Daily Stress Takes a Toll on Long-Term Mental Health

"Our emotional responses to the stresses of daily life may predict our long-term mental health, according to a new study published inPsychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychological scientist Susan Charles of the University of California, Irvine and colleagues conducted the study in order to answer a long-standing question: Do daily emotional experiences add up to make the straw that breaks the camel’s back, or do these experiences make us stronger and provide an inoculation against later distress?

Using data from two national surveys, the researchers examined the relationship between daily negative emotions and mental health outcomes ten years later.

Participants’ overall levels of negative emotions predicted psychological distress (e.g., feeling worthless, hopeless, nervous, and/or restless) and diagnosis of an emotional disorder like anxiety or depression a full decade after the emotions were initially measured.

Participants’ negative emotional responses to daily stressors — such as argument or a problem at work or home — predicted psychological distress and self-reported emotional disorder ten years later.

The researchers argue that a key strength of the study was their ability to tap a large, national community sample of participants who spanned a wide age range. The results were based on data from 711 participants, both men and women, who ranged in age from 25 to 74. They were all participants in two national, longitudinal survey studies: Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) and National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE).

According to Charles and her colleagues, these findings show that mental health outcomes aren’t only affected by major life events — they also bear the impact of seemingly minor emotional experiences. The study suggests that chronic nature of these negative emotions in response to daily stressors can take a toll on long-term mental health.

In addition to Charles, co-authors on the study include Jennifer Piazza of California State University, Fullerton; and Jacqueline Mogle, Martin Sliwinski, and David Almeida of Pennsylvania State University."

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For more information about this study, please contact: Susan T. Charles at scharles@uci.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Wear and Tear of Daily Stressors on Mental Health" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 oramikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

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The Power of Suggestion: What We Expect Influences Our Behavior, for Better or Worse

A lucky rabbit foot. A glass of wine. A pill. What do these things all have in common? Their effects -- whether we do well on a test, whether we mingle at the cocktail party, whether we feel better -- all depend on the power of suggestion.

In a new article, psychological scientists Maryanne Garry and Robert Michael of Victoria University of Wellington, along with Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School and Plymouth University, delve into the phenomenon of suggestion, exploring the intriguing relationship between suggestion, cognition, and behavior. The article is published in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Over their research careers, Garry and Kirsch have both studied the effects of suggestion on cognition and behavior. Kirsch focused mostly on suggestion in clinical psychology, while Garry, whose work is supported by the Marsden Fund of New Zealand, was interested in the effects of suggestion on human memory. When the two got to talking, "we realized that the effects of suggestion are wider and often more surprising than many people might otherwise think," says Garry.

Across many studies, research has shown that deliberate suggestion can influence how people perform on learning and memory tasks, which products they prefer, and how they respond to supplements and medicines, which accounts for the well-known placebo effect.

But what can explain the powerful and pervasive effect that suggestion has in our lives? The answer lies in our 'response expectancies,' or the ways in which we anticipate our responses in various situations. These expectancies set us up for automatic responses that actively influence how we get to the outcome we expect. Once we anticipate a specific outcome will occur, our subsequent thoughts and behaviors will actually help to bring that outcome to fruition.

So, if a normally shy person expects that a glass of wine or two will help him loosen up at a cocktail party, he will probably feel less inhibited, approach more people, and get involved in more conversations over the course of the party. Even though he may give credit to the wine, it is clear that his expectations of how the wine would make him feel played a major role.

But it's not just deliberate suggestion that influences our thoughts and behaviors -- suggestions that are not deliberate can have the very same effects. As the authors point out, "simply observing people or otherwise making them feel special can be suggestive," a phenomenon termed the Hawthorne effect. As a result, people might work harder, or stick to a task for longer. And this case is more worrying, says Garry, "because although we might then give credit to some new drug or treatment, we don't realize that we are the ones who are actually wielding the influence."

It is for precisely this reason that the issue of unintentional suggestion has important implications for academic researchers. "In the scientific community, we need to be aware of -- and control for -- the suggestions we communicate to subjects," says Garry. The authors note that some recent failures to replicate previous research findings may ultimately be explained by such unintentional suggestion. "Recent research suggests that some of psychological science's most intriguing findings may be driven, at least in part, by suggestion and expectancies," Garry observes. "For example, a scientist who knows what the hypothesis of an experiment is might unwittingly lead subjects to produce the hypothesized effect -- for reasons that have nothing to do with the experiment itself."

And the unintended effects of suggestion aren't just restricted to the laboratory -- they cut across many real world domains, including the fields of medicine, education, and criminal justice. For example, converging evidence on eyewitness identification procedures demonstrates that the rate of false identifications is significantly higher when lineups are conducted by people who know who the suspect is than when the lineups are conducted by people who don't.

While research has provided clear evidence for the phenomenon of suggestion, there is still much more to learn about the underlying relationship between suggestion, cognition, and behavior. As the authors point out, researchers still don't know where the boundaries and limitations of these effects lie. "And, if a 'real' treatment and a 'suggestion' lead to a similar outcome, what differentiates between the two?" says Garry. Understanding these issues has important real world implications. "If we can harness the power of suggestion, we can improve people's lives."

