To determine “how public figures realize creative forms of apologetic speech in order to minimize their responsibility for misdeeds,” Kampf examined 354 conditional apologies made by Israeli public figures, organizations, or institutions between 1997 and 2004, breaking them down into specific categories and sub-categories. (…)

After making racist remarks about Ethiopian immigrants, writer Samuel Shnitzer replied with a classic “if” statement: “If someone was hurt by the column I wrote, I am very sorry about that.” Ariel Sharon’s 2002 statement concerning the deaths of Palestinian civilians during a military campaign managed to include both an “if” and a “but”: “The Israeli Defense Force is sorry if civilians were injured, but not for the successful operation.”

As Kampf pointed out, this delicate wordplay is important to politicians who want to keep their jobs. But it’s even more crucial to business executives who, if they truly accepted responsibility, might end up in jail. A research team led by the University of Ulster’s Owen Hargie analyzed the testimony of four CEOs of financial institutions before a committee of the British Parliament in 2009 and noted a similar pattern of obfuscation.

“The main type of apology used by the senior bankers fell into the ‘I’m sorry you’re sick’ category, where the person is in effect saying that he or she has no personal responsibility for what happened, but recognizes and expresses sympathy for the person’s predicament,” the researchers write.

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

photo { Stephanie Gonot }

There is no consensus about the symptom criteria for psychopathy, and no psychiatric or psychological organization has sanctioned a diagnosis of psychopathy itself. (…)

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist is a standard ratings tool in forensic settings to label people as psychopaths.

A study by Hare and colleague suggested that one to two percent of the US population score high enough on a screening version of the scale to be considered potential psychopaths.

According to some, there is little evidence of a cure or effective treatment for psychopathy; no medications can instill empathy, and psychopaths who undergo traditional talk therapy might become more adept at manipulating others and more likely to commit crime. (…)

According to Hare, psychopathy stems from as yet unconfirmed genetic neurological predispositions and as yet unconfirmed social factors in upbringing. A review published in 2008 indicated multiple causes, and variation in causes between individuals.

Hare also notes that some psychopaths can blend in, undetected, in a variety of surroundings, including corporate environments He has described psychopaths as “intraspecies predators.” (…)

Psychopaths are rarely psychotic.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R) is the psycho-diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess psychopathy. (…)

▪ Glibness/superficial charm
▪ Grandiose sense of self-worth
▪ Pathological lying
▪ Cunning/manipulative
▪ Lack of remorse or guilt
▪ Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
▪ Callousness; lack of empathy
▪ Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
▪ Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
▪ Parasitic lifestyle
▪ Poor behavioral control
▪ Lack of realistic long-term goals
▪ Impulsivity
▪ Irresponsibility
▪ Juvenile delinquency
▪ Early behavior problems
▪ Revocation of conditional release
▪ Promiscuous sexual behavior
▪ Many short-term marital relationships
▪ Criminal versatility
▪ Acquired behavioural sociopathy/sociological conditioning (Item 21: a newly identified trait i.e. a person relying on sociological strategies and tricks to deceive)

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Ask a social scientist about the keys to happiness and you’re likely to hear that it’s better to buy experiences than buy possessions. What you’re unlikely to hear is a good explanation for why experiences make people happier.

Two Cornell psychologists, Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich, attempted to answer this question by examining regret rather than satisfaction in the aftermath of a purchase. They theorized that with material purchases the strongest regret stems from action (i.e. buying the wrong thing), whereas with experiential purchases the strongest regret comes from inaction (not having the experience.) The result is that those who make a purchase are more likely to feel regret when buying a material good, and therefore buying a material good leads to comparatively less happiness.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Erwin Olaf }

Group settings can diminish expressions of intelligence, especially among women

Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics — such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties — can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, who led the study.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

I’ve covered these highly counter-intuitive findings before and the title of that article sums it up: Weather Has Little Effect on Mood.

Most of us intuitively think the weather has quite a strong effect on our mood. Many assume that the rain and cold weather depresses us and sun and warmth perks us up.

So why don’t we see this effect in the research?

That’s the question a new study by Klimstra et al. (2011) tries to answer.

