Originally posted on December 2, 2014. As I explain in a recent APS Observer essay (here), my short list of psychology’s greatest research programs includes the 250+ scientific publications that have followed Scottish lives from childhood to later life.  The studies began with all Scottish 11-year-olds taking intelligence tests in 1932 and in 1947 (the results of which Ian Deary and his team discovered many years later).  After meeting Deary at an Edinburgh conference in 2006 and hearing him describe his tracking these lives through time, I have followed his team’s reports of their cognitive and physical well-being with great fascination. Last April, some 400 alums of the testing—now 93 or 78 years old (including those shown with Deary below)—gathered at the Church of Scotland’s Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, where Deary regaled them with the fruits of their participation. One of his conclusions, as reported by the October 31st Science​, is that “participants’ scores at age 11 can predict about 50% of the variance in their IQs at age 77.” I invited Professor Deary to contribute some PowerPoint slides of his studies for use by teachers of psychology.  He generously agreed, and they may be found here. Photo courtesy of Ian Deary. ... View more

Originally posted on December 9, 2014. Economic inequality is a fact of life.  Moreover, most folks presume some inequality is inescapable and even desirable, assuming that achievement deserves financial reward and that the possibility of making more money motivates effort. But how much inequality is good?  Psychologists have found that places with great inequality tend to be less happy places, and that when inequality grows so does perceived unfairness, which helps offset the psychological benefits of increased affluence.  When others around us have much more than we do, feelings of “relative deprivation” may abound. And as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson document, countries with greater inequality also experience greater health and social problems, and higher rates of mental illness. So, how great is today’s economic inequality? Researchers Michael Norton and Dan Ariely invited 5,522 Americans to estimate the percent of wealth possessed by the richest 20 percent in their country. The average person’s guess—58 percent—“dramatically underestimated” the actual wealth inequality. (The wealthiest 20 percent possessed 84 percent of the wealth.) And how much inequality would be ideal?  The average American favored the richest 20 percent taking home between 30 and 40 percent of the income—and, in their survey, the Republican versus Democrat difference was surprisingly modest. Now, working with Sorapop Kiatpongsan in Bangkok, Norton offers new data from 55,238 people in 40 countries, which again shows that people vastly underestimate inequality, and that people’s ideal pay gaps between big company CEOs and unskilled workers is much smaller than actually exists.  In the U.S., for example, the actual pay ratio of S&P 500 CEOs to their unskilled workers (354:1) far exceeds the estimated ratio (30:1) and the ideal ratio (7:1). Their bottom line:  “People all over the world and from all walks of life would prefer smaller pay gaps between the rich and poor.” ... View more

Originally posted on December 16, 2014. The December APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan on “The Neural Greenhouse:  Teaching Students How to Grow Neurons and Keep Them Alive.” Our brains are like greenhouses, he notes, with new neurons sprouting daily, “while others wither and die.” To take this neuroscience into the classroom, he offers three activities. In the same issue, I say, “Let’s Hear a Good Word for Self-Esteem.” Mindful of recent research on the perils of excessive self-regard—of illusory optimism, self-serving bias, and the like—I offer a quick synopsis of work on the benefits of a sense of one’s self-worth. I also offer Google ngram figures showing sharply increased occurrences of “self-esteem” in printed English over the last century, and of decreasing occurrences of “self-control.” ... View more

Originally posted on December 23, 2014. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drawing from its own continuing household interviews, offers new data​ on who in the U.S. is most likely to suffer depression, and how often.   Some noteworthy findings: Overall rate of depression: Some 3 percent of people age 12 and over were experiencing “severe depressive symptoms.” More people—7.6 percent—were experiencing “moderate or severe” symptoms, with people age 40 to 59 at greatest risk. Many more—78 percent—“had no depressive symptoms.” Gender and depression. Women experience nearly double (1.7 times) men’s rate of depression. Poverty and depression. People living below the poverty line are 2½ times more likely to be experiencing depression. (Does poverty increase depression? Does depression increases poverty? Or—mindful of both the stress of poverty and the CDC-documented impact of depression on work and home life—is it both?) Depression and treatment.  Only 35 percent of people with severe symptoms reported contact with a mental health professional in the prior year. ... View more