Source: Association for Psychological Science [June 06, 2012]

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Stressed Men Are More Social

Freiburg researchers have refuted the common belief that stress always causes aggressive behavior. A team of researchers led by the psychologists and neuroscientists Prof. Markus Heinrichs and Dr. Bernadette von Dawans at the University of Freiburg, Germany, examined in a study how men react in stressful situations -- and have refuted a nearly 100-year-old doctrine with their results.

According to this doctrine, humans and most animal species show the "fight-or-flight" response to stress. Only since the late 1990s have some scientists begun to argue that women show an alternate "tend-and-befriend" response to stress -- in other words, a protective ("tend") and friendship-offering ("befriend") reaction. Men, in contrast, were still assumed to become aggressive under stress. Von Dawans refuted this assumption, saying: "Apparently men also show social approach behavior as a direct consequence of stress."

With this study, the research team experimentally investigated male social behavior under stress for the first time. The results are published in the  journal Psychological Science. The economists Prof. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Prof. Urs Fischbacher of the University of Konstanz, Germany, as well as the psychologist Prof. Clemens Kirschbaum from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, also participated in the study. Last year, Heinrichs and von Dawans already developed a standardized procedure for inducing stress in groups using a public speaking task. The researchers examined the implications of this stressor for social behavior using specially designed social interaction games.. These games allowed them to measure positive social behavior -- for example, trust or sharing -- and negative social behavior -- for example, punishment.

In the study, subjects who were under stress showed significantly more positive social behavior than control subjects who were not in a stressful situation. Negative social behavior, on the other hand, was not affected by stress. For Markus Heinrichs, this has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the social significance of stress: "From previous studies in our laboratory, we already knew that positive social contact with a trusted individual before a stressful situation reduces the stress response. Apparently, this coping strategy is anchored so strongly that people can also change their stress responses during or immediately after the stress through positive social behavior."

Source: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg [May 21, 2012]

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Emotionally Intelligent People Are Less Good at Spotting Liars

People who rate themselves as having high emotional intelligence (EI) tend to overestimate their ability to detect deception in others. This is the finding of a paper published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology on18 May 2012.

Professor Stephen Porter, director of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law at University of British Columbia, Canada, along with colleagues Dr. Leanne ten Brinke and Alysha Baker used a standard questionnaire to measure the EI of 116 participants.

These participants were then asked to view 20 videos from around the world of people pleading for the safe return of a missing family member. In half the videos the person making the plea was responsible for the missing person's disappearance or murder.

The participants were asked to judge whether the pleas were honest or deceptive, say how much confidence they had in their judgements, report the cues they had used to make those judgements and rate their emotional response to each plea.

Professor Porter found that higher EI was associated with overconfidence in assessing the sincerity of the pleas and sympathetic feelings towards people in the videos who turned out to be responsible for the disappearance.

Although EI, in general, was not associated with being better or worse at discriminating between truths and lies, people with a higher ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of EI) were not so good at spotting when people were telling lies.

Professor Porter says: "Taken together, these findings suggest that features of emotional intelligence, and the decision-making processes they lead to, may have the paradoxical effect of impairing people's ability to detect deceit.

"This finding is important because EI is a well-accepted concept and is used in a variety of domains, including the workplace."

Source: British Psychological Society (BPS) [May 18, 2012]

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Are character traits determined genetically?

Genes play a greater role in forming character traits -- such as self-control, decision making or sociability -- than was previously thought, new research suggests.

Genes play a greater role in forming character traits -- such as self-control, decision making or sociability -- than was previously thought, new research suggests [Credit: Web]

A study of more than 800 sets of twins found that genetics were more influential in shaping key traits than a person's home environment and surroundings.

Psychologists at the University of Edinburgh who carried out the study, say that genetically influenced characteristics could well be the key to how successful a person is in life.

The study of twins in the US -- most aged 50 and over- used a series of questions to test how they perceived themselves and others. Questions included "Are you influenced by people with strong opinions?" and "Are you disappointed about your achievements in life?"

The results were then measured according to the Ryff Psychological Well-Being Scale which assesses and standardizes these characteristics.

By tracking their answers, the research team found that identical twins -- whose DNA is [presumed to be] exactly the same -- were twice as likely to share traits compared with non-identical twins.

Psychologists say the findings are significant because the stronger the genetic link, the more likely it is that these character traits are carried through a family.

Professor Timothy Bates, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, said that the genetic influence was strongest on a person's sense of self-control.

Researchers found that genes affected a person's sense of purpose, how well they get on with people and their ability to continue learning and developing.

Professor Bates added: "Ever since the ancient Greeks, people have debated the nature of a good life and the nature of a virtuous life. Why do some people seem to manage their lives, have good relationships and cooperate to achieve their goals while others do not? Previously, the role of family and the environment around the home often dominated people's ideas about what affected psychological well-being. However, this work highlights a much more powerful influence from genetics."

The study, which builds on previous research that found that happiness is underpinned by genes, is published online in the Journal of Personality.

Source: University of Edinburgh [May 16, 2013]

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In the Genes, but Which Ones? Studies That Linked Specific Genes to Intelligence Were Largely Wrong, Experts Say

For decades, scientists have understood that there is a genetic component to intelligence, but a new Harvard study has found both that most of the genes thought to be linked to the trait are probably not in fact related to it, and identifying intelligence's specific genetic roots may still be a long way off.

