New social psychology magazine!

Sweet! I have just recently found out about this fairly new on-line magazine called, The Inquisitive Mind , or more simply, In-Mind. What's so cool about In-Mind? Well, I'll tell you!

In-Mind is a free, quarterly on-line magazine about, what else, social psychology! It's all about making social psychology more accessible to the public. The articles are written by real psychologists, and concern current research trends within the field. As well, readers don't really have to worry much about convoluted, scientific jargon. Instead, the articles are fairly easy to read and, at the same time, quite stimulating. Additionally, readers can debate with an article's author! Here's how they describe themselves:

"Welcome to the website of the Inquisitive Mind. The Inquisitive Mind, or In-Mind, is a young and exciting on-line quarterly magazine for social psychology. The magazine’s purpose is designed to interact with everyone that is interested in everyday human concerns and to inform you on the hot trends in scientific social psychological research. Now, science has its own language and you might not feel like having the time to keep up-to-date. We will attempt to bridge the existing gap by relating important social psychological research to issues that catch your mind . . .

. . . So, what all does In-Mind offer? First, you can read on the aforementioned topics by reading our articles. In order to read the full articles, you will have to register. This is free, and you may do so through the controls on the left. After you have registered, you may continue with the button 'articles' to read full articles (introductions of articles are available without registration). You can then discuss, debate, and argue with the authors and with other members. Moreover, if you find other members with common interests, you may connect with them directly through our In-Mind Community; every member has the opportunity to create a profile. Also, as a member you can automatically create your own blog. Use this blog to wander and wonder in the interesting world of social psychology . . ."

It looks really cool to me. I'm pretty excited about it, and, as you can see, I've added it to my "sites that I like" sidebar.

They even have some pretty appealing links and videos about social psychology. For instance, I found an interesting lecture given by Dr. Mahzarin Banaji on In-Mind. Dr. Banaji is a social psychologist from Harvard University who basically studies how our unconscious biases affect our social perceptions and attitudes. You can check out the video here:




Go see the website! I know you'll enjoy it!

Our mental number line?

Now here’s a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a while. I finally found some time (or motivation) to get it done I guess :)

Firstly, I should state that my research interests mostly lie within the field of social psychology (specifically affiliation and social rejection). But I also have some general interests in topics across a variety of other psychology sub-fields (as you can probably tell, I have a rather large interest in evolutionary psychology, which to me is more of a way of thinking about psychology than a sub-field). Well, this is a post about a general interest of mine, and that is the concept of number. Specifically, this post is going to be about human and animal abilities to order and represent numbers.

Jessica Cantlon and Elizabeth Brannon (2006) are researchers from Duke (you can find Brannon’s website here) who worked on two experiments investigating: 1) the ability of two rhesus macaques to apply a learned ordinal numerical rule, and 2) compared the performance of these same monkeys with that of humans on ordering pairs of numbers. In the first experiment, the authors trained the rhesus macaques to present in ascending order all possible pairings of stimuli, of which each represented a numerical value between 1 and 9. The stimuli consisted of a background with 1 through 9 square shapes in various colors and sizes, kind of like the blue boxes in the photo below:

Once the ordinal rule was learned, the macaques were then presented with stimuli that represented novel numerical values (10, 15, 20 and 30). Of the experimental sessions, there were three types of pairings. The first type were familiar-familiar pairs where each stimulus represented a value between 1 and 9. The second type were familiar-novel pairs, in which one stimulus represented a value among 10, 15, 20 or 30 and the other stimulus represented a value between 1 and 9. And lastly, the third type of pairing was novel-novel. This is where both stimuli represented a value among 10, 15, 20 and 30. Once presented with the pairings, the macaques were expected to use the ordinal rule and order the values from smallest to largest, which is what the authors found!

The monkeys ordered these values in the same direction that they originally learned to order the values between 1 and 9. The findings are particularly interesting considering that the authors used a numerical value up to 30 and previous studies have only presented monkeys with values of up to 10. So not only does this first experiment show that rhesus macaques can compare and apply ordinal rules to unfamiliar values, but these monkeys can also represent and compare values of at least 30 with the possibility of no upper limit!

