The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Siblings as agents of socialisation (New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development).

Serotonin: New Aspects of its Functions in the Brain (The International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology). This issue is free to access.

Word learning and lexical development across the lifespan (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B). Like all Royal Society journals, this issue is free to access until the end of Feb, in celebration of their 350th anniversary.

Rationality and emotions (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B). Like all Royal Society journals, this issue is free to access until the end of Feb, in celebration of their 350th anniversary.

Children and research: 'voice', agency and intergenerational relationships (Children and Society).

What do young children know about managing fear?

The recent film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things are prompted much debate about whether it's appropriate to subject children to material which they could find frightening. It's rather topical then that a new research paper has looked at young children's understanding of fear reduction strategies, finding them to be more precocious than previously realised.

Liat Sayfan and Kirsten Lagattuta presented 48 children aged between 4 and 7 years with picture-based short stories. The children were asked to imagine that they were the central character. The stories involved the child, either alone or with a companion, catching sight of a possible threat - either what could be a dangerous creature, such as a bear, or what might be an imaginary frightening creature, such as a ghost. The pictures were drawn such that the presence or not of the threats was ambiguous.

Even the youngest children recognised that people differ in how vulnerable they are to fear, seeing adults as being less prone than children and men less prone than women. The girls were more sensitive to these differences than the boys.

Another gender difference was that, at all ages, the girls tended to propose more avoidant fear reduction strategies - such as running and hiding - compared with the boys' suggestion of more aggressive strategies, including going on the attack.

Surprisingly perhaps, children at all ages suggested that the story characters could use psychological (e.g. 'imagine that my mummy is there') as well as behavioural (e.g. 'go to my room') strategies to overcome their fears, although this tendency did increase with age. Another developmental change was that the older children proposed more 'reality affirming strategies' (e.g. 'I can remember that ghosts aren't real') whereas the four- and five-year-olds proposed more so-called 'positive pretense' strategies (e.g. 'I'll use a sword to fight the dragon').

'These data advance current knowledge about the development of children's understanding of mind, emotion, and coping during childhood,' the researchers said.
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Sayfan L, & Lagattuta KH (2009). Scaring the monster away: what children know about managing fears of real and imaginary creatures. Child development, 80 (6), 1756-74 PMID: 19930350

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

Students behave in a more helpful manner after listening to Michael Jackson's Heal The World and other songs with prosocial lyrics.

Contributions of Societal Modernity to Cognitive Development: A Comparison of Four Cultures.

'...children of 4 years find a question about what they themselves will need to play in the future harder to answer than a similar question posed about another child.'

The Dodo Bird Verdict - controversial, inevitable and important: a commentary on 30 years of meta-analyses. (The Dodo Bird Verdict is the finding that different therapeutic approaches are generally of similar efficacy.)

What judges, the general public and experts believe about the testimony of eye-witnesses.

Alison Gopnik reviews Stanislas Dehaene's 'Reading in the brain, The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention'.

How Sigmund Freud, his nephew and a box of cigars forever changed American marketing.

Hospital staff make better decisions using textual information rather than medical charts

Whether from first-hand experience or from TV and film, we've probably all seen those medical charts that hang at the bottom of hospital beds. A new study makes the surprising claim that it might be better if these graphical charts were replaced or complemented with short passages of text conveying the same information. Marian Van Der Meulen and colleagues say that graphs are prone to misinterpretation by inexperienced, distracted staff and text leads to more accurate courses of action. Of course translation of medical charts into text-based summaries is labour intensive to an impractical degree, as the researchers freely acknowledge. But they say new software that can automatically translate data into text-based summaries could potentially solve this problem.

Van Der Meulen's team presented 35 nurses and doctors from the neonatal intensive care unit (ICU) at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with real data from 24 infant patients. The participants' task was to scrutinise the data and decide on what the next course of action should be. The data, which provided information on factors like blood pressure and temperature, as well as previous actions taken by staff, was either presented via time series graphs, in the conventional manner; as text-based summaries translated from the graphs by medical experts; or as computer-generated text. It's important to note that both forms of text summary provided no clinical interpretation, they merely summarised the salient information in the graphical data.

