Christmas a Time of Hope.

Christmas is above all a time of hope. It is the darkest, coldest and most miserable time of the year in the northern hemisphere. In ancient times the winter solstice was celebrated as the time when daylight begins to lengthen and the prospect of Spring seems not too far distant. It was this time that the early Christian Church chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus although his actual birth was probably in Spring time. The Church chose wisely for it is at the darkest times that hope means most of all: when all the natural world seems to be cold and dead.
The Star of Bethlehem has, in a sense, only a bit part in the Christmas story it guides the wise men and the shepherds but its significance is much greater than that. The star is a symbol of hope in a dark and brutal world ,as dark then as it is now: a time of the massacre of the Holy Innocents by the brutal Herod. Yet the wise men followed the star in hope and so too did the shepherds. In a time when Christmas can be about so much less, about materialism, gluttony and greed; all that the babe of Bethlehem stood against, it is well to remember the star that shone in hope above the simple stable yard.
There is some cause for hope in that a recent survey by the Institute of Marketing found that hard times have had a major effect upon people's values they are:
1. a profound need for hope;
2. a sense of post-materialism;
3. a focus on people and things closest to us;
4. the comfort of ritual; and
5. the idea of the rewards of practicality, planning and hard work.

So, people want to hope - to believe in a better future, a long term vision of a society where people have common values which focus on each other rather than on 'things'. Help with our communities and kindness and generosity shown to each other and a concern for family and those closest to us which Christmas renews. Even when we are beset by hardship, illness and all the troubles of everyday life we can hope in time, "all will be well and all manner of things shall be well."

Get Your Swagger On this Christmas!

How to Enjoy Yourself at Christmas...

It's a fact that some of us find Christmas parties and socialising a bore and a pain. We really can't be bothered making the effort to mix with people we don't know and would much rather be at home with our families. In fact, psychologists have shown, if people are asked to choose whether to spend time chatting to a friend or a stranger they will usually choose the friend: no surprise there then.However, we actually get far more satisfaction from talking to a stranger -why ?


Talking to strangers is more fun than we predict because showing off makes us feel good.When you chat to someone you know well it's comfortable, relaxed and familiar—with a friend we know what we're getting. With a stranger, though, anything could happen.

The problem with strangers is that we have to make more of an effort: psychologists call it 'impression management'. With friends we can 'be ourselves', which means letting it all hang out; but with strangers we control our behaviour more tightly and our impression management goes into overdrive.

It's this effort and stress of controlling ourselves with strangers that puts us off and why sometimes we can't be bothered and sulk in a corner while everybody else seems to be having a good time. But according to recent research there are hidden benefits to this effort and a lesson for all of us about how we (should) treat those we know well.

Get your swagger on

In their research Dunn et al. (2007) had participants in long-term relationships predict how pleasurable it would be to interact with:

Their partner.
An opposite sex stranger.
They then had a quick chat and rated how good they felt afterwards. What they found was that people enjoyed talking to their romantic partner less than they predicted. On the other hand they had more fun talking to a stranger than they had predicted.

So what's going on here? How can people be having more fun than they imagine talking to complete strangers and less with the person they are in a long-term relationship with?

What the researchers found was that it comes down to whether or not you're making an effort. Sometimes when we talk to our friends and partners we don't make much of an effort to entertain them, show off or to present ourselves in the best light. But we do tend to make more of an effort with strangers.

In a follow-up study the researchers told participants to make an effort with their partners and then their enjoyment of the social interaction improved in line with their predictions. This suggests we can all have more fun with our partners and friends if we make an effort.

There's a fascinating point that comes out of this research. When we predict how fun talking to a stranger will be, we fail to factor in the extra effort we make. But when we think about our partners we fail to factor in how lazy we tend to be.

There are two morals to this story: the sad but unsurprising fact that we take our partners and friends for granted and the less intuitive idea that strangers are more fun than we imagine because showing off makes us feel good.So, when it comes to party time get that swagger going and make the effort!

A Christmas Lesson for All of Us.

What Lesson does Scrooge have for us ?

Ebenezer Scrooge is probably one of Charles Dickens most famous characters. Every Christmas there are plays, cartoons and films which star this famous figure. We all know the story of how a mean, selfish, spiritually blind and cruel man became kind and benevolent through a series of traumatic encounters with four ghosts – these encounters transform Scrooge from a miser into a virtual saint. I'm writing about it because it's a story I have loved since I was a child and hold before me as a model of how we, ourselves, ought to behave towards others. If I am tempted to be mean or cruel ,or to be less than generous I think of Scrooge and the following exchange:

“Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the  pen again.’And the Union workhouses.’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are  they still in operation?’
‘Both very busy, sir.’
‘Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’
‘Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,’ returned the gentleman, ‘a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?’
‘Nothing!’ Scrooge replied.
‘You wish to be anonymous?’
‘I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge. ‘Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’
‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’
‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better  do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
We can still hear such opinions today about our own poor and unemployed. The ghosts show Scrooge how love, warmth, affection and generosity can transform his life from one of absolute poverty to one of joy and giving. A Christmas message for everybody. Scrooge was liberated from the deadness of his spiritual prison by doing good to others and so becoming a better person himself. What greater message could there be at this time of the year than the hope ,that we may all learn with Scrooge, that loving others is the secret to being loved ourselves.

