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Cutting-edge reports on the latest psychology research
Christian Jarrett
753 posts
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- January 15, 2009
- 03:24 PM
- 1,136 views
Practising describing wines could help you become a connoisseur
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
"Hmm, it tastes peachy, gutsy, with a pinch of wild berries," the wine connoisseur says after swirling the Chiraz round her mouth and pulling a few rubbery facial expressions. Such attempts to verbalise the flavour of wine may come in for a deserved degree of scorn, but a new study suggests that describing wines may actually help us distinguish among them.The psychologists Angus Hughson and Robert Boakes were actually attempting to replicate an inconsistently observed learning effect known as "v........ Read more »
Angus Hughson, & Robert Boakes. (2008) Passive perceptual learning in relation to wine: Short-term recognition and verbal description. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(1), 1-8. DOI: 10.1080/17470210802214890
- January 14, 2009
- 09:55 AM
- 972 views
Do you do voodoo?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
They are beloved by prestigious journals and the popular press, but many recent social neuroscience studies are profoundly flawed, according to a devastating critique - Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience - in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science (PDF).The studies in question have tended to claim astonishingly high correlations between localised areas of brain activity and specific psychological measures. For example, in 2003, Naomi Eisenberger at the University of California an........ Read more »
Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, & Harold Pashler. (2009) Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
- January 13, 2009
- 04:43 AM
- 1,205 views
Adult ADHD leads to more accidents and poorer performance at work
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
What happens when children with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) grow up and go to work? According to Ronald Kessler and colleagues, at least some of them continue to experience cognitive difficulties, thus impairing their work performance and increasing the number of accidents they are involved in.Kessler's team surveyed 8563 staff, including office and manual workers, at a major American manufacturing firm. They found 1.9 per cent of them met the criteria for Ad........ Read more »
R. C. Kessler, M. Lane, P. E. Stang, & D. L. Van Brunt. (2008) The prevalence and workplace costs of adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in a large manufacturing firm. Psychological Medicine, 39(01), 137. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291708003309
- January 12, 2009
- 04:47 AM
- 931 views
The community role played by pubs
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
They used to be seen as the heart of the community, but today British pubs (short for "public houses") are closing at a rate of five a day. It is timely then that a Department of Health-funded study has published its findings on the views of 79 heavy drinkers about the role pubs play in the local community.The participants had been recruited as part of a larger study, and were targeted for this research as they were seen by the researchers as "expert informants" on pub life.While some of the par........ Read more »
Jim Orford, Alison Rolfe, Sue Dalton, Catherine Painter, & Heather Webb. (2009) Pub and community: The views of Birmingham untreated heavy drinkers. Journal of Community , 19(1), 68-82. DOI: 10.1002/casp.980
- January 7, 2009
- 05:46 AM
- 1,186 views
Computer game could help prevent traumatic flashbacks
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The idea of fire-fighters, rape victims and car crash survivors being led away from their trauma to play the jigsaw-style video-game Tetris is surreal, but could soon become a reality. That's because Emily Holmes and colleagues have shown that playing the game half an hour after watching traumatic scenes on video, led people to experience fewer flashbacks of those scenes.We already have relatively effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as eye-movement desensitisatio........ Read more »
Emily A. Holmes, Ella L. James, Thomas Coode-Bate, & Catherine Deeprose. (2009) Can Playing the Computer Game “Tetris” Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science. PLoS ONE, 4(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004153
- January 6, 2009
- 12:00 AM
- 985 views
Are the police any better than us at judging the accuracy of eye-witness statements?
