The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Resilience in schools (Psychology in the Schools).

Digit Ratio (2D:4D) and Individual Differences Research (Personality and Individual Differences).

Emotion and Morality (Emotion Review).

Neural Representations in Visual Word Recognition (Brain and Language).

Gender and relationships (British Journal of Developmental Psychology).

Educational Neuroscience (NeuroImage).

Probabilistic models of cognitive development (Cognition).

Remembering the 2005 London bombings: Media, memory, commemoration (Memory Studies).
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[This post was compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.]

The psychology of gift giving - just give them what they want

By spending days hunting for that special gift for your friend or partner, you'll show them just how much you care, and also what incredible insight you have into their needs and interests. Right? Not exactly. A new study by a pair of researchers at Harvard and Stanford suggests that most people, at least in North American culture, would prefer that you simply buy them something that they've told you they want. They said romance was dead, it is now.

Francesca Gino and Francis Flynn demonstrated this phenomenon across three studies. First off, nearly two hundred participants were asked to recall a time they'd either received or given a wedding gift. Those who were specifically asked to recall receiving a gift from their set list reported being more appreciative than those who recalled receiving a surprise gift that they hadn't asked for. By contrast, participants who recalled giving a gift, thought it was probably appreciated just as much whether it was selected from a list or chosen independently.

A second study required 160 participants to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they'd either bought a birthday gift for a significant other, or received one. Gift givers didn't think it would make any difference, in terms of appreciation levels, whether they bought a surprise gift or something explicitly asked for. By contrast, those participants who imagined receiving a gift said they'd appreciate more a gift they'd asked for, than a surprise gift. What's more, this extra appreciation for an asked-for gift was mediated by their feeling that the gift-giver had been extra thoughtful.

So far, the results are based on thought experiments or memories. The third study involved 90 participants creating Amazon wish-lists and half of them playing gift-givers and half gift-receivers. Among the gift-givers, half were asked to choose a listed item to give to a recipient; the other half saw the list, but were instructed to choose a surprise item. Consistent with the first two studies, participants in a giving role didn't anticipate that it would make any difference to appreciation levels whether a gift was a surprise or selected from the wish-list. By contrast, participants in a receiving role were more appreciative of gifts selected from their wish-list and they perceived these gifts to be more thoughtful and more personal.

It seems gift-givers and receivers are at odds with each other. Gift-recipients prefer to receive items they've asked for, and they think givers who fulfil this ideal are more thoughtful. Yet when we're the one who is doing the giving, we suffer a temporary blind-spot and fail to realise that people tend to prefer receiving what they told us they want.

Are there any exceptions to this odd state of affairs? Yet another study found that if a recipient only mentions one desired gift, as opposed to a list of desirables, then gift-givers are able to see the value in offering what's asked for. Money also changes the results. A final study with 107 student participants found that gift-givers thought money wouldn't be appreciated as much as an asked-for gift, but recipients expressed the opposite opinion and said they'd actually appreciate money more than items they'd asked for.

Gino and Flynn said their results fit into a larger literature showing people's relative inability to take other people's perspectives into account. For example, in buying and selling it's been shown that we tend to overestimate how much other people will share our own views. The researchers also noted the practical lessons to take from their findings: "Gift givers would be wise to pay attention to gift registries, wish lists, and explicit requests from friends and significant others," they said. "Conversely gift recipients can facilitate the gift-giving process by not only being more direct about making suggestions for gifts, but being more specific as well. Rather than putting together one big 'wish list', they should instead list one big wish."
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Gino, F., and Flynn, F. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (5), 915-922 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.015

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

The hypnotised brain

Forget swinging pocket watches and unedifying stage antics, hypnosis is a genuinely useful tool for studying psychogenic symptoms - that is, neurological symptoms with no identifiable organic cause (known in psychiatry as "conversion disorder", the idea being that emotional problems are "converted" into physical ailments).

Consider hand paralysis, which some patients complain of in the absence of any neurological injury or disease. In a new study led by Martin Pyka at the University of Marburg, hand paralysis was induced in 19 healthy participants through hypnosis, thus providing a model of what may be going on in conversion hand paralysis. The hypnotised participants had their brains scanned while they rested calmly, and these results were then compared against a second scanning session in which the participants were not hypnotised.

The main result is that hypnosis-induced hand paralysis was associated not with brain areas involved with inhibiting movement (e.g. the supplementary motor area, located towards the front of the brain), but with increased coupling between regions associated with representation of the self (especially the precuneus, located in the parietal lobe, and the posterior cingulate cortex), and with regions that represent and monitor one's own movements (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). This suggests it's not so much that the participants' hand control was suppressed, but that they no longer believed they had the power to move their hands. This fits the findings from an earlier brain imaging study of a woman with conversion paralysis, which found changes in brain areas associated with self-monitoring and auto-biographical memory, but not areas associated with motor inhibition.

"We believe that the suggestions given during induction of hypnosis, which started with metaphors such as 'the left hand feels weak, heavy, adynamic,' 'any energy leaves the hand,' and continued with direct instructions like 'the left hand is paralysed, you cannot move the hand anymore,' induced an altered self-perception of the participants and their motor abilities," the researchers said. They acknowledged that a weakness of their study was that they'd deliberately recruited highly suggestible participants: "Thus, it is unclear whether the reported functional coupling can only be attributed to the neurofunctional impact of hypnosis or also to the selection of the subjects," they said.

As an aside, Jean-Martin Charcot, the "Napoleon of neurology", considered hyponosis-proneness to be a hallmark of patients with hysteria - a now defunct catch-all diagnosis, which included patients with conversion disorder. At the end of the 19th century at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Charcot often hypnotised his hysterical patients during his series of hugely popular public demonstrations of the condition. Hypnosis also became a common means of treatment for hysteria (although Charcot himself was not an advocate), whereby the entranced patient revealed, often via new emerging "personalities", the past traumas and fixed ideas at the root of their physical ailments. Hypnosis as a treatment fell out of favour with Freud's rise to prominence: he believed it was possible to get to the root of a patient's subconscious problems by talking to them directly, without the need for hypnosis.
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Pyka, M., Burgmer, M., Lenzen, T., Pioch, R., Dannlowski, U., Pfleiderer, B., Ewert, A., Heuft, G., Arolt, V., and Konrad, C. (2011). Brain correlates of hypnotic paralysis—a resting-state fMRI study. NeuroImage, 56 (4), 2173-2182 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.03.078

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