Originally posted on April 18, 2014. “The Internet is one big field study,” observed Adam Kramer, a social psychologist and Facebook researcher, at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) presidential symposium on big data.  Some big data factoids, gleaned from the conference: There are, according to Eric Horvitz, Managing Director of Microsoft research, 6.6 degrees of separation between any two people on the Internet. Google has now digitized 6 percent of all published books, creating a huge archive of words that can be tracked over time at https://books.google.com/ngrams.  One can use this resource to answer interesting questions . . . such as: is it true that the term “homosexuality” hardly predates the 20th century, and that “sexual orientation” is a late 20th century concept?  It took me about a second to create this figure of the proportional frequency of these terms over time: On Facebook, Kramer reported Parents and children take an average 371 days to friend one another. Mothers use 10% more nurturing words when communicating with their children. In the 2010 congressional elections, people’s posting their having voted led to 340,000 additional voters among their friends and friends of friends. Positive emotion words in people’s posts are followed, in the ensuing three days, by increased positive emotion words in friend’s posts, and vice versa for negative emotions. A research team led by Blaine Landis at the University of Cambridge analyzed all 30.49 billion international Facebook friendships formed over four years, and reported (in an SPSP poster) that people tended to “friend up.”  Those from countries with lower economic status were more likely to solicit friendship with those in higher status countries than vice versa. ... View more

Originally posted on April 24, 2014. “39-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hears for First Time” headlined Yahoo, in one of the many gone-viral Deaf-can-now-hear videos.  Each depicts the compelling emotions of someone who, thanks to the activation of a new cochlear implant (CI), is said to be hearing sound for the first time—and (in this case) conversing in English!  Was this woman (Joanne) completely congenitally deaf as a result of Ushers Syndrome?  And did she immediately gain, as some media implied, the ability to understand speech on first hearing it? As my brother said in forwarding this, it’s “an amazing story.” The power of CIs to restore hearing is, indeed, amazing, as I can attest from meeting many people with CIs at hearing loss meetings.  As one who is tracking toward the complete deafness that marked the last dozen years of my mother’s life, I anticipate someday benefitting from CIs. Moreover, I appreciate the power of a compelling example, such as the video example I offer (here) of a child’s first experience of a home TV room hearing loop.  And who can suppress a smile when watching this boy’s first experience of a CI? Without disrespecting the Deaf culture (which regards deafness and Sign language as not defects needing fixing), and without diminishing Joanne’s powerful experience, what shall we make of her ability to understand and to speak? Does this video overturn what psychological science has taught us about the critical period for language development during life’s early years?  Is it not important that children receive CIs before language develops?  Haven’t experiments that removed cataracts and “restored vision” to natively blind people taught us that, for normal perceptual experience, the brain must be sculpted by sensory input in life’s early years? I posed these questions to Dr. Debara Tucci, a Duke Medical Center cochlear implant surgeon with whom I serve on the advisory council of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.  Our shared questions:      1. Was Joanne completely deaf from birth?  Has she heard no sound until the moment of this recording?  As I will explain in a future entry, in popular use “deaf” often conflates true and complete deafness with substantial hearing loss.  Some Usher’s Syndrome patients sometimes are born completely deaf, but others experience progressive hearing loss.  With hearing aids, they acquire language early in life.  Joanne’s use of spoken language suggests that she is not hearing speech for the first time in her life.      2. A person who has been completely deaf from birth could potentially lip read.  When testing such patients with newly activated CIs, it would be interesting to know if they can “hear” speech when the speaker’s face is obscured. As a CI provider, Dr. Tucci nevertheless welcomes such videos:  “Even though the history accompanying the video may not be entirely correct, and a little misleading, it is basically a positive thing.  I would rather have 10 people come in and be told they are not a candidate than miss one person who is.  Also, we are implanting long deafened people who don't have speech/language ability not with the thought that they will develop or understand speech, but to increase connectedness and for safety concerns.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 28, 2014. Reports of restored vision in children in India have been confirmed in a new Psychology Science article, summarized here, on “Improvement in spatial imagery following sight onset late in childhood.” The research, led by Tapan Kumar Gandhi of MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, in collaboration with Suma Ganesh and Pawan Sinha, studied children who were blinded from birth by dense cataracts. After surgery removed the cataracts at about 12 to 14 years, the children were no longer completely blind. Their abilities to discern light and dark, enabled some spatial imagery. Practically, I wondered, what does this mean? Doesn’t the brain need to experience normal sensory input early in life in order to produce normal perceptual experience later in life? I asked Dr. Gandhi to explain the children’s post-surgery abilities. Could they potentially ride a bicycle or drive a car? His answer (quoted with permission): The onset of sight is not immediately accompanied by much joy or pleasure, contrary to what is depicted in movies. The child has to get used to the new inputs. Over the first few weeks, the child begins to feel more comfortable with the visual world, even though they might not recognize much of it. Their visual acuity is sub-par, most likely permanently so. But, despite a blurry percept, the brain is able to achieve significant proficiency over the course of the first half year on many visual skills such as face detection, and visually guided navigation. Although driving is well-beyond their economic means, some of the Prakash children have indeed learned to ride a bicycle. We typically find that the children and their parents are in high spirits when they visit us for a clinical follow-up a few weeks after the surgery. ... View more

