You’ll find it under the new tab Teaching Index, where topics are listed in the order many psychology textbooks follow (biological bases, perception, cognition, development, social and personality). That made more sense to me than alphabetical, because it grouped areas in useful ways (perception and visual attention, for example).

This is not an attempt to index the whole blog, but if there’s something I’ve missed in terms of an existing post or a useful category, please let me know in the comments.

Quick review: good book, very fun read, and I’m happy to recommend it to almost everyone. I just have one small quibble.

For the quibble to make any sense, you need to know something about my teaching. Students in all my psychology classes have to write a few paragraphs to earn “culture points.” They must consider how psychology connects to art, though the social context surrounding the event is also fair game for analysis. So my students attend a concert, visit a museum, or go to a play or dance performance and then write a paragraph connecting some aspect of psychology to their experience. I get a lot of discussion of the Gestalt grouping principles with paintings, but every semester several students make more interesting connections: noticing how a theatrical production manipulated their attention using a sudden movement, or positive reinforcement at work between live performers and their audience, or discussing how a particular aspect of memory may explain a very surprising emotional reaction to a sculpture.

My inspiration for the assignment came from a comment by Hermann von Helmholtz, who some of you will think of as a physicist (that whole conservation of energy thing), but who psychologists also get to claim for his work on color vision (the lovely trichromatic theory) and pitch perception (an approximation of the place theory). Helmholtz quotes a Goethe poem, and then writes:

…he [Goethe] may teach us how a mortal — who had indeed learned to stand even if he touched the stars with his forehead — still kept a clear eye for truth and reality. The true researcher must always have something of the artist’s insight, of the insight which led Goethe, and Leonardo da Vinci, too, to great scientific thoughts. Both artist and researcher strive — even if in different ways — towards the same goal: to discover new lawfulness. One must not, however, want to propagate idle daydreams and crazy fantasies for artistic insight. Both the true artist and the true researcher know how to work properly and how to give their work a stable form and convincing similitude.

Because I’m someone who assigns and grades discussions on the intersection of science and art every semester, I am not Jonah Lehrer’s target audience. I already agree with Lehrer’s thesis that art is an important avenue for understanding the world, and understanding our experience. Lehrer, joining Helmholtz, makes the case that science isn’t the only viable method of analysis.

Of course art and science are good for different things, but I think Lehrer is trying to write to a group of folks who may have forgotten (or never knew?) that great art offers us important insights into the world. To my mind, Lehrer overemphasizes what some of the artists might have “known,” but my guess is he does this because he is addressing an art-deprived audience. I enjoy learning about the art of Cézanne and Stravinksy, but I am really not convinced that either man gained special insight from their art about the physiological mechanisms behind early vision (edges are important!) and the flexibility of the auditory cortex. I think it’s great to be able to see the art and recognize its appeal might be related to the first analysis of the visual system; I’m just not sure why it has to be true that Cézanne “knew” that edges were critical to the mechanism.

That said, it’s a good book. So good, that I’m thinking about using it in my new seminar, tentatively named “The Ordinary, and Extraordinary, Mind”

Hermann von Helmholtz (2003). “The facts of perception.” In M. P. Munger (Ed.) The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. New York. Oxford University Press.

Everyone knows a “perfectionist.” We think of him or her as someone who strives for, and often attains, a high level of performance. But what are the psychological effects of this behavior? Psychologists categorize perfectionists according to two commonly accepted forms. Adaptive (‘healthy’) perfectionists set high standards for themselves, and use these goals to elicit their best effort. This form of perfectionism, measured by a subscale of the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (APS-R), called the High Standards scale, is associated with positive psychological outcomes such as high self-esteem and social adjustment.

Maladaptive (‘unhealthy’) perfectionists, on the other hand, set unattainably lofty goals, that is, no level of achievement is ever enough. This form of perfectionism, measured by another subscale of the APS-R, called the Discrepancy scale, is correlated with several unhealthy outcomes, including depression, substance abuse and eating disorders. It is said that adaptive perfectionists have drive while maladaptive perfectionists are driven.

