Review of the new biography of Stanley Milgram – architect of one of the most famous experiments in social psychology – by Raj Persaud in the British Medical Journal:
“The late Stanley Milgram fairly lays claim to be one of the greatest behavioural scientists of the 20th century.
Don’t believe everything you read – even if it has been published in a reputable scientific journal:
“Dr John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina in Greece, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, recently analysed 45 well publicised studies from leading journals appearing between 1990 and 2003.
Continue reading “Healthy Scepticism Towards Research Pays Off”
“Each year in the U.S., 25,000 adults commit suicide. People who have attempted suicide are at high risk for another suicide attempt. Researchers wanted to know how to reduce that risk. They may have found their answer in a particular kind of psychotherapy, which appears to cut that risk by half.”
Continue reading “Cognitive Therapy Reduces Repeat Suicide Attempts by 50 Percent”
Mind Hacks have a good entry on how mental illness is shaped by culture:
It’s Friday so let’s kick back and enjoy some geek psychology.
Seeing the phrases ‘human courtship’ and ‘mathematical modelling’ in the same sentence means only one thing – a couple of maths PhDs had too much time on their hands. Dr Peter Sozou and Professor Rob Seymour of UCL created a model of human courtship that finds that essentially ‘worthless gifts’ like theatre tickets or meals out will get you the right girl.
The theory goes that if you buy her something that can be exchanged or refunded, she’ll dump you and cash in the winnings. On the other hand, if you cleverly show you’re not tight by paying for the meal, the message that you’re a good provider is sent but you can’t be ripped off – it’s tricky for her to get a refund on a partly-digested meal.
Here’s a few more problems for the geek psychologists to work on: calculating the optimum hairstyle for successful mating, including a formula that takes into account length, parting and ‘product’. Also perhaps with the new mathematics of mating we can solve the Fermat’s Last Theorem of dating: when on a date how much should you tip a waitress who, while delivering excellent service, kept flirting with you and making your date jealous?
New Scientist
Light piece in The Guardian on the psychology of magic.
“…not content with just enjoying the tricks, psychologists are now using their effects on the mind to work out how we handle the floods of sensory information coming into our brains and process it into a mental picture of the world around us. Magic is a deception, a disruption of that orderly mental picture where things seem to float in mid-air or coins and cards vanish in front of our eyes. Scientists now believe that, by mapping out how our brains are deceived, they could even help to unlock some of the mysteries of consciousness itself.”
The idea of magic unlocking the mysteries of consciousness is a bit far-fetched. Still, if there’s a man for the job, it’s Professor Richard Wiseman, who was the youngest member of The Magic Circle before becoming a professional psychologist.Bursting the magic bubble
As the eyes are the window to the soul, psychologists’ fascination with them is no surprise. In the first of two new studies, cognitive psychologists looked at whether there was a relationship between neuroticism and where people direct their visual attention.
The study found that those higher in neuroticism – essentially pessimists – tend to pay more attention to the lower part of the visual field. On the other hand those lower in neuroticism – optimists – paid more attention to the upper part. Now whether this has anything to do with how people behave in the real world is a hotly argued point in psychology – here’s a short description of ecological validity.
The final claim of the article that redirecting attention upwards might raise mood is highly speculative. Despite this, the BBC news story does the usual media job of generalising to the point of inanity.
On a more positive note for BBC News they do have a nice article about how parts of our brains ‘switch off’ when we blink. Researchers claim that this is why we don’t tend to experience a mini-blackout while blinking. This was investigated by lighting up the eye from the inside so researchers could differentiate between an eye blink and a dark scene (see photo above). Clever huh?
Does “feeling down” mean seeing down? Depressive symptoms and vertical selective attention [Article abstract]
New research, published in Health Psychology, has found that optimists recover more quickly than pessimists after a death or the onset of severe illness in the family. This is the latest in a line of research supporting the idea that being optimistic is good for your health. Optimists have been found to live as much as 19% longer – perhaps because they have more friends, persist at healthy behaviours and have stronger immune systems.
Participants in this research were assessed for optimism and pessimism using the Life Orientation Test, while sick days were used in this research as an indication of health levels. The authors argue that this is more accurate than self-report methods of assessing health. These tend to be open to a variety of problems including people simply forgetting or misreporting when they were ill.
So, how is possible to stay positive when life is treating you like a punch-bag? Dr Raj Persaud in his book ‘The Motivated Mind’ reports research into the differing mental habits of optimists and pessimists showing it’s all in how we interpret past successes and failures.
