A way to change adolescent behaviors?

Bryan et al. present an interesting strategy for the difficult task of changing adolescent behaviors:

Significance

Behavioral science has rarely offered effective strategies for changing adolescent health behavior. One limitation of previous approaches may be an overemphasis on long-term health outcomes as the focal source of motivation. The present research uses a rigorous randomized trial to evaluate an approach that aligns healthy behavior with values about which adolescents already care: feeling like a socially conscious, autonomous person worthy of approval from one’s peers. It improved the health profile of snacks and drinks participants chose in an ostensibly unrelated context and did so because it caused adolescents to construe the healthy behavior as being aligned with prominent adolescent values. This suggests a route to an elusive result: effective motivation for adolescent behavior change.

Abstract

What can be done to reduce unhealthy eating among adolescents? It was hypothesized that aligning healthy eating with important and widely shared adolescent values would produce the needed motivation. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled experiment with eighth graders (total n = 536) evaluated the impact of a treatment that framed healthy eating as consistent with the adolescent values of autonomy from adult control and the pursuit of social justice. Healthy eating was suggested as a way to take a stand against manipulative and unfair practices of the food industry, such as engineering junk food to make it addictive and marketing it to young children. Compared with traditional health education materials or to a non–food-related control, this treatment led eighth graders to see healthy eating as more autonomy-assertive and social justice-oriented behavior and to forgo sugary snacks and drinks in favor of healthier options a day later in an unrelated context. Public health interventions for adolescents may be more effective when they harness the motivational power of that group’s existing strongly held values.

Reason is not required for a life of meaning.

Robert Burton, former neurology chief at UCSF and a neuroscience author, has contributed an excellent short essay to the NYTimes philosophy series The Stone. A few clips:

Few would disagree with two age-old truisms: We should strive to shape our lives with reason, and a central prerequisite for the good life is a personal sense of meaning...Any philosophical approach to values and purpose must acknowledge this fundamental neurological reality: a visceral sense of meaning in one’s life is an involuntary mental state that, like joy or disgust, is independent from and resistant to the best of arguments...Anyone who has experienced a bout of spontaneous depression knows the despair of feeling that nothing in life is worth pursuing and that no argument, no matter how inspired, can fill the void. Similarly, we are all familiar with the countless narratives of religious figures “losing their way” despite retaining their formal beliefs.

As neuroscience attempts to pound away at the idea of pure rationality and underscore the primacy of subliminal mental activity, I am increasingly drawn to the metaphor of idiosyncratic mental taste buds. From genetic factors (a single gene determines whether we find brussels sprouts bitter or sweet), to the cultural — considering fried grasshoppers and grilled monkey brains as delicacies — taste isn’t a matter of the best set of arguments...If thoughts, like foods, come in a dazzling variety of flavors, and personal taste trumps reason, philosophy — which relies most heavily on reason, and aims to foster the acquisition of objective knowledge — is in a bind.

Though we don’t know how thoughts are produced by the brain, it is hard to imagine having a thought unaccompanied by some associated mental state. We experience a thought as pleasing, revolting, correct, incorrect, obvious, stupid, brilliant, etc. Though integral to our thoughts, these qualifiers arise out of different brain mechanisms from those that produce the raw thought. As examples, feelings of disgust, empathy and knowing arise from different areas of brain and can be provoked de novo in volunteer subjects via electrical stimulation even when the subjects are unaware of having any concomitant thought at all. This chicken-and-egg relationship between feelings and thought can readily be seen in how we make moral judgments...The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have shown that our moral stances strongly correlate with the degree of activation of those brain areas that generate a sense of disgust and revulsion. According to Haidt, reason provides an after-the-fact explanation for moral decisions that are preceded by inherently reflexive positive or negative feelings. Think about your stance on pedophilia or denying a kidney transplant to a serial killer.

After noting work of Libet and others showing that our sense of agency is an illusion - initiating an action occurs well after our brains have already started that action, especially in tennis players and baseball batters - Burton suggests that:

It is unlikely that there is any fundamental difference in how the brain initiates thought and action. We learn the process of thinking incrementally, acquiring knowledge of language, logic, the external world and cultural norms and expectations just as we learn physical actions like talking, walking or playing the piano. If we conceptualize thought as a mental motor skill subject to the same temporal reorganization as high-speed sports, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the experience of free will (agency) and conscious rational deliberation are both biologically generated illusions.

