The brain basis of "unrealistic optimism"

Life is a little like going for a walk in the rain. Sooner or later you're going to get wet - be that in the form of bad health, unrequited love or job redundancy. It's remarkable that we ever venture out. We do so sheltered under the umbrella of "unrealistic optimism". Depressed people aside, the rest of us underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us and overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes. Asked to imagine positive scenarios, we do so with greater vividness and more immediacy than when asked to picture negative occurrences - our images of those are hazy and distant.

Now Tali Sharot (author of the forthcoming book The Optimism Bias) and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. Sharot had participants estimate their likelihood of experiencing 80 adverse life events from developing Alzheimer's to being robbed. After they gave each estimate, the participants were given the correct average probability for a person in their socio-economic circumstances. In a subsequent testing session, participants had a second chance to forecast their risk of experiencing the same 80 misfortunes. Throughout this process, Sharot scanned the activity of the participants' brains.

One key finding is that the participants showed a bias in the way that they updated their estimates, being much more likely to revise an original estimate that was overly pessimistic than to revise an original estimate that was unduly optimistic (79 per cent of participants showed this pattern). The researchers checked and this difference wasn't to do with the positive feedback being remembered better, but purely to do with it being taken account of more than negative feedback.

There were some intriguing neural insights. Discovering that an initial estimate was unduly pessimistic was associated with increased activity across the frontal lobes, in left inferior frontal gyrus, left and right medial frontal cortex/superior frontal gyrus, and also in the right cerebellum - and this increased activity correlated with the participants' subsequent updating of their estimate in the second round of predictions. By contrast, discovering that they'd been overly optimistic was associated with reduced activity in the inferior frontal gyrus extending into precentral gyrus and insula, and again this activity change was related to the likelihood that the participants would revise their estimate in the second round of predictions.

The researchers also compared the brain activity between the most and least optimistic participants. High scorers in trait optimism showed less of the activity drop in inferior frontal gyrus when they discovered they'd been overly optimistic. That is, their brains seemed to ignore information educating them about the depressing reality of their chances of experiencing adversity later in life. In contrast, the brains of the high and low optimists responded to desirable feedback (in which they learned they'd been unduly pessimistic) in exactly the same way.

"Our findings offer a mechanistic account of how unrealistic optimism persists in the face of challenging information," said Sharot and her team. "We found that optimism was related to diminished coding of undesirable information about the future in a region of the frontal cortex (right inferior frontal gyrus) that has been identified as being sensitive to negative estimation errors."

The researchers also reflected on the wider implications of their research. They said that unrealistic optimism likely evolved to enhance exploratory behaviour and has the benefit of reducing stress and anxiety. However, they said that this rosy view comes at a cost. "For example," they said, "unrealistic assessment of financial risk is widely seen as a contributing factor in the 2008 global economic collapse."
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Sharot, T., Korn, C., and Dolan, R. (2011). How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality. Nature Neuroscience, 14 (11), 1475-1479 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2949

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The Psychology of Fear

Happy Halloween Everybody.

The Psychology of Fear is the latest addition to the psychology journal article collection. An initiative by the All About Psychology website to make important, insightful and engaging publications freely available.

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The Psychology of Fear

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The Psychology of Fear

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The Psychology of Fear

The first ever experimental investigation of laughing at oneself

To be capable of laughing at oneself is usually considered a mark of good character and the foundation of a robust sense of humour. Yet this is a behaviour that's barely been touched on by psychologists. Opinions have been expressed - for example, La Fave and his colleagues thought that laughing at oneself was never genuine and couldn't be a truly happy event. But for largely practical reasons, experiments on the topic are non-existent. Now Ursula Beermann and Willibald Ruch have shown one way to do it.

