Psychology Research

Ezra Klein reviews Obama’s handling of yesterday’s health summit — a piece well worth reading for a taste of how sharply focused and serious Obama is about truly comprehensive health-care reform. Karen Tumlty, a health-care expert, describes in Time her own family’s grueling wrestling match with the health-insurance industry. A timely story — no pun intended — as it makes painfully clear that it’s not just the 46 million people uninsured (did I just say “just” 46 million people) who fare poorly in the current system. Genetic Future looks at how a Victorian-era height-prediction system beats modern genetics . When times are hard, sometimes those white capes start to show . A new theory of how birds (and flying) evolved . Dr. Bell at Mind Hacks ponders eye contact. Read the comments on this post…

Debunkers, I salute you! When I came across this Daily Mail headline last week… How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer …I simply let out a low moan without bothering to read any further. I assumed it was the usual sensationalist rubbish that frequently passes for the media reporting of science. Nowadays, for good or ill, I take it for granted that almost any science story appearing in the newspapers or on TV will be at best misleading and at worst just plain wrong. So, what else is new? Click, flip, turn the page, forget about it… Context uncovered But soon I was brought back to this story again. It was later in the week, thanks to the stalwart work of Vaughan at Mind Hacks , that I happened to discover that it wasn’t just the journalist who’d been quoting research without contextualising, it was the author of the original paper as well. It seems that Dr Aric Sigman’s paper ( PDF ), published in the journal Biologist, really does suggest that social networking online is associated with a higher risk of cancer. Crudely put Sigman cites research showing that using the internet can lead to loneliness, and loneliness has also been associated with increased cancer risk. Voila, there’s your media-friendly scare story. What the newspaper coverage doesn’t tell you is what Mind Hacks clearly does: that this research is, as Vaughan puts it, ‘appalling’. Sigman, it seems, has strung together a couple of correlations then drawn an extremely speculative conclusion from them. The correlation between internet use and loneliness isn’t even accurate – there’s plenty of correlational evidence that shows the exact opposite: that internet use actually decreases loneliness. Heroes and villains The heroes and villains in this little story are clear. Villain status firstly has to be accorded to Sigman for spouting this tosh in the first place. The Daily Mail and BBC News – and probably loads of other outlets – do their familiar job of passing on whatever seems likely to catch the attention of the visceral masses, without providing any perspective for understanding this information. Again, villain status. Mind Hacks are our heroes once again, along with John Grohol over at Psych Central who also points to the inadequacies of Sigman’s article and its subsequent reporting. Praise should also go to the NHS blog Behind The Headlines – a guide to science that makes the news – who weigh-in with a thoughtful response . Winner of my newly inaugurated ‘ Gurning Scientist Award’, though, has to go to Dr Ben Goldacre of Bad Science who appeared on Newsnight opposite Sigman to help expose the ‘research’ for what it is: scary speculation. The praise for Goldacre has been particularly fulsome in regard to the facial expressions he pulls while Sigman is talking. Here’s the video : Salute the heroes I tell you all this partly out of guilt. When I first started PsyBlog I wanted to help correct the awful coverage of psychology I read in the mainstream media, but it turned out that PsyBlog didn’t evolve in that direction. Of course I still come across barmy reporting of psychological science on a regular basis; this usually makes me wring my hands, feel a bit guilty, then write about some classic psych studies instead. Thankfully, though, I’m feeling a lot less guilty in recent years. In the response to Sigman’s article I saw the number of people prepared to fight back against misinformation in both the research and reporting of psychological science. And this is not the first time or the first scientific field – not by a long way. I only pick a few examples mostly from psychology blogs because that’s closest to home – there are many others doing fantastic work (like Professor David Colquhoun’s Improbable Science ) Ironically an aspect of what Sigman thinks is giving us cancer, is what I believe is giving us real debate, and ultimately a better stab at the truth. Thank goodness for the people who are prepared to take the time to do the debunking. I salute you – long may you continue to open our eyes! » See also: Eight Ways The Media Distorts Psychology [Image credit: michal_hadassah ]

