Another New Blog

Our new blog can be found at psychologyalert.com

Hurricane Anxiety

Here is an excerpt of an article in the New Orleans paper Times-Picaune:

Productive worrying

Hurricanes may stress us out, but they can also spotlight our strengths

Friday, September 12, 2008

By Chris Bynum

Stress. Tension. Anxiety. Why don't we just call it what it is: Worry. That pretty much covers all the emotional bases when facing an impending hurricane.

We worry that if we don't evacuate, we will relive the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. We worry that if we do evacuate, we may never get back home. We worry that if the next storm is a Katrina, no one will return. We worry that any storm could change our lives yet again. So is there a better way to worry so we can put this stress and tension to more productive use?

"Worriers equate uncertainty with a bad outcome," says Craig Marker, psychologist and director of the Anxiety Treatment Center at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. In the minds of New Orleanians, a "bad outcome" is their reference point.

"The things that come to mind are the most emotional," says Marker, who says it makes sense that we would first think of the worst-case scenario. This mindset is called "availability heuristic."

"It's the shortcut we take to the worst possible conclusion," says Marker. But consider the best-case scenario, he says.

"Think about other storms that didn't have the worst possible outcome (such as Gustav)," says Marker. In other words, what about the storms that passed us by?

Easy to say, right? If it's hard for you to do, practice "productive worry."

Prepare as much as you can for the worst you can imagine.

"Then let go," says Marker. "Once you have prepared, ask yourself if continuing to worry gives you any advantages."

Maintaining a perspective is another way to create calm before a storm.

"We take other risks in our lives on a daily basis," says Marker. "Like getting into a car or on a plane." One reason hurricanes are so scary is that they are not everyday risk factors, he says.

"People who seem to be the most afraid of sharks are those who live in the middle of the country. People who surf every day and are the closest to sharks are the least afraid," says Marker.

And that is where New Orleanians have the advantage. They have already survived hurricane damage of historical proportions.

New location for Blog

A new blog can be found at:
http://blogs.nova.edu/marker

Predictable Irrational

Here is an excerpt from John Tierney discussing experiments described in Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational.

In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish . . . .

They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. . . . After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

Why were they so attached to those doors? The players . . . say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.

They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says.

Perception of the size of a golf hole

Here is an excerpt from PsyBlog discussing how perception is affected. Our lab is currently doing research on how fear can affect perception.

Jessica K. Witt, an assistant professor at Purdue University, found that golfers who play well are more likely to actually see a bigger hole.

Witt's research team conducted three experiments. In the first, 46 golfers were asked to estimate the size of the hole after they played a round of golf. The diameter of a golf hole is 10.8 centimeters. The golfers selected one of nine black holes from a poster that ranged in size from 9-13 centimeters. Those who selected larger holes were the same players who had better scores on the course that day.

These findings matched up with previous research by Witt and Proffitt which found that people who were successful at hitting a ball remembered it as larger.

...

Although Witt's research doesn't tell us, a second new study does show how easy it is for imagination to directly influence our perception of the world. Joel Pearson from Vanderbilt University and colleagues found that people's imagination influences both how they currently see something and how they see it in the future.

In their experiment participants imagined a pattern of either vertical or horizontal stripes. They were then presented with a horizontal pattern to one eye and a vertical pattern to the other eye. The effects of binocular rivalry mean that most people see the two patterns alternating. But subjects in this experiment were more likely to see the pattern they had been imagining.

"You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact," says Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right."

Pearson and colleagues found strong individual differences in the influence of imagination on perception. While imagination influenced everyone's perception, some people were much more influenced than others. This might suggest that some sports-people have a better developed talent for effective visualisation than others.

Affective Forecasting vs. Cognitive Dissonance

Here is an excerpt from an article describing an interview with Steven Pinker. Of note, is how Pinker paid attention to our deficits in affective forecasting (our ability to predict our future happiness) and forgot to pay attention to cognitive dissonance (how we tend to justify our actions).

Pinker cites the example of Dan Gilbert's work on affective forecasting, which has shown just how poor we are at predicting what will make us happy, despite our great confidence in our ability to do just that.

About 13 minutes into the interview Pinker says he himself learned from Gilbert's findings. Before Pinker made the decision to switch from MIT to Harvard, rather than imagining himself in his new job at Harvard, he asked colleagues he knew who'd made the same move, how they had found the experience.

This may sound shrewd but I couldn't help thinking that Pinker forgot to factor in the power of cognitive dissonance. Because of the tendency we all have to justify our own actions, and to see ourselves as wise decision-makers, the colleagues who gave up their job at MIT and went to Harvard are perhaps the last people Pinker should have spoken to if he wanted an objective assessment. Subconsciously or otherwise, research on cognitive dissonance predicts these people will have been highly motivated to perceive their decision to have been a good one.

Meditation and Attentional Blink

Here is a video blog from Scientific America discussing how meditation affects attentional blink:

Cognitive Dissonance and On the Other Hand

Here is a portion of an entry written by Scott Adams on how people may have individual differences on the amount of cognitive dissonance that they can handle.

Recently I saw the best case of cognitive dissonance I have ever seen. It was on Bill Maher's show, Real Time, which I love. Bill was interviewing Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who has a book about global warming, called "Cool It." The economist made the following points clearly and succinctly:

1. Global warming is real, and people are a major cause.

2. When considering the problems that global warming will cause, we shouldn't ignore the benefits of global warming, such as fewer deaths from cold.

3. The oceans rose a foot in the last hundred years, and the world adapted, so the additional rise from global warming might not be as big a problem as people assume.

4. Developing economical fossil fuel alternatives is the only rational solution to global warming because countries such as China and India will use the cheapest fuel, period. If only the developed countries who can afford alternatives change their ways, it’s not enough to make a dent in the problem.

The Danish economist’s argument doesn't fall into the established views about global warming. He wasn't denying it is happening, or denying humans are a major cause. But he also wasn’t saying we should drive hybrid cars, since he thinks it won’t be enough to help. He thinks we need to make solar (or other alternatives) more economical. That’s the magic bullet. His views don’t map to either popular camp on this issue, and it created a fascinating cognitive dissonance in Bill Maher (a fan of hybrid cars) and his panelists. Here are their reactions after the interview:

Rob Thomas said the interview "...confused the shit out of me." (Yet the economist was completely clear and communicated well.)

Salman Rushdie said, jokingly, that what he heard was "There's no connection between smoking and lung cancer." By that he meant the author was denying that fossil fuels contribute to global warming. (The economist said exactly the opposite, and clearly.)

Bill Maher said, "...20 years later, this guy is going to say, 'You know what? Yeah, there is global warming." (The economist already said exactly that during the interview. In fact, his entire book is based on global warming being true and hastened by fossil fuels.)

Dan Gilbert on Social Psychology

Here is an excerpt from Dan Gilbert in Psychologist magazine discussing 'revolutions' in science and social psychology:

Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we’ve outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.

Radical Acceptance

Linehan (1993) makes the following five fundamental points regarding "radical acceptance":

1. Acceptance is acknowledgment of what is.
2. Acceptance is non-judgmental, not a matter of deeming something good or okay.
3. Freedom from suffering requires accepting rather than resisting reality.
4. Choosing to tolerate pain or distress in the moment is acceptance.
5. Accepting rather than avoiding painful emotions actually alleviates suffering.

Cognition and Emotion Part 2

Here is more (part 1) related to Jon Haidt's book on the analogy of the rider (cognition) and the horse (emotion):

The point of these studies is that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate. You don’t really know why you think something is beautiful, but your interpreter module (the rider) is skilled at making up reasons, as Gazzaniga found in his split-brain studies. You search for a plausible reason for liking the painting, and you latch on to the first reason that makes sense (maybe something vague about color, or light, or the reflection of the painter in the clown’s shiny nose). Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made. If you listen closely to moral arguments, you can sometimes hear something surprising: that it is really the elephant holding the reins, guiding the rider. It is the elephant who decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly and automatically . . . , but only the rider can string sentences together and create arguments to give to other people. In moral arguments, the rider goes beyond being just an advisor to the elephant; he becomes a lawyer, fighting in the court of public opinion to persuade others of the elephant’s point of view.

* * *
In my studies of moral judgment, I have found that people are skilled at finding reasons to support their gut feelings: The rider acts like a lawyer whom the elephant has hired to represent it in the court of public opinion.

One of the reasons people are often contemptuous of lawyers is that they fight for a client’s interests, not for the truth. To be a good lawyer, it often helps to be a good liar. Although many lawyers won’t tell a direct lie, most will do what they can to hide inconvenient facts while weaving a plausible alternative story for the judge and jury, a story that they sometimes know is not true. Our inner lawyer works in the same way, but, somehow, we actually believe the stories he makes up. To understand his ways we must catch him in action; we must observe him carrying out low-pressure as well as high-pressure assignments.

