Interogation Techniques and False Confessions

Here is an excerpt from the BPS blog:

Over two hundred Asian and Caucasian students were invited to take part in what they were told was a test of their personality and typing skills. During the typing part of the task, they were warned in advance that pressing the 'Alt' key would cause the computer to crash and a loss of all data. Subsequently, when the participants were required by the task to type 'Z' (near the 'Alt' key), the researchers contrived it so that the computer duly crashed, and the participants were accused of pressing the 'Alt' key.

Next the students were subjected to either 'minimising' remarks (e.g. "Don't worry. It was just an accident" and "This programme seems not to be working lately") or 'maximising' remarks that played up both the evidence for the student being guilty and the seriousness of the alleged error (e.g. "You must have pressed it" and "We have run over 50 people on this test in the past three weeks and the computer hasn't crashed once").

Overall, 43 per cent of the students subsequently signed a confession statement, stating falsely that they had indeed pressed the 'Alt' key. Crucially, the confession rate was four times higher among the students subjected to minimising remarks as opposed to maximising remarks.

The researchers said that in real life, minimising techniques "give the suspect a false sense of security using flattery, offering legal or moral face-saving excuses for actions, conceptualising actions as accidental, blaming the victim and underplaying the seriousness of the charges."

Further analysis showed the female students were more likely to falsely confess, as were those students who scored high on a test of suggestibility. Personality factors such as self-esteem were not related to the rate of false confession.

"A continued investigation of the factors that contribute to false confessions and confession behaviour in general will greatly inform our understanding of the phenomenon and aid in efforts to prevent the occurrence of false confessions and their liberty-depriving consequences," the researchers said.

Klaver, J.R., Lee, Z., Rose, V.G. (In Press). Effects of personality, interrogation techniques and plausibility in an experimental false confession paradigm. Legal and Criminological

The Low Serotonin Myth

Mindhacks has an interesting article on how the low serotonin theory of depression has continued. Here is an excerpt:

Bad Science has a fantastic article on antidepressants and the widely-promoted but scientifically unsupported 'low serotonin theory' of depression.

Owing to a huge advertising push by drug companies, not only the 'man on the street', but also a surprisingly large numbers of mental health professionals (clinical psychologists, I'm look at you) believe that depression is linked to 'low serotonin' in the brain.

The only drawback to this neat sounding theory is that it is almost completely unsupported by empirical evidence or scientific studies.

Experiments that have deliberately lowered serotonin levels in the brain have found that it is possible to induce 'negative mood states' (usually milder and as short-lasting as a slight hangover), but these do not even begin to compare to the depths of clinical depression.

...

This is not to say that antidepressants don't help treat depression, (evidence suggests they do - although the effect is more modest than drug companies would have us believe), or that neurobiology isn't important (by definition, if it's a change in thought and mood, it's a change in brain function).

If you're interested in the history of how the 'low serotonin hypothesis' came to be thought up and then subsequently promoted, despite the lack of evidence, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice recently published a great article on the topic [pdf].

Can you be too Happy?

Authors of a December, 2007 article in Perspectives in Psychological Science discuss how extreme happiness may be related to less than optimal outcomes in measures of success. Their research points to moderately high happiness as being most highly correlated with other measures of success. The article can be found here and below is the abstract. The full text article can only be accessed with a subscription, but there are excerpts of the findings here and here.

Psychologists, self-help gurus, and parents all work to make their clients, friends, and children happier. Recent research indicates that happiness is functional and generally leads to success. However, most people are already above neutral in happiness, which raises the question of whether higher levels of happiness facilitate more effective functioning than do lower levels. Our analyses of large survey data and longitudinal data show that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation. Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success, as well as the resources that are available.

Tiger Woods

Here is an excerpt from Slate.com, which describes a new research study investigating whether other golfers do worse when Tiger Woods plays:

Tiger is thus formidable even if he doesn't always take first, which gets us to the study's question: How does his participation in a tournament affect other players' performance? It's almost a given that other players will rank lower when Tiger gets first place, but what the study asks is whether other players shoot more strokes on a given course when Tiger's in the mix.

Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well—about an extra stroke per tournament—when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, "exempt" players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger's presence doesn't mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35^th—there's not much difference between the prize for 35^th and 36^th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger's hot streaks, when his competitors' prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors' scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger's well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors' scores were unaffected by Tiger's presence.

Physical and Psychological Stress Effects on the Menstrual Cycle

From Mindhacks:

Inkling has an interesting article on the effect of stress on the menstrual cycle that investigates the received wisdom that stress can prevent periods.

It turns out the scientific studies have found no conclusive answer as they've returned mixed results, but this may be because they don't adequately distinguish between physical stress and psychological stress.

A range of physical health problems are known to halt menstruation. Malnutrition is a common example and this is why women with anorexia often don't have periods.

Of course, physical and psychological stress go hand in hand, but one study that looked at healthy young women under a great deal of psychological stress, but no major physical health problems, found no alteration in the menstrual cycle.

So Ellison examined female juniors at Harvard who were preparing for the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] and compared their anxiety levels (and ovulation schedules) to women who were not preparing for the MCAT. In order to make sure there were no other factors at play, all the women were otherwise physically healthy, were not using any oral contraceptive pill that would change hormone levels, and all reported normal ovulation...

But despite the significant increase in stress, there was no change in ovulation or periods in either group. No matter how stressed these students were about the upcoming exam, they continued to have a visit from Aunt Flow right on schedule. This was even the case during the final days and weeks leading up to the MCAT exam, when the subjects described intense stress levels that only Harvard pre-meds can sustain. The study was published in the December 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The Big One Factor of Personality

A recent article by Janek Musek suggests that the Big Five factors of personality, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness correlate and can be combined to create the 'Big One' factor of personality. Here is an excerpt describing this article:

Musek tested hundreds of participants using numerous personality measures, including the Big Five Inventory, the Big Five Observer and the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).

Using a statistical technique called factor analysis, Musek found that a single factor explained much of the variance in people's scores on the Big Five Dimensions of personality. This means that someone who scores highly on one of the five factors (in the case of neuroticism, scores are reversed so that a 'high score' reflects emotional stability) is also more likely to score high on the others. In other words, there seems to be some key trait that captures the essence of all these dimensions.

What does this mean in psychological terms? The Big One seems to reflect a contrast between the socially desirable and undesirable components of the Big Five. "The Big One unifies positive aspects of conformity (stability) and non-conformity (plasticity) within a single superordinated dimension," Musek wrote.

And according to Musek there could even been a physiological basis for the person who scores high on the Big One - "combining low levels of the functioning of the central serotonergic system and higher levels of the functioning of the ascending rostral dopaminergic system."

Musek Janek (2007). A general factor of personality: Evidence for the Big One in the five-factor model. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 1213-1233.

File Drawer Problem in Drug Studies

The file drawer problem (described here) is a publication bias in which results that are significant are published more that results that are not statistically significant. Thus, non-significant findings end up in the file drawer.

A research team led by Erick Turner of the Oregon Health & Science University published a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, which describe this problem in some studies on the efficacy of SSRI medications. Here is an excerpt of some of the discussion in this article:

"Selective publication can lead doctors to make inappropriate prescribing decisions that may not be in the best interest of their patients and, thus, the public health," they wrote.

The idea that unfavorable test results get quietly tucked away so nobody will see them -- sometimes call the "file drawer effect" — has been around for years.

The Turner team was able to study the question because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a registry in which companies are supposed to log details of their drug tests before the experiments are begun.

They could see which experiments approved by the FDA between 1987 and 2004 were ultimately publicized in the medical literature and the main criteria the researchers planned to measure success.

"It tells you where they placed their bets before they saw the data," Turner said in a telephone interview.

