Research at Essex University suggests a link between optimistic/pessimistic behaviour and variations in a gene that controls serotonin.
Each of us inherits two versions of the gene, either two short ones, two long ones, or one of each. People who had two longs versions were most likely to focus on the positives, according to the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
How the gene works is unclear, but Ashwin suspects it might dampen down activity in part of the brain called the amygdala, which plays a leading role in regulating our emotions. People with two short versions of the gene show more activity in that part of the brain and are more likely to be neurotic and anxious about their lives, the researchers said.
The discovery raises the prospect of employers screening out applicants who take a glum view on life. But individuals vary too much for such a test to be effective, the researchers told the Guardian.
Of course they’re probably wrong, but who cares, working for a living is rubbish anyway.
Via the Guardian.
Daft research post of the day:
Tom Fawcett, who lectures in mental toughness at Salford University, decided to study the sitting habits of passengers travelling on double deckers between Manchester and Bolton. His findings suggest that our seating preference reveals something about our personality. Forward-looking people tend to sit at the front of the top deck, the independent-minded in the middle and those with a rebellious streak at the rear.
My favourite part of this is the fact that Tom Fawcett apparently lectures in mental toughness. Mental toughness?
From the Guardian.
Jonah Lehrer has an excellent piece on how city living affects your brain.
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
The full article is here.
An interesting piece in The Guardian examines 4 of the latest books on the human brain.
Half a century ago, passionate to study the brain, I began my graduate research in a gloomy, red-brick building in south-east London – the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry. In the biochemistry department I was rapidly disabused of any idea that my research might lead to a greater understanding of how the brain could be ‘the organ of mind’ – and still less that it might provide any help for the hospitals patients, whom I could dimly see through my laboratory windows. Neurochemistry meant grinding rats brains up and extracting their enzymes; neuroanatomy was about cutting thin slices and staining them to be viewed under the microscope; neurophysiology was sticking minute electrodes into nerve cells and checking their electrical responses. To articulate the thought that this might tell one anything about ‘higher nervous functions’ was strictly out of bounds. A dozen years ago, I heard a young American physiologist describe the study of consciousness as a ‘CLM’ – a career limiting move. No topic for a young and ambitious neuroscientist, best left for those old enough to be experiencing the ‘philosopause’ – said to affect scientists who had run out of research steam.
How times have changed! What was once dangerous territory is now the hottest theme in brain research. The subtitle of Semir Zekis excellent new book is Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness. David Lindens is brasher: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. Richard Joyce goes even further in claiming that our very morality is an evolved property of the brain. The rupture with the past is striking. From the ancients to the 20th century, it was philosophers who speculated about how the mind and brain might work. Now it is neuroscientists who are displacing the philosophers and theologians and telling us how we must behave. Three hundred years ago, David Hume argued that one could not derive an ought from an is, but now we are being told that our ‘oughts’ – our moral feelings – are indeed ‘ises’, genetically and developmentally incarnated in our brains. Whole new scientific disciplines – neuroeconomics, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics – are emerging. No wonder that an issue of Science, timed for Novembers US election, claimed that brain imaging could identify voting intentions.
More here.
Via 3quarksdaily.
Recent studies have lead psychologists to conclude that contrary to popular wisdom, women are not always drawn to the most attractive and successful men. The research, by Simon Chu and colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire, suggests that when it comes to potential long-term partners, women may unconsciously fear the desertion or infidelity of high-status men.
Men who hold medium-status jobs on the other hand, and have reasonable, rather than stellar, good looks tend not to provoke such fears and may constitute a “safer”, and consequently more appealing, long-term option.
To examine the influence that a man’s status might have on his perceived suitability as a long-term partner, researchers created fictional personal ads which were then shown to 186 women. The ads contained pictures of men that had previously been rated as either very attractive, moderately attractive or unattractive. Career information was then added using criteria from the Office of National Statistics to assign a status ranking to each job. Company directors and architects were among the high-status jobs; medium-status jobs included travel agents and teachers; low-status jobs included postmen and waiters. Finally, phrases commonly found in personal ads were used to flesh out the ads.
Asked to rate the men according to their appeal as a long-term partner, the women did not give highest marks to the most successful and attractive men. In fact, these men were ranked as poorly as the most unattractive and lowest-status men. Instead, the women preferred men who were moderately attractive and had medium-status jobs.
The researchers found these results to be consistent with the view that, when thinking about the long-term, women are drawn towards men who are more likely to remain faithful and have time to devote to raising a family. And on this basis, it’s the men in the middle of the pack who finish first.
Via the Guardian.
If you’re not like Calvin you may be mulling over some resolutions and looking for a few ways to improve your chances of making them last beyond the first week of January.
Psychcentral has a good rundown of some of the key ways to make successful new year’s resolutions based on a study by Miller & Marlatt from 1998:
To be successful with your own resolutions:
- Have a strong initial commitment to make a change.
- Have coping strategies to deal with problems that will come up.
- Keep track of your progress. The more monitoring you do and feedback you get, the better you will do.
Ingredients for setting yourself up for resolution failure include:
- Not thinking about making resolutions until the last minute.
- Reacting on New Year’s Eve and making your resolutions based on what’s bothering you or is on your mind at that time.
- Framing your resolutions as absolutes by saying, “I will never do X again.”
Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at Hertfordshire University, had some slightly different (though not incompatible) suggestions.
