How Good Are We At Correctly Interrupting Our Emotions?

We all know the basic emotions people can feel, like happiness, confusion, sadness, anger etc. But how good are we at interpreting these emotions when we do feel them? Do we sometimes label one emotion as something else?

A study conducted by Dutton and Aron (1973) went out to see whether the emotion of fear could be wrongly interpreted as attraction. To do this, they asked men who were known known to be of a nervous disposition to walk over a swaying bridge with a large drop beneath it and low hand rails. Whilst on the bridge an attractive woman approached them and asked them to fill in a simple survey. The men were given a phone number and told to call if they wanted more information about the meaning of the survey. The same method was used on men crossing another bridge that had no reason to initiate the feeling of fear.

The survey in itself was irrelevant to the study. What was really being tested was how many of the men would later call back. It was thought that the men on the fear – inducing bridge would be more likely to call as they would interpret the emotion of fear into the emotion of attraction.

On the stable, safe bridge only 2 out of the 16 participants called. But, on the rickety bridge, 9 out of 18 called. So something about the rickety bridge made people more likely to call. Dutton and Aron concluded that this meant the men called because they were attracted to the woman and this attraction was amplified when the men already felt the emotion of fear.

However there are many reasons to doubt these results. Some of the problems lie within the study itself. Ethically, it does not sit well with me that men who were known to be of a nervous disposition were asked to cross a bridge that was made to make them nervous. This is intentionally causing a participant discomfort. Also, who says that the men rang up because they found the woman attractive? It could be that the nervous men were more anxious about the meaning behind the study due to their personality and that is why they called.

There have also been studies that have found it is rare that a  negative attraction (fear) can be interpreted as a positive emotion (attraction) . Indeed some studies have specifically shown it can’t be done at all (Zanna et al, 1976). It is true that we can easily interpret  positive emotion into a different positive emotion and vice versa. Neutral emotions can be interpreted either way depending on how our day is going. For example arousal from caffeine intake may be interrupted as elation or irritation.

This got me thinking about the nerves people feel when we are asked to do our POPPS speeches. The people who tries to reinterpret their nerves as excitement and anticipation is likely to do better and feel better about performing than one who thinks of them as signals to run away and hide.

So it is very easy to interpret positive emotions as other positive emotions and the same with negative emotions, but very unlikely to interpret a positive emotion with a negative one and a negative emotion with a positive one.

 

 

 

Should you Go with your Gut?

During the course of our lives we have to make very complicated decisions. Some decisions are made after weeks of deliberation e.g. what university to attend, whereas others have to be made on the spot e.g. how we react when if someone starts shouting at us. Some people have to make on-the-spot decisions much more often. Surgeons have to make potentially life-saving decisions in seconds and fire fighters have to decide which route is the safest option. Less dramatically, we all have to decide what to do at the weekend and what deals are best for us at the supermarket.

When time is in short supply and decisions have to be made, is it better to go with your gut feeling or to use whatever time you do have to try and reason it out?

A new study by Mikels et al. (2011) tried to figure out the answer to this question, and claims to have found that following your gut instinct creates the best outcome. However, the validity of this study is something to be questioned.

In the experiment, participants (a low number of 76) who were all undergraduates (making it impossible to generalise results) were given information about four hypothetical cars. The information was presented one attribute at a time (serially) and in random order for 4 seconds per attribute. Each attribute was positive (e.g., “gets good gas mileage”) or negative (e.g., “gets poor gas mileage”). The options were designed such that one car (the “best” option) had 75% positive attributes, two cars had 50% positive attributes, and one car had 25% positive attributes. Before reading the information about the options, participants were instructed to attend to, and base their decision on, either their feelings about the options or the details about the options. The results showed that using the emotions led to much better outcomes. In one of the studies the number of participants getting the right answer went up from only 26% in the detail-focused condition to 68% in the feeling-focused condition.