Children see Pollution as Immoral

Children's moral judgments about environmental harm
When I was a boy at junior school the teacher always had a 'nature table ' in her classrom and she used to take us for nature walks in the local woods and moss lands. I enjoyed the opportunity of being outside in the natural world among, the birds, flowers and trees.Somehow, it gives you a feeling of being part of nature and of the natural world.As you all know we are a school which is very envionmentally conscious. Most of us feel angry when we see people randomly dropping paper or wasting food. A study of young children in northeastern USA shows that they see harm against the environment as morally worse than bad manners. And asked to explain this judgement, many of them referred to the moral standing of nature itself - displaying what is called "biocentric" reasoning. This means that the natural world in and of itself deserves our respect for what it is. This advance shows a change from similar research conducted in the 1990s, leading the authors of the new study, Karen Hussar and Jared Horvath, to speculate about "the possible effects of the increased focus on environmental initiatives during the last decade ... Although typically thought to emerge in later adolescence, a willingness to grant nature respect based on its own unique right-to-existence was present in our young participants."

Hussar and Horvath presented 61 children (aged 6 to 10 years) with 12 story cards: 3 portrayed a moral crime against another person (e.g. stealing money from a classmate); 3 portrayed bad manners (e.g. eating salad with fingers); 3 portrayed a boring personal choice (e.g. colouring a drawing with purple crayon); and 3 portrayed an environmentally harmful action (e.g. failing to recycle; dropping litter,damaging a tree). For each card, the children were asked to say if the act was OK, a little bad or very bad, and to explain their reasoning.

The children rated moral crimes against other people as the worst of all, followed by harm against the environment, and then bad manners. Dull personal choices were judged largely as "OK". There were no differences with age.

Asked to justify their judgments about environmental harm, 74 per cent of the explanations given referred to "biocentric" reasons (e.g. "A tree is a living thing and, it's like, breaking off your arm - someone else's arm or something"); 26 per cent invoked human-centred reasons (e.g. "Because without trees we wouldn't have oxygen"). The ratio of these categories of explanation didn't vary by age, but did vary by gender, with girls more likely to offer biocentric reasons. This fits with a wider, but still inconclusive, literature suggesting that women tend to base their moral judgments on issues of care, whereas men tend to base their moral judgments on issues of justice.

Hussar and Horvath said it was revealing that the children placed environmental harms midway between harms against other people and bad manners. "This environmental domain [of moral harm] implies a sophisticated comprehension by young children such that consideration is afforded to environmental life over social order, but, at the same time, consideration is afforded to human life over environmental life."

In contrast with the present findings, research conducted in the 90s found that young children tended to offer human-centred reasons for the wrongness of environmental harm, only invoking biocentric reasons more frequently in late childhood or adolescence.

"To conclude, it is evident that the participants in the current study are constructing morally-based views about nature and humans' place within it from a very young age," the researchers said. "This moral stance was succinctly articulated by one of our participants: 'Even if there's no rules you should respect ... (and) be good to the environment.'."
So, it looks as if environmental education in school is making children far more conscious of the importance of the natural world to our lives.

Me and My Teddy Bear...

Feeling socially excluded? Try touching a teddy bear (seriously). My teddy was exactly like the one on the right.

It is not a matter for shame that when we are small, or not so small children we are very attached to our teddy bears. When I left home for university when I was 18 I hid my teddy bear in the back of my wardrobe. However, on returning home after my first term I discovered my mother had found him and put him in the bin. The fact that I still remember this after forty odd years tells you something.

Feeling as though we belong is important for our mental and physical wellbeing. Social exclusion hurts and it darkens our mood many of us feel that we are deliberately left out by others. Very rarely do other people think about how they exclude people on grounds of gender, sociability or even age.

Unfortunately, this sets up a vicious circle because we're then less likely to engage in friendly, prosocial acts, and so less likely to form new bonds with others.Why should we show friendship to others when it clearly isn't returned ? A new study documents an effective way to break this cycle - excluded people should touch a teddy bear. Seriously.

Across two studies Kenneth Tai and his colleagues prompted some of their participants to feel socially excluded, either by giving them false feedback on a personality questionnaire ("You're the type who will end up alone later in life") or by contriving an uncomfortable situation in a group task with other participants ("I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with"). Other participants were given more heartening feedback (e.g. lots of people chose you to be in their group) and acted as a comparison.

Next, all the participants had to rate a "consumer product" - a 80cm, furry teddy bear. Some of the participants were given the teddy bear to hold; others evaluated him from a distance.

The researchers were interested in how being socially excluded would influence the participants' willingness to volunteer for more experiments in the future, and their willingness to share money with another person in an economic game (both taken to be signs of pro-social behaviour). And most of all, the researchers wanted to know if touching a teddy first would make any difference to these behaviours.

It did. Socially excluded participants who had the chance to touch the teddy bear were more likely to volunteer for future experiments and they shared money more generously with another participant. By contrast, touching the teddy made no difference to the behaviour of participants who weren't socially excluded.

