Social influence undermines "The Wisdom of Crowds"

Interesting observations from Lorenz et al:

Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects. We compare subjects’ convergence of estimates and improvements in accuracy over five consecutive estimation periods with a control condition, in which no information about others’ responses was provided. Although groups are initially “wise,” knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The “social influence effect” diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The “range reduction effect” moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The “confidence effect” boosts individuals’ confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.

Antiinflammatory drugs oppose antidepressant drug action

Life just got much more complicated for doctors prescribing both antidepressant and anti-inflamatory drugs to the same patient. Greengard and colleagues have found a specific molecular pathway linking cytokines and the actions of antidepressant drugs. Their findings confound established wisdom, because they imply that brain cytokines exert antidepressant actions and mediate the influences of the principal serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant drugs. Doctors now should weigh the benefits of antiinflammatory agents against their possible lessening of the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs.

Anti-inflammatory drugs achieve their therapeutic actions at least in part by regulation of cytokine formation. A “cytokine hypothesis” of depression is supported by the observation that depressed individuals have elevated plasma levels of certain cytokines compared with healthy controls. Here we investigated a possible interaction between antidepressant agents and anti-inflammatory agents on antidepressant-induced behaviors and on p11, a biochemical marker of depressive-like states and antidepressant responses. We found that widely used anti-inflammatory drugs antagonize both biochemical and behavioral responses to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In contrast to the levels detected in serum, we found that frontal cortical levels of certain cytokines (e.g., TNFα and IFNγ) were increased by serotonergic antidepressants and that these effects were inhibited by anti-inflammatory agents. The antagonistic effect of anti-inflammatory agents on antidepressant-induced behaviors was confirmed by analysis of a dataset from a large-scale real-world human study, “sequenced treatment alternatives to relieve depression” (STAR*D), underscoring the clinical significance of our findings. Our data indicate that clinicians should carefully balance the therapeutic benefits of anti-inflammatory agents versus the potentially negative consequences of antagonizing the therapeutic efficacy of antidepressant agents in patients suffering from depression.

The echo chamber online.

Natasha Singer does an interesting article noting Eli Pariser's new book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You,” and citing the opinions of several web gurus on how we are increasingly being encased in cocoons of information (passed through filters knowing our previous behavior) that reinforce our existing opinions and tastes.

Mozart - Fantasia in C Minor

Len and I held our annual Musical/Social at our Twin Valley Road home Sunday afternoon May 22. I performed this program for about 50 friends:

An afternoon of Fantasias:
Mozart - Fantasia in C Minor
Haydn - Fantasia in C Major
Chopin - Fantasy in F Minor
Liszt - Années de pèlerinage - Vallee d'Obermann
Debussy - Estampes III. Jardins sous la pluie

I did a video recording of the performance, but the conditions were not optimal, with background noises, etc.. so I am over the next period of time going to make a proper high quality audio recording of each of the pieces, synching it a video recording stripped of its lower quality sound. The upload of the first of these to YouTube is below, The Mozart Fantasia in C Minor.

“Representational rigidity” in our aging brains

Great...here we have Yassa et al. showing how a portion of the brain is doing what my knee joints are slowing doing, becoming more rigid with age. They look at the "place cells" in the hippocampus thought to be involved with discriminating between similar patterns. Long-term memory functions deteriorate with age, and the hippocampus, which play a role in learning new facts and remembering events, is one the sites that undergo the earliest changes.

Converging data from rodents and humans have demonstrated an age-related decline in pattern separation abilities (the ability to discriminate among similar experiences). Several studies have proposed the dentate and CA3 subfields of the hippocampus as the potential locus of this change. Specifically, these studies identified rigidity in place cell remapping in similar environments in the CA3. We used high-resolution fMRI to examine activity profiles in the dentate gyrus and CA3 in young and older adults as stimulus similarity was incrementally varied. We report evidence for “representational rigidity” in older adults’ dentate/CA3 that is linked to behavioral discrimination deficits. Using ultrahigh-resolution diffusion imaging, we quantified both the integrity of the perforant path as well as dentate/CA3 dendritic changes and found that both were correlated with dentate/CA3 functional rigidity. These results highlight structural and functional alterations in the hippocampal network that predict age-related changes in memory function and present potential targets for intervention.

MindBlog posts this summer.

With the arrival of the summer, and the start of my 11th year as an emeritus (i.e. retired) University of Wisconsin professor, I am wanting to relax the self-imposed obligation or drumbeat of a daily blog post. I am keenly aware of how my attentional capacities are slowly waning, as the number of little grey cells between the ears decreases. The time I spend scanning the tables of contents of various journals, reading a much larger number of articles than are mentioned in posts, and frequently settling for ‘good enough’ blog posts, is detracting from my getting into potential longer term personal and professional projects. So, for the next period of time, I'm going to spend less time cruising for material, and have a go at only posting what I come across that really strikes me.

Nightclub owner? Use perfume...

Here is an amusing bit...not surprisingly, smells in the environment change behavior. The summary from Science Alert:

In nightclubs, body odors and the stench of stale beer stand out. Most nightclubs now forbid smoking which, for better or worse, used to cover up those smells. Can giving patrons whiffs of something more fragrant make them happy and coax them into buying more drinks? A private company called MoodScent in Amsterdam, whose mission is to "revolutionize the nightclub experience," thinks so. Along with a pair of university researchers, they pumped orange, seawater, and peppermint scents into a set of three clubs in Germany and Holland over different nights. They filmed the clubbers and rated them on their dancing, and had them fill out questionnaires as they left. Online in Chemosensory Perception this month, the authors report that visitors were more cheerful, danced harder, and were more confident in approaching the opposite sex when there was a scent—it didn't matter which one. The clubs' alcohol sales were higher, too.

Control your spotlight

Here are excerpts from Jonah Lehrer's contribution to the Edge.org question "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"  He discusses Mischel's work showing that it is not willpower, but "strategic allocation of attention" that leads to successful life outcomes.  His simple experiment was to offer 4-year olds either one marshmallow immediately, or two marshmallows if they waited while he stepped out for a few minutes. Mischel:

...discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these "high delayers" all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs from "Sesame Street," or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn't defeated — it was merely forgotten. ...Mischel refers to this skill as the "strategic allocation of attention," and he argues that it's the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that's wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory.