What then are we to do with the concept of rationality? It would be a shame to get rid of a term useful in characterizing the clarity of a line of reasoning. Everyone understands that “being rational” implies trying to strip away biases and innate subjectivity in order to make the best possible decision. But what if the word rational leads us to scientifically unsound conclusions?

Going forward, the greatest challenge for philosophy will be to remain relevant while conceding that, like the rest of the animal kingdom, we are decision-making organisms rather than rational agents, and that our most logical conclusions about moral and ethical values can’t be scientifically verified nor guaranteed to pass the test of time. (The history of science should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to believe in the persistent truth of untestable ideas).

Even so, I would hate to discard such truisms such as “know thyself” or “the unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Reason allows us new ways of seeing, just as close listening to a piece of music can reveal previously unheard melodies and rhythms or observing an ant hill can give us an unexpected appreciation of nature’s harmonies. These various forms of inquiry aren’t dependent upon logic and verification; they are modes of perception.

Statistics versus judgement.

This interesting website, pointed out to me by a friend, offers to send a daily gem of information to you, usually an excerpt from a published book...so, being a glutton for input streams, I signed up. I usually move on after glancing at a given day's topic, but this excerpt from Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" I pass on, after excerpting even further:

In his book Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A The­oretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence, psychoanalyst Paul Meehl gave evidence that statistical models almost always yield better predictions and diagnoses than the judgment of trained professionals. In fact, experts frequently give different answers when presented with the same information within a matter of a few minutes...Meehl's book provoked shock and disbelief among clinical psychologists, and the controversy it started has engendered a stream of research that is still flowing today, more than fifty years after its publication. The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algo­rithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tanta­mount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convinc­ingly documented.

The range of predicted outcomes has expanded to cover medical vari­ables such as the longevity of cancer patients, the length of hospital stays, the diagnosis of cardiac disease, and the susceptibility of babies to sudden infant death syndrome; economic measures such as the prospects of success for new businesses, the evaluation of credit risks by banks, and the future career satisfaction of workers; questions of interest to government agencies, including assessments of the suitability of foster parents, the odds of recidivism among juvenile offenders, and the likelihood of other forms of violent behavior; and miscellaneous outcomes such as the evaluation of scientific presentations, the winners of football games, and the future prices of Bor­deaux wine. Each of these domains entails a significant degree of uncer­tainty and unpredictability. We describe them as 'low-validity environments.' In every case, the accuracy of experts was matched or exceeded by a simple algorithm.

Another reason for the inferiority of expert judgment is that humans are incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information. When asked to evaluate the same information twice, they frequently give different answers. The extent of the inconsistency is often a matter of real concern. Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as 'normal' or 'abnormal' contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions. A study of 101 indepen­dent auditors who were asked to evaluate the reliability of internal corpo­rate audits revealed a similar degree of inconsistency. A review of 41 separate studies of the reliability of judgments made by auditors, pathologists, psy­chologists, organizational managers, and other professionals suggests that this level of inconsistency is typical, even when a case is reevaluated within a few minutes. Unreliable judgments cannot be valid predictors of anything

Is Donald Trump's frontostriatal connectivity weakened?

Chester et al. find an interesting correlation between grandiose narcissism and the strength of connections between brain areas that process self-relevant stimuli (the medial prefrontal cortex) and reward (the ventral striatum):

Narcissism is characterized by the search for affirmation and admiration from others. Might this motivation to find external sources of acclaim exist to compensate for neurostructural deficits that link the self with reward? Greater structural connectivity between brain areas that process self-relevant stimuli (i.e. the medial prefrontal cortex) and reward (i.e. the ventral striatum) is associated with fundamentally positive self-views. We predicted that narcissism would be associated with less integrity of this frontostriatal pathway. We used diffusion tensor imaging to assess the frontostriatal structural connectivity among 50 healthy undergraduates (32 females, 18 males) who also completed a measure of grandiose narcissism. White matter integrity in the frontostriatal pathway was negatively associated with narcissism. Our findings, while purely correlational, suggest that narcissism arises, in part, from a neural disconnect between the self and reward. The exhibitionism and immodesty of narcissists may then be a regulatory strategy to compensate for this neural deficit.

Think less, think better.

In an NYTimes piece, Moshe Bar translates the psycho-speak (which caused me to completely miss the point of the work) of an article describing research done with with graduate student Shira Baror. Some clips from the NYTimes pieces, then the article abstract:

Shira Baror and I demonstrate that the capacity for original and creative thinking is markedly stymied by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of “mental load.” Many psychologists assume that the mind, left to its own devices, is inclined to follow a well-worn path of familiar associations. But our findings suggest that innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.

