Sweet-toothed and sweet natured - how people who like sweet things are sweet

"Honey", "Sweetheart", "Sugar": how come so many terms of endearment pertain to sweetness? Might the metaphor be grounded in a real link between sweet taste and pleasing personality traits and behaviour?

Brian Meier and his team had dozens of students rate the agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism of 100 people, based on pictures of their faces and a strap-line identifying each person's preference for a particular food, such as "I like grapefruit". People who said they liked a sweet food were judged by the students as more agreeable, suggesting that we implicitly recognise that a taste for sweet things is grounded in a sweet personality.

Are people right to make this implicit assumption? Further studies suggested so. Students who rated their own personality as more agreeable also tended to have a stronger preference (than their less agreeable peers) for sweet foods and drinks. Among a different set of students, a stronger preference for sweet foods correlated positively with their willingness to volunteer their time, unpaid, for a separate unrelated study - considered by the researchers as a sign of prosocial behaviour.

So, we assume that people who like sweet foods are nice people, and it turns out they are. Can this link be exploited? What if you give someone a sweet food to eat - will they feel more agreeable? Will they actually become more helpful? In two further studies, students given chocolate to eat (either a Hershey's Kiss or a piece of Dove Silky Smooth chocolate), rated themselves as more agreeable and actually volunteered more of their time to help an unknown researcher, as compared with students given a sour sweet or a water cracker.

"We are unaware of any studies showing that taste metaphors are consequential in predicting social functioning, and thus the findings are unique," the researchers said. Why is there this link between sweet taste and personality and behaviour? Meier and his team think one possible root cause may lie in breast-feeding. "... [H]uman breast milk is decidedly sweet in taste and chemical composition and feeding episodes are marked by a close bond of mother and child," they observed. "Thus, one of the earliest bases for later emotional attachments is also marked by a sweet-tasting ingested food."

The psychologists added that future research is needed to explore other potential links between tastes and personality. Might lovers of spicy foods have spicy personalities, for instance? Also, we need to find out if the same links pertain in languages other than English. "The general point is that taste-related metaphors may be useful in understanding other personality processes than those examined," they said.

Meanwhile, if wind of these results gets out, romantic liaisons could become a little more complicated. Has your partner given you that box of chocolates to make you "sweet", literally because they're after something and want you to be more amenable? On the other hand: maybe it's a test. If you turn your nose up at a chocolate, what will that tell them about your personality?
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Meier, B., Moeller, S., Riemer-Peltz, M., and Robinson, M. (2011). Sweet taste preferences and experiences predict prosocial inferences, personalities, and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0025253

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Neurotics experience more immersion when watching films

Descriptions of neurotics are typically unflattering: they're fearful, tense people, prone to catastrophise and will often shy away from challenges. Well, here's some more uplifting news for folk matching this personality description. A study of film immersion has found that people who score highly in neuroticism (as measured by agreement with statements like "I worry a lot") tend to feel more absorbed in films. This is associated with their enjoying horror and sad films less, but comedies more.

David Weibel and his team had 64 participants (average age 28 years) watch three movie clips taken from The Shining (the scene where the boy is playing in the hallway); The Champ (a boy's father dies after suffering a severe beating in the ring); and When Harry Met Sally (the scene where Sally fakes an orgasm in a cafe). The participants, half of whom were students, rated how immersed they felt in the clips and how detached they felt from their real, physical environment. They also said how much they'd enjoyed the film excerpts.

The half of the participants who scored higher in neuroticism experienced more immersion during all three clips - happy, sad and scary - compared with the lower scorers in neuroticism. "A possible explanation," the researchers said, "could be that neurotics usually have a highly reactive sympathetic nervous system making them sensitive to any environmental stimulation."

The more neurotic participants also liked the scary and sad clips less, but enjoyed the funny clip more. The implication is that immersion mediates enjoyment, but unfortunately this wasn't tested.

Weibel's team said their finding has theoretical import because media experts tend to assume that engendering greater immersion in an audience will always lead to more enjoyment. "Our findings contradict this assumption," they said. "In the two negatively connotated conditions, participants scoring high on neuroticism experienced more presence than those scoring low, but at the same time reported less enjoyment than individuals with low neuroticism scores. We therefore assume that for these participants, the feeling of being there in the sad or fearful world was experienced in a negative way. This in turn resulted in decreased enjoyment."
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Weibel, D., Wissmath, B., & Stricker, D. (2011). The influence of neuroticism on spatial presence and enjoyment in films Personality and Individual Differences, 51 (7), 866-869 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.07.011

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When death is an aphrodisiac

Feeling frisky?