The second experiment was conducted to compare the performance of these monkeys with human participants and specifically to test how much the number comparisons are controlled by Weber’s law in each species (Weber’s law essentially states that the ability to discriminate between two values depends on the ratio between the two and not the actual absolute values. For instance, it is easier to discriminate between the values of 1 and 9 than it is to discriminate between the values of 28 and 29).

The same macaques and 11 university students were instructed to pick the smallest value presented out of pairings of the same stimuli. This time each stimulus represented a numerical value between 2 and 30. The human participants were instructed not to count, but to respond as quickly as possible once the stimuli appeared. The investigators observed that the monkeys and the human participants performed similarly in accuracy. Indeed, the difference between monkeys and humans in accuracy was smaller than the difference between the most and least accurate humans! The monkeys did perform significantly faster than the humans though. This could be attributed to the training, but remains unclear. However, the data from both the human and monkey groups did conform to the pattern predicted by Weber’s Law. Accuracy decreased and reaction time increased as the ratio between the small and large values increased. Whenever the values increased and the distance between them decreased, it took both humans and monkeys more time to order them.

Now, I thought that this was an intriguing article when I first read it last year. It seems to support the supposition that humans and animals use a similar system for representing and ordering numbers. We seem to have a mental number line in common. Perhaps we evolved an underlying mechanism for non-verbal number representation from a common primate ancestor? Well, anyways, I thought the article was pretty cool and just wanted to share it, haha.

Citation:

Cantlon, J., & Brannon, E. (2006). Shared system for ordering small and large numbers in monkeys and humans.

Psychological Science, 17(5), 401 – 406.

Self-replicating robots . . . and more

So I was just browsing around for some cool videos and what not, and guess what I found? If you guessed a short talk given by Hod Lipson, then you'd be correct!

As you might recall, I wrote about Lispon back in June concerning his plenary address at HBES 2007. As I wrote before, he was my favorite speaker over the course of the conference. His topic was evolutionary robotics, which is basically about creating robots that:

"decide for themselves how they want to walk; robots that develop a sense of what they look like; even robots that can, through trial and error, construct other robots just like themselves"

It is really a very interesting area that may even help us understand how the human brain constructs self-models. Is it similar to how these robots develop a sense of themselves?

Well, anyways, Lispon gave a brief version of the same address, with the same video clips, as a TED Talk on October 11, 2007. If you don't feel like visiting the website, I have posted the video below. It's definitely really cool and worth the watch:

Celebrating the Cognitive Revolution

Yeah, so I was just browsing around Steven Pinker's website, and noticed that he had a link to some interesting video.

Basically, the Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard held a discussion celebrating the beginning of the cognitive revolution, and which inaugurated a new, permanent exhibit in William James Hall on the history behind the revolution. The talk (discussion) is titled: "The Cognitive Revolution at Fifty Plus or Minus One." The discussion includes a panel of none other than: George Miller, Noam Chomsky, Susan Carey and Jerome Bruner. The discussion is also introduced and moderated by Pinker himself. (all are pictured above: Pinker, Carey, Miller, Chomsky and Bruner) Oh . . . and this took place around April! (How did I miss this?)

The talk is very awesome! The panel discussion is broken into 4 videos and I definitely recommend viewing them all! Well, to anyone who's interested in the History of Science/Psychology/Cognitive Science anyways. Of course, it is pretty "Harvard-centric," as I think Pinker himself said, but the panel does mention some other important players, such as Piaget and Edward Tolman. It's really cool just to hear about how a department absorbed in radical behaviorism in the 1950's (B.F. Skinner) could give birth to an influential paradigm that allowed purposeful thought! It's also really cool to hear about all the thinkers who influenced each on the panel.

Check it out!

Today in the History of Psychology

Today, in 1907, one of the most famous pioneers in social psychology was born. The man that I am speaking of, and who is pictured to the right, is of course Solomon Asch. Like many in his day, Asch was trained as a gestalt psychologist. (An approach that advocates that the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts." For instance, the brain cannot be defined just by its seperate parts, but by how each acts on each other simultaneously).

