Category: Psychology

New micro x-ray imaging study suggests Neanderthals had vocal apparatus for speech.

Although we like to think of human language as being unique, new research suggests that Neanderthals may have spoken a language not too dissimilar to those used today.

Scientists have long thought that Neanderthals — who shared the Earth with our human ancestors for thousands of years — had neither the physiological equipment nor the cognitive capacity for language.

However, a new insight has come from micro x-ray imaging of a Neanderthal’s hyoid bone, a bone that is central to tongue movement and swallowing.

The 60,000 year old Neanderthal remains were originally found in Israel in 1983.

While the shape of the hyoid bone was virtually identical to our own, with the technology available then it wasn’t possible to show this meant they may have been able to talk.

Now, though, a new analysis published in PLoS ONE, suggests language may be much older than was previously thought (D’Anastasio et al., 2013).

One of the study’s authors, Stephen Wroe, explains:

“By analysing the mechanical behaviour of the fossilised bone with micro x-ray imaging, we were able to build models of the hyoid that included the intricate internal structure of the bone.

We then compared them to models of modern humans.

Our comparisons showed that in terms of mechanical behaviour, the Neanderthal hyoid was basically indistinguishable from our own, strongly suggesting that this key part of the vocal tract was used in the same way.

From this research, we can conclude that it’s likely that the origins of speech and language are far, far older than once thought.”

Evidence of similarities in the hyoid bone don’t prove that Neanderthals could talk, of course. For that, more concrete evidence would be required.

Nevertheless, it’s an intriguing finding that Neanderthals had some of the basic vocal hardware required.

Whether or not they had the requisite cognitive capacity is another question altogether — one that the passage of time has made very difficult to answer.

Image credit: Erich Ferdinand

Our ability to remember and learn is powered by a crucial molecular change.

A new study has identified an important molecular change which takes place in the brain when we learn and remember (Brigidi et al., 2014).

Learning changes the way a fatty acid in the brain attaches to a protein called delta-catenin.

This change is essential in adjusting the connectivity between brain cells, which enables us to learn.

One of the study’s authors, Shernaz Bamji, explained:

“More work is needed, but this discovery gives us a much better understanding of the tools our brains use to learn and remember, and provides insight into how these processes become disrupted in neurological diseases.”

The results come from the study of an animal model.

They found that after learning about new environments, the levels of modified delta-catenin were almost doubled.

Delta-catenin has been previously identified as playing an important role in memory, but this is the first study to show the molecular mechanism at work.

The study’s lead author, Stefano Brigidi, said:

“Brain activity can change both the structure of this protein, as well as its function. When we introduced a mutation that blocked the biochemical modification that occurs in healthy subjects, we abolished the structural changes in brain’s cells that are known to be important for memory formation.”

The findings may also shed light on why people with some mental disabilities find it hard to learn.

For example, people with a rare genetic disorder called Cri-du-chat syndrome–named after the distinctive cry of affected infants–have a gene deletion which disrupts delta-catenin.

There have also been links made between delta-catenin and the severe mental disorder schizophrenia.

Image credit: MR McGill

Studies reveal ironic mental processes, our love of secrets, why robots are creepy and more…

Some psychology experiments are so wild and wacky that, at first glance, you can’t help wondering if the experimenters are unhinged.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, who sadly passed away last year, was dedicated to making his experiments interesting to take part in and having them produce deep psychological insights.

He usually succeeded on both levels.

Below are five studies he and colleagues carried out and what they tell us about being human.

1. What putting can tell you about mental control

Putting golf balls might not seem the most psychologically revealing activity but I can assure you it is!

In this study participants were ushered into room lit only by a UV light. Some were given a putter that glowed orange, others a black one so they couldn’t see it (Wegner et al., 1998).

They were then told to shoot a yellow ball at a glowing target and sometimes specifically asked not to overshoot the hole.

Sometimes while putting they were also told to keep a six-digit number in their heads.

A weird thing happened: when people tried particularly hard not to overshoot the hole, that was when they tended to overshoot it the most.

If participants were told to try and keep a six-digit number in their heads at the same time, they overshot the hole even more.

The purpose of the different coloured putter was to look at the influence of self-monitoring. The study found people’s putts became even worse when they could see the putter in their hands.

Interpretation: known as an ‘ironic process’, sometimes the harder we try not to do something, the more likely we are to do it.

This seems to be particularly true in sports where it’s vital to let the body do what it’s good at, rather than trying to take conscious control.