Originally posted on January 6, 2015. University of Warwick economist Andrew Oswald—someone who creatively bridges economics and psychological science, as in his studies of money and happiness—offers some fascinating recent findings on his website:​ A huge UK social experiment​ “offered incentives to disadvantaged people to remain and advance in work and to become self-sufficient.” Five years later the experimental group indeed had higher earnings than the control group, but lower levels of well-being (less happiness and more worries). Ouch. Income (up to a point) correlates with happiness. But is that because richer people tend to be happier, or happier people tend to be richer? By following adolescent and young adult lives through time, with controls for other factors, the data​ reveal that happiness does influence future income. After winning a lottery, do people political attitudes shift right?  Indeed yes​.  “Our findings are consistent with the view that voting is driven partly by human self-interest.  Money apparently makes people more right-wing.” This finding syncs with earlier findings​ that inequalities breed their own justification.  Upper-class people are more likely than those in poverty to see people’s fortunes as earned, thanks to their skill and effort—and not as the result of having connections, money, and good luck.  Such findings also fit U.S. political surveys showing that high income individuals​ are more likely to vote Republican...despite—here’s a curious wrinkle to ponder—high income states​ being less likely to vote Republican.  We might call this “the wealth and politics paradox”—poor states and rich individuals vote conservative. Care to speculate why this difference? ... View more

Originally posted on January 13, 2015. Last night’s national championship college football game, today’s New York Times article on America’s greatest small college rivalry (involving my own Hope College), and the upcoming Super Bowl all bring an interesting psychological question to mind:  Why do we care who wins? What psychological dynamics energize rabid fans? In a 2008 Los Angeles Times essay I offered answers to my own questions, which first crossed my mind just before tipoff at that rivalry game described in today’s Times. The pertinent dynamics include the evolutionary psychology of groups, ingroup bias, social identity, group polarization, and the unifying power of a shared threat. In a 2014 Politico essay I extended these principles in reflections on political and religious animosities between groups that, to outsiders, seem pretty similar (think Sunni and Shia, or Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant).  The same social dynamics that fuel fun sports rivalries can, writ large, produce deep-rooted hostilities and social violence. ... View more

Originally posted on February 4, 2015. Friday my focus was hearing research and care—at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, where I sit on the Advisory Council (assessing federal support for hearing research and hearing health).  Days later, I was cheering on my ill-fated hometown Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. Alas, there is some dissonance between those two worlds, especially for fans of the team that prides itself on having the loudest outdoor sports stadium, thanks to its “12th Man” crowd noise—which has hit a record 137.6 decibels . . . much louder than a jackhammer, notes hearing blogger, Katherine Bouton. With three hours of game sound rising near that intensity, many fans surely experience temporary tinnitus—ringing in the ears—afterwards...which is nature’s warning us that we have been baaad to our ears.  Hair cells have been likened to carpet fibers. Leave furniture on them for a long time and they may never rebound. A rule of thumb: if we cannot talk over a prolonged noise, it is potentially harmful. With repeated exposure to toxic sound, people are at increased risk for cochlear hair cell damage and hearing loss, and for constant tinnitus and hyperacusis (extreme sensitivity to loud noise). Men are especially vulnerable to hearing loss, perhaps partly due to greater noise exposure from power tools, loud music, gunfire, and sporting events (some researchers have implicated noise is men’s greater hearing loss).  But some men know the risks, as 2010 Super Bowl-winning quarterback Drew Brees illustrated, when lifting his son Baylen, with ear muffs during the post-game celebration. For more on sports and noise, visit here. ... View more