Asch studied many aspects of social behavior including impression formation, and even wrote one of the first influential social psychology text books, simply called, Social Psychology (1952). But what he is probably most famous for is a set of experiments he conducted in the 1950's on the topic of conformity.

In his experiments, participants viewed a picture of a line and were to compare this line to a separate set of lines to see which best resembled the first (pictured below):
All participants were confederates (basically fake participants/actors) except one. Before being asked which line correctly resembled the first, the confederates were instructed to give an incorrect answer. The confederates and one participant were all seated in a classroom, where the one participant occupied the last seat. And they were instructed to announce their answer aloud, with the real participant answering last. When the confederates were unanimous in their incorrect judgments, most real participants felt discomfort from the answer they thought was right and the answer that they heard the confederates say. Most of the participants caved under the social pressure, leaving only about 29% of his subjects who refused to "join the bogus majority." Of course if the confederates were not unanimous in their incorrect judgments, then most participants would give the correct answer.

This experiment had some interesting implications for the power of conformity in social groups and has laid the groundwork for the famous obedience experiments by Stanley Milgram.

Happy Birthday Solomon Asch!

"The Stuff of Thought"

Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, is finally out! Woohoo! It came out on Tuesday and I rushed to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up my copy. I can't wait to start reading it! I'm going to try to get to it this weekend, at least start on it if I can get my other work done. I'm so excited!

Darwinian Medicine

For those of you interested, evolutionary psychologist/psychiatrist Dr. Randolph Nesse has put together a series of lectures for the Henry Stewart Talks called, Evolution and Medicine: How New Applications Advance Research and Practice.

The combined lectures were designed to be a complete introductory course to the field of evolutionary medicine with over 30 expert contributors. Topics include: Fundamentals of evolution and medicine, evolutionary genetics, infectious diseases, co-evolution and arms races, environmental factors, constraints and trade-offs, sexual selection and reproduction, cancer, mental disorders, and practical applications. Power-point slides come along with each talk as well.

The only bad thing about the lectures is that you cannot view them for free. That's right, you have to purchase them! But many, not all, of the lectures offer a playable extract for free. It's a little 5 minute sample of the talk, I guess so you can decide whether you want to buy the rest or not. Of course the single user license is about $650! Wow! So it's just like enrolling in a online course I suppose, just without the grade. From what I heard from the playable extracts . . . they seem pretty interesting.

Go check them out!

Today in the History of Psychology

"There is nothing so practical as a good theory."
- Kurt Lewin, 1951

Today in 1890, the "founder of social psychology," Kurt Lewin, was born!

Originally from Prussia, he emigrated to the United States as a result of World War II. He held a position at the University of Iowa, where he developed his interests in social phenomena and even began research, in order to help the war effort, such as examining troop morale. Of course, coming from the German tradition of Gestalt Psychology, he was a true believer in a good theory. One cannot fix a problem from evidence alone. To create a solution to a social problem, one must fully understand the issue. Lewin was really the first to utilize theory-building for the understanding of social "facts," and he rigorously employed experimentation to test his hypotheses.

He moved to MIT around 1944, where he established the Research Center for Group Dynamics. One might say, the field of group dynamics is where his importance lays and where his legacy proliferates. Here he developed and refined his field theory of social behavior, B=ƒ(P,E), (behavior is a function of a person and his/her environment). That basically means, one's behavior is due to the situation the person is in when the behavior occurs, rather than emphasizing past experiences (upbringing). He also looked at concepts such as group performance and leadership styles, and even found that democratic leadership proved to be the most productive type of leadership.

Lewin died in 1947, just three years after the establishment of his research center, yet his legacy lived on through his students. One of these students was Leon Festinger. Festinger studied under Lewin at the University of Iowa where he received his Ph.D in 1942. He later followed Lewin to MIT and headed the Research Center for Group Dynamics after Lewin died.

Happy Birthday Kurt Lewin!

the summer just goes by so fast . . .

