The U.S. has announced a new pandemic-focused advisory body, and APS has responded to urge that psychological science expertise be included in the group’s personnel and activities.

Earlier this month, policy reports indicated that U.S. President Biden’s administration had formed a new Pandemic Innovation Task Force, led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Early reports suggest that the task force will focus on developing vaccines, treatments, tests, and tools to help combat new variants of the COVID-19 virus as well as future pandemics and other biological threats.

Responding to this news, APS Chief Executive Officer/Executive Director Robert Gropp wrote the chairs of this new group to encourage that psychological science be represented among the members and topic areas of the group.

“An integrated scientific and engineering response—one that fully includes behavioral science—is required for an effective response to the current crisis and to improve responses to future crises,” writes Gropp in the letter, dated January 26.

The letter advises that global technical and engineering investments and advances are most effective when paired with the scientific understanding of human behavior that psychological science can help provide. It references similar calls that APS has made to President Biden surrounding the formation of a COVID-19 advisory board that the president formed at the end of 2020.

Illustrating the insights that psychological science can bring to bear on combatting COVID-19’s effects and preparing for future pandemics, Gropp referenced the APS Global Collaboration on COVID-19, which is bringing together psychological scientists to identify the ways that psychological science has—and should—been used to respond to the global pandemic.

(Watch a recording of a recent collaboration virtual event, “Psychology Meets Biology in COVID-19,” by clicking here.)

The development of this advisory body comes amid a heightened period of interest in and appreciation for the insights that behavioral science can provide to policymaking. Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of senators released a draft bill that would create a new public health information and communications advisory committee. The bill specifically encourages representation of psychologists on this committee. Look for future analysis of this bill online at www.psychologicalscience.org.

APS will continue to monitor the new Pandemic Innovation Task Force as it develops and will keep APS members apprised.

To read APS CEO Robert Gropp’s letter to the chairs of the Pandemic Innovation Task Force, click here.

The Labor Department reported on Jan. 4 that 4.53 million people quit their jobs in November, breaking a record set in September and part of an almost year-long trend that has been dubbed the “Great Resignation.” You might be tempted to join them: In July, Gallup found that 48 percent of U.S. workers were actively job-hunting or keeping an eye out for opportunities, a situation the polling organization labeled the “Great Discontent.”

As a psychologist, I’ve seen that discontent reflected in my practice. Many of my patients have been doing much more soul-searching about their jobs than before the coronavirus blew up our lives.

Some, especially women, are deciding that carrying on with their jobs is not sustainable or worthwhile during the pandemic’s upheaval. This is consistent with statistics indicating there were about 2.3 million fewer women in the workforce in February 2021 than a year earlier, and about 1.8 million fewer men.

…

A new year, with its blank calendar pages, usually engenders widespread optimism, a feeling that this time around, things will be different. But this January comes with heavy baggage. After nearly two years of uncertainty, struggle, and loss due to the coronavirus pandemic, the future has many of us feeling more apprehensive than excited.

Humans tend to view big temporal changes as moments of renewal and potential, according to Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We group life into chapters,” she told me, underscoring the idea that people commonly see themselves as characters in their own book. Despite the typical mundanity of the first week of January, many feel like they’ve entered a new chapter filled with hope and promise. “The recent past feels more distant,” she said, and even just a few weeks ago “feels further behind us.” The year 2021 wasn’t the big shift from 2020 that folks expected, though, and many are dialing down this unbridled hope.

…

The question of free will is still hotly debated. On the one hand, we clearly experience ourselves as able to make choices and freely act on them. If you fancy some crisps, you can choose to walk into a shop, buy a packet and eat them. Or you can choose to eat a pastry, a salad, or nothing at all. This certainly feels like free will.

On the other hand, neuroscience evidence clearly shows that the brain usually initiates our actions before we’re aware of them. Here’s what I mean. Your brain’s primary task is to regulate the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. But there’s a snag: your brain spends its days locked in a dark, silent box (your skull) with no direct access to what’s going on inside your body or outside in the world.

It receives ongoing information about the state of your body and the world – ‘sense data’– from the sensory surfaces of your body (your retina in your eyes, your cochlea in your ears, and so on). These sense data are outcomes of events in the world and inside your body. But your brain does not have access to the events or their causes. It only receives the outcomes. A loud bang, for example, might be thunder, a gunshot, or a drum, and each possible cause means different actions for your brain to launch.