Anyone who has ever tried to push something out of their minds (cake, cigarettes, a forbidden lover…) knows it’s apt to come back even stronger.

2. What footsie reveals about secret relationships

Participants in this study were told to engage in a little footsie under the table with a stranger (Wegner et al., 1994).

However, some pairs were told to keep their footsie secret from another couple who were also sat at the table, while other pairs did not keep their footsie a secret.

When they were asked afterwards, the participants who’d been keeping their footsie secret were significantly more attracted to each other than those who’d been conducting their footsie openly.

Interpretation: People love secrets: even the simplest things can become exciting if only they are kept secret. People obsess over secrets way more than things that are well-known to others.

3. What creepy robots tell us about being human

People were shown a video of a lifelike robot, either from the back so that they could only see a bunch of wires, or from the front (below) so they could see its childlike face (Gray & Wegner, 2012).

The robot–which was called ‘Kasper’ and designed to help children with autism–simply moved around in the video.

‘Kaspar’

What they found was that adults found the robot particularly creepy when they could see its human-like face, but much less so when all they could see was a bunch of wires.

Interpretation: People find robots creepy because we associate experiencing thoughts and emotions with being human. When a human-like robot appears to be experiencing things we get creeped out.

Experiencing the world through our senses may be even more fundamental to being human than our sense of having control over ourselves.

4. How nakedness changes perceptions of mind

People were shown pictures of both men and women with their shirts on and shirts off, with all their clothes on or completely naked (Gray et al., 2011).

They were then asked questions that examined how we think about people based on whether or not they are wearing clothes.

What they found was that when people are naked, we tend to think of them as having less control over themselves but more access to experience.

Interpretation: When people are naked, it’s not accurate to say that we just objectify them, seeing them purely as physical objects without minds. However, we do change how we think about their minds.

When naked, we see other people less as moral agents capable of competent actions and more as feeling beings.

5. The psychology of pain

Participants in a study by Gray and Wegner (2008) were told the experimenters were investigating ‘psychophysical perception’; in fact it was all about pain.

They were paired up with someone who was actually in on the experiment, but who participants thought was just another innocent like them.

One part of the study involved the real participants receiving electrical shocks to their hand.

It was set up so that some participants thought the other person had deliberately chosen to give them the pain perception test when there was another option that didn’t involve pain.

For other participants, though, it appeared that the other person had no choice but to administer the pain perception test.

Participants who thought the other person was deliberately inflicting the pain on them experienced the pain as more intense than those who thought the other person had no choice.

Interpretation: pain has a large psychological component and part of that component can be social. When we are physically hurt it feels more intense if the other person meant to do it.

Image credit: Tom Lin

Here are 10 of the best talks about psychology from some of the superstars of this and related fields.

1. Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil

“Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge.”

2. Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.”

3. Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

“Alison Gopnik takes us into the fascinating minds of babies and children, and shows us how much we understand before we even realize we do.”

4. Steven Pinker: Human nature and the blank slate

“Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate argues that all humans are born with some innate traits. Here, Pinker talks about his thesis, and why some people found it incredibly upsetting.”

5. Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds

“Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples’ thoughts — and judges their actions.”

6. Elyn Saks: A tale of mental illness — from the inside

“Is it okay if I totally trash your office?” It’s a question Elyn Saks once asked her doctor, and it wasn’t a joke. A legal scholar, in 2007 Saks came forward with her own story of schizophrenia, controlled by drugs and therapy but ever-present. In this powerful talk, she asks us to see people with mental illness clearly, honestly and compassionately.

7. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness

“Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.””

8. Dan Ariely: Why we think it’s OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)

“Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational — and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp.”

9. VS Ramachandran: 3 clues to understanding your brain

“Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples.”

10.Elizabeth Loftus: The fiction of memory

“Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It’s more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider.”

A study of gossip has found that it can have positive effects on group behaviour, including encouraging cooperation and deterring selfishness.

Some gossip, researchers find, can help protect against the exploitation of nice people and promote the ostracism of bullies.

The findings comes from a new study by Feinberg et al. (2014) who had 216 participants playing a game in groups which involved financial choices.

The game is set up so that people are supposed to work cooperatively with each other, but they can benefit from it by being selfish.

Except in this study, between rounds people changed groups and were allowed to gossip about people in the last group.

This meant that if people were selfish, their reputation got passed on to others and they ended up being ostracised.

