Category: Psychology

Those who had played the game had 62% fewer intrusive memories in the following week.

Playing Tetris — a retro tile-matching puzzle game — can help reduce the formation of intrusive memories after a traumatic event, new research finds.

Participants in the study had all been involved in a car accident in the last six hours.

They were waiting in the E.R. in Oxford, England.

While waiting to be seen, some were encouraged to play Tetris.

A comparison group just filled in an activity log of what had happened since they had arrived in the hospital.

The results showed that in the following week those who had played Tetris had 62% fewer intrusive memories.

Their bad memories also faded quicker than those in the other group.

One participant in the study said:

“It certainly took my mind off it at a time when I probably would have sat brooding and feeling very sorry for myself.”

It is thought that playing the game interferes with the way memory is consolidated.

There is a window of opportunity soon after a traumatic event, research suggests.

Tetris may disrupt the process of moving the event to long-term memory to be endlessly recalled and replayed.

Simple activities like counting and doing quizzes do not seem to work as well.

It requires a visually engaging activity in which the player can get immersed.

Tetris is probably not the only computer game that will work: something that engages the senses will do the same job.

The team plan to study Candy Crush in the future.

Dr Lalitha Iyadurai, the study’s first author, said:

“A brief psychological intervention including Tetris offers a cognitive ‘therapeutic vaccine’ that could be administered soon after a traumatic event to prevent the recurrence of intrusive memories of trauma in the subsequent week.”

The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry (Iyadurai et al., 2017).

A well managed natural environment is particularly important to people.

Being in the natural environment is linked to higher satisfaction with life, new research finds.

People were particularly satisfied if they felt their natural environment was being well managed.

Dr Kelly Biedenweg, the study’s first author, said:

“Whether people feel like things are fair and they have a voice in process of making decisions and whether governance is transparent — those are the foundations of why people even can interact with nature.”

The results come from a survey of 4,000 residents of the Puget Sound region of Washington State.

They measured 13 factors that might link to life satisfaction.

Dr Biedenweg said:

“Eleven of the 13 had a positive correlation to overall life satisfaction.

The links between ecological conditions, like drinking water and air quality, and objective well-being have been studied quite a bit, but the connection between various aspects of engaging the natural environment and overall subjective well-being have rarely been looked at.

We wanted to identify the relative importance of diverse, nature-oriented experiences on a person’s overall life satisfaction assessment and statistically prove the relationship between happiness/life satisfaction and engaging with nature in many different ways.”

Nature is beneficial to life satisfaction in six ways, the researchers found:

1. Social and cultural events,
2. trust in governance,
3. access to local wild resources,
4. sense of place,
5. outdoor recreation,
6. and psychological benefits from time outdoors.

Dr Biedenweg said:

“Controlling for demographics, all were significantly related to life satisfaction.

The fact that trust in governance was a significant predictor of life satisfaction — in fact, the most statistically significant predictor of the ones we looked at — it was nice to see that come out of the research.

The way we manage is the gateway to people being able to get livelihoods and satisfaction from nature.”

The study was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (Beidenweg et al., 2017).

It is a way of expressing universal, shared experience and creating some emotional distance.

People use the word ‘you’ when they really mean ‘I’.

It helps to distance them from negative emotional experiences, new research finds.

For example, the expression “you win some, you lose some” probably means the person has failed, but that it could happen to anyone.

The pronoun, therefore, helps you to feel better about the experience.

Ariana Orvell, the study’s first author, explained:

“When people use “you” to make meaning from negative experiences, it allows them to ‘normalize’ the experience and reflect on it from a distance.”

Ms Orvell continued:

“Or saying that ‘when you are angry, you say and do things that you will most likely regret’ might actually explain a personal situation, but the individual attempts to make it something many people relate to.”

Ms Orvell concluded:

“We suspect that it’s the ability to move beyond your own perspective to express shared, universal experiences that allows individuals to derive broader meanings from personal events.”

The study was published in the journal Science (Orvell et al., 2017).

Using GPS navigation could be having a dramatic effect on the memory centres of your brain.

Using GPS navigation turns off parts of the brain that would otherwise be used to navigate, new research finds.

The hippocampus — an area of the brain central to memory and navigation — did not respond to new streets when using GPS navigation.

The prefrontal cortex also showed no additional activation while people used GPS navigation.

Dr Hugo Spiers, one of the study’s authors, explained:

“Entering a junction such as Seven Dials in London, where seven streets meet, would enhance activity in the hippocampus, whereas a dead-end would drive down its activity.

If you are having a hard time navigating the mass of streets in a city, you are likely putting high demands on your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

Our results fit with models in which the hippocampus simulates journeys on future possible paths while the prefrontal cortex helps us to plan which ones will get us to our destination.

When we have technology telling us which way to go, however, these parts of the brain simply don’t respond to the street network.