...this cognitive skill...seems to be a core part of success in the real world...when Mischel followed up with the initial subjects 13 years later — they were now high school seniors — he realized that performance on the marshmallow task was highly predictive on a vast range of metrics. Those kids who struggled to wait at the age of four were also more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. Most impressive, perhaps, were the academic numbers: The little kid who could wait fifteen minutes for their marshmallow had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

These correlations demonstrate the importance of learning to strategically allocate our attention. When we properly control the spotlight, we can resist negative thoughts and dangerous temptations. We can walk away from fights and improve our odds against addiction. Our decisions are driven by the facts and feelings bouncing around the brain — the allocation of attention allows us to direct this haphazard process, as we consciously select the thoughts we want to think about.

Furthermore, this mental skill is only getting more valuable. We live, after all, in the age of information, which makes the ability to focus on the important information incredibly important. (Herbert Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.") The brain is a bounded machine and the world is a confusing place, full of data and distractions — intelligence is the ability to parse the data so that it makes just a little bit more sense. Like willpower, this ability requires the strategic allocation of attention.

Predicting the conscious experience of other people

Here is a fascinating abstract for one of the lectures, by Geraint Rees and colleagues, at the upcoming 15th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Mind reading with machines may be closer than we think.

There has been considerable interest in using multivariate decoding techniques applied to fMRI signals in order to decode the contents of consciousness. The use of such signals has inherent disadvantages due to the delay of the hemodynamic response. Moreover to date it has not been shown possible to generalize the decoding of brain signals from one individual to another. This limits the potential utility of such approaches. Here we used a different approach that circumvented these difficulties by using magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals to decode the contents of consciousness, and to test whether such correlates generalized reliably across individuals. We recorded the MEG of 8 healthy participants while they viewed an intermittently presented binocular rivalry stimulus consisting of a face and a grating. Using a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure, we trained support vector machines on the MEG signals to decode the rivalry percept. Decoding was significantly better than chance in all participants. We then tested whether a support vector machine trained on MEG signals from one participant could successfully decode the rivalry percept of another. Again, decoding accuracy was significantly better than chance. These findings demonstrate that it is possible to decode perception independently of physical stimulation using MEG signals in near real time in a way that generalizes across individuals. Our findings indicate that certain neural mechanisms universally covary with the contents of visual consciousness, and mark a potentially important step in the design of devices for decoding the contents of consciousness in individuals unable to report their experience behaviorally.

Musical experience enhances hearing in the aging brain

Parbery-Clark et al. perk me up a bit with this bit of work, suggesting that without my musical training, my increasing difficulty in hearing speech in noise might be worse!

Much of our daily communication occurs in the presence of background noise, compromising our ability to hear. While understanding speech in noise is a challenge for everyone, it becomes increasingly difficult as we age. Although aging is generally accompanied by hearing loss, this perceptual decline cannot fully account for the difficulties experienced by older adults for hearing in noise. Decreased cognitive skills concurrent with reduced perceptual acuity are thought to contribute to the difficulty older adults experience understanding speech in noise. Given that musical experience positively impacts speech perception in noise in young adults (ages 18–30), we asked whether musical experience benefits an older cohort of musicians (ages 45–65), potentially offsetting the age-related decline in speech-in-noise perceptual abilities and associated cognitive function (i.e., working memory). Consistent with performance in young adults, older musicians demonstrated enhanced speech-in-noise perception relative to nonmusicians along with greater auditory, but not visual, working memory capacity. By demonstrating that speech-in-noise perception and related cognitive function are enhanced in older musicians, our results imply that musical training may reduce the impact of age-related auditory decline.

Guilt motivates cooperation

An article by Chang et al. in Cell examines neural, psychological, and economic bases of guilt aversion. They use fMRI during a game involving trust to demonstrate that signals rising in the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and elsewhere promote cooperative behavior in the game, possibly facilitated by the psychological motivation to avoid disappointing others. The abstract includes an outline summary and a video discussion of the work.

Highlights
Guilt can be formally operationalized as failing to live up to another's expectations
Guilt aversion motivates cooperative behavior
Decisions which minimize future guilt are associated with insula, SMA, DLPFC, TPJ
Decisions which maximize financial reward are associated with vmPFC, NAcc, DMPFC

Summary
Why do people often choose to cooperate when they can better serve their interests by acting selfishly? One potential mechanism is that the anticipation of guilt can motivate cooperative behavior. We utilize a formal model of this process in conjunction with fMRI to identify brain regions that mediate cooperative behavior while participants decided whether or not to honor a partner's trust. We observed increased activation in the insula, supplementary motor area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), and temporal parietal junction when participants were behaving consistent with our model, and found increased activity in the ventromedial PFC, dorsomedial PFC, and nucleus accumbens when they chose to abuse trust and maximize their financial reward. This study demonstrates that a neural system previously implicated in expectation processing plays a critical role in assessing moral sentiments that in turn can sustain human cooperation in the face of temptation.

A correlate of our distractability in our brain's parietal cortex

From Kanai et al.:

We all appreciate that some of our friends and colleagues are more distractible than others. This variability can be captured by pencil and paper questionnaires in which individuals report such cognitive failures in their everyday life. Surprisingly, these self-report measures have high heritability, leading to the hypothesis that distractibility might have a basis in brain structure. In a large sample of healthy adults, we demonstrated that a simple self-report measure of everyday distractibility accurately predicted gray matter volume in a remarkably focal region of left superior parietal cortex. This region must play a causal role in reducing distractibility, because we found that disrupting its function with transcranial magnetic stimulation increased susceptibility to distraction. Finally, we showed that the self-report measure of distractibility reliably predicted our laboratory-based measure of attentional capture. Our findings distinguish a critical mechanism in the human brain causally involved in avoiding distractibility, which, importantly, bridges self-report judgments of cognitive failures in everyday life and a commonly used laboratory measure of distractibility to the structure of the human brain.

Is happiness overrated?

John Tierney does a nice article on Martin Seligman, the founder of the positive psychology movement, who has modified his views since the appearance of his 2002 best selling book "Authentic Happiness" - whose title he now regrets.  Seligman has subsequently noted limitations of the 'authentic happiness' concept,  suggested by observations of people proceeding joylessly and repetitively through tasks such as making lots of money, playing bridge -  repeating and accumulating in the apparent absence of any positive emotion - suggesting that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.