A study led by Kenneth Rice followed 499 students to find out how colleges might successfully intervene to help maladaptive high-achieving students attain a healthier psychological profile. One goal of the study was to identify the relationship between the healthy and unhealthy forms of perfectionism and depression, where depression is measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES-D) and the Beck Hopelessness Scale.

The results confirm expectations: Unhealthy perfectionism leads to more depression and hopelessness, while healthy perfectionism is either unrelated or negatively related depending on the depression measure. In short, high-achieving students are served well when they set high standards, but are adversely affected when their perfectionist tendencies get out of hand.

How Do Stress and Social Connectedness Interact with Discrepancy To Affect Outcome?
The authors next consider how stress, which is measured by the Perceived Stress Scale, interacts with unhealthy perfectionism to affect the risk of depression. The authors find two important results. First, unhealthy perfectionism and stress both independently lead to more depression. Second, unhealthy perfectionism, in combination with high stress, leads to an even higher level of depression. In other words, a high level of stress or a high discrepancy score alone can be problematic for depression, but in combination their effects are magnified.

To quantify their results, the authors use their statistical results to predict outcome scores for four hypothetical individuals who have either a ‘high’ or ‘low’ stress level, and either a ‘high’ or ‘low’ level of unhealthy perfectionism. To facilitate the interpretation of these results, I entered their calculations into an Excel spreadsheet, and then created bar charts from these data.

The results show depression as measured by the Beck Hopelessness Scale (the results are similar for the CES-D depression measure). For reference, a Beck score above 9 defines clinical depression.

The figure shows that, when stress is low, the Beck score is relatively low, independent of the value of the discrepancy score — the indicator of unhealthy perfectionism. When stress is high, however, hopelessness increases markedly, and the effect is especially pronounced for individuals who have high unhealthy perfectionism. Students with both high levels of stress and high unhealthy perfectionism have much higher risks of depression than those with either high stress or unhealthy perfectionism alone.

Finally, the authors look at the relationship between social connectedness, which is measured by The Social Connectedness scale, and depression. A high score on The Social Connectedness scale indicates that one has more friends and spends more time socializing. The results are shown in the figure below.

Note that for students who have a high level of social connectedness, the risk of depression is low regardless of the level of unhealthy perfectionism. The risk remains low for students who have low scores for social connectedness if they also have low unhealthy perfectionism. The Beck scores, however, increase dramatically for students who have both a low level of social connectedness and high unhealthy perfectionism. Put simply, unhealthy perfectionism is not as problematic in students who have high levels of social interaction.

Implications of the Study
The authors are careful to avoid assigning causality in their results. Perhaps some individuals have hidden attributes that make them driven, stressful, avoidant of social connections. Or, perhaps driven students create undue internal stress, and also avoid socializing owing to their compulsion to do more work. Either way, the authors suggest that by adopting a more aggressive counseling program, and encouraging more social contact, the university could mitigate the deleterious effects of unhealthy perfectionism among high-achieving students.

While this study contributes to our understanding of how the various forms of perfectionism affect one’s psychological well being, it is important to note that the issue of perfectionism’s origins, in either of its forms, is left unanswered.

Rice, K.G., Leever, B.A., Christopher, J., & J.D. Porter (2006). Perfectionism, Stress and Social (Dis)Connection: A Short-Term Study of Hopelessness, Depression, and Academic Adjustment Among Honors Students. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(4), 524-534.

If a baby is placed in a new, strange situation, a common reaction is to look to its mother. For example, whenever I met a new baby I was to babysit, she would always look to her mother at first, as if to get her mother’s opinion on the potentially frightening situation. But why, exactly, is the baby looking to its mother? It might be for comfort in a novel situation, but it might also be to receive information. A team led by Trisha Striano has developed a study to test whether babies look to their mothers for comfort, or just to get facts about a situation.