However, just because the participant was instructed to use their feelings or reasoning to select the best car, it does not mean that they did. If an individual is naturally a reasoning person who does not generally involve feelings in making decisions they are not going to change just because a researcher is telling them to. There is a higher correct result for those told to base their decision on feelings, but this could just be because they are not trying to figure it out so much. The participants told to use reasoning may have felt under more pressure to come up with the correct answer causing them to try and absorb more information and becoming stressed which can inhibit memory (JW Newcomer, 1999).

 

Mikels claims to have found evidence that it is better to use your gut instinct when making decisions, but the method is flawed and the results can not be generalised therefore more research in this area needs to be done. 

Abortion leads to mental health problems?

In 2009 a study by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues made a very big claim, that woman who had abortions were more likely to be diagnosed with mental health problems later in life. no only was this claim very big, but it was also very false. If the above statement is in fact true it is surely not proven by this study.

The flaws in Coleman’s study were brought to light when researchers Steinberg and Finer tried to replicate the study in 2012. When the failed to do so they contacted the original authors and looked more thoroughly into Coleman’s data.

Coleman at al. had taken into account diagnoses throughout the women’s lifetimes. They had no data regarding if such diagnoses had been given before or after the time of the abortion.

Pricilla tried to defend her study. Here’s what the New York Times reported:

[…] Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University and her co-authors included all lifetime mental health disorders in their analysis, rather than only those instances occurring after the abortion took place. They were “hoping,” she says in a letter defending her methodology, “to capture as many cases of mental health problems as possible,” by including a longer period of time.

This argument is flawed. To say she was simply trying to capture as many diagnoses as possible is basically saying she did so to support her hypothesis and risked her validity as a result is experimenter bias. It in no way supports her methodology, it is simply an excuse.

To further defend herself, she now says that “majority of mental health problems likely occurred after the abortions” because most of the abortions studied occurred before age 21, but the data regarding diagnosis used in the study were not obtained until they were, on average, age 33. This is a valid point. However such facts should be included in the studies write up and to say ‘most’ does not mean all. It is a factor that could have been easily controlled and it seems Priscilla did not control it only to get the data she wanted. This goes against the idea of trying to prove the null hypothesis when researching.

The true numbers still remain unknown. The researchers only looked at the lifetime diagnoses with the knowledge of if that woman had an abortion at some point. Therefore the true outcome of the data could be that women who have mental health problems are more likely to have an abortion. Without the order of events known it is hard to make any definitive statements.

Julia Steinberg of the University of California at San Francisco and Lawrence Finer (2012) of the Guttmacher Institute found what they called, in a letter to the journal’s editors, “untrue statements about the nature of the dependent variables and associated false claims about the nature of the findings.”

“This is not a scholarly difference of opinion,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data.”

 

It is of course true that abortion causes emotional trauma. Researchers should try and better understand the psychological effects of such a procedure, but it should be done with honest, careful research.

Can the Heart Store Memories?

For hundreds of years, the heart is mentioned when explaining emotional aspects of our lives. Sayings such as ‘they broke my heart’, ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and ‘follow your heart’ are not uncommon in everyday conversation. But could these be more than metaphors? Could it be that some of our emotions and memories are actually stored in the heart as well as the brain? The theory is known as cellular memory. Most medical academics are sceptical, but the evidence for such a theory is mounting up and hard to explain away.

Many transplant patients claim to be more out going, adventurous and discover a love of extreme sports after their surgery. Although many of them believe they have gotten such attributes from their donor they cannot know for sure due to the strict confidentiality rules surrounding donors. Such cases are easily explained away by skeptics. The patients have in a way been given a second chance at life, to live without the illness that plagued them for years. Of course they would become more out going and want to live life to the full which could explain the new love of extreme sports. However the more specific cases are rare, but mind blowing.