This feeling of accomplishment contributes to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “well-being” or “flourishing,” a concept that Dr. Seligman has borrowed for the title of his new book, “Flourish.” He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment...
“Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,” he writes. “Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”

...The best gauge so far of flourishing, Dr. Seligman says, comes from a study of 23 European countries by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So of the University of Cambridge. Besides asking respondents about their moods, the researchers asked about their relationships with others and their sense that they were accomplishing something worthwhile.

Denmark and Switzerland ranked highest in Europe, with more than a quarter of their citizens meeting the definition of flourishing. Near the bottom, with fewer than 10 percent flourishing, were France, Hungary, Portugal and Russia.

Language processing in our visual brain

Bedny et al. make the fascinating observation that some regions of the visual cortex of congenitally blind people become active in processing verbal tasks. Thus, brain areas thought to have evolved for vision can take on language processing as a result of early experience, innate microcircuit wiring properties specific to language are not required.

Humans are thought to have evolved brain regions in the left frontal and temporal cortex that are uniquely capable of language processing. However, congenitally blind individuals also activate the visual cortex in some verbal tasks. We provide evidence that this visual cortex activity in fact reflects language processing. We find that in congenitally blind individuals, the left visual cortex behaves similarly to classic language regions: (i) BOLD signal is higher during sentence comprehension than during linguistically degraded control conditions that are more difficult; (ii) BOLD signal is modulated by phonological information, lexical semantic information, and sentence-level combinatorial structure; and (iii) functional connectivity with language regions in the left prefrontal cortex and thalamus are increased relative to sighted individuals. We conclude that brain regions that are thought to have evolved for vision can take on language processing as a result of early experience. Innate microcircuit properties are not necessary for a brain region to become involved in language processing.

Twitter/Facebook/Our Brain

I recommend checking out this entertaining exchange,  also these comments on whether Facebook helps or hinders offline friendships.

No sleep, better mood...

It is known that sleep deprivation leads to exaggerated neural and behavioral reactivity to negative, aversive experiences, but some patients with depression seem to perk up with lack of sleep. Gujar et al. now find that sleep deprivation also increases the reactivity of our brain reward networks, biasing us towards more positive appraisals of good emotional experiences. They did MRI measurements on 14 people who hadn't slept for about 36 hours while presenting them with emotionally neutral and pleasant-looking images. The volunteers rated a greater proportion of the images as 'pleasant' than did people who had maintained a normal sleep routine.:

....Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), .. we demonstrate that sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity throughout human mesolimbic reward brain networks in response to pleasure-evoking stimuli. In addition, this amplified reactivity was associated with enhanced connectivity in early primary visual processing pathways and extended limbic regions, yet with a reduction in coupling with medial frontal and orbitofrontal regions. These neural changes were accompanied by a biased increase in the number of emotional stimuli judged as pleasant in the sleep-deprived group, the extent of which exclusively correlated with activity in mesolimbic regions. Together, these data support a view that sleep deprivation not only is associated with enhanced reactivity toward negative stimuli, but imposes a bidirectional nature of affective imbalance, associated with amplified reward-relevant reactivity toward pleasure-evoking stimuli also. Such findings may offer a neural foundation on which to consider interactions between sleep loss and emotional reactivity in a variety of clinical mood disorders.

Academics and health of minority students improved by brief social-belonging intervention

From Walton and Cohen, who briefly presented to half of the students in the study a narrative that framed social adversity in school as shared and short-lived. The message encouraged students to attribute adversity not to fixed deficits unique to themselves or their ethnic group but to common and transient aspects of the college-adjustment process.

A brief intervention aimed at buttressing college freshmen’s sense of social belonging in school was tested in a randomized controlled trial (N = 92), and its academic and health-related consequences over 3 years are reported. The intervention aimed to lessen psychological perceptions of threat on campus by framing social adversity as common and transient. It used subtle attitude-change strategies to lead participants to self-generate the intervention message. The intervention was expected to be particularly beneficial to African-American students (N = 49), a stereotyped and socially marginalized group in academics, and less so to European-American students (N = 43). Consistent with these expectations, over the 3-year observation period the intervention raised African Americans’ grade-point average (GPA) relative to multiple control groups and halved the minority achievement gap. This performance boost was mediated by the effect of the intervention on subjective construal: It prevented students from seeing adversity on campus as an indictment of their belonging. Additionally, the intervention improved African Americans’ self-reported health and well-being and reduced their reported number of doctor visits 3 years postintervention. Senior-year surveys indicated no awareness among participants of the intervention’s impact. The results suggest that social belonging is a psychological lever where targeted intervention can have broad consequences that lessen inequalities in achievement and health.

Raw GPA by student race, experimental condition, and academic term. Means are noncumulative and were combined across cohorts. Ranges in sample sizes and standard errors for European Americans are N = 25 to 33 and SE = 0.08 to 0.14; for African Americans, N = 30 to 37 and SE = 0.09 to 0.12.

Nice guys finish first...

Here is a nice compilation and review of the messages in several books I have mentioned in previous posts.   David Brooks does his usual interesting summary on a contemporary topic in social and evolutionary psychology -  in this case the evolution of cooperation.

Cultural attractors

I'm not exactly breaking any speed records getting through my scan of the responses to Edge.org's annual question of the year - "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" Here is one more:

Dan Sperber - Cultural Attractors

In 1967, Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of a meme: a unit of cultural transmission capable of replicating itself and of undergoing Darwinian selection...I want to suggest that the concept of a meme should be, if not replaced, at least supplemented with that of a cultural attractor.

...bits of culture — memes if you want to dilute the notion and call them that — remain self-similar not because they are replicated again and again but because variations that occur at almost every turn in their repeated transmission, rather than resulting in "random walks" drifting away in all directions from an initial model, tend to gravitate around cultural attractors. Ending Little Red Riding Hood when the wolf eats the child would make for a simpler story to remember, but a Happy Ending is too powerful a cultural attractor.

...Why should there be cultural attractors at all? Because there are in our minds, our bodies, and our environment biasing factors that affect the way we interpret and re-produce ideas and behaviors...When these biasing factors are shared in a population, cultural attractors emerge.

...Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: they are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So, we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issue of journals, millionth copy sold of a record, and so on.

...In the diffusion of techniques and artifacts, efficiency is a powerful cultural attractor...Much more than faithful replication, this attraction of efficiency when there aren't that many ways of being efficient, explains the cultural stability (and also the historical transformations) of various technical traditions.