In their first experiment, Striano et al. used ambiguous and unambiguous cliff set-ups in order to determine whether infants look to adults in novel situations for comfort or for information. Here’s an example of a visual cliff:

The “cliff” consists of Plexiglas extending beyond the edge of a platform, created to look like a potentially dangerous drop-off to the infant. The ambiguous cliff was 20 cm deep, and the unambiguous cliff was 56 cm deep; the researchers assumed that the unambiguous cliff was obviously deep to the infant and therefore would be seen as dangerous. In the experiment, the mother was instructed to encourage her infant to crawl across the cliff without using any gestures. An experimenter placed the infant at the edge of the cliff, with the mother 30 cm away from the deep side of the cliff. The mothers began encouraging their infants to cross the cliff only after the infants initially looked at them.

The result of this study was that infants placed on the unambiguous, deep cliff took significantly longer to cross the cliff than the infants placed on the ambiguous cliff, and the duration of the first look to their mother was also significantly longer. The fact that the initial look was longer for infants presented with the deep cliff suggests that infants were seeking comfort when looking to their mothers. However, the overall amount of time infants took looking at their mothers was the same for all groups. Striani’s team speculates that it is possible that the deep cliff is actually more ambiguous to infants than the shallow cliff and that therefore infants look at their mother longer when presented with the deep cliff because they are seeking information. Since this study could not give a conclusive answer about whether infants look to their mothers for comfort or information, the researchers developed a new experiment.

In this study, the same cliff setup was used, but there were four different conditions that varied in the amount and type of encouragement and information each infant received from his/her mother. The first group of infants’ mothers encouraged them vocally while facing them (face plus voice), the second group of infants’ mothers encouraged them vocally while facing away from them (voice only), the third group of infants’ mothers talked about crossing the cliff apparatus to an experimenter and in “non-motherese”(talk to adult), and the fourth group of infants’ mothers gave no encouragement at all and did not face their infants (no cues).

This experiment used100 10-month-olds, but only 34 were considered in the results because the other 66 were excused from the study either because the infant became fussy or because of technical problems with the experiment. Of the 34 infants considered, 12 were in the face plus voice condition, 12 were in the voice only condition, 6 were in the talk to adult condition, and 4 were in the no cues condition.

Although prior to the experiment the researchers did not intend to focus on how many infants they could actually consider in their results, that is what they focused on after the experiment concluded. Twenty-two infants had to be excused from the experiment due to fussiness. Out of those 22 infants, most were in the talk to adult or no cues conditions. Take a look at this graph of the portion of infants excluded from each condition:

The research team argues that the high number of infants that needed to be excluded from the experiment suggests that infants are looking to their mothers for comfort in novel situations, because they were not receiving any form of comfort in the third and fourth conditions and therefore became fussy and did not cross the cliff. The crossing time, frequency of looks, and proportion of total duration of looks were not significantly different for any condition. However, the length of the initial look was significantly longer in the talk to adult condition than in any other condition.

So it appears that infants look to their mothers in novel situations for comfort, not information, because although they received information in the talk to adult condition, they did not receive any comfort and therefore most did not cross the cliff. The results also suggest that infants as young as 10 months old can distinguish between when a person is talking to them and when they are addressing others, but cannot utilize any information that is not addressed directly to them. This is evident because although the mothers in the talk to adult condition were giving information about crossing the cliff, because the information was not addressed directly to the infant, the infant did not cross the cliff.

Both studies conducted by Striano et al. suggest that infants look to their mothers in novel conditions in order to be comforted. However, neither study can be considered completely definitive, as there are a few other possible explanations for the results. For example, in the second experiment, it is possible that infants were in fact seeking information, but did not cross in the talk to adult condition because they did not understand that they could use information that was not directed specifically at them. Also, in the first experiment, it is possible that the fact that mothers were encouraging their infants to cross a deep cliff in the unambiguous condition actually made the situation more ambiguous for the infant, thus causing them to look at the mother longer initially in order to seek information about the situation. Although the results cannot be considered completely definitive, they offer insight into a fascinating aspect of child development.

Striano, T., Vaish, A., & Benigno, J.P. (2006). The meaning of infants’ looks: Information seeking and comfort seeking? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24, 615-630.