* * *

Studies of everyday reasoning show that the elephant is not an inquisitive client. When people are given difficult questions to think about—for example, whether minimum wage should be raised—they generally lean one way or the other right away, and then put a call in to reasoning to see whether support for that position is forthcoming. . . . Most people gave no real evidence for their positions, and most made no effort to look for evidence opposing their initial positions. David Perkins, a Harvard psychologist who has devoted his career to improving reasoning, has found the same thing. He says that thinking generally uses the “makes-sense” stopping rule. We take a position, look for evidence that supports it, and if we find some evidence—enough so that our position “makes sense”—we stop thinking. But at least in a low-pressure situation such as this, if someone else brings up reasons and evidence on the other side, people can be induced to change their minds; they just don’t make an effort to do such thinking for themselves

Cognition and Emotion

Below is an analogy Jon Haidt uses in his book The Happiness Hypothesis to describe the relationship between our higher order cognition (the rider in his analogy) and emotion (the horse). He goes on to discuss how we feel that we are in control of the horse (or our emotions), but the horse does many things automatically that we have very little control over (nor would could our cognitions be efficient enough at controlling.

I first rode a horse in 1991, in Great Smoky National Park, North Carolina. I’d been on rides as a child where some teenager led the horse by a short rope, but this was the first time it was just me and a horse, no rope. I wasn’t alone—there were eight other people on eight other horses, and one of the people was a park ranger—so the ride didn’t ask much of me. There was, however, one difficult moment. We were riding along a path on a steep hillside, two by two, and my horse was on the outside, walking about three feet from the edge. Then the path turned sharply to the left, and my horse was heading straight for the edge. I froze. I knew I had to steer left, but there was another horse to my left and I didn’t want to crash into it. I might have called out for help, or screamed, “Look out!”; but some part of me preferred the risk of going over the edge to the certainty of looking stupid. So I just froze. I did nothing at all during the critical five seconds in which my horse and the horse to my left calmly turned to the left by themselves.

As my panic subsided, I laughed at my ridiculous fear. The horse knew exactly what she was doing. She’d walked this path a hundred times, and she had no more interest in tumbling to her death than I had. She didn’t need me to tell her what to do, and, in fact, the few times I tried to tell her what to do she didn’t much seem to care. I had gotten it all so wrong because I had spent the previous ten years driving cars, not horses. Cars go over edges unless you tell them not to.

OCD, Thought-Action Fusion, and 9/11

Here is an excerpt describing a case study of a boy who thought that missing his ritual caused the 9/11 attacks. These ideas of thoughts causing catastrophic results is commonly known as thought action fusion.

Researchers in London have documented the case of a ten-year-old boy with obsessive compulsive symptoms, who believed the terror attacks of 9/11 occurred because he had failed to complete one of his daily rituals.

...

The boy - described as "extremely pleasant and likeable" and with good school grades - was first referred for consultation a year before 9/11 took place.

Robertson next saw the boy two weeks after 9/11, at which point he was in a terrible state - "tortured", as he put it, by his tics, and wracked with guilt, believing that 9/11 occurred because he had failed to walk on a particular white mark on a road.

This was just one of the many rituals the boy had developed during the course of the year. Others included so-called "dangerous touching" rituals, including the need to feel the blade of knives to check their sharpness, and to put his hand in the steam of a kettle to check its heat.

Importantly, the researchers said the boy's beliefs about 9/11 were distinct from the kind of delusions expressed by people with psychosis, and instead reflected an extreme form of the anxiety that people with obsessive compulsive disorder often experience when they fail to complete their rituals.

Robertson, M., Cavanna, A. (2008). The Disaster was my Fault!. Neurocase DOI: 10.1080/13554790802001395

Conspicuous Consumption

Here is an excerpt from the Mind Hacks blog discussing a recent article about differences in showing off wealth:

The Atlantic magazine has an interesting article on how conspicuous consumption - the practice of showing off luxury goods - differs across social groups and seems to be more common when your peers are low earners.

The piece discusses work led by economist Kerwin Charles who was interested in why, despite being less well off on average, black and latino Americans spent a larger proportion of their income on visible goods.

Their research found that race, in itself, wasn't important, as conspicuous consumption was explained in all racial groups as being almost entirely due to the wealth of the community in which the person lives.

It turns out that the poorer the community, the larger the level of conspicuous consumption. In other words, people from less well off communities have a greater need to advertise their wealth through the visible goods they buy.

The full paper is available online as a pdf if you want the full details, but the Atlantic article goes on to observe that in higher-income communities people tend to spend their money on luxury goods others can't see, but which provide experiences.

Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff describe a similar pattern in their book, The Middle-Class Millionaire, which analyzes the spending habits of the 8.4million American households whose wealth is self-made and whose net worth, including their home equity, is between $1 million and $10 million. Aside from a penchant for fancy cars, these millionaires devote their luxury dollars mostly to goods and services outsiders can’t see: concierge health care, home renovations, all sorts of personal coaches, and expensive family vacations. They focus less on impressing strangers and more on family- and self-improvement. Even when they invest in traditional luxuries like second homes, jets, or yachts, they prefer fractional ownership. “They’re looking for ownership to be converted into a relationship rather than an asset they have to take care of,” says Schiff. Their primary luxuries are time and attention.

Link to Atlantic article 'Inconspicuous Consumption'.

pdf of full text of study.
Link to Economist article on 'conspicuous altruism'.

Worry Helps Me Cope

Here is an excerpt from the Don't Delay Blog:

Three British psychologists ...collected data from 179 students, measuring their procrastination (behavioral and decisional), worry, anxiety, depression and metacognition. ...

"Metacognition refers to the beliefs, psychological structures, events and processes that are implicated in the control, modification, and interpretation of thinking itself" (p. 320). In short, these processes are proposed to be part of the executive functions of the brain, the control components of information processing.

...

What they found
1. Beliefs about cognitive confidence (e.g., "my memory can mislead me at times") was related to behavioral procrastination.

2. Positive beliefs about worry (e.g., "worrying helps me cope") was related to decisional procrastination.

...
In the words of the study authors, "In the case of behavioral procrastination, it is plausible to postulate that individuals who hold negative beliefs about their cognitive efficiency (a metacognitive dimension that is closely associated with negative emotions; Wells, 2000) may doubt their task performance capabilities. This is likely to adversely impact motivation as well as task initiation and persistence, leading to behavioral procrastination." [emphasis added]

"A possible explanation of the link between positive beliefs about worry and decisional procrastination could be that when an individual experiences an emotional trigger, positive beliefs about worry lead to the activation of ‘internal reality testing' or ‘mental problem solving' routines. The latter are likely to hinder decision-making processes leading to decisional procrastination" (p. 322).

This research underscores the destructive effects of doubt and worry, particularly the false belief that something like ruminative worry can be productive. These irrational beliefs sustain task delay.

References
Spada, M.M., Hiou, K., & Nikcevic, A.V. (2006). Metacognitions, emotions and procrastination. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy: An International Quarterly, 20, 319-326.

Wells, A. (2000). Emotional disorders and metacognition: Innovative cognitive therapy. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Wells, A., & Matthews, G. (1994). Attention and emotion: A clinical perspective. Hove, UK: Erlbaum.

Internet Surveys

Here is an excerpt from the 'As you like it' Blog. It describes a poor survey done on AOL.

If Comedy Central were doing a skit on survey design, this would be it. If a slot machine were as rigged as this survey, the gaming commission would shut down the casino. If a college student designed a survey that was this lame, the school would be justified in having the kid flogged in the campus center. This isn't a survey, it's an advertisement for AOL and Cookie Magazine.

This survey is so savagely incompetent that I am in awe at how many different media outlets covered it. The headline at the top of the first page of the survey reads in large bold type ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH? ANY? And take a look at the pictures that go along with the questions:

You've got to love these neutral images that were attached to each survey question!

This is the survey equivalent of walking into a voting booth and there's an air-brushed poster of John McCain kissing a baby above the voting machine.

How would you feel if you had cancer and the doctors determined the efficacy of the drug they were about to give you from a survey that was designed like this? What amazes me most about this survey is that they were only able to manipulate 34% of the "wives" who took it to say they had cheated on their husbands!

Look, I honestly can't tell you if 34% of wives cheat on their husbands, or if it's more like 90%. But neither can the people at Cookie Magazine or AOL based on this dog. Maybe I don't get worked up enough about what the average housewife does when her panties are down around her ankles. What I do get crazy about is when an advertisement tries to sell itself as science.