Over at Mind Hacks , Vaughan has a typically wonderful post on the “maternal impression” theory, which suggested that a psychological trauma inflicted on the pregnant mother would lead to profound defects in the unborn child. As Vaughan notes, this crude 19th century theory slowly faded away, as it became clear that birth defects had nothing to do with the mental state of the mother. But then, Vaughan says, the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change. The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet counterparts, they were quick and comfortable in the Artic conditions and made swift and deadly attacks. In one of history’s great military victories, they defeated the Russians but suffered heavy losses. Many of the dead were young men, and many of the grieving were young pregnant women. Nearly 40 years later, two Finnish psychiatrists decided to look at the mental health of the children who grew up without fathers. They compared children born to women who grieved during pregnancy, to those born to women who lost their husbands after the child had been born. Their study, published in 1978, found that mothers who had lost their husbands during pregnancy were much more likely to have children who later developed schizophrenia. Many similar studies have found that severe maternal stress during pregnancy affects the developing brain of the child, increasing the risk of cognitive or psychiatric problems later in life, possibly due to the effect of the hormonal response of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system. Consider this depressing finding from the lab of Elizabeth Gould . She found that if a pregnant rhesus monkey is forced to endure stressful conditions – like being startled by a blaring horn for 10 minutes a day – her children are born with reduced neurogenesis, even if they never actually experience stress once born. This pre-natal trauma, just like trauma endured in infancy, has life-long implications. The offspring of monkeys stressed during pregnancy have smaller hippocampi, suffer from elevated levels of glucocorticoids and display all the classical symptoms of anxiety. Stress, in other words, has a way of lingering on. From the perspective of the brain, this makes a crude sort of sense. After all, if you’re mom was stressed when pregnant then you’re probably being born into a tough world. Why invest in a lavish cortex, stuffed full of new neurons? It probably makes sense to err on the side of scarcity and anxiety. Read the comments on this post…

New study finds that short-term memory is improved 20% by walking in nature, or even just by looking at an image of a natural scene. I’m sitting in front of the computer and I’ve been working too hard for too long without a break. My brain feels like it’s filling with wet cardboard. In fact what I’m doing isn’t writing any more, it’s just typing. I go to the kitchen, stand there for a moment, can’t remember what I’ve come in for, feel foolish, then eat a biscuit. It doesn’t help. Time for a walk. But where to? Perhaps into town to pick up some supplies, or maybe the other way, towards the park and the river? Most of us are aware that a quick walk around the block does wonders for the mind. But what a new study reveals is that if you want to come back with your brain power enhanced, the scenery en route really matters. Communing with nature Marc G. Berman and colleagues at the University of Michigan wanted to test the effect of a walk’s scenery on cognitive function ( Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, 2008 ; PDF ). In the first of two studies participants were given a 35 minute task involving repeating loads of random numbers back to the experimenter, but in reverse order. After this cognitive psychology special (!) they were sent out for a walk – one group around an arboretum and the other down a busy city street – both while being tracked with GPS devices. They each repeated the memory test when they got back. The results showed that people’s performance on the test improved by almost 20% after wandering amongst the trees. By comparison those subjected to a busy street did not reliably improve on the test. In the second study participants weren’t even allowed to leave the lab but instead some stared at pictures of natural scenes while others looked at urban environments. The improvements weren’t quite as impressive as the first study, but, once again, the trees and fields beat the roads and lampposts. These results replicated a previous study by Berto (2005) who found that just viewing pictures of natural scenes had a restorative effect on cognitive function. People’s performance was soon restored by picture of trees, fields and hills, but not by streets, industrial units or even complex geometric patterns. Attention Restoration Theory What is it, then, about being immersed in real natural scenes that allows the mind to unwind? Kaplan (1995) provides a nice explanation based on the idea that attention is split into two types: Involuntary attention is grabbed by whatever is most immediate to our survival. We have less control over this and consequently find it very difficult to ignore things like buses coming straight at us. Directed attention is what we use to override our instinctual, involuntary attention. It allows us to resolve conflicts so that, for example, we can work out we are in more immediate danger from a car overtaking that bus. Vitally, directed attention is thought important to our short-term memory. Imagine crossing a busy street: our involuntary attention is being pulled one way then the other by all sorts of stimuli. There are other people on a collision course, crossing signals to decipher, police sirens in the distance – not to mention the cars, buses and motorcycles whizzing past on the road. All this buzz means we continually have to decide where our attention should be directed. This is tiring. In comparison natural scenes only engage our involuntary attention modestly: it’s enough to stop us getting bored, but not so much we need to engage our directed attention to work out where to put our focus. Effectively gazing at the sunset gives our directed attention a rest and we can let our minds wander. Trees and fields: the ultimate cognitive enhancers? So just as we might have predicted nature is a kind of natural cognitive enhancer, helping our brain let off steam so it can cruise back up to full functioning. The beauty of this study is it neatly tests the idea and puts a concrete number on the improvement. Of course it only tested an arboretum, and only one type of cognitive function. It may well be that other natural areas provide even greater benefits. What about the sea-side, sunsets or sand dunes? What about perception, problem-solving or executive function? Whatever the outcomes in different natural environments, these benefits for cognition are impressive for what is essentially a free activity (providing natural areas are close). In fact these results are even more impressive when you consider the difficulty researchers have had showing the benefits of ‘brain training’ software for cognitive function (see: which cognitive enhancers really work? ). Like many a favourite psychology study this one is also practical. When our minds need refreshing and if natural scenery is accessible, we should take the opportunity. If not then just looking at pictures of nature is a reasonable second best. Of course many people already decorate their homes with images of landscape, probably without realising the cognitive benefits. So even if you can’t get out of the house, and all your windows look out onto urban jungle, when you need a break take a glance at a few images of nature. Flickr wouldn’t be a bad place to start. » Related : Activities in the open air have the strongest restorative effect on our mental states . » Also see Mind Hacks for more on this subject. [Image credit: l'etrusco ]