…

Sweden is launching a new agency to defend against a rising threat: disinformation — organized campaigns to spread false information.

The Scandinavian country, home to about 10 million people, established the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency on Jan. 1, in a bid to safeguard its “democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion,” the agency said on its website. As the country heads into elections this year, the agency will work alongside the Swedish military and government on the new battleground of fake news and misinformation.

“The security situation in our near European environment has deteriorated for some time now and therefore we need to rebuild our total defence,” Magnus Hjort, the agency’s deputy director, told The Washington Post by email.

…

By now, even people who differ on nearly all issues seem to agree on at least one thing: American politics has become riven by tribal conflict. Tucker Carlson claims that “schools are creating tribalism in our kids.” Former President Barack Obama has warned that we risk “turning away from democratic principles in favor of tribalism and ‘might makes right.’” As the journalist George Packer, now of The Atlantic, once summarized the problem, “American politics today requires a word as primal as ‘tribe’ to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation. Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They’re badges of identity, not of thought.” The underlying psychology of “us and them” appears grounded in deep-rooted human tendencies to carve the world into groups and discriminate in favor of one’s own.

…

Every morning, I wake up and grab my doom machine. My phone is a piece of revolutionary technology that puts the entire world a scroll away, its every pixel an industrial miracle. It’s also a cataclysm-delivery device.

I roll over and click the blue “f” logo to watch older friends and relatives grow angry and entrenched in their politics. I click on Twitter and drown in a torrent of terrible news delivered by shouting messengers. On apps like Citizen, push alerts warn me of violence and petty crimes happening right now in my area, while neighborhood narcs and NIMBYs feud and name-call on Nextdoor.

On the doom machine, feeling helpless and hopeless is easier than ever. Our politics, institutions, and reality itself seem fractured. Perhaps the only salve is to fight on the doom machine over who’s to blame. Inevitably, this makes us feel worse instead of better. So why do we keep doing it? It seems that many of the extremely online are drawn to the doom, and that should make us concerned about the health and future of our public digital spaces.

…

Most of us have had the experience of struggling mightily to solve a problem only to find, while taking a walk or doing the dishes, that the answer comes to us seemingly from nowhere. Psychologists call these sudden aha! moments “insight.” They occur not only when we are faced with a problem but also when we suddenly “get” a joke or crossword puzzle clue or are jolted by a personal realization. Scientists have identified distinctive brain activity patterns that signal moments of insight, but there is still some debate about whether insight is simply the final, most satisfying step in a deliberative thought process or a wholly separate form of thinking.

An ingenious new study by a team of Belgian psychologists provides additional evidence that insight engages unconscious mechanisms that differ from analytic, step-by-step reasoning. Even when people are managing multiple demands on their brainpower, the research suggests their intuitive thought processes may still be readily accessible.

…

Among immediate colleagues, it’s easy to spot two groups of people: genuine friends, who make each workday a little brighter; and sworn enemies – the people who will deliberately make your life hard for no reason. But what about all those people in the middle? 

These colleagues may offer a sympathetic ear to your woes, but then go and gossip about them behind your back. Or they’ll defend you from criticism, but then take sole credit for a joint project, erasing your contributions without a backward glance. They help and they hurt in equal measure; they are frenemies, or “ambivalent relationships”. 

In the past, workplace psychologists had tended to take a black and white view of our relationships with our colleagues, while ignoring the many grey areas of our social networks. Yet the latest research shows that our frenemies are equally, if not more, important than the people at either extreme of the spectrum – with unique consequences for our health, wellbeing and our behaviour in the workplace. And by understanding their complexities, we can all learn to navigate office politics more wisely – as well as potentially reduce the stress they cause. 

…

Recently I met the astronomer Pascal Oesch, an assistant professor at the University of Geneva. Professor Oesch and his colleagues share the distinction of having discovered the most distant known object, a small galaxy called GNz-11. That galaxy is so far away that its light had to travel for 13 billion years to get from there to here. I asked Professor Oesch if he felt personally connected to this tiny smudge on his computer screen. Does this faint blob feel like part of nature, part of the same world of Keats and Goethe and Emerson, where “vines that round the thatch-eves run; to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”?