Experimenter's Expectancies and Placebo

Here is an excerpt discussing how a physician's expectancy can change how much the patient experiences the placebo effect:

... it is possible to show that doctors are as important in producing the meaning response as patients. Gracely et al (1985) looked at the effect of placebo on pain in patients having their wisdom teeth extracted. The study was set up as a standard double-blind (neither the doctor nor the patient knows if the patient is getting a real medicine or an inert placebo), with the possibilities being a placebo, fentanyl (which usually reduces pain) and naloxone (which usually blocks reduction in pain, so could be expected to increase the pain of the procedure). The twist was that for the first half of the experiment the doctors, but not the patients, were told that a supply problem meant that no patient would be getting the pain-relieving fentanyl. In the second half the doctors were told that the problem had been resolved, so that now the patients might receive fentanyl. By comparing levels of patient pain in the placebo condition is possible to gauge the effect of doctor expectations on the meaning response of the patients. In this condition patients are all receiving inert substances, and they all 'know' the same thing: they might receive a placebo, pain-relief or 'pain-enhancement'. The doctors don't tell them about the supply problem and, for that matter, they don't know themselves for definite what the patient is given. The only difference is that for the patients in the first half, the doctors think they know that pain-relief is not a possibility, whereas in the second half it is. The graph of the results, copied from Moerman's book is below:

As you can see, patients in the PN group --- those whose doctors thought they might receive pain-relief had a large pain-relieving placebo effect. Those in the PNF group --- those whose doctors thought they couldn't receive pain-relief --- didn't have a pain-relieving placebo effect.

What I think is interesting about this study is, firstly, it confirms the need for rigorous double-blind controls in studies of medicine and, secondly, just how significant an effect this subtle manipulation has. The doctors don't know anything definite, and they certainly aren't telling the patients what they suspect or guess, but somehow --- a look? a slightly brighter smile? a slightly lowered tone? --- they communicate their knowledge of the probabilities to the patients who then experience a real change in their levels of pain because of it.

A striking aspect of the meaning response is that one could suppose that patients have control over their experience of different levels of pain. After all, we know that the pills are inert. Could we just imagine ourselves a 'placebo effect' in all situations where we have unnecessary pain? Sadly, normally we can't do this --- the meaning response doesn't work like that. Doctors are required to give patients permission to feel less pain. Perhaps a fundamental part of the creation of meaning is that it requires other people.

Gracely, R. H., Dubner, R., Deeter, W. R., & Wolskee, P. J. (1985). Clinicians' expectations influence placebo analgesia. Lancet, 1(8419), 43.

Moerman, D. E. (2002). Meaning, medicine, and the "placebo effect". Cambridge University Press: New York.

Money can Buy Happiness -- If it is Spent on Someone Else

Here is an excerpt of a blog discussing a recent article published in Science:

Another recent article by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin, and Michael I. Norton, published in 2008 in Science, concluded that money can buy happiness, so long as the money is spent on someone else. They described three studies. The first was a survey of Americans and found that the am0ount of money people spent in gifts to others or gave to charity was positively associated with general happiness, even when overall income was controlled. (By the way, they also found that overall income predicted happiness.). In their second study, they surveyed employees at a company who had received profit-sharing bonuses. The amount of the bonus spent on others predicted happiness six to eight weeks later, whereas the amount of the bonus spent on themselves did not. Their third study was a true experiment: Research participants were given either $5 or $20 and instructed to spend the money either on themselves or on others. Then their happiness was ascertained, Those who spent the money on others were happier, and the amount of money did not matter. One more finding was reported: Additional participants were asked to predict what would make people happier, and they mistakenly said that the most happiness would result from spending $20 on themselves.

3 tips for Happiness

Here are 3 tips on maximizing happiness from Psyblog:

1. Visualising your best possible self

Visualising your best possible self may sound like an exercise in fantasy but, crucially, it does have to be realistic. Carrying out this exercise typically involves imagining your life in the future, but a future where everything that could go well, has gone well. You have reached those realistic goals that you have set for yourself.

Then, to help cement your visualisation, you commit your best possible self to paper. This exercise helps draw on the proven benefits of expressive writing.

The effectiveness of this activity was tested in a study by King (2001). Students were asked to write about their best possible future selves for 20 minutes over 4 consecutive days. This group was compared with one writing on a neutral topic, one writing about traumatic life events and another writing about both traumatic events and their best possible future selves.

The results showed that those who had only written about their best possible selves showed greater improvements in subjective well-being compared to all the other groups. The benefits of the exercise could even be measured fully five months later.

Since the results were so encouraging after only a four-day exercise, two other studies have investigated longer periods. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2006) and Dickerhoof et al. (2007) carried out studies over 4 and 8 weeks respectively. Both of these backed up the previous findings.

It's not hard to speculate on why this exercise might be effective, it probably helps to:

• Create a sense of efficacy, meaning and purpose.
• Foster optimism.
• Set written goals and plan means of achieving them.

2. Helping others

Even if you haven't come across the 'best possible selves' exercise, you'll almost certainly have heard the idea that helping others is beneficial to the self. Helping out at a soup kitchen, volunteering on a helpline, visiting shut-ins - all are certainly virtuous activities. But isn't helping others for no tangible personal benefit too much like self-sacrifice?

Actually, the research suggests there's a very good selfish reason to help others - it really does seem to make us happier. In one study students were asked to perform five acts of kindness each week for six weeks (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schkade, 2005). These were things like writing a thank-you note, giving blood or helping a friend with their work. Students were told either to perform one act each day or all five acts on one day.

Both experimental groups showed a better outcome than the control group whose well-being declined over the six-week period (perhaps exams were looming!). Those who performed their acts of kindness each day showed a small increase in well-being.

But the highest well-being was seen in those students who carried out all their acts of kindness on one single day on each of the six weeks of the study. Their well-being increased by an impressive 40%.

Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade (2005) suggest the reason for the difference is that a single act of kindness each day doesn't make an appreciable difference to the everyday routine, especially as these were only small acts.

3.Practicing gratitude

I've already covered the third activity that has shown promise in increasing happiness: practicing gratitude. A study conducted by Emmons and McCullough (2003) found that sitting down weekly to write about five things we are grateful for increased happiness levels by 25%. If you're short of ways of practicing gratefulness, this list of ways to be grateful culled from Dr Emmons' book will be useful.

You might also be interested in my review of Dr Robert Emmons' book 'thanks!' which details his experiments and expands on practicing gratitude.

Manny and A-Rod

Here is an excerpt from the Situationist on the social psychology of Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez:

...Yankee third-baseman Alex Rodriguez, better known as A-Rod. He muscled 54 home runs during the regular season, a particularly impressive feat given that he plays in Yankee Stadium, which, with its deep left field, has historically been inhospitable to right-handed power hitters. Although the situation has seemed stacked against him power-wise, A-Rod thrived this year–much like he has every season. In fact, A-Rod recently became the youngest player in baseball history to reach 500 career homeruns and he is on track to smash the home-run records set and re-set by the likes of Babe Ruth, Henry Aaron, and most recently Barry Bonds. In addition to going yaaarrrrrrd, A-Rod has led the league in runs scored, runs batted in, total bases, and extra-base hits. He also shares the MLB record for most home runs in the month of April, hitting 14 in 2007.

In short, A-Rod is a phenomenal player — arguably the best ever and certainly among the very best in his generation. At least in the regular season, that is.

You see, A-Rod, also known as “Mr. April through September,” has been notoriously unimpressive in the playoffs (though he showed glimmers of is regular-season greatness in this year’s post season). The stats confirm the perceptions and explain the collective disappointment among his home-team fans and the serious doubts relentlessly raised about his ability to hit in the biggest games, when it really matters. NY Post columnist Filip Bondy, for instance, recently lamented, “The same man who homered 54 times during the season hasn’t managed to loop the ball over the infielders’ heads even once.” Similarly, Yankees minority owner Barry Halper drew headlines a couple of years ago for asking, “An A-Rod experience? How about he hits a few balls through the infield in the postseason? That’s the kind of A-Rod experience I’d like.”

So why does A-Rod devolve from the best hitter in baseball to a black hole in the lineup, from MVP to MD[isappointing]P, when it comes playoff time? Does he just not care? Is he lazy? Does he lack the will to win?

Far from it. In fact, A-Rod is one of the most driven players in the game. As Kevin Kernan reported in the New York Post this summer: “Alex Rodriguez’s sprint to 500 home runs is not just about his incredible talent, it’s about work ethic, too. Rodriguez is not only the most talented player in baseball, he is the game’s hardest worker.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, another question and some more background.

So if A-Rod is a post-season home-run dud, who is the post-season dinger king?

Red Sox Nation proudly gives you none other than Manny Ramirez, the 2004 World Series MVP who already has 24 post-season homeruns (and counting), more than any other player in the sport’s history, and who leads all players in this year’s playoffs in home runs and runs batted in.