With the more selfish people excluded from the game, the groups were able to perform better.

The study’s lead author, Matthew Feinberg, explained:

“Groups that allow their members to gossip sustain cooperation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t. And groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracize untrustworthy members. While both of these behaviors can be misused, our findings suggest that they also serve very important functions for groups and society.”

Those who decided to be more selfish, however, often learned from their mistakes after they were ostracised. The threat served to improve their behaviour.

Co-author Rob Willer explained:

“Those who do not reform their behavior, behaving selfishly despite the risk of gossip and ostracism, tended to be targeted by other group members who took pains to tell future group members about the person’s untrustworthy behavior. These future groups could then detect and exclude more selfish individuals, ensuring they could avoid being taken advantage of.”

This study backs up previous findings which have shown that people are more generous when they know others may talk about their reputation.

Of course not all gossip serves such benevolent purposes–a lot of it is just pernicious.

But along with the irrelevant or damaging information can come crucial indicators about other people’s reputation. Often this sort of informal word would be difficult to get by other means.

Gossiping is good for you

Not only that, but passing on gossip can actually be therapeutic.

A previous study by Feinberg et al. (2012) found that people felt better after passing on information about other people’s antisocial behaviour.

Matthew Feinberg said:

“Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip.”

Image credit: jamacab

Transcranial Random Noise Stimulation can improve learning and speed up mental calculations.

The study, carried out at Oxford University, gave participants just five days of training with a relatively new form of brain stimulation: transcranial random noise stimulation (Snowball et al., 2013).

Some participants in the study had parts of their brains electrically stimulated while they were learning calculation drills.

Another group had a ‘sham’ treatment which appeared the same to participants, but crucially the machine was turned off after just 30 seconds.

Learning faster

The area targeted by the brain stimulation was in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Activity in this area has been associated with learning, memory and executive control.

The results, which are published in the journal Current Biology, demonstrated that those receiving the brain stimulation learned more quickly and were faster to make the mental calculations.

Crucially, these gains were still evident when participants were tested again six months later.

Less mental effort

The study also examined physiological changes in the brain as a result of the training programme.

By measuring changes in blood haemoglobin concentrations, the researchers were able to calculate how hard the brain was working while doing maths.

What emerged was that, after training, the brains of those who had received stimulation had lower peak concentrations of blood haemoglobin.

This suggests the brain may not have been working as hard to achieve the same results. The authors think this may be because the relevant brain regions are displaying: “more efficient neurovascular coupling”.

The results of this study provide encouragement for those looking for ways to enhance cognitive function.

One of the study’s authors, Roi Cohen Kadosh, explained:

“Maths is a highly complex cognitive faculty that is based on a myriad of different abilities. If we can enhance mathematics, therefore, there is a good chance that we will be able to enhance simpler cognitive functions.”

Image credit: Enzo Varriale

Scientist thought it took the brain at least one-tenth of a second to understand an image, until now.

A new study has brought the estimate of how fast you can process an image down to an incredible 13 milliseconds.

The new study, conducted by MIT researchers and published in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, used everyday images such as of picnics and smiling couples (Potter et al., 2013).

Previous research by Professor Mary Potter and colleagues had found it takes one-tenth of a second for images to be processed.

After hitting the retina, the information must be passed to the visual areas of the brain and then around processing loops to identify the image.

In the new study, they began presenting images to their participants faster and faster to see if they could still make accurate judgements about them.

They expected a rapid decline in performance as they approached one-twentieth of a second, but it didn’t come.

Instead, although their performance declined, people could still identify novel images when they were shown for just 13 milliseconds.

The researchers were unable to present the images any faster as the monitors they were using couldn’t support it.

Porter said:

“The fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts. That’s what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we’re looking at.”

Simon Thorpe, an expert on visual processing speed, said:

“This new paper shows that the meaning of an image can be extracted even when an image is mixed up in a sequence of six or even 12 images presented at 13 milliseconds per image—a rate of about 75 frames a second.”

He added:

“Another striking finding was that the effect is also seen when the question concerning the target is only presented after the sequence has been run, meaning that the brain can extract meaning even when there is no way to predict what will be shown.”

The authors think this is evidence that images continue to be processed after they have been seen, even when they are presented for such a short time.

Professor Potter said:

“If images were wiped out after 13 milliseconds, people would never be able to respond positively after the sequence. There has to be something in the brain that has maintained that information at least that long,”

Image credit: Andras Pfaff

A new experiment suggests that, like humans and some primates, dogs have the complex skills required to recognise faces.