In that sense our brain has switched off its interest in the streets around us.”

A previous study found that the hippocampi of London taxi drivers expands after they learn the streets.

This study suggests, though, that using GPS navigation does not work memory centres in the brain the same way.

Dr Spiers said:

“The next step for our lab will be working with smart tech companies, developers, and architects to help design spaces that are easier to navigate and increase wellbeing.

Our new findings allow us to look at the layout of a city or building and consider how the memory systems of the brain may likely react.

For example, we could look at the layouts of care homes and hospitals to identify areas that might be particularly challenging for people with dementia and help to make them easier to navigate.

Similarly, we could design new buildings that are dementia-friendly from the outset.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (Javadi et al., 2017).

What would you do if repeatedly ordered to give a strong electric shock to a helpless stranger?

The year 1963 saw the publication of what was to become one of the most famous psychology studies ever.

Stanley Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments are the stuff of legend.

What his experiments found was that — when ordered to — 63% of people would give a potentially dangerous electric shock to a stranger.

It was designed to show how easily human beings cow to authority.

Now, Polish psychologists, repeating the study, have found that the results are just as surprising in this century as they were in the last.

The question is: what would you do if repeatedly ordered to give a strong electric shock to a helpless stranger?

Dr Tomasz Grzyb, a study author, said:

“Upon learning about Milgram’s experiments, a vast majority of people claim that ‘I would never behave in such a manner’.

Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant.”

In the experiment people are put under more and more pressure to electrocute a stranger.

Although the stranger is an actor pretending to be electrocuted, the pain they are inflicting looks real.

Slowly but surely, the poor guinea pig is told to crank up the voltage until it gets to the level marked ‘Danger: Severe shock’.

Of the 80 people in the study, fully 90% went all the way to the maximum level of electrocution after being ‘ordered’ to by the experimenter.

The study’s authors explain:

“Our objective was to examine how high a level of obedience we would encounter among residents of Poland.

It should be emphasized that tests in the Milgram paradigm have never been conducted in Central Europe.

The unique history of the countries in the region made the issue of obedience towards authority seem exceptionally interesting to us.”

Dr Grzyb concluded:

“…half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Doliński et al., 2017).

Multitasking myths and how to improve your multitasking skills.

Contrary to what many people believe, women are NOT better at multitasking than men.

Professor Timo Mäntylä, author of a study on gender differences in multitasking, said:

“On the contrary, the results of our study show that men are better at multitasking than women.”

How much better men are at multitasking than women depends on women’s menstrual cycle, the research found.

Professor Mäntylä said:

“Previous studies have shown that women’s spatial skills vary across the menstrual cycle with high capacity around menstruation and much lower around ovulation, when oestrogen levels are high.

The results showed a clear difference in multitasking between men and women in the ovulation phase, while this effect was eliminated for women in the menstrual phase.”

And this finding is not just the result of one study, but several.

Why you should avoid multitasking anyway!

Multitasking is nothing to be proud of.

In general the brain works best when we concentrate on one thing at a time.

And multitasking could even cause the brain to shrink:

“Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.

For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control.”

How to improve your multitasking skills

Should you be interested in improving your multitasking skills, exercise is one key:

“Physical fitness increases multitasking skills by increasing the size of crucial areas of the brain, a new study finds.

Neuroscientists found larger gray matter volume in several brain areas of those who had higher cardiorespiratory fitness.

These brain areas help boost both reasoning and problem-solving.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Mäntylä, 2013).

Brain image from Shutterstock

How your eye contact signals whether you are a good conversationalist.

People look away during conversations to stop their brain overloading, new research suggests.

So, breaking eye contact allows us to express ourselves more clearly — perhaps indicating a better conversationalist.

The finding helps balance out the common advice from ‘experts’ to maintain eye contact.

Keeping eye contact is supposed to help build an emotional connection with others.

Broadly speaking, this is true.

But eye contact during a conversation is a dynamic process.

Most people don’t naturally stare unblinking into the other person’s eyes while talking (I say most people, but there are a few!).

By the same token, most people don’t totally avoid eye contact while talking.

Eye contact is usually a kind of dance, where the person speaking tends to look away more than the person listening.

(Again this isn’t always true: some people appear to be unaware that it is rude to let their eyes roam the room while you are talking to them!)

Eye contact is stimulating

In this study people were asked to play a word-association game.

The results showed that looking away helped people find the right word more quickly.

When forced to maintain eye contact while search for a difficult word, it took them longer.

The explanation is that staring into someone’s eyes is mentally stimulating.

So, the brain automatically forces you to look away to conserve cognitive resources.

This only happens, though, when we are searching for difficult words.

When the words are easy, it’s relatively easy for us to maintain eye contact.

The study’s authors conclude:

“…eye contact interferes with domain-general cognitive control processes during verb generation.