Touching a teddy increased the prosocial behaviour of excluded participants by increasing their experience of positive emotion. The researchers tested this by asking participants to explain their decision about sharing money in the economic game. Excluded participants who touched the teddy were more likely to give answers like this one, featuring mentions of positive emotions: "There is no urgent need for myself to have the money and it is always comforting to be pleasantly surprised by others, even if it's from a stranger. So I just hope the money can be useful for the person who receives it."

Why on earth would touching a teddy bear have these effects on grown adults? Part of it could have to do with the links between emotional and physical warmth. Past research has shown that socially excluded people rated a room's temperature as colder, and people who feel more lonely tend to take more hot baths. There are also obvious links with past research showing the emotional and physical benefits of contact with pets. Finally, it could also be to do with people anthropomorphising the teddy (i.e. seeing it as human). Touch from another human can boost oxytocin levels - a hormone involved in feelings of trust and social closeness - perhaps touching the teddy had a similar effect.

Tai and his colleagues said there are lots of avenues for future research to explore - would touching a soft blanket have the same benefits observed in this study, or what about touching a plastic teddy? Would the results be replicated in a culture that tends not to anthropomorphise teddies?

"Often times, it may be hard to renew affiliative bonds with other people when one has been socially excluded by others," the researchers concluded. "During situations that may be hard for people to regain social connection with others after being rejected, one can choose to seek solace in the comfort of a teddy bear." So get cuddling that there teddy!

GHOSTS, what exactly are they ?

Ghosts 'all in the mind'

My postings on ghosts have attracted a great deal of interest. They have always been a source of fascination to psychologists .In the nineteenth century William James wrote extensively about the supernatural a topic which also interested his brother Henry. Modern psychology considers ghosts to be the mind's way of interpreting how the body reacts to certain surroundings.

Dr. Wiseman of Hertfordshire university has carried out one of the most extensive studies of ghostly phenomena. Dr Wiseman's team used hundreds of volunteers
A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields may trigger feelings that "a presence" is in a room - but that is all they are, feelings.

This explanation of ghosts is the result of a large study in which researchers led hundreds of volunteers around two of the UK's supposedly most haunted locations - Hampton Court Palace, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Dr Richard Wiseman and his colleagues say their work has thrown up some interesting data to suggest why so many people can be spooked in the same building but provides no evidence that ghosts are real.

Clustered experiences

In Hampton Court - alleged to contain the ghost of the executed Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII - the volunteers were asked to face their fear.

UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES

The top image was taken in South Bridge Vault 9
The bottom image was taken just five minutes later
How does one explain the white fuzz? An artefact of processing?
They had to record any unusual experiences, such as hearing footsteps, feeling cold or a presence in the room, as well as marking the location and intensity of the experience on a floor plan.

Before this, candidates were also asked to reveal any prior knowledge of hauntings at the site.

The researchers then examined the distribution of unusual experiences.

In a "normal" setting, you would expect the ghostly encounters to be evenly spaced, but in classic haunting, they would be clustered around certain places.

The results were striking: participants did record a higher number of unusual experiences in the most classically haunted places of Hampton Court, areas such as the Georgian rooms and the Haunted Gallery.

And in the Edinburgh vaults, the result was the same - the vaults considered most haunted were the locations where the most unusual encounters occurred during the study.

Environmental cues

The researchers interpret this as evidence that hauntings are a real phenomenon because they are concentrated in specific places over time.

THE ROLE OF MAGNETISM

When we measure houses where pervasive haunts occur, the place where the occupants find they can sleep, by trial and error, has the most consistent and normal magnetic field strengths
Dr Michael Persinger

Indeed, it is known for people from different cultures to consistently report similar experiences over perhaps hundreds of years.

"Hauntings exist, in the sense that places exist where people reliably have unusual experiences," Dr Wiseman said "The existence of ghosts is a way of explaining these unusual experiences."

But are the ghosts real? Dr Wiseman and his colleagues are not so sure.

They claim, somewhat paradoxically, that the hauntings exist but the ghosts do not.

"People do have consistent experiences in consistent places, but I think that this is driven by visual factors mainly, and perhaps some other environmental cues," he said.

Sensitive people

Making detailed measurements at each place, such as temperature, light intensity and room space, Dr Wiseman thinks that people are responding unconsciously to environmental cues and the general "spookiness" of their surroundings.


He cites examples of mediums successfully indicating haunted areas of buildings with no prior knowledge of them and suggests that they may be particularly sensitive to magnetic fields.

Spiritualists interpret this as evidence that the ghosts are there, but another explanation is that the mediums are simply more sensitive to the environmental cues that result in haunted feelings - not sensitivity to the ghosts themselves.

Sceptics have long maintained that ghostly encounters are influenced by a person's knowledge of the place and its history, the "prior knowledge hypothesis".

But this study refutes that explanation, as the statistics showed that prior knowledge did not affect the areas in which strange experiences were recorded.

"We found little if no evidence that people's prior knowledge mattered," said Dr Wiseman. "If anything, it made them veer away from having experiences in the known haunted sites."