Sixty-seven undergrads rated their own ability to laugh at themselves and they nominated one or two peers to provide third-party ratings of the same. Sneakily, whilst the participants filled out these and other questionnaires at a computer, a screen camera took pictures of them. A little later the participants were asked to rate distorted pictures of the faces of unfamiliar men and women. To their surprise, included in the selection were the sneaky photos taken earlier of themselves. These photos of the participants had also been distorted to be, for example, stretched wide as if looking in a spoon (the Mac "Photobooth" software was used to create these effects).

The participants were filmed while they rated the photos so the researchers could later analyse the footage to see whether the participants laughed at the distorted images of themselves. Ekman's Facial Action Coding system, which focuses on the flexing of specific facial muscles, was used to decode the participants' facial expressions, and in particular to look for signs of genuine "Duchenne smiles", which are symmetrical and involve creasing of the muscles around the eyes. Signs of laughter were also noted.

The findings seemed to validate the new methodological approach. Although 80 per cent of participants flashed a genuine smile at least once on seeing their own distorted image, it was those who claimed to be able to laugh at themselves, and whose peers agreed with this verdict, who showed more frequent and intense smiling and laughter in response to the distorted self-images, and fewer signs of fake smiles or negative emotion. On the other hand, there was no correlation between participants' ability to laugh at themselves (based on self- and peer-report) and the amount of laughter triggered by distorted images of other people's faces. This suggests that proclivity for laughing at oneself really is a distinct trait, separate from a general readiness to laugh.

Finally, those participants who laughed more at themselves tended to have more cheerful, less serious dispositions and to be in a better mood on the day of testing.

"...[T]he current study succeeded in providing the first empirical evidence on the phenomenon of laughing at oneself," the researchers said.
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Beermann, U., and Ruch, W. (2011). Can people really “laugh at themselves?”—Experimental and correlational evidence. Emotion, 11 (3), 492-501 DOI: 10.1037/a0023444

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Does crying really make you feel better?

Psychologists have made surprisingly little progress in explaining why we cry. A popular idea is that crying is cathartic - that the tears of sadness wash away life's woes like detritus carried off in the tide. This has been supported by retrospective surveys that ask people how they felt after previous bouts of crying. Lab studies, by contrast, which involve participants watching weepie movies, have found crying to have no such benefit. Both approaches, however, are seriously flawed. Findings from the retrospective approach are prone to memory distortion and people's answers are likely influenced by the popular cathartic idea. Lab studies, meanwhile, suffer from a lack of realism.

A superior method is to have participants complete a daily crying diary for an extended period of time, to be completed each night - soon enough to reduce memory distortions, but not too intrusive to interfere with the behaviour under observation. Believe or not, just one diary study of crying has been conducted before. Now Lauren Bylsma and her colleagues have performed the second, involving 97 female undergrads who completed a crying diary, including questions about daily mood and crying context, for between 40 and 73 days. In all, 1004 crying episodes were documented, and all participants cried at least once. Most bouts of crying were triggered by conflict; the next most common reason was loss, followed by personal failing.

Bylsma's headline finding is that crying mostly had little positive benefit, at least not on overall daily mood. Not only did crying episodes tend to be preceded by two days of lower daily mood, they were also associated with lower daily mood on the day of crying and lower daily mood on two successive days afterwards. For mood in the specific moments after a crying session, the results were more encouraging. Most often mood was reported as unchanged (60.8 per cent), but 30 per cent of sessions were associated with a positive mood change, with 8.8 per cent leading to a deterioration in mood.

Other findings included: more intense (but not longer) crying episodes were associated with more positive mood outcomes, as were crying episodes that followed a feeling of inadequacy and that triggered a positive change in the situation. Also, crying in the company of one other person was associated more often with positive mood change than was crying alone or crying in the company of multiple people. Conflict tears tended not to be associated with a positive mood change, undermining the idea that tears can defuse social tensions.