1. Make only one resolution.
2. Plan in advance, rather than waiting for January 1.
3. Avoid repeating a previous resolution.
4. Make your resolutions specific.
5. Reward yourself (e.g., by buying a new book or CD if you lose a few pounds or cut down on smoking).
If you want to add an altruistic financial incentive to your resolution-making you can always try Pledgehammer. From Pedgehammer’s about page:
Pledgehammer.com is a site that helps you keep your promises. We do this by making your pledge public and asking you to decide on a deadline as well as a financial incentive. Should you not succeed we kindly ask you to donate money to a charity you choose yourself. This way your unsuccessful pledge may help to save the rainforest or support families in third world countries, making it not all that unsuccessful after all.
Alternatively, there’s The Carrot.
Apparently, you do not lose 45% of body heat through your head, as is commonly supposed. If true, this myth which dates back to a 1970s US army survival manual, would mean that not wearing a hat would be like not wearing trousers.
It seems the army conducted an experiment in which soldiers dressed in Arctic survival suits but with their heads uncovered were exposed to sub-zero temperatures. Not surprisingly, most of the body heat was lost through the uncovered heads, but:
The face, head and chest are more sensitive to changes in temperature than the rest of the body, making it feel as if covering them up does more to prevent heat loss. In fact, covering one part of the body has as much effect as covering any other. If the experiment had been performed with people wearing only swimming trunks, they would have lost no more than 10% of their body heat through their heads, the scientists add.
From the Guardian.
Research in 2007 by David Figlio, professor of economics at the University of Florida, suggests that giving children unusually spelled names, such as, LaQuisha or Da’Quan can have an adverse effect on their educational development. Figlio’s basic hypothesis is that names such as these are associated with lower socio-economic status and that teachers unconsciously have lower expectations for such students. The lowered expectations then become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy as the teachers give these students less attention and instruction in the classroom and the students subsequently score lower on tests.
To test this hypothesis, Figlio used birth certificate data from children born in Florida between 1989 and 1996 to create a list of names that had a high probability of being associated with low socio-economic indicators, such as a mother who was a teenager or unmarried when her child was born, was a high school dropout or came from families with a history of poverty.
Figlio’s next step was to calculate what he referred to as the “Scrabble” score of each name, giving points for infrequently appearing consonants, punctuation or for names formed by multiple syllables. Then he used data collected in the late 1990s from a school district in Florida on 55,046 children in 24,298 families with two or more children. He analyzed the records to see how children with such names performed in school compared to their siblings who had less unusual names.
As a benchmark to measure student performance, Figlio used scores based on the Stanford-8 or Iowa Test of Basic Skills. To reduce the likelihood of confounding variables Figlio also controlled for variables considered likely to effect a student’s academic development, such as, the student’s weight at birth (an indicator of the quality of prenatal care), parental ages and marital status.
The data supported Figlio’s hypothesis. Allowing for the existence of considerable individual differences, Figlio nevertheless concluded that children who have names associated with low socio-economic status scored lower on reading and mathematics tests than their siblings with names that have weaker class associations. Figlio found these results to be “consistent with the notion that teachers and school administrators may subconsciously expect less of students with names associated with low socio-economic status . . . and these expectations may possibly become a self-fulfilling prophesy.” Read More »
Posted in Social Psychology | Tagged Names |
Via Mind Hacks is this terrific piece in the Economist looking at the way the brain shops. Ever wonder why fruits and veggies are the first thing you come across when you enter a supermarket?
Fruit and vegetables can be easily damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But psychology is at work here: selecting good wholesome fresh food is an uplifting way to start shopping, and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the stodgy stuff later on.
New technology is being used to compile an incredible amount of information about shoppers and the way they behave: images from security cameras monitor shoppers’ behaviour; mobile phone signals track not just where shoppers go in the store, but how long they spend there.
Also interesting is the idea that it’s often not price that deters shoppers from making a purchase, but the fact that they couldn’t decide between two alternatives. One way of dealing with this issue is to use a “decoy” item that’s not there to offer a viable alternative, but to help nudge you toward the decision the shop wants you to take.
The full article is here.
Posted in Behaviour | Tagged Shopping |
The Independent had a story the other day that shot to the number 2 slot on its website and even made it to the front page of the Huffington Post. It was titled “Hypnotherapist, 75, jailed for sex attacks”. As far as I could tell from reading the story though this man did not use hypnosis in his sexual assaults. What he did do was set himself up as a hypnotherapist and spiritual healer and then abuse this position of trust. He did not put the girls into a hypnotic trance and then attack them, but that’s what the headline implies. Oh, how the media seems to love the idea that hypnosis renders people completely helpless.
As an antidote Scientific American has an interesting piece that concludes hypnosis is much more like being awake than not.
Increasingly, evidence is suggesting that the effects of hypnosis result largely from people’s expectations about what hypnosis entails rather than from the hypnotic state itself. Still, it is always possible that future studies could overturn or at least qualify this conclusion. In particular, research on potential physiological markers of hypnosis may elucidate how hypnosis differs from other states of consciousness. Although hypnosis poses fascinating mysteries that will keep scientists busy for decades, it seems clear that it has far more in common with everyday wakefulness than with the watch-induced trance of Hollywood crime thrillers.
I’m not completely convinced by this. The use of hypnosis instead of anasthetic in dentistry, for example, speaks to a consciousness that has at least something significantly different from everday wakefulness. On the other hand, a similar dose of realism on this topic in the mainstream press from time to time wouldn’t be a bad thing.