So, in a sense, the question is still open, there ARE phenomena - just not necessarily supernatural.

Dr Wiseman and colleagues report their to the BPS.

Last year I published a ghostly picture of an airman at Gosport. Here is another of a woman dressed in 1940's clothes on the balcony of St.Botolph's church. It must be a fake obviously since there are no such things as ghosts...Is it that our mind takes a random pattern of light and shade and creates an image from it which actually isn't there:like the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, or a face in the clouds ?




ST BOTOLPH'S CHURCH

Bishopsgate. London EC2.

In 1982, photographer Chris Brackley took a picture inside this historic old church. The only people present were himself and his wife. When the photograph was developed he was astonished to note that a woman in old-fashioned garb was standing on the balcony to the right of the altar. The negative was subjected to considerable expert analysis, which revealed that that there was no double exposure to the film and it was also proved that none of Chris’s equipment was faulty. The only explanation for the mysterious figure was that someone must have actually been standing on the balcony when the picture was taken. A few years later Chris was contacted by a builder who had been employed on restoration work in St Botolph’s crypt. He explained that, in knocking down a wall he had inadvertently disturbed a pile of old coffins. One had come open to reveal a reasonably well-preserved body the face of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure that had made an uninvited appearance in Chris’s photograph.

Ear Worms and Us!

What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?

PYT was triggered by the letters EYC 

All of us, at one time or another have a tune stuck in our head. It might be " All Things Bright and Beautiful after school assembly. In fact,the brain has its own jukebox. A personal sound system for your private listening pleasure. The downside is that it has a mind of its own. It often chooses the songs and it frequently gets stuck, playing a particular tune over and over until you're sick of it. Psychologists have nicknamed these mental tunes "earworms" (from the German Ohrwurm). A study from 2009found that they can last anywhere between minutes to hours, but that they're only unpleasant in a minority of cases. Now a team led by Victoria Williamson, in partnership with BBC 6 Music and other international radio stations, has surveyed thousands of people to try to find out the various triggers that cause earworms to start playing. Radio listeners and web visitors were invited to fill in an online form or email the station about their latest earworm experience and the circumstances that preceded it.

Just over 600 participants provided all the information that was needed for a detailed analysis. Predictably, the most frequently cited circumstance was recent exposure to a particular song. "My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday," one 6 Music listener wrote in. "Woke at 4.30 this morning with it going round me head. PLEASE DON'T EVER PLAY IT AGAIN." In relation to this kind of earworm-inducing exposure, the survey revealed the manifold ways that we come into contact with music in modern life, including: music in public places, in gyms, restaurants and shops; radio music; live music; ring tones; another person's humming or singing; and music played in visual media on TV and on the Internet.

However, a song doesn't have to be heard to worm its way inside your head. Many listeners described how earworms had been triggered by association - contact with certain people, rhythms, situations, sounds or words - sometimes with quite obscure links. "On my journey, I read a number plate on a car that ended in the letters 'EYC' which is NOTHING LIKE 'PYT' (by Michael Jackson)," said another listener, "but for some unknown reason, there it was - the song was in my head."

Memories also triggered earworms - for example, driving along the same stretch of road that a song was first heard. And also anticipation. Another listener had "Alive" by Pearl Jam stuck in their head in the days before attending a Pearl Jam concert.

Mood and stress were other triggers. "Prokofiev 'Montagues and Capulets' opening theme. I was writing an email about a distressing subject. I suspect the mood of the piece matched my mood at the time," said an amateur musician. Another listener had Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror playing in her mind ever since she'd been thinking about the star non-stop and feeling sad (the survey coincided with his death in 2009).

A final theme to emerge from the survey was the way that earworms start playing when we're in a "low attention state", bored or even asleep. "My earworm is 'Mulder and Scully' by Catatonia. In fact I dreamt about running through woods and this was the sound track in my head," said a 6 Music listener. Another survey respondent experienced K'naan "Waving Flag" when mind wandering through a monotonous lab task.

Theoretically, Williamson and her colleagues said earworms can be understood as another manifestation of what Ebbinghaus in the nineteenth century identified as "involuntary memory retrieval". They could even provide a new window through which to study that phenomenon.

"While musical imagery is a skill that many (especially musicians) can utilise to their advantage, involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is an involuntary, spontaneous, cognitive intrusion that, while not necessarily unpleasant or worrying, can prove hard to control," the researchers concluded. "The present study has classified the breadth of circumstances associated with the onset of an INMI episode in everyday life and provided insights into the origins of the pervasive phenomenon, as well as an illustration of how these different contexts might interact."

What about you? What earworms have you experienced lately and what was the context? Please use comments to share your earworm experiences.
_________________________________

Williamson, V., Jilka, S., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Mullensiefen, D., and Stewart, L. (2011). How do "earworms" start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery Psychology of Music DOI: 10.1177/0305735611418553

Why do we like HORROR ?