Remarkably, the participating nurses and doctors chose significantly more appropriate courses of action after looking at the textual summaries written by an expert as compared with looking at the standard time-series graphs. Decisions made after looking at the computer-generated text were poorer than decisions taken after the human-generated text but were just as accurate as decisions made from the graphs.

'Overall, these results confirm that in a neonatal ICU, human generated descriptions of time series physiological measures are better able to support medical decision-making than graphs with trend lines,' the researchers said.

These findings will only have relevance to real-life hospital settings if a way can be found to make the computer-generated text as effective as the text written by a human expert. The researchers are confident that this can be achieved. A research paper they have in press has compared the two types of text to look for differences that could help improve the BT-45 software that was used in this study. Such differences include the human text having a more coherent grammatical structure and narrative and a tendency to group physiological measures together.

'...[F]urther development of this technology is likely to be extremely fruitful in supporting complex real-world cognition,' the researchers concluded.
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van der Meulen, M., Logie, R., Freer, Y., Sykes, C., McIntosh, N., & Hunter, J. (2010). When a graph is poorer than 100 words: A comparison of computerised natural language generation, human generated descriptions and graphical displays in neonatal intensive care. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (1), 77-89 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1545

When new psychological symptoms emerge after a head injury

If a patient with a complicated psychiatric history suffers a traumatic brain injury and then develops new psychological problems, how do you know whether the new problems are related to the head injury or the prior psychiatric diagnoses? This dilemma forms the latest 'complex case' to appear in the journal Personality and Mental Health where it is accompanied by five expert commentaries.

The complex case is described by psychiatrist Kathleen Diehl at the University of Michigan. She undertook several sessions of therapy with a woman referred to as 'Ms C' after the lady, a 50-year-old divorcee, had suffered a head injury as a result of a fall at work. Prior to the accident, Ms C had a long history of depression, suicidality, self-harm and had received a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder - a condition associated with relationship problems and emotional lability. Ms C had been physically abused as a child and had suffered extreme physical brutality at the hands of her ex-husband. She had two children, one of whom had cerebral palsy and had been moved to foster care.

After her fall, Ms C reported chronic dizziness, double-vision and head aches, but three brain scans, two taken immediately after her injury, have failed to uncover any signs of brain injury. Other symptoms to emerge after her fall include apparently unprovoked episodes of dissociation, in which Ms C would regress to a child-like manner and speak in a girl's voice. She experienced temporal dislocation, believing that she was living through a time eleven years prior to the present, such that she claimed not to recognise her pets or the medical staff attending to her. Despite these claims she seemed able to use modern technologies, such as her mobile phone. As plans for her return to work approached she developed panic symptoms. She was mostly oppositional in therapy and declined to participate in 'dialectical behavioural therapy' exercises which are designed to help increase emotional tolerance and help reduce distress.

Traumatic brain injury is known to lead to psychological problems in many cases, but given the negative brain scan results and Ms C's prior history, the psychiatrist Diehl concluded that it is 'difficult to distinguish organically based symptoms from emotional problems'. She asks: Just 'how do Ms C's medical and psychiatric symptoms overlap?' The expert replies, unfortunately behind a pay wall, are available here.
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Diehl, K. (2009). Head trauma, dissociation and possible development of multiple personalities. Personality and Mental Health, 3 (4), 295-301 DOI: 10.1002/pmh.95

Right-handers sit to the right of the movie screen to optimise neural processing of the film

Although our bodies appear largely symmetrical on the outside, the way our brains are organised and wired is rather more lop-sided. This is obvious to us in relation to handedness, whereby the brain is better at controlling one hand than the other. The idea that, for many of us, the left-hemisphere is dominant for language is also widely known. However, functional asymmetry between the brain hemispheres also affects our behaviour in more subtle ways that are still being explored. The latest example of this comes from Japan where Matia Okubo has shown that right-handers have a preference for sitting to the right of the cinema screen, but only when they are motivated to watch the film. The finding is consistent with the idea that in right-handers, the right-hemisphere is dominant for processing visual and emotional input. By sitting to the right of the screen, the film is predominantly processed by the right-hemisphere and the suggestion is that, without necessarily realising it, right-handers are choosing to sit in an optimal position for their brain to digest the movie.