The study has its limitations - for example, the mood scale only had a three-point range, and of course it's a shame that men weren't included too. But even granted these limitations, the researchers emphasised that theirs was "the first extended examination of the relationship between crying and mood using detailed contextual information from multiple crying episodes and, as such, represents an important step towards understanding this striking human behaviour."
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Bylsma, L., Croon, M., Vingerhoets, A., and Rottenberg, J. (2011). When and for whom does crying improve mood? A daily diary study of 1004 crying episodes. Journal of Research in Personality, 45 (4), 385-392 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2011.04.007

Related Digest item: What does crying do for you?

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

New gadget provides fresh insight into goose-bumps

My most recent experience of goose-bumps (aka goose-flesh) was watching the latest episode of Being Human, the BBC's supernatural drama. This rather odd form of emotional reaction, in which a chill is felt and bumps form on the skin and the hairs stand erect, was noted by Darwin and has continued to intrigue scientists. Unfortunately, past research into 'piloerection' (to use its technical name) has been hampered by the lack of an objective measure.

Previous experiments relied on participants indicating when they were experiencing the feeling. This is problematic: the feeling might be illusory; participants' internally-focused vigilance creates an unnatural situation; and the act of indicating how one is feeling can interfere with other physiological measures taken at the same time. Now Mathias Benedek and Christian Kaernbach have taken a fresh look at goose-bumps using a new objective measure - a camera that records the skin of the forearm and uses an algorithm to detect the trade-mark pimpling and raising of the hairs.

Benedek and Kaernbach wired fifty undergrads (seven males) up to their new piece of kit. The students then listened to four music clips and four clips from films (each between 90 seconds and five minutes long). These were from a larger selection picked for their power to provoke goose-bumps. Examples included My Heart Will Go On, performed by Celine Dion; Only Time, performed by Enya; a scene from Armageddon (in which the astronaut says good-bye to his daughter before sacrificing his own life for the good of mankind); and a scene from Braveheart (featuring a stirring speech by William Wallace).

The study threw up a host of new findings. The film clips were a more reliable provoker of goose-bumps than the music clips (24 per cent vs. 11 per cent). The participants had heard of most of the music and film material, but there was a tendency for unfamiliar clips to have more goose-bump power. Overall it was fairly tricky to provoke goose-bumps, with only 40 per cent of the clips doing so. There was also a gender difference - none of the men experienced goose-bumps vs. 47 per cent of the women - but this has to be taken with caution because there were so few men in the sample.

Sometimes there was a mismatch between the objective measure of goose-bumps and participants' self-report. On 34 per cent of the occasions that their hairs stood on end, participants didn't report they had goose-bumps. Contrarily, on 11 per cent of trials, participants said they had goose-bumps when in fact they didn't. These data highlight the risks associated with relying on self-report.

From a theoretical perspective the most important findings relate to the physiological correlates of goose-bumps. One existing theory states that goose-bumps are a marker of peak arousal. The current study found that goose-bumps correlated with increased heart rate and blood pressure. On the other hand, breathing deepened during goose-bumps, and participants reported feeling more 'moved' when they had goose-bumps, not more aroused, neither of which is consistent with the peak arousal account.

Another hypothesis holds that goose-bumps are provoked by sadness, creating a cold sensation which promotes an evolutionary advantageous desire for social reunion. Benedek and Kaernbach said the increased heart rate, deep breathing (non-crying sadness has these effects too) and feeling of 'being moved' are consistent with this account. However, they also acknowledged that previous studies have found that goose-bumps are often pleasurable. Taken altogether, the researchers think goose-bumps probably reflect a distinct emotional state, a kind of awed mixture of fear and joy. In English and French we lack a dedicated word for this, but in German they have 'Rührung' and 'Ergriffenheit', which means something similar.