Visual cliff image source:

http://www.uclan.ac.uk/psychology/bully/images/cliff.jpg

Our three movies showed some kind of quadripedal action, and we provided a long list of possible anwers. Two of our three movies depicted very typical actions for the actor–a dog walking, and a human baby crawling. The third movie showed something slightly unusual–a human adult crawling. Did the unusualness of the action matter?

Here are the top responses we got as people viewed the movie showing an adult human crawling. For the most part, people successfully matched the actor and action, though a sizable group understood the action to be that of a gorilla. There is a significant interaction between certain kinds of experience and identifying this movie: parents were more likely to see this figure as human than dog owners. Dog owners are more likely to say “gorilla,” and parents are more likely to mistake the crawling adult for a crawling baby. So, how do dog owners do with the actual dog movie?

Well, most folks do recognize the dog as a dog, with the two pig options a distant second. However, the parents are actually more accurate than the dog owners. Almost all the parents also had pets (not just dogs), which actually makes the difference more interesting: Something about being a parent seems to be adding to the ability to interpret action. The final movie was a crawling baby, something parents certainly dealt with at some point (though we didn’t ask how old the children were).

So much for parenting and visual expertise! By far the most popular response to our crawling baby was “gorilla walking.” In fact, both parents and dog owners are equally likely to identify the baby as a crab or a kangaroo! Stripped down to its essence, the action of a crawling baby is really tough to recognize.

Brian Meier, Michael Robinson and Benjamin Wilkowski thought the personality factor of agreeableness might be playing a role in how individuals react to aggression-related cues. You know who agreeable people are–they are the ones who warm and friendly, and seem to be able to diffuse tense situations by bringing up helpful ideas.

In their first experiment, Meier and his team showed participants three words and asked them to identify which two words were associated with one another. For example, if presented with “torture,” “floor,” and “slash” you’d say that “torture” and “slash” are the related pair. Half the participants rated a series of aggressive words, and half rated a series of neutral words (like “buy,” “floor,” and “mop”). Following this priming procedure, participants were tested for levels of aggression using a competitive reaction time task. Participants were run in small groups, so they could see that there were several people in the lab being tested at the same time. In this competitive reaction time task, participants were told they were competing with another person to see who could react quicker to a sound. If they lose this simple race, they will hear a blast of noise; if they win, silence. Participants were also told that their competitor is setting the volume of the noise blast, and that they get to set the volume blast that this person will receive. Setting a higher volume reveals higher aggression. There are lots of interesting questions you can address with this situation, but of particular importance in this study is the very first noise setting the participants set–before they have lost any of the races. Any differences in this first noise level can be attributed to the preceding priming task involving either aggressive or neutral words.

The graph reveals that individuals who score low on agreeableness are dramatically impacted by the priming manipulation, with significantly higher noise settings following a session dealing with aggressive words. But what is particularly interesting is the lack of effect the aggressive prime had on the highly agreeable individuals–folks scoring high on the agreeableness scale were not negatively impacted by the aggressive priming. In other words, being highly agreeable seems to offer some kind of buffer against reacting aggressively, even after you’ve spend quite some time thinking about aggressive words. In fact, the data hint that the aggressive priming decreased subsequent aggression as measured by the first noise setting, and this led to Meier et al’s second experiment.

Instead of measuring aggression, in the second study Meier et al examined how words are related to one another in memory, which gives insight into how individuals might interpret and react to different situations. For example, if the words “dog” and “bite” are closely linked in your mind, you might interpret a dog as more of a threat than someone for whom the word “dog” is more closely linked with “pet.” Of course, personal history is going to play a major role in how words and ideas are associated. Participants were asked to categorize a long series of words as either prosocial (words like “admire,” “console,” and “forgive”) or antisocial (words like “blame,” “insult,” and “ridicule”). The words appeared randomly to the participants, and the critical analysis involves looking at how quickly individuals could correctly categorize a prosocial word that followed either another prosocial word, or an antisocial word. For example, are you faster to identify the word “praise” as prosocial when you’ve just identified “agree,” or when you’ve just identified “quarrel?”