His at-plate prowess notwithstanding, Manny “Who Cares?” Ramirez, may be better known (often inaccurately, in our view) for laziness, detachment, and a lack Red Sox spirit. He’s the kind of player who, through slothful and apathetic base-running, turns a near home-run (and easily a two-bagger) into single, as he did in the AL Championship Series last week against Cleveland. Commentators and fans alike have an expression for his lah-ti-dah recalcitrance — it’s just “Manny being Manny.”

Manny was being Manny again last week when, with the team on the brink of elimination down 3 games to 1, the blasé bopper responded to a question about his team’s dire situation with his own questions: “Why should we panic?” In classic Manny-speak, he went on: “If it doesn’t happen, so who cares? There’s always next year. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

To many die-hard Red Sox fans (who know that “next year” may not come around for something closer to a century and who seem to think that planet’s very existence turns on the outcome of a baseball tournament), that sort of talk is barely forgivable. The reaction on sports radio and sports blogosphere was swift and merciless. Consider, for instance, comments by Chris Ruddick of The Sports Network, who blasted Ramirez:

Enough is enough with him . . . he pretty much confirmed what everyone has believed all along — he could care less whether he wins or loses . . . . This winter, though, they should make every effort to get him out of town. Send him to the West Coast, where baseball is treated with nowhere near the intensity it is in Boston. He’d be a perfect fit in Anaheim.

Run’mouttatown! Of course, the fact that losing a baseball game is “not,” in fact, “the end of the world,” was somehow lost on many of Manny’s critics. In the end, Manny was forgiven, not because of the truth of his statements, but because of the pop of his Louisville Slugger which helped propel Boston over Cleveland for a trip to the World Series this year!

So here’s the puzzle: Why does “crewcut A-Rod” with his unparalleled talent and undeniable desire to win, flop in the post-season while “Manny dredlocks” thrives, nonchalantly carrying his team to the big show while rewriting the record books for post-season offense. More succinctly, why does Mr. Baseball falter when Mr. Don’t-Worry-Be-Happy dominates?

One simple answer is that “randomness happens.” It’s true that many apparent “streaks” should be attributed to chance and statistical probability than to the dispositions of those individuals who happen to be on the fortunate or unfortunate side of the same coin. We don’t want to rule that possibility out — in fact, it is a factor that we have emphasized in a previous post and which is the topic of the excellent blog “The Hot Hand in Sports.” But the fact that A-Rod and Manny consistently fizzle and thrive respectively during the playoffs, year after year, suggests that there may be more to the patterns than just happenstance or luck.

So, to solve our puzzle, we think it might be helpful to talk about some lessons from social psychology — lessons that may initially seem to have little relevance for the ballpark.

Researchers have demonstrated that, because of pervasive negative (and positive) group-based stereotypes in our culture, members of those groups are often at risk of being stigmatized (or esteemed) by the stereotype:

“African Americans, for example are likely to be well aware that stereotypes accuse them of being intellectually inferior and aggressive; and women are well aware that stereotype accuse them of being emotional, bad at math, and lacking leadership aptitude.”

As Claude Steele (among others) has detailed, the anticipation of being reduced to a negative stereotype can, in some circumstances, yield a self-fulfilling dynamic, which he calls “stereotype threat.” At-risk individuals often experience a kind of anxiety, self-consciousness, or disruptive psychological state that itself can undermine performance. We have discussed the causes and consequences of stereotype threat in other posts (including “Your Group is Bad at Math,” “Gender-Imbalanced Situation,” “Race Attributions and Georgetown University Basketball,” and “Don W-Ho?.”)

When stereotype threat is activated (for example, when a math test is described as “diagnostic” of intellectual ability), performance is significantly lowered by members of a stigmatized group (though it is “lifted” by members of groups associated positively with intellectual ability). And when the stereotype threat is not activated (for instance, when the same exam is framed as “non-diagnostic” of intellectual ability) the performance of members of the stigmatized group rises (and that of the other group falls). The presence or absence of stereotype threat thus has a significant effect on performance of groups with otherwise comparable skill levels.

As the research has demonstrated, someone who is very talented and accomplished can be reduced to mediocrity or worse when the disruption of stereotype threat kicks in:

“[T]his situational predicament does not require the stigmatized to have any internal doubts about their ability, or their group’s ability, in those domains. In fact, the effects of stereotype threat may be most acutely felt by those individuals who are invested and skilled in the targeted domain, or by those individuals who at least care about the social consequences of being judged incompetent in that domain.”

This suggests another way in which stereotype threat can lose its teeth. Indeed, the research has shown that there are many individuals who are members of a stereotyped group but for whom the risk of being negatively stereotyped along a given domain seems to have no bite – namely, those individuals who do not consider success or failure in that domain an important element of their identity. Put differently, there is no “threat” in stereotype threat when the individual does not care.

Although the long-term implications of “not caring,” would likely harm a person’s performance, “not caring” can be an extremely effective means of improving one’s performance on a specific test on a given day – particularly when the alternative would be caring a great deal while fearing that one will confirm others’ negative expectations.

You see where this is going. Return with us to home plate and the “test” of the major league playoffs. Ian Herbert recently wrote a terrific summary of the psychology of batting. To understand that, it’s necessary to understand something about the “automaticity” of batting (for a related post, see “The Unconscious Genius of Baseball Players“) Herbert explains that although the game’s greatest hitters make it all seem easy, “the scientific consensus [is] that hitting is basically impossible. That’s right, impossible.” Consider the what’s involved:

A ball thrown by a major league pitcher reaches speeds of 100 m.p.h. and an angular velocity (the speed in degrees at which the ball travels through your field of vision) of more than 500 degrees per second. A typical human can only track moving objects up to about 70 degrees per second. Add to this the fact that it takes longer to swing a bat than it does for a pitch to go from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt, which means a hitter must start his swing before the ball is released and has less than a half a second to change his mind. All that equals impossible.

Part of what makes batting possible is that the professionals are better than average at keeping their eye on the ball — though none can actually continue to watch a pitch from hand to bat. Another part of what makes the impossible feasible is that the pitcher’s pitches are not totally random in terms of placement, velocity, and so on, and the batters can take cues from the pitcher’s body position and arm speed, from the batter’s own situation (the count, the number of outs, and so on), and from the ball’s early location and spin to estimate where the ball will be when it moves from hand to plate a split-second later. Of course, very little of this is conscious and calculated. The body reacts automatically, informed as it is by practicing the fundamentals and fine-tuned by the rewards of successes and the penalties of failures. If you’re really really good, you might just manage to get a hit thirty percent of the time.

What about the clutch-hitting situation? Is there any reason that one’s performance could be affected by the importance of the moment? Ian Herbert writes:

Research dating back to a 1984 study by Florida State’s Roy Baumeister . . . and including work by . . . Sian Beilock [at University of Chicago] suggests that if you put a player in a pressure situation, he develops a greater than normal self-focus — what we colloquially call trying too hard. When you learn a process like a baseball swing, it is important to practice it step-by-step, and novice hitters actually think through their actions of shifting their weight, rotating their hips, and so forth. But experts do this naturally. Indeed, . . . when expert hitters were asked to focus on a particular part of their swing, it adversely affected their performance.

In other words, if a batter begins thinking about an otherwise automatic process or otherwise becomes self-conscious, performance suffers. And here we think that the lessons of stereotype threat and of batter’s-box psychology converge.

Why does Rodriguez seem to fall apart when the season is on the line? We suspect, you guessed it, that A-Rod may care too much and, consequently, must deal with the added anxiety that a lackluster performance will confirm the negative conception of him as a post-season loser, a conception that has been haunting him for years. It is as if, in the big games, he’s saddled with the proverbial monkey, which prevents him from relaxing and allowing his own motor memory to do what it otherwise clearly knows how to do.

We recognize that, in a way, this is not news. Many commentators, such as Selena Roberts of the New York Times, believe that A-Rod has tried too hard to succeed when it matters the most, which in turn has caused him to fail (since his mechanics are adversely affected and he is no longer “in the zone” that serves him so well during the regular season). Others summarize A-Rod’s stats with a single word: “choke.” Indeed, the folks at tradearod.com have compiled a list of associated names, including “Please Opt Out Rod,” “Buzzkill,” “Mr. Springtraining,” and, of course, “Choke-Fraud.” Along those lines, sports blogger Josh Bacott explains that “the name Alex Rodriguez has become synonymous with . . . shrinking at the moments his team needs him most.”

What social psychology helps us do is better understand the source of A-Rod’s difficulty in clutch games and to understand that there is nothing particularly unusual or unforgivable about it. But it does more than that.