Okubo presented 200 students with a grid showing the seats available in a cinema (a central area was shown as occupied; the screen was at the top of the grid). In the first experiment, all the students were told that the film was enjoyed by friends and critics, with half also told that the story was sad and depressing and to imagine that they'd rather avoid seeing it. For students who only heard the recommendation, the right-handers were far more likely to choose a seat to the right of the screen (74 per cent did so), whereas the left-handers and mixed-handers didn't show a bias for one side or the other.

For the students who were put off the film, none showed a preference for the right-hand seats, regardless of their handedness. This suggests that we only choose an optimal seat for our brain organisation when we're motivated to watch the film. Left-handers and mixed-handers are known to have a more balanced distribution of function across their hemispheres so this could explain why they didn't show the opposite bias to the right-handers.

A second experiment was nearly identical, but this time half the students were told the film was excellent and depressing, whereas the other students were simply told they wouldn't enjoy it. Again, when they were motivated to watch the film, even a depressing one, the right-handers showed a bias for seats to the right of the screen. 'People tend to adopt the most effective manner in which their hemispheric functions can be utilised,' Okubo said, adding that: 'It is tempting to think that some other undiscovered behavioural asymmetries can also be discovered through this approach'.

This new research comes after a past study showed that adults with a more artistic, less analytic thinking style (associated with the right hemisphere) were more likely to sit on the right-hand side of the classroom; and another that showed people are more likely to exhibit the left side of their face (controlled by the right hemisphere) when asked to express emotion in a family photo, but to show their right profile when asked to pose as a scientist.
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Okubo, M. (2010). Right movies on the right seat: Laterality and seat choice. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (1), 90-99 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1556

[Related Digest item here]

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the BPS Research Digest

A natural history of the Earworm - the song that won't get out of your head

Earworms are those songs that get lodged in your cranium, playing over and over and over. There's been surprisingly little published research on the phenomenon, although several popular science writers like Oliver Sacks have speculated about it. There's also an 'expert' in the form of Professor James Kellaris at the University of Cincinnati, but his investigations all appear to be unpublished. That hasn't stopped Kellaris' university from hosting a website devoted to earworms. And there's also an online earworm exhibition at San Francisco's Exploratorium.

Now two British psychologists, Philip Beaman and Tim Williams, have decided it's time to fill the empirical void and serve up some actual data on earworms. They surveyed just over one hundred railway travellers, students and visitors to a public garden about their earworm experiences, and they also asked 12 other participants to keep diary records for four weeks about their earworms.

Beaman and Williams found, contrary to the speculation, that earworms don't seem to be more common in people with musical expertise, although a study that actually targets musicians is needed to verify this. Instead, they found that it is people who judge music to be of more importance who are more likely to get a song stuck in their head.

Previous commentators have also tended to highlight the unpleasantness of earworms and compared them to the intrusive thoughts associated with obsessive compulsive disorder. However, the new research found that only a minority of earworms (33 per cent in the diary study) were described by participants in this way. Very few earworms recurred in the same day and most were usually gone by the next day. However, earworms did seem similar to intrusive thoughts in relation to attempts to banish them. Participants reported that most strategies, such as trying to think of another song, actually made the original earworm worse.

The researchers also looked at the typical length of earworm episodes. Approximately 27 minutes was the verdict from the diary study, and several hours was the survey result. Finally, what about the idea that some specific songs are more prone to becoming earworms than others? The researchers found little evidence for this. Different participants named and shamed different earworm songs and each individual participant tended to report a range of different songs, rather than pointing to repeat offending by the same recalcitrant tune. Instead, earworm potential appeared to be determined by amount of exposure to a tune combined with that tune's relative simplicity and repetitiveness.
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Beaman CP, & Williams TI (2009). Earworms ('stuck song syndrome'): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) PMID: 19948084

What does a doodle do? It boosts your memory and concentration

You know you're bored when you start shading in the squares of your notebook. Apparently it's a habit that could be helping you to concentrate. In a neat little experiment, Jackie Andrade asked forty participants to listen to a monotone two and a half minute phone message about arrangements for a party. They were told the message would be dull, that there was no need to memorise it, but that they should write down the names of the people who would be able to attend the party. Crucially, half the participants were also told to 'doodle' as they listened, by shading in the squares and circles of their note-paper.