...we gave participants a free-association task while simultaneously taxing their mental capacity to different degrees...they were given a word (e.g., shoe) and asked to respond as quickly as possible with the first word that came to mind (e.g., sock)...We found that a high mental load consistently diminished the originality and creativity of the response: Participants with seven digits to recall resorted to the most statistically common responses (e.g., white/black), whereas participants with two digits gave less typical, more varied pairings (e.g., white/cloud).

In another experiment, we found that longer response times were correlated with less diverse responses, ruling out the possibility that participants with low mental loads simply took more time to generate an interesting response. Rather, it seems that with a high mental load, you need more time to generate even a conventional thought. These experiments suggest that the mind’s natural tendency is to explore and to favor novelty, but when occupied it looks for the most familiar and inevitably least interesting solution...Our study suggests that your internal exploration is too often diminished by an overly occupied mind, much as is the case with your experience of your external environment.

After practicing vipassana meditation:

My thoughts — when I returned to the act of thinking about something rather than nothing — were fresher and more surprising...It is clear to me that this ancient meditative practice helps free the mind to have richer experiences of the present. Except when you are flying an F-16 aircraft or experiencing extreme fear or having an orgasm, your life leaves too much room for your mind to wander. As a result, only a small fraction of your mental capacity remains engaged in what is before it, and mind-wandering and ruminations become a tax on the quality of your life. Honing an ability to unburden the load on your mind, be it through meditation or some other practice, can bring with it a wonderfully magnified experience of the world — and, as our study suggests, of your own mind.

Now, here is the abstract of their article titled "Associative Activation and Its Relation to Exploration and Exploitation in the Brain," which, when I first scanned it, gave me no clue of the exegesis above!

Associative activation is commonly assumed to rely on associative strength, such that if A is strongly associated with B, B is activated whenever A is activated. We challenged this assumption by examining whether the activation of associations is state dependent. In three experiments, subjects performed a free-association task while the level of a simultaneous load was manipulated in various ways. In all three experiments subjects in the low-load conditions provided significantly more diverse and original associations compared with subjects in the high-load conditions, who exhibited high consensus. In an additional experiment, we found increased semantic priming of immediate associations under high load and of remote associations under low load. Taken together, these findings imply that activation of associations is an exploratory process by default, but is narrowed to exploiting the more immediate associations under conditions of high load. We propose a potential mechanism for processing associations in exploration and in exploitation modes, and suggest clinical implications.

A succinct list of some of our common psychological errors.

I want to point to Belsky's article on why we think we are better decision makers under uncertainty than we really are. He summarizes several common errors:

The sunk cost fallacy - hanging on to a decision, or an investment, in an unconscious desire to justify it.

Loss aversion - reacting more strongly to loss of a resource (time, goods, or money) than to a similar gain.

Overconfidence - overrating our abilities, knowledge, and skill (two thirds of investors rate their financial sophistication as advanced, but barely pass a financial literacy exam.)

Optimism bias - which seems to be hard-wired into our brains because it has evolutionarily useful, driving humans to strive in the face of long odds.

Hindsight bias - rewriting history to make ourselves look good, as in misremembering our forecasts in a way that makes us look smarter.

Attribution bias - attributing good outcomes to our own skills, but bad outcomes to causes over which we had no control.

Confirmation bias - giving too much weight to information that supports our existing beliefs and discounting that which does not.

Self-policing by psychologists - many prominent experiments fail replication tests

Benedict Carey offers context, summary, and reactions to the recent Science article reporting work of a consortium of 270 scientists on five continents led by psychologist Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia. (Other commentaries on this work are offered by Bohannon and by The Guardian.) The bottom line is that only 36 percent of the findings from almost 100 studies in the top three psychology journals held up when the original experiments were rigorously redone. This work was an 'inside job,' with psychologists doing the replication attempts communicating with cooperative original researchers. Carey describes a culture change that is taking hold in the psychological research community, towards greater transparency, data sharing, and preregistration of studies with journals that spells out hypotheses and how they are going to be tested. "Doing this upfront is a powerful check against moving the goal posts on a study — that is, analyzing the data and working backward, reverse-engineering the “hypothesis” to fit those findings."

(addendum 9/1/2015:  another useful commentary, "Psychology is Not in Crisis")

Is it love or lust? Look at eye gaze.

Bolmont et al. ask:

When you are on a date with a person you barely know, how do you evaluate that person’s goals and intentions regarding a long-term relationship with you? Love is not a prerequisite for sexual desire, and sexual desire does not necessarily lead to love. Love and lust can exist by themselves or in combination, and to any degree.