Fear coils in your stomach and clutches at your heart. It’s an unpleasant emotion we usually do our best to avoid. Yet across the world and through time people have been drawn irresistibly to stories designed to scare them. Writers like Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Clive Barker continue to haunt the popular mind. Far longer ago, listeners sat mesmerised by violent, terrifying tales like Beowulf and Homer’s Odyssey.

‘If you go to your video store and rent a comedy from Korea, it’s not going to make any sense to you at all,’ says literature scholar Mathias Clasen based at Aarhus University, ‘whereas if you rent a local horror movie from Korea you’ll instantaneously know not just that it’s a horror movie, but you’ll have a physiological reaction to it, indicative of the genre.’

Why is horror the way it is?

Fresh from a study visit to the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Clasen believes the timeless, cross-cultural appeal of horror fiction says something important about humans, and in turn, insights from evolutionary psychology can make sense of why horror takes the form it does. ‘You can use horror fiction and its lack of historical and cultural variance as an indication that there is such a thing as human nature,’ he says.

This nature of ours is one that has been shaped over millennia to be afraid, but not just of anything. Possibly our ancestors’ greatest fear was that they might become a feast for a carnivorous predator. As science writer David Quammen has put it, ‘among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat’. There’s certainly fossil evidence to back this up, suggesting that early hominids were preyed on by carnivores and that they scavenged from the kill sites of large felines, and vice versa. Modern-day hunter-gatherers, such as the Aché foragers in Paraguay, still suffer high mortality rates from snakes and feline attacks.

Such threats have left their marks on our cognitive development. Research by Nobuo Masataka and others shows that children as young as three are especially fast at spotting snakes, as opposed to flowers, on a computer screen, and all the more so when those snakes are poised to strike. Modern-day threats, such as cars and guns, do not grab the attention in this way. That we’re innately fearful of symbolic threats is known as ‘prepared learning’. The snake is a very powerful image imprinted in the human mind.

Another study published just this year by Christof Koch and his team has shown how the right amygdala, a brain region involved in fear learning, responds more vigorously to the sight of animals than to other pictures such as of people, landmarks or objects.

Viewing the content of horror fiction through the prism of evolutionary evidence and theory, it’s no surprise that the overriding theme of many tales is that the characters are at risk of being eaten. ‘Do we have many snakes or snake-like creatures or giant serpents in horror fiction?’ Clasen asks. ‘Yes we do: look at Tremors – they were really just very big snakes with giant fangs’. In fact, many horror books and movie classics feature oversized carnivorous predators, including James Herbert’s The Rats. Alien is, for this reason one of the most frightening films - lizard like, violent and carnivorous -lovely :)

Are we Blind to Internet Banners ?

It's a line of research that Google doesn't want you to know about. Many studies suggest people have a habit of simply ignoring web banners on Internet sites - a phenomenon known as banner blindness. The evidence for this ad avoidance is based largely on tests of people's explicit memory of ads after they've browsed a site. Of course that doesn't mean that the participants hadn't looked at the ads, nor does it mean that the ads hadn't lodged their message subconsciously.

Now Guillaume Hervet and his team have attempted to address these points in an eye-tracking study. Thirty-two participants read eight web-pages about choosing a digital camera. On the third, fourth, seventh and eighth pages, a Google-style rectangular text ad (180 x 150 pixels) was embedded in the right-hand side of the editorial content. The second ad was different from the first, and then the same two ads appeared on the seventh and eighth pages, respectively. Also, half the participants were exposed to ads that were congruent with the camera topic of the web-pages; the other half to incongruent ads. All advertised brands were fictitious.

The results may be of some consolation to Google and their advertisers. Eighty-two per cent of the participants did actually look at one or more of the ads. Or put another way: of the 128 ad exposures, 37 per cent were looked at once or more. Had the ad content made a lasting impression? To test this, after the browsing phase, the participants attempted to read the same ads presented in varying degrees of blurry degradation. Their performance was compared to a new group of control participants who hadn't done the earlier web browsing. If performance was superior among the participants who'd earlier been exposed to the ads, this would suggest they had a lasting memory of the ad content. In fact, performance was only superior for web-browsing participants who'd earlier been exposed to ads in a congruent context.

Another aspect to the results is how the participants' behaviour changed over the course of the web browsing. The first and third ads were looked at for longer than the second and fourth ads. This is probably because the second and fourth ads appeared on pages that had been preceded by a page with an ad on it in the same location - the participants seemed to have learned to ignore that area of the page. On the other hand, it seems a couple of pages without ads was enough to restore ad-looking behaviour.

The lessons for web advertisers are clear: don't advertise on every page, vary ad location, and make sure the ad topic is congruent with the web-site content. 

DISGUST: its psychological function....

Total Recoil

Survival of the primmest

Chances are, there's a special something that's guaranteed to turn your stomach. Perhaps it's the sight and smell of a decomposing pigeon at the side of the pavement, maggots wriggling from its vacant eye sockets.

Or perhaps you squirm whenever you think of your grandma's mucky dentures by her bedside.

Whatever your pet hate, disgust is a basic emotion common to all humans. But for decades, nobody really understood why it existed. Scientists now believe we can find the answer by examining the things that disgust us.