Today’s New Scientist has an interesting follow-up letter to a recent article on whether brain scan lie-detection could ever be reliable court evidence. The article noted that the traditional and flawed lie polygraph lie-detector test had been questioned in the past, and the letter notes an earlier example of the test being criticised in an insightful short story: Doubts about the use of polygraphs have been around for much longer than you report (4 October, p 8). In G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story The Mistake of the Machine , published in 1914, a polygraph detects stress in a prisoner accused of murdering Lord Falconroy. The reason isn’t guilt: the prisoner is in fact Lord Falconroy, in disguise and anxious to stay undiscovered. Chesterton wrote that polygraph scientists “must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey ; and a jolly rotten test, too.” If you’re not sure quite how unreliable polygraph lie-detector tests are, I recommend an earlier article on Mind Hacks that is worth reading solely for the story of the falsely convicted Floyd ‘Buzz’ Fay, who trained 20 fellow inmates to fool the lie detector test to help prove his innocence. All while behind bars. You gotta respect that. Link to letter. Link to Mind Hacks on polygraph hacking.

The Atlantic magazine has an excellent article about the heated issues raised by children who want to be the opposite sex. It’s an excellent piece that captures both the dilemmas of parents and mental health professionals sparked by potentially transgendered children. I sometimes jokingly suggest that clinical child psychology would be better described as clinical parent psychology, owing to the fact that it almost always involves working as much with the parents’ anxieties as the child’s. This is particularly important when it comes to behaviours which are not considered, in themselves, to be physically or mentally damaging, but which are socially unacceptable or stigmatised, because the pressure often takes the form of others wishing the child would conform to social norms. The Atlantic article gives some vivid examples of some of the pressures, as the child, mother, father, professionals, peers and campaigning groups each have different opinions on how to manage a young child that dresses and acts like a child of the opposite sex. As we discussed in a post about an NPR programme that covered the same territory, one of the big controversies is whether to try and treat the child to identify with their birth sex, or whether to help them cope with the stresses of adjusting to life as a transgendered child. This is complicated by the fact that follow-up studies have shown that not all children who have cross-gender desires when young maintain them through puberty. However, hormone treatment exists which can delay puberty so it makes it easier for a child to pass as the opposite sex if this is thought the best course of action. The Atlantic piece is a remarkably well-researched piece that covers a great deal of the mental health debate about the practice and ethics of treating what are known as ‘gender dysphoric’ children, but also gives us a revealing insight into some of the family and social dynamics that affect the individuals. A compelling and thought-provoking insight into this contested area. Link to Atlantic article ‘A Boy’s Life’. Link to previous Mind Hacks piece on ‘gender identity disorder’.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind had a two part series on the implications of neuroplasticity – particularly the discovery that the brain can physically ‘rewire’ itself through adulthood, albeit in a more limited way in comparison to the process that occurs during childhood. I found the second part a little more satisfying than the first as it’s a bit more focused, but it’s also interesting as it mostly discusses the relationship between neuroplasticity and psychotherapy. The interviewee is psychiatrist Norman Doidge who is obviously quite a committed Freudian and argues than many of Freud’s ideas can be now understood in terms of neuroplasticity. Some of his comments are provocative, some innovative and others a little too much like dogma re-interpreting modern neuroscience, but it’s a fascinating conversation none-the-less. One of the difficulties with the term ‘neuroplasticity’ is that it’s actually fairly vague. It is often applied to normal neuronal changes (during memory formation, for example) to the growth of new neurons (neurogenesis) to the changes in activation after brain injury seen on neuroimaging studies and to improvements in abilities after brain injury even when no direct measurement of the brain has taken place. This means it can be all things to everyone and easily fits into any other explanation of change without necessarily adding anything. We know that neuroplasticity happens. Saying how it happens is key, and a measure of a good explanation is where this knowledge helps us understand the cognitive and behavioural changes better. Indeed, Doidge does a good job of discussing how various forms of neuroplasticity might reflect different types of behavioural changes, which makes the programme time well spent. Link to part one of ‘The power of plasticity’ Link to part two.