Using the usual collection of heterosexual college students as subjects, the authors tracked eye movements as subjects viewed a series of photographs of persons they had never met before. In a separate session the subjects were asked whether the same photographs elicited feelings (yes or no) of sexual desire or romantic love. The results of a lot of fancy eye tracking analysis?

...subjects were more likely to fixate on the face when making decisions about romantic love than when making decisions about sexual desire, and the same subjects were more likely to look at the body when making decisions about sexual desire than when making decisions about romantic love

Duh........anyway, here is their abstract, which inexplicably doesn't include the above bottom line:

"Reading other people’s eyes is a valuable skill during interpersonal interaction. Although a number of studies have investigated visual patterns in relation to the perceiver’s interest, intentions, and goals, little is known about eye gaze when it comes to differentiating intentions to love from intentions to lust (sexual desire). To address this question, we conducted two experiments: one testing whether the visual pattern related to the perception of love differs from that related to lust and one testing whether the visual pattern related to the expression of love differs from that related to lust. Our results show that a person’s eye gaze shifts as a function of his or her goal (love vs. lust) when looking at a visual stimulus. Such identification of distinct visual patterns for love and lust could have theoretical and clinical importance in couples therapy when these two phenomena are difficult to disentangle from one another on the basis of patients’ self-reports."

Top Brain, Bottom Brain - a user's manual from Kosslyn and Miller

I thought I would point to a recent book authored by Kosslyn and Miller:  “Top Brain - Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think.” They make a good effort to communicate (co-author Miller is a professional journalist/author), yet it is a tough slog at points.

Their basic simplification is to describe the top and the bottom parts of the brain as performing different sorts of tasks. The bottom-brain system classifies and interprets sensory information from the world, and the top-brain system formulates and executes plans. Here is the standard brain graphic from their introduction:

You can have four separate ways of arranging a set of opposites like top and bottom, and they make these into four personality types distinguished by different relative activities of the two.:

To do a disservice to their more balanced and extended presentation, I cut to the chase with an irreverent condensation:

The movers appear to be your winners, top brain action people who actually also use the bottom half to pay attention to the consequences of their actions and use the feedback.

The stimulator is more the ‘damn the cannons, full speed ahead’ kind of person, less inclined to attend to the consequences of their actions and know when enough is enough.

The Perceivers are mainly bottom brain perceivers and interpreters, but unlikely to initiate top brain detailed or complex plans.

Finally, the people with lazy top and bottom brains are ‘whatever…’ types, absorbed by local events and immediate imperatives, passively responsive to ongoing situations, i.e. the U.S. electorate.

Chapter 13 presents a test for the reader to determine his or her own individual style. They suggest that although you may not always rely on the same mode in every context, peoples' responses to the test indicate that they do operate in a single mode most of the time. You can take the test in the book, or take it online at www.TopBrainBottomBrain.com and have your score computed automatically.

When psychotherapy works - what are the brain changes?

The journal Brain and Behavioral Science circulates forthcoming articles for peer commentary before their final publication in the journal. I thought I would pass on the abstract of such an article by Lane et al., who propose that the essential ingredients in therapeutic change include: 1) reactivating old memories; 2) engaging in new emotional experiences that are incorporated into these reactivated memories via the process of reconsolidation; and 3) reinforcing the integrative memory structure by practicing a new way of behaving and experiencing the world in a variety of contexts.

Memory Reconsolidation, Emotional Arousal and the Process of Change in Psychotherapy: New Insights from Brain Science

Richard D. Lane, Lee Ryan, Lynn Nadel, and Leslie Greenberg

Abstract: Since Freud clinicians have understood that disturbing memories contribute to psychopathology and that new emotional experiences contribute to therapeutic change. Yet, controversy remains about what is truly essential to bring about psychotherapeutic change. Mounting evidence from empirical studies suggests that emotional arousal is a key ingredient in therapeutic change in many modalities. In addition, memory seems to play an important role but there is a lack of consensus on the role of understanding what happened in the past in bringing about therapeutic change.