What effect do thoughts of death have on a typical person's desire for sex? The short answer is that it depends. Armed with insight from terror management theory and attachment theory, Gurit Birnbaum and her colleagues have made a start unpicking the detail of when and for whom death is an aphrodisiac.

Research on terror management theory has shown that people respond to mortality reminders by bolstering their own cultural view, derogating opposing views, and shoring up their self-esteem. By this account, the effect of death on libidinous desire will depend on the meaning that sex has for a person.

An initial study with 36 women and 40 men in Israel found that thinking about death led the men, but not the women, to say that they'd be more likely (compared with controls who thought about a dentist visit) to take part in a casual, one-night stand with a person they'd met at a pick-up bar. Perhaps, the researchers reasoned, this is because cultural norms dictate that 'sexual conquests' can be a self-esteem boost for men, but less so for women.

A follow-up was similar to the first except the 163 Californian participants were asked to imagine a potential one-night in a more romantic context, after a candle-lit dinner and engaging conversation. In this case, thoughts of death led both men and women to say that they'd be more likely than controls to go ahead with the one-night stand, thus showing how a subtle change in sexual symbolism can alter the relationship between morbid thoughts and sexual desire.

This idea was supported in a third study with 89 men and women who were primed with thoughts of death before considering their willingness to have either physical, hedonistic sex with a long-term partner or romantic, loving sex. This time, thoughts of death, compared with thoughts of a dental visit, increased participants' desire for loving, romantic sex, but not purely physical sex. In fact, there was a slight trend for participants to be put off this latter kind of sex, perhaps because morbid thoughts make some people want to escape their animal nature, not be reminded of it.

Lastly, Birnbaum's team explored the role of attachment style in all this, leading to some complex results. This time, morbid thoughts increased most people's overall sexual desire, unless they had an anxious attachment style (characterised by clingy behaviour driven by self-doubt). For these anxious types, when morbid thoughts did lead to sexual desire it was for reasons of relationship insecurity - i.e. to have sex with a partner as a way to cement the relationship. By contrast, for participants with an avoidant attachment style (characterised by emotional distance and self-reliance) morbid thoughts led to increased desire for sex that would bolster self-estem. For men with an avoidant attachment style, this meant a desire for casual sex.

Taken together the research paints a complex picture in which the effect of death-related thoughts on people's libido depends on the meaning that sex has for them. In turn this meaning is shaped by cultural norms and a person's attachment style. 'Although the present research is an important step toward shedding light on the dual potential of sex for both joy and distress,' the researchers said, 'more research is needed to elucidate its contextual determinants and the psychological mechanisms regulating its expression.'
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BIRNBAUM, G., HIRSCHBERGER, G., and GOLDENBERG, J. (2011). Desire in the face of death: Terror management, attachment, and sexual motivation. Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2010.01298.x

Better than sex! US college students value self-esteem boosts more than bodily pleasures

'Because you're worth it!' L'Oreal's catchphrase taps into the narcissistic zeitgeist. But it also begs the question: Are we at risk of becoming obsessed with feeling good about ourselves? According to new research by Brad Bushman and his co-workers, not only do US college students have higher self-esteem than previous generations, they now value self-esteem boosts more than sex, food, receiving a salary payment, seeing a friend or having an alcoholic drink.

Bushman's team made their finding by asking dozens of US college students to imagine their favourite food, sexual activity, self-esteem boosting activity (e.g. receiving a compliment, getting a good grade) etc, and in each case to say how much they wanted it and how much they liked it. The key finding was that self-esteem boosting activities came out on top.

Some validity was lent to these thought-experiments by offering the students a real chance to boost their self-esteem. For example, in the first study, as well as answering questions about food, sex and so on, the students were scored on a simple verbal intelligence test. They were then given the opportunity to wait around for an extra ten minutes to receive a score based on a different algorithm that usually produces higher scores. The students who said earlier that they wanted self-esteem more than they liked it (taken as a sign of being addicted to self-esteem) tended to be the ones who stayed behind for the chance to receive a higher intelligence score.

Other personality factors that the researchers looked at were 'entitlement', and trying to get other people to recognise how good you are, otherwise known as 'pursuing self-image goals'. Higher scores on entitlement, as measured by agreement with statements like 'If I ruled the world it would be a much better place,' tended to correlate with wanting the rewards - that's the imagined self-esteem boosts, sex, food etc - but not the liking of them. Predictably enough, pursuing self-image goals tended to correlate with placing a high value on self-esteem boosts.