Half-Empty – When something bad happens to a pessimist, they assume it is representative of a pervasive problem. This can lead to ‘catastrophising’ – allowing a setback to have disastrous implications for the rest of your life. To compound the problem a pessimist will also assume that a problem encountered is permanent and personal.
Half-Full – When something bad happens to an optimist, they do the exact opposite. An optimist tends to restrict the event’s implications, avoid taking it personally and assume it is only a temporary state of affairs.
What about if something good happens to an optimist and a pessimist? Reverse the patterns seen above. An optimist will let it spill over into other areas of their life as well as assuming it’s personal and permanent.
And a pessimist doesn’t.
Pessimists, of course, will claim that optimists suffer from ‘False Hope Syndrome‘ – but that’s just typical of their negative thinking!
Optimism and Pessimism as Predictors of Change in Health After Death or Onset of Severe Illness in Family [PDF]
Press Release
A study published this month in Neuropsychobiology has found that sustained caffeine use has no significant enhancing effects on performance or mood and does not provide a restorative effect after poor sleep. So are the approximately 90% of us who feel we get a boost from caffeine, just deluding ourselves?
Research into caffeine has produced mixed results. Previous studies have shown some associations between caffeine intake and increased alertness, vigilance and lower levels of fatigue – as we might expect. Even so, some researchers have found that the apparent benefits of caffeine are only seen in individuals who already use the drug. Those not already caffeine users show much smaller improvements. Other studies, however, have found different patterns.
This study differs from many previously carried out by controlling for the effects of caffeine withdrawal. What it suggests is that these types of apparent enhancements are more the result of the alleviation of caffeine withdrawal. Caffeine withdrawal has already been recognised as a kind of disorder causing certain predictable symptoms including drowsiness, headaches and negative mood. It is the association in our minds between the alleviation of caffeine withdrawal symptoms and our morning cup of coffee that keep us coming back for more.
What studies like this suggest is that, overall, our cognitive functions are no more highly tuned if we use drinks containing caffeine than if we abstain completely. In fact there was some evidence found here that caffeine might actually be undermining the restorative effects of sleep.
There has been evidence from epidemiological studies of the long-term benefits of caffeine consumption – such as protection from cancer – but these are, at best, fairly speculative. Equally, caffeine does raise blood pressure and increase the risk of coronary heart disease and strokes.
The findings of this study are a blow to the perception that caffeinated drinks provide a boost to mental performance. After all, most people don’t drink tea or coffee for the long-term health benefits – they just want to wake up.
A word of warning to those inspired to give up: breaking a habit as ingrained as drinking tea or coffee can be difficult and it has been shown that a stepped approach is best. The symptoms of complete caffeine withdrawal can last up to 7 days and are not pleasant if experienced in one go. I know, I’ve tried it.
Dietary Caffeine, Performance and Mood: Enhancing and Restorative Effects after Controlling for Withdrawal Reversal [Article abstract]
Reanalysis of data collected from the most expensive research into the treatment of alcoholism has found little support for the use of psychological therapies.
The research compared a number of psychosocial treatments (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Motivational Enhancement Therapy and Twelve Step Facilitation – based on the method used by Alcoholics Anonymous) and found that they accounted for only 3% of the variability in the patient’s outcome. In other words, psychological therapies hardly had any beneficial effect in treating alcoholics.
The failure of current methods of treatment is particularly highlighted by the fact that this study found that, in clinical trials, untreated alcoholics showed significant improvements – almost as much as those who received treatment.
How is it that new therapies are often adopted before they have been properly tested? Part of the problem for psychology, despite the lip-service paid to the importance of the evidence base, is the relative ease of introducing new treatments. Unlike pharmaceutical treatments, psychological treatments are unlikely to have damaging side-effects. Combine this with the problem for much scientific research that negative results often go unreported, and the seeds are there for a proliferation of ineffective therapies.
Despite this seeming like bad news for psychological approaches to alcoholism, it shows the importance of the scientific method in psychology. The strength of any science is founded on its ability to admit when the evidence does not support the treatment methods currently used. And for alcoholism this evidence shows little support for psychological treatments.
This kind of evidence, however, does not show that psychological therapies are never going to be any use in the treatment of alcoholism, only that the correct method has not yet been found. Admitting failure is the first step towards finding a better way. This is why, sometimes a negative result is actually a positive one.Are alcoholism treatments effective? The Project MATCH data. [Abstract + link to free PDF of study]Press release
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