...And what is the attractor around which the "meme" meme gravitate? The meme idea — or rather a constellation of trivialized versions of it — has become an extraordinarily successful bit of contemporary culture not because it has been faithfully replicated again and again, but because our conversation often does revolve — and here is the cultural attractor — around remarkably successful bits of culture that, in the time of mass media and the internet, pop up more and more frequently and are indeed quite relevant to our understanding of the world we live in.

Testosterone and economic risk aversion.

Here is a curious finding... people with low or high levels of testosterone are less aversive to economic risk:

Testosterone is positively associated with risk-taking behavior in social domains (e.g., crime, physical aggression). However, the scant research linking testosterone to economic risk preferences presents inconsistent findings. We examined the relationship between endogenous testosterone and individuals’ economic preferences (i.e., risk preference, ambiguity preference, and loss aversion) in a large sample (N = 298) of men and women. We found that endogenous testosterone levels have a significant U-shaped association with individuals’ risk and ambiguity preferences, but not loss aversion. Specifically, individuals with low or high levels of testosterone (more than 1.5 SD from the mean for their gender) were risk and ambiguity neutral, whereas individuals with intermediate levels of testosterone were risk and ambiguity averse. This relationship was highly similar in men and women. In contrast to received wisdom regarding testosterone and risk, the present data provide the first robust evidence for a nonlinear association between economic preferences and levels of endogenous testosterone.

[Note: Mean salivary testosterone concentrations were 86.5 pg/mL (SD = 26.0) for men and 14.2 pg/mL (SD = 7.0) for women]

Education, religion, and wealth

An interesting graphic from yesterday's New York Times Magazine.  (X axis is percentage of college graduates, Y axis is percentage of households with annual income above $75,000, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baptists at lower left, reform Jews and Hindus at upper right, secularists just above middle of the line.).  Click on the graphic to enlarge it. :

Black Swan Technology

Vinod Khosla's answer to the Edge.org question "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?":

The Black Swan Technology

Think back to the world 10 years ago. Google had just gotten started; Facebook and Twitter didn't exist. There were no smart phones, no one remotely conceived of the possibility of the 100,000 iPhone apps that exist today. The few large impact technologies (versus slightly incremental advances in technologies) that occurred in the past 10 years were black swan technologies...I believe "black swan technology" is a conceptual tool that should be added to everyone's cognitive toolkit today is simply because the challenges of climate change and energy production we face today are too big to be tackled by known solutions and safe bets.

So what are these next generation technologies, these black swan technologies of energy? These are risky investments that stand a high chance of failure, but enable larger technological leaps that promise earthshaking impact if successful: making solar power cheaper than coal or viable without subsidies, economically making lighting and air conditioning 80 percent more efficient. Consider 100 percent more efficient vehicle engines, ultra-cheap energy storage, and countless other technological leaps that we can't yet imagine. It's unlikely that any single shot works, of course. But even 10 Google-like disruptions out of 10,000 shots will completely upend conventional wisdom, econometric forecasts, and, most importantly, our energy future.

To do so we must reinvent the infrastructure of society by harnessing and motivating bright minds with a whole new set of future assumptions, asking "what could possibly be?" rather than "what is." We need to create a dynamic environment of creative contention and collective brilliance that will yield innovative ideas from across disciplines to allow innovation to triumph. We must encourage a social ecosystem that encourages taking risks on innovation. Popularization of the concept of the "Black Swan Technology," is essential to incorporate the right mindset into the minds of entrepreneurs, policymakers, investors and the public: that anything (maybe even everything) is possible. If we harness and motivate these bright new minds with the right market signals and encouragement, a whole new set of future assumptions, unimaginable today, will be tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

Dirty Liberals!

Helzer and Pazarro make some interesting associations between reminders of physical cleanliness and moral and political attitudes. Their abstract, with a few parenthetic additions:

Many moral codes place a special emphasis on bodily purity, and manipulations that directly target bodily purity have been shown to influence a variety of moral judgments. Across two studies, we demonstrated that reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. In the first study, individuals (the usual gaggle of college undergraduates used in studies like this, 60 in this case) in a public setting (entering the hallway of a building) who were given a reminder of physical cleansing (questioned near a wall mounted hand sanitizer) reported being more politically conservative than did individuals who were not given such a reminder (and did not see the sanitizer). In a second study, individuals reminded of physical cleansing in the laboratory (a wall sign about air born contaminants, use of hand wipes) demonstrated harsher moral judgments toward violations of sexual purity and were more likely to report being politically conservative than control participants. Together, these experiments provide further evidence of a deep link between physical purity and moral judgment, and they offer preliminary evidence that manipulations of physical purity can influence general (and putatively stable) political attitudes.

A monkey could paint that well!... apparently not

Maybe abstract art is more accessible than I thought...From Hawley-Dolan and Winner:

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., “artist,” “child”) that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups’ judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists’ intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.

New happiness research

While I seldom mention (and am remiss in even reading) other blogs,  this item in the Freakonomics blog caught my attention. It starts with a summary discussion by NYU economics professor William Easterly who reminds us of the Easterlin paradox, which stipulates that it is our income relative to our peers rather than our absolute income that determines our happiness.

...the paradox has not held up that well, although it survives in some truncated form. The first important finding that has emerged from the new flood of data is that the original idea of “happiness” failed to discriminate adequately between two different ideas: first, emotional feelings of “happiness”, measured on a day-to-day basis; and second, a more stable, long-run satisfaction with one’s life. The first continues to be called “happiness” ... while the second is now called “life satisfaction”. Both are valid and useful concepts, but they should not be confused. The newest surveys do a good job at measuring the two separately. The Easterlin paradox turns out to hold much more with “happiness” than with “life satisfaction”....The piece of the Easterlin paradox that really falls apart with newer data is his evidence that there was little difference between rich and poor countries on average happiness. Especially with the life satisfaction concept and a much larger sample, the differences are now recognised as vast...

Brain Buzz, a 9 volt battery and some wires...

Here in an engaging review by Douglas Fox, of efforts to enhance learning and intelligence by transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), which is as simple as hooking up a 9 volt battery and an appropriate resistor (remember ohm's law? I= E/R) to deliver about a 2 milliamp current to the scalp. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded research showing that a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq is learned twice as quickly during the electrical stimulation. Fox discusses a number of other studies, as well as debate surrounding the technique.

Language evolution inferred from phonemic diversity

Atkinson has done an analysis that strongly points to a single African origin of modern human languages. The greatest diversity in phonemes (perceptually distinct units of sound that differentiate words) in languages spoken today is found in Africa. These include strange sounding (to westerners) clicks and staccato noises. His abstract, and a figure from the paper:

Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.