The core idea of this paper is that therapeutic change in a variety of modalities, including behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, emotion-focused and psychodynamic psychotherapy, results from the updating of prior emotional memories through a process of reconsolidation that incorporates new emotional experiences. The authors present an integrative memory model with three interactive components - autobiographical (event) memories, semantic structures, and emotional responses - supported by emerging evidence from cognitive neuroscience on implicit and explicit emotion, implicit and explicit memory, emotion-memory interactions, memory reconsolidation, and the relationship between autobiographical and semantic memory. We propose that the essential ingredients of therapeutic change include: 1) reactivating old memories; 2) engaging in new emotional experiences that are incorporated into these reactivated memories via the process of reconsolidation; and 3) reinforcing the integrative memory structure by practicing a new way of behaving and experiencing the world in a variety of contexts. The implications of this new neurobiologically-grounded synthesis for research, clinical practice and teaching are discussed.

Three psychological regions of the U.S. - economic, health, social, political correlates

Rentfrow and collaborators probe the possibility of dividing regions of the United States, not in terms of traditional social and economic indicators, but in terms of psychological characteristics instead. It seems reasonable that psychological factors would underlie higher level outcomes such as social and economic indicators.

...the present work aimed to determine whether it is possible to construct a map of the United States based entirely on psychological characteristics, in this case personality traits. What would such a map look like? And how would its individual regions vary in terms of key political, economic, social, and health (PESH) metrics known to vary geographically within countries?

The analysis was at a state level, covered data obtained in many studies for millions of people, and the article has mind-numbing detail on statistical analysis of these studies. Just to cut to the chase, I though it would be interesting to show their final summary and graphic.

The maps displayed show the geographical concentrations of the personality clusters across the United States. What is especially striking is that each of the personality clusters formed a distinctive geographical pattern. Cluster 1 (Friendly & Conventional) comprises states predominantly in the north central Great Plains and in the South. States in the Mountain, Pacific Coast, Mid-Atlantic, and New England regions were the least similar to this particular cluster. States predominantly in the West and some along the Eastern Seaboard were prototypical of Cluster 2 (Relaxed & Creative), whereas most of the states in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Gulf Coast were most different from this cluster. Finally, states in New England and the Middle Atlantic were prototypical of Cluster 3 (Temperamental & Uninhibited), whereas states in the Southeast, Great Plains, and Mountain region were not members of this cluster.

"Only Disconnect" - The pathology of digital of connectivity

Alas, it seems increasingly clear that to follow E.M. Forster’s dictum “Only Connect” (i.e. with humans in person, what our emotional brain evolved to do.) it is also necessary to follow Evgeny Morozov’s more recent dictum (and title of his review of several several books) “Only Disconnect.” (with the pseudo-connectivity of our tweets,followers, facebook friends, blog hits, google+ plus counts, Klout numbers, Thumbs up or downs, Shout outs, Likes, etc.). I will pass on some clips from Morozov's article. After noting descriptions by the Weimar Republic's literary luminary Siegfried Kracauer of the public over stimulation of his day, and his remedy of 'radical boredom' as an antidote, Morozov continues:

These days, "the state of permanent receptivity" has become the birthright of anyone with a smartphone. We are under constant assault by "interestingness"...the anti-boredom lobby has all but established its headquarters in Silicon Valley...

Information overload can bore us as easily as information underload. But this form of boredom, mediated boredom, doesn't provide time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it.

Morozov quotes from French philosopher Henri Lefebvre from the early 1960's

Today everything comes to an end virtually as soon as it begins, and vanishes almost as soon as it appears..As interest in it gets progressively weaker, so news becomes more rapid and concentrated, until finally, at the end of a shorter and shorter period, it wears itself..We have the phoney "new" faked novelty..The confusion between triviality which no longer appears trivial and sensationalism which is made to appear ordinary is cleverly organized. New shrinks to the size of the socially instantaneous, and the immediate instant tends to disappear in an instant which has already passed.

And then, Morozov notes:

I should admit that I'm something of a "contemplative computing" devotee, which is also to say, a distraction addict. Last year, I bought a safe with a built-in timer that I use to lock away my smartphone and Internet cable for days on end. (Tools like Freedom didn't work for me - they are too easy to circumvent.

What's needed is a modern-day counterpart to the anti-noise campaigners of a century ago.. Information deserve its own environmentalism....what is modernity if not a collection of pickets of silence and distraction? Consider the Amtrak train: yes, we get Wi-Fi, but we also get the Quiet Car..Both radical boredom and radical distraction can get us closer to "authentic rapture within the inauthentic domain." The trick is not to settle for their tepid, mediocre versions.

Likewise, the possibility of controlled disconnection - embedded in software like Freedom and harware like my safe - reassures us that our task lists and deadlines are manageable, if we approach them with distraction. Like travel and dance, both are illusions concocted by modernity... Life in the New Digital Age might be disorienting, but at least it isn't nasty, brutish, and short. Not in the Quiet Car, anyway.

