A nation's mood from its songs and blogs?

As a followup on monday's post on happiness and the blogosphere, Benedict Carey points to researchers who suggest that linguistic analysis — of song lyrics, blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being.

Bilingual infants are more flexible learners.

From Kovács and Mehler:

Children acquire their native language according to a well-defined time frame. Surprisingly, although children raised in bilingual environments have to learn roughly twice as much about language as their monolingual peers, the speed of acquisition is comparable in monolinguals and bilinguals. Here, we show that preverbal 12-month-old bilingual infants have become more flexible at learning speech structures than monolinguals. When given the opportunity to simultaneously learn two different regularities, bilingual infants learned both, whereas monolinguals learned only one of them. Hence, bilinguals may acquire two languages in the time in which monolinguals acquire one because they quickly become more flexible learners.

Even cockroaches get lonely.

The research highlights section of the July 29 Nature points out an interesting study from Lihoreau et al. suggesting why, when you find cockroaches in your home, "there's never just one."

Even cockroaches develop psychological problems if they are denied a normal social life. Animals reared in solitude are less likely to explore new environments or search for food, are more timid when approaching other cockroaches and are less able to spot the signs of a good mate. The effects of solitary confinement parallel those of 'isolation syndrome' described in a variety of vertebrates, and the suggestion is that it may develop when any group-living species is denied company.

Here is the abstract from the Lihoreau et al study:

Social isolation has dramatic consequences on the development of individuals of many vertebrate species, and it induces a set of behavioural disturbances rending them unable to process environmental as well as social stimuli appropriately. We hypothesized that isolation syndrome is a ubiquitous trait of social life that can be observed in a wide array of species, including invertebrates. Here we report that gregarious cockroaches (Blattella germanica) reared in isolation showed (i) stronger exploration-avoidance, (ii) reduced foraging activity, (iii) reduced willingness to interact socially, and (iv) reduced ability to assess mating partner quality than conspecifics reared in groups. We demonstrate the occurrence of a behavioural syndrome induced by social isolation, similar to syndromes described in vertebrates, revealing the importance of social interactions and group-living in this non-eusocial insect species. We suggest that investigating social isolation effects on individual development should provide interesting results to assess social cohesion of species and thus constitute an additional tool for comparative studies focusing on the evolution of social life.

Brain activity accociated with honest and dishonest decisions.

Greene and Paxton make some interesting observations:

What makes people behave honestly when confronted with opportunities for dishonest gain? Research on the interplay between controlled and automatic processes in decision making suggests 2 hypotheses: According to the “Will” hypothesis, honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, comparable to the controlled cognitive processes that enable the delay of reward. According to the “Grace” hypothesis, honesty results from the absence of temptation, consistent with research emphasizing the determination of behavior by the presence or absence of automatic processes. To test these hypotheses, we examined neural activity in individuals confronted with opportunities for dishonest gain. Subjects undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) gained money by accurately predicting the outcomes of computerized coin-flips. In some trials, subjects recorded their predictions in advance. In other trials, subjects were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy, allowing them to gain money dishonestly by lying about the accuracy of their predictions. Many subjects behaved dishonestly, as indicated by improbable levels of “accuracy.” Our findings support the Grace hypothesis. Individuals who behaved honestly exhibited no additional control-related activity (or other kind of activity) when choosing to behave honestly, as compared with a control condition in which there was no opportunity for dishonest gain. In contrast, individuals who behaved dishonestly exhibited increased activity in control-related regions of prefrontal cortex, both when choosing to behave dishonestly and on occasions when they refrained from dishonesty. Levels of activity in these regions correlated with the frequency of dishonesty in individuals.

Our bias blind spot.

Pronin et al carry out three studies that suggest that knowledge of particular biases in our judgment and inference, and the ability to recognize the impact of those biases on others, neither prevents us from succumbing nor makes us aware of having done so. Indeed, participants in their research denied that their assessments of their personal qualities and their attributions for a particular success or failure had been biased even after having displayed the relevant biases and reading descriptions of them.

Mindblog is back...