For decades, scientists have understood that there is a genetic component to intelligence, but a new study has found both that most of the genes thought to be linked to the trait are probably not in fact related to it, and identifying intelligence's specific genetic roots may still be a long way off [Credit: Web]

Led by David I. Laibson '88, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics, and Christopher F. Chabris '88, Ph.D. '99, assistant professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., a team of researchers examined a dozen genes using large data sets that included both intelligence testing and genetic data. As reported in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, they found that in nearly every case, the hypothesized genetic pathway failed to replicate. In other words, intelligence could not be linked to the specific genes that were tested.

"It is only in the past 10 or 15 years that we have had the technology for people to do studies that involved picking a particular genetic variant and investigating whether people who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have that genetic variant," said Chabris. "In all of our tests we only found one gene that appeared to be associated with intelligence, and it was a very small effect. This does not mean intelligence does not have a genetic component, it means it's a lot harder to find the particular genes, or the particular genetic variants, that influence the differences in intelligence."

To get at the question of how genes influence intelligence, researchers first needed data, and plenty of it.

Though it had long been understood, based on studies of twins, that intelligence was a heritable trait, it wasn't until relatively recently that the technology emerged to allow scientists to directly probe DNA in a search for genes that affected intelligence.

The problem, Chabris said, was that early technology for assaying genes was very expensive, meaning that such studies were typically limited to, at most, several hundred subjects, who would take IQ tests and provide DNA samples for testing.

As part of their study, Chabris and his colleagues relied on several pre-existing data sets -- a massive study of Wisconsin high school graduates that began in the 1950s, the Framingham Heart Study, and an ongoing survey of all twins born in Sweden -- to expand that subject pool from a few hundred to many thousands.

"What we want to emphasize is that we are not saying the people who did earlier research in this area were foolish or wrong," Chabris said. "They were using the best technology they had available. At the time it was believed that individual genes would have a much larger effect -- they were expecting to find genes that might each account for several IQ points."

To identify genes that might play a role in intelligence, previous researchers used the "candidate gene approach," which requires identifying a gene that is already linked with a known biological function -- such as Alzheimer's disease or the production of a specific neurotransmitter. If people who scored high on intelligence tests shared a particular variant of that gene, it was believed, that demonstrated the gene's role in intelligence.

"These were reasonable hypotheses," said study co-author Daniel J. Benjamin '99, Ph.D. '06, assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. "But in retrospect, either the findings were false positives or the effects of the genes are much, much smaller than anyone had anticipated."

Chabris, however, emphasized that the results don't point to the idea that the dozen genes examined in the study play no role in intelligence, but rather suggest that intelligence may be tied to many genes and the ways in which they interact.

"As is the case with other traits, like height, there are probably thousands of genes and their variants that are associated with intelligence," he said. "And there may be other genetic effects beyond the single gene effects -- there could be interactions between genes, there could be interactions between genes and the environment. What our results show is that the way researchers have been looking for genes that may be related to intelligence -- the candidate gene method -- is fairly likely to result in false positives, so other methods should be used."

Author: Peter Reuell | Source: Harvard University [February 24, 2012]

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Psychologists reveal how emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge

Psychologists at Bangor University believe that they have glimpsed for the first time, a process that takes place deep within our unconscious brain, where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, they identify a reaction to negative language inputs which shuts down unconscious processing.

For the last quarter of a century, psychologists have been aware of, and fascinated by the fact that our brain can process high-level information such as meaning outside consciousness. What the psychologists at Bangor University have discovered is the reverse- that our brain can unconsciously 'decide' to withhold information by preventing access to certain forms of knowledge.

The psychologists extrapolate this from their most recent findings working with bilingual people. Building on their previous discovery that bilinguals subconsciously access their first language when reading in their second language; the psychologists at the School of Psychology and Centre for Research on Bilingualism have now made the surprising discovery that our brain shuts down that same unconscious access to the native language when faced with a negative word such as war, discomfort, inconvenience, and unfortunate.

They believe that this provides the first proven insight to a hither-to unproven process in which our unconscious mind blocks information from our conscious mind or higher mental processes.

This finding breaks new ground in our understanding of the interaction between emotion and thought in the brain. Previous work on emotion and cognition has already shown that emotion affects basic brain functions such as attention, memory, vision and motor control, but never at such a high processing level as language and understanding.

Key to this is the understanding that people have a greater reaction to emotional words and phrases in their first language- which is why people speak to their infants and children in their first language despite living in a country which speaks another language and despite fluency in the second. It has been recognised for some time that anger, swearing or discussing intimate feelings has more power in a speaker's native language. In other words, emotional information lacks the same power in a second language as in a native language.

Dr Yan Jing Wu of the University's School of Psychology said: "We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system. We think we've identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness.

"Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorised about but never previously located."

So why would the brain block access to the native language at an unconscious level?

Professor Guillaume Thierry explains: "We think this is a protective mechanism. We know that in trauma for example, people behave very differently. Surface conscious processes are modulated by a deeper emotional system in the brain. Perhaps this brain mechanism spontaneously minimises negative impact of disturbing emotional content on our thinking, to prevent causing anxiety or mental discomfort."

He continues: "We were extremely surprised by our finding. We were expecting to find modulation between the different words- and perhaps a heightened reaction to the emotional word -- but what we found was the exact opposite to what we expected- a cancellation of the response to the negative words."