Nocebo pain facilitation occurs at spinal cord level.

I have had the impression that placebo and nocebo effects were the province of higher cortical brain machinations, the power of suggestion tweaking our subjective experience to feeling more or less pain than in the absence of an intervention. Geuter and Büchel now make the interesting observation this power of suggestion relays right down into the spinal cord, to alter its pain signalling pathways:

Nocebo hyperalgesia is an increase in subjective pain perception after a patient or subject underwent an inert treatment without any active ingredient. For example, verbal suggestion of increased pain can enhance both pain experience and responses in pain-related cortical brain areas. However, changes in cortical pain responses may be secondary to earlier amplification of incoming pain signals within the spinal cord. To test for a potential early enhancement of pain signals in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, we combined a nocebo heat pain paradigm with spinal functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy volunteers. We found that local application of an inert nocebo cream on the forearm increased pain ratings compared with a control cream, and also reduced pain thresholds on the nocebo-treated skin patch. On the neurobiological level, pain stimulation induced a strong activation in the spinal cord at the level of the stimulated dermatomes C5/C6. Comparing pain stimulation under nocebo to a control pain stimulation of the same physical intensity revealed enhanced pain-related activity in the ipsilateral dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Importantly, the activation of the main effect of pain and the nocebo effect spatially overlapped. The current study thus provides direct evidence for a pain-facilitating mechanism in the human spinal cord before cortical processing, which can be activated by cognitive manipulations such as nocebo treatments.

A Cornucopia of Mind Blog sites.

Scientific American has announced that its daughter magazine Scientific American Mind has set up a Blogs site that lists a number of psychology, neuroscience, etc. blogs dealing with the Mind. Just starting to sample from the blogs listed is an overwhelming experience. Keeping up with blogs dealing with mind in the current blogosphere would be more than a full time job. My own list of "Other Mind Blogs" in the right hand column of this blog is several years old, and now doesn't include many excellent current efforts. I occasionally find this blog listed in "Top Psychology Blogs" on other sites.  We could all easily spend all our time "taking in each other's laundry," to become aggregators of aggregators of aggregators ad infinitum. This is why I don't look much at other Mind Blogs, but rather stick to looking through recent original research articles in the major journals. The efforts of each of us who labor away passing on some small fraction of the research world are appreciated by a sufficient number of readers to motivate us to continue.

Having said I don't look at other mind blogs,  I'll pass on this gem from "Brain Pickings" (click to enlarge and see text more clearly: "Friendship-The Silent Places-Where Speech Ends"

The brain basis of our superiority illusion.

One of the most robustly documented findings of psychology is the "optimism" bias, which leads us to put rose-colored glasses on past, future, and our own abilities. (Did you know that a spectacular 94% of college professors rate themselves to have teaching abilities that are above average?.) Equally well documented is the fact the people who have a fully realistic view of their abilities and their importance to groups tend to be depressed. It seems clear that most of us are completely unequipped to function without a vast array of positive delusions about our abilities, our futures, etc.

There is a large literature on this. Dan Dennett and McKay have written a treatise in Brain and Behavioral Science that examines possible evolutionary rationales for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, instances of self-deception, etc., they conclude that only positive illusions meet their criteria for being adaptive. Johnson and his colleagues have produced an evolutionary model suggesting that overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and that populations tend to become overconfident as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition.

 Yamada et al. now look at resting state functional connectivity between brain regions whose activity correlates with the superiority illusion. Their abstract, and one figure from their paper:

The majority of individuals evaluate themselves as superior to average. This is a cognitive bias known as the “superiority illusion.” This illusion helps us to have hope for the future and is deep-rooted in the process of human evolution. In this study, we examined the default states of neural and molecular systems that generate this illusion, using resting-state functional MRI and PET. Resting-state functional connectivity between the frontal cortex and striatum regulated by inhibitory dopaminergic neurotransmission determines individual levels of the superiority illusion. Our findings help elucidate how this key aspect of the human mind is biologically determined, and identify potential molecular and neural targets for treatment for depressive realism.

Influence of striatal D2 availability on superiority illusion is mediated through dorsal anterior cingulate - striatal functional connectivity. Assuming an inverse relationship between D2 receptor availability and presynaptic dopamine release, dopamine likely acts on striatal D2 receptors to suppress functional connectivity between the dorsal striatum and dACC (2). This connectivity predicts individual differences in the superiority illusion  The indirect effect of striatal D2 receptor availability on the superiority illusion is significantly mediated through dACC-striatal functional connectivity . “+” indicates a positive relationship; “–,” a negative relationship.