One example is a woman named Claire Sylvia. She received a heart and lungs from an 18 year old male. All Claire was told was that it was from a young man who had died in an accident. Within three months of being given the transplant Claire began to crave beer – a drink she had never cared for, and loved to eat green peppers – a food she had hated prior to the transplant. She also had an overwhelming sense that her donor had been named Tim. When asking the hospital about this they agreed to look more into the situation and ask the donors family if the confidentiality could be broken. They did this because she was correct, the young man had been named Tim. She met his family and was also informed that he had a love of beer and green peppers.

The most shocking example I have come across whilst researching this has been that of an eight year old girl who received the heart of a ten year old girl. After surgery the young girl began having vivid nightmares about a girl being murdered. The dreams became so distressing she was sent to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist believed that the dreams were so vivid they had to be actual memories. Yes, you guessed it, the donor had been murdered and this little girl was seeing the last moments of her donors life. The dreams were so vivd and accurate that they even helped the police convict the killer.

Cellular theory has been given more weight after the discovery that neuropeptides exist not only in the brain as once thought but in all the tissues of the body. These neuropeptides are a way for the brain to “speak” to other bodily organs and for the organs to rely information back. However it is unknown if these newly found circuits could indeed store memories as the brain does in different organs.

Many questions remain. If such a phenomenon is true, why don’t all transplant patients experience it? Lots of people receive hearts and lungs from donors and feel exactly the same as they did (apart from a lot better medically of course). Could it be that some individuals are more ‘in tune’ with their bodies and therefore their organs store more memories than others which are then passed on?

One thing is for sure, a lot more research into this needs to be done. It can be distressing for a patient to feel so strongly the personality of their donor to be told it is nonsense and it could open the door to a huge medical discovery.

Here is a link to the documentary I watched that gave me the blog idea. Enjoy, it’s amazing. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/transplanting-memories/4od

Does the Duck/Rabbit Illusion Work as a Test of Creativity?

The Duck/Rabbit Illusion

There is little doubt you have not seen the optical illusion above once if not many times before. It is a very popular image that can either be seen as a duck, a rabbit or both alternatively. But could the ability to see both animals easily within the image reflect how creative you are?

Wiseman et al (2011) thought that there was a link between how the illusion is viewed and creativity levels .

He tested this by asking participants what animal they could see and, via a scale, how easy they found it to flip from one animal to the other if they could at all. The participants were then asked how many uses they could think of for an everyday object such as a chair in two minutes. They could be ordinary uses like to sit on, or more original uses such as using it to help build a fort. Wiseman assumed (note: only assumed) that the number of uses provided correlated to how creative the participant was.

Wiseman found that the participants who found it easy to flip from the duck to the rabbit and vise versa could think of an average of 5 uses for the object, whereas those who could not flip between the duck and the rabbit at all  come up with less than 2 uses.

Wiseman claimed that this suggests the ease with which you can flip from rabbit to duck/duck to rabbit is a clue to how creative you are. Flipping the image is like a small flash of creative insight and when you notice the world can be seen in a different way.

However although the participants used in this study were male, female and of  a good number (593 participants took part), their age and ethnicity was not recorded. This means there could be a cultural or age factor in play. Maybe the ‘more creative’ participants were the younger ones and the lesser creative the older participants. Or perhaps there is a cultural difference at play. People in Western culture are more likely to have seen the illusion before and therefore might simply be more practised at flipping from one animal to the next rather than it be based on their creativity as Wiseman has suggested.

It is also true that the data could be tainted by demand characteristics. The participant may have guessed what was being tested after being informed of both tasks and played up to it, maybe even without really meaning to. They may have also been put out that they could not easily see both animals in the illusion, and therefore believe themselves to be uncreative and as a result perform worse than they would usually on the next task. The tasks should have maybe been switched round for half of the participants to remove this possibility.

The study is only correlational. It is possible it is a factor that has not even been mentioned in the study that is effecting the relationship between the 2 tasks other than creativity.