If the stereotype-threat analogy has any relevance, it helps us see that the problem is not a function merely of A-Rod’s disposition (as the kind of person who is “clutch” or the kind of person who “chokes”); it also reflects the expectations and conceptions in A-Rod’s situation, surrounding him like the chalk of the batter’s box or the love-him-when-he-succeeds-but-despise-him-when-he-fails fans. And those expectations, reactions, and resultant anxieties may be a big part of what leads to the pop-ups, double-play balls, and strikeouts that disproportionately characterize his playoff at bats. When sports writers and commentators and fans dispositionalize a player as “Mr. Clutch” or as “Mr. Choke,” they are influencing what they assume they are only describing. Blaming A-Rod is, at least in part, creating A-Rod.

At the very moment when A-Rod is attempting to be the hero or avoid being the villain, he ought to be watching the pitch. For most players, that is easier said than done — unless, perhaps, you’re a very strange bird . . . unless, in other words, you’re Manny Ramirez.

“Being Manny” and “not caring very much” at the dish may be the best way for a good hitter to be great. And, if you look at what the experts have to say about Manny’s notorious apathy, they seem to understand that it may well be the secret to his success. In response to Manny’s scandalous comments last week, Red Sox president Larry Lucchino said: “When I hear that I say, that’s why Manny Ramirez is the kind of hitter that he is. There is a certain relaxation about Manny.”

“Calmness, yes, [he] essentially has it at all times. And when he’s got a bat in his hand he uses it effectively because of that focus. He’s just not tight. He was trying to say ‘you know, let’s don’t panic. We’re going out and play this game. We’re going to have fun . . . that’s how I took it. . . . I think what you see in that is the essential Manny Ramirez, and one reason why for seven consecutive years we’ve seen an exceptional offensive [player].” This “calmness,” of course, is not meant to suggest that Ramirez lacks effort. In fact, as Bruce Allen of Boston Sports Media Watch carefully notes, Ramirez is renowned for his pre-game hitting preparation. Still, as his teammate and possible 2007 American League MVP, Mike Lowell, has said, Ramirez “has a [hitting] ability that I don’t understand . . . it’s just unbelievable.”

In the long run, athletes and others face a kind of trade-off between being committed to hard work — and all the elements associated with a “winning attitude” over the long haul — and to something like apathy or nonchalance when it comes to execution. True, practicing can make the impossible simple, but caring too much can make the simple impossible again.

If our argument has any validity, it suggests an unconventional lesson: the secret to success is, at least at times, not caring. In a world in which many assume that winners and losers are determined by “heart,” “will,” “a sense of urgency,” “the eye of the tiger,” and so on, Manny reminds us that maybe we can succeed by keeping things in perspective. “Winning attitudes” are great, but there’s a lot to be said for a a little ho-hum mixed in. Why is it always “Manny being Manny?” Maybe more people, including Alex Rodriguez, should consider “being Manny.”

Predicting Our Emotional Future

Here is an excerpt from the BPS blog describing research on our ability to predict the future. Also of interest is Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson's work on this same topic.

Nick Sevdalis and Nigel Harvey gave 47 participants £10 each to split as they chose with an unseen stranger in another room. If the stranger rejected the amount they were offered as too mean, then both the participant and stranger would go away empty handed. The participants were asked how much regret and disappointment they expected to experience if their offer was rejected.

In fact, the task was fixed - there were no strangers, and every participant was told that their offer had been rejected. Immediately after receiving the rejection, the participants were asked to report how much regret and disappointment they actually felt. Participants who had made reasonably high offers experienced significantly less regret than they thought they would, and on average, all participants experienced less disappointment than they expected.

In a second experiment, 27 students were asked to predict the grade they would receive for a real piece of coursework and to say how much regret and rejoicing they would experience if their actual mark was higher or lower than they expected. After receiving their grade, they reported how the news actually made them feel.

Overall, the students underestimated the mark they received, but they overestimated how delighted this better-than-expected result made them feel. Together with the first experiment, the findings suggest we overestimate how despondent bad outcomes will make us feel, and we overestimate how pleased good outcomes will make us feel.

The researchers suggested that to improve our decision-making, we should discount how we think different outcomes will make us feel. “Anticipated regret is certainly a powerful decision cue,” they said. “Whether it is an effective one remains to be empirically demonstrated.”

Sevdalis, N. & Harvey, N. (2007). Biased forecasting of postdecisional affect. Psychological Science, 18, 678-681.

Tragic Fallacy

Here is an excerpt from the Addiction in Society Blog:

Hillary Clinton, in presenting her argument for why her campaign should continue in the face of overwhelming statistical odds, noted that Robert Kennedy was assassinated at a point later in the 1968 presidential campaign than the current date. ... Why would she draw such an ugly analogy? To understand how such a smart, savvy, and campaign-seasoned person as Senator Clinton could miscalculate so badly, we need to understand her and husband Bill's world view.

For the Clintons, all things relate back to them, and to their current effort to regain the presidency. One critic, commenting on the frame of reference of a writer detailing her efforts to become famous early in the last century, noted that she saw World War I primarily as an interruption of her career - as though the entire world existed to provide a set and characters for her life story.

In literature, viewing all events as centering around your own life is called the "tragic fallacy." The scientific/religious equivalent is the view that the universe revolves around the earth and human beings. In psychopathology, this way of interpreting the world is called "feelings of reference," as in the paranoid delusion that people on television are talking about you.

For the Clintons, Robert Kennedy's death on June 6 "proves" that Hillary should keep running until at least that date.

Jealousy

There is a great article by Robert Leahy that appeared in the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy. In this article, he and his colleague, Dennis Tirch, discuss feelings of jealousy and how to deal with them. Below is an excerpt from Robert Leahy's blog on some of the strategies.

Jealousy is angry agitated worry.

When we are jealous we worry that our partner might find someone else more appealing and we fear that he or she will reject us. Since we feel threatened that our partner might find someone more attractive, we may activate jealousy as a way to cope with this threat. We may believe that our jealousy may keep us from being surprised, help us defend our rights, and force our partner to give up interests elsewhere. Similar to worry, jealousy may be a “strategy” that we use so that we can figure out what is going wrong or learn what our partner “really feels”. We may also think that our jealousy can motivate us to give up on the relationship—so that we don’t get hurt any more. If you are feeling jealous, it’s important to ask yourself what you hope to gain by your jealousy. We view jealousy as a coping strategy.

Similar to other forms of worry, jealousy leads us to focus only on the negative. We interpret our partner’s behavior as reflecting a loss of interest in us or a growing interest in someone else: “He finds her attractive” or “He is yawning because I am boring”. Like other forms of worry, jealousy leads us to take things personally and to mind-read negative emotions in other people: “She’s getting dressed up to attract other guys”.

Jealousy can be an adaptive emotion.

People have different reasons—in different cultures---for being jealous. But jealousy is a universal emotion. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss in The Dangerous Passion makes a good case that jealousy has evolved as a mechanism to defend our interests. After all, our ancestors who drove off competitors were more likely to have their genes survive. Indeed, intruding males (whether among lions or humans) have been known to kill off the infants or children of the displaced male. Jealousy was a way in which vital interests could be defended.

We believe that it is important to normalize jealousy as an emotion. Telling people that “You must be neurotic if you are jealous” or “You must have low self-esteem” will not work. In fact, jealousy—in some cases—may reflect high self-esteem: “I won’t allow myself to be treated this way”.

Jealousy may reflect your higher values

Psychologists---especially psychoanalysts---have looked at jealousy as a sign of deep-seated insecurities and personality defects. We view jealousy as a much more complicated emotion. In fact, jealousy may actually reflect your higher values of commitment, monogamy, love, honesty, and sincerity. You may feel jealous because you want a monogamous relationship and you fear that you will lose what is valuable to you. We find it helpful to validate these values in our patients who are jealous.

Some people may say, “You don’t own the other person”. Of course, this is true---and any loving relationship with mutuality is based on freedom. But it is also based on choices that two free people make. If your partner freely chooses to go off with someone else, then you may rest assured that you have good reasons to feel jealous. We don’t own each other, but we may make affirmations about our commitment to each other.

But if your higher values are based on honesty, commitment and monogamy, your jealousy may jeopardize the relationship. You are in a bind. You don’t want to give up on your higher values---but you don’t want to feel overwhelmed by your jealousy.

Jealous feelings are different from jealous behaviors

Just as there is a difference between feeling angry and acting in a hostile way, there is a difference between feeling jealous and acting on your jealousy. It’s important to realize that your relationship is more likely to be jeopardized by your jealous behavior---such as continual accusations, reassurance-seeking, pouting, and acting-out. Stop and say to yourself, “I know that I am feeling jealous, but I don’t have to act on it.”

Notice that it is a feeling inside you. But you have a choice of whether you act on it.

What choice will be in your interest?

Accept and observe your jealous thoughts and feelings

When you notice that you are feeling jealous, take a moment, breathe slowly, and observe your thoughts and feelings. Recognize that jealous thoughts are not the same thing as a REALITY. You may think that your partner is interested in someone else, but that doesn’t mean that he really is. Thinking and reality are different.