Negativity bias and political ideology

I've just received a reviewer's copy of an upcoming article in Brain and Behavioral Science in the vein of several MindBlog posts mentioning work on the brains of conservatives versus liberals: "Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political Ideology" by J. R. Hibbing, K.B. Smith, and John R. Alford. I thought MindBlog readers might be interested in their abstract:

Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous, deep-seated, and often follow common, recognizable lines, with the supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, doing battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of these distinct political orientations is likely a prerequisite for managing political disputes, a source of social conflict often leading to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of these differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared to liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest future approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.

The End of History Illusion.

The Jan 4 issue of Science has an interested article by Quoidbach et al. on our perception of how much we changed in the past decade and how much we expect to change in the next. Here is some context from their introduction:

At every stage of life, people make decisions that profoundly influence the lives of the people they will become—and when they finally become those people, they aren’t always thrilled about it. Young adults pay to remove the tattoos that teenagers paid to get, middle-aged adults rush to divorce the people whom young adults rushed to marry, and older adults visit health spas to lose what middle-aged adults visited restaurants to gain. Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret? One possibility is that people have a fundamental misconception about their future selves. Time is a powerful force that transforms people’s preferences, reshapes their values, and alters their personalities, and we suspect that people generally underestimate the magnitude of those changes. In other words, people may believe that who they are today is pretty much who they will be tomorrow, despite the fact that it isn’t who they were yesterday. In the studies we describe here, we showed that people expect to change little in the future, despite knowing that they have changed a lot in the past, and that this tendency bedevils their decision-making. We call this tendency to underestimate the magnitude of future change the “end of history illusion.”

And here is their summary and discussion:

Across six studies of more than 19,000 participants, we found consistent evidence to indicate that people underestimate how much they will change in the future, and that doing so can lead to suboptimal decisions. Although these data cannot tell us what causes the end of history illusion, two possibilities seem likely. First, most people believe that their personalities are attractive, their values admirable, and their preferences wise (10); and having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change. People also like to believe that they know themselves well (11), and the possibility of future change may threaten that belief. In short, people are motivated to think well of themselves and to feel secure in that understanding, and the end of history illusion may help them accomplish these goals.

Second, there is at least one important difference between the cognitive processes that allow people to look forward and backward in time (12). Prospection is a constructive process, retrospection is a reconstructive process, and constructing new things is typically more difficult than reconstructing old ones (13, 14). The reason this matters is that people often draw inferences from the ease with which they can remember or imagine (15, 16). If people find it difficult to imagine the ways in which their traits, values, or preferences will change in the future, they may assume that such changes are unlikely. In short, people may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.

Although the magnitude of this end of history illusion in some of our studies was greater for younger people than for older people, it was nonetheless evident at every stage of adult life that we could analyze. Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain. History, it seems, is always ending today.

Psychological distance enhances conformity to group norms.

In yet another of one of those studies that give what would appear to be a generally applicable result, but is based on experiments carried out on two rather selective population represented by undergraduate psychology students at a U.S. college (UC-Davis, and NYU), Ledgerwood and Callahan demonstrate that psychological distance can enhance conformity to group norms, contra the usual association of the distanced or abstracted thinker (think Spock or Obama) with reasoned opinions that resist group pressure.

In the first study noted in their abstract below. they manipulated the temporal distance of a policy by varying whether it would be implemented in the near or distant future. They then provided participants with information about the majority opinion before asking them to report their own attitudes toward the policy. (The study's 67 participants (72% female) completed a study described as an online student opinion survey. All participants read an article excerpt (ostensibly from an online campus newsletter), which stated that the Davis City Council was considering whether to approve a proposal that would require all bicycles - the primary mode of student transportation in Davis - to use rear bicycle lights for nighttime travel.) Participants tended to conform to group opinion when the policy would be implemented in the relatively distant future, expressing more favorable attitudes when the group favored the policy than when the group opposed it.

The second study, a bit more complicated, asked students who had been primed in a diversionary task that required thinking in either concrete or abstract terms, to vote on a previously defined affirmation action issue. They did this by privately placing a number of 'yes' or 'no' tokens proportional to how strongly they felt in boxes that already contained tokens placed by the group of previous voters (actually the experimenters). Participants conformed to the group norm after they had been led to think abstractly, voting more strongly in favor of affirmative action when the group seemed to support it rather than oppose it.