The psychologists made this discovery by asking English-speaking Chinese people whether word pairs were related in meaning. Some of the word pairs were related in their Chinese translations. Although not consciously acknowledging a relation, measurements of electrical activity in the brain revealed that the bilingual participants were unconsciously translating the words. However, uncannily, this activity was not observed when the English words had a negative meaning.

Source: Bangor University [May 08, 2012]

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'Losing yourself' in a fictional character can affect your real life

When you "lose yourself" inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own - a phenomenon the researchers call "experience-taking."

They found that, in the right situations, experience-taking may lead to real changes, if only temporary, in the lives of readers.

In one experiment, for example, the researchers found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election several days later.

"Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behavior and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways," said Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

There are many ways experience-taking can affect readers.

In another experiment, people who went through this experience-taking process while reading about a character who was revealed to be of a different race or sexual orientation showed more favorable attitudes toward the other group and were less likely to stereotype.

"Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes," said Geoff Kaufman, who led the study as a graduate student at Ohio State. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College.

Their findings appear online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

Experience-taking doesn't happen all the time. It only occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading, Kaufman said. In one experiment, for example, the researchers found that most college students were unable to undergo experience-taking if they were reading in a cubicle with a mirror.

"The more you're reminded of your own personal identity, the less likely you'll be able to take on a character's identity," Kaufman said.

"You have to be able to take yourself out of the picture, and really lose yourself in the book in order to have this authentic experience of taking on a character's identity."

In the voting study, 82 undergraduates who were registered and eligible to vote were assigned to read one of four versions of a short story about a student enduring several obstacles on the morning of Election Day (such as car problems, rain, long lines) before ultimately entering the booth to cast a vote. This experiment took place several days before the 2008 November presidential election.

Some versions were written in first person ("I entered the voting booth) while some were written in third person ("Paul entered the voting booth"). In addition, some versions featured a student who attended the same university as the participants, while in other versions, the protagonist in the story attended a different university.

After reading the story, the participants completed a questionnaire that measured their level of experience-taking - how much they adopted the perspective of the character in the story. For example, they were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements like "I found myself feeling what the character in the story was feeling" and "I felt I could get inside the character's head."

The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking. And a full 65 percent of these participants reported they voted on Election Day, when they were asked later.

In comparison, only 29 percent of the participants voted if they read the first-person story about a student from a different university.

"When you share a group membership with a character from a story told in first-person voice, you're much more likely to feel like you're experiencing his or her life events," Libby said. "And when you undergo this experience-taking, it can affect your behavior for days afterwards."

While people are more likely to lose themselves in a character who is similar to themselves, what happens if they don't learn that a character is not similar until later in a story?

In one experiment, 70 male, heterosexual college students read a story about a day in the life of another student. There were three versions - one in which the character was revealed to be gay early in the story, one in which the student was identified as gay late in the story, and one in which the character was heterosexual.

Results showed that the students who read the story where the character was identified as gay late in the narrative reported higher levels of experience-taking than did those who read the story where the character's homosexuality was announced early.

"If participants knew early on that the character was not like them - that he was gay - that prevented them from really experience-taking," Libby said.

"But if they learned late about the character's homosexuality, they were just as likely to lose themselves in the character as were the people who read about a heterosexual student."

Even more importantly, the version of the story participants read affected how they thought about gays.

Those who read the gay-late narrative reported significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals after reading the story than did readers of both the gay-early narrative and the heterosexual narrative.

Those who read the gay-late narrative also relied less on stereotypes of homosexuals - they rated the gay character as less feminine and less emotional than did the readers of the gay-early story.

"If people identified with the character before they knew he was gay, if they went through experience-taking, they had more positive views - the readers accepted that this character was like them," Kaufman said.

Similar results were found in a story where white students read about a black student, who was identified as black early or late in the story.

Libby said experience-taking is different from perspective-taking, where people try to understand what another person is going though in a particular situation - but without losing sight of their own identity.

"Experience-taking is much more immersive - you've replaced yourself with the other," she said.

The key is that experience-taking is spontaneous - you don't have to direct people to do it, but it happens naturally under the right circumstance.

"Experience-taking can be very powerful because people don't even realize it is happening to them. It is an unconscious process," Libby said.

Author: Jeff Grabmeier | Source: Ohio State University [May 07, 2012]

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Are You a Facebook Addict?

Are you a social media enthusiast or simply a Facebook addict? Researchers from Norway have developed a new instrument to measure Facebook addiction, the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.

More and more people get addicted to social media, such as Facebook. Researchers at University of Bergen have created a scale to measure Facebook addiction [Credit: Colourbox]

"The use of Facebook has increased rapidly. We are dealing with a subdivision of Internet addiction connected to social media," Doctor of Psychology Cecilie Schou Andreassen says about the study, which is the first of its kind worldwide.

Andreassen heads the research project “Facebook Addiction” at the University of Bergen (UiB). An article about the results has just been published in the renowned journal Psychological Reports. She has clear views as to why some people develop Facebook dependency.

"It occurs more regularly among younger than older users. We have also found that people who are anxious and socially insecure use Facebook more than those with lower scores on those traits, probably because those who are anxious find it easier to communicate via social media than face-to-face," Andreassen says.

People who are organised and more ambitious tend to be less at risk from Facebook addiction. They will often use social media as an integral part of work and networking.

"Our research also indicates that women are more at risk of developing Facebook addiction, probably due to the social nature of Facebook," Andreassen says.