Yes it does! Classes started today in fact, but I feel like it was just the beginning of June last week. Oh well, the summer was fun and I think that I did some pretty cool stuff (besides getting married).

For instance, I held two jobs over the summer. Firstly, I was a teaching assistant for a class concerning research methods in clinical psychology. Not my particular field of interest, but it was pretty nice regardless. We only had like 6 students. I mostly ran the labs where they conducted two research projects. One project was an online environmental attitudes survey, where some questions were borrowed from another survey collected in the 80's. Essentially, the students were supposed to look at how attitudes on the environment have changed in the past twenty years. For their other project, I had them rate tape recordings of psychiatric patients. The patients participated in a series of role plays as a measure of social skills. The students then rated the tapes based on a set of criteria for conversational content as well as non-verbal content. This was mostly an exercise for the students so that they had experience conducting inter-rater reliability estimates. We wanted them to know how hard it is to obtain good reliability with these types of procedures. You don't really get that kind of knowledge just from reading journal articles.

My other job was as a research consultant at The Glennan Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology at Eastern Virginia Medical School. This was a pretty cool job as well. I worked for Dr. Barbara Freund, who mostly conducts driving simulation research on patients with Alzheimer's. Well, over the summer she obtained two new simulators from Raydon Corp. My project pretty much was centered around conducting quality assurance tests on the simulators to make sure that they were fit for participants in future studies. But she also let me participate in whatever else she had going on that I may have been interested in, which was cool. I really enjoyed it there. I thought that it would be like playing video games all day, but interestingly enough it wasn't. I still have to write a post about "simulator sickness," which I've wanted to write since June . . . just haven't had the time I suppose. It'll be up here soon though. What's really cool is that she's letting me work for her during the academic year, as research on the side . . . because I'll always need the extra experience. Of course this will only happen if my schedule permits it, my thesis is my number one priority!

So that's what the majority of my summer was spent on, although I also spent a lot of time teaching my wife how to play racquetball. She's gotten really good too! We both have also spent a lot of time studying for the GRE's. We're both nearing the end of our Master's programs (hers is in Literature) and we definitely want to go on for our Doctorates. That means we have to go through the lovely process of applying to graduate school again . . . YEA! (can you feel the horror?) Once more, we are trying to get into the same school! It'll work out somehow though. I'm actually not that worried about it.

Well, that was my summer. I now have a semester off solid work to look forward to, but it's cool because I'm really looking forward to the research opportunities that I will be participating in this semester, including my thesis on social ostracism/exclusion. I'm also taking a required course on psychopathology, and will probably audit the evolutionary psychology course offered through our department. Lastly, I will be the teaching assistant for my research advisor, Dr. John Nezlek, which is very cool! He's brilliant, so the more time I spend around him, hopefully the more I'll pick up. The course is "Research Methods of Social Psychology," which is a perfect fitting for me. I'll be controlling the labs for the course, but will be sitting in on the classes as well. And the first meeting will be tomorrow!

That's all for now!

Colbert on Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer, science writer and editor of Skeptic magazine, was recently featured on The Colbert Report. It was pretty good, like all the others. Shermer did a pretty good job of explaining the need for science and skepticism, in the limited amount of time given. Favorite quote:

"If you want something to work, you use science!"

He also gives examples of how to examine evidence to disprove conspiracy theories (9/11 conspiracy theories in particular) and why you can't just go on anecdotal evidence for anything! If you want to find something out, you have to research the evidence!

the science behind out-of-body experiences

Here's a New York Times article of interest. Research published today in Science examines how normal, healthy people can have out-of-body experiences.

Usually the various sensory systems of which we observe our environment (vision, touch, balance, etc.) work together to create our sense of being. Yet when one system is thrown off or is given inaccurate information that greatly differs from the other systems the brain may try to make sense of the mis-matched information. In fact, it may force a sense of being in a different body.

In one experiment, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, asked participants to wear virtual reality goggles while an image taken of their backs was shown to them as being six feet in front of them. As this image was being projected, he simultaneously stroked their backs and their images' backs with a stick. If the two strokes occurred in sychronism, participants reported being inside the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, there was no illusion. Strangely, when the image being projected was not of the participant, but instead of a mannequin dressed in the same clothes as the participant the illusion still occurred.

