we call it may matter more than we think.

Hurricane Christopher versus Christina

Having trawled through the records, the researchers returned to the lab to test their finding experimentally.

People were given a series of hypothetical storms with male and female names and asked to make judgements about their intensity and the risk they faced.

The results showed that people consistently rated male-named hurricanes, like Hurricane Christopher or Hurricane Victor as more intense and more risky than their female-named counterparts, like Hurricane Alexandra and Hurricane Christina.

Shavitt continued:

“People imagining a ‘female’ hurricane were not as willing to seek shelter.

The stereotypes that underlie these judgments are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women — they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men.”

The irony is that until the late 1970s, hurricanes were always given female names, as they were thought to embody feminine qualities like unpredictability.

This practise — and the sexist reasoning behind it — was quite rightly abandoned in favour of alternating between male and female.

Oddly, though, what we’ve learnt is that we’d be better off naming all hurricanes after men to take advantage of people’s stereotypical views.

The researchers estimate that changing a severe hurricane’s name from “Eloise” to “Charley” could potentially cut the death toll by one-third.

Perhaps the naming of hurricanes is one specific situation where we shouldn’t worry about being sexist,  if being a little sexist is going to save lives.

Image credit: Eric Fleming