Language locations and regional variation in phonemic diversity. (A) Map showing the location of the 504 sampled languages for which phoneme data was compiled from the WALS database. (B) Box plots of overall phonemic diversity by region reveal substantial regional variation, with the highest diversity in Africa and the lowest diversity in Oceania and South America. The same regional pattern also applies at the language family level.

Slow spring at Twin Valley

I returned to the 1860 stone schoolhouse that is my home in Middleton Wisconsin April 12,  having no idea that spring would be so chilly and slow here.  The picture shows the few blooms that have appeared.  The Magnolia bush behind the daffodils is usually in full bloom at this time. 

 

Monkey memory.

We now have the collapse of yet another supposed barrier between the minds of men and monkeys. It is known that monkeys can recognize pictures they have seen before (in experiments in which they are rewarded for doing so), but Basile and Hampton have devised a further behavioral protocol that let's them demonstrate recall, holding in mind an object without actually seeing it. Language is not necessary — either for having the ability to recall, or for proving it to an experimenter. Here is their abstract:

If you draw from memory a picture of the front of your childhood home, you will have demonstrated recall. You could also recognize this house upon seeing it. Unlike recognition, recall demonstrates memory for things that are not present. Recall is necessary for planning and imagining, and it can increase the flexibility of navigation, social behavior, and other cognitive skills. Without recall, memory is more limited to recognition of the immediate environment. Amnesic patients are impaired on recall tests, and recall performance often declines with aging. Despite its importance, we know relatively little about nonhuman animals' ability to recall information; we lack suitable recall tests for them and depend instead on recognition tests to measure nonhuman memory. Here we report that rhesus monkeys can recall simple shapes from memory and reproduce them on a touchscreen. As in humans , monkeys remembered less in recall than recognition tests, and their recall performance deteriorated more slowly. Transfer tests showed that monkeys used a flexible memory mechanism rather than memorizing specific actions for each shape. Observation of recall in Old World monkeys suggests that it has been adaptive for over 30 million years and does not depend on language.

Here is the basic protocol, as described by Nicholas Bakalar's NYTimes summary:

Researchers trained five rhesus monkeys. On a 5-by-5-inch grid on a computer screen, the monkeys were shown a shape consisting of three adjacent squares, one blue and two red in various patterns...After a moment, the red squares disappear, and the blue square moves to a different box on the grid. After another delay, the monkey has to restore the red squares to their original places in relation to the blue one by pressing on the correct boxes of the grid. When he does so successfully, he gets a food reward.

Increasing vanity in our culture.

John Tierney points to some fascinating work that looks at the lyrics of popular songs to assay our culture's increasing self absorption:

...after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

Last year, data from studies on nearly 50,000 students was subjected to a meta-analysis published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, that confirmed that narcissism has increased significantly in the past three decades. During this period, there have also been reports of higher levels of loneliness and depression

Healing anxiety disorders with cortisol

Around 6% of the adult population experiences some degree of acrophobia, strong anxiety and dizziness on exposure to, or anticipation of, a range of height-related situations. In some, but not all, people this condition can be ameliorated by behavioral therapy aimed at achieving habituation and eventual extinction of the phobic reaction by presenting them with the real or imagined phobic situation in a graduated way. de Quervain et al. show this therapy can be enhanced if a cortisol pill is taken one hour before a therapy session:

Behavioral exposure therapy of anxiety disorders is believed to rely on fear extinction. Because preclinical studies have shown that glucocorticoids can promote extinction processes, we aimed at investigating whether the administration of these hormones might be useful in enhancing exposure therapy. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, 40 patients with specific phobia for heights were treated with three sessions of exposure therapy using virtual reality exposure to heights. Cortisol (20 mg) or placebo was administered orally 1 h before each of the treatment sessions. Subjects returned for a posttreatment assessment 3–5 d after the last treatment session and for a follow-up assessment after 1 mo. Adding cortisol to exposure therapy resulted in a significantly greater reduction in fear of heights as measured with the acrophobia questionnaire (AQ) both at posttreatment and at follow-up, compared with placebo. Furthermore, subjects receiving cortisol showed a significantly greater reduction in acute anxiety during virtual exposure to a phobic situation at posttreatment and a significantly smaller exposure-induced increase in skin conductance level at follow-up. The present findings indicate that the administration of cortisol can enhance extinction-based psychotherapy.

Heartbeat synchrony between performer and crowd - emotional resonance

Amazing observations on the annual fire walking ritual in the Spanish village of San Pedro Manrique. Researchers were stymied in their efforts to measure physiological parameters such as blood pressure, cortisol levels, or pain tolerance in individuals as they were walking across a bed of hot coals, but were able to put heart rate monitors on both fire-walkers and spectators. It was a small study, monitoring heart rates of 12 fire-walkers, 9 spectators related to fire-walkers, and 17 unrelated spectators who were just visiting.

The heart rates of relatives and friends of the fire-walkers followed an almost identical pattern to the fire-walkers’ rates, spiking and dropping almost in synchrony. The heart rates of visiting spectators did not. The relatives’ rates synchronized throughout the event, which lasted 30 minutes, with 28 fire-walkers each making five-second walks. So relatives or friends’ heart rates matched a fire-walker’s rate before, during and after his walk. Even people related to other fire-walkers showed similar patterns.

This cohesion and solidarity happened in spectators who were simply watching, not sharing with performers the movements, vocalizations, or rhythms usually presumed to accompany social bonding through emotional resonance.  (added later...here is the PNAS article on this.)

Have your legal hearing just after the judge’s lunch break.

Fascinating observations by Danziger et al.:

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.

Physical pain and social rejection: same brain areas

This open access article by Kross et al. is well worth a look. It is a beautiful example of piggybacking a newer kind of human social emotion on top of brain area that originally evolved to deal with physical insults:

How similar are the experiences of social rejection and physical pain? Extant research suggests that a network of brain regions that support the affective but not the sensory components of physical pain underlie both experiences. Here we demonstrate that when rejection is powerfully elicited—by having people who recently experienced an unwanted break-up view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected—areas that support the sensory components of physical pain (secondary somatosensory cortex; dorsal posterior insula) become active. We demonstrate the overlap between social rejection and physical pain in these areas by comparing both conditions in the same individuals using functional MRI. We further demonstrate the specificity of the secondary somatosensory cortex and dorsal posterior insula activity to physical pain by comparing activated locations in our study with a database of over 500 published studies. Activation in these regions was highly diagnostic of physical pain, with positive predictive values up to 88%. These results give new meaning to the idea that rejection “hurts.” They demonstrate that rejection and physical pain are similar not only in that they are both distressing—they share a common somatosensory representation as well.