And it turns out this is true. In fact Klimstra et al. found four distinct groups:

1. Unaffected
2. Summer lovers
3. Summer haters
4. Rain haters

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Mark Rice }

In a new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), people with schizophrenia showed greater brain activity during tests that induce a brief, mild form of delusional thinking. This effect wasn’t seen in a comparison group without schizophrenia.

“We studied a type of delusion called a delusion of reference, which occurs when people feel that external stimuli such as newspaper articles or strangers’ overheard conversations are about them,” says CAMH Scientist Dr. Mahesh Menon, adding that this type of delusion occurs in up to two-thirds of people with schizophrenia. “Then they come up with an explanation for this feeling to make sense of it or give it meaning.”

The study was an initial exploration of the theory that the overactive firing of dopamine neurons in specific brain regions is involved in converting neutral, external information into personally relevant information among people with schizophrenia. This may lead to symptoms of delusions. “We wanted to see if we could find a way to ’see’ these delusions during Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanning,” says Dr. Menon.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and by poor emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social or occupational dysfunction. The onset of symptoms typically occurs in young adulthood, with a global lifetime prevalence of about 0.3–0.7%.

Genetics, early environment, neurobiology, and psychological and social processes appear to be important contributory factors; some recreational and prescription drugs appear to cause or worsen symptoms. Current research is focused on the role of neurobiology, although no single isolated organic cause has been found. The many possible combinations of symptoms have triggered debate about whether the diagnosis represents a single disorder or a number of discrete syndromes.

Despite the etymology of the term from the Greek roots skhizein (”to split”) and phren- (”mind”), schizophrenia does not imply a “split mind” and it is not the same as dissociative identity disorder—also known as “multiple personality disorder” or “split personality”—a condition with which it is often confused in public perception.

The mainstay of treatment is antipsychotic medication, which primarily suppresses dopamine (and sometimes serotonin) receptor activity.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Brian James }

They call it “game transfer phenomenon,” or GTP. In a controversial study, they described a brief mental hiccup during which a person reacts in the real world the way they would in a game. For some people, reality itself seems to temporarily warp. Could this effect be real?

Most of us are gamers now. The stereotype of a guy living in his parents’ basement on a diet of Cheetos and soda is long gone. The average gamer is 34 years old, gainfully employed and around 40 per cent are female. They play, on average, 8 hours a week and not just on consoles; around half of the gaming activity today is on smartphones.

Still, the idea of Angry Birds spilling into reality does sound far-fetched. Indeed, if you read some of the descriptions of GTP, they can seem a little silly. After dropping his sandwich with the buttered side down, for example, one person interviewed said that he “instantly reached” for the “R2″ controller button he had been using to retrieve items within PlayStation games. “My middle finger twitched, trying to reach it,” he told the researchers. (…)

Half accused the researchers of disingenuously formalising idiosyncratic experiences reported by a small sample of 42 - that charge was countered by their subsequent study replicating the findings in 2000 gamers. The other half asked why Griffiths was rebranding a familiar finding. “They said, ‘we’ve known about this for ages’,” he recalls. “It’s called the Tetris effect.”

That term was coined in 1996 to refer to a peculiar effect caused by spending a long time moving the game’s falling blocks into place. Play long enough and you could encounter all sorts of strange hallucinatory residuals: some reported witnessing bathroom tiles trembling, for example, or a floor-to-ceiling bookcase lurching down the wall. In less extreme but far more common cases, people saw moving images at the edge of their visual field when they closed their eyes.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

photo { Arthur Tress }

A new analysis of personality tests taken by 10,000 men and women in America has found there is only a 10% overlap between the sexes where they share the same kind of personalities.

(…)

Researchers, from Italy and the Manchester Business School, say the reason we think men and women are similar is that we have been using the wrong methods to assess them.

The personality test included 15 scales, collected under five headings: 



Extraversion (warmth, liveliness, social boldness, privateness and self reliance.

Anxiety (emotional stability, vigilance, apprehension and tension.)


Tough-mindedness (warmth, sensitivity, abstractedness and openness to change).


Independence (dominance, social boldness, vigilance and openness to change). 


Self Control (liveliness, rule-consciousness and perfectionism.)

When comparing men’s and women’s overall personality profiles using the new method very large differences between the sexes became apparent. (…)

“We believe we have made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated.”