Originally posted on February 5, 2015. “The worst call in Super Bowl history,” read a headline in my hometown Seattle Times after Seahawks' head coach Pete Carroll seemingly threw the game away with his ill-fated decision to pass – rather than run – as the game clock expired. Actually, Carroll made two end-of-half decisions in Sunday’s Super Bowl, both questioned by the NBC announcers. The differing outcomes of the decisions – and the resulting reactions by pundits and fans – offer potent examples of a mental pitfall that has been the subject of roughly 800 psychological science publications. “Hindsight bias,” also known as the “I knew it all along phenomenon,” is the almost irresistible tendency to believe – after an experiment, a war, an election, or an investment – that the outcome was foreseeable. After the stock market drops (it “was due for a correction”) or an election is lost (by a “terrible candidate”), the outcome seems obvious – and thus blameworthy. But, as research shows, we often do not expect something to happen until it does. Only then do we clearly see the forces that triggered the event, and feel unsurprised. Because outcomes seem as if they should have been foreseeable, we are more likely to blame decision makers for what are, in retrospect, “obvious” bad choices, rather than praise them for good ones (which also seem “obvious”). As the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” With six seconds remaining in the first half, Carroll decided to throw for a touchdown – a risk that could have resulted in the clock expiring. Better to kick a safe field goal, argued the NBC announcers. But the gamble worked, and Carroll was acknowledged to have made a “gutsy” call. Then, at the game’s end, with 26 seconds left – and victory less than a yard away – Carroll and his offensive coordinator ventured a fateful, intercepted pass. Fans exploded on social media. A (less-explicit) version of most reactions: “With three downs and one timeout to go, and the league’s best powerful runner at the ready, what was he thinking?” “The stupidest coaching decision I can recall,” I vented to my wife afterwards, aided by 20/20 hindsight. But like all the football fans who made Coach Carroll an object of national ridicule, I was judging the call after knowing the outcome. The next morning I reassessed the situation. With one timeout, I now realized, Seattle could venture, at most, two running plays. The attempted pass was a free third play – which, if incomplete, would still leave them with the same two possible running plays. Moreover, the odds of an interception at the one-yard line are, I later learned, even less than the odds of a fumble. And had a touchdown pass arrived in the receiver’s hands a half-second sooner, we could use game theory to explain how the wily Seahawks won by doing what their opponent least expected. Responding to those who claimed he made “the worst call ever,” Carroll later explained to Today Show host Matt Lauer, “It was the worst result of a call ever. The call would have been a great one if we caught it. It would have been just fine and no one would have thought twice about it.” Bringing statistical analysis to the decision, FiveThirtyEight.com impeccably calculated that Carroll had indeed made a smart one – that he had slightly increased his team’s chance of a win. What’s more, the evidence-based bad coaching decision was made by New England coach Bill Belichick, who, instead of calling a timeout, opted to let the clock run down (which would have deprived quarterback Tom Brady of another scoring opportunity in the likely event of a Seattle touchdown). But probabilities are not certainties. In sports, as in life, good decisions can yield bad outcomes. Bad decisions can have lucky outcomes. And once outcomes are known we immediately retrofit our thinking. Thanks to hindsight bias, “winning erases all sins.” And losing makes a good coaching call look not gutsy but just plain stupid – even to a psychologist-fan who temporarily forgot what he teaches. (Note:  This essay was simultaneously co-published by www.TheConversation.com) ... View more

Originally posted on February 9, 2015. Northeastern University history professor Benjamin Schmidt is making waves, after harvesting 14 million student reviews from “Rate My Professor.”  He offers a simple interactive tool that can allow you—perhaps as an in-class demonstration—to compare words that students use to describe male and female professors. You can give it a try, here.  I entered some intelligence-related words (“smart,” “brilliant,” “genius”) and some emotion-related words (“sweet,” “nasty”).  Even as one who writes about gender stereotypes, I was stunned by the gender effect. ... View more

