Emotion
April 17, 2008
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
If you saw a headline like this one in your local newspaper, you might first think it's some type of info-tisement sponsored by the floral industry. You'd probably be right, too. So what is this headline doing in Cognitive Daily? We've found a study to support the notion that flowers actually induce real positive emotions.
Was it paid for by the floral industry? Yes, it was. Does that mean it's bad research? Not necessarily. A team led by Jeannette Haviliand-Jones has conducted an impressive set of three experiments, each of which contributes to the idea that giving someone flowers improves their mood, not just at the moment of delivery, but long afterwards.
In the first experiment, 147 women were recruited using ads in supermarkets to participate in a study about "normal daily moods." In exchange, they would be given one of 10 possible gifts, but they weren't told which gift they'd receive. The women were all called on the phone and given a questionnaire to assess their mood and overall life satisfaction. Then, 10 days later, two experimenters showed up at their door at a scheduled time to deliver the gift.
One third of the women received flowers, one third got a fruit basket, and one third got a candle. These gifts had been pre-selected by a group of volunteers to have equivalent appeal, and they all had equivalent monetary value. Chocolate wasn't chosen as a gift because some raters found it unappealing because of the danger of gaining weight.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:33 PM • Comments (21)
April 14, 2008
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as a traditional mealtime prayer, are often expressed by rote. Growing up, my family wasn't very religious, but when we had dinner with family or friends, we'd usually say grace. I was probably well into my teens before I understood what "blessusolordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybounty" actually meant.
While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a worthwhile practice, there hasn't been much experimental research on whether gratitude really has a positive impact on our lives. Several studies have found that gratitude correlates with positive emotions such as happiness, pride, and hope, but experimental work -- showing that gratitude causes these things -- is scarcer.
Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough figured it would be worthwhile to explore this notion. Their method of study was both ingenious and simple: they would ask 201 students in a health psychology class to respond to a weekly questionnaire. Everyone rated their well-being, was tested on a measure of gratefulness, and reported on their physical health and level of exercise. The key to the study was a division into three groups. The first group listed five things they were grateful for each week. The second group listed five hassles or irritants from the past week. The final group simply wrote down five "events or circumstances" from the past week. This continued for ten weeks.
What sort of things did they write?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:34 AM • Comments (16)
December 27, 2007
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
Earlier this week we discussed the relationship between life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, finding that for measures such as relative income, the happiest people weren't always the best-off. For relationships, however, the happiest individuals also seem to do better.
But these measures were only taken at an instant in time. What about over longer periods? The College and Beyond study questioned incoming college freshmen in 1976, and included a self-rating of "cheerfulness," among many other measures. Then those same individuals were surveyed in 1995. How did cheerfulness affect income nearly two decades later? Here are the results:
As you can see, it depends on the individual. People who came from higher-income families earned significantly more than those who were from low-income families. But the pattern for high-income families looks more like the pattern previously observed only for relationships: the more cheerful respondents were in 1976, the more they made in 1995. For low-income families, being extremely cheerful didn't pay off as well: respondents from the second most cheerful group in 1976 earned more in 1995 than the most cheerful group.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:30 AM • Comments (5)
December 24, 2007
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment.
People around the world rate happiness as more important than intelligence, success, and material wealth. But is it possible to be too happy? An extremely happy person might be less motivated to seek a better job, more education, or better health care. Short-term happiness could conceivably be a route to a less satisfying life. Yet many government policies, for example, are justified by a desire to promote more and more happiness. Isn't there a limit?
A team led by Shigehiro Oishi conducted what they claim is the first study of the idea that there may be an optimal happiness level. There is a wealth of data available that includes some measure of happiness along with other possible measures of well-being, so rather than conducting a new survey, the researchers re-analyzed several different data sets with an eye to learning if the optimal level of happiness might be something less than "perfectly content."
The first study they considered was the World Values Survey, which was administered to over 100,000 individuals from 96 different countries between 1981 and 2000. One of the many questions respondents were asked was "all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life these days?" This is a pretty standard measure of happiness: respondents are simply asked to rate their overall happiness level on a numerical scale (in this case, 1 to 10). Another common way to assess happiness is on a moment-to-moment basis: You could be happy overall with your life, but sad momentarily when a favorite pet dies. Oishi's team concerned itself primarily with the more long-term variety -- but many studies have also shown that momentary happiness correlates with life satisfaction.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:16 AM • Comments (12)
December 17, 2007
Category: Emotion • Face perception • Research
This past weekend, I went to two different holiday parties. While many of the people at the parties were friends, I was also introduced to a couple dozen new people -- out of town guests of the hosts, friends of friends, or people from our small town that I somehow had never met. If I run into one of these people at the coffee shop tomorrow, how likely will I be to remember that I've met them before? One possibly relevant factor is that I was a designated driver at just one of the two parties.