Women scored higher than men on Sensitivity (sensitive, aesthetic, sentimental), Warmth (warm, outgoing and attentive to others) and Apprehension (apprehensive, self-doubting and worrying.)

Men outscored women on Dominance (dominant, forceful, aggressive) and Emotional Stability (emotionally stable, adaptive, mature).

{ Mirror | Continue reading | PLoS One | full paper }

Many simple mistakes are obvious once you see them — and almost impossible to detect before you do.

Writing in The New York Times recently, Joseph Hallinan noted our tendency to infer what we see rather than actually look closely. (…) One of his best examples is a wrong note in the score of a Brahms sonata that countless musicians never noticed because, for years, they silently “corrected” it in performance. A naïve piano student kept getting it “wrong” until he looked and saw that she was actually playing what was on the page.

It’s the same problem all of us run up against when we try to proof-read a text, especially if we were the ones who wrote it. We see what we know the text means, rather than what is actually printed on the page.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

artwork { John J. O’Connor }

One particular process in communication is to send and receive wordless messages. This kind of information transmission is commonly referred to as “nonverbal communication” (NVC). Nonverbal signals include facial expressions, bodily orientation, movements, posture, vocal cues (other than words), eye gaze, physical appearance, interpersonal spacing, and touching. As such, they support and moderate speech, facilitate the expression of emotions, help communicating people’s attitudes, convey information about personality, and thus negotiate interpersonal relationships, even in the form of rituals. (…) There seems to be some kernel of truth in the proverb that “actions speak louder than words.” (…)

Some support on the significance of NVC in social life comes from studies that have investigated non-verbal cues in human courtship situations. In these studies, first encounters of opposite-sex strangers were covertly filmed in “unstaged interaction” to investigate flirting behavior. When opposite sex strangers meet for the first time, they both face the risk of being deceived. Neither opponent is aware of the other’s intention, thus both have to rely heavily on non-verbal cues. Grammer (1990) reported that, in such a situation, there is a remarkable consistency in the repertoire of female solicitation behaviors in the presence of a male stranger, including eye- contact, followed by looking away, special postures, ways of walking, and so on. Interestingly, men were found to approach women who expressed high rates of signaling these behaviors more frequently.

In later study, Grammer et al. (1999) found that some information about female interest is not only inherent in the number of certain non-verbal signals, but is also encoded in the quality of body movements, such as their amplitude and speed. For example, women moved more frequently, but also displayed smaller and slower movements when they were interested in a man. Men in turn reacted to the quality of these movements positively and judged the situation to be more pleasant.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading | PDF }

According to the research, in modern America the average income required to be happy day-to-day, to experience “emotional well being” is about $75,000 a year. According to the researchers, past that point adding more to your income “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness, or stress.” A person who makes, on average, $250,000 a year has no greater emotional well-being, no extra day-to-day happiness, than a person making $75,000 a year. In Mississippi it is a bit less, in Chicago a bit more, but the point is there is evidence for the existence of a financiohappiness ceiling. The super-wealthy may believe they are happier, and you may agree, but you both share a delusion.

{ You Are Not So Smart | Continue reading }

photo { Joel Meyerowitz, Spinning Christmas Tree, New York City, 1977 }

“I’m sorry” is infamous for its inadequacy. It often seems flippant, insincere, or incomplete, as in “I’m sorry you feel that way” or “I’m sorry, but…” (…)

Researchers found evidence to support the widely-held assumption that women apologize more frequently than men. They also found, however, that women reported committing more offenses than men, and this difference fully accounted for the apology finding. In other words, men apologized for the same proportion of the offenses that they believed they had committed — they just didn’t report committing as many offenses.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

related { Why Some People Say ‘Sorry’ Before Others }

At thirty-eight, Kiehl is one of the world’s leading younger investigators in psychopathy, the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed, and harder to describe than the symptoms of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. This absence of easily readable signs has led to debate among mental-health practitioners about what qualifies as psychopathy and how to diagnose it. (…)