"Evolving the I" a MindBlog lecture at the Univ. of Wisconsin

I thought I would pass on to MindBlog readers a a web version of the lecture I gave last Thursday to the Evolution Seminar Series at the Univ. of Wisconsin Madison where I am an Emeritus Professor. The title and topics:

Making Minds - Evolving and Constructing the “I”

I. Evolving brains.
The Beast Within
Mirroring
Varieties of “I”

II. Developing brains
Physical environment
Social environment

III. Modeling the subjective self:
The illusion of agency
The virtual machine and virtual organs
Emotions as evolved organs of consciousness

IV. Embodied cognition
Social emotions
Metaphor
Art and Music

V. Summary - the Self Illusion

Why old folks don’t sleep as well.

Older people have an earlier phase of everyday activity compared with the young. Not only is the consolidation of sleep and wake dramatically reduced, but overall circadian amplitude of hormones and body temperature are lower. Now Pagani et al. find that the biological clocks in cells taken from young and old people have the same periods, but they can be shortened by a heat labile factor in blood serum from older people. Identification of this factor might lead to development of drugs that block its action.:

Human aging is accompanied by dramatic changes in daily sleep–wake behavior: Activity shifts to an earlier phase, and the consolidation of sleep and wake is disturbed. Although this daily circadian rhythm is brain-controlled, its mechanism is encoded by cell-autonomous circadian clocks functioning in nearly every cell of the body. In fact, human clock properties measured in peripheral cells such as fibroblasts closely mimic those measured physiologically and behaviorally in the same subjects. To understand better the molecular mechanisms by which human aging affects circadian clocks, we characterized the clock properties of fibroblasts cultivated from dermal biopsies of young and older subjects. Fibroblast period length, amplitude, and phase were identical in the two groups even though behavior was not, thereby suggesting that basic clock properties of peripheral cells do not change during aging. Interestingly, measurement of the same cells in the presence of human serum from older donors shortened period length and advanced the phase of cellular circadian rhythms compared with treatment with serum from young subjects, indicating that a circulating factor might alter human chronotype. Further experiments demonstrated that this effect is caused by a thermolabile factor present in serum of older individuals. Thus, even though the molecular machinery of peripheral circadian clocks does not change with age, some age-related circadian dysfunction observed in vivo might be of hormonal origin and therefore might be pharmacologically remediable.

Yet another distortion of democracy.

An interesting study from Davis et al., on the effects of instantaneous polling while an election debate is proceeding:

A recent innovation in televised election debates is a continuous response measure (commonly referred to as the “worm”) that allows viewers to track the response of a sample of undecided voters in real-time. A potential danger of presenting such data is that it may prevent people from making independent evaluations. We report an experiment with 150 participants in which we manipulated the worm and superimposed it on a live broadcast of a UK election debate. The majority of viewers were unaware that the worm had been manipulated, and yet we were able to influence their perception of who won the debate, their choice of preferred prime minister, and their voting intentions. We argue that there is an urgent need to reconsider the simultaneous broadcast of average response data with televised election debates.

Religion and brain atrophy...

I guess I might as well continue the religion theme of yesterday's post with this piece from Owen et al., on religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in later life:

Despite a growing interest in the ways spiritual beliefs and practices are reflected in brain activity, there have been relatively few studies using neuroimaging data to assess potential relationships between religious factors and structural neuroanatomy. This study examined prospective relationships between religious factors and hippocampal volume change using high-resolution MRI data of a sample of 268 older adults. Religious factors assessed included life-changing religious experiences, spiritual practices, and religious group membership. Hippocampal volumes were analyzed using the GRID program, which is based on a manual point-counting method and allows for semi-automated determination of region of interest volumes. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. These associations were not explained by psychosocial or demographic factors, or baseline cerebral volume. Hippocampal volume has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease. The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.

How to decrease belief in intelligent design

Tracy et al. make the encouraging observation that teaching existential meaning in naturalism can decrease belief in intelligent design. Their research:

...examined the psychological motives underlying widespread support for intelligent design theory (IDT), a purportedly scientific theory that lacks any scientific evidence; and antagonism toward evolutionary theory (ET), a theory supported by a large body of scientific evidence. We tested whether these attitudes are influenced by IDT's provision of an explanation of life's origins that better addresses existential concerns than ET. In four studies, existential threat (induced via reminders of participants' own mortality) increased acceptance of IDT and/or rejection of ET, regardless of participants' religion, religiosity, educational background, or preexisting attitude toward evolution. Effects were reversed by teaching participants that naturalism can be a source of existential meaning (see text clip of Dawkins' writing just below), and among natural-science students for whom ET may already provide existential meaning. These reversals suggest that the effect of heightened mortality awareness on attitudes toward ET and IDT is due to a desire to find greater meaning and purpose in science when existential threats are activated.

(sample clip from Dawkins: "It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. And understanding the nature of the world and the nature of ourselves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about. Truth should be pursued, and science helps us pursue it; science gives us meaning.")

Liberal and Conservative brains

Greg Miller does a commentary on Kanai et al.'s study of correlations between political orientation and brain structure. The Kanai et al. abstract:

Highlights:

-Political liberalism and conservatism were correlated with brain structure
-Liberalism was associated with the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex
-Conservatism was associated with increased right amygdala size
-Results offer possible accounts for cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives

Summary:

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2,3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4,6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.

Multitasking compromises short term memory in seniors.

Sigh... A careful noting "by Clapp et al. of the "deficient ability to dynamically switch between functional brain networks" that I so clearly note in my 69 year old brain as I sit here in front of my new toy, an Apple 27" cinema display monitor I'm using to do four simultaneous tasks (and can't remember activities a few steps back when I switch to a different window) ..... Their basic observation is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.

Multitasking negatively influences the retention of information over brief periods of time. This impact of interference on working memory is exacerbated with normal aging. We used functional MRI to investigate the neural basis by which an interruption is more disruptive to working memory performance in older individuals. Younger and older adults engaged in delayed recognition tasks both with and without interruption by a secondary task. Behavioral analysis revealed that working memory performance was more impaired by interruptions in older compared with younger adults. Functional connectivity analyses showed that when interrupted, older adults disengaged from a memory maintenance network and reallocated attentional resources toward the interrupting stimulus in a manner consistent with younger adults. However, unlike younger individuals, older adults failed to both disengage from the interruption and reestablish functional connections associated with the disrupted memory network. These results suggest that multitasking leads to more significant working memory disruption in older adults because of an interruption recovery failure, manifest as a deficient ability to dynamically switch between functional brain networks.