Of the 74 studies that started for the 12 antidepressants, 38 produced positive results for the drug. All but one of those studies were published.

However, when it came to the 36 studies with negative or questionable results, as assessed by the FDA, only three were published and another 11 were turned around and written as if the drug had worked.

"Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome," said the team.

For example, of the seven negative studies done on GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil, five were never published. The researchers found three studies for GSK's Wellbutrin SR, but the two negative ones never reached print.

There were five studies for Pfizer's Zoloft, but the three showing the drug to be ineffective were not published and a fourth study, ruled as questionable by the FDA, was written and published to make it appear that the drug worked.

The figure below comes from the Wall Street Journal, which also has a good write-up of the study.

Joseph LeDoux on Fallability of Memory

Here is an excerpted statement from Joseph LeDoux on Edge:

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning.

That Karim's study changed my mind is clear from the fact that I told him, when he proposed to do the study, that it was a waste of time. I'm not swayed by arguments based on faith, can be moved by good logic, but am always swayed by a good experiment, even if it goes against my scientific beliefs. I might not give up on a scientific belief after one experiment, but when the evidence mounts over multiple studies, I change my mind.

Shyness and Social Phobia

Here is a great excerpt from an interview with Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. The full article can be found here.

In Oren Rudavsky's recent film, The Treatment, a wealthy Manhattan widow is baffled that a schoolteacher might be so anxious about speaking in public that he can't eat and suffers from stomach cramps and diarrhea. After all, surely he must speak in front of others every day. His reply is, in effect -- well, yes, but only in front of students. The schoolteacher probably wouldn't take any comfort from the popularity of his fear: According to one notorious statistic, Americans are more afraid of public speaking than of death.

I've begun with this example it points up a real enigma about our minds: How can a purely cultural experience such as public speaking translate into brain chemistry? After all, neither term in "public speaking" is straightforward. How big a group counts as "public"? Are they friends, colleagues, strangers, or a mix? Am I drunk or sober? Am I reading a prepared speech? fielding questions? participating in a judicial, civic, or religious ritual? How is it that our serotonin levels are able to make such finegrained judgments? Even if one focuses just on physical responses -- mild sweat, an elevated heart rate -- people may well attribute different meanings to those responses. (I was scared / I was in the zone / I was angry.) Despite these difficulties, some psychiatrists have proposed that "public speaking phobia" ought to receive its own diagnostic classification.

By focusing on the intersection between culture and chemistry, Christopher Lane's wonderful new book, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale UP, 2007) shows why we ought to be more skeptical of the rush to medicate "social phobias" -- Psychology Today's "disorder of the decade"! -- with powerful drugs, especially in children and adolescents. Despite the alleged precision of recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, "social phobia, the most enigmatic and poorly-defined anxiety disorder, became the psychosocial problem of our age." It is as if the very vagueness of the definition allows its meaning to expand, until the "unavoidable conclusion is that we've narrowed healthy behavior so dramatically that our quirks and eccentricities -- the normal emotional range of adolescence and adulthood -- have become problems we fear and expect drugs to fix." What's worse, he suggests, the drugs we expect to fix our problems all too frequently fail to do so, and in many cases actually make matters worse.

...The second part of the book focuses on the tight fit between the turn to neuropsychiatric models of diagnosis and the marketing demands of big pharma. The side effects of these powerful drugs make a mockery of the word "selective" in selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). As we are beginning to understand more fully, SSRIs are a decidedly mixed blessing, and their consumer-orientated marketing is unseemly at best. ...

Let's begin with your most serious claims. You argue that social anxiety disorder is conceptually overbroad and overdiagnosed, while Paxil and the other drugs prescribed for this disorder are ineffective, if not outright dangerous, for many patients. But you also argue that the role of serotonin in mental illness is vastly overstated, and in fact has no direct causal relation. At the risk of sounding naïve, how did the mythology around serotonin take hold?