Easy queasy

At the end of the 1990s, Dr Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine began to survey people in different countries to find out what things they found disgusting. Curtis uncovered some interesting cultural peculiarities. For example, food cooked by a menstruating woman was a frequent cause of disgust in India. While fat people scored highly as disgusting in the Netherlands.

But overall, people kept reporting the same things as revolting wherever they were from. It seems that whether we live in Islington or Isla Pinta, Margate or Marrakech, we are all disgusted by:

• Bodily secretions - faeces (poo), vomit, sweat, spit, blood, pus, sexual fluids
• Body parts - wounds, corpses, toenail clippings
• Decaying food - especially rotting meat and fish, rubbish
• Certain living creatures - flies, maggots, lice, worms, rats, dogs and cats
• People who are ill, contaminated

These universal sources of disgust led Curtis to hypothesise that disgust might be genetic; hard-wired in our brains and imprinted on our biological code by millions of years of natural selection. But what persistent force in our past drove us to evolve such a powerful emotion?

The origin of faeces

Excreta is most common cause of disgust around the world.

The things people consistently find disgusting also make us ill. This link convinced Curtis that disgust was a biological mechanism for avoiding infectious disease. Faeces, pus and corpses are all sources of dangerous bacteria and viruses; faeces alone being the source of more than 20 dangerous bugs.

The genes for disgust probably arose by accident and then became common through natural selection. The observation that most animals avoid eating each other's faeces suggests that disgust could have evolved a very long time ago.

Unwashed genes

Curtis still believes that upbringing plays an important role in determining what we find disgusting. But she believes that we have evolved genes that predispose us to find some things more disgusting than others.

"Imagine a child had never come into contact with either a rat or an orange. If you showed the rat and the orange to that child for the first time, they would probably be fascinated not disgusted," says Curtis.

"If you then decided to condition that child to be disgusted by both things, I think you would find it easier to get them to be disgusted by a hairy, smelly rat than to be disgusted by a nice round orange," she adds.

Out of sight, out of mind

Crucial to this instinctive reaction are visual rules of thumb, which we use to decide what is and isn't a disease threat.

Visual cues are so powerful, we often squirm at the sight of things we know are harmless, simply because they happen to look like a disease threat.

Take worms for example. While many species of worm are harmless - like the humble earthworm - some have evolved to become human gut parasites. Over millions of years, we have evolved an instinctive avoidance of gut parasites in animal meat. And this same visual aversion to long, slimy, wriggly animals makes us squirm at the harmless earthworm.

The gum of a man's mouth infected with larvae from a sarcophagid fly during a nap in the open.

The photograph on the left is of an elderly Israeli man who is thought to have been infected when he sat down under a tree to sleep. A sarcophagid or 'flesh' fly crawled inside his mouth and deposited its live larvae in the gaps between his gums and teeth.

The smell of fear

Another vital trigger is our sense of smell. Smell causes such a powerful response in the brain that the US Army has been trying to develop a stink bomb with an odour foul enough to be used for riot-control. The Metropolitan Police have already expressed an interest in the weapon.

But we can override the disgust response. People find family less disgusting than strangers. And when it comes to sex, we compromise between our instinctive avoidance of disease and our urge to reproduce.

Opposing views

But not everyone believes that we have a genetic predisposition to be disgusted. Unlike Curtis, Paul Rozin of Penn State University thinks that disgust is culturally acquired.

Rozin carried out his own survey on the things people found disgusting and discovered that causes of death rated the highest amongst his North American subjects.

"Anything that reminds us we are animals elicits disgust," Rozin writes. "Disgust functions like a defence mechanism, to keep human animalness out of awareness."

People around the world use the same expression to display their disgust.

Anatomy of disgust

But few people argue that the way we express our disgust is universal. Humans use a distinctive facial expression to signal disgust.

Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco found that this was identical in different cultures across the globe. We make this expression by screwing up our noses and pulling down the corners of our mouths.

MRI scans also reveal that we use a special part of the brain when we get disgusted: the anterior insular cortex.

Curtis has even claimed that disgust could have been one of the first words uttered by humans. "The word 'yuck' is similar in languages all over the world. It seems to be a proto-word," says Curtis.

Despite rapid advances in medicine, disease still poses an unprecedented threat to human life in the 21st century. If disgust really is as crucial to our survival as some scientists believe, then we're likely to be saying yuck for a very long time to come.

Happy New School Year!

Welcome back to Psychblog, or Tea and Toast which has been resting over the summer examination period. We're hoping this year to host contributions from the whole school on psychological issues and debates which we will publish on the blog. One topic which has been mentioned to me by several girls is depression. I think we ought to be very clear about this topic - to be 'fed up' is a perfectly normal mood in everybody's life. Somehow society has created an expectation that we all ought to be happy all of the time this is just not possible - 'no sunshine without shadows' as my mum used to say. A clinical depression is very different and , fortunately, rare. All it needs to snap most people out of 'fed upness' is a kind word, a thoughtful deed, or a good laugh. Laughter is Dr.Brown's cure for the blues.. try it and see.

Please post comments on the school web site, what are your cures for the blues ?