Originally posted on February 10, 2015. After falsely reporting being grounded by rocket fire while on a military helicopter in Iraq, and subsequently having his reported experiences during Hurricane Katrina challenged, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has been grounded by pundit fire. Williams apologized, saying he misremembered the Iraqi incident. Talk shows and social media doubted anyone could misremember so dramatically, labeling him “Lyin’ Brian,” and grafting Pinocchio’s nose onto his face. It’s possible that Williams is, indeed, a self-aggrandizing liar (meaning he knowingly and intentionally told untruths). But to those who know the dramatic results of research into sincere but false memories by Elizabeth Loftus and others, it’s also believable that, over time, Williams constructed a false memory...and that Hillary Clinton did the same when misreporting landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996. Most people view memories as video replays. Actually, when we retrieve memories, we reweave them. We often then replace our prior memory with a modified memory—a phenomenon that researchers call “reconsolidation.” In the reconsolidation process, as more than 200 experiments have shown, misinformation can sneak into our recall. Even imagined events may later be recalled as actual experiences. In one new experiment, people were prompted to imagine and repeatedly visualize two events from their past—one a false event that involved committing a crime in their adolescence. Later, 70 percent reported a detailed false memory of having committed the crime!  False memories, like fake diamonds, seem so real. Is Brian lyin’? Does he have Pinocchio’s nose for the news? Perhaps—though telling blatant untruths surely is not a recipe for enduring success and prestige in his profession. Or might he instead be offering us a fresh example of the striking malleability of human memory? P.S. The morning after I submitted these reflections for posting, the New York Times offered this excellent (and kindred-spirited) application of false memory research to the Williams episode. ... View more

Originally posted on March 4, 2015. When was the last time you studied without distractions? Or did any one activity without simultaneously doing another? Multitasking pops up everywhere. While we work, we check our phones for messages, tweet our thoughts, listen to music, and update our Facebook status. At least that’s what my students tell me they do in their other classes. You may think listening to music while you prep for a big test helps you relax so you can concentrate and study. I used to think so. In college, I’d sit down with my textbooks, pop in my headphones, and turn on my favorite music to set the mood for studying.  Then I’d spend hours going over the material—and play my make-believe drums or air guitar! Yes, I studied alone in college. A lot. Listening to music may help college-aged students stay focused, but one new study found that older adults had more trouble remembering information they had learned while music was played in the background. The study challenged younger and older adults to listen to music while trying to remember names. For the older adults, silence was golden. But when the researchers made the older adults listen to music while they tried to remember the names, their memory lapsed. College-aged participants’ performance did not suffer regardless of whether they listened to music while memorizing names. Before you turn up the tunes to study, consider your age first. If you’re a younger college student, keep pressing play. Older students might be better off studying in silence. Regardless of our age, we might do well by taking a few minutes each day to set aside distractions, slow down, and become mindful of our thoughts, feelings, and environment.  ... View more

Originally posted on March 6, 2015. My nominee for psychology’s most misunderstood concept is negative reinforcement (which is not punishment, but actually a rewarding event—withdrawing or reducing something aversive, as when taking aspirin is followed by the alleviation of a headache). In second place on my list of oft-misunderstood concepts is heritability. My publishers’ twitter feed today offered this: Sure enough, the news source says it’s so.  But it isn’t.  Tracking back to the actual study, and its own press release, we see that, as we might have expected, the conclusion was drawn from a twin study that estimated the genetic contribution to variation among individuals in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) scores. Heritability refers to the extent to which differences among people are due to genes. If the heritability of ASD is 80 percent, this does not mean that 80 percent of autism cases are attributable to genes and 20 percent of cases to environment. And it does not mean that any particular case is 80 percent attributable to genes and 20 percent to environment.  Rather it means that, in the context studied, 80 percent of the differences among people was attributable to genetic influence. ... View more