The researchers' conclusion is that given the low specificity of other physiological measures of emotion, measuring goose-bumps objectively could prove to be a useful new tool in the psychologist's armamentarium when studying emotional responses.
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Benedek M, and Kaernbach C (2011). Physiological correlates and emotional specificity of human piloerection. Biological psychology PMID: 21276827

How anger can make us more rational

Anger can de-bias our thinking

Imagine you're in a room with four people, one is lip-snarling angry, the others are calm. Who among them would you consider the most likely to think rationally? A surprising new study suggests that in at least one important respect it's actually the angry individual who will be the more rational decision maker. How come? Because they'll be less prone to the confirmation bias - our tendency to seek out information that supports our existing views.

Maia Young and her colleagues had 97 undergrads take part in what they thought were two separate experiments. The first involved them either recalling and writing about a time they'd been exceptionally angry (this was designed to make them angry), or a time they'd been sad, or about mundane events.

Next, all the participants read an introduction to the debate about whether hands-free kits make speaking on a mobile phone while driving any safer. All participants had been chosen because pre-study they believed that they do. The most important part came next, as the participants were presented with one-sentence summaries of eight articles, either in favour, or against, the idea that hands-free kits make driving safer. The participants had to choose five of these articles to read in full.

Which participants tended to choose to read more articles critical of hands-free kits and therefore contrary to their own position? It was the participants who'd earlier been made to feel angry. What's more, when the participants' attitudes were re-tested at the study end, it was the angry participants who'd shifted more from their original position on the debate.

These findings were supported in a follow-up involving 89 adults, with the controversial issue pertaining to who should be the next US president, in what was then the upcoming 2008 election. Once again, participants provoked into feeling angry tended to choose to read articles that ran counter to their original position (be that favouring Obama or McCain). Another detail was that this effect of anger was entirely explained by what the researchers called a 'moving against' tendency, measured by participants' agreement, after the anger induction, with statements like 'I wanted to assault something or someone'.

Young and her team said their results provided an example of anger leading to a cognitive pattern characterised by less bias. 'Although the hypothesis disconfirming behaviour that anger produces may well be an aggressive act, meant to move or fight against the opposition's opinion,' they said, 'its result is to provide those who feel angry with better information.'

What are the real-life implications of this result? The researchers conceded that it's unrealistic to make people angry as a way to improve their decision making. However, they said that in a work meeting, if someone is angry, they might be the one best placed to play the role of devil's advocate on behalf of the group. 'By encouraging angry group members to select information necessary for group discussion,' the researchers explained, 'the group as a whole may get the benefit of being exposed to diverse views and, as a result, achieve a more balanced perspective.'
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Young, M., Tiedens, L., Jung, H., and Tsai, M. (2011). Mad enough to see the other side: Anger and the search for disconfirming information. Cognition and Emotion, 25 (1), 10-21 DOI: 10.1080/02699930903534105

How well can we communicate emotions purely through touch?

Romantic couples outperformed pairs of strangers

Whether it's a raised eyebrow or curl of the lip, we usually think of emotions as conveyed through facial expressions and body language. Science too has focused on these forms of emotional communication, finding that there's a high degree of consistency across cultures. It's only in the last few years that psychologists have looked at whether and how the emotions can be communicated purely through touch.

A 2006 study by Matthew Hertenstein demonstrated that strangers could accurately communicate the 'universal' emotions of anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy, purely through touches to the forearm, but not the 'prosocial' emotions of surprise, happiness and sadness, nor the 'self-focused' emotions of embarrassment, envy and pride. Now Erin Thompson and James Hampton have added to this nascent literature by comparing the accuracy of touch-based emotional communication between strangers and between those who are romantically involved.

Thirty romantic couples (the vast majority were heterosexual) based in London took part. One partner in each romantic pair attempted to communicate 12 different emotions, one at a time, to their partner. They sat at opposite sides of a table divided by a curtained screen. The emotional 'decoder' slid their forearm through the curtain for the 'encoder' to touch, after which the 'decoder' attempted to identify which of the 12 emotions had been communicated. The participants were filmed throughout.