You don’t have to obey your jealous feelings and thoughts.

Notice that your feeling of anger and anxiety may increase while you stand back and observe these experiences. Accept that you can have an emotion—and allow it to be. You don’t have to “get rid of the feeling”. We have found that mindfully standing back and observing that a feeling is there can often lead to the feeling weakening on its own.

Recognize that uncertainty is part of every relationship

Like many worries, jealousy seeks certainty. “I want to know for sure that he isn’t interested in her”. Or, “I want to know for sure that we won’t break up”. Ironically, some people will even precipitate a crisis in order to get the certainty. “I’ll break off with her before she breaks off with me!”

But uncertainty is part of life and we have to learn how to accept it. Uncertainty is one of those limitations that we can’t really do anything about. You can never know for sure that your partner won’t reject you. But if you accuse, demand and punish, you might create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Examine your assumptions about relationships

Your jealousy may be fueled by unrealistic ideas about relationships. These may include beliefs that past relationships (that your partner had) are a threat to your relationship. Or you may believe that “My partner should never be attracted to anyone else”. You may also believe that your emotions (of jealousy and anxiety) are a “sign” that there is a problem. We call this “emotional reasoning”—and it is often a very bad way to make decisions.

Or you may have problematic beliefs about how to feel more secure. For example, you may believe that you can force your partner to love you—or force him or her to lose interest in someone else. You may believe that withdrawing and pouting will send a message to your partner---and lead him to try to get closer to you. But withdrawing may lead your partner to lose interest.

Sometimes your assumptions about relationships are affected by your childhood experiences or past intimate relationships. If your parents had a difficult divorce because your father left your mother for someone else, you may be more prone to believe that his may happen to you. Or you may have been betrayed in a recent relationship and you now think that your current relationship will be a replay of this.

You may also believe that you have little to offer—who would want to be with you? If your jealousy is based on this belief, then you might examine the evidence for and against this idea. For example, one woman thought she had little to offer. But when I asked her what she would want in an ideal partner---intelligence, warmth, emotional closeness, creativity, fun, lots of interests---she realized that she was describing herself! If she were so undesirable, then why would she see herself as an ideal partner?

Use effective relationship skills

You don’t have to rely on jealousy and jealous behavior to make your relationship more secure. You can use more effective behavior. This includes becoming more rewarding to each other--- “catch your partner doing something positive”. Praise each other, plan positive experiences with each other, and try to refrain from criticism, sarcasm, labeling, and contempt. Learn how to share responsibility in solving problems---use “mutual problem solving skills”. Set up “pleasure days” with each other by developing a “menu” of positive and pleasurable behaviors you want from each other. For example, you can say, “Let’s set up a day this week that will be your pleasure day and a day that will be my pleasure day”. Make a list of pleasant and simple behaviors you want from each other: “I’d like a foot-rub, talk with me about my work, let’s cook a meal together, let’s go for a walk in the park”.

Above Average

An excerpt from the Freakonomics Blog:

What do American drivers, the children of Lake Wobegon, and termites have in common?

They are all above average.

Here’s what a regular reader called LLP pointed out in an e-mail:

There is a TV ad running here in Southern California for a pest control company. It states that “the average termite eats 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” so your million dollar home is at risk.

This got me thinking that the idea of average is on the upper limit — which does not make sense since no termite can exceed the maximum time alloted in a day or a week.

Reinforcing Sickness

Here is an excerpt from slate.com providing a doctor's account of why too many antibiotics are given out. It brings up an interesting question to psychotherapy. That is, should we kick out patients who we don't feel need treatment? If we keep them in treatment, are we reinforcing the idea that they are sick and need help?

While working a busy night shift in the ER recently, I evaluated a 13-month-old girl. On her chart, the triage nurse had written: "Infant with fever and runny nose. Mother here for antibiotics." The baby was fussy but probably more tired than uncomfortable. Between her squirms, she cooed and smiled at me. Her anxious and upset mother, however, was in far worse shape, repeatedly sticking a rubber bulb syringe up her infant's nostrils in a futile attempt to suck out an endless stream of snot. The mom was also really mad: She had been waiting for more than three hours for a doctor to see her daughter. Now she wanted antibiotics: specifically, a prescription for bubble-gum-flavored amoxicillin.

By my assessment, the child was not acutely ill: She'd had a low-grade fever for two days, her mother said, and a mild cough, but she had clear lungs and appeared well-hydrated. Her eardrum may have had some fluid behind it but wasn't red or bulging. Just as the baby was trying to put my stethoscope in her mouth, paramedics pushed through the ambulance doors with a patient who was having an acute stroke. I had to decide right then if I was going to give this mother the antibiotics she wanted, even though I thought her daughter probably didn't need them.

The profligate prescription of antibiotics—for children and adults with upper respiratory infections, sinus infections, and even middle-ear infections—is a problem because most of these illnesses are caused by viruses, not bacteria, which are what conventional antibiotics attack.

Interviewer Effect on Children's Answers

Here is an excerpt from the BPS blog on interviewing children and how the interviewer's behaviors can profoundly impact the child's answers:

Eighty-six children, aged 8 to 10, took part in a ten minute lesson on how the vocal chords work, before being interviewed about the session a week later. Some of the children were interviewed by a woman who smiled and did not fidget. The others were interviewed by the same woman, but in their case she was not smiling and she fidgeted by tapping her hand or foot.

One of the questions asked the children whether or not they had been touched by the teacher during the lesson. Only eight children said falsely that they had - all of them had been interviewed by the woman when she was unsmiling and fidgeting. Moreover, significantly more of the children interviewed by the woman when she was unsmiling and fidgeting answered misleading questions incorrectly. "Children may be less prone to oppose an adult who they view as distant and strict," the researchers said.

The children interviewed by the fidgeting, unsmiling woman also said they didn't know the answer to questions far less frequently than did the children interviewed by the same woman smiling and not fidgeting. Perhaps the former group of children felt "more vulnerable and anxious" and therefore "more compelled to give an answer even when they did not know it," the researchers said.

"Better understanding of the effects of interviewers' behaviours should allow professionals to control and manipulate them in interviews so as to increase the reliability of eye witness reports," Almerigogna and colleagues concluded.

Almerigogna, J., Ost, J., Akehurst, L., Fluck, M. (2008). How interviewers' nonverbal behaviors can affect children's perceptions and suggestibility. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 100(1), 17-39. DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2008.01.006

Dissociative Identity Disorder

Here is an excerpt from Mind Hacks on the rise and fall of the incidence of Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This excerpt discusses John Kihlstrom's ­2005 review article on dissociative disorders:

Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID is a diagnosis that describes where someone manifests various personalities, often of a diverse range of people - from children to adults of either sex.

It is controversial partly because diagnoses seemed to massively increase when two famous films on the disorder were popular.

Kihlstrom makes the interesting point that the increase in the number of people diagnosed with the disorder was also matched by an increase in the number of personalities each person seemed to have.

An interesting feature of the DID “epidemic” is an increase not just in the number of cases but also in the number of alter egos reported per case. In the classic literature, the vast majority of cases were of dual personality (Sutcliffe & Jones 1962, Taylor & Martin 1944). By contrast, most of the new cases compiled by Greaves (1980) presented at least three personalities; in two other series, the average number of alter egos was more than 13 (Kluft 1984, Putnam et al. 1986).

As Kenny (1986) noted, it was almost as if there were some kind of contest to determine who could have (or be) the patient with the most alter egos. The famous Eve, of course, appeared to have three personalities (Osgood & Luria 1954, Thigpen & Cleckley 1954). But when popular and professional interest in MPD was stimulated by the case of Sibyl, who was reported to possess 16 different personalities (Schreiber 1973), Eve replied with her own account of her illness, eventually claiming 22 (Sizemore & Huber 1988).

Despite the almost-infinite number of possible synaptic connections in the brain, one might say that the mind simply is not big enough to hold so many personalities. The proliferation of alter egos within cases, as well as the proliferation of cases, has been one of the factors leading to skepticism about the disorder itself.

In general, dissociative disorders are where one part of consciousness seems to be 'split off' or inaccessible to another.

For example, psychogenic amnesia or conversion disorder ('hysteria') are more common examples and hypnosis seems to reliably induce the phenomena in some people.

These are still some of the most mysterious processes in psychology and are fraught with controversy, particularly as they're often linked to repressed memories from abuse or trauma.

This is one of the more difficult areas to study scientifically because it largely relies on self-report, and Kihlstrom notes there is still no convincing evidence that trauma or abuse leads to amnesia for the event.

Link to PubMed abstract of Kihlstrom's review.
Link to full-text of pre-print.

Free Advice vs. Advice that is Paid For

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:

Francesca Gino at Carnegie Mellon University, whose new study shows that we're more likely to use advice we've paid for than advice that's free, even if there's no difference in quality between the two sources.