Language and thought

Jill Hohenstein's talk last Wednesday demonstrated how psychologists have been attempting to answer a question that is also much-discussed amongst philosophers: what is the relationship between language and thought?

As an experimental psychologist, her work (and the work she cites) involves looking at speakers of interestingly-different languages and seeing whether the differences in language relate to differences in the performance of various non-linguistic tasks.

One example she gave was that of directions. Our language provides us with different ways of thinking about spatial relationships: in absolute terms and in relative terms. In absolute terms, I could say that the main school is South of my current location in Gwyer; in relative terms, I could say that it is straight ahead of me. However, some languages do not provide both of these options: some only allow for the description of absolute spatial relationships.

In order to test whether these differences in languages affected how people thought about spatial relationships, speakers of both languages were given a task where they had to look at an array of objects, then turn around 180 degrees and organise another set of objects “in the same way”. The idea was that the speakers of the “absolute” language should put the objects in the same absolute locations (i.e., if a red circle was at the northern end of the first array they would put a red circle at the northern end of their array), whereas the speakers of languages like English would be able to put the objects either in the same absolute locations or in the same relative locations (i.e., if red circle was on their right of the first array they would put a red circle at the right-hand end of their array).

Professor Hohenstein reported that there had been mixed results from studies such as these, but that there seemed to be some effect of language on response, as predicted. This provided evidence for the view that language does, to some extent, affect the way that we actually think rather than just constraining the ways in which we are able to express our thoughts.

In philosophy, the viewpoint that language structures our thought is known as conceptual relativism, or as the idea that different people could have alternative conceptual schemes. A conceptual scheme is a language, a system of categories that allows us to think and talk about the world and make claims about it. So the claim of conceptual relativism is the claim that there could exist languages that cannot be translated into each other because they carve up the world into such different concepts.

If this were the case, then there would be different “truths” expressable in different languages – true statements could be made in one language that could not be made in another. An interesting paradox is that it is impossible to give an actual example of this relativism of truth claims, because any example of an imaginary untranslatable language would have to be given in our language and thus would not be truly untranslatable. This demonstrates that it is impossible to move outside of our own conceptual scheme and imagine an alternative one.

But not being able to imagine an alternative conceptual scheme does not mean that such a thing is impossible; and we can provide examples which point towards what untranslatable truth claims might look like.

For example, if a group of language speakers had just one word (and one concept) for orange and yellow, then they would be able to say truthfully that “this rose is the same colour as that satsuma”, which cannot be directly translated into English (the indirect, truth-maintaining translation would be something like “this rose is red-or-orange and that satsuma is also red-or-orange”, which is a bit of a mouthful but nevertheless true).

And a small-scale example of real conceptual relativism comes from mathematics: apparently mathematical truths can be expressed in the grammar of Reimannian geometry that cannot be expressed in the grammar of classical, Euclidean geometry.

The studies cited by Professor Hohenstein also point towards the possibility that a radically different language – perhaps one used by creatures with completely different sensory apparatus to us – could cause its users to think about the world in radically different ways to us.

There is some debate in philosophy as to whether the idea of alternative conceptual schemes – languages which cannot be translated into English – makes sense at all, but I think that the insights provided by experimental psychologists suggest that it does, even if such things cannot be imagined.

Jill Hohenstein and Childrens' Language

Dr. Hohenstein will be giving a lecture at St.Helen's this week.

Research interests

My research examines how thought and language are interrelated in child and adult cognition. I have two lines of work that address this topic: 1) structure of language and cognition, and 2) discourse and cognitive development.

Linguistic Structure: This strand of my research has investigated the use of motion descriptions in English and Spanish, focusing on the manner and path aspects of motion. Several of my studies have used motion events to examine different features of motion event judgments and descriptions. These range from studies on infant ability to discriminate manner and path in motion events, to Spanish/English adult bilinguals' use of motion verbs to describe these events. I have also shown that children make different similarity judgments about motion events as a factor of the language they are learning and their age. I am currently conducting pilot work investigating metaphorical motion in Spanish and English.

Discourse: This body of work has been conducted in conjunction with the Centre for Informal Learning and Schools. I am interested in learning what children can glean from their linguistic contexts. These contexts may be implicit teaching devices used by parents and others in their environments. To this end, I have been involved in an examination of children's ideas about science and learning in a museum context, as related to parents' questioning and explanation patterns in parent-child conversations. I am also investigating children’s understanding of the origin of species as related to parent-child conversation about science. In addition, I am interested in examining naturalistic use of analogy in informal as well as formal contexts to promote understanding of new material.

 

Teaching

• Foundation Degree: How Children Learn
• BA English Language & Communication: Psycholinguistics
• MA Language, Culture and Diversity: Language, Culture and Mind
• Doctorate in Education: Theories and research in educational settings
• Quantitative Methodology Teaching: PhD cause and effect, PhD basics of quantitative methods, EdD methods of inquiry
• Co-organiser: Current issues in Psychology and Cognitive Processes (PCP)

 

Programme Director

• Doctorate in Education/Doctorate in Professional Studies

Memberships

• Society for Research in Child Development
• Cognitive Development Society
• British Psychological Society
• European Association of Research in Learning and Instruction
• International Cognitive Linguistics Association
• International Association for the Study of Child Language

 

 

 

 

Freud the Joker

Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) at nearly the same time as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), but here pleasure is approached from the angle of wit and its mechanisms and motives. In this work Freud further develops his principal discoveries on mental activity described in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), already containing a reference to wit in the structure of dreams.