Oesch answered that he looks at such distant smudges every day. Sure, they’re part of the universe, he said. But consider the abstraction (thought I). A few exhausted photons of light from GNz-11 dropped on a photoelectric detector aboard a satellite orbiting Earth, produced a tiny electrical current that was translated into 0s and 1s, which were beamed to Earth in a radio wave. That information was then processed in data centers in New Mexico and Maryland and eventually landed on Professor Oesch’s computer screen in Geneva. These days, professional astronomers rarely look at the sky through the lens of a telescope. They sit at computer screens.

But not only astronomers. Many of us invest hours each day staring at the screens of our televisions and computers and smartphones. Seldom do we go outside on a clear night, away from the lights of the city, and gaze at the dark starry sky, or take walks in the woods unaccompanied by our digital devices. Most of the minutes and hours of each day we spend in temperature-controlled structures of wood, concrete, and steel. With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature. We live mediated lives. We have created a natureless world.

…

Almost every year of my adult life, I’ve started the New Year with a set of resolutions that I’ve been determined to keep. The results, predictably, have been variable.

In 2021, I mostly kept to my fitness goal of doing one 20-minute HIIT workout each day, but I failed miserably at my aim of quitting social media. According to my weekly screen-time reports, I still spend between two and three hours each day on my phone, much of that time doomscrolling.

I am far from alone in my determination to start each new year with a plan for self-improvement. At least a quarter of people typically make at least one New Year’s resolution, and a large portion of those good intentions end in disappointment. 

For those who don’t follow this tradition, the very act of creating a New Year’s resolution can seem illogical. Rationally speaking, 1 January should be no better than any other day to make a life change – so why put the needless pressure on ourselves to ‘upgrade’ our lives at the opening of a new calendar?

Recent psychological research, however, suggests that there are many good reasons to begin a new regime on the first day of a new year. And by understanding and capitalising on those mechanisms, we can all increase our chances of sticking to our new goals for 2022.

…

Many people use the New Year to turn over a new leaf – to act in a way that is more rational and in our better interests. Yet we all have to confess this is more difficult than it might seem.

Here are three examples from my series – Think with Pinker – of common irrationality traps and how to avoid them.

1. Future you

When people contrast what they are “thinking” with what they are “feeling”, often what they have in mind is the difference between immediate and longer-term enjoyment. For example – a feast now and a slim body tomorrow; a trinket today and sufficient funds when the rent is due; a night of passion and the facts of life nine months later.

This contrast between times can feel like a struggle between selves, as if we have one self who enjoys a streaming TV series and another who enjoys good grades in an exam.

…

When we talk about the pandemic, we talk about stress. Burnout. Uncertainty. Isolation. We don’t talk as much about trauma. But a growing number of mental health professionals say that’s what people are experiencing as the pandemic drags on — and we may need a new way to talk about what they’re going through. NPR’s Kat Lonsdorf reports.

Psychiatrist, neurologist and author Bessel van der Kolk explains how the brain processes and recovers from trauma. His 2004 book The Body Keeps the Score surged to the top of bestseller lists during the pandemic.

…

The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) at the National Institutes of Health invites prospective poster presenters to apply for special recognition in the 2022 APS Annual Convention. This recognition is meant to forge connections between research in psychological science and dental, oral, and craniofacial health. Please visit the NIDCR website for a brief overview of applicable areas of science.

Multiple recognitions may be given, depending on receipt of eligible poster submissions. Awards consist of complimentary convention registration and special recognition in the APS Virtual Poster Showcase. Only first authors are eligible to receive this award.

For questions regarding this award please contact the APS Meetings team at convention@psychologicalscience.org.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has awarded the 2022 Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences to Mahzarin R. Banaji, the 2010–2011 APS President and an APS William James Fellow, for her work in furthering the understanding of implicit social cognition.  

“Her research has helped establish and quantify the role that unconscious processes play in governing human social actions and judgments of others,” according to the official announcement from NAS. “Banaji’s work on implicit, group-based attitudes and beliefs continues to pave the way toward a more rigorous and quantitative approach to understanding the human mind in social context.”  