Neuromarketing - not ready for prime time...

I don't usually react to emails suggesting that mindblog consider mentioning what turn out to be commercial sites, but I thought the points raised by Dan Hill in this article (PDF) were quite interesting, apart from the fact this his company, Sensory Logic, would like to sell your business their services on facial analysis of emotional reactions to stimuli or services. His contention is that facial coding, which follows the response of 43 facial muscles that signal emotion, is superior to other emotional monitors such as EMG (bio feedback), EEG (electrical activity on or just below the scalp), or fMRI (brain scans).

Juvenile training improves adult skills - at a cost.

Sarro and Sanes ask whether there are long-term effects of early sensory training that can only be assessed after maturation. The experiments examine auditory processing in gerbils and find that early training in detecting amplitude modulation yield adults with abilities superior to other animals trained as adults. This would probably hold for us humans, but you don't do conditioned avoidance experiments on human infants...

Sensory experience during development can modify the CNS and alter adult perceptual skills. While this principle draws support from deprivation or chronic stimulus exposure studies, the effect of training is addressed only in adults. Here, we asked whether a brief period of training during development can exert a unique impact on adult perceptual skills. Juvenile gerbils were trained to detect amplitude modulation (AM), a stimulus feature elemental to animal communication sounds. When the performance of these juvenile-trained animals was subsequently assessed in adulthood, it was superior to a control group that received an identical regimen of training as adults. The juvenile-trained animals displayed significantly better AM detection thresholds. This was not observed in an adult group that received only exposure to AM stimuli as juveniles. To determine whether enhanced adult performance was due solely to learning the conditioned avoidance procedure, juveniles were trained on frequency modulation (FM) detection, and subsequently assessed on AM detection as adults. These animals displayed significantly poorer AM detection thresholds than all other groups. Thus, training on a specific auditory task (AM detection) during development provided a benefit to performance on that task in adulthood, whereas an identical training regimen in adulthood did not bring about this enhancement. In contrast, there was a cost, in adulthood, following developmental training on a different task (FM detection). Together, the results demonstrate a period of heightened sensitivity in the developing CNS such that behavioral training in juveniles has a unique impact on adult behavioral capabilities.

Pain reduction by mindfulness meditation - brain correlates

Zeidan et al. offer these interesting results on possible consequences of a form of mindfulness meditation called Shamatha, or focused attention, which is a cognitive practice of sustaining attention on the changing sensations of the breath, monitoring discursive events as they arise, disengaging from those events without affective reaction, and redirecting attention back to the breath. Slightly edited clips from the abstract:

The subjective experience of one's environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory events. To better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation influences pain in healthy human participants. After 4 d of mindfulness meditation training, meditating in the presence of noxious stimulation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57% and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest... Meditation reduced pain-related activation of the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex [note: the noxious stimulus was a thermal stimulator placed on the rear right calf, and thus would be reported to the left (contralateral) somatosensory cortex]...Meditation-induced reductions in pain intensity ratings were associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, areas involved in the cognitive regulation of nociceptive (pain) processing. Reductions in pain unpleasantness ratings were associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation, an area implicated in reframing the contextual evaluation of sensory events. Moreover, reductions in pain unpleasantness also were associated with thalamic deactivation, which may reflect a limbic gating mechanism involved in modifying interactions between afferent input and executive-order brain areas. Together, these data indicate that meditation engages multiple brain mechanisms that alter the construction of the subjectively available pain experience from afferent (incoming) information.

Self control makes us angry

In several different places I have come across this interesting article by Gal and Liu. Exerting self control is usually assoicated with positive emotions and wellbeing, but some research has also shown that exerting self control can lead to increased aggression. The authors:

...find that exerting self control is associated with angry behavior more broadly. In particular, using a “matched-choice paradigm,” we find that after exerting self control people exhibit increased preference for anger-themed content, greater interest in faces exhibiting anger, greater endorsement of anger-framed appeals, and greater irritation to others‟ attempts to control one‟s behavior.

The authors note that because the anger-related behaviors examined in their experiments are not inappropriate, they are unlikely to reflect diminished capacities of self-regulation. Three of the several possible reasons why exerting self-control might elicit (implicit) anger they list are:

Goal Frustration - primitive and evolutionary roots drive angry facial expressions and the autonomic response of facial flushing in a newborn baby when a sucking treat is removed.

Diminished sense of Autonomy - anger from the sense that one‟s sense of freedom is restricted and that one is "forced" to choose the virtuous path rather than indulgence.

Ego depletion - the state of being depleted (not having the short term goal deferred for the long term goal) makes people angry.

Dialing numbers on your cellphone can elicit concepts

Observations by Topolinski note an interesting consequence of our cell phone habits:

When people perform actions, effects associated with the actions are activated mentally, even if those effects are not apparent. This study tested whether sequences of simulations of virtual action effects can be integrated into a meaning of their own. Cell phones were used to test this hypothesis because pressing a key on a phone is habitually associated with both digits (dialing numbers) and letters (typing text messages).  In the first experiment, dialing digit sequences induced the meaning of words that share the same key sequence (e.g., 5683, LOVE). This occurred even though the letters were not labeled on the keypad, and participants were not aware of the digit-letter correspondences. In a second experiment, subjects preferred dialing numbers implying positive words (e.g., 37326, DREAM) over dialing numbers implying negative words (e.g., 75463, SLIME). Finally, subjects preferred companies with phone numbers implying a company-related word (e.g., LOVE for a dating agency, CORPSE for a mortician) compared with companies with phone numbers implying a company-unrelated word.

Outsourcing self regulation

It seems reasonable that thinking about supportive partners should be motivationally bolstering - leading us to work harder. Fitzsimonds and Finkel make observations that suggest just the opposite - that such thoughts are motivationally undermining, causing us to make less ambitious plans to pursue goals and to spend less time on the pursuit.
The their first experiment,

...participants who thought about how their partner helped them with health goals (as opposed to career goals) planned to spend less time and effort on health goals in the upcoming week. This pattern was stronger for depleted participants than for nondepleted participants.