Wiseman’s study is a very interesting one with intriguing results but further research must be done.

“Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns” – My critical analysis

The title of this journal is accrete. It explains what the study was for – to see what parts of the brain were activated when a mystical experience occurs.

The explanations of the findings of the study were justified. It claimed to find that several brain regions were and systems mediate mystical experience which it did to a certain extent. It did not find that only one specific part of the brain was responsible which other studies in the past have suggested. However, the mystical experience reference bothers me. The participants were asked to relive a mystical experience rather than to achieve it. Therefore the mystical experience it self could still be experienced in a specific part of the brain, but accesses the other parts of the brain when it is relived by the individual. Although this is unlikely as reliving an experience can be very close to being there again, it is still a possibility and a flaw within this study.

This was not the experiments only flaw. It’s participants, although having a good age range, were all Carmelite nuns and therefore if would be very hard to generalise the findings to the wider population. There were only 15 of them that took part as well, not making it a very large study. This means it is very likely that extraneous variables may have been at work and mutated the results undetected.

The design of the study also creates problems with validity. The 3 conditions, resting controlled and mystical were all performed by the same participants which eliminates individual differences but they were not all the same length as an attempt to reduce fatigue in participants. Although this is understandable it could be that the brain needs the same amount of time in, say, the relaxed condition to achieve the same activity that is achieved in the mystical condition.

When it comes to the news report, the message the headline portrays is very different to the content of the article which is actually pretty accrete. The headline ‘Nuns prove God is not figment of the mind’ is so incorrect. It not only suggests that the study has found mystical experiences are not experienced in the brain when the opposite is true, but it also claims to have proved this fact. Whether or not God exists, mystical experiences either cause or are caused by brain processes.

the study itself, although a few flaws in the design, did have significant findings. The news report was accrete at points, but would have given of the wrong impression completely based on the headline. This is dangerous, as many people skip through articles only focusing on the headline before turning the page. It is of the most importance that the title of an article accurately reflects the content which the above article definitely fails to do.

Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” Study

In my opinion, Ainsworth’s Strange Situation study into the subject of attachment is one of the most flawed studies I have ever come across. It was an experiment carried out in the 1970’s.

Ainsworth wanted to investigate how attachment in children aged 1 – 2 years vary and how the behaviours of that attachment manifest. To do this, the ‘Strange Situation’ procedure was created. An infant and their mother are left alone in a room. A stranger then enters before the mother leaves the infant alone with the stranger. The mother then returns before the stranger leaves. The mother then leaves the infant alone in the room for the first time. The stranger returns one last time, and then the mother. The stranger then leaves and once again the mother and infant are alone in the room. Each change of situation lasts 3 minutes before it is altered again, and the infants reaction if each change of environment is carefully observed and, according to Ainsworth, the findings of which can identify the infants attachment style.

The infants behaviour was measured under four specific categories. Separation anxiety (the unease of the child when left by the mother), the infants willingness to explore, stranger anxiety (the infants response to the stranger) and reunion behaviour (the way the mother was greeted on return). By observing these four behaviours, Ainsworth was sure she could identify the child’s attachment style.

The conclusion of the study was that there are three forms of attachment (secure attachment, resistant attachment and avoidant attachment), and that the type of attachment was determined by the behaviour of the mother (primary care giver).

However as I have already stated, I have many issues with this study.  It does have a high reliability. This means that it achieves consistent results.  For example, a study conducted in Germany found 78% of the children were classified in the same way at ages 1 and 6 years (Wartner, et al. 1994). However whether it has a high validity is a very different matter. The study only evaluates the infants attachment to the mother. The mother may not be the primary care giver. The infant may display completely different characteristics if put in the strange situation with a father or sibling. The infants behaviour may also change if put in the same situation at a different time of day or in a different state of mind. For example, a securely attached child may behave in a way considered to be insecurely attached if they were sleepy or coming down with a fever. The study has been criticised for breaking ethical grounds to as the child is out under stress and those, especially those labelled ‘insecurely attached’ would suffer anxiety as a result of the study. The participants in the study were all American. This means is is a sample bias and the results can not logically be applied to families outside America. And last and by no means least, the study has low ecological validity. The child was put in a situation they would never experience in day to day life. They would never be left alone with someone they had never seen before, and the stranger and parent were following a set script which may alter how they perceive their parent. If the mother is talking very differently than usual, this would cause confusion in the infant and may lead to a change in behaviour.

