Category: Human

worthy links

Published on by djLeave a comment

Nice piece from the Boston Globe on the positive benefits of solitude. (My friend Adam Waytz, from the Harvard psychology department, gets a mention.)

Congenitally blind people use visual cortex to do language processing

An essay by June Carbone regards the role of neuroscience in determining punishment for adolescents who commit crimes such as murder. Focused on a recent US Supreme Court decision on the juvenile death penalty, the piece points out some of the limitations of applying neuroscientific findings to issues of jurisprudence.

A new study from researchers at Northeastern University says day traders make more money when they stay with the herd.

Baby-faced black CEOs

Published on by djLeave a comment

Having a baby face benefits black CEOs, says a new study from researchers at Northwestern University. Not only are black CEOs more baby faced than white ones, they are also judged to be warmer. Furthermore, baby faced black CEOs tend to lead more prestigious firms and make more money than mature-faced ones. Researchers suggested that a baby face is disarming and lessens the impact of stereotypical perceptions that blacks are threatening.

The research builds upon earlier work (Rule and Ambady, 2009; Zebrowtiz and Montepare, 2005) that showed having a baby face could be a liability for people seeking high leadership positions in government or private industry. Those studies looked exclusively at White males. The current study looked to examine whether these results would apply to, or differ in the case of, other social groups, particularly, black men.

The results showed that having a baby face benefitted black men in CEO positions compared to black men who were more mature faced in terms of both earning higher compensation and leading more prestigious companies. And although Black male CEOs with baby faces were perceived as being warmer than their white counterparts, they were also perceived as being less competent.

The implications of these findings are noteworthy for Black men aspiring to leadership positions in American corporations. As the researchers point out, White males often display competent leadership by employing angry and authoritative leadership styles (expressing anger, banging on tables, aggressively dressing down employees, etc…) High-ranking Black male leaders may not have this same luxury, having to resort to a more moderate and constrained style of leadership.

fMRI lie detection takes a hit

Published on by djLeave a comment

Companies like No Lie fMRi and Cephos took a hit with a recent ruling that fMRI would not be allowed as evidence of lying in a criminal court case .

Botox isn’t just skin deep

Published on by dj2 Comments

It’s no secret that Botox injections can sometimes cause their recipients to become decidedly waxen faced. This presents a quandry for some Hollywood actors, who are under pressure to maintain a youthful appearance but still need to be able to convey emotion on their faces. Sadly, many seem to favor a wrinkle-free visage over faithfullness to their craft.

And there may be even more reason to avoid the Botox needle. A growing body of evidence is suggesting that not only does Botox affect our ability to express emotion, it actually diminishes our emotional experiences. This is due to the phenomenon of psychological embodiment, or, the notion that one’s emotional experiences are not a product of the brain alone, but, rather, are modulated by feed back from the body.

A set of recent experiments have specifically examined the role of facial expression in the processing of emotion. One experiment had subjects read sentences describing pleasant or unpleasant situations while either holding a pen in their mouth (forcing them to smile) or in the lips (forcing them to frown). Participants processed sentences faster when the forced facial expression was congruent with the valence of the sentence, e.g. when smiling during pleasant sentence or frowning during unpleasant sentences. (This effect, and the facial expression produced by the manipulation, occured out of the conscious awareness of the participants.) Previous work has shown that reading words that describe emotions activates specific facial muscles: corrugator supercilli for negative words, and zygomaticus for positive words. These are the primary muscles behind frowns and smiles, respectively. In other words, voluntary activation of specific facial muscles led to downstream effects in emotional experience.

In a new study, researchers at University of Wisconsin- Madison wondered if the relationship would hold if those same muscles were involuntarily deactivated.

Enter Botox.

The Experiment:
Participants — recruited through area cosmetic surgery clinics and given $50 credit towards their Botox treatments — were scheduled for two sessions. In session one, participants read sets of happy, angry and sad sentences. After each sentence, they pressed a key on the keyboard to indicate they’d finished reading. After reading all of the sentences, participants were given a Botox injection. Two weeks later, participants came in for their second session, during which they performed the same reading task they’d performed in session one ( with new happy, angry and sad sentences).

