Research
dmunger | April 19, 2006The average 3- to 10-year-old girl in the U.S. owns eight Barbies. Only one percent of this group owns no Barbies. And every girl seems to go through similar stages with her Barbies -- first, adoration, next, ambivalence, and finally, rejection. By the time they're in middle school, most girls have either thrown out their Barbies or cut off their hair and amputated multiple limbs. These aren't just casual observations -- a 2004 study observed that while young girls identify with Barbie, 10- to 14-year-olds have distanced themselves from Barbie.
But what of the recent media hype suggesting…
dmunger | April 18, 2006Take a look at these two faces.
One of these women can't recognize that the other is afraid, but when asked to express fear, is still able to produce a fearful expression. Can you tell which is which?
We know the amygdala is associated with identifying scary music; we know the amygdala helps us generate a fear response, but what about producing a fear response?
S.P. are the initials of a 54-year-old woman who had surgery to remove her right amygdala to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy. During the surgery, it was found that her left amygdala was damaged as well, and so she effectively…
dmunger | April 13, 2006If you have normal hearing and an amygdala, you can probably tell which of these two songs is "happy," and which is "scary."
Song 1
Song 2
However, for extreme cases of epilepsy, one treatment is to surgically remove the amygdala, the area of the brain which processes, among other things, the sensation of fear. People who have had this surgery fail to recognize fearful facial expressions. A 1978 study in which experimenters stimulated patients' amygdalas directly with electrodes caused them to behave as if they were afraid.
But other efforts to induce fear reactions in patients whose…
dmunger | April 11, 2006Yesterday's post brings up an interesting question: How can you be unaware of having even seen an image, and yet be able to make reliable judgments about that image? That article is just one example of a variety of situations in which people can be unaware of seeing something, even immediately after being given a quick glimpse of it, yet behave as if they have seen it.
We discussed how visual images can be "masked" -- flashed quickly and then followed by another image which is displayed for a longer period. Though observers had no conscious recollection of seeing faces, they still could make…
dmunger | April 10, 2006How long does it take to decide if someone's attractive? It might be before you even know you looked.
Researchers can use a masking technique to show an image of a human face subliminally -- without the observer being aware of seeing it. To do it, they first show a scrambled face (39 milliseconds). Next, the face itself (13 milliseconds), a blank screen (13 milliseconds), and a cartoon face (39 milliseconds). I've tried to duplicate the technique using an animated GIF file, but I think it's beyond the capability of an ordinary web browser.
Click here to see it
Did you see a human face? I had…
dmunger | April 6, 2006Standup comics have long made vice president Dick Cheney the butt of their jokes, suggesting that he's never seen in public with the President because he inhabits some fortified underground bunker so as to avoid terrorists or some other unidentified threat, or that he's actually a cyborg, secretly controlling the government from his dark, hidden lair. But recent research in visual attention suggests that there might be another reason Cheney wouldn't want to be seen near the President. It may be that by standing next to a more famous person, your own appeal is diminished.
I'm actually only…
dmunger | April 3, 2006Babies as young as three months old will follow the eyes of an adult to look at the same thing the adult is looking at. This behavior makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: if a predator or other danger looms, we can learn from the actions of others (though it's unclear exactly what a three-month old would do to escape a ravenous bear).
But if the gaze-following behavior is really a survival adaptation, wouldn't we be more likely to follow someone's gaze if they also had a fearful facial expression? After all, if someone's glancing to the side with a cheerful smile, we don't expect…
dmunger | March 30, 2006The TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a bit of a guilty pleasure for our family. I've never been quite sure why we like it: the plot of the show is always the same. We're introduced to a family which has undergone some terrible tragedy through no fault of their own: the father has been blinded by the gunshot of a thief while he was working overtime at a convenience store, or the daughter is undergoing treatment for chemotherapy, or the grandmother has adopted six troubled teenagers. Despite (and sometimes because of) their best efforts, the family's home has fallen into extreme…
dmunger | March 29, 2006Take a look at the QuickTime movie below. It will show a still image for 10 seconds, then a blank screen. Then it will show you the image again. Your job is to look for a detail that has been changed between the two images.
Most people have difficulty with this task. Even when the part that changes is central to the image, accuracy is typically no better than 50 percent. For the particular type of change depicted in this movie, accuracy averages less than 30 percent. If you didn't notice the change, drag the slider in the movie quickly back and forth and you should be able to spot the…
dmunger | March 27, 2006Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful?
How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more?
If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable (number 2 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those that are rotated more from the vertical position (again, number 2 in the figures) are more suffering and less angry.