For the above reasons I do not think Ainsworth’s strange situation study is a valid way of studying attachment in children.

 

Case studies vs Experiments

There are two different sources researchers get their information from. One is from experiments, where variables are added and taken away as the researchers wish, and the other is from case studies, which is the analysis of an instance that arose by itself.

There are as with everything pros and cons to both these sources.

Take for example Stanford’s prison experiment. Twenty four men were randomly selected, and then randomly split into the two groups of guards and prisoners.  The experiment was abandoned 6 days in as the ‘officers’ began to abuse their authority and the participants started to drop out. This was an experiment. Therefore variables were controlled, participants were randomly selected and conditions were monitored. However even though this small group of the population acted this way, does it mean all the population would? Can it be generalised and it be said that all of us, if put in a position of authority would abuse that role? What about the real prison guards. In a real life situation authoritative roles have responsibility and apart from the odd few that authority is not abused. Maybe there were other variables that affected how those men behaved. Maybe one had been abused in early life and took the experiment as a way to release anger by inflicting abuse on someone else. Maybe eleven of the guards had personalities which made them easily influenced and the twelfth guard had an aggressive streak. Maybe if the men were left in those roles for longer they would have maintained a level of decency however the experiment had to be terminated due to ethical reasons.

On the other hand, take the case of Genie. Genie was a girl who spent the first thirteen years of her life locked in a bedroom and strapped to a potty chair where her only her father was allowed to talk to communicate with her and he would only growl and bark at her like a dog to keep her quiet. When genie was discovered she was mute had developed a characteristic “bunny walk” in which she held her hands up in front, like claws and constantly sniffed, spat, and clawed. She provided an excellent case for the study of linguistics and psychologists interested in child isolation and how we learn language at at later age. However Genie was just one child who was put in this situation. The variables were not controlled and Genie herself was not randomly selected. Maybe she was born with a mental disorder anyway that would have made her behave in some of the ways that was out down to be a cause of her isolation. Maybe if another child were put in such horrific circumstances they would have reacted very differently. Of course unless another case study such as Genie presents itself these questions will never be answered. And even if such a case arose, it would be very unlikely that the child’s treatment, environment or even gender would be the same. Obviously such a circumstance can not be replicated in an experiment as that would be unethical.

So basically, experiments give us more control over variables and a bigger subject size, but its limited by ethics and the inability to control all variables for a long period of time. Case studies are valuable as they are genuine and not limited by ethics but are rare to come across and hard to compare to other such cases as they are all very different.

I think its experiments that wins this one. No one (in theory) is harmed by its occurrence and variables can be better controlled.

Does the use of Ethics limit Psychology?

Ethics are a very important factor to consider when forming a psychological experiment. There are many things to take into account. There is the obvious such as will the participant be harmed either physically or emotionally, to the more tricky matters of ethics such as how much should the participant be told about the means of the experiment.

This all sounds pretty straight forward however researchers can sometimes find themselves with the dilemma of conflicting ethics and despite the strict guidelines of ethics they have to use their own opinions to decide what the most ethical thing to do. This puts psychologists in a very responsible and influential position and often the matter is put forward to other psychologists to come to a conclusion.