Originally posted on April 30, 2014. Those of us with hearing loss cheered one of our own, Seattle Seahawks football player Derrick Coleman, as he became a national exemplar in the U.S. for living with hearing loss. We reveled in the Super Bowl Duracell ad chronicling his life story.  And we felt a warm glow when he gifted twin New Jersey 9-year-old sisters with Super Bowl tickets and handwritten encouraging words:  “Even though we have hearing aids, we can still accomplish our goals and dreams!” As 500,000+ Google links to “Deaf Seahawks fullback” testify, Coleman’s story inspires us.  The reports of Coleman’s “deafness” also raise an interesting question:  Who is deaf? By using a combination of hearing aids and the natural lip reading that we all do, Coleman, despite his profound hearing loss, reportedly hears his quarterback call plays amid the din of the Seahawks stadium.  And he converses, as when amiably answering questions at a Super Bowl press session. In doing so, he is akin to millions of others who live well with hearing loss. Without our hearing aids or cochlear implants, some of us among the world’s 360 million people with hearing loss become truly deaf—unable to hear normal conversation.  When I remove my hearing aids before showering in my college gym, the locker room banter goes nearly silent.  In bed at night without my aids, my wife’s voice from the adjacent pillow becomes indecipherable, unless she turns to speak into my ear. So, in his everyday functioning, is Derrick Coleman “deaf”? Am I deaf?  Are my friends in the hearing loss community deaf? Partly out of respect for my nonhearing, signing cousins in the Deaf Culture, my answer is no:  I am not Deaf.  Like Deaf people who fluently communicate with Sign, a genuine language, I am also not disabled or “hearing impaired” (which labels a person).  Rather I am a person with hearing loss.  The Hearing Loss Association of America—“the nation’s voice for people with hearing loss”—offers resources that assist “people with hearing loss and their families to learn how to adjust to living with hearing loss [and] to eradicate the stigma associated with hearing loss”—and thus to live as not-deaf. I asked the Association’s recently retired director, Brenda Battat, whose hearing was partially restored with a cochlear implant, if she considers herself deaf.  “No. From a life experience, functioning, and self-identity perspective I do not consider myself deaf.” Ditto my friend, musician Richard Einhorn, who has a substantial hearing loss and was recently featured in a news story that was headlined: "Hearing Loops Give Music Back to Composer Who Went Deaf in a Day." “The ‘deaf’ label is not accurate,” notes Einhorn, who uses various technologies to hear.  “With a good hearing aid and additional listening technology such as hearing loops, I can hear well enough in most situations to participate fully in conversations and enjoy live music, theater, and films.” Thanks to new hearing technologies, most of us with hearing loss can effectively function as not-deaf.  My state-of-the-art hearing aids amplify sound selectively, depending on my loss at different frequencies.  They offer directionality.  They compress sound (raising soft sound and lowering extremely loud sound).  Via a neck-worn Bluetooth streamer, they wirelessly transmit phone conversation and music from my smart phone to both my hearing aids. And thanks to my favorite hearing technology—the hearing loops that broadcast PA sound wirelessly to my in-the-ear speakers (aka hearing aids)—I hear! Ergo, while most natively Deaf people are served by Sign, the rest of us—the invisible majority with hearing loss—need hearing assistance.  We respect, but live outside of, the Deaf Culture.  We benefit from new hearing technologies.  Lumping all people with hearing loss together as “deaf” respects neither Deaf people nor those with hearing loss.  Here ye, hear ye! ... View more