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Plenty of research has been conducted into the ability of people, including police officers, to judge whether people are lying: most of us are useless, while new research suggests the police may be better. However, little research has been conducted into whether, deliberate deception aside, people can judge the accuracy of eye-witness statements. This is an important issue given how unreliable eye-witnesses can be, even when they think they're telling the truth.Now Torun Lindholm has made a star........ Read more »
Torun Lindholm. (2008) Who can judge the accuracy of eyewitness statements? A comparison of professionals and lay-persons. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22(9), 1301-1314. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1439
- January 2, 2009
- 12:00 AM
- 1,201 views
Babies can tell the difference between happy and sad music
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
By nine months of age, babies can already tell the difference between jolly jingles and sad ones. You can probably imagine that demonstrating this was no mean feat for researchers, given the obvious difficulties of asking babies what they think.Ross Flom and colleagues took advantage of the fact that babies tend to look longer at something that's novel. Of course, this depends on their ability to tell that something is new and different.Dozens of babies aged between three and nine months were pr........ Read more »
R FLOM, D GENTILE, & A PICK. (2008) Infants’ discrimination of happy and sad music. Infant Behavior and Development, 31(4), 716-728. DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2008.04.004
- December 29, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 872 views
How "card credit" and "you thank" appear as "credit card" and "thank you"
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
In an experiment reminiscent of French Connection's successful FCUK advertising campaign, psychologists in America have documented a new word illusion using what they call the "fast pairs" method.Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Alison Morris have found that participants presented very briefly with familiar word pairs in the unfamiliar order, tend to report that the words appeared in their usual order (read the title to this post quickly enough and you might experience a similar effect). For exampl........ Read more »
C CALDWELLHARRIS, & A MORRIS. (2008) Fast Pairs: A visual word recognition paradigm for measuring entrenchment, top-down effects, and subjective phenomenology☆. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(4), 1063-1081. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2008.09.004
- December 23, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,134 views
Signs of petty crime, such as litter and graffiti, really do encourage more serious law-breaking
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The Broken Windows theory of crime reduction, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book The Tipping Point, has received new robust empirical support from a series of studies by Dutch researchers.According to the theory, more serious crimes can be averted by reducing low level crime such as littering and graffiti. Gladwell attributed the dramatic fall in crime in New York in the 90s to the zero tolerance approach of the police at that time, which effectively put into practice the advice ........ Read more »
K. Keizer, S. Lindenberg, & L. Steg. (2008) The Spreading of Disorder. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1161405
- December 22, 2008
- 04:10 AM
- 1,114 views
A spontaneous experience of a sensed presence caught on EEG
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Serendipitous timing has allowed researchers in Canada to capture the brain activity of a woman experiencing a spontaneous sense of someone else being in the room with her, when really she was alone.This feeling of sensed presence is rather common. For example, more than half of patients who suffer a head injury without loss of consciousness go on to experience a sensed presence during the subsequent year. It's also common among people with temporal lobe epilepsy. Curiously, the presence is per........ Read more »
Michael Persinger, & Sandra Tiller. (2008) Case report: A prototypical spontaneous 'sensed presence' of a sentient being and concomitant electroencephalographic activity in the clinical laboratory. Neurocase, 14(5), 425-430. DOI: 10.1080/13554790802406172
- December 17, 2008
- 11:00 PM
- 966 views
Why you should take extra care when buying a Xmas gift for a man
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
As you go shopping for Christmas presents this holiday, bear in mind that buying the wrong gift for a man could put your relationship with him in jeopardy, whereas buying a bad gift for a woman is far less dangerous.That's according to Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues who asked dozens of participants to rate their preference for twelve different stores, and to then choose a gift for their partner, in the form of a chance to win vouchers from one of those stores.The researchers fixed the results so ........ Read more »
Elizabeth W. Dunn, Jeff Huntsinger, Janetta Lun, & Stacey Sinclair. (2008) The Gift of Similarity: How Good and Bad Gifts Influence Relationships. Social Cognition, 26(4), 469-481. DOI: 10.1521/soco.2008.26.4.469
- December 11, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,251 views
Sudoku puzzles show we're all capable of deductive reasoning
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
So much contemporary research in psychology focuses on the flaws in our thinking and the errors in our decision making. There is something refreshing therefore in a new study by Louis Lee and colleagues who have used the digit-placement puzzle Sudoku to argue, contrary to many others, that untrained people are capable of pure deductive reasoning - this is the ability to arrive at a logical conclusion by following the implications of one or more premises. In an initial experiment, ten Chinese Ho........ Read more »
N.Y. Louis Lee, Geoffrey Goodwin, & P. N. Johnson-Laird. (2008) The psychological puzzle of Sudoku. Thinking , 14(4), 342-364. DOI: 10.1080/13546780802236308
- December 8, 2008
- 04:53 AM
- 1,086 views
Identifying the tools of persuasion used by the British National Party
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
We need to understand the tools of persuasion used by members of the far-right British National Party (BNP) if we are to combat the messages of prejudice they spread. That's according to Mick Finlay and C Wood, who analysed articles published on the BNP website after the terrorist bombings in London in July 2005, written by party leader Nick Griffin and the party's legal director Lee Barnes. Publication of this study is timely, coming as it does when the BNP are enjoying increased electoral su........ Read more »