Such conflicting ethics are much more common that one might expect. Especially when it comes to the issues of ‘informed consent’ and keeping the validity of the experiment.  For example, take Milgrams behavioural study of obedience (1963). I will not go into details as I am sure most of you are aware of the study I am referring to. This experiment was criticised heavily for being unethical as it caused many participants short term and, in some cases, long term trauma. One way of reducing such stress would have been to tell the participants that they were in fact not giving shocks to an authentic participant but the shouts they could hear were only simulated by a sound machine. If Milgram were to have done this the experiment could have in no way been seen as unethical. However, if the participants had been told this they would not have acted in a natural way and the results of the study would not be valid. They would also be a lot more chance of them guessing what the experiment was trying to research which would lead to the problem of ‘demand characteristics’. This is when the participant becomes figures out (or thinks they have) how the researcher is expecting them to act so acts in this way and not how they would otherwise, or if the conditions in the experiment were presented to them in a real life situation.

So, although ethics may have gone against what Milgram did, he did it anyway. He’s studies opened everyones eyes to how and why people do unspeakable things when told to by someone in perceived authority. Before he did the study psychologists estimated only 3% of those studied would administer the fatal shock and these people would be sadistic or mentally unstable. Milgrams study found that 65% of the population administered the fatal shock. Therefore of Milgram had sticked to the rules of ethics this major breakthrough would have never happened.

It makes you wonder, how many experiments could be done if ethics were not there to restrict them and even if they did cause temporary harm to participants the findings such studies could be so beneficial that the ends justify the means. Also, every researcher has to abide by the ethics rules, but who says that those are ethical? For all we know there could be a huge unethical issue hidden in there that we all just accept to be ethical because the guidelines say so. We can never know the appropriate place to put the line between when to follow such guidelines and when to use our own common sense. Ethics restricts psychology.

Is it appropriate to animals in psychological research?

Although UK Law heavily regulates animal testing and suggests using other means if possible, it also requires it within the medical world. It states that any new drug must be tested on at least two different species of live mammal and one of these must be a large non-rodent. This is so any obscene side effects and be seen and obliterated until being tested on humans. Although a reaction of a human to a drug will be slightly different to a mammals it would be very similar.

But can the same be said about psychological experiments?
Can we use animals in psychological research and apply the results to humans?

In 1958, Harry Harlow devised an experiment to try and prove the general assumption that the attachment made between new borns and their mothers was one based on the need for the infant to obtain food, water and to avoid pain was wrong. He did this by removing rhesus monkeys from their mothers just a few hours after birth and giving them a choice between a wire ‘mother’ that had a bottle of milk attached to it, or a soft mother made terrycloth but which provided no food. The monkeys spend significantly more time with the mother made of terry cloth than the one made of wire sometimes even going without food in order to stay with the comforting ‘mother’.

“These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance,” Harlow explained (1958).

Harlow’s study does indeed show that contact comfort is very important in early life, but it only shows us that this is true in Rhesus monkeys. Although many assume it would also apply to humans as humans and monkeys have been proven to be remarkably similar in the past, is assuming ever really enough in the world of psychology? If psychology claims to be a science than surely such statements should be proven, not just assumed.

It is of course impossible to prove the same is true of human infants while following ethical guide lines so many would argue that as monkeys are the closest we can test, we have no choice but to assume.

There is also the implication of the trauma caused to the monkeys tested on. Being removed from their mother at such a young age is traumatic enough but when the surrogate mothers were removed the monkeys displayed signs of great distress including rocking, screaming and freezing up.

This experiment did change, for the better, the way child care and adoption were handled within social services which would  promote some to say that the ends justified the means.

But i ask you this, if the experiment cannot prove that the same is true of humans which is what it sought to prove in the first place, then does that mean that those monkeys were put under the stress of being removed from any physical contact with a living thing hours after birth for absolutely no reason? Let alone the distress that must have been experienced by the mothers of these monkeys at having their new offspring taken away.

If results obtained from animals cannot be applied to humans and it causes the animals involved irreversible damage, is it ever appropriate to use animals in psychological  research?