Psychology Website

Jumat, 19 Agustus 2011

Feast

Our round-up of the latest juicy tit-bits in psychology:

"What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?" (Stanford Magazine). And catch Zimbardo, one of the guards, and a prisoner speaking to BBC Radio 4.

Why cities are like brains. Jason Goldman explains on his Thoughtful Animal blog. His post is part of a larger special issue of Scientific American, all about the science of cities, including plenty of psychology.

Get your diary out: more psychology at the One Culture festival of literature and arts at the Royal Society in October.

Also, this month, there's a show at the Edinburgh Fringe inspired by the amnesiac HM, plus a chance to meet neuroscientists who worked with HM, and who sliced up his brain (after he died, in 2008).

The proportion of scientific papers being retracted has increased sharply over recent years. Neuro-writer Jonah Lehrer reflects on why.

Even urban pockets of greenery can have a rejuvenating effect on well-being, says Wray Herbert for the Association for Psychological Science.

Some people are affected for longer than others by positive and negative events - what Alex Fradera for the Occupational Digest blog calls "Emotional Hangovers".

False confessions: "People have a strange and worrying tendency to admit to things they have not, in fact, done" says the Economist.

We've updated our round-up of the psych commentary on the English riots.

A new 2-part series on BBC Radio 4 explores human cultural and genetic evolution and how they interact (features Steve Pinker and others).

The contents of visual working memory can affect our perception of incoming sensory stimuli - says an intriguing post from Mo Costandi at his Neurophilosophy blog.

A hair-thin electronic skin that can monitor brain activity and enable remote computer control, plus lots more. Ed Yong on an exciting technological innovation.

--
If you prefer your psychology news on the fly, follow @researchdigest. For links to eye-catching studies that we didn't have time to Digest for you, go to Extras; for links to the latest journal special issues in psychology, try our aptly named Special Issue Spotter.

Kamis, 18 Agustus 2011

Empathy breeds altruism, unless a person feels they have low status. A brain-scan study with a lesson for riot-hit England

In a defining image of the recent English riots, a man helped an injured youngster to his feet while an accomplice stole from the same victim's bag. This sheer lack of empathy on the part of the perpetrators has shaken observers to their core. How could humans display such a lack of altruism toward their fellow man?

A possible clue comes from a new brain imaging study that has examined links between the neural correlates of empathy, an act of altruism, and participants' subjective sense of their social status. Among people who feel they have low status, the study finds, increased neural markers of empathy are actually related to reduced altruism. The researchers surmised this is because any feelings of empathy are quashed by a grudging sense of low status. This could be a kind of defence mechanism whereby self-interest dominates over empathy for others. A possible lesson is that by reversing people's feelings of low status, through educational opportunities and other interventions, we all gain, by reinstating the usual link between empathy and altruism.

Yina Ma and her team at Peking University scanned the brains of 33 student participants while they watched numerous video clips of people being pricked painfully in the face or hand by a needle, or touched on those same parts by a cotton bud (referred to as a Q-tip in the US). Extra activity in the brain, in response to the needle clips versus cotton bud clips, was taken to be a neural marker for empathy (seeing someone else in pain is known to trigger activity in the pain matrix of one's own brain).

The participants also rated their own empathy levels and their subjective sense of their socio-economic status. They were shown a ladder with ten rungs, with the top rung representing people with the best jobs and education and most money; participants then indicated which rung they saw themselves as occupying. Although the participants were students at the same university they varied in their subjective sense of status. Finally, the participants were left alone in a room with an anonymous donation box, labelled as raising money to help impoverished patients with cataracts.

Among patients who considered themselves privileged in terms of socio-economic status, there was a positive relationship between empathy and altruism. The more neural signs of empathy they displayed in the scanner (based on extra activity in the left somatosensory cortex when viewing needle clips), the more empathy they said they had, and the more money they chose to donate to charity. By contrast, among participants who considered themselves lower in socio-economic status, the opposite pattern was observed. The greater their empathy-related brain activity in the scanner (based on extra right somatosensory cortex and inferior frontal cortex activity in response to needle clips), the less empathy they said they had, and the less money they chose to donate to charity. The researchers said the empathy-related inferior frontal cortex activity observed in these participants could be a sign of inhibitory processes quashing the emotional impact of seeing another person in pain.

Note, there was no absolute difference in the amount of money donated by participants who self-identified as low or high socio-economic status. The finding is more subtle and suggests empathy has a differential effect on our altruistic behaviour depending on how we see our standing in the world.

"Our findings have significant implications to the social domain," the researchers said, "in that, besides improving objective socio-economic status, raising subjective socio-economic status via education may possibly manifold altruistic behaviours in human society."

The findings add to a complex literature that suggests lower socio-economic status is sometimes associated with more empathy and altruism, but sometimes associated with reduced empathy.
_________________________________

Ma, Y., Wang, C., and Han, S. (2011). Neural responses to perceived pain in others predict real-life monetary donations in different socioeconomic contexts. NeuroImage, 57 (3), 1273-1280 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.003

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

Rabu, 17 Agustus 2011

Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It by John B Watson

A free full text copy of Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It by John B Watson is now available over at the main website.

Psychology as the behaviorist views it was originally presented as a lecture by John B Watson at Columbia University in 1913. This landmark address would become known forever as the "behaviorist manifesto" and bestow on Watson the title of "father of behaviorism."

This classic publication is essential reading for psychology students and educators.

If you would like to read Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It over at the psychology website, you can do so via the following link.

Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It

Download and Keep Your Own Copy

If you would like to download and keep a PDF text copy of Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It, you can do so via the following link.

Download Your Own Copy Here

Psychology on Facebook