The Results:
Participants took longer to read angry sentences in session two compared to session one. There was no difference for happy or neutral sentences. This result showed that denervating facial muscles impairs the processing of emotional language, and supports the idea of facial movement as a moderating factor in the bi-directional link between language and emotion.

On one hand, this finding might dissuade some people from going for Botox treatment. The idea of losing one’s full emotional capacity seems a bit distasteful, conjuring up visions of emotional zombieism. On the other hand, the impairment is selective for anger. Could this be an unanticipated benefit? It might be nice to have one’s experience of anger compromised, particularly for those prone with excessive anger problems. Might Botox not have a positive effect on one’s mood (that is, above and beyond the effect of knowing one’s forehead is as smooth as a babies rump?) I can just see the ad now: “Botox: It doesn’t just make you look less angry, but makes you feel less angry.” I’m certainly glad Peter Finch didn’t Botox before his classic scene from “Network” (actors: note the anger lines in the forehead).

Go here for the paper, which includes some interesting speculation as to possible neural and psychological mechanisms.

The Effect of Exposure to Violent Media on Helping Behavior

Published on by djLeave a comment

Watching violent films or playing violent video games decreases helping behavior towards people in need of assistance, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan.

In one experiment, participants are playing a violent or non-violent video game when a loud and apparently physical fight breaks out in the hallway just outside their room, resulting in one person being injured. In a second experiment, participants are exiting a movie theater after watching either a violent R-rated film or a non-violent PG-rated film when they encounter an injured woman who has dropped her crutches and is struggling to pick them up. In both experiments, researchers timed how long it took for the participant to help the person in need and, in both cases, those who were exposed to violent media took longer to help than those exposed to non-violent media.

Researchers attribute the delay in helping to desensitization, suggesting that exposure to violent media causes people to become numb to the pain and suffering of others, leading to less helpful behavior. Of the two experiments, the video game experiment seems fairly sound, but there are some problems with experiment two, the movie experiment.

For one, the sample population is non-random. In order to address this issue, researchers had some people encounter the woman before they went in the theatre. In this case, there was no difference in reaction time between the two groups in terms of their helping behavior. This certainly points to the possibility that the behavioral difference was a result of the violent movie, but I would suggest that this doesn’t, however, completely rule out that there was something systematically different about the population attending the violent film. Maybe the decrease in helping behavior for people choosing to attend the violent film is context-dependent, only surfacing after exposure to a prime (the violent film), whereas this behavioral change wouldn’t surface in people who choose more benign, and less violent, movie fare.

I would also posit that its not impossible that some element other than violence in the violent film might have primed people to be less helpful, or that some element in the non-violent film primed people to be more helpful. For the record, the violent and non-violent movies which served as independent variables were “The Ruins” and “Nim’s Island,” respectively. I’ve seen neither film so can’t posit a guess as to which moderating variables could be responsible, but given the fact that we’re talking about two feature-length Hollywood movies and not films carefully constructed so that the only difference between them is the level of violence, its not hard to imagine that such variables might be present.

Experiment 1, as I mentioned earlier, is on more solid ground. It seems unlikely that helping behavior was primed by the video games in the non-violent condition, which included titles like Tetris and 3D Pinball, although its remotely possible that the decrease in helping behavior in the violence condition was moderated by some variable other than violence. An additional strength of Experiment 1 is that participants were randomly assigned to either condition,

Although published as a package deal, I see these two experiments as addressing slightly different questions. In experiment one, participants are playing instrumental roles and actually initiating much of the violent behavior to which they’re exposed. Those watching a movie, on the other hand, are passively involved in the experience, which would seem to require far less active attention and, not incidentally, no active role or involvement in the violence portrayed.

Pre-testing nonwithstanding, both the non-randomness of the population attending the violent film, and the possibilty of some systematic difference in this population, and also the possibility that some other variable primed the decrease in helping behavior, or an increase in helping behavior in the non-violent condition, suggests some problems with the claim that passive exposure to violent media leads to a decrease in helping behavior. The researchers suggest that either active participation in or passive exposure to violent media lead to a decrease in helping behavior but I would suggest that, for the reasons mentioned above, a strong claim can only be made for the former and not the latter.