Banaji has long been revered for her contributions to the psychological sciences and is considered a leader in research regarding implicit social cognition and “implicit bias,” a term she coined with colleague Anthony Greenwald in 1995.  

The NAS announcement also noted her contribution “to the future of the field through her mentorship, public education, and ongoing leadership on science boards, committees, and organizations.” According to her Harvard University profile, Banaji continues in her role as the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University to research the social attitudes of adults and children, beliefs and stereotypes, and individual responsibility.   

Established in 2013 by APS William James Fellow Richard C. Atkinson, the Atkinson Prize is a biennial $100,000 award designed to individually honor the work of two experts who have significantly contributed to the advancement of the psychological and cognitive sciences.  

In addition to Banaji, APS Fellow Leah Somerland has been recognized by the NAS with a $75,000 Troland Research Award for her research on the adolescent brain and psychological development.  

The Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded the 2022 John P. McGovern Award Lecture in the Behavioral Sciences to APS Fellow John T. Wixted for his contributions to the overall understanding of human memory. 

In December, the APS journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest featured Wixted’s research (with APS Fellows Gary L. Wells and Elizabeth F. Loftus) on flaws inherent on relying on eyewitness memory in courtroom proceedings. “Test a witness’s memory of a suspect only once,” the researchers urged. Wixted discussed this research further in an interview on the APS podcast Under the Cortex. 

According to the official AAAS award announcement, “[Wixted] is being recognized for his work on understanding the mechanisms of human memory, focusing on the neuroscience of memory and amnesia, signal-detection and analyses of recognition memory, and eyewitness memory.” 

Wixted is a distinguished professor of psychology at University of California San Diego (UCSD), where he researches episodic memory and cognitive mechanisms regarding recognition memory through signal detection theory. His UCSD profile mentions his related work, which “investigates how episodic memory is represented in the human hippocampus,” and “is based mainly on single-unit recording studies performed with epilepsy patients.” 

First delivered in 1990, the John P. McGovern Award Lecture was created to help further scholars’ research and exploration of the behavioral sciences and includes a $5,000 cash prize. Wixted will deliver the lecture at the 2022 AAAS Annual Meeting in February. 

A Person-Centered Analysis of Craving in Smoking-Cue-Exposure Research
Michael A. Sayette, Madeline E. Goodwin, Kasey G. Creswell, Hannah J. Esmacher, and John D. Dimoff

Sayette and colleagues analyzed data from 672 daily smokers who had been deprived of nicotine for 5–12 hrs before participating in one of seven studies in which they reported their urge to smoke before and during exposure to cues associated with cigarette use (e.g., lighting a cigarette). Sixty nine percent of participants reported a higher urge during cue exposure. However, 31% of participants reported maximal urge before cue exposure, classifying them as nonresponders in traditional cue-reactivity analyses. These results suggest that traditional analyses, centered on mean levels of cue reactivity rather than person-centered analyses, may underestimate cue-reactivity effects.

Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms Are Associated With Heightened Avoidance of Low-Probability, High-Aversion Threats: A Preliminary Test of the Improbable-Catastrophe Hypothesis
Christopher Hunt, Nikki Degeneffe, Johanna Bixby, and Shmuel Lissek

This research suggests that individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) appear to have a heightened sensitivity to improbable catastrophes—events that are both catastrophic and highly improbable (e.g., contracting HIV from a doorknob). Hunt and colleagues tested college students with varying levels of OCD symptom severity and found that, in a paradigm designed to elicit varying degrees of perceived threat probability and aversiveness, participants who had higher levels of OCD symptoms revealed greater threat expectancy, physiological reactions, and avoidance in the face of unlikely but highly aversive threats than participants with lower levels of OCD.

The Impact of Moral-Injury Cognitions on Psychological Outcomes in Refugees: An Experimental Investigation 
Joel Hoffman and Angela Nickerson

Beliefs regarding moral violations (moral-injury cognitions) appear to underlie the association between potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs; events that potentially transgress deeply held moral beliefs and often occur in a context of traumatic exposure) and psychological symptoms in refugees, this research suggests. Hoffman and Nickerson simulated a PMIE (an asylum seeker forcibly separated