Here is the abstract:

Intuition suggests that a distanced or abstract thinker should be immune to social influence, and on its surface, the current literature could seem to support this view. The present research builds on recent theorizing to suggest a different possibility. Drawing on the notion that psychological distance regulates the extent to which evaluations incorporate context-specific or context-independent information, we suggest that psychological distance should actually increase susceptibility to sources of social influence that tend to be consistently encountered across contexts, such as group norms. Consistent with this hypothesis, two studies showed that psychological distance and abstraction increased conformity to group opinion and that this effect persisted in a novel voting-booth paradigm in which participants believed their voting behavior was both anonymous and consequential. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding the social side of abstraction as well as the conditions under which different types of social influence are likely to be most influential.

Scientific basis of a psychotherapy.

I've been wanting to pass on elements of a nice essay written by Eric Kandel for last year's Edge question, which describes Aaron Beck's development of cognitive behavioral therapy, a systematic psychological treatment for depression that focuses on distorted thinking rather than presumed unconscious conflicts. This is a pragmatic relatively value-neutral approach that avoids considerations of, and lacks the richness of, dealing with object relations, morality, or origins. (A random aside: I remember from my postdoctoral years at Harvard Medical School's Neurobiology Department (1967-68) that Eric Kandel, trained as a psychiatrist, would drop by at our communal lunch time to talk about his new work on a strange sea slug named Aplysia, work which was the basis of his later Nobel prize for uncovering a neuronal basis for memory. He was quizzed by Hubel and Wiesel, also to win the prize for their work in vision.) Kandel describes Beck's basic innovations:

First, he introduced instruments for measuring mental illness..beginning with a Depression Inventory, a Hopelessness Scale, and a Suicide Intent Scale. These scales helped to objectify research in psychopathology and facilitated the establishment of better clinical outcome trials.

Second, Beck introduced a new short-term, evidence-based therapy he called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Third, Beck manualized the treatments. He wrote a cookbook so method could be reliably taught to others. You and I could in principle learn to do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Fourth, he carried out with the help of several colleagues, progressively better controlled studies which documented that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy worked more effectively than placebo and as effectively as antidepressants in mild and moderate depression. In severe depression it did not act as effectively as an anti-depressant but acted synergistically with them to enhance recovery.

Fifth and finally, Beck's work was picked up by Helen Mayberg, another one of my heroes in psychiatry. She carried out FMRI studies of depressed patients and discovered that Brodmann area 25 was a focus of abnormal activity in depression. She went on to find that if—and only if—a patient responded to cognitive behavior therapy or to antidepressants SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) this abnormality reverted to normal.

We are meant to become cyborg.

I pass on some clips from a brief essay by Sherry Turkle:

Winnicott believes that during all stages of life we continue to search for objects we experience as both within and outside the self. We give up the baby blanket, but we continue to search for the feeling of oneness it provided. We find them in moments of feeling "at one" with the world, what Freud called the "oceanic feeling." We find these moments when we are at one with a piece of art, a vista in nature, a sexual experience.

As a scientific proposition, the theory of the transitional object has its limitations. But as a way of thinking about connection, it provides a powerful tool for thought...it offered me a way to begin to understand the new relationships that people were beginning to form with computers...I could see that computers were not "just tools." They were intimate machines. People experienced them as part of the self, separate but connected to the self.

A novelist using a word processing program referred to "my ESP with the machine. The words float out. I share the screen with my words." An architect who used the computer to design goes went even further: "I don't see the building in my mind until I start to play with shapes and forms on the machine. It comes to life in the space between my eyes and the screen."...After studying programming, a thirteen year old girl said, that when working with the computer, "there's a little piece of your mind and now it's a little piece of the computer's mind and you come to see yourself differently." A programmer talked about his "Vulcan mind meld" with the computer.

This way of thinking about the computer as an evocative objects puts us on the inside of a new inside joke. For when psychoanalysts talked about object relations, they had always been talking about people. From the beginning, people saw computers as "almost-alive" or "sort of alive." With the computer, object relations psychoanalysis can be applied to, well, objects. People feel at one with video games, with lines of computer code, with the avatars they play in virtual worlds, with their smartphones. Classical transitional objects are meant to be abandoned, their power recovered in moments of heightened experience. When our current digital devices—our smartphones and cellphones—take on the power of transitional objects, a new psychology comes into play. These digital objects are never meant to be abandoned. We are meant to become cyborg.