Category: Psychology

The mental health charity SaneLine is staring into the abyss of financial ruin after the government stopped its funding and the tsunami appeal diverted many of its donors. The charity provides a telephone helpline staffed by volunteers that gives advice to those with mental health difficulties.

The papers have reported a variety of different stories over the last month, some conflicting, others potentially congruent. SaneLine might take anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000 calls each year (in face the former figure is closer to the truth). The charity apparently made a mistake in its applications for government funding. And/or perhaps the Department of Health failed to pay them the money they were owed under previous funding agreements.

As so often in government it’s impossible to know exactly what is really going on. What they say is happening is probably just a smoke-screen for the real behind-the-scenes machinations. Whatever the truth, it seems incredible that the government is taking away funding from a charity that provides such a valuable service.
Help Save SaneLine

Cognitive psychologists are very interested in how we recognise faces (here’s a previous entry on face blindness). In their attempts to work out precisely how we manage this task they’re always carrying out strange experiments. None stranger than this article entitled: “The role of eyebrows in face recognition”.

This research actually found that eyebrows are more important in face recognition than the eyes. Plus they can make you look sexy:

“Practitioners in the field of facial aesthetics, such as make-up artists and cosmetic surgeons, have long appreciated the influence of eyebrows on attractiveness (eg Cosio and Robins 2000). During the 18th century, in fact, in Western Europe full eyebrows were considered so essential to facial beauty that some upper-class women and courtiers would affix mouse hide to their foreheads.”

You may laugh now, but you’ll be taking it seriously when Naomi Campbell is striding down the catwalk with two small fake-fur pelts dangling from her forehead.

…but not against his will – they’re still working on that:

“A paralysed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a brain chip that reads his mind. Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair after a knife attack in 2001. The pioneering surgery at New England Sinai Hospital, Massachusetts, last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone. The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher.”

BBC News

Just a small point. You may be aware that there is some connection between relative finger lengths and the amount of testosterone you were exposed to in the womb. Testosterone is linked to aggressive behaviour and so you might think that you can predict how aggressive someone is by looking at their relative finger lengths. Dr Peter Hurd puts us right:

“…finger lengths explain about 5 percent of the variation in these personality measures, so research like this won’t allow you to draw conclusions about specific people. For example, you wouldn’t want to screen people for certain jobs based on their finger lengths.”

To employers: Please listen to the man, we don’t want another graphology situation.

Most of us like to think that we have chosen our occupations, rather than them choosing us. We have reasons for what we are doing, visions of where we want to get to. We have career planning, career goals – the feeling of control.

And yet if you ask people about their career decisions, almost 70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events. The two Australian psychologists who carried out this research, published next month in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour, believe they have provided further support for the Chaos Theory of Career Development. I wouldn’t argue with that.

On the other hand I wouldn’t like to be the career counsellor explaining to my client that their career might well depend on the fluttering of an HR manager’s eyelashes over China. (Please excuse my mixing of popular science metaphors!)
Article abstract

You can listen online to a five part series on Radio 4 that examines four of Freud’s works 100 years after they were first published. Each programme is only 15 minutes, but if you have to choose only two, then go for the first, ‘Sexual Aberrations’ and the last, ‘Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious’.

The question of why we laugh is one of those enigmas that’s always interesting to theorise on, but almost guaranteed never to provide a watertight answer. Still, Freud was one of the first to suggest that laughter was all about sharing our forbidden desires. We laugh because we’re hearing the unsayable, the unpalatable. That accounts for 98% of my jokes anyway.
Radio 4: Freudian Slips

Dr Petra Boynton (left), the sex and relationship psychologist, provides some useful criticism of self-help books in response to an article in the Guardian Weekend. She points out that the authors of these books are often not qualified in the relevant field, rely on anecdotal evidence rather than the established research and their advice can actually prove harmful.

But there are some good self-help books out there so how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Check the author’s credentials and read on for Dr Boynton’s suggestions…
Self help or self harm?

When asked to estimate a three minute period of time, 20 year olds are significantly more accurate than the middle aged or elderly. Why? It seems that the elderly experience time more quickly than the young. Remember when you were a child and the summer holidays seemed to last forever? Perhaps as you get older, the reverse is true and the summer passes in what seems like a single month.

Raj Persaud discusses this strange effect with Professor Douwe Draaisma (left), whose latest book is reviewed by Steven Rose. Professor Draaisma has also carried out research into people’s lives flashing before their eyes.
All in the Mind

The heated debate on the average differences between the minds of men and women rumbles on. A perfectly rational and psychologically sound article published earlier this week in The Guardian elicited some furious letters from readers.

Helena Cronin makes all the usual and unassailable points about psychological sex differences and then draws evolutionary psychology into the argument. Whether you buy the evolutionary aspect of her argument or not – and many psychologists hate the evolutionary approach with a vengeance – the article does accurately represent the scientific evidence available.

None of the letters published in the paper criticised her science, one in fact admonished her for talking about science at all, saying:

“Helena Cronin is wrong to bring science into a discussion of the possible differences between the minds of men and women.”

The real subtext, of course, is political:

“There is much that is offensive in Helena Cronin’s attempts to rehash sexual stereotypes as scientific realities…”

By contrast, articles like this one entitled “It is official: Women are better drivers than men”, won’t even raise an eyebrow. And why should they?
From IC Wales

I need your help with some nominations for the most unusual research in psychology. Zimbardo’s prison experiments or Milgram’s compliance research are both unusual and strange in their own ways, but quite well known. What about all the other good stuff that’s crept in under the radar?

My personal favourite was done by David Rosenhan (left) who faked madness to get into a mental institution. Why? Just to show how little psychiatrists really knew (or even know?).

Nominate any ideas by emailing them to me. It would be good if you could find a link to some description of the research on the web.