Category: Psychology

“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” — Albert Schweitzer

Last year I covered 5 unusual studies on the psychology of dogs and their owners. This kicked off a comment thread which discussed how dogs act as ice-breakers, how they might mediate the tension between couples and how long after you died they would wait to feast on your flesh.

Apparently dogs wait longer than cats although I’m pretty sure there’s no experimentally controlled evidence for this.

Continue reading “Human-Cat Psychology: Do Cats Improve Our Mood and Become Attached to Us?”

An infant’s very first step in their year-long journey to their first word is perhaps their most impressive.

This first step is discriminating and categorising the basic sound components of the language they are hearing.

To get an idea how hard this might be think about listening to someone speaking a language you don’t understand.

Foreign languages can sound like continuous streams of noise in which it’s very hard to pick up where one word starts and another word begins.

Young infants face an analogous challenge but not initially at the level of words, but at the lower level of pure noise.

Their first struggle is to tell the difference between the most basic components of speech, the individual sounds we are making, the phonemes.

Noticing the difference between ‘b’ and ‘p’

Until a classic study carried out by Peter D Eimas and colleagues from Brown University in 1971, psychologists were not sure how soon infants could discriminate phonemes.

Eimas and colleagues’ study used infants aged between just 1 and 4 months old and tested their ability to discriminate between a ‘b’ sound and a ‘p’ sound (Eimas et al., 1971).

To get an idea of how difficult this is, consider the fact there’s only a 10ms difference in timing between the two.

To be able to hear this difference, a baby has got to have a very fine-tuned ear.

The method they used for intuiting whether the infants had noticed a change from one sound to the other was pretty ingenious.

They were hooked up to a fake nipple which measured their rate of sucking, the idea being that this was a proxy for how interested they were in what was going on around them.

The more interested, the faster they suckled.

First, infants’ suckling rates were measured while they were exposed to one repeated sound, say the ‘b’.

Initially infants found this interesting and sucked a bit faster.

Then after a while they get bored and their suckling rate reduced.

Here’s the crucial part: in some experimental conditions the sound is changed to a ‘p’, while in other conditions it continues with the same ‘b’.

The question is whether infants notice this change, as evidenced by an increased suckling rate, and thereby demonstrate that they can discriminate the tiny difference between a ‘b’ and a ‘p’ sound.

Innate ability to discriminate phonemes

What Eimas and colleagues found was that even the one-month old infants appeared to be able to tell the difference between a ‘b’ sound and a ‘p’ sound.

This findings, and more like it, suggests to many psychologists that infants are born with skills which enable them to categorise sounds that only slightly vary.

This skill is one of the basic building blocks of language learning.

Most languages contain about 40 distinct phonemes and an infant’s ultimate task is to master all of them.

During their first three months of life infants make all kinds of sound, but none of them bear much resemblance to speech.

But, partly because of this innate ability to discriminate the components of speech, by 3 months they start producing vowel-like sounds.

They’ve conquered their first few phonemes and are well on their way to their first words.

The first word

While infants seem to be born with an ear fine-tuned for language, this starts to subtly change at around 11 months of age.

Subsequent findings have shown that adults cannot successfully distinguish as wider a range of phonemes as infants.

This is because until about 11 months of age infants are masters of discriminating phonemes used in all different types of languages.

But after 11 months infants settle down with one set of phonemes for their first language, and lose the ability to discriminate the phonemes from other languages.

Infants are beginning to specialise in their own language.

The specialisation at 11 months in one set of around 40 phonemes, along with other linguistic processes, is clearly crucial as it quickly brings a magical moment: the first word.

→ This article is part of a series on 10 crucial developmental psychology studies:

1. When infant memory develops
2. How self-concept emerges in infants
3. How children learn new concepts
4. The importance of attachment styles
5. When infants learn to imitate others
6. Theory of mind reveals the social world
7. Understanding object permanence
8. How infants learn their first word
9. The six types of play
10. Piaget’s stages of development theory

.

A new study demonstrates that imagination can have a direct effect on our perception of the world. This may help explain why more accomplished sports-players describe perceiving the ball, or target such as a golf cup, as bigger.

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

Continue reading “Better Golfers See Bigger Hole”

Understanding ourselves is partly about understanding who it is we want to become.

Because each of us is a perpetual work in progress, we live our lives with one eye on the future. In that future we see ourselves transformed into our true, ideal self – just as we would like to be.

Continue reading “Why Our Ideal Self Seems Further Away For Us Than Others”

Send me your favourite examples of psychobabble and I will publish them here on PsyBlog.

My first experience of ‘psychobabble’ was at school. Kids used to shout an abusive epithet across the playground and when some poor soul turned around to look they all cried in unison, “Complex!”, as in the Freudian term ‘Oedipus complex’.

As is usually the case with psychobabble it was a technical psychological term used out of context – not that I was sufficiently well-read (or stupid enough) to point that out at the time. Continue reading “Psychobabble: Which Expressions Do You Love to Hate?”

I vividly remember my first day at University when I was 18-years-old: not just the terror and the excitement but also the sheer, crushing weight of people I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me.

Of course everyone was in the same boat and it wasn’t long before I had made new friends. When I think back, one of my firmest friends was a guy I met at the introductory session of my course on the very first day.

Continue reading “Friendships Can Depend on Who You Meet First”

Women’s underwear is likely to get men thinking about sex, but might it also change apparently unrelated behaviours?

New research conducted by Bram Van den Bergh and colleagues finds that sexual stimuli actually make some men impatient to receive a reward that has little to do with sex.

Continue reading “Touching Lingerie Makes (Some) Men Impatient for Monetary Rewards”

When trying to predict what will make us happy in the future, we naturally rely on beliefs we have acquired with experience. Unfortunately these beliefs about the way our emotions operate are frequently misleading.

Experiments have shown that people have a natural tendency to over-generalise beliefs about their emotions to situations where they don’t apply. Psychologists call these belief biases.

Here are four belief biases that people often display when trying to predict how an event will make them feel in the future:

Continue reading “4 Belief Biases That Can Reduce Pleasure”

Mondays should be depressing. The memory of a fun weekend still fresh in the mind, returning to all the problems left behind on Friday and the endless expanse of time until next weekend. Surely Mondays are the most depressing day of the week?

Continue reading “Mondays Are Not As Depressing As You Think”