Assigning emotions to shapes is nothing new. In experiments as early as the 1940s, individuals have been found to consistently apply the same emotions to shapes in schematic cartoons…
dmunger | March 21, 2006What's the best way to ensure that law enforcement officers don't abuse their authority and coerce innocent suspects into confessing? Yesterday we discussed research suggesting that a side-view videotape of a confession was more likely than a head-on view to result in an accurate assessment of whether that confession was voluntary or coerced.
But the Lassiter team's study was still open to some key criticisms. First, the study participants were all college students -- certainly not a typical jury demographic. Second, jurors don't see videotaped confessions in isolation -- when a confession is…
dmunger | March 20, 2006College student Bradley Page dropped his girlfriend off in a park one evening, only to learn later that she had been murdered and buried in a shallow grave. Police investigating the death interviewed him about the incident, repeatedly asking him why he could have left her alone in that park. "It was the biggest mistake of my life," he responded in anguish. Eventually, the officers told him that witnesses had seen him near where the body was buried and that his fingerprints had been found on the murder weapon. These statements astonished Page, who hadn't even remembered leaving his apartment.…
dmunger | March 16, 2006A Witches' Bible states that "the sensitive is psychically aware of character qualities, or emotional or spiritual states, in the subject, and this awareness presents itself to him or her as visual phenomena." It's easy to dismiss such claims as pseudoscientific claptrap, yet there exist humans who, when presented with nonvisual stimuli such as tastes or smells, perceive visual imagery. I'm talking about the scientifically recognized condition, synesthesia. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode.…
dmunger | March 14, 2006If my twentieth high school reunion last year was any indication, we seem to hang on to the music we listened to as adolescents longer than any other time period. Everyone was dancing to "Purple Rain" and "Rock Lobster" like the music written in 1984 was the best ever written. A 1996 study confirmed this notion, finding that young adults express stronger preference ratings for music than older adults.
Take a look at a random sampling of accounts on MySpace, and you'll see that nearly every member has a song associated with his or her account. It's as if music somehow forms part of a person's…
dmunger | March 9, 2006We've reported on studies about cell phones and driving before. A general consensus has formed that driving with cell phones (even hands-free phones) is dangerous. What matters most, it appears, isn't so much the physical aspect -- holding and operating the phone -- but how demanding the conversation itself is.
Research on aging has suggested that older drivers may be even more impaired by driving with a cell phone than younger drivers, since older adults tend to perform worse on "dual task" activities than younger adults. But what about the years of driving experience that older adults have…
dmunger | March 7, 2006The Prisoner's Dilemma is an ethical conundrum that's been used for years by psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explore human behavior. The basic scenario is this: two criminals have been captured and placed in separate cells. Neither prisoner is allowed to talk to the other, and the interrogators don't have enough evidence to prosecute either one. If prisoner A confesses and prisoner B doesn't, then prisoner A is released and prisoner B gets punished. If both confess, then both will get a lighter sentence. If neither confesses, then both will be released. For each prisoner,…
dmunger | March 2, 2006When human infants are born, the physical structure of their brains has not fully developed: the human brain continues to grow for more than two years after birth. It's very clear that newborn infants don't have the same cognitive abilities as babies even 6 months older. For example, they can't move their heads follow along a movement with their eyes. They appear to have very little control over their limbs. Three-month-olds have difficulty reaching and grasping objects. For humans, walking or crawling isn't a remote possibility for more than six months. Contrast this to wildebeasts, for…
gmunger | March 1, 2006We've reported on a variety of different studies looking video games and various measures of aggression (you can check out our "Video Games / Technology" category, and our archives) and a fairly common reaction, often coming from an avid gamer, is that this simply isn't true about him. Now one of the serious complications of doing psychological research is that our intuitions about how, or even what, we are doing can be dramatically wrong--this is why psychologists started doing experiments some one hundred and twenty odd years ago. You cannot refute a careful experiment with a personal…
gmunger | February 27, 2006You can get a lot of information from a simple bar graph, but to what extent does the arrangement of the bars matter? You can find great commentary about good design, but what about a nice clean experiment? Martin H. Fischer led a team that asked participants to indicate if a given relationship was true or false, based on a variety of different bar graphs. For example, is A > B in this graph?
And what about this one?
If you are like most people, it was easier to confirm that A was larger than B in the first graph -- where the bars were oriented vertically. In addition to…
dmunger | February 23, 2006Since yesterday's post on attention grabbed so much, well, attention, let's try another one. Only this time, instead of looking at what factors cause us to pay attention to something, we'll consider an experiment that studied the emotional effects of attention. If you're asked to look for people with blond hair, for example, you may eventually come to have a different emotional response to people with blond hair than others.
A team led by Mark Fenske developed a simple procedure to see if the focus of our attention can affect emotion. Twenty-four college students participated in a task that…