According to Andreassen, the research also shows that Facebook addiction was related to extraversion. People with high scores on the new scale further tend to have a somewhat delayed sleep-wake rhythm.

Six warning signs

As Facebook has become as ubiquitous as television in our everyday lives, it is becoming increasingly difficult for many people to know if they are addicted to social media. Andreassen’s study shows that the symptoms of Facebook addiction resemble those of drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and chemical substance addiction.

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale is based on six basic criteria, where all items are scored on the following scale: (1) Very rarely, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Often, and (5) Very often:
 

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.

• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.

• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.

• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.

• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.

• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

Andreassen’s study shows that scoring “often” or “always” on at least four of the seven items may suggest that you are addicted to Facebook.

About the Scale

In January 2011, 423 students – 227 women and 196 men – participated in tests for the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale. The scale can facilitate treatment research, clinical assessment and can be used for the estimation of Facebook addiction prevalence in the general population worldwide.

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale has been developed at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen in collaboration with the Bergen Clinics Foundation, Norway. The researchers involved are also working with instruments measuring other addictions, such as the recently introduced Bergen Work Addiction Scale.

Author: Sverre Ole Dronen | Source: University of Bergen [May 07, 2012]

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The gifts we keep on giving

Birthdays, graduations, Christmas, baby showers, bridal showers, bar and bat mitzvahs, Mother's Day, Father's Day, first marriages (and second.. and third…), wedding anniversaries, the spontaneous friendship gesture, the occasional sorry-about-that gesture, hostess gifts and presents that don't even fall into a recognizable category. The year is filled with opportunities and obligations to give and receive.

So who can blame someone for doing a little recycling, or as it is commonly known, regifting? Not the person who actually gave the original gift, despite what a regifter may think.

In an article to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers from Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Harvard Business School and the London Business School explore the whole question of regifting from the perspective of both the original giver and the receiver who may or may not rewrap and regift.

In five studies they investigate whether the practice of "regifting", which is a social taboo, really is as offensive to givers as regifters assume. Over and over again, participants who had received gifts and were told to contemplate regifting thought that the original givers would be more offended than givers reported feeling.

"Regifitng isn't bad," said Gabrielle Adams from the London Business School. "In fact it is one way to ensure that gifts are passed along to those who will truly enjoy them. People shouldn't be afraid to pass along a gift they received to someone else."

In one study, 178 participants were divided into the roles of givers and receivers. They all read a scenario in which they were asked to imagine that they had recently been given a watch as a graduation gift. Givers were asked to imagine that the receiver had either regfited the watch to a friend or had thrown the watch in the trash. Receivers were asked to imagine that they had either regifted or trashed the watch.

The reactions to each scenario were measured on a five point "offensiveness" scale, which ranged from "very slightly or not at all" to extremely offended. Those who contemplated regifting the watch or pitching it, were asked to rate how offended the giver would be with either scenario. Givers did the same.

Givers were less offended when they learned that the receiver had regifted the watch than when they learned the receiver threw the gift away. But those who received the gift believed that givers would be equally offended no matter what option they took. They basically equated regifting with discarding.

"The finding that receivers think that regifting is as bad as throwing a gift in the trash was particularly interesting to us, " said Adams. "Givers thought throwing a gift away would be much worse than regifting it."

It all boils down to beliefs about entitlement, researchers say. Receivers feel that givers should have a say in what happens to their gifts, while givers feel that receivers are entitled to do whatever they like with a gift.

How to get everyone on the same page? Just add another holiday to the gift giving list; this one could be called National Regifting Day. Adams explains, "It turns out that National Regifting Day is one way to make receivers think regifting is less offensive."

Source: Association for Psychological Science [May 07, 2012]

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The bright side of death: Awareness of mortality can result in positive behaviors

Contemplating death doesn't necessarily lead to morose despondency, fear, aggression or other negative behaviors, as previous research has suggested. Following a review of dozens of studies, University of Missouri researchers found that thoughts of mortality can lead to decreased militaristic attitudes, better health decisions, increased altruism and helpfulness, and reduced divorce rates.

"According to terror management theory, people deal with their awareness of mortality by upholding cultural beliefs and seeking to become part of something larger and more enduring than themselves, such as nations or religions," said Jamie Arndt, study co-author and professor of psychological sciences. "Depending on how that manifests itself, positive outcomes can be the result."

For example, in one study American test subjects were reminded of death or a control topic and then either imagined a local catastrophe or were reminded of the global threat of climate change. Their militaristic attitudes toward Iran were then evaluated. After being reminded of death, people who were reminded of climate change were more likely to express lower levels of militarism than those who imagined a local disaster.

"The differences seen in this study resulted from the size of the group with which the test subjects identified," said Ken Vail, lead author and psychology doctoral student. "In both cases, they responded to the awareness of mortality by seeking to protect the relevant groups. When the threat was localized, subjects aggressively defended their local group; but when the threat was globalized, subjects associated themselves with humanity as a whole and became more peaceful and cooperative."

After real catastrophes, such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, people's heightened fear and awareness of death had both positive and negative effects.

"Both the news media and researchers tended to focus on the negative reaction to these acts of terrorism, such as violence and discrimination against Muslims, but studies also found that people expressed higher degrees of gratitude, hope, kindness and leadership after 9/11." Vail said. "In another example, after the Oklahoma City bombing, divorce rates went down in surrounding counties. After some stimuli escalates one's awareness of death, the positive reaction is to try to reaffirm that the world has positive aspects as well."