When sorted by their agreeableness scores, opposing patterns appear. Individuals low in agreeableness are slower to identify a prosocial word that immediately followed an antisocial word. In striking contrast, individuals high in agreeableness are faster to identify prosocial words that immediately follow antisocial words. For highly agreeable individuals, the antisocial words are closely related to prosocial words–which might explain why similar individuals didn’t show aggressive behavior in the first experiment. Aggressive thoughts are not uniquely primed following the processing of aggressive words for highly agreeable people. In fact, they are primed for prosocial words!

This raises an interesting possibility: the key to decreasing aggressive behavior might be to focus on developing agreeable and prosocial reactions to situations. This is not necessarily an easy task–how hard is it to smile when you’d really like to snarl? But promoting caring and friendly behaviors might be easier than removing all violent media and video games from your son’s, your daughter’s, and even your own life.

Meier, B.P., Robinson, M. D. & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related primes. Psychological Science, 17, 136-142.

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 manipulating whether the bars were vertical or horizontal, Fischer et al also looked at where the numbers fell along the number line. In the following graphs, the absolute difference between the black and white bars is a constant, but it might take you a minute to really see that.

In previous research, Fischer had found that participants are faster to make left responses to smaller numbers, and right responses to larger numbers. In other words, when confronted with two numbers, you are faster to identify the leftmost one as the smaller, and the rightmost one as the larger. This suggests that your underlying mental number line starts with small numbers on the left — which is certainly the way most rulers are printed. Given this left-right coding, it would follow that horizontally oriented bars would be easier to read. However, that’s not what Fischer et al actually observed: participants were significantly faster with vertically oriented bars depicting positive or negative values. The orientation difference didn’t hold for graphs depicting mixed pairs (one positive, one negative).

Participants were also significantly faster at making decisions regarding positive numbers, regardless of orientation. What is particularly interesting about these results is that our underlying mental number line, which seems to run from left to right, is not leading to an advantage for horizontally oriented bars. Instead, there is a suggestion that increased vertical height corresponds to “more” — something which might be more universal than a number line that matches Western reading habits.

One final, personal note about gridlines (those lines that extend across the graph for each scale mark): Yuck! Fischer et al included them in the stimuli for their experiment, and so I included them here, but I bet they get in the way as much, if not more, than bar orientation. Clearly, there is more work to be done.

Fischer, M. H., Dewulf, N. & Hill, R. L. (2005). Designing bar graphs: Orientation matters. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 953-962.

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As always, you’ll have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday, March 1 to complete the survey, which should only take a minute of your time. But don’t wait too long, because the survey will close when we receive 250 responses.

Dave should have last week’s results up within a few hours.

In general, it looks as if the blue object is a bit behind the rod; or that the flashed object is lagging relative to the moving rod. This is called the flash-lag effect (FLE) and has been studied in lots of labs, but today I’m going to tell you about an experiment by Romi Nijhawan of the University of Sussex that explored the role of eye movements and FLE (The flash-lag phenomenon: object motion and eye movements, Perception, 2001). Nijhawan asked participants to focus on the small cross at the center, and showed participants a ring, rotating about a fixed point on screen (Panel A). At some point, a flash perfectly filled the rotating ring (Panel B), but participants actually saw a small gap (Panel C) as the flashed object lagged behind the moving one in their perception.

You can play with a cool interactive version of this display here.

So, when your eye is fixed on the cross at the center, you misperceive the flash behind the moving ring. What does this tell us about the car parked on the side of the road? In an additional experiment, Nijhawan used a ring that was stationary and asked participants to follow a small pursuit point around the path of motion (Panel A).

Now, when your eye is moving up, any image on your retina is moving down (think about how the road moves opposite the direction you are going when you look out the passenger window). Just when the pursuit point was in the center of the stationary ring, Nijhawan again perfectly filled the center with a flash (Panel B). And again, participants saw a flash-lag effect (Panel C), but this time it wasn’t the ring that was moving, it was their own eyes! No matter the source of the movement (the object moving, or your eyes), we misperceive the relative locations of briefly flashed objects. When you are passing that parked car with its hazard lights on, the blinking lights might look a little off because your motion is creating a flash-lag effect, leading you to see the lights a bit disconnected from the car.