There's another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is remembered: the facial expression. In 2004, Arnaud D'Argembeau and Martial Van der Linden found that people who viewed a series of photos of faces were more likely to remember smiling faces compared to angry faces -- even when the faces they were later asked to recall had neutral expressions.
In a new study, they wanted to explore the other factors affecting our our ability to remember faces. This time they had 72 volunteers rate 16 faces on one of three different attributes: emotion expressed, intelligence, and nose size. The faces were seen for just five seconds each. Some of the faces they saw were happy, and some were angry. After a one-minute distraction task, there was a surprise memory test. The viewers were shown neutral faces, some of which they had seen before, and some they hadn't. So which faces did they remember? Here are the results:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:58 PM • Comments (10)
November 27, 2007
Category: Emotion • Face perception • Research
Do people ever tell you to "just smile, you'll feel better"? If you're like our daughter Nora, you hear it a lot, and you get annoyed every time you hear it. Telling a teenager to smile is probably one of the best ways to ensure she won't smile for the next several hours. But the notion that "smiling will make you feel better" has actually been confirmed by research. There are several studies demonstrating that people are happier when they smile, at least in certain circumstances.
It's not as easy as you might think to study the effect. For one thing, it's possible that it's not the physical smile itself, but the request that's causing the emotional change. Researchers have attempted to get around that problem by simply directing people to move their facial muscles in a proscribed sequence ("Move your lips to expose your teeth while keeping your mouth closed." "Now use your cheek muscles to pull the corners of your lips outward," and so on). But still, it's likely that research participants will catch on to the purpose of the study when they are asked whether they are feeling happy or sad.
In 1988 a team led by Fritz Strack came up with a brilliant cover story that allowed them to manipulate facial expressions without the research participants' awareness. The researchers told participants that they were studying adaptations for people who had lost the use of their hands. Such individuals would need to use their mouths to hold pencils for writing, or to use a television remote. The study was to assess whether the unpleasantness or difficult of these tasks affected their "attentional abilities and responsiveness." The current study on people with full use of their hands was simply designed to test the procedure.
The participants then held a pencil in their teeth (which naturally activates the muscles typically used for smiling) or lips (which does not activate those muscles), and then rated several cartoons for funniness. Those who were (unknowingly) "smiling" rated the cartoons as funnier than people who weren't smiling.
Innovative as it was, the Strack team's study had several limitations, the most important of which is that the researchers didn't account for the physical differences in holding a pencil with lips versus teeth. If the people are simply more uncomfortable holding a pencil in their lips, that might explain the entire difference between the "smiling" and "not smiling" conditions.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:03 PM • Comments (14)
November 13, 2007
Category: Emotion • Learning and testing • Reasoning • Research
Yesterday we discussed several experiments offering converging evidence that exposure to the color red, even for brief periods before taking a test, can result in lower achievement. It's startling research, but as my daughter suggested at breakfast this morning, maybe people are just intimidated by the color red because that's the color that's always used for grading.
Aren't we just conditioned to see red as threatening? That might be part of it, but in nature red also frequently suggests danger. Many poisonous plants and animals are red. Blood is red. Hot coals and lava are red. It's possible that humans have a biological predisposition to avoid the color red.
In our nonscientific poll conducted yesterday, we asked readers what the dominant color on their computer desktop was. Just 28 out of 550 respondents chose red from our list of 11 colors -- about half of what you'd expect if colors were chosen arbitrarily. It's possible that many computer users simply never change from their computer's default desktop, but someone (at Microsoft or Apple, for example) had to decide on a default, didn't they? Why didn't they choose red?
The team led by Andrew Elliot suspected that avoidance motivated by the color red may be the reason test-takers scored worse on tests marked with red, and they developed an additional two experiments to explore that notion.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:46 AM • Comments (20)
November 12, 2007
Category: Emotion • Learning and testing • Reasoning • Research
One of the things I was taught in English graduate school was never to grade papers using red ink. Students don't respond well to the color red, I was told -- it's intimidating. I always thought this was a little far-fetched, and my instructors couldn't offer a peer-reviewed journal article that definitively answered the question of whether red ink was harmful.
There is some research on the question of whether red is harmful in an academic setting -- but it's inconclusive, with some studies showing harm and others appearing to show a benefit to the color red. For decades, there has been a theoretical argument that red is arousing or threatening, but little data to back it up. A team led by Andrew Elliot argues that what little data exists is problematic. Most of the studies on color suffer from flaws. In many cases, the experimenter was aware of the color condition, and so may have biased research subjects with actions that were themselves seen as intimidating or threatening.
One seemingly contradictory study that found athletes performed better while wearing red could be explained in two ways: either red improves performance because athletes wearing the color win more frequently, or red impairs performance of competitors facing athletes wearing red.
I'm going to talk about Elliot et al.'s study, but first I thought I'd try a little poll. Do CogDaily readers avoid the color red in their workspace? Hide all your windows and look at your desktop background. What's the dominant color in the picture?
If your desktop doesn't include any of those colors, just pick the closest one. We'll soon see if your responses bear any relation to the study results.
Now, on to the study. After a series of six experiments, Elliot's team arrived at the astonishing conclusion that a brief exposure to the color red does indeed impair performance on several different types of tests. Let's break down their methods:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:50 AM • Comments (19)
November 1, 2007
Category: Emotion • Perception • Research • Taste
This article was originally posted on May 10, 2006
Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings.
I've attempted to reproduce the type of display these researchers suggest may distract you from your cravings (click on the image to start the animation).
The original research, however, didn't take into account whether participants were hungry. Perhaps if you're already hungry, the visual distraction won't help.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:24 PM • Comments (8)
October 25, 2007
Category: Emotion • Music • Research
Take a look at these schematic faces:
Just a few simple changes to the mouth and eyebrows can create faces depicting a wide array of emotions. Face 1, for example, is clearly quite happy, and face 12 is sad. Face 7 is obviously angry. But what about face 4? Embarrassed? Happy but sleepy?
Perhaps your own emotion at the time you look at the faces might affect your understanding of the emotions the faces convey, especially when the emotional state depicted is unclear. Perhaps people suffering from clinical depression are stuck in a sort of infinite feedback loop: every face they see seems sadder than it really is, causing more negative emotions, worsening the depression.
Working with healthy college students, a team led by Antoinette L. Bouhuys manipulated their emotional states before asking them to rate the emotions depicted in pictures.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:28 PM • Comments (14)
September 18, 2007
Category: Color perception • Emotion • Language • Research
Take a look at this video (QuickTime required). The screen will turn white for 1/2 second. Then a word will appear for about 1.5 seconds. Pay attention to the particular shade of gray the word is printed in. Next, a strip of five different grey squares will appear. Which square matches the color of the word?
It's a difficult task, but not impossible (we'll collect answers in a poll at the end of the post). A team led by Brian P. Meier had college student volunteers complete a similar task, and they were able to achieve 30 percent accuracy -- somewhat better than the 20 percent you would expect if they were choosing randomly. But as you might guess, the researchers weren't primarily interested in how accurate the viewers were. What they wanted to know is if the word itself influenced the students' choice of color.
In 1999 the controversial linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argued that metaphors used in language can actually affect our perceptions. Indeed, metaphors of "light" and "dark" are frequently used by politicians to represent good and evil. But Lakoff and Johnson's research is typically applied only to linguistic meaning. Can it also apply to visual cognition? In 2004 Meier led a team which found that viewers were faster and more accurate categorizing positive words when the letters were white, and better categorizing negative words when the letters were black.
In a new set of experiments, Meier's team wanted to see if the process worked in reverse.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:38 PM • Comments (8)
September 3, 2007
Category: Development / Aging • Emotion • Research • Social
Note: This article was originally posted on November 14, 2006
If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a few miles from each other develop such different attitudes?
Nepal offers an excellent opportunity to learn about how different cultural values are passed from generation to generation, because some of its villages are so isolated that members of one community rarely interact with others. A team led by Pamela Cole studied four such villages: two Tamang, and two Brahman, which were otherwise similar (in terms of education, wealth, and family structure). Amazingly, 91 of the 92 households in these villages agreed to participate in the study, allowing a Nepalese observer to come into their homes and observe the interactions between caregivers and 3- to 5-year-old children.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:35 AM • Comments (5)
August 15, 2007
Category: Emotion • Face perception • Perception • Research • Social
On our recent trip to Europe, we had a hard time getting the kids to smile for pictures. Most of our pictures of Nora ended up looking something like this (actually this one's a self portrait, but you get the idea):
Here her expression is basically neutral, and if it wasn't such a dramatic shot, it would be a bit boring.
When we could get her to smile, often the smile was inauthentic -- posed, or even sarcastic, like in this shot:
Here she's expressing mock excitement over her parents' excitement about the figure depicted in the statue: Leonardo Fibonacci, the great mathematician (click on the photo for a closer view).
Authentic smiles generally came at inopportune moments for photography, such as this one:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:48 PM • Comments (9)
August 3, 2007
Category: Development / Aging • Emotion • Research • Social
Like most parents, Greta and I were very excited about having our first baby (Greta, I imagine, might be somewhat less enthusiastic about me putting this vintage photo of her online...). We weren't naive, though -- we had heard from friends and family about the sleepless nights, the juggling of jobs and child care, the constant requirements for feeding, and the endless stacks of diapers. We knew it wouldn't be an easy task, but we felt we were up to it, and we were overjoyed to be having a child.
But at what point does this optimism become a burden? If you're unrealistically hopeful about the experience of having a baby, could that adversely affect your ability to care for your child? What about your relationship with your spouse or significant other? Might that suffer, too? Might you yourself sink into depression, or have other mental health problems?
A 1992 study found that women are often over-optimistic about having children: when their babies were 12 months old, they rated their relationships with their partner, family, and friends as less satisfying than they expected prior to having a child. But this study did not use standard measures, so it's difficult to assess how reliable the findings were. It's also impossible from this study to tell whether the initial optimism was helpful or harmful. Other studies have found that overoptimism can be beneficial for relationship happiness, and even completing student research projects.
A team led by Kate Harwood attempted to rectify the problems of the 1992 study with a new study of 71 women having babies for the first time. In the new study, the researchers were careful to use only measures that had been previously normed in other studies. Pregnant women completed surveys before birth, and four months after birth. Were these women generally overoptimistic, as Harwood's team expected to find? No. Below is a graph showing the difference between pre- and post-natal parenting expectations:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:54 AM • Comments (7)
May 8, 2007
Category: Development / Aging • Emotion • Face perception • Intentionality • Research
Take a look at these two pictures. Who is more dangerous?
It's not hard to decide, although I wouldn't hurt a fly, and Nora, even at age three, could be brutal with her sarcasm. Now, what's the most dangerous situation?
Again, an easy decision. While Carhenge is certainly an awe-inspiring monument (and perhaps Jim could scratch himself on one of those cars), Nora's descent of this rock spire gives me shivers.
You might think that there aren't many differences in how adults judge threats in examples such as this, but there is some reason to believe that older adults may have a different response to danger than young adults. The volume of the amygdala, the so-called center of fear in the brain, decreases with age. The frontal cortex, believed to be the area responsible for understanding the thoughts and intentions of others, also diminishes in size more rapidly with age compared to other parts of the brain.
Ted Ruffman, Susan Sullivan, and Nigel Edge showed pictures like the ones above to both college students (younger adults) and older adults averaging age 69. Each picture was rated on a scale of -3 (not dangerous) to +3 (dangerous). Some of the pictures were faces, and some depicted situations like extreme sports, wild animals, or weather events, with no visible human faces. All these pictures had previously been categorized by both younger and older adults into low danger, medium danger, and high danger categories. Here are their results:
For the situation pictures, the difference between young and old adults was not significant, but for faces, older adults consistently rated the threat from the high danger pictures significantly lower than younger adults. The same pattern occurred whether the pictures had been previously categorized by younger or older adults.
This difference can't be explained by the strategy used to rate the pictures: both young and old adults tended to rate pictures of women and smiling faces as less dangerous.
The researchers make a compelling, though not conclusive case that what may be going on here is that older adults are simply worse at determining threats from faces than younger adults. After all, the results held true whether the categories had been determined by old or young people. Yet it's still possible that young adults are the ones who are consistently wrong.
If the differences in young adults and older adults really are due to some sort of decline in ability, then Ruffman's team suggests that future research might focus on imaging the brain while participants rate this set of images: if differences in ratings correspond to differing brain activity, that would also suggest that older adults' system for assessing threats has been compromised.
Ruffman, T., Sullivan, S., & Edge, N. (2006). Differences in the way older and younger adults rate threat in faces but not situations. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 61B(4), 187-194.
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:25 PM • Comments (17)
March 22, 2007
Category: Emotion • Face perception • Film • Research
The Kuleshov Effect, discovered nearly a century ago by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, posits that the context in which we see an image of an actor's face will determine the emotion the face portrays. For example, take a look at this short little clip I made (QuickTime required). First you'll see a gray screen, then a photo, then a second gray screen, and another photo of a face, taken just after that person looked at the first photo:
What emotion would you say characterizes the second face? Is it neutral, subtly happy, or subtly sad?
Kuleshov's work suggests that most viewers will see that second face as happier in the context of the happy photo preceding it, compared to if they had seen it on its own. If the identical photo had been preceded by a negative image such as an aggressive dog, people would rate it more negatively.
Research during the 1980s and 1990s confirmed the effect, but it has been exploited by filmmakers countless times during the intervening decades -- the neutral face of a heroine is seen as sad if she's just witnessed her lover's death, but happy if she's anticipating his arrival on the next train.
Most recently, a team led by Dean Mobbs replicated the Kuleshov Effect while viewers' brain activity was monitored via fMRI. Mobbs' team showed movies similar to the example above to 14 volunteers. Sometimes the first (context) image was neutral, sometimes it was positive (happy), and sometimes negative (fearful). While the fMRI monitored brain activity, viewers rated the second (neutral) image as positive or negative. This chart shows the results:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 5:10 PM • Comments (9)
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