C. Wood, & W. M. L. Finlay. (2008) British National Party representations of Muslims in the month after the London bombings: Homogeneity, threat, and the conspiracy tradition. British Journal of Social Psychology, 47(4), 707-726. DOI: 10.1348/014466607X264103
- December 3, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,122 views
How to name drop
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Most of us have done it: dropped a name in a conversation and then waited for people to form the appropriate conclusions. "Wow, if Christian is friends with that guy, well then he must be really important/intelligent/popular". Unfortunately, it's a fairly transparent strategy. Indeed, according to Carmen Lebherz and colleagues, name-dropping will probably make you appear less likeable and less competent - unless, that is, you make your association with the famous name sound suitably distant and ........ Read more »
Carmen Lebherz, Klaus Jonas, & Barbara Tomljenovic. (2009) Are we known by the company we keep? Effects of name-dropping on first impressions. Social Influence, 4(1), 62-79. DOI: 10.1080/15534510802343997
- December 1, 2008
- 03:43 AM
- 1,116 views
A touch emotional
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Researchers have documented a new form of synaesthesia - the brain condition that leads people to experience a crossing over of the senses.While synaesthesia often involves letters or sounds triggering the perception of specific colours, celebrated brain scientist V.S. Ramachandran and his colleague David Brang have identified two young women who experience strong emotions when they feel the touch of certain fabrics or textures.For 22-year-old AW, for example, the feel of denim provokes a powerf........ Read more »
V. S. Ramachandran, & David Brang. (2008) Tactile-emotion synesthesia. Neurocase, 14(5), 390-399. DOI: 10.1080/13554790802363746
- November 27, 2008
- 03:29 PM
- 1,035 views
When clients in therapy show sudden, dramatic improvements
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
There's growing evidence that people who undergo psychological therapy often demonstrate sudden, dramatic improvements, almost as though they've had a revelatory change of outlook and thinking style. What's more, these sudden changes appear to be clinically meaningful. People who exhibit sudden improvements from one session to the next are more likely than other clients to show greater and more sustained improvement after they've stopped participating in therapy.Now Elise Clerkin and colleagues ........ Read more »
E CLERKIN, B TEACHMAN, & S SMITHJANIK. (2008) Sudden gains in group cognitive-behavioral therapy for panic disorder☆. Behaviour Research and Therapy. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2008.08.002
- November 26, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,378 views
We're better at spotting fake smiles when we're feeling rejected
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
The last thing you need if you're feeling rejected is to waste time pursuing friendships with people who aren't genuinely interested. That's according to Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, who say we've actually evolved a perceptual adaptation to rejection that helps prevent this from happening.Bernstein's team provoked feelings of rejection in students by asking them to write about a time they felt rejected or excluded. These students were subsequently better at distinguishing fake from real........ Read more »
Michael J. Bernstein, Steven G. Young, Christina M. Brown, Donald F. Sacco, & Heather M. Claypool. (2008) Adaptive Responses to Social Exclusion: Social Rejection Improves Detection of Real and Fake Smiles. Psychological Science, 19(10), 981-983. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02187.x
- November 24, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 948 views
Patients on secure wards are more likely to be aggressive towards staff of their own sex
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Secure ward managers may be able to reduce patient aggression by carefully monitoring the sex ratio of the staff relative to the patients. That's according to Susan Knowles and colleagues who've found that mental health patients held on a medium secure ward were more likely to exhibit physical or verbal aggression to staff of the same sex as themselves.The researchers analysed incident report records kept between 2004 and 2006 by two male-only and two female-only wards at a medium secure unit in........ Read more »
Susan Knowles, Sarah Coyne, & Stephen Brown. (2008) Sex differences in aggressive incidents towards staff in secure services. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry , 19(4), 620-631. DOI: 10.1080/14789940801962130
- November 14, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 961 views
Dazzled by digits: how we're wooed by product specifications
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
From megapixels and gigabytes to calorie counts and sun protection factors, there's barely a product out there that isn't proudly boasting its enviable specs to would-be purchasers. A new study suggests these figures exert a powerful, irrational effect on consumers' decision-making, even overriding the influence of a person's direct experience with a product.In an initial experiment, Christopher Hsee and colleagues asked 112 students to choose between one of two hypothetical cameras: one boasted........ Read more »
Christopher K. Hsee, Yang Yang, Yangjie Gu, & Jie Chen. (2008) Specification Seeking: How Product Specifications Influence Consumer Preference. Journal of Consumer Research, 2147483647. DOI: 10.1086/593947
- November 12, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,204 views
Pregnancy affects women's memory for what they plan to do
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Anecdotal reports of women experiencing memory problems during pregnancy have recently been supported by lab research showing that pregnant women under-perform on tests of retrospective memory, such as word learning tasks. What's not been established clearly until now, however, is whether prospective memory is also impaired: that is, the ability to remember to do those things when one planned to - such as keeping appointments and taking medication.Peter Rendell and Julie Henry tested twenty preg........ Read more »
Peter Rendell, & Julie Henry. (2008) Prospective-memory functioning is affected during pregnancy and postpartum. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 30(8), 913-919. DOI: 10.1080/13803390701874379
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