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is divided into three sections: analytic, synthetic, and theoretical. As in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud discusses at length the theories of philosophers (Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer, Theodor Lipps) and writers (Jean Paul, Heinrich Heine, Georg Licthenberg), and gives examples from Jewish folklore in the self-analytical part of the book. This self-analysis is as essential here as it was in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901).

The first part (analytic) is essentially descriptive: the mechanisms of jokes makes use of the principal elements of dream work, which Freud summarises, providing an overview of the techniques used in telling jokes. As with dreams, these mechanisms are unconscious and can only be determined after the fact. But to these mechanisms Freud adds the element of meaning, that is, the aims of wit, the pleasurable or hostile satisfaction obtained in telling jokes. It is this meaning he attaches to humour that makes his investigation of jokes profound.

The second part (synthetic) investigates the pleasure of jokes and its mechanisms and building on the work of Gustav Theodore Fechner, Freud makes use of ideas developed earlier in the Project for a Scientific Psychology [1895]). The distinction between jokes and the comic allowed Freud to emphasize that the former is essentially a social activity requiring the presence of a third party, or other people. The activity is further complicated by the fact that group ,as well as individual, dynamics are at play: "Why are we driven to tell our own joke to someone else? . . . Because we are unable to laugh at it ourselves" (Freud, 1905c, p. 190). Hence the famous Freudian joke, “ a man is marooned on a desert island with Pamela Anderson. They have sex. He says Pam will you do me a favour ? She says “ Sure, what?” He says will you put on this false moustache and use a gruff voice. She says “OK” not knowing where this is going. When she does this he goes up to her nudges her in the ribs and says “Guess what, I slept with Pamela Anderson.”

The third part (theoretical) returns to the comparison between dreams and jokes, but from the point of view of the unconscious. Freud indicated that he hoped to convince readers of the richness of his ideas presented in 1900 in 'The Interpretation of Dreams' , which were often reduced to the simple idea of "wish fulfillment." He also related his theories to those of Theodor Lipps and noted "there is a return of the mind in dreams to an embryonic point of view" (p. 211). In the pleasure of jokes, adults discover again the infantile as a source of the unconscious: this is most clearly illustrated by clowning -such as slipping on banana skins or by play with words and thoughts. The chapter closes with an analysis of the varieties of the comic, which is more difficult to analyse because it is not a process elaborated like a dream or joke but an encounter with a situation. According to Freud, "The comic arises in the first instance as an unintended discovery derived from human social relations" (1905c, p. 234). The production of the comic (imitation, parody) highlights a narcissistic, self-loving,aspect of the mind, that is, the comparison of self and other. How could he/she behave like such an idiot.

The book concludes with some of Freud's subtlest and richest ideas about the subject, namely the distinction between humour and irony. He returned to this distinction in his short article on humour in 1927.

Though this book has not always received the attention it deserves, it is definitely an important work. Lacan (1998) discussed it in his seminar on the formations of the unconscious a reommendation in itself.

The Vile Frankie Boyle -who thinks he's funny ?

This is from a review of the most vile of modern 'comedians' who would find jokes about Baby 'P' funny ? I suggest only a person with the sickest and most degraded form of mind. Among some groups, for example, some university students, this type of cruel filth passes for sophistication. Could it be, that among groups of young people who have never, in any sense, suffered in their brief lives the intense pain of Baby 'P' is worth little more than a giggle. To human beings who are capable of empathy with the pain and anguish of others this kind of 'humour encourages only anger and disgust.

This is from a view of a recent 'performance'of his.

The good news is that 38-year-old Frankie Boyle has hinted this may be his final tour as he thinks he is getting too old for live performances.

The bad news is there are another eight mind-blowingly offensive London shows left. I have previously enjoyed this poison-tongued Scot, but he now seems stuck in such a hateful groove his scorched earth act — let’s hope it is only an act — is wearing thin.
This gig, part of his tour fragrantly entitled I Would Happily Punch Every One Of You In The Face, was a sour triumph of vitriol over wit.
Susan Boyle was on the receiving end of sustained venom, while Heather Mills, Katie Price and Jade Goody were skewered too. Women were targeted more than men.
When Boyle spewed his bile over celebrities there was a satirical element, but when he picked on life’s innocents, from Madeleine McCann to Baby P, he became truly unpalatable.
One could argue that these jokes are an escape valve, yet there is something deeply disturbing about this vile recovering alcoholic’s obsession with life’s underbelly.
A psychiatrist would have a field day, as will the press when his Channel 4 series starts.
Most of it was pure bile and it filth. Not so much a comedy show, more a horrible, guilty  secret pleasure. Thankfully there will not be many more unless Frankie cancels his retirement.

So, why do some people find this cruel and viscious 'humour' amusing ?