New research suggests the mere act of walking through a doorway helps people forget, which could explain many millions of confusing moments that happen each day around the world. A study published recently in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that participants who walked through doorways in a virtual reality environment were significantly more likely to forget memories formed in another room, compared with those who traveled the same distance but crossed no thresholds.
Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Ever Enter a Room & Forget Why You Went There? Blame The Doorway.
Overestimating Your Own Abilities May Be an Evolutionary Boost
What’s the News: We may strive for humility, but we benefit from a little hubris, too, according to a study published last week in Nature. Overconfidence in your abilities can help you triumph in competitions you might not have won otherwise, the study found, and can impart an evolutionary advantage when the potential payoff is high compared to the cost of conflict.
Those Graphic New Cigarette Labels Won’t Help, Psychology Says
What’s the News: Starting in September 2012, the FDA will require every pack of cigarettes sold in the US to be emblazoned with a large, text-and-image health warning, similar to the labels already seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and several other countries. The FDA unveiled the nine label designs earlier this week; several are quite graphic, including photos of cancerous lungs and lips and a man exhaling smoke through his tracheotomy hole.
These graphic images, however, may not be an effective way to get smokers to quit, or deter new smokers from starting. Several neuroscience and psychology studies show that these fear tactics have little effect—and may at times do more harm than good.
Parallel Lines Never Cross, Even in Remote Amazonia
What’s the News: Adults and school-age children may understand some basic principles of geometry even without formal math training at all, according to a study published online yesterday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Thirty members of the Mundurucú, an indigenous Amazonian group, could intuitively grasp geometric concepts about angles, lines, and points, the researchers found.
When Scientists Act Like Jerks, Asian-Americans Reach for a Hamburger
What’s the News: Fitting in is a perennial problem for almost everybody, especially immigrants and their children (for more, see The Joy Luck Club). And anxiety about food is definitely part of it: when your friends think your mom’s home cooking is weird, well, maybe you’ll just pretend you don’t like it either. In fact, maybe you’ll eat more French fries and pizza than is entirely healthy to fit in, something that might explain why newly arrived immigrants balloon to the rest of the U.S. population’s levels of obesity in just 15 years. In a study designed to see how being perceived as un-American changed peoples’ food choices, scientists behaved badly and then brought out the menus.
Do Action Video Games Make Players Better Decision Makers?
“Halo: Reach,” the newest installment in the long-running Halo video game saga, comes out today. While players are rampaging around in the digital universe and slaughtering everything in sight, they might be doing something else too: improving their decision-making skills.
Action-packed video games, including first-shooters like those in the Halo franchise, can lead people to make better and quicker rapid-fire decision, according to a Current Biology study by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues.
“What’s surprising in our study is that action games improved probabilistic inference not just for the act of gaming, but for unrelated and rather dull tasks,” Bavelier says. [Science News]
Across America, Girls Are Beginning Puberty Younger
Girls around the country are starting puberty ever younger, says a new study out in Pediatrics.
Researchers led by Frank Biro studied more than a thousand girls between six and eight years old from New York, Cincinnati, and San Francisco. Their findings: By the age of 7, about 23 percent of black girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls, and 11 percent of white girls showed enough breast development to be considered pubescent. Those numbers are even more extreme than the findings of a similar 1997 study that seemed to show the age entering puberty was dropping fast.
Says Biro:
“In 1997, people said, ‘That can’t be right; there must be something wrong with the study’. But the average age is going down even further” [Los Angeles Times].
The starkness of Biro’s statistics has drawn plenty of attention. But just what it means is a difficult question, because there’s no “ideal” age for entering puberty.
Scientists’ Mouse Fight Club Demonstrates the Home Field Advantage
It feels good to win. And it feels even better to win at home.
For a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matthew Fuxjager and his colleagues investigated the winner effect, wherein animals (and perhaps humans) build up testosterone in advance of a confrontation, and the fight’s winner maintains that elevated level. By studying male mice fighting one another, Fuxjager was able to see what happens in the brains of winners. Not only did victorious mice experience the “winner effect,” but those who won at home—in their own cages—saw the most activity, and wanted to keep on fighting.
To get these results, Fuxjager’s team essentially created a tournament of mouse fights.
Just Kick The Ball: The Scientific Secret to World Cup Penalty Shots
If you relax and concentrate, you’re more likely to make a goal. Seems pretty logical, but researchers at Britain’s Exeter University have tracked soccer players eye-movements to make sure. They have confirmed that players who ignore goalies’ distracting antics are more likely to make the shot.
The latest in the why-Britain-hasn’t-won-the-World-Cup-since-1966 line of research–which has also looked at the ball’s surface (smooth is good but some grooves necessary) and the psychological benefits of playing on your home field (it’s better)–Greg Wood’s study will appear in the Journal of Sports Medicine. Hopefully it will be available in time for the World Cup‘s start on June 11th.
Wood says that goalies can make use of a biological instinct to screw up a kicker’s shot.
“We focus on things in our environment that are threatening. In a penalty kick, that threat is a goalkeeper,” Wood said. “If he (the goalkeeper) can make himself more threatening, he can distract the kicker even more. By doing (certain) behaviors, he can make it so the kicker will kick (the ball) near the goalie.” [AP]
Lesbian Parents & Their Well-Adjusted Kids: What the Study Really Means
The U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, a quarter-century look at the welfare of kids born to lesbian couples, has finally come out in the journal Pediatrics this week with the headline-grabbing finding that those children not only do as well as the rest of the population, they might actually fare better. You can download the paper by lead author Nanette Gartrell for free right now, but here are the key parts:
Select population only
Census data says that there are more than 270,000 American kids in same-sex households, with twice that many having a single gay parent. Gartrell’s study follows a particular slice: Lesbian couples who were together before the child’s birth, identified themselves as a lesbian couple, and went through the artificial insemination process. It didn’t include, for instance, women who may have had a child in a previous heterosexual relationship and then entered into a lesbian one later.