In a different but related experiment, Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, had participants sit while wearing goggles connected to two video cameras set up behind them. He then began to stroke each person's chest with a stick, while at the same time moving a second stick just under the camera lenses so that it seemed to stroke the virtual body. When both strokes were simultaneous, the illusion of being outside their bodies was reported by the participants.

This is some really cool stuff I must say. It definitely gives some interesting insight into what goes on during near-death experiences where people report a sense of being outside of their bodies. Usually in these types of experiences individuals go through serious trauma or injury. There's no telling what their brains are trying to make sense of in these situations. Though one point to make is that they usually report a feeling of floating over their bodies, whereas participants in the above experiments did not have such a strong sense of floating. Of course, that is what future research is all about . . . right?

understanding a junk food junkie . . .

Mmm . . . mmm . . . good!

There's an interesting article from Scientific American that helps explain the current understanding of compulsive eating and its relation to drug abuse.

Basically, both types of behaviors activate the same brain circuitry in similar ways. The circuitry involved are neuronal networks that once evolved for the purpose of rewarding behaviors that were essential for the survival of our species (sex, finding/eating food, etc.) We essentially get rewarded for eating food (pleasure from taste), but at the same time we are conditioned with the various cues that preceded the pleasure (what the food looked like, the smell and where we found it), so that when we encounter those same cues again we expect the same pleasure, which, in turn, should make us more likely to eat the viand again.

"if the behavior necessary to seek a pleasurable experience was triggered exclusively by the object, the conditioned response would be very ineffective indeed; think about the need to find food to survive, for example: say we are primitive creatures in the jungle and you by pure chance taste a banana. The banana tastes good, but if you were just conditioned to remember that it tasted good—and not to the smell, the shape, the color, or the location of the banana—your ability to find it again would be impaired. Once you create this conditioned memory, though, it’s just like Pavlov’s dogs; the response becomes a reflex. This conditioned response underlies both the drive in drug addiction and the drive in compulsive eating."

In neuroimaging studies scientists have found that people display an increased level of dopamine in their striatum (brain area associated with reward and motivational responses) after just seeing and smelling their favorite food. The article also explains that this is the same thing that happens when drug addicts watch videos of people taking their drug of choice! At that high-calorie foods are more reinforcing than low-fat, low-calorie foods, which makes sense because as hunter-gatherers food was not always abundant. Eating high-calorie foods would be advantageous, because that contain more energy. But most of us don't live in hunting and gathering societies anymore:

"Our genes have changed little, but in our environment, we are now surrounded by high-fat, high-sugar foods. And this abundance is undoubtedly a major factor contributing to the rise in obesity Conditioning responses are incredibly powerful with food: when I go past a vending machine and I see chocolates I like very much, I desire the chocolate even though I’m not hungry. But if those chocolates weren’t there, it would be the last thing on my mind."

Such research adds additional insight into treatments for obesity and compulsive eating. One area that I find interesting is the use of biofeedback for treating over-eating:

"Yet another exciting area NIDA is researching is the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI) in biofeedback to train people to exercise specific parts of their brains, just like muscles. Sean Mackey of Stanford University, neuroscientist Christopher De Charms of Omneuron [in SanFrancisco] and their colleagues have similarly trained healthy subjects and chronic-pain sufferers to control their brain activity to actually modulate their experience of pain. So NIDA is exploring the possibility that you might use this kind of biofeedback to train people to control a region of the brain called the insula, which has been implicated in food and drug cravings. Smokers who have a lesion in the insula after a stroke, for instance, seem to lose the desire to smoke."

Pretty cool stuff. Well, anyways, check out the rest of the article!

"it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking"

If you've seen the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, then you may remember that the main character, Joel Barish (played by Jim Carrey), hires a company to erase the memories of his ex-girlfriend (played by Kate Winslet) after an epsiode of heart-break. This ends up being a mistake for Joel, and he spends the majority of the film struggling to preserve what's left of his memories of Clemetine while unconscious.