After this, the romantic couples were split up and participants paired up with a stranger to repeat the exercise (encoders and decoders kept whichever role they'd had first time around). Strangers were usually formed into same-sex pairs, to avoid the social awkwardness of touching an opposite-sex partner. This created an unfortunate confound, acknowledged by the researchers, which is that most romantic couples were opposite-sex whereas most stranger pairs were same-sex. However, focusing only on results from same-sex pairs versus opposite-sex pairs suggested gender was not an important factor.

The key finding is that although strangers performed well for most emotions, romantic couples tended to be superior, especially for the self-focused emotions of embarrassment, envy and pride. Thompson and Hampton calculated that chance performance (i.e. merely guessing) would produce an accuracy rate of 25 per cent. Although there were 12 emotions to select from, the rationale here is that some are far more similar to each other than others, so even a guesser would perform better than 1/12 accuracy. Romantic partners communicated universal emotions, prosocial and self-focused emotions with an accuracy of 53 per cent, 60 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively - in each case, far better than chance performance. In contrast, strangers achieved accuracy rates of 39 per cent, 56 per cent and 17 per cent, for universal, prosocial, and self-focused emotions respectively, with the last considered as no better than chance performance.

How did the romantic couples achieve their greater accuracy? They touched for longer, but this wasn't correlated with accuracy. Using footage of the experiment, the researchers coded the types of touch used (a wide range of discrete touch types were identified, from trembling and scratching to slapping and squeezing), and for each emotion it was clear that strangers were using similar kinds of touch as were romantic couples. This means that there were either subtle differences in the touching used by romantic couples, which the experimenters had failed to detect, or the 'decoders' were interpreting the same touch cues differently when they were delivered by an intimate partner.

This topic is ripe for further investigation - for example, does the touch advantage shown by romantic couples extend to non-emotional communication? Would other long-term, but non-sexual, relationship partners such as siblings, show a similar advantage? And would romantic partners still display an advantage if they didn't know who was doing the touching? 'Our findings extend the literature on the communication of emotion,' the researchers said. 'The nature of particular relationships appears to have the ability to diminish the ambiguity of emotional expression via touch.'
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Thompson, E., and Hampton, J. (2011). The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touch. Cognition and Emotion, 25 (2), 295-306 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2010.492957

Other people may experience more misery than you realise

You are not alone ...

Have you ever had the feeling that everyone else seems so sorted, so at ease? You look about you and see friends chatting over lunch, people laughing on their mobiles, others escaping contentedly through novels or newspapers. According to Alexander Jordan and colleagues, most of us have such a tendency to underestimate other people's experience of negative emotion. In turn the researchers think this skewed perception perpetuates a collective delusion in which we all strive to present an unrealistically happy front because we think that's the norm.

Jordan's team began their investigation by asking 63 undergrads to describe recent negative and positive emotional experiences they'd had. As expected, the negative examples (e.g. had an argument; was rejected by a boy/girl), more than the positive examples (e.g. attended a fun party; had a great meal), tended to occur in private and to provoke emotions that the students had attempted to suppress.

The most frequently cited of these experiences were then put to a separate set of 80 students whose task was to say how many times in the last two weeks they had lived through something similar, and to estimate how often their peers had. The important finding here was that the students consistently underestimated their peers' experience of negative events (by an average of 17 per cent) whilst slightly over-estimating their peers' experience of positive situations (by 5.6 per cent).

What about close friends - surely we have a more accurate sense of their emotional lives? A third study was based on emotional weekly blogs kept by over 200 students, which they used to rate their experience of various positive and negative emotions over the course of a term. Each blog student then nominated a close friend or romantic partner who had to estimate the range of emotions the blogger had experienced that term. Consistent with the study's main message, close friends and partners tended to underestimate the bloggers' experiences of negative emotions and to overestimate their experiences of positive emotions. A deeper analysis of the data suggested the underestimation of negative emotion was partly mediated by the bloggers' deliberate suppression of their negative emotions.