This result indicates that the efficiency of cognitive control in conversation is, to some extent, influenced specifically by eye contact.”

The study was published in the journal Cognition (Kajimura et al., 2016).

Brains scans during religious experience reveal the effects of intense divine feelings.

Brain activation during religious experience is similar to that seen during music, gambling, sex and love.

In other words: it activates the areas of the brain that are central to rewards.

For the research, devout Mormons were encouraged to “feel the spirit”.

Feeling the spirit is a critical part of Mormon life.

It is used as the main way of communicating with the divine, as well as feeling peace and closeness with God.

A small group of church members were shown videos and read quotes designed to induce religious feelings.

These almost universally had the desired effect as participants reported feelings of physical warmth and peace.

Many were even in tears.

Brain scans were carried out during this experience.

Michael Ferguson, the study’s first author, said:

“When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded.”

The scans showed that intense religious experience was linked to activity in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain critical for reward processing.

Spiritual feelings was also linked to activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

This area of the brain is involved in judgement, evaluation and moral reasoning.

The Mormons also showed activation in brain regions central to concentration.

Dr Jeff Anderson, a study co-author, said:

“Religious experience is perhaps the most influential part of how people make decisions that affect all of us, for good and for ill.

Understanding what happens in the brain to contribute to those decisions is really important.”

It is thought the brain works quite differently during these religious experiences to how it does during meditation.

The study was published in the journal Social Neuroscience (Ferguson et al., 2016).

Seven steps to a more meaningful life includes meditation, movement and maximisation.

Top of the list for living a meaningful daily life is being more mindful, according to occupational therapist Dr. Melanie Austin-McCain.

She says:

“Be present, smile, humble yourself, and acknowledge others.

With mindfulness, you’re really in the present and focusing on your senses and your experiences — what you are feeling, thinking, and doing.”

Healthy daily routines and long-term goals are so important for a meaningful life, Dr McCain says:

“Evidence shows that having a purpose in life is helpful in promoting health and preventing chronic disease.

It’s about finding out about who you are, the things you like do and that are meaningful for you and setting goals that align with those things.”

Here are the six other steps that Dr McCain recommends:

1. Meditation

It’s not productive to set daily goals for meditation, according to Dr McCain.

Instead, it is better to set aside some time to simply sit quietly and review your goals for the day and think about your intentions.

• Read more about the benefits of meditation, including a quick-start guide on how to meditate.

2. Movement

Keep the mind and body active every day, says Dr McCain.

The benefits of exercise are well known, of course, but the mind needs stretching in just the same way.

Try new things from time-to-time and use new strategies to approach old problems.

3. Management

Everyone should occasionally take a little time to take a broader view of their own life.

• Where am I going?
• Am I spending my time in the best way?
• What improvements could be made?

These sorts of ‘management’ sessions could include thinking about diet, exercise, relationships or anything else that is important to you.

4. Maximisation

Use a “future is mine” mindset, says Dr McCain.

Remind yourself of your own potential and that of others.

5. Meaningfulness

Try to find the happiness and joy in the things you do.

Part of this is acknowledging those who provide you support, Dr McCain says:

“Meaningfulness is more like gratitude — awareness and appreciation of the things around you.”

6. Mentoring

It is beneficial to take on a mentor in different areas of life, as well as being a mentor for others, says Dr McCain.

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It helps to provide emotional balance by regulating heart rhythms. It also encourages ecstasy and wonder, as well as joy and calm.

Spending time in woodland areas has a healing effect on the mind and the body, helping to provide emotional balance, new research finds.

Being in nature helps us to regulate our emotions, when compared to an urban environment.

Nature also helps to regulate heart rhythms, the research found.

Together, nature helps to bring feelings of:

• ecstasy and wonder,
• as well as joy and calm.

Dr Miles Richardson, the study’s first author, said:

“We’re excited about this research as it brings together previous work in order to explain how nature regulates emotions and the heart and shows spending time in nature positively changes our health and well-being through helping balance the feelings of threat, drive and contentment we experience each day.

Exposure to nature is emotional and emotion is the constant companion of sensation with feelings, rather than thoughts, coming first when we encounter nature and these emotions have a physiological basis, which nature and well-being research often overlooks.

Overall, the work provides a simple yet compelling argument to convince others of the role of, and need for, nature in our everyday lives.”

The researchers analysed 13 studies carried out on a total of 871 people.

These compared the effects of urban with natural environments.

Nature provides emotional balance

Nature, the studies showed, helped to regular parasympathetic nerve activity, which is linked to feelings of contentment.

It also lowered sympathetic nerve activity, which is linked to lowered drive, or a lack of stress.

Professor David Sheffield, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Nature brings balance to our emotions and the nervous system that influences the function of our internal organs, such as the heart, ultimately revealing the stress-busting power of nature.”

The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science (Richardson et al., 2016).