Feast

Introducing a new Digest feature: "Feast", our occasional round-up of links to recent psychology news, gossip, podcasts, blog-posts and radio/tv shows:

BBC 2's Newsnight had a featurette on memory on Wednesday evening (from 30 minutes, 40 seconds onwards), to coincide with the 5th International Conference on Memory at The University of York.

The Developmental Neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop has written an open letter to Baroness Susan Greenfield, urging her to stop peddling unfounded claims about the internet and autism.

Deader than dead: people in vegetative states are viewed as deader than corpses, reports Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

The Centre Forum think tank calls for a national parenting campaign to teach the population basic parenting skills, reports the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. (PDF of the report Parenting Matters: Early Years and Social Mobility).

The August issue of The Psychologist magazine is out now and includes open-access articles on the psychology of holidays and a brief-history of gory brain-injuries.

Higher education is burning out its employees, says new research covered by Alex Fradera at the BPS Occupational Digest.

Psychology Press has launched a new journal: Religion, Brain and Behavior - the first issue is free to access.

The latest Neuropod podcast has hit the wires, including segments on gut neurons and bird grammar.

Ben "bad science" Goldacre presented a show for BBC Radio 4 on longitudinal research and you can listen to it on iPlayer.

The American Psychologist is due to publish a special issue to mark ten years since 9/11. The Indy and other outlets are reporting that the terror attacks exposed how inappropriate psychological debriefing can exacerbate trauma.

Hear Freud, Jung, Skinner, Milgram and other great thinkers in their own words. New BBC Four series is underway with the first episode available on iPlayer.

The 2011 Royal Institution Xmas Lectures, entitled Meet Your Brain, are to be delivered by psychologist Bruce Hood.

Channel 4 has started a new 3-part series looking at how buildings affect our health and behaviour. The first episode is available via 4oD.

Psychological commentary from NPR radio on the US debt-ceiling negotiations.

Scientific American Mind reviews The Rough Guide to Psychology, by Digest editor Christian Jarrett.

A short from RadioLab features Bob Milne, a ragtime pianist whose brain appears to run on a dual-core processor (listen to find out why!)

--
PS. Most of these links are taken from the BPS Research Digest Twitter feed: @researchdigest

PPS. This is an experimental format: if you'd like us to continue compiling similar posts on a regular basis, please register your approval via comments. Thanks!

How a simple point of grammar could affect our voting decisions

A simple tweak in the tense of a verb could make the difference between electoral victory and defeat, according to a study by US researchers.

Imagine you encountered the following text: "Timmy Tucker is a senior politician. Last year Timmy championed human rights, and was fiddling his expenses."

Now compare with this version: "Timmy Tucker is a senior politician. Last year Timmy was championing human rights, and fiddled his expenses."

How does each version affect your view of Timmy Tucker? New findings from Caitlin Fausey and Teenie Matlock suggest that the first version is more likely to damage Timmy's re-election prospects.

The researchers found that the imperfect tense (e.g. "was fiddling") exacerbates the effect of a negative claim about a politician, compared with the perfect tense (e.g. "fiddled"). Fausey and Matlock aren't certain why this is, but they think the imperfect tense gives the sense that an action is ongoing, whereas the perfect tense brings closure.

For an initial study, 354 participants were split into four groups, with each reading one of four versions of a description of a politician who was up for re-election. Participants who read a version in which the man was described as last year "taking hush money" were more confident that he wouldn't be re-elected and estimated that he'd taken more money, as compared with participants who read a version in which it was written that last year "he took hush money". This subtle change in verb tense made no difference to the verdict of participants who read a positive account of the politician ("was collecting donations" vs. "collected donations").

A second study with a further 127 participants was similar except this time they all read a version that featured both a positive and negative claim about the politician. Those participants who read the description featuring a negative claim in the imperfect tense with the positive claim in the perfect tense ("was removing homes and extended roads") were less likely to say he would be re-elected (40 per cent vs. 56 per cent), compared with those who read the same claims with the tenses the other way around ("removed homes and extending roads")*.

"Because scandals involving political candidates are a hot topic in media coverage and campaign ads, insight into the power of the grammar used to communicate negative information will likely improve our understanding about how linguistic media shapes voting patterns," the researchers said.
_________________________________

Fausey, C., and Matlock, T. (2011). Can Grammar Win Elections? Political Psychology, 32 (4), 563-574 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00802.x

*In this example, extending roads is assumed by the researchers to be a positive activity - environmentally minded readers might not agree with that assumption!

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

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

Anomalous experiences in the general population are common.

Expert footballers may extract more information from a single glance.

Should juries be made up of fewer than twelve people?

Why don’t smart teens have sex?

Attempting to quit smoking without telling anyone is just as effective as making a public announcement.

Brain stimulation over Broca’s area differentially modulates naming skills in neurotypical adults and individuals with Asperger’s syndrome.

Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive biases.

Good mothers, bad thoughts: New mothers’ thoughts of intentionally harming their newborns.

A meta-analysis of interventions to reduce loneliness.

Working memory training and transfer in older adults.

Is there a sensitive period in human incest avoidance? (pdf)

The neural correlates of narcissism.

_________________________________

[This post was compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.]