In a second experiment,

...participants who thought about how their partner helped them with academic-achievement goals procrastinated more, leaving themselves less time for an academic task, than did participants in two control conditions. This pattern was stronger for participants who were told that procrastinating would drain their resources for the academic task than for participants who were told that procrastinating would not drain their resources for that task.

A final experiment

...found that participants who decreased their effort after thinking of an instrumental significant other reported higher relationship commitment to that individual than did participants who did not decrease their effort.

The authors suggest that:

...partners may develop shared self-regulatory systems, or “transactive self-control,” relying on each other for help with self-control. Individuals who rely on their romantic partner for help with self-control in one area may be able to conserve valuable resources for other goal pursuits. If so, such a shared self-regulatory system—although it could ironically undermine short-term outcomes, as in the case of the outsourcing phenomenon shown here—could ultimately benefit partners if it allowed them to best make use of their limited self-control resources over time.

A long, diligent life...

Lagergren reviews Friedman and Martin's recent book on the 8-decade long longevity study started in 1921 at Stanford University by Lewis Terman, which has followed the histories of 1,500 gifted children from schools in the state and followed them from the age of 11 into adulthood, collecting a variety of data to see what might predict later success and accomplishment. The recent update collects information on those who have died.

Some results are as expected, such as that smoking is bad for longevity. Others turn conventional wisdom on its head...working hard for long hours in a demanding job to achieve high status is better for your health and life expectancy than taking it easy and lacking ambition. Marriage is a blessing for men more than women; and men suffer more adverse health effects from divorce, perhaps turning to drink or drugs. The authors emphasize the benefits of an active social network — more common for women — as a buffer against life's harmful events. And they are critical of simple health advice, such as to jog or eat less fat, arguing that it is the whole approach to life that is essential, not the details. To give a person a list of health recommendations does not work, they point out, if the person cannot or does not follow them.

The best predictor of a long and healthy life turned out to be conscientiousness — the extent to which a child was prudent, dependable and persistent in the accomplishment of his or her goals...You do not become conscientious overnight. It is the long-term, determined work of adopting and sticking to healthy habits and seeking good social environments and relationships that makes the difference. Later follow-up of Terman's subjects showed that conscientiousness in middle age and later counts almost as much as in childhood... Conscientious people do more to protect their health and are less likely to engage in risky activities such as smoking, drinking or drug-taking, the study found. They also find their way to happier marriages, better friendships and optimum work situations. As a result, they are less likely to die from all causes...

Being physically active as a child is also a predictor of longevity, but only if that activity is maintained into and beyond middle age. The life-years gained by jogging may amount to no more than the time you spend doing it, the authors note. So we needn't all aim to run marathons; rather, we should just maintain an activity that we enjoy.

Disorder promotes discrimination and stereotyping

Stapel and Lindenberg find that environmental signs of disorder, such as uncollected trash at a train station or cars parked askew on a sidewalk, are sufficient to induce bystanders to desire orderliness. The consequences are that these bystanders elect to sit further from minorities when asked to fill in a survey and donated less of their payments (for participating in the survey) to help immigrants and the homeless. The desire for order is fulfilled by an increased propensity toward classification, which includes stereotyping. [One field study used the Utrecht train hub in the middle of the Netherlands, where thousands of travelers pass through on a daily basis. During a cleaners’ strike, the train station quickly turned into a dirty and disordered environment. After the station had not been cleaned for a few days in a row, the authors asked 40 travelers who were waiting for their train to participate in their study in return for a candy bar or an apple. They were asked to judge the extent to which they thought certain traits applied to a particular group (in their case, Muslims, homosexuals, and the Dutch). The laboratory experiments, where behaviors after pictures of order versus disorder were used, employed 40-70 subjects.]. Here is their abstract:

Being the victim of discrimination can have serious negative health- and quality-of-life–related consequences. Yet, could being discriminated against depend on such seemingly trivial matters as garbage on the streets? In this study, we show, in two field experiments, that disordered contexts (such as litter or a broken-up sidewalk and an abandoned bicycle) indeed promote stereotyping and discrimination in real-world situations and, in three lab experiments, that it is a heightened need for structure that mediates these effects (number of subjects: between 40 and 70 per experiment). These findings considerably advance our knowledge of the impact of the physical environment on stereotyping and discrimination and have clear policy implications: Diagnose environmental disorder early and intervene immediately.

Hurt the flesh, cleanse the soul....

Here are some summary, slightly edited, clips from an interesting study by Bastian et al. (performed on the usual batch of college undergraduates, paid $10 for their participation in the study):

Pain purifies. History is replete with examples of ritualized or self-inflicted pain aimed at achieving purification...When reminded of an immoral deed, people are motivated to experience physical pain. Student participants in the study who wrote about an unethical behavior not only held their hands in ice water longer but also rated the experience as more painful than did participants who wrote about an everyday interaction. Critically, experiencing pain reduced people’s feelings of guilt, and the effect of the painful task on ratings of guilt was greater than the effect of a similar but nonpainful task.

Pain has traditionally been understood as purely physical in nature, but it is more accurate to describe it as the intersection of body, mind, and culture. People give meaning to pain, and we argue that people interpret pain within a judicial model of pain as punishment. Our results suggest that the experience of pain has psychological currency in rebalancing the scales of justice—an interpretation of pain that is analogous to notions of retributive justice. Interpreted in this way, pain has the capacity to resolve guilt.

People are socialized to understand pain within this judicial framework. Physical pain is employed as a penalty (e.g., spanking children for misbehavior), and unexplained pain is often understood as punishment from God. The judicial model is explicit in the Latin word for pain, poena, which means “to pay the penalty.” Understood this way, pain may be perceived as repayment for sin in three ways. First, pain is the embodiment of atonement. Just as physical cleansing washes away sin, physical pain is experienced as a penalty, and paying that penalty reestablishes moral purity. Second, subjecting oneself to pain communicates remorse to others (including God) and signals that one has paid for one’s sins, and this removes the threat of external punishment. Third, tolerating the punishment of pain is a test of one’s virtue, reaffirming one’s positive identity to oneself and others.

Previous work has demonstrated that giving meaning to pain affects people’s management of that pain. By introducing the judicial model of pain, we emphasize that giving meaning to pain can also affect other psychological processes. Although additional research is needed, our findings demonstrate that experiencing pain as a penalty can cause people to feel that their guilt is resolved and their soul cleansed.