Afterwards, the doodlers had noted fractionally more of the correct names (7.8 on average vs. 7.1 - a statistically significant difference). What's more, moments later, the doodlers also excelled in a surprise memory test of the guests' names and the places mentioned in the message, recalling 29 per cent more details than the non-doodlers.

Andrade said more research is obviously needed to find out how doodling helps us maintain our attention. However, her theory is that by using up slightly more mental resources, doodling helps prevent the mind from wandering off the boring primary task into daydream land. This study is part of an emerging recognition in psychology that secondary tasks aren't always a distraction from primary tasks, but can sometimes actually be beneficial.
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Andrade, J. (2010). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (1), 100-106 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1561

People really are happier in those US states identified as having better 'quality of life'

With our political leaders giving serious consideration to adopting population well-being, or 'happiness', as their ultimate goal (rather than economic prosperity), there is a greater need than ever to ensure that our scientific measures of the concept are valid. Prior research in this area has tended to involve asking large samples of people how satisfied they are with their lives. But how do we know that their answers are really trustworthy and accurate? Now Andrew Oswald and Stephen Wu have cross-checked an enormous sample of subjective well-being data from the USA to see if it matches up with economists' estimates of where people ought to be happiest based on quality-of-life data for different US states. Their encouraging finding is that there is a most impressive correspondence between the two data sets. Indeed Oswald told the Digest that he almost didn't believe his computer screen when the results came up. The likelihood of the two sets of data corresponding so well by chance is '1 in 10,000' he told me.

Oswald and Wu obtained subjective well-being data for over 1.3 million US citizens using the United States Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System. This allowed them to arrive at average well-being or 'happiness' estimates for the different states in the US. They then compared these estimates with quality-of-life data published by Stuart Gabriel in 2003. He and his colleagues looked at about 25 factors, including weather, crime, and commuting time. Whereas a magazine might give these factors equal weighting and calculate a state's desirability by summing its scores across the 25 factors, Gabriel's team used average house prices and wages to ascertain the importance of each factor to potential residents. If a state's house prices and wages remained high despite a wet climate, for example, this would suggest that rain is less important than other factors. Crucially, the subjective data matched the economists' league table of states. People seem to be happier in those places that the economists have identified as having a high quality of life.

'The study's finding suggests that subjective well-being data contain genuine information about the quality of human lives,' the researchers concluded.

So, which states in the US were the most and least happy? Top of the happiness league were Louisiana and Hawaii. Bottom were Connecticut and New York. California didn't fare much better. Commenting on California and New York's dismal showing, Oswald said: 'Many people think these states would be marvellous places to live in. The problem is that if too many individuals think that way, they move into those states, and the resulting congestion and house prices make it a non-fulfilling prophecy.'
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AJ Oswald, & S Wu (2009). Objective confirmation of subjective measures of human well-being: Evidence from the USA. Science.

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Identifying and developing potential (Industrial and Organisational Psychology).

Early Childhood Education and Immigrant Children: Promises, Perils, Cultures, and Transitions to School (Early Childhood Research Quarterly).

Brain Informatics (Cognitive Systems Research). From the editorial: 'Brain Informatics (BI) has recently emerged as an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on studying the mechanisms underlying the human information processing system .... It investigates the essential functions of the brain, ranging from perception to thinking, and encompassing such areas as multi-perception, attention, memory, language, computation, heuristic search, reasoning, planning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, discovery, and creativity.'

Psychiatric and Behavioral Aspects of Burn Injury (International Review of Psychiatry).

Adolescent sexual offending (Behavioural Sciences and the Law).

Rationality restored (Social Cognition).