A final study showed that students with a greater tendency to underestimate their peers' negative emotions also tended to feel more lonely, less satisfied with life and to ruminate more, thus suggesting that underestimating others' misery could be harmful to our own well-being. Of course the causal direction could run the other way (i.e. being lonely and discontented could predispose us to think everyone else is happier than they are), or both ways. The researchers acknowledged more research is needed to test this.

Assuming the present results can be replicated, an enduring mystery is why we continue to underestimate other people's misery whilst knowing full well that most of our own negative experiences happen in private, and that we frequently put on a brave, happy face when socialising. Why don't we reason that other people do the same? Jordan and his colleagues think this is probably part of an established phenomenon in psychology - 'the fundamental attribution error' - in which people downplay the role of the situation when assessing other people's behaviour compared with their own.

A fascinating implication of this research is that it could help explain the popularity of tragic art, be that in drama, music or books. 'In fictional tragedy, people are given the opportunity to witness "the terrible things in life" that are ordinarily "played out behind the scenes",' the researchers said (quoting Checkhov), 'which may help to depathologise people's own negative emotional experiences.'
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Jordan, A., Monin, B., Dweck, C., Lovett, B., John, O., and Gross, J. (2010). Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence of Others' Negative Emotions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37 (1), 120-135 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210390822

The evolutionary roots of laughter

To evolutionary psychologists, the noise made by gorillas, chimps and bonobos when you tickle their feet is no laughing matter. These distinctive vocalisations suggest that rather than evolving separately, laughter evolved in a shared common ancestor before becoming tailored in each primate species, including humans.

To find support for this idea, Diana Szameitat and her colleagues scanned the brains of 18 men and women whilst they listened to the sound of human tickle-induced laughter as well as laughter prompted by joy and taunting. The researchers found a 'double-dissociation' - the tickle laughter provoked extra activity in the secondary auditory cortex, likely reflecting the acoustical complexity of this kind of laughter, whereas the joy and taunting laughter prompted more activity in the medial frontal cortex, a region associated with social and emotional processing. These differences were observed whether the participants were tasked with categorising the laughter they heard, or merely with counting the number of laughs. The finding suggests that humans produce and process an evolutionarily 'old' form of tickle-based laughter, which is shared with non-human primates, as well as a newer, more emotionally sophisticated variant.

The laughter stimuli were provided by a team of eight professional actors using 'auto induction' techniques. This means they used their imagination, memories, and body movements to provoke the required emotions and bodily sensations in themselves as far as they could. The researchers said they only selected laughter samples that had been accurately categorised (as joy, taunting, or tickle laughter) in pilot work at well above chance levels by naive listeners. The dependence on acted laughter does seem to be a weakness of the study, however, especially as it's a well-documented fact that people are unable to tickle themselves.

'Our study provides suggestive evidence that laughter, in the form of a reflex-like reaction to touch, has been adopted into human social behaviour from animal behaviour,' the researchers said. 'Through the differentiation of human social interaction over time this "simple" form of laughter may have diversified to become a spectrum of different laughter variants in order to accommodate increased complexity of human social interaction.'
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Szameitat, D., Kreifelts, B., Alter, K., Szameitat, A., Sterr, A., Grodd, W., and Wildgruber, D. (2010). It is not always tickling: Distinct cerebral responses during perception of different laughter types. NeuroImage, 53 (4), 1264-1271 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.06.028

Snakes in a brain scanner!

Forget snakes on a plane, this was snakes in a brain scanner! To chart the neural activity associated with overcoming fear, Uri Nili and colleagues scanned snake-phobic participants' brains while they chose, with the press of a button, whether or not to bring a live, 1.5M long corn snake, located on a conveyer belt in the scanner room, nearer to their heads, or to shift it further away (watch video). A control condition replaced the snake with a teddy bear.

The subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) - part of the frontal cortex buried under the corpus callosum - emerged as a key area involved when participants chose to overcome their fear and bring the snake closer to their heads - i.e. when they acted courageously. When people reported high fear but chose to bring the snake closer, sgACC activity increased, whilst physiological markers of fear dropped and activity in emotion processing regions, such as the amygdala, was reduced. Nili's team said this suggests the sgACC plays a role in dampening down fear-related bodily arousal. Consistent with this, the sgACC is known to be involved in regulating the paraysmpathetic nervous system (which is in opposition to the fight or flight response) and is deeply interconnected with brain structures involved in emotional processing.

In contrast, when courage failed and the participants chose to direct the snake further from them, sgACC activity dropped away (no longer correlating with fear levels), somatic signs of fear increased, as did activity in emotion-processing regions like the amygdala.

The only other brain region that was more active during displays of courage was the right temporal pole - a part of the brain that's known to be involved in modulating emotions triggered by visual stimuli, and also in the self-evaluation and monitoring of one's own emotions.

This new research has some important and exciting implications. From a practical perspective, the fact that bodily signs of fear were reduced during moments of courage, even while subjective fear was high, raises a concern with studies that use physiological measures (such as sweatiness of the skin) as a marker for fear. For example, studies of therapeutic interventions for phobias, which rely on physiological markers, risk mistaking what's in fact a display of courage for successful fear eradication.

Manipulating sgACC activity could also be a new target for therapy: 'Such interventions may range from training in meditation techniques that lead to greater activity in this region,' the researchers said, 'to transcranial magnetic stimulation similar to that attempted to alleviate depression.'
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Nili, U., Goldberg, H., Weizman, A., & Dudai, Y. (2010). Fear Thou Not: Activity of Frontal and Temporal Circuits in Moments of Real-Life Courage. Neuron, 66 (6), 949-962 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.06.009

How language reflects the balance of good and bad in the world

Imagine a garden filled with sweet smelling flowers and weeds. The flowers vastly outnumber the weeds, but the latter are more varied. And there's another asymmetry - whereas the flowers have a pleasant scent, the weeds aren't just scent-less, they're poisonous, they can kill. According to a new study, life is like this garden. Positive events outnumber negative events, but negative events are more varied and potent. Paul Rozin and colleagues say that the English language reflects this state of affairs and so do at least twenty other languages.

Rozin's team began by analysing a corpus of 100 million words of spoken and written English and found that positive words are used far more often than negative words - just as you'd expect if positive events are more common (to take one example, 'good' is mentioned 795 times per million words compared with 153 mentions per million for 'bad').

Moreover, the researchers say we've adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be 'unmarked' - that is, the positive is the default (e.g. 'happy') whereas the negative is achieved by adding a negating prefix (i.e. 'unhappy'). Rozin cites four more such habits. Here's one more: when stating pairs of good and bad words together, it's nearly always the convention to mention the positive word first: as in 'good and bad' and 'happy and sad' rather than the other way around.

Turning to the dark side, the greater variety of negative events in the world is also reflected in English usage. For example, many negative words don't have an opposite: 'sympathy' (i.e. there's no word for sympathising about another person's good fortune), 'murderer' (there's no word for giver of life), 'risk', 'accident' etc.

To see if these patterns are reflected in other languages, Rozin's team interviewed the speakers of twenty languages (one speaker per language): Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Ibo, Arabic, Turkish, Tamil, Hindi, German, Icelandic, Swedish, French, Portugese (Brazilian), Spanish, Russian, and Polish.

Overwhelmingly, the patterns found for English also applied in these other languages. For instance, for eight sample adjectives, including 'pleasant', 'dirty', 'disgusting' and 'pure', it was the convention in 83.9 per cent of cases across all 20 languages for the positive word to be stated first alongside its negative opposite. Likewise, the negative words 'sympathy', 'murderer', 'risk', and 'accident' nearly always lacked a positive opposite.