What does all this mean? Bushman's team think the new results confirm that self-esteem is an essential human need, as claimed by humanistic psychology pioneer Abraham Maslow and others. 'Overall, our findings shed new and interesting light on just how important it is for people to feel worthy and valuable,' the researchers said. But their write-up is tinged with anxiety. Valuing self-esteem can encourage the pursuit of self-image goals, which they warned can lead to conflict with others. 'Of course we should enjoy the good things in life, but not so much that we want them more than we like them,' Bushman's team concluded. 'We do not want to become addicted to self-esteem or other rewards, or we will become "slaves" to them, to borrow the words of Fritz Perls [the founder of Gestalt therapy].'
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Bushman, B., Moeller, S., and Crocker, J. (2010). Sweets, Sex, or Self-Esteem? Comparing the Value of Self-Esteem Boosts with Other Pleasant Rewards. Journal of Personality DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00712.x

When and how psychological data is collected affects the kind of students who volunteer

Psychology has a serious problem. You may have heard about its over-dependence on WEIRD participants - that is, those from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich Democracies. More specifically, as regular readers will be aware, countless psychology studies involve undergraduate students, particularly psych undergrads. Apart from the obvious fact that this limits the generalisability of the findings, Edward Witt and his colleagues provide evidence in a new paper for two further problems, this time involving self-selection biases.

Just over 500 Michigan State University undergrads (75 per cent were female) had the option, at a time of their choosing during the Spring 2010 semester, to volunteer either for an on-line personality study, or a face-to-face version. The data collection was always arranged for Wednesdays at 12.30pm to control for time of day/week effects. Also, the same personality survey was administered by computer in the same way in both experiment types, it's just that in the face-to-face version it was made clear that the students had to attend the research lab, and an experimenter would be present.

Just 30 per cent of the sample opted for the face-to-face version. Predictably enough, these folk tended to score more highly on extraversion. The effect size was small (d=-.26) but statistically significant. Regards more specific personality traits, the students who chose the face-to-face version were also more altruistic and less cautious.

What about choice of semester week? As you might expect, it was the more conscientious students who opted for dates earlier in the semester (r=.-.20). What's more, men were far more likely to volunteer later in the semester, even after controlling for average personality difference between the sexes. For example, 18 per cent of week one participants were male compared with 52 per cent in the final, 13th week.

In other words, the kind of people who volunteer for research will likely vary according to the time of semester and the mode of data collection. Imagine you used false negative feedback on a cognitive task to explore effects on confidence and performance. Participants tested at the start of semester, who are typically more conscientious and motivated, are likely to be affected in a different way than participants who volunteer later in the semester.

This isn't the first time that self-selection biases have been reported in psychology. A 2007 study, for example, suggested that people who volunteer for a 'prison study' are likely to score higher than average on aggressiveness and social dominance, thus challenging the generalisability of Zimbardo's seminal work. However, despite the occasional study highlighting these effects, there seems to be little enthusiasm in the social psychological community to do much about it.

So what to do? The specific issues raised in the current study could be addressed by sampling throughout a semester and replicating effects using different data collection methods. 'Many papers based on college students make reference to the real world implications of their findings for phenomena like aggression, basic cognitive processes, prejudice, and mental health,' the researchers said. 'Nonetheless, the use of convenience samples place limitations on the kinds of inferences drawn from research. In the end, we strongly endorse the idea that psychological science will be improved as researchers pay increased attention to the attributes of the participants in their studies.'
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Witt, E., Donnellan, M., and Orlando, M. (2011). Timing and selection effects within a psychology subject pool: Personality and sex matter. Personality and Individual Differences, 50 (3), 355-359 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.10.019

Previously on the Digest: Just how non-clinical are so-called non-clinical community samples?
Just how representative are the people who volunteer for psychology experiments?

For group creativity, two narcissists are better than one

"God is really an artist, like me ... I am God, I am God, I am God." Pablo Picasso

Some experts have suggested there's a link between narcissism and creativity - that the self-obsession and self-belief create the necessary time and space for originality to flourish. On the contrary, Jack Goncalo at Cornell University has just published results from three experiments which show that narcissists on their own aren't any more creative than usual, even though they think they are. The narcissist's braggadocio also leads others to overestimate the originality of their ideas. On the other hand, Goncalo's team show that when it comes to group creativity, the competitiveness of multiple narcissists really is beneficial, so long as you don't have too many of them.