Originally posted on May 2, 2014. Many faculty fret over students’ in-class use of computers—ostensibly there for note taking, but often also used for distracting e-mail, messaging, and checking social media.  A soon-to-be-published study by Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (UCLA) offers faculty an additional justification for asking students not to use computers. In three experiments, they gave students either a laptop or a notebook and invited them to take notes on a lecture (a TED lecture in two of the studies).  Later, when they tested their memory for the lecture content, they found no difference in recall of factual information.  But taking notes in longhand, which required participants to summarize content in their own words, led to better performance on conceptual-application questions. “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” is the apt title for their article, to appear in Psychological Science. “Participants using laptops were more inclined to take verbatim notes,” explained Mueller and Oppenheimer.  Better to synthesize and summarize, they conclude:  “laptop use in classrooms should be viewed with a healthy dose of caution; despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.” For one of my colleagues, this study, combined with the unwanted distractions of in-class computer use, inspires a new class policy:  for better learning, no computer use in class. ... View more

Originally posted on May 6, 2014. At the 2012 International Congress of Psychology meeting in Cape Town, I enjoyed a wonderful talk by Elizabeth Loftus, which offered a terrific demo of how memory works.  Loftus showed us a handful of individual faces that we were later to identify, as if in a police line-up.  Later, she showed us some pairs of faces, one seen earlier and one not, and asked us which one we had seen.  In the midst of these, she slipped in a pair of faces that included two new faces, one of which was rather like an earlier seen face.  Most of us understandably but wrongly identified this face as previously seen.  To climax the demonstration, when she showed us the originally seen face and the previously chosen wrong face, most of us (me, too) picked the wrong face!  As a result of our memory reconsolidation, we—an audience of psychologists who should have known better—had replaced the original memory with a false memory. ... View more

Originally posted on May 8, 2014. Knowing that people don't wear their hearts on their sleeves, psychologists have longed for a "pipeline to the heart."  One strategy, developed nearly a half century ago by Edward Jones and Harold Sigall, created a “bogus pipeline.” Researchers would convince people that a machine could use their physiological responses to measure their private attitudes.  Then they would ask them to predict the machine's reading, thus revealing attitudes which often were less socially desirable than their verbalized attitudes.  More recently, psychologists have devised clever strategies for revealing “implicit attitudes,” by using reaction times to assess automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words. (In contrast to consciously held “explicit attitudes,” implicit attitudes are like unconscious habits.) A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Katherine Coffman and fellow economists demonstrates a third strategy for getting people to reveal sensitive information—the “Item Count Technique” (ICT). One group was given four simple statements, such as “I spent a lot of time playing video games as a kid,” and then was asked how many of the four statements “apply to you.”  A second group was given the same four statements plus a fifth:  “I consider myself to be heterosexual,” and then was asked how many of the five statements “apply to you.” Although no individual is asked to reveal which specific statements are true of them, a comparison of the two groups’ answers reveals—for the sampled population—the percent agreeing with the fifth statement. Thus, without revealing anyone’s sexual orientation, the ICT aggregate data showed a 65 percent higher rate of non-heterosexual identity than was self-reported among people who were asked straight-out: “Do you consider yourself to be heterosexual?”   But then let’s not discount public surveys.  Nate Silver’s digest of presidential polling data correctly predicted not only the 2012 U.S. national presidential outcome, but also the outcome in all 50 U.S. states.  Specific, explicit attitudes can predict behavior. ... View more