Dozens of students were asked questions about American history and received small cash prizes for correct answers. The students were either given the option of receiving advice on the correct answers, or advice was imposed on them. Sometimes this advice was free; other times it was paid for out of the students' winnings. Crucially, the advice always came from the same source - in the form of the answer that a student from a pilot session had given to the same question - so the quality of advice was held constant regardless of whether it was free or paid for.

Throughout the study, the participants took more account of advice they had paid for than advice they were given free, even though it was made clear to them that the advice was of the same quality. A final study showed the students took even more account of advice if it was made more expensive.

Gino said her findings could be explained by a phenomenon in decision-making theory known as the sunk cost fallacy. This is our desire to justify our past investments through our present and future behaviour - it's why that expensive pair of shoes that you never wear is still cluttering up your cupboard. In the case of advice, it seems we feel compelled to use guidance we've paid for, so as to justify the expense. And perhaps it explains why expensive frauds can sometimes be so influential.

GINO, F. (2008). Do we listen to advice just because we paid for it? The impact of advice cost on its use. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.03.001

Non-Clinical Community Samples

An excerpt from BPS Reasearch Digest Blog:

The tactic used by most researchers is to recruit from the wider community, for example by advertising in the local paper. But Thurston's team argue a large proportion of the general community actually have their own mental health problems, and many of them are receiving therapy, something many researchers fail to screen for. This means that what research papers describe as a "non-clinical community sample" may not be so "non-clinical" after all.

Thurston and her colleagues assessed 224 families recruited through adverts in local newspapers in south eastern USA as part of a larger study. They found 11 per cent of the teenagers, 20 per cent of the mothers and 13 per cent of the fathers met the diagnostic criteria for one or more psychiatric disorders. Moreover, 12 per cent of the teenagers, 20 per cent of the mothers and 11 per cent of the fathers were currently in therapy. These two groups didn't completely overlap - for instance, there were 25 mothers who met diagnostic criteria for a psychiatric disorder but who weren't in therapy.

Thurston's team said their findings have implications for research validity. Differences previously identified between clinical and so-called "non-clinical" groups may be caused by a factor other than the clinical status of the two groups.

Researchers should screen their community participants to find out if they are currently experiencing mental distress or participating in therapy, Thurston's team advised. But as regards whether such participants should then be excluded from research, Thurston and her colleagues said: "There is no perfect answer, but rather, researchers must weigh the costs and benefits of their exclusionary criteria in relation to the goals of the study."

Thurston, I.B., Curley, J., Fields, S., Kamboukos, D., Rojas, A., Phares, V. (2008). How nonclinical are community samples?. Journal of Community Psychology, 36(4), 411-420. DOI: 10.1002/jcop.20223

The Secret

An excerpt from the "How of Happiness" Blog regarding the book, the Secret:

...the law of attraction [which argues that you can manifest or attract whatever your heart desires, from Prada bags to husbands] sounds ridiculous. But it works! It has truly, sincerely, and genuinely made me happier.”

I am a psychological scientist who conducts randomized controlled experiments that test what strategies make people happier over the long term (and how and why). But I cannot argue with the claim that faithfully using the law of attraction has made particular individuals happy. Of course, such anecdotal evidence can be strongly biased. For example, people may try to convince themselves that something into which they have put a lot of effort is truly valuable, or they may selectively recall successes versus failures. However, my guess is that if we test The Secret’s recommendations in a randomized controlled experiment, it would likely be shown to “work.” Why? Because, as my new graduate student, Matthew Della Porta, announced to me the other day in an inspired understatement, “You know, The Secret is just a giant placebo effect.”

A placebo effect occurs when a pill, procedure, or behavior has the intended salutary outcome – for example, relief of headache or lifting of depression – simply because the person believes that it will have that outcome. The placebo effect is truly mind-over-body, or mind-over-mind, in action. The pill may be a sugar pill and the strategy may be completely worthless, but if you think that it’s going to work, it just might work.

Placebo effects aren’t trivial. A sugar pill or sham treatment (even sham surgery) can lead people to feel less anxious, to show reduced inflammation, to witness declines in blood pressure, and even to build muscle mass. In the case of psychological “sham” treatments, such as those described in Rhonda Byrne’s film and book, people may benefit and become genuinely happier for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are pursuing a significant, committed, and absorbing life goal (simply having such goals is associated with happiness) and the fact that they are engaged with the world and other people (social bonds are also associated with happiness).

Vitamin F

An excerpt from the Psychology Today Blog:

Over the next month I want you to develop the habit of confronting fear. It's my opinion that the human body needs fear. You may not have noticed, but on the government's chart of recommended daily allowance of essential vitamins and minerals, just under Vitamin E and above Folic acid, is Vitamin F for fear. A healthy person has a bit of fear in their lives every day. Without fear, you're not challenging yourself and growing. You have your choice—I'm prescribing ten minutes of apprehension or two minutes of utter terror, every day.

Opt in or Opt out

Below is an excerpt from the Social Sciences Statistics Blog regarding the differences in countries who have a opt-in versus and opt-out policy on organ donation. Here are links to the original paper.

The results on organ donation in Europe are particularly striking, as the authors show that large differences in organ donation rates in otherwise similar European nations (e.g. Sweeden and Denmark) may in large part be a consequence of whether organ donation is an opt-in or opt-out option on the drivers license application.

As the authors note, there are substantial public policy implications to research along these lines. For example here in the U.S., there is a growing chorus of policy gurus, including at least one major presidential candidate, pushing for policies such automatic retirement accounts. The idea is that rather than enacting more blunt mechanisms (e.g. mandates), we can implement policies that harness the inertia brought about by default options to achieve policy goals.

Affordances

Here is an interesting excerpt from the MindHacks Blog:

You're on the side of rock-wall, and you have to go up (or down) by looking around you for somewhere to move your hands or feet. If you can't see anything then you're stuck and just have to count the seconds before you run out of strength and fall off. What often happens to me when climbing is that I look as hard as I can for a hold to move my hand up to and I see nothing. Nothing I can easily reach, nothing I can nearly reach and not even anything I might reach if I was just a bit taller or if I jumped. I feel utterly stuck and begin to contemplate the immanent defeat of falling off.

But then I remember to look for new footholds.

Sometimes I've already had a go at this and haven't seen anything promising, but in desperation I move one foot to a new hold, perhaps one that is only an inch or so further up the wall. And this is when something magical happens. Although I am now only able to reach an inch further, I can suddenly see a new hold for my hand, something I'm able to grip firmly and use to pull myself to freedom and triumph (or at least somewhere higher up to get stuck). Even though I looked with all my desperation at the wall above me, this hold remained completely invisible until I moved my foot an inch --- what a difference that inch made.

Psychologists have something they call affordances (Gibson, 1977, 1986), which are features of the environment which seem to 'present themselves' as available for certain actions. Chairs afford being sat on, hammers afford hitting things with. The term captures an observation that there is something very obviously action-orientated about perception. We don't just see the world, we see the world full of possibilities. And this means that the affordances in the environment aren't just there, they are there because we have some potential to act (Stoffregen, 2003). If you are frail and afraid of falling then a handrail will look very different from if you are a skateboarder, or a freerunner. Psychology typically divides the jobs the mind does up into parcels : 'perception', (then) 'decision making', (then) 'action'. But if you take the idea of affordances seriously it gives lie to this neat division. Affordances exist because action (the 'last' stage) affects perception (the 'first' stage). Can we experimentally test this intuition, is there really an effect of action on perception? One good example is Oudejans et al (1996) who asked baseball fielders to judge were a ball would land, either just watching it fall or while running to catch it. A model of the mind that didn't involve affordances might think that it would be easier to judge where a ball would land if you were standing still; after all, it's usually easier to do just one thing rather than two. This, however, would be wrong. The fielders were more accurate in their judgements --- perceptual predictions basically --- when running to catch the ball, in effect when they could use base their judgements on the affordances of the environment produced by their actions, rather than when passively observing the ball.

The connection with my rock-climbing experience is obvious: although I can see the wall ahead, I can only see the holds ahead which are actually within reach. Until I move my foot and bring a hold within range it is effectively invisible to my affordance-biased perception (there's probably some attentional-narrowing occurring due to anxiety about falling off too, (Pijpers et al, 2006); so perhaps if I had a ladder and a gin and tonic I might be better at spotting potential holds which were out of reach).

Gandhi Quotes

A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

Action expresses priorities.

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.

I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won't presume to probe into the faults of others.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

My life is my message.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Happiness in Altruistic Behavior

Here is an excerpt from the Not Exactly Rocket Science Blog:

Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British Columbia wanted to see if there were ways of channelling the inevitable pursuit of money towards actually making people happier. Together with Lara Aknin and Michael Norton, she asked a representative group of 632 Americans to disclose their average monthly expenditure and to rate how happy they were.