This is quite a remarkable study from a 1985 edition of the International Journal of Neuroscience that investigated whether the apparent greater use of mental imagery during masturbation by men than women was due to differences in hemispheric specialisation. To test whether this might be to do with brain organisation, rather than gender itself, the researchers tested the idea by asking about imagery during masturbation in right-handed males, who typically show strong hemispheric specialisation, and left-handed men, who typically show less specialisation. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the full paper and have no idea whether the claim that women typically report less imagery and fantasy is still thought reliable, as these sorts of findings are notoriously influenced by how the question is asked. However, the study seemed to find partial support for it’s own hypothesis at least. Sex and handedness differences in the use of autoerotic fantasy and imagery: a proposed explanation. Int J Neurosci . 1985 May;26(3-4):259-68. Gottlieb JF. Previous research has described a greater use of fantasy and imagery during masturbation by men, than women. This study suggests that this gender disparity results from the increased frequency of bilateral speech representation found in the female brain. Support for this theory was obtained by comparing the use of autoerotic fantasy and imagery in another group distinguished by their degree of cerebral lateralization: dextral vs. sinistral males. The prediction that masturbatory fantasy and imagery would be more common in the more lateralized dextral males was partially confirmed in this study. I gave up looking for a suggestive yet tasteful image than combined the concepts of sex and hemispheric specialisation, so I’ve illustrated this post with picture of a flower instead. As an aside, brain anatomy has a few rude jokes thrown in. For example, the mammillary bodies are two small round areas that are part of the limbic system. Their name comes from the fact that the look like breasts. I was told by a neuroanatomy lecturer that one of the reasons given for why women shouldn’t study medicine in the 1900s was because they’d be offended by the blue humour. However, the tradition has continued and there are many bawdy mnemonics that help modern students of the nervous system learn the names and functions of the cranial nerves . Link to PubMed entry for hemispheric fantasy study.

An unintentionally funny headline from The Telegraph : “Home Office considers downgrading ecstasy”, presumably to just a general feeling of contentment. The serious story behind the headline is the annual ritual in the UK where the government asks a panel of scientific advisors about the link between the legal classification of drugs and the scientific evidence for their harm, and then ignores them. This recent review is being headed up by psychopharmacologist David Nutt who was also involved in the government commissioned report that used the scientific evidence to rank recreational drugs, both legal and illegal, by their dangerousness. As is traditional, the list bore no relation to the legal classification and was ignored. Not that it matters, as a recent World Health Organisation study that found that drug laws in any particular country were not related to the extent of drug use by the population. There’s nothing like an evidence-based drugs policy. Link to Telegraph story (thanks Tenyen!). Link to World Health organisation study in PLoS Medicine .

Apologies if Mind Hacks posts are a little irregular over the next week or so. I’m currently in the process of leaving London and moving to the beautiful city of Medellín , Colombia, where I’ll be working with some fantastic neuropsychiatrists at the Universidad de Antioquia and the Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl. I leave a week today and I shall be continuing with Mind Hacks although I might be a bit scrambled by the move and the jet lag for a while. It looks like I shall be discovering a great deal about Latin American cognitive science over the next few months, so I’ll try to pass on some of the highlights here. Other than that, normal service should continue! If you’re interested in neuropsychiatry in Colombia, the open-access national psychiatry journal Revista Colombiana de Psiquiatría published a special issue last year that gave an impressive review of the area and it includes summaries in English. Link to full-text of special issue.