Still jet-lagged, I'll be taking some time to cobble myself back together again. Here are a few vacation photos of Deric in London, and Len and Deric in Hagley (Hagley is a far western surburb of Birmingham where we used a colleague's house as a base to explore some spots in the Cotswolds). If I ever needed more personal objective data on the decay of one's brain plasticity on aging, I sure got it when I started to drive on the left after a 14 year absence from the UK! What I recalled as being rather fun and effortless (negotiating complex roundabouts, etc.) now went with much more energy, concentration, focus, and stress. This, I presume, reflects the difference between the 67 year old and the 53 year old versions of Deric's brain.

Why health care reform is paralyzed...

In the Aug. 3 issue of the New Yorker, Hertzberg writes a concise and lucid description of why we are the only wealthy democracy on this planet that has failed to get either universal health care or some form of guaranteed health insurance. Other democracies can actually make democratic decisions, we appear to be unable to:

A president may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legilatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legilatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interest can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures - which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat - an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down.

Happiness increasing in the blogosphere...

The following is from the "Random Samples" section of the Aug. 7 issue of Science. This may be just a tad simplistic??

Day in, day out, bloggers pour their feelings onto the Web. Now researchers are mining those outpourings to track society's mood swings.

Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth, applied mathematicians at the University of Vermont, Burlington, automatically searched 2.4 million blogs, via the Web site www.wefeelfine.org, for phrases containing the words "I feel." Their computers then scanned those phrases for 1034 emotionally charged words that a 1999 psychology study had ranked on a happiness scale from 1 (miserable) to 9 (ecstatic). From the words' frequency and scores, an algorithm calculated a net feel-good factor for each day and month.

For the past 4 years, happiness has steadily increased in the blogosphere, Dodds and Danforth reported online recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Spirits spike on Christmas and Valentine's Day but dip on 11 September. The happiest day since 2005 was 4 November 2008, the day of the U.S. presidential election. In contrast, Michael Jackson's death in June triggered a 3-day trough.

The Vermont scientists are now studying Twitter feeds. James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego, says the new method will enable scientists "to take the pulse of the whole world, assessing the mood of human society."

Deric's MindBlog on vacation in the UK.

I've just arrived in London on my second trip of the summer: 16 days in the UK, first staying at a friend's flat near the Baker St. station, then with my partner in a Univ. of Wisconsin colleague's house in Hagley, just west of Birmingham. Deric Bownds' MindBlog will be taking a break unless I find myself in the mood to do some posts during the trip.

Taking turns in conversations - universals and cultural variation

Stivers et al. examine the frequent claims in anthropological literature that cultures differ radically in the timing of conversational turn-taking (e.g. Nordic cultures as slow, New York Jewish culture as fast):

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

The "Neuro Revolution"

German cognitive scientist and writer Stephan Schleim writes a review (download here) that is appropriately critical of Zack Lynch's new spiel "The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World."

Some midweek Chopin - a Polonaise

Mapping the human brain "connectome"

It seems that almost everything can come now with an "-ome" suffix (referring to a totality of some sort. Beyond the original "genome" we now have a long list, including the proteome, speechome, mechanome, etc.). A massive project to establish a human brain connectome, or map of all brain connections, has just received a 30 million dollar cash infusion from the N.I.H. This is an unbelievably daunting task, Over the past century, neuroscientists have used three main sets of anatomical approaches to study neural connectivity: single-cell impregnation, optically based tract-tracing and electron microscopy. More recent techniques involve attaching color markers to intrinsic neuronal labels (shown in figure). Resolution at the electron microscope level, so far done only for the small nervous system of the nematode roundworm, is still technically inaccessible, so that the work will actually be on lower resolution of nerve tracts. But... I wonder then about the minor detail that no two human brains are the same. Even the brains of identical twins have been shown to differ significantly in their activation patterns and connectivity. (The same variability also confounds comparative genome studies.) While it will indeed be exciting, as it was for the human genome, to be told "We now have the first human brain connectome," an awesome amount of work then must follow.

Science Tattoos

An amazing gallery of what people will do to themselves (in the name of science?).