In their personal lives, people also were influenced to make positive choices after their awareness of death was increased. Studies found that conscious thoughts of death can inspire intentions to exercise more. Other studies found that keeping mortality in mind can reduce smoking and increase sunscreen use.

Even subconscious awareness of death can more influenced behavior. In one experiment, passers-by who had recently overheard conversations mentioning the value of helping were more likely to help strangers if they were walking within sight of cemeteries.

"Once we started developing this study we were surprised how much research showed positive outcomes from awareness of mortality," said Arndt. "It seems that people may be just as capable of doing the opposite and 'looking on the bright side of death,' as the Monty Python song says."

Source: University of Missouri-Columbia [April 30, 2012]

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Highly Religious People Are Less Motivated by Compassion Than Are Non-Believers

"Love thy neighbor" is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious.

"Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. "The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns."

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.

While the study examined the link between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly examine the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others. However, researchers hypothesize that deeply religious people may be more strongly guided by a sense of moral obligation than their more non-religious counterparts.

"We hypothesized that religion would change how compassion impacts generous behavior," said study lead author Laura Saslow, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.

Saslow, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco, said she was inspired to examine this question after an altruistic, nonreligious friend lamented that he had only donated to earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti after watching an emotionally stirring video of a woman being saved from the rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.

"I was interested to find that this experience -- an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers -- was replicated in three large, systematic studies," Saslow said.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed data from a 2004 national survey of more than 1,300 American adults. Those who agreed with such statements as "When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them" were also more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as loaning out belongings and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train, researchers found.

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person, non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: "These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals," the study found.

In the second experiment, 101 American adults watched one of two brief videos, a neutral video or a heartrending one, which showed portraits of children afflicted by poverty. Next, they were each given 10 "lab dollars" and directed to give any amount of that money to a stranger. The least religious participants appeared to be motivated by the emotionally charged video to give more of their money to a stranger.

"The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity," Willer said. "But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants."

In the final experiment, more than 200 college students were asked to report how compassionate they felt at that moment. They then played "economic trust games" in which they were given money to share -- or not -- with a stranger. In one round, they were told that another person playing the game had given a portion of their money to them, and that they were free to reward them by giving back some of the money, which had since doubled in amount.

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than other participants in the study.

"Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people," Willer said.

In addition to Saslow and Willer, other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley psychologists Dacher Keltner, Matthew Feinberg and Paul Piff; Katharine Clark at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Sarina Saturn at Oregon State University.

The study was funded by grants from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley's Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, and the Metanexus Institute.

Author: Yasmin Anwar | Source: University of California - Berkeley [April 30, 2012]

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Big Girls Don’t Cry

A study to be published in the June 2012 issue of Journal of Adolescent Health looking at the relationships between body satisfaction and healthy psychological functioning in overweight adolescents has found that young women who are happy with the size and shape of their bodies report higher levels of self-esteem. They may also be protected against the negative behavioral and psychological factors sometimes associated with being overweight.

A group of 103 overweight adolescents were surveyed between 2004 and 2006, assessing body satisfaction, weight-control behavior, importance placed on thinness, self-esteem and symptoms of anxiety and depression, among other factors.

"We found that girls with high body satisfaction had a lower likelihood of unhealthy weight-control behaviors like fasting, skipping meals or vomiting," said Kerri Boutelle, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. Boutelle added that the positive relationship shown in this study between body a girl's happiness with her body and her behavioral and psychological well-being suggests that improving body satisfaction could be a key component of interventions for overweight youth.

"A focus on enhancing self-image while providing motivation and skills to engage in effect weight-control behaviors may help protect young girls from feelings of depression, anxiety or anger sometimes association with being overweight," said Boutelle.

Additional contributors included first author Taya R. Cromley, PhD, of UCLA; Stephanie Knatz and Roxanne Rockwell, UC San Diego; and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, MPH, RD and Mary Story, PhD, RD, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

This study was supported by a University of Minnesota Children's Vikings Grant.

Source: University of California, San Diego Health Sciences [April 27, 2012]

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Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief

A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The study, which is published in the April 27 issue of Science, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief.

“Our goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,” says lead author Will Gervais, a PhD student in UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. “A combination of complex factors influence matters of personal spirituality, and these new findings suggest that the cognitive system related to analytic thoughts is one factor that can influence disbelief.”

Researchers used problem-solving tasks and subtle experimental priming – including showing participants Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker or asking participants to complete questionnaires in hard-to-read fonts – to successfully produce “analytic” thinking. The researchers, who assessed participants’ belief levels using a variety of self-reported measures, found that religious belief decreased when participants engaged in analytic tasks, compared to participants who engaged in tasks that did not involve analytic thinking.

The findings, Gervais says, are based on a longstanding human psychology model of two distinct, but related cognitive systems to process information: an “intuitive” system that relies on mental shortcuts to yield fast and efficient responses, and a more “analytic” system that yields more deliberate, reasoned responses.

“Our study builds on previous research that links religious beliefs to ‘intuitive’ thinking,” says study co-author and Associate Prof. Ara Norenzayan, UBC Dept. of Psychology. “Our findings suggest that activating the ‘analytic’ cognitive system in the brain can undermine the ‘intuitive’ support for religious belief, at least temporarily.”