Now of course this is all science-fiction. But what if you really could erase specific long-term memories? Say memories of a deceased loved one? Or, in Joel's case, an ex-mate? Would you do it? What about traumatic experiences? Would you be willing to erase memories of a traumatic experience?

Well, we are a long way from the memory erasing capabilities of Eternal Sunshine, but research recently published in Science suggests that long-term memories are not etched in stone as previously thought. Instead, memory might be more like a "machine" that must keep running in order to hold onto experiences. Yadin Dudai, Head of the Weizmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department, found that by inhibiting the synaptic protein, PKMzeta, long-term memories in rats could be erased.

Essentially, Dudai's team trained rats to avoid certain tastes. Once the aversion was learned, they then injected the rats with a substance in the area of the cortex associated with taste memories. This substance is a PKMzeta blocking agent. After only a single application, the rats forgot their taste aversion training.

"The technique worked as successfully a month after the memories were formed, which is analogous to years in humans, and all signs so far indicate that the affected unpleasant memories of the taste had indeed disappeared."

"In other words, long-term memory is not a one-time inscription on the nerve network, but an ongoing process which the brain must continuously fuel and maintain and these findings raise the possibility of developing a 'memory eraser'."

That's pretty cool . . . very interesting, but I can't help being left feeling uneasy. If we actually reach the point of developing a "memory eraser," would it be used for practical, commercial purposes? And what would they be? Is it even ethical to erase anyone's long-term memories for any purpose? Perhaps erasing memories of traumatic experiences that lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course, I'm sure that such memory erasing capabilities would not be so solicitously advertised as it was in Eternal Sunshine, and there would probably be restrictions on the procedure. Very cool research, but definitely opens up a host of ethical questions.

Cure for fear?

Now here's an interesting article. According to the press release, scientists from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have discovered the molecular mechanism behind fear!

They found that inhibiting the enzyme, Cdk5, within the hippocampus of mice, eliminated a fear that they learned within a particular context:

"In the current research, genetically engineered mice received mild foot shocks in a certain environment and were re-exposed to the same environment without the foot shock.

The team found that mice with increased levels of Cdk5 activity had more trouble letting go of the memory of the foot shock and continued to freeze in fear.

The reverse was also true: in mice whose Cdk5 activity was inhibited, the bad memory of the shocks disappeared when the mice learned that they no longer needed to fear the environment where the foot shocks had once occurred."

This research was recently published in Nature Neuroscience. Pretty cool! Such exciting findings could possibly open up the door to new effective treatments for various emotional disorders, extreme phobias and even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Very cool!

Gilbert on Colbert . . .

Here's another interview for you, from the Colbert Report. In this interview, Colbert takes on Daniel Gilbert and his book, Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert is a social psychologist from Harvard that specializes in affective forecasting. Affective forecasting is one's ability to predict his/her future emotional state. People seem to be bad at predicting their emotional states, and Gilbert even explains that people are not particularly good at knowing what makes them happy. I have not read his book yet, but I intend to (it's on my list of books to read over the summer).

But anyways, the interview was good as always . . . and I got some interesting facts out of it. Like . . . people with kids are less happy than people without children. And the more children you have, the more unhappier you will be. Well, of course, that's talking about people on the average. I don't think it really says anything about happiness on the individual level. There's really no way to tell whether having a child is going to make you happy or not. Some people have really good, happy relationships with their children . . . others have bad relationships with them. It just happens to be that, on the average, people with children are unhappier than people without children. Of course, he doesn't really qualify this unhappiness. How unhappy are people with kids on average? What is it comparable to? Is it like getting fired from a job? Or eating just too much chocolate cake, to the point where you feel sick? Are people with pets less happy than people without pets as well? (just a thought)

On another note, there are some things that seem to make people happy. They are: 1. Marriage and 2. Religion. But again, the same thoughts come to mind. Does this say anything about me as an individual, as opposed to people on average? And how happy do these things make people comparatively speaking?

Oh well, I guess I just have to read the book I suppose.

Check out the Colbert clip, and if this stuff sounds interesting, go out and get the book!