She found that personal spending, including bills, living expenses and treats for oneself, made up 90% of the average outgoings but had no bearing on satisfaction. On the other hand, people who spent more money on others by way of gifts or charitable donations, were much happier for it. That either suggests that selfless spending increases happiness, or just that happier people are more likely to plump up more money for friends or charities.

Dunn sought out firmer conclusions by watching what happened to people who received an unexpected windfall. She surveyed 16 employees at a Boston firm who were given a bonus that ranged from $3,000 to $8,000. About two months later, Dunn grilled them about how they had spent the money and again, regardless of the size of the bonus, those who devoted more of their windfalls to selfless ends ended up happier, while those who splashed out on themselves did not. To paraphrase a saying, it's not how much you have, it's what you do with it that counts.

Finally, Dunn tested this theory through an experiment. She gave 46 people either $5 of $20, and an afternoon to spend it. Half of the lucky volunteers were told to splurge on themselves, while the other half had to buy a gift for someone else or to give the money to charity. By the evening, the charitable individuals felt happier than they did in the morning while the self-spenders did not, regardless of which bill they were given, and despite the fact that they were acting on instructions.

...

And in a deeply ironic twist, the types of behaviour that allow money to buy happiness are subverted by the presence of, you guessed it, more money! Higher incomes bring greater self-sufficiency and as people start to need less help themselves, they tend to provide less for others. In psychological experiments, just the mere thought of money made people less likely to donate to charity, help acquaintances or spend time with friends, exactly the types of behaviour that are linked to happiness.

An emerging viewpoint from the science of happiness is that a persons' circumstances in life - their income, jobs and so on - tend to have limited long-term effects on their happiness. People mentally adapt to stable situations unless they learn to actively engage with their circumstances - simply put, savour the moment or your goalposts will shift. This latest study is consistent with this idea, for it showed that the way in which money is spent has a greater bearing on contentment than how much is made.

There is a silver lining then. While Dunn's work implies that of selfless spending is the key to happiness, it also suggests that you don't need to pauperise yourself to do it. The experimental study suggested that paying as little $5 towards a selfless cause can result in a significant spike in happiness. Given that the volunteers in the first study only spent 10% of their earnings on other people, there is plenty of leeway for purchasing a bit of pleasure.

And if all of that seems obvious in hindsight, consider this: when Dunn asked a fresh group of 109 people about the things that would make them happiest, she found that they were, on average, doubly wrong. A majority of 63% predicted that personal spending would make them happier than selfless spending while 86% said that they would be happier with the $20 bill than the $5 one. Those are certainly the intuitive answers, but they are not the empirical ones.

Dunn, E.W., Aknin, L.B., Norton, M.I. (2008). Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness. Science, 319(5870), 1687-1688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150952

Ignoring What Might Have Been

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:

we take into account what might have happened if we'd taken a different path, made a different decision. These so-called 'fictive' thoughts can lead us to change the way we behave in the future. But now Pearl Chiu and colleagues have shown this ability is lacking in smokers - a finding they say could have implications for treating addiction.

Thirty-one smokers and 31 non-smokers had their brains scanned as they played an investment game. They were given $100 with which to invest in stocks and shares and after each round they were told how much money they'd made, relative to how much money they could have made if they'd invested the maximum amount in their chosen shares.

Discovering how much money they could have made if they'd invested a larger amount affected the subsequent decision-making of the non-smokers but not the smokers. It's not that the brains of the smokers didn't register this information - they, like the non-smokers, showed increased activity in a part of the brain called the caudate when shown what they'd missed - it's just they didn't act on it. Pearl Chiu and co-workers say this cognitive anomaly helps explain why smokers carry on puffing away without regard for the positive outcomes that could have ensued had they have given up.

Chiu, P.H., Lohrenz, T.M., Montague, P.R. (2008). Smokers' brains compute, but ignore, a fictive error signal in a sequential investment task. Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn2067

Reputation Management in Autism

Below is an interesting excerpt summarizing research on how kids with autism lack the skill to manage their reputation.

The autistic subjects showed normal activity during the "other phase" (when they were learning how much their partner was going to repay them), but they did not show the activation in the mid-cingulate during the "self phase" (when they were deciding how much to invest).

Why was there only a difference during one phase of the game? Imagine yourself at the moment you make an investment. This instance is your only chance to influence the other player. You are trying to read and manipulate his or her mind. At the same time, you are trying to build a reputation as a person who can be trusted.

Our speculation is that this process of reputation management is impaired in autistic individuals, because it depends on the ability to read the minds of others. This hypothesis can be tested experimentally. If we are concerned with our reputation then our behavior will be strongly affected by whether or not an audience is present to observe our actions. Consider, for instance, another sharing game known as the dictator game. One player is given $100 and is allowed to share any amount he or she chooses with the other player. In this situation, the rational thing to do would be to give the other player no money at all, because the second player is powerless to respond. Even "dictators" will typically dole out a small proportion of the money, however. When there is an audience for the transaction, dictators give away even more money. Presumably, they do not want to have a reputation for meanness or for acting unfairly. If autistic people are not concerned with their own reputation, then their behaviour should not be affected by the presence of an audience.

Hoarding Documentary

Below is a link to a documentary following four hoarders:
http://www.vimeo.com/603058

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

How do you know when you are finished eating?

An excerpt from Brian Wasnick, author of Mindless Eating:

In a recent study, researchers from my Cornell Food Lab asked 133 participants from Paris and 145 from Chicago to complete a brief survey on their food habits, posing the question “How do you know when you are through eating dinner?”

The Parisians said they knew they were through when they no longer felt hungry or when the food no longer tasted good to them. Their answers suggested that they're influenced by internal cues — whether they liked the taste of the food or whether they wanted to leave room for a later dessert — to tell them dinner's over. In Chicago, it was a different ball game. The 145 Americans relied on external cues of satiety. They said they knew they were through eating when they cleaned their plate, when everyone else at the table was finished or when the TV show they were watching was over.

The Americans were more influenced by their environment than whether they were actually still hungry. Since most of the signals in our society, from TV commercials to our best friends, tell us to “eat, eat, eat,” it can be difficult to control intake if we're ignoring our own bodies.

The study, conducted by Collin Payne and Pierre Chandon and published recently in the journal Obesity, also found that, for both the American and French participants, the heaviest people tended to be the ones who relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating.

Placebo Works Better if It Costs More

An excerpt about different costs of a placebo:

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in North Carolina, and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested 82 volunteers.

All got a light electric shock and were offered what they were told was a painkiller.

Half were given a brochure describing the pill as a newly approved painkiller that cost $2.50 per dose and half were given a brochure describing it as marked down to 10 cents.

Writing in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Ariely and colleagues said the effects were unexpectedly strong.

Eighty-five percent of volunteers who thought they were getting a $2.50 pill said they felt less pain after taking it, compared with 61 percent of those who thought they were getting a discounted drug.

The results fit with other studies that show charging more for something makes people value it more. But Ariely said the combination with the placebo effect was especially interesting.

Signs of Threat Change Decision Making

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:

Aspects of the environment that indicate danger - from flashing lights to a mere exclamation mark - lead us to make faster and more extreme judgements about fairness.

Kees van den Bos and colleagues say this happens because when we sense a threat, and what they call the 'human alarm system' is activated, we tend to form faster and more extreme reactions, with justice-related decisions being no exception.

In one experiment, university students stared either at an exclamation mark for one minute, or at a line with a dot above it - the latter serving as a control condition. Next the participants played a computer-based task with what they thought was another participant, but was really just a computer programme. Afterwards, some participants were asked how lottery tickets - a reward for taking part - should be shared between themselves and their playing 'partner', based on their performances. The remaining participants were told the lottery tickets would be distributed without seeking their opinion. Finally, the participants were asked to indicate how fair this system of ticket allocation was.

Amazingly, the mere act of staring at an exclamation mark significantly affected the participants' reactions. The difference in fairness judgments between those who'd been given a say and those who hadn't was greater among the participants who'd previously stared at an exclamation mark than among the control participants - in other words their judgments were more extreme (those who'd been given a say responded more positively, those who hadn't, responded more negatively, relative to the control participants who had and hadn't been given a say).

Another experiment asked dozens of shoppers on the streets of Amersfoot in the Netherlands to imagine a scenario in which their colleague had either received the same or a larger bonus than they had. Half the shoppers were asked near to a flashing road-work light - their subsequent judgements on the fairness of the bonus allocation were more extreme than those asked with the light switched off.

VANDENBOS, K., HAM, J., LIND, E., SIMONIS, M., VANESSEN, W., RIJPKEMA, M. (2008). Justice and the human alarm system: The impact of exclamation points and flashing lights on the justice judgment process. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(2), 201-219. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2007.03.001