I think a lot of the mythology about low serotonin sprang up when neuropsychiatrists in the 1970s and '80s championed biological explanations for mental illness. Their goal was really to help us think that such distress stemmed from the brain rather than the mind. In June 1976, for example, Robert Spitzer, then chair of the task force overseeing major revisions to DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), tried to get approved a very bold claim: “A mental (psychiatric) disorder is a medical disorder.” He wasn’t successful, because so many pointed out the enormous influence of psychological and social factors in shaping mental distress. But Spitzer’s argument has since gained momentum because it’s appealingly straightforward and has so much financial support. If we can say that the cause of distress is a “chemical imbalance,” then the solution points logically to drug treatments rather than therapists focusing on the mind by, say, encouraging a shift in perception.

But just one of many problems with the “chemical imbalance” argument is that it oversimplifies so much. No one can establish conclusively what a chemical balance is because it varies so much from one person to the next and, indeed, from one day to the next.

Correlation between the Cost and Taste of Wine

Here is an excerpt of a discussion of a study which discusses why more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect them to.

Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study [pdf], shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where volunteers were asked to taste and rate five different wines, each individually priced.

What the volunteers didn't know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occasion it was described as costing $90 a bottle, on another as costing $10 a bottle.

The volunteers rated the 'more expensive' wine as significantly more likeable despite being identical to the 'cheaper' wine.

...

Interestingly, there was no difference in the brain areas directly related to experiencing taste, and the researchers suggest that the belief that the wine is more expensive probably doesn't directly change our sensory experience, but leads us to think that the experience is more 'valuable'.

The results echo behavioural studies which have found that wine the same wine is rated differently when served in different quality bottles.

Link to write-up from The Times.

Polls and Obama

This week's New Hampshire's Presidential Primary has led to many discussions of whether Obama suffered from the "Bradley effect", in which some white voters say that they will support a black candidate when responding to poll questions but end up voting for a white candidate at the ballot box. There is an interesting article from last year that describes much of the research on this effect related to Obama. It is ironically titled "Can you trust what polls say about Obama's electoral prospects?"

Decisions Based on What Others Decide

Here is an interesting excerpt on how people make decisions based on how others around them decide:

The behavioural economists Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav speculated that we all tend, like you, to alter our choices to fit in with those around us – and they decided to put the theory to the test.

They came to an agreement with a local bar, dressed up as bar staff, and offered unsuspecting groups free samples from a choice of four tempting local beers. (One of the customers recognised Professor Ariely and assumed that his academic career had run aground.)

Sometimes the experimenters took the orders in conventional fashion; at other times, they made each person’s order confidential by asking them to write their desired beer on a piece of paper. After bringing the samples, Ariely and Levav noted how much the recipients had enjoyed their beers.

You will recognise your predicament in their results. First, when orders were called out publicly, people tended to avoid duplicating the choices of others. Second, that mattered: the people who chose first were significantly happier with their choices than those who felt obliged to choose whatever beer was left over. (This survey was done in the US. When transferred to Hong Kong, people instead tended to emulate the first choice. But, again, those who chose first were happier.)

The implication is obvious. You should make a mental note of what you wish to eat and not change your mind when your husband announces his selection. If that is too “boring’’, the solution is even simpler: order first.

Relative Risk Statistic

The Association for Psychological Science's Observer has an interesting article by Gerd Gigerenzer, on helping physician's make decisions. Here is an excerpt of his discussion of the relative risk statistic versus the absolute risk statistic:

Another numerical representation that tends to cloud doctors’ minds is relative risk. We read that mammography screening reduces the risk of dying of breast cancer by 25 percent. Many people believe this to mean that the lives of 250 out of 1,000 women are saved, whereas a group of Swiss gynecologists’ interpretations varied between one in 1,000 and 750 in 1,000! How large is the actual benefit? Randomized trials showed that, out of 1,000 women not screened, four died of breast cancer within about 10 years, whereas among those who were screened, three died. Thus, the absolute risk reduction is one out of 1,000 women, or 0.1 percent, whereas the relative risk reduction is 25 percent. In a representative 2006 survey of 1,000 German citizens, I found that hardly anyone understands what the 25 percent means. Other sources of confusion are single-event probabilities and five-year survival rates.