In January of 2007, Kiehl arranged to have a portable functional magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner brought into Western—the first fMRI ever installed in a prison. So far, he has recruited hundreds of volunteers from among the inmates. The data from these scans, Kiehl hopes, will confirm his theory, published in Psychiatry Research, in 2006, that psychopathy is caused by a defect in what he calls “the paralimbic system,” a network of brain regions, stretching from the orbital frontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex, that are involved in processing emotion, inhibition, and attentional control. (…)

The inmate was being shown a series of words and phrases, and was supposed to rate each as morally offensive or not. There were three kinds of phrases: some were intended as obvious moral violations, like “having sex with your mother”; some were ambiguous, like “abortion”; and some were morally neutral, like “listening to others.” The computer software captured not only the inmate’s response but also the speed with which he made his judgment. The imaging technology recorded which part of the brain was involved in making the decision and how active the neurons there were. (…)

Neurons in the brain consume oxygen when they are “firing,” and the oxygen is replenished by iron-laden hemoglobin cells in the blood. The scanner’s magnet temporarily aligns these iron molecules in the hemoglobin cells, while the imaging technology captures a rapid series of “slices”—tiny cross-sections of the brain. The magnet is superconductive, which means it operates at very cold temperatures (minus two hundred and sixty-nine degrees Celsius). The machine has a helium cooling system, but if the system fails the magnet will “quench.” Quenches are an MRI technician’s worst fear; a new magnet costs about two million dollars.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading | Read more: The Disconnection of Psychopaths }

The ability to trust, love, and resolve conflict with loved ones starts in childhood—way earlier than you may think. That is one message of a new review of the literature in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

“Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later,” says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. “Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren’t aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind,” about how you’ll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection.

While those attitudes can change with new relationships, introspection, and therapy, in times of stress old patterns often reassert themselves.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Hot guys tend to underestimate women’s interest in them, while other men, particularly those looking for a one-night stand, are more likely to think a woman is much more into them than she actually is, a new study says.

Women, however, showed the opposite bias — they routinely underestimated men’s interest in them.

This sort of self-deception may help both men and women play the mating game successfully, suggest the researchers, a team of psychologists from the University of Texas, Austin. The findings also fits with past research showing that guys are clueless on the subtleties of nonverbal cues from women, taking a subtle smile as a sexual come-on, for instance.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

This research examined the relative sexual attractiveness of individuals showing emotion expressions of happiness, pride, and shame compared with a neutral control. (…)

A large gender difference emerged in the sexual attractiveness of happy displays: happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride showed the reverse pattern; it was the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women.

{ The Impact of Emotion Expressions on Sexual Attraction | PDF | via Overcoming Bias }

Recent studies have noted positive effects of red clothing on success in competitive sports, perhaps arising from an evolutionary predisposition to associate the color red with dominance status. Red may also enhance judgments of women’s attractiveness by men, perhaps through a similar association with fertility.

Here we extend these studies by investigating attractiveness judgments of both sexes and by contrasting attributions based on six different colors. Furthermore, by photographing targets repeatedly in different colors, we could investigate whether color effects are due to influences on raters or clothing wearers, by either withholding from raters information about clothing color or holding it constant via digital manipulation, while retaining color-associated variation in wearer’s expression and posture.

When color cues were available, we found color-attractiveness associations when males were judged by either sex, or when males judged females, but not when females judged female images.

Both red and black were associated with higher attractiveness judgments and had approximately equivalent effects.

Importantly, we also detected significant clothing color-attractiveness associations even when clothing color was obscured from raters and when color was held constant by digital manipulation.

These results suggest that clothing color has a psychological influence on wearers at least as much as on raters, and that this ultimately influences attractiveness judgments by others.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

One of the great conundrums of daily life is whether to be upfront about your weaknesses, and while it may be unwise to begin revealing all the times in your life that you’ve soiled yourself, a new study finds that when it comes to groups, descriptions that include positive and negative terms reduce prejudice more effectively than descriptions that include only positive terms.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michael Crowe }

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 and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. (…)

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. (…)

“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.”

{ BPS | Continue reading }

One of the better-known psychology factoids is that 80% of people tend to think they are above average (if you don’t know this, you’re clearly in the “below-average” 20%).

A new study explains this tendency by finding evidence for what the researchers call the “better-than-my-average-effect.”

Essentially, we evaluate how we really are by looking at our best performances, but when we evaluate others we tend to focus on their average performance.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }