Science of the SpiritS


People 2

OCD: The Surprising Truth - 94% of people have experienced unwanted, intrusive thoughts

Image
94% of people have experienced unwanted, intrusive thoughts.
Have you ever had a sudden impulse to jump under a train, stab your partner with a knife or perform some other unthinkable act?

Many see these as signs of mental disturbance but, according to new research from around the world, fully 94% of people have experienced unwanted, intrusive thoughts or impulses.

The phenomenon is not confined solely to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other problematic thinking patterns.

The research comes from Concordia University in Canada and 15 other institutions in different countries, including France, Hong Kong, Sierra Leone and Australia (Moulding et al., 2014).

They found that across 777 participants, almost all of them had experienced intrusive thoughts or images in the last three months.

Info

Scientists have built an 'off switch' for the brain

Human Brain
© The Independent, UK
Scientists have developed an "off-switch" for the brain to effectively shut down neural activity using light pulses.

In 2005, Stanford scientist Karl Deisseroth discovered how to switch individual brain cells on and off by using light in a technique he dubbed 'optogenetics'.

Research teams around the world have since used this technique to study brain cells, heart cells, stem cells and others regulated by electrical signals.

However, light-sensitive proteins were efficient at switching cells on but proved less effective at turning them off.

Now, after almost a decade of research, scientists have been able to shut down the neurons as well as activate them.

Mr Deisseroth's team has now re-engineered its light-sensitive proteins to switch cells much more adequately than before. His findings are presented in the journal Science.

Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded the study, said this improved "off" switch will help researchers to better understand the brain circuits involved in behavior, thinking and emotion.

Vader

Researchers tackle 'virtually ignored' psychological study of spite

David Marcus
© Robert Hubner/Washington State UniversityWashington State University psychology professor David Marcus has measured spitefulness with a test similar to those used for other personality traits
Some of the world's nastiest behavior grows out of spite, the dark art of hurting an opponent even when it comes at a price to yourself.

Divorcing couples often go out of their way to hurt each other and even their kids, skirting the more peaceful path to moving on.

Tax evaders can grow so vengeful over a penalty that they'll double down on their cheating.

Terrorists can be so keen to hurt their enemies, they commit suicide in the process.

Spitefulness can even elevate a small slight, like lurking in wait for a parking space, into a vengeance worthy transgression.

Palette

Seeing red? The mind-bending power of colour

mood palette
Mood palette: The scientific evidence for the effect of colour on our emotions and behaviour is growing
Red makes us more attractive, blue more alert, while pink can sap a man's strength. Once dismissed as hippyish, the science of colour is finally being taken seriously

If you give the patient one pill, he perks up. If you give him another pill, he calms down. That might not surprise you. What might, though, is that it still works even when the pills contain no actual medicine.

Studies show that red pills are more effective stimulants than blue pills; blue pills are more effective as sleeping tablets than orange tablets. Green, white or blue pills aren't as effective as red ones as painkillers. But these were all placebos, administered in a series of experiments in the Sixties and Seventies, looking at how our perception of colour affects our minds and bodies. There was no painkiller, there was no stimulant.

The idea that colours affect our mood - red makes us angry, or sexually receptive; blue soothes us, or saddens us; that sort of thing - seems vaguely hippyish. Alternative medicine types push "chromotherapy", treating unwellness with colour; an odd amalgam of Victorian pseudoscience and cod-eastern mysticism. But now, the body of scientific research into colour is growing. And it all points to one thing: our perception of colour really does affect our minds, and our bodies. A 2004 study found that football teams wearing red were statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours. Another, in 2008, found that male volunteers shown photos of averagely attractive women on red and white backgrounds rated the women on red as more good-looking. Meanwhile, an experiment in the Seventies found that male prison inmates became physically weaker when they were housed in pink-painted cells.

Clipboard

Want to pass that final? Take notes by hand for better long-term comprehension

hand note taking
Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks - research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Walk into any university lecture hall and you're likely to see row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide (online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing solitaire, just to name a few). But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes.

"Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended - and not for buying things on Amazon during class - they may still be harming academic performance," says psychological scientist Pam Mueller of Princeton University, lead author of the study.

This is a photo of a student taking notes by hand.Mueller was prompted to investigate the question after her own experience of switching from laptop to pen and paper as a graduate teaching assistant:

"I felt like I'd gotten so much more out of the lecture that day," says Mueller, who was working with psychology researcher Daniel Oppenheimer at the time. "Danny said that he'd had a related experience in a faculty meeting: He was taking notes on his computer, and looked up and realized that he had no idea what the person was actually talking about."

Mueller and Oppenheimer, who is now at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true.

People

Neurotics don't just avoid action: They dislike it

Image
That person we all seem to know who we say is neurotic and unable to take action? Turns out he or she isn't unable to act but simply doesn't want to.

A study of nearly 4,000 college students in 19 countries has uncovered new details about why neurotic people may avoid making decisions and moving forward with life. Turns out that when they are asked if action is positive, favorable, good, they just don't like it as much as non-neurotics. Therefore persuasive communications and other interventions may be useful if they simply alter neurotics' attitudes toward inaction.

These findings come the study "Neuroticism and Attitudes Toward Action in 19 Countries." It is published in the Journal of Personality and was written by Molly E. Ireland, Texas Tech University; Justin Hepler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Hong Li, Battelle Center for Analytics and Public Health; and Dolores Albarracín - the principal investigator of the study-- from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

"You're so neurotic!" It's a phrase that's tossed about casually, but what exactly is neuroticism? It is a personality trait defined by the experience of chronic negative affect - including sadness, anxiety, irritability, and self-consciousness - that is easily triggered and difficult to control. Neurotic people tend to avoid acting when confronted with major and minor life stressors, leading to negative life consequences.

Comment: Being neurotic isn't something set in stone. There are various contributing factors, like diet and working on the self that can assist with modifying one's attitude toward various situations. Read the following forum thread, as an example, to learn more.


Eye 1

People selectively remember the details of atrocities that absolve in-group members

Image
Conversations about wartime atrocities often omit certain details. According to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, these omissions can lead people to have different memories for the event depending on social group membership.

"We started thinking about this project around the time when stories began to emerge in the popular media about atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan," says lead researcher Alin Coman, psychological scientist at Princeton University.

"We wanted to scientifically investigate the effect of hearing about these incidents at the level of the American public," Coman notes. "How will people remember these atrocities? Will they tend to suppress the memory to preserve the positive view of their in-group? Will they conjure potential pieces of information to justify the atrocities?"

Ark

Obsessive practice isn't the key to success - Here's why

Excerpted from "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning"

Image
Here's a study that may surprise you. A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket. The kids who did the best by far were those who'd practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets.

Why is this? We will come back to the beanbags, but first a little insight into a widely held myth about how we learn.

The myth of massed practice

Most of us believe that learning is better when you go at something with single-minded purpose: the practice-practice-practice that's supposed to burn a skill into memory. Faith in focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time until we've got it nailed is pervasive among classroom teachers, athletes, corporate trainers, and students. Researchers call this kind of practice "massed," and our faith rests in large part on the simple fact that when we do it, we can see it making a difference. Nevertheless, despite what our eyes tell us, this faith is misplaced.

If learning can be defined as picking up new knowledge or skills and being able to apply them later, then how quickly you pick something up is only part of the story. Is it still there when you need to use it out in the everyday world? While practicing is vital to learning and memory, studies have shown that practice is far more effective when it's broken into separate periods of training that are spaced out. The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not. Practice that's spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don't get the rapid improvements and affirmations you're accustomed to seeing from massed practice. Even in studies where the participants have shown superior results from spaced learning, they don't perceive the improvement; they believe they learned better on the material where practice was massed.

Eye 1

Kent Kiehl: What it's like to spend 20 years listening to psychopaths for science

Bundy
© Donn Dughi/Bettmann/CORBISTed Bundy, shown here in 1978, unwittingly had a role in sparking Kent Kiehl’s interest in psychopaths
Kent Kiehl was walking briskly towards the airport exit, eager to get home, when a security guard grabbed his arm. "Would you please come with me, sir?" he said. Kiehl complied, and he did his best to stay calm while security officers searched his belongings. Then, they asked him if there was anything he wanted to confess.

Kiehl is a neuroscientist at the Mind Research Network and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and he's devoted his career to studying what's different about the brains of psychopaths - people whose lack of compassion, empathy, and remorse has a tendency to get them into trouble with the law. On the plane, Kiehl had been typing up notes from an interview he'd done with a psychopath in Illinois who'd been convicted of murdering two women and raping and killing a 10-year old girl. The woman sitting next to him thought he was typing out a confession.

Kiehl recounts the story in a new book about his research, The Psychopath Whisperer. He has been interviewing psychopaths for more than 20 years, and the book is filled with stories of these colorful (and occasionally off-color) encounters. (Actually,The Psychopath Listener would have been a more accurate, if less grabby title.) More recently he's acquired a mobile MRI scanner and permission to scan the brains of New Mexico state prison inmates. So far he's scanned about 3,000 violent offenders, including 500 psychopaths.

Eye 1

Psychopaths far more common in human population than people believe, says expert

psychopath whisperer
So you say you once worked for a boss so evil, cunning and completely devoid of any human compassion or empathy that you joked to your co-workers, "This guy's a psychopath!"

Everyone had a good laugh at that. But the joke may have been on you and your coworkers because it is quite possible your boss was/is a psychopath.

In fact, according to Dr. Kent Kiehl psychopaths are far more common in the human population than we think.

He should know. Kiehl is a famous neuroscientist at the Mind Research Network and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and he's spent his entire career getting into the minds of such people -- studying what's different about the brains of psychopaths.

Those are people whose lack of compassion, empathy and remorse is sometimes the mark of a hardened criminal such as a serial killer, but more often than not the psychopath can be the person sitting next to you in class, working alongside you at the office or even sitting next to you at church.