Originally posted on May 12, 2014. Sleep consumes time we could spend foraging and it exposes us to predators.  It’s a waste and a risk.  So why do humans sleep?  Why didn’t nature design us for continual activity and vigilance? In the October 18, 2013 Science, researchers offer an answer:  sleep enables house cleaning.  Studies of mice show that sleep sweeps the brain of toxic metabolic waste products. Ergo, at the day’s end we can say to our loved ones:  Good night.  Sleep tidy. ... View more

Originally posted on May 19, 2014. Self-serving bias—the tendency to perceive oneself favorably—has become one of personality-social psychology’s most robust phenomena.  It’s our modern rendition of ancient wisdom about pride, which theologians have considered the basic sin (much as Freud considered repression the basic defense mechanism). Self-serving bias appears in people’s judging themselves as better-than-average—on just about any subjective, socially desirable dimension.  Compared with people in general, most people see themselves as more ethical, friendly, intelligent, professionally competent, attractive, unprejudiced, and healthier—and even as more unbiased in their self-assessments! As part of my reporting on the world of psychology, I enjoy, as an affiliate British Psychological Society affiliate member, two of its journals, and also its Research Digest.  (The digest, authored by Christian Jarrett, is available as a free bimonthly e-mail here.) The Digest put a smirk on my face with its synopsis of a new British Journal of Social Psychology report by Constantine Sedikides, Rosie Meek, Mark Alicke, and Sarah Taylor.  The Sedikides team found that English prisoners incarcerated for violence and robbery saw themselves, compared with “an average member of the community,” as (I am not making this up) more moral, kind, and compassionate. Shelly Taylor’s humbling surmise, in her 1989 book, Positive Illusions, still rings true: “The [self-]portraits that we actually believe, when we are given freedom to voice them, are dramatically more positive than reality can sustain.” ... View more

Originally posted on May 21, 2014. A New York Times report on “the extreme sport” of remembering confirms what psychology instructors have long taught:  the power of mnemonic aids, especially organized images, to enable memory performance.  We humans are really good at retaining visual images, and we’re much better at later reproducing visualizable words (bicycle) than abstract words (process).  Thus it can help, when remembering a short grocery list, to use the peg-word system, with numerically ordered items—bun, shoe, tree, door, etc.—and to hang the grocery items on those images. Likewise, reports the Times article, all the competitors in a recent world memory contest used a “memory palace,” by associating to-be-remembered numbers, words, or cards with well-learned places, such as the rooms of a childhood home.  Challengers who claim to have invented an alternative method inevitably “come in last, or close to it,” noted one world-class competitor. Memory researchers who study these memorists report that they are, as you might expect, smart.  But they also have unusual capacities for focused attention and holding information in working memory. Yet, like you and me successfully forgetting previous locations of our car in the parking lot, they also need to be able to replace their place-item associations with new items. In this they are unlike students, who, if they are to become educated persons, need to retain information for months and years to come.  And for that there is no easy substitute for other well-researched memory aids, such as spaced practice, active rehearsal, and the memory consolidation that comes with a solid night’s sleep. ... View more

Originally posted on May 23, 2014. John Watson and Rosalie Rayner made psychologist history with their 1920 report of the fear conditioning of 11-month old “Little Albert.”  After repeated pairings of a white rat with an aversive loud noise, Albert reportedly began whimpering at the sight of the rat.  Moreover, his fear reaction generalized, to some extent, to the sight of a rabbit, a dog, and a sealskin coat, but not to more dissimilar objects. Ever since, people have wondered what became of Little Albert.  One team of psychologist-sleuths identified him as Douglas Merritte, the son of a campus hospital wet nurse who died of meningitis at age 6.  For a forthcoming article in the American Psychologist, another team of sleuths—Russell Powell, Nancy Digdon, Ben Harris, and Christopher Smithson—have identified an even more promising candidate.  William Albert Barger who went by “Albert B”—the very name used by Watson and Rayner—neatly fits many of Little Albert’s known characteristics.  This Albert was not brain-damaged and was easy-going, though (likely coincidentally, given how Albert’s fears would diminish between sessions) he had an aversion to dogs! Albert died in 2007, without ever knowing of his early life in a hospital residence, or of his apparent part in psychology’s history. ... View more