Better than the rest?
The study, which began in 1986, ended up following 78 kids from lesbian couples who were recruited for the study in Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco.
The mothers were interviewed during pregnancy or the insemination process, and additionally when the children were 2, 5, 10 and 17 years old. Those children are now 18 to 23 years old. They were interviewed four times as they matured and also completed an online questionnaire at age 17, focusing on their psychological adjustment, peer and family relationships and academic progress [CNN].
The children of these lesbian couples were just as well-adjusted as the kids of heterosexual couples to whom the researchers compared them. Indeed, the kids in the study proved superior in some areas, like academics, self-esteem, and behavior, as shown by the standard “Child Behavior Checklists” that were part of the surveys.
Does a Dose of Testosterone Make Trusting Women More Skeptical?
All it takes for some people to be a little less trusting of their fellow humans is a little more testosterone, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers led by Jack van Honk of the Netherlands used a sample of 24 women in their study. The team showed photos of 150 strangers’ faces to the women and asked them to rate the faces for trustworthiness, using a scale from -100 to +100. The scores women gave after receiving a placebo became their “baseline” score. The women also completed a trustworthiness survey after being given an increase in testosterone instead of placebo (they weren’t told when they received which).
Scientists found that women were not so easily taken in by a stranger’s face after receiving a dose of the hormone…. Women who appeared the most trusting after receiving the “dummy” placebo reduced their scores by an average of 10 points when their testosterone was boosted [Press Association].
Why? The researchers point to the social advantages testosterone can confer:
Does a Rare Genetic Disorder Make People Less Racist?
Are the racial stereotypes that each of us holds rooted in social fear? That’s the question behind a study out in Current Biology in which researchers investigated children with Williams’ syndrome. This genetic disorder comes from the loss of 26 genes and is marked by, among other things, a lack of social fear in patients: Meeting strangers for the first time, they’ll treat them like old friends.
According to research by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, those children seemed less given to racial stereotyping than the children without the condition they studied, and the researchers attribute that to the lack of social fear in the kids with Williams’. This result may jibe with previous brain-scanning studies of people with Williams’ syndrome which found unusual activity in their amygdalas, a brain center associated with fear. Interestingly, the children with Williams’ syndrome showed a similar gender bias as the other children, suggesting a different neurological cause for gender and race bias.
However, some scientists point to problems with the study. The sample size is quite small, which is difficult to avoid when studying a rare condition, but still casts doubt on the findings. For instance, 64 percent of the time the children with Williams’ syndrome gave answers that could indicate racial stereotyping, but the margin for error was so large that the researchers concluded 64 percent was not significantly different from 50 percent, a set of perfectly color-blind answers.
For deeper analysis, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear
80beats: Study: Damage to Brain’s Fear Center Makes People Riskier Gamblers
DISCOVER: How Not To Be a Racist
Image: Current Biology
Disaster Psychology: Protect the Women—If There’s Time
According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chivalry just depends on how much time you’ve got.
That was the conclusion Benno Torgler and colleagues arrived at by studying two of history’s most famous shipwrecks: The Titanic, where social norms seem to have prevailed and women and children had a better chance of surviving, and the Lusitania, where they did not. The rapid sinking of the Lusitania appears to have triggered the selfish instinct for survival in its passengers, while the slow sinking of the Titanic may have allowed altruism to reemerge.
More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912 and sank over the course of three hours in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. In their analysis, the researchers studied passenger and survivor lists from both ships, and considered gender, age, ticket class, nationality and familial relationships with other passengers. The differences emerged after a closer look at the survival rates [The New York Times]. Children aboard the Titanic, researchers say, were about 15 percent more likely to survive than adults, and women had more than a 50 percent better chance than men to make it out alive.
Study: People Imagine God in Their Own Images
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people tend to project their own opinions onto God, according to a new study (in press) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But, the researchers say, they also found that when people tweak their own opinions, they tend to also change their idea of God’s beliefs in order to keep the two in line.
The team conducted seven studies in the US, including four in which they surveyed people about their own beliefs on controversial issues such as abortion and the death penalty. Participants were also asked about what they thought God believed, as well as famous people like Bill Gates and President George Bush [Sydney Morning Herald]. Scientists then asked the participants—all of whom believed in the Abrahamic God and most of whom were Christians—to do things that might change their minds, like writing an essay about the death penalty from the opposite viewpoint of their own. When participants changed their own opinions, their ideas of God’s opinion changed too, though their opinions of what other people thought remained the same.
Sad and Ironic Study Says Loneliness Can Be Contagious
In our slideshow this fall of social factors that make you fat, DISCOVER mentioned research from 2007 that gathered data from the famous Framingham Heart Study, which has been tracking people in the Massachusetts town since 1948, to show that having overweight friends made people more likely to put on the pounds. Now, another study, this time published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, uses the same Framingham data to suggest that loneliness is actually contagious.
But how could the feeling of social isolation be socially contagious? The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate [Washington Post]. Friends of lonely people were 52 percent more likely to develop lonely feelings, the researchers say, and a friend of that person was 25 percent more likely.