Two hundred and forty-four undergrads completed a standardised measure of narcissism (sample items included 'I really like to be the centre of attention')  followed by two classic tests of creativity. One of these involved thinking up new uses for a brick, the other required them to draw a new kind of alien. Students who were more narcissistic didn't excel any more than usual on the creativity tests, but they thought they had.

For the second study, 76 students were formed into pairs and allocated the role of movie pitcher or evaluator. The former had 10 minutes to plan an idea for a new Hollywood movie before pitching it to the latter.

Ideas pitched by students who scored higher in narcissism tended to be rated as more creative and feasible - an association that was mediated by the fact that narcissistic pitchers were perceived as more energetic and enthusiastic. However, when the transcripts of the pitches were coded carefully by independent judges unaware of who had delivered which pitches, the more narcissistic participants no longer scored higher on creativity and feasibility.

The implication seems to be that the braggadocio of the narcissists, rather than the true quality of their ideas, led evaluators to rate their pitches more highly. The researchers said that this finding should be alarming for people who work in fields that lack objective measures of the quality of ideas. 'In such fields, creative output may gradually decline as true creative talent is continuously traded for charisma and enthusiasm,' they warned.

So far the research has challenged the idea that narcissists on their own really are more creative. But what about in groups? The final study involved 292 undergrads completing a measure of narcissism before forming 73 four-person groups. Their task was to suggest ways for a real company to improve its performance. The key finding here was that groups with approximately two narcissists on board tended to outperform those with more or fewer narcissists. Why should this be? Goncalo's team think that the presence of two narcissists generates a healthy dose of in-group competition, thus helping idea generation. However too many narcissists in the proverbial kitchen and the excessive internal competition spoils the creative broth.

'The same needs for recognition and power that cast a dark shadow on narcissists may position them as catalysts for creative colloquy,' the researchers said. 'The results suggest that to capitalise on the narcissists in our midst, we should collaborate with them and encourage them to collaborate with each other. In so doing, groups could turn what is often considered a decidedly negative trait into a valuable source of creative tension.'
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Goncalo JA, Flynn FJ, and Kim SH (2010). Are Two Narcissists Better Than One? The Link Between Narcissism, Perceived Creativity, and Creative Performance. Personality and social psychology bulletin PMID: 20947771

Hunting the successful psychopath

Put aside the dramatic Hollywood portrayals. Suited, married, high achieving, some of them walk among us. No, not vampires or super-heroes but 'successful psychopaths'. Like their criminally violent cousins - the standard psychopaths - these people are ruthless, callous, fearless and arrogant. But thanks to their superior self-control and conscientiousness, rather than landing in prison, they end up as company chief executives, university chancellors and Queen's Council barristers. Well, that's the idea anyway. But it's an idea that's proven difficult for psychologists to investigate. After all, if you advertise for volunteers for a study of successful people who are psychopathic, you're not likely to get many responses.

Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt and her collaborators tried a different tack. They surveyed hundreds of members of the American Psychological Association's Division 41 (psychology and law), criminal attorneys and professors of clinical psychology about whether they'd ever known personally an individual who was successful in their endeavours and who also matched Hare's definition of a psychopath: 'social predators who charm, manipulate and ruthlessly plow their way through life ... completely lacking in conscience and feeling for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.'

Of the 118 APA members, 31 attorneys and 58 psychology professors who replied, 81, 25 and 41, respectively, said they'd previously known a successful psycho. The examples given were predominantly male and included current or former students, colleagues, clients, and friends (sample descriptions here). The survey respondents were asked to rate the personality of the successful psychopath they'd known and to complete a psychopathy measure of that person. These ratings were then compared with the typical profile for a standard (unsuccessful) psychopath.

The key difference between successful and standard psychopaths seemed to be in conscientiousness. Providing some rare, concrete support for the 'successful psychopath' concept, the individuals described by the survey respondents were the same as prototypical psychopaths in all regards except they lacked the irresponsibility, impulsivity and negligence and instead scored highly on competence, order, achievement striving and self-discipline.

'The current study used informant descriptions to provide information about successful psychopaths,' the researchers concluded. 'Such persons have been described in papers and texts on psychopathy but only anecdotally. This was the first study to conduct a systematic, quantitative analysis of such persons.'
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Mullins-Sweatt, S., Glover, N., Derefinko, K., Miller, J., & Widiger, T. (2010). The search for the successful psychopath. Journal of Research in Personality, 44 (4), 554-558 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.05.010

The links between bloggers' personalities and their use of words

You can tell a person's personality from the words they use. Neurotics have a penchant for negative words; agreeable types for words pertaining to socialising; and so on. We know this from recordings of people's speech and from brief writing tasks. Now Tal Yarkoni has extended this line of research to the blogosphere by analysing the content of 694 blogs - containing an average of 115,000 words written over an average period of about two years - and matching this with the bloggers' (predominantly female; average age 36) answers to online personality questionnaires.

Some commentators have suggested that the internet allows people to present idealised versions of themselves to the world. Contrary to that idea, Yarkoni found that bloggers' choice of words consistently related to their personality type just as has been found in past offline research.

More neurotic bloggers used more words associated with negative emotions; extravert bloggers used more words pertaining to positive emotions; high scorers on agreeableness avoided swear words and used more words related to communality; and conscientious bloggers mentioned more words with achievement connotations. These were all as expected. More of a surprise was the lack of a link between the Big Five personality factor of 'openness to experience' and word categories related to intellectual or sensory experience. Instead openness was associated with more use of prepositions, more formal language and longer words.

The sheer size of the data set at Yarkoni's disposal allowed him to look not only at links between personality factors and broad word categories (as past research has done) but to also zoom in on the usage of specific words. Among the most strong and intriguing correlations were: Neuroticism correlated with use of 'irony' and negatively correlated with 'invited'; Extraversion correlated with 'drinks' and negatively correlated with 'computer'; Openness correlated with 'ink'; Agreeableness with 'wonderful' and negatively correlated with 'porn'; and Conscientiousness correlated with 'completed' and negatively correlated with 'boring'.

'The results underscore the importance of studying the influence of personality on word use at multiple levels of analysis,' Yarkoni concluded, 'and provide a novel approach for refining existing categorical word taxonomies and identifying new and unexpected associations with personality.'
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Yarkoni, T. (2010). Personality in 100,000 Words: A large-scale analysis of personality and word use among bloggers. Journal of Research in Personality, 44 (3), 363-373 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.04.001

On a related note, don't forget our recent Bloggers Behind the (psychology) Blogs interview series.

It's the way they move - politicians' personalities inferred from their motion patterns

People form impressions about the personality of politicians simply from the way they move, according to a new study. This isn't your typical body-language investigation into double-armed hand-shakes, bitten lips and fidgety fingers. Rather Markus Koppensteiner and Karl Grammer devised a new system for mathematically describing the movement patterns of forty real German politicians giving speeches in parliament. Each 16-second, silent video was converted into a stick figure by using an interactive computer programme to place dots on key landmarks such as the elbows, shoulders and forehead. The movement of these landmarks generated dynamic coordinate data which was then crunched according to mathematical characteristics including the 'turbulence coefficient' (i.e. periods of high activity followed by periods of low activity), and the activity levels of body parts such as the head and arms.

Next, 150 participants, mostly students, watched these same video clips and rated the personalities of the moving stick figures. The key finding was that there were correlations between the personality characteristics attributed by the students to the stick figures and the motion patterns of those stick figures as identified by the researchers' motion analysis programme. For example, politicians who displayed a high turbulent coefficient (low activity interrupted by periods of high activity) tended to be rated as more agreeable. Those who displayed more head movements were considered less conscientious, and those who showed low turbulence (i.e. consistently high activity levels) with many horizontal and vertical arm movements tended to be considered more extravert.

Koppensteiner told the Digest that these results are preliminary so caution is advised. For example, it's far too soon to consider body language training based on the findings. 'Telling someone to move a lot (which I found to be a signal for high extraversion) would not turn this person into an extravert. Maybe it would just look strange,' he said. Part of the reason for the caution is that these movement patterns were considered all together, so it's not obvious what effect it would have if just one element were changed. Nor is it known whether a trained pattern of movement would provoke the same personality attributions as when that same pattern occurs naturally. Finally, the personality ratings in the current study were made in the absence of any speech so we don't yet know how movement patterns and speech interact.

Notwithstanding those caveats, Koppensteiner said that the findings do have exciting implications - for example, if the technique were refined, it's possible that it may one day be possible to analyse a politician's movement patterns and predict the kind of personality attributions that voters are likely to make about them. Also, if these attributions reflect politicians' actual personalities, then an analysis of their movement patterns could be used as a way to discern their personality. 'Although at an exploratory stage,' Koppensteiner and Grammer concluded, 'the current study hints that charisma is partly linked to individual differences in successfully presenting oneself on a non-verbal level.'
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Koppensteiner, M., & Grammer, K. (2010). Motion patterns in political speech and their influence on personality ratings. Journal of Research in Personality, 44 (3), 374-379 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.04.002