Originally posted on May 28, 2014. Climate change is upon us.  The recent National Climate Assessment, assembled by a large scientific panel, confirms that greenhouse gases continue to accumulate.  The planet is warming. The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The seas have begun rising.  And more extreme weather will plague our future. Alas, most of the American public is not yet alarmed about this weapon of mass destruction.  The 31 percent who in 1998 thought “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated” increased to 42 percent in 2014.  And the 34 percent of Americans who in 2014 told Gallup they worry “a great deal” about global warming was essentially the same as in 1989. Part of the problem is what psychologists and their students know as the availability heuristic. Our judgments get colored by mentally available events and images. And what’s more cognitively available than slow cli­mate change is our recently experienced local weather (see here and here).  Local recent temperature fluctuations tell us nothing about long-term planetary trends. (Our current weather is just weather.) Yet, given unusually hot local weather, people become more accepting of global climate warming, while a recent cold day reduces people’s concern about climate warming and overwhelms less memorable scientific data.  Snow in March?  “So much for global warming!” After Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, its resi­dents’ vivid experience of extreme weather increased their environmentalism.  This suggests that a silver lining to the tragedy of more droughts, floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather may, in time, be increased public concern for climate change.  In the meantime, to offer a vivid depiction of climate change, Cal Tech scientists have created an interactive map of global temperatures over the last 120 years. ... View more

Originally posted on May 30, 2014. If asked that question, who would come to your mind? For a forthcoming Archives of Scientific Psychology report, Ed Diener (University of Illinois), Shigehiro Oishi (University of Virginia), and JunYeun Park (University of Illinois), painstakingly assembled data from citations, textbook page coverage, and major awards. Their top three, in order, were Albert Bandura (whose 218,219 citations also marked him as our most cited psychologist), Jean Piaget, and Daniel Kahneman. Looking just at introductory psychology textbook pages mentioning different psychologists, the top two were Robert Sternberg and Martin Seligman. ... View more

Originally posted on June 5, 2014. An amazingly comprehensive new Lancet study, with nearly 150 authors, tracks overweight and obesity rates across 188 countries from 1980 to 2013.  Some highlights: Worldwide, the proportion of overweight adults (BMI ≥ 25) increased from 29 to 37 percent among men and 30 to 38 percent among women. Over the last 33 years, no country has reduced its obesity rate. In 2010, “overweight and obesity were estimated to cause 3.4 million deaths.” National variations are huge, with the percentage overweight ranging 85 percent among adults in Tonga to 3 percent in Timor-Leste. The study is amazing not only in its global comprehensiveness, across time, but also in its public, interactive data archive available from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. As a screen shot example, I compared the U.S. increase in the overweight percentage (upper dark line) with the global increase (lower dark line).  All other countries are in light blue. ... View more

Originally posted on June 12, 2014. My last post—noting the new worldwide estimate that 37 percent of men and 38 percent of women are overweight—got me to wondering if we have other examples of all-humanity data. One is our species’ life expectancy, which has risen from 46.5 years in the early 1950s to 70 years today. What a gift—two dozen more years of life! And then we have new data from the Gallup World Poll which is surveying countries with more than 98 percent of the world’s population. Aggregating data from this resource, Ed Diener, Louis Tay, and I were able to answer (here) this simple question: Asked, “Is religion important in your daily life?,” what percent of humanity will respond “yes”? The answer: 68 percent. Two in three humans. When mentioning this answer in talks, I offer, with a smirk, the usual caveat on reporting survey data: We should be cautious about generalizing beyond the population sampled. (These data represent but one species on one planet, and may not represent the views of other life forms elsewhere in the universe.) What’s striking about each of these all-humanity measures is the extraordinary variation across countries—from 3 percent overweight adults in Timor-Leste to 85 percent in Tonga; from 49 year life expectancy in Chad to 89 in Monaco; from 16 percent for whom religion is important in Estonia to 100 percent in Bangladesh and Niger. We humans are all kin beneath the skin. Yet how we differ. [A note to our valued readers:  Nathan DeWall and I anticipate a more relaxed two-a-week pace of blogging this summer, and returning to our weekday postings at the summer’s end.] ... View more