'We hope that this study calls the attention of emotion researchers to some interesting and widespread valenced biases in the use of language,' the researchers said. 'We believe these biases are adaptive responses to asymmetries in the world, as it interacts with organisms.'
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Rozin, P., Berman, L., & Royzman, E. (2010). Biases in use of positive and negative words across twenty natural languages Cognition & Emotion, 24 (3), 536-548 DOI: 10.1080/02699930902793462

The Say "Cheese" Guide To Avoiding Divorce

Exploring Psychology



(Photo Credit: Matthew Johnson)

Whether you're looking for your soul mate or you think you've already found them, you might want to take a closer look at their photographs before you do the whole marriage thing; because according to a study that has just been published in the journal of Motivation and Emotion, smile intensity in photographs predicts divorce later in life.

Abstract

Based on social–functional accounts of emotion, we conducted two studies examining whether the degree to which people smiled in photographs predicts the likelihood of divorce. Along with other theorists, we posited that smiling behavior in photographs is potentially indicative of underlying emotional dispositions that have direct and indirect life consequences. In the first study, we examined participants’ positive expressive behavior in college yearbook photos and in Study 2 we examined a variety of participants’ photos from childhood through early adulthood. In both studies, divorce was predicted by the degree to which subjects smiled in their photos.

(Matthew J. Hertenstein et al, DePauw University).

Be Careful Though!

Before you say "I do" to Mr or Ms smiley watch the following video for some alternative Funky Motown psychology - "Don't let the smile fool ya - Take my advice I'm only try' to school ya"

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The Say "Cheese" Guide To Avoiding Divorce

Psychology on the Dance Floor. Investigating Emotional Movement

Exploring Psychology



(Photo Credit: BdwayDiva1)

I was reading about the various events that will be taking place as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival and one in particular caught my eye. It read:

A dancer performs in total darkness. Points of light illuminate her movements. Is watching dance enough to make you feel like dancing? Take part in this live experiment investigating emotion perception and dance. No dance skills necessary, dancing shoes optional.

Given that I am officially one the worst dancers in the world I was intrigued to find out more. It turns out that this event is based on a research project by Professor Richard Wiseman and Dr Peter Lovat from the University of Hertfordshire, who are working alongside dancer Caroline Duker to investigate how dancers portray emotion. As part of the research design, participants watch a dancer perform the same routine either in full light, or in the dark with small points of light attached to the dancer's body. Participants must then attempt to work out the emotion the dancer is portraying.

In discussing their initial findings Professor Wiseman notes.

In one part of the experiment, participants saw a dancer portray one of four emotions (neutral, joy, sadness, and anger) whilst performing in full light. The results showed that people were 80% correct. The second part of the experiment involved watching videos of the same dance sequences, but this time everyone just saw six light points that were attached to the dancers shoulders, wrists and ankles.

The previous work had shown that people were about 63% accurate when shown 13 points of light. Remarkably, participants in our study were 62% accurate with just six points of light. This suggests that people can recognise emotional movement from just the smallest amount of information. We found no difference between men and woman, or different ages.

Perceptual Importance

Existing studies into the perception of emotion almost exclusively employ a static methodology i.e. still photographs of facial expressions. These fascinating results suggest that dynamic displays of emotion expressed non facially may be just as important and as such warrant further investigation.



In the Mood for Dancing will be taking place at the Edinburgh Science Festival on Thursady April 16th.

Click Here for full details.

Professor Richard Wiseman

I recently made Professor Richard Wiseman the inaugural entrant into The Psychology Light Hall of Fame. The Psychology Light Hall of Fame recognises the work of those individuals who make the study and teaching of psychology accessible, fascinating and thoroughly entertaining.

Click Here to find out more about Professor Wiseman. (scroll down towards bottom of page).

The Universal Joy of Dance



I Taught This Guy All His Moves

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Psychology on the Dance Floor. Investigating Emotional Movement