The cognitive neuroscience of dyslexia and its repair

John Gabrieli offers a review article in the July 17 issue of Science. Several clips:

Reading is essential in modern societies, but many children have dyslexia, a difficulty in learning to read. Dyslexia often arises from impaired phonological awareness, the auditory analysis of spoken language that relates the sounds of language to print. Behavioral remediation, especially at a young age, is effective for many, but not all, children. Neuroimaging in children with dyslexia has revealed reduced engagement of the left temporo-parietal cortex for phonological processing of print, altered white-matter connectivity, and functional plasticity associated with effective intervention. Behavioral and brain measures identify infants and young children at risk for dyslexia, and preventive intervention is often effective. A combination of evidence-based teaching practices and cognitive neuroscience measures could prevent dyslexia from occurring in the majority of children who would otherwise develop dyslexia.


Brain activation differences in dyslexia and its treatment. Functional magnetic resonance imaging activations shown on the left hemisphere for phonological processing in typically developing readers (left), age-matched dyslexic readers (middle), and the difference before and after remediation in the same dyslexic readers (right). Red circles identify the frontal region, and blue circles identify the temporo-parietal region of the brain. Both regions are hypoactivated in dyslexia and become more activated after remediation.

Brain changes from childhood to young adulthood

Supekar et al. compare large scale brain functional networks in 7-9 and 19-22 year olds and find that they differ significantly in hierarchical organization and interregional connectivity. Subcortical areas are more strongly connected with primary sensory, association, and paralimbic areas in children, whereas young-adults show stronger cortico-cortical connectivity between paralimbic, limbic, and association areas.

National Institutes of Health to be run by a religionist??

Sam Harris doesn't like the idea. Neither do I.

For a mellow start to the week - a Grieg Nocturne

Reason, emotion, and decision-making

Steven Quartz does an opinion piece in Trends in Cognitive Science noting that the tidy separation of our decision making into cognitive and emotional components is not appropriate. Two slightly edited clips:

Many models of judgment and decision-making (JDM) posit distinct cognitive and emotional contributions to decision-making under uncertainty. Cognitive processes typically involve exact computations according to a cost-benefit calculus, whereas emotional processes typically involve approximate, heuristic processes that deliver rapid evaluations without mental effort. However, it remains largely unknown what specific parameters of uncertain decision the brain encodes, the extent to which these parameters correspond to various decision-making frameworks, and their correspondence to emotional and rational processes. A review of basic research suggests that emotional processes encode in a precise quantitative manner the basic parameters of financial decision theory, indicating a reorientation of emotional and cognitive contributions to risky choice.

Despite the popularity and commonsense appeal of distinguishing between cognitive and emotional contributions to JDM, many fundamental issues remain unresolved. Theories can be characterized in terms of the representations and the computations over those representations they posit, and it remains unclear in what ways cognitive and emotional contributions to JDM differ along these dimensions. That is, at the level of representation, what specific parameters of uncertain decision contexts are encoded by the brain, to what extent do such representations correspond to the parameters of various decision-making frameworks, and to what extent do putatively distinct cognitive and emotional contributions to JDM correspond to distinct underlying representations of uncertain decision contexts? Addressing these issues poses several challenges, not least that competing theories are not behaviorally distinguishable. This suggests that adjudicating among different theories requires neural studies that use quantitative and parametric frameworks with suitable resolution to distinguish among the main parameters of these various models and disassociating the representation of their basic parameters from other potential components of uncertain choice, including learning, motivation and salience. Based on recent work using such experimental designs, I suggest that putative distinctions between cognitive and emotional contributions to JDM at the level of representation collapse. Emerging evidence suggests that emotional contributions to JDM do not encode approximate, heuristic evaluations. Rather, it suggests that emotional processes encode the precise, mathematically defined parameters of traditionally cognitive accounts of decision-making from economics and related fields, such as finance. On a more general note, such findings indicate that once-considered basic distinctions, such as that between cognition and emotion, do not map seamlessly onto brain functioning. That is, just as studies of the deep interconnectivity among emotional and cognitive structures suggests that assigning cognitive or emotional specialization to structures is deeply problematic, proposed functional distinctions, such as complexity differences between emotional and cognitive representations and computations, are likewise problematic.

The unconscionable rip-offs of American cell phone companies

Have an iPhone and fume at AT&T? Get furious over listening to Verizon's long introduction before you can leave a message? (They make 850 million a year by forcing us to sit there and wait).. Pogue writes a nice summary of your frustrations. Also, I can't resist passing on this New Yorker cartoon on the iPhone (click on the cartoon to enlarge it).