The study involved more than 650 participants in the U.S. and Canada. Gervais says future studies will explore whether the increase in religious disbelief is temporary or long-lasting, and how the findings apply to non-Western cultures.

Recent figures suggest that the majority of the world’s population believes in a God, however atheists and agnostics number in the hundreds of millions, says Norenzayan, a co-director of UBC’s Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. Religious convictions are shaped by psychological and cultural factors and fluctuate across time and situations, he says.

Source: University of British Columbia [April 26, 2012]

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Action Videogames Change Brains

A team led by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto reveals that playing an action videogame, even for a relatively short time, causes differences in brain activity and improvements in visual attention.

Previous studies have found differences in brain activity between action videogame players and non-players, but these could have been attributed to pre-existing differences in the brains of those predisposed to playing videogames and those who avoid them. This is the first time research has attributed these differences directly to playing video games.

Twenty-five subjects -- who had not previously played videogames -- played a game for a total of 10 hours in one to two hour sessions. Sixteen of the subjects played a first-person shooter game and, as a control, nine subjects played a three-dimensional puzzle game.

Before and after playing the games, the subjects' brain waves were recorded while they tried to detect a target object among other distractions over a wide visual field. Subjects who played the shooter videogame and also showed the greatest improvement on the visual attention task showed significant changes in their brain waves. The remaining subjects -- including those who had played the puzzle game -- did not.

"After playing the shooter game, the changes in electrical activity were consistent with brain processes that enhance visual attention and suppress distracting information," said Sijing Wu, a PhD student in Spence's lab in U of T's Department of Psychology and lead author of the study.

"Studies in different labs, including here at the University of Toronto, have shown that action videogames can improve selective visual attention, such as the ability to quickly detect and identify a target in a cluttered background," said Spence. "But nobody has previously demonstrated that there are differences in brain activity which are a direct result of playing the videogame."

"Superior visual attention is crucial in many important everyday activities," added Spence. "It's necessary for things such as driving a car, monitoring changes on a computer display, or even avoiding tripping while walking through a room with children's toys scattered on the floor."

The research was supported by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada in the form of Discovery Grants to Spence and co-author Claude Alain of the Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre and U of T's Psychology Department.

The research team also included U of T PhD candidate Cho Kin Cheng, Jing Feng, a postdoc at the Rotman Research Institute, and former undergraduate student Lisa D'Angelo.

Source: University of Toronto [April 26, 2012]

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Do I look bigger with my finger on a trigger? Yes, says study

UCLA anthropologists asked hundreds of Americans to guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of easily recognizable objects, including handguns. 

Photo from study. Holding a gun like this makes a man appear taller and stronger than he would otherwise, UCLA anthropologists have found [Credit: Daniel Fessler/UCLA]

The research, which publishes April 11 in the scholarly journal PLoS ONE, confirms what scrawny thugs have long known: Brandishing a weapon makes a man appear bigger and stronger than he would otherwise. 

"There's nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do," said Daniel Fessler, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. "Danger really does loom large -- in our minds." 

Researchers say the findings suggest an unconscious mental mechanism that gauges a potential adversary and then translates the magnitude of that threat into the same dimensions used by animals to size up their adversaries: size and strength. 

"We've isolated a capacity to assess threats in a simple way," said Colin Holbrook, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in anthropology and co-author of the study. "Though this capacity is very efficient, it can misguide us." 

The study is part of larger project funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research to understand how people make decisions in situations where violent conflict is a possibility. The findings are expected to have ramifications for law enforcement, prison guards and the military. 

"We're exploring how people think about the relative likelihood that they will win a conflict, and then how those thoughts affect their decisions about whether to enter into conflict," said Fessler, whose research focuses on the biological and cultural bases of human behavior. He is the director of UCLA's Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers who explore how various forms of evolution shape behavior. 

For the study, the UCLA researchers recruited participants in multiple rounds using classified advertisements on the websites Craigslist and MechanicalTurk. In one round, 628 individuals were asked to look at four pictures of different hands, each holding a single object: a caulking gun, electric drill, large saw or handgun. 

"Tools were used as control objects to rule out the possibility that a simple link with traditionally masculine objects would explain intuitions that the weapon-holders were larger and stronger," Fessler explained. 

The individuals were then asked to estimate the height of each hand model in feet and inches based solely on the photographs of their hands. Participants also were shown six images of progressively taller men and six images of progressively more muscular men and asked to estimate which image came closest to the probable size and strength of the hand model. 

Study participants consistently judged pistol-packers to be taller and stronger than the men holding the other objects, even though the experiment's four hand models were recruited on the basis of their equivalent hand size and similar hand appearance (white and without identifying marks such as tattoos or scars). 

To rule out the possibility that a feature of any one hand might influence the estimates, researchers had taken separate pictures of each hand holding each object -- some participants saw the gun held by one hand model, others saw the same gun held by another model, and so on; they did the same thing for each of the objects. The researchers also shuffled the order in which the photos were presented. 

On average, participants judged pistol packers to be 17 percent taller and stronger than those judged to be the smallest and weakest men -- the ones holding caulking guns. Hand models holding the saw and drill followed gun-wielders in size and strength. 

"The function of the system is to provide an easy way for people to assess the likelihood that they would win or lose in a conflict," said Jeffrey K. Snyder, a UCLA graduate student in anthropology and a study co-author. 