The research is the first to measure dogs’ eye movements as they looked at pictures of both humans and other dogs.

The research, conducted by Somppi et al. (2013) and published in the journal Animal Cognition, trained dogs to lie down and look at images presented on a computer screen in front of them.

The dogs were shown pictures of their owner and other dogs they knew, as well as both humans and dogs who were strangers to them.

All the while their eye movements were tracked.

It was clear that dogs were most interested in the faces of other dogs, as they looked at these images the longest.

The dogs also spent more time looking at the faces of their human owners than they did at the faces of strangers.

Fascinated by the eyes

In addition, dogs were shown the pictures upside down. This is because upside-down faces are thought to help reveal how our brains process faces.

The researchers found that the dogs were interested in the upside-down faces and looked at them for the same length of time, on average, as those that were the right way up.

Like humans, though, dogs were most fascinated by the eyes, especially when the faces were the right way up.

The authors conclude that dogs may well be able to pick their owners out in a photograph:

“Dogs are likely to recognize conspecific [other dogs] and human faces in photographs, and their face perception expertise may extend beyond their own species.”

→ Read on: 5 Intriguing Studies of Human-Dog Psychology

Image credit: Charlie Stinchcomb

Giving yourself permission to sin means you can get what you want, but at what cost?

You want another slice of cake or glass of wine, but you know you shouldn’t have one.

It’s the classic self-control dilemma.

But luckily there’s a loophole; sometimes we mentally give ourselves permission to indulge: “Well, I’ve worked hard today, so I’ll have another slice of cake or glass of wine.”

Now there’s a ‘license to sin’.

A recent study cleverly demonstrates this ‘license to sin’ and shows how dangerous it can be (de Witt Huberts et al., 2012).

A little snack

To investigate, the researchers tricked one group of people into thinking they’d worked twice as hard on a boring test as another group.

Both groups were then asked to do a ‘taste test’ of some rather tempting looking snacks.

The group that thought they’d worked harder now had more of a ‘license to sin’ as a reward to themselves.

And sure enough they ate, on average, 130 calories more in 10 minutes than the other group.

It’s fascinating that the participants did this without being told they’d worked harder or being given any other cues.

Also remember that, on average, both groups had their mental self-control muscles depleted the same amount as they’d both spent the same time doing the boring task.

Avoid the loophole

What this study is showing is that these well-worn mental thought processes can be insidious. The mind has all sorts of tricks it plays so that it can get what it wants.

The ‘license to sin’ is one of them. You want to over-indulge, so your mind creates this little story that says: I’ve worked hard, so I deserve it.

The clever thing is that it can completely bypass all those logical, rational things we’ve told ourselves about healthy eating (or whatever it is) and, non-coincidentally, we get what we want.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t indulge ourselves from time-to-time, but the question is: how often is the license to sin being invoked?

It’s a way of allowing our misbehaviour that is like an exception we all know about, but somehow don’t pull ourselves up on.

Being more aware of, and watching out for this trick may be useful in bolstering our self-control.

Image credit: Christophe Verdier

In the new research on 59 participants, those who were confirmed night owls (preferring late to bed and late to rise) had lower integrity of the white matter in various areas of the brain (Rosenberg et al., 2014).

Lower integrity in these areas has been linked to depression and cognitive instability.

This research doesn’t tell us what the relationship is, but the authors guess that it may be related to ‘social jet-lag’.

Social jet-lag comes about because night owls are forced to live–as most of us are–like early risers.

Work, school and other institutions mostly require early rising, which, for night owls, causes problems.

As night owls find it difficult to get to sleep early, they tend to carry large amounts of sleep debt.

In other words, they’re exhausted all the time.

As a result, they tend to be larger consumers of caffeine and other stimulants, in order to counteract their sleep debt.

Who’s a night owl?

Night owls make up around 20% of the population, with about 10% of us being larks–preferring to sleep early and rise early.

The rest of us are balanced in between.

This means about 70% should be able to adapt to either rising early or sleeping later, as long as they stick to good sleep habits (see: How to Fall Asleep Fast).

Men are more likely to be night owls–this seems to be related to higher levels of testosterone.

This is why adolescent males have the tendency to be extreme night owls, staying up all night and sleeping in all day.

Naturally, then, women, along with the elderly of both sexes, are more likely to be larks.