Gender Stereotypes and Memory

Many studies have found that being reminded of gender stereotypes can affect how one performs on an exam. For example, if girls are told that females are not as capable as males on math, they do more poorly on a math test than do girls who do not get that information.

A recent article investigated how gender stereotypes can also distort students' memories of how they had previously done on an exam. Here is an excerpt of the findings:

An initial study with 73 high school students (34 boys) showed that those students who more strongly endorsed gender stereotypes in relation to maths and the arts, subsequently showed more biased recall of their past exam performance. That is, girls who endorsed the stereotypes underestimated their past maths performance, while boys who endorsed the stereotypes tended to underestimate their past arts performance.

A second study with 64 high school students gave some a highly salient reminder of gender stereotypes - that is, they rated their agreement with statements like "Men are gifted in mathematics" and "Women are gifted in the arts", before rating their own abilities. Others were given what was considered a weaker reminder of gender stereotypes - they rated their own performance first, before evaluating men and women in general. Finally, all the students recalled their past exam performance.

Girls given a more salient reminder of gender stereotypes underestimated their actual past maths exam performance while boys in this condition overestimated their maths performance. No such difference was observed in the weak reminder condition. Regarding the arts, all students overestimated their performance, but among those given a salient reminder of stereotypes, the girls overestimated their arts performance more, and the boys far less.

The researchers said these findings could have real world implications: "It is possible that women are less likely to embrace scientific careers than men because gender stereotypes lead them to underestimate their past achievement."

Chatard, A., Guimond, S. & Selimbegovic, L. (2007). "How good are you in math?" The effect of gender stereotypes on students' recollection of their school marks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 1017-1024.

Anxiety and Sports

Here is an excerpt from the Research Digest Blog of the British Psychological Society:

There are two rival theories - one states that anxiety is so distracting it stops performers from being able concentrate on what they're doing. The other argues that anxiety causes the sportsman or woman to become overly conscious of their movements - skilled actions that had become automatic are made excruciatingly explicit, thus causing the athlete to regress to their standard as a novice.

Now Daniel Gucciardi and James Dimmock have tested these rival theories with twenty experienced Australian golfers, who have handicaps ranging from 0 to 12. The golfers performed putts in three conditions - they either had to focus on three words that represented components of their technique (e.g. "arms", "weight", "head"); focus on three irrelevant words, for example three colours; or focus on just one word that summed up their putting action, such as "smooth".

They did all this in a low anxiety context first, and then the whole thing was repeated with the pressure cranked up by the offer of cash rewards for the best performances. Would the anxiety of the high pressure context cause the golfers' performance to deteriorate?

The added anxiety only caused the golfers' performance to deteriorate when they were focusing on three words that represented components of their putting action. By contrast, their under-pressure performance actually improved slightly when they were thinking of irrelevant words or just one word that holistically represented their action.

These findings appear to support the idea that anxiety affects performance by causing people to think too much about their actions, not because it is distracting per se. If anxiety was a problem by virtue of being distracting, then having to focus on three irrelevant words should have compounded the problem just as much as three words related to the putt.

Overall, the golfers' performance was most accurate when they focused on a single, holistic word that represented their putting action. The researchers said this finding, though preliminary, suggests expert performers should be encouraged to "adopt more global, higher-level cue words that collectively combine the mechanical process of their technique, which may act as either a schematic cue or a conscious distraction."

Gucciardi, D.F. & Dimmock, J.A. (2008). Choking under pressure in sensorimotor skills: Conscious processing or depleted attentional resources? Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 9,