Concerned that their findings might be influenced by popular culture, which often depicts gun-slingers as big and strong men, the team conducted two more studies using objects that did not seem to have a macho image: a kitchen knife, a paint brush and a large, brightly colored toy squirt gun. In the initial round, a new group of 100 subjects was asked to evaluate the danger posed by each of the objects (which were presented alone, without hands holding them). They then were asked to pick the type of person most associated with the object: a child, a woman or a man. 

Not surprisingly, individuals rated the knife most dangerous, followed by the paint brush and squirt gun. But where the most lethal object in the earlier studies -- the handgun -- would likely have been associated with men, participants in this study most often associated the most lethal object -- the kitchen knife -- with women. The paint brush was most often associated with men, and the squirt gun with children. 

In the final round of tests, a new group of 541 individuals was shown male hands holding the knife, paint brush and squirt gun and was then asked to estimate the height and muscularity of the hand models. Once again, men holding the most lethal object -- in this case, the kitchen knife -- were judged to be the biggest and strongest, followed by those holding the paint brush and the squirt gun. 

"It's not Dirty Harry's or Rambo's handgun -- it's just a kitchen knife, but it's still deadly," Holbrook said. "And our study subjects responded accordingly, estimating its holder to be bigger and stronger than the rest." 

Author: Meg Sullivan | Source: University of California - Los Angeles [April 11, 2012]

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Does religious faith lead to greater rewards here on Earth?

Delayed gratification: People who are good at overcoming their immediate impulses to take small rewards now — in favor of larger rewards down the road — do better in many areas of life, including academic achievement, income, job performance and health. What life experiences develop this ability? A new study published online, ahead of print, by the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, finds that religious people are better able to forgo immediate satisfaction in order to gain larger rewards in the future. The study is the first to demonstrate an association between religious commitment and a stronger preference for delayed, but more significant, rewards. 

"It's possible to analyze virtually all contemporary social concerns, from excessive credit card debt to obesity, as problems of impulsivity. So the fact that religious people tend to be less impulsive has implications for the sorts of decisions they make with their money, time, and other resources," says Michael McCullough, professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami (UM), and principal investigator of this study. "Their tendency toward less impulsive decision-making might even be relevant to their stands on public policy issues, such as whether governments should be seeking to reduce their expenditures on public services and entitlement programs in the current economic environment." 

In the research work, titled "Religious people discount the future less," 277 undergraduate University students, from a variety of religious denominations and ethnic backgrounds, chose between receiving a small financial monetary reward that the investigators made available immediately--for example "$50 today," or a larger reward that was available only after longer amounts of time had passed—for example, "$100 six months from now." Participants' commitment to their religious beliefs and institutions was also measured, among other relevant variables. The data shows that the extent to which the participants follow religious teachings positively correlates with their ability to delay gratification. 

The findings suggest that through religious beliefs and practices, people "develop a more patient style of decision making." According to the study, religion teaches this type of patience by directing people's attention to the distant future—the afterlife—which may cause their nearer-term future on this earth to feel subjectively closer. 

"People who are intrinsically religious and who indicate an interest in the afterlife tend to report that the future feels as though it is approaching quickly and that they spend a lot of time thinking about the future," the study says. 

Source: University of Miami [April 04, 2012]

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Death anxiety increases atheists' unconscious belief in God

New research suggests that when non-religious people think about their own death they become more consciously skeptical about religion, but unconsciously grow more receptive to religious belief. 

The research, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, also found that when religious people think about death, their religious beliefs appear to strengthen at both conscious and unconscious levels. The researchers believe the findings help explain why religion is such a durable feature of human society. 

In three studies, which involved 265 university students in total, religious and non-religious participants were randomly assigned to "death priming" and control groups. Priming involved asking participants to write about their own death or, in the control condition, about watching TV. 

In the first study, researchers found that death-primed religious participants consciously reported greater belief in religious entities than similar participants who had not been death-primed. Non-religious participants who had been primed showed the opposite effect: they reported greater disbelief than their fellow non-religious participants in the control condition. 

Study co-author Associate Professor Jamin Halberstadt says these results fit with the theory that fear of death prompts people to defend their own worldview, regardless of whether it is a religious or non-religious one. 

"However, when we studied people's unconscious beliefs in the two later experiments, a different picture emerged. While death-priming made religious participants more certain about the reality of religious entities, non-religious participants showed less confidence in their disbelief," Associate Professor Halberstadt says. 

The techniques used to study unconscious beliefs include measuring the speed with which participants can affirm or deny the existence of God and other religious entities. After being primed by thoughts of death, religious participants were faster to press a button to affirm God's existence, but non-religious participants were slower to press a button denying God's existence. 

"These findings may help solve part of the puzzle of why religion is such a persistent and pervasive feature of society. Fear of death is a near-universal human experience and religious beliefs are suspected to play an important psychological role in warding off this anxiety. As we now show, these beliefs operate at both a conscious and unconscious level, allowing even avowed atheists to unconsciously take advantage of them." 

The paper co-authors also included Jonathan Jong, currently at the University of Oxford, who undertook the experiments as part of his PhD thesis, and Matthias Bluemke, currently at the University of Heidelberg. Associate Professor Halberstadt was Jong's supervisor. 

The findings from the three experiments will be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 

Source: University of Otago [April 01, 2012]

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