Originally posted on March 17, 2015. One of the pleasures of writing psychological science is learning something new nearly every day, from the continual stream of information that flows across my desk or up my screen.  Some quick examples from the last few days: Nudging nutrition. Joseph Redden, Traci Mann, and their University of Minnesota colleagues report a simple intervention that increases schoolchildren’s veggie eating.  In a paper to appear in PLOS One, they report—from observations of 755 children in a school cafeteria—that, for example, offering carrots first in the serving line (in isolation from other foods to come) quadrupled their consumption. For more on healthy eating nudges, see Mann’s forthcoming book, Secrets from the Eating Lab​. Hugging prevents colds.  In new research by Sheldon Cohen and his team, social support, indexed partly by the frequency of experienced hugs, predicted fewer and milder infections among 404 healthy people exposed to a cold virus.  A hug a day keeps sickness away? Finger digit ratio predicts national differences in gender inequality?  It’s not news that nations vary in female political representation, workforce participation, and education.  It was news to me that they reportedly also vary in 2D:4D—that’s the ratio of the index (2D) and ring finger (4D) lengths.  Nations that purportedly show relatively high female fetal testosterone exposure (supposedly manifest as low 2D:4D) and relatively low male fetal testosterone exposure (high 2D:4D) have higher rates of female parliamentary and workforce participation. Hmmm. How effective is repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) for treating depression?  A few well-publicized studies suggested it was effective. But a new meta-analysis of all the available studies indicates this treatment actually provides only “minimal clinical improvement.” And this is why teachers and authors need to consider all of the available research, and not just isolated studies. It’s not all in our genes: Exercise really is healthy. Finnish researchers studied 10 identical male twins—one of whom regularly exercised, the other not. Despite having similar diets, the sedentary twins had more body fat, more insulin resistance, less stamina, and less brain gray matter. The moral to us all:  join the movement movement. ... View more

Originally posted on March 27, 2015. At a recent foundation consultation at Stanford, I enjoyed meeting Andrew Meltzoff, the amiable and articulate co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences in my home city (where he lives but a short walk from my former high school). Meltzoff is known to psychology teachers and students for his many studies of infant imitation, including his classic 1977 Science​ report on 2- to 3-week old infants imitating his facial gestures. It was, he reported, a powerful experience to stick out his tongue and have newborns do the same. “This demonstrates to me the essential socialness of human beings.” I’ve always wondered what newborns really are capable of visually perceiving, and he reminded me that it’s not much—but that they have their best acuity for the distance between their mother’s breast and eyes, which also was the distance between his face and the infants’ eyes. His lab is now reading infants brains using the world’s only infant brain imaging MEG (magnetoencephalography) machine, which reads brain magnetic activity more finely than possible with EEG. He reports that “When a brain sees, feels, touches, or hears, its neuronal activity generates weak magnetic fields that can be pinpointed and tracked millisecond-by-millisecond by a MEG machine.” That is allowing Meltzoff and his colleagues to visualize an infant’s working brain as the infant listens to language, experiences a simple touch on the hand, or (in future studies) engages in social imitation and cognitive problem solving. On the horizon, he envisions future studies of how children develop empathy, executive self-control, and identity. He also anticipates exploring how children’s brains process information from two-dimensional digital media versus their three-dimensional everyday world, and how technology can best contribute to children’s development. In such ways, they hope to “help children maximize their learning capabilities.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 14, 2015. As most introductory psychology students learn, negative emotions often affect health. And persistent anger can lash out at one’s own heart. Might negative emotions, such as anger, also be risk factors for entire communities? In an amazing study in the February Psychological Science, Johannes Eichstaedt and thirteen collaborators ascertained heart disease rates for each of 1,347 U.S. counties. They also obtained from Twitter 148 million county-identified tweets from these 1,347 counties. Their finding: a county’s preponderance of negative emotion words (such as “angry,” “hate,” and various curse words) predicted its heart disease deaths “significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.” A preponderance of positive emotion words (such as “great,” “fantastic,” and “enjoyed”) predicted low heart disease rates. Given that the median Twitter user is age 31, and the median heart disease victim is much older, why should Twitter language so successfully predict a county’s heart disease-related deaths? Younger adults’ tweets “may disclose characteristics of their community,” surmise the researchers, providing “a window” into a community’s social and economic environment. An anger-laden community tends to be, for all, a less healthy community, while happier makes for healthier. www.loopflorida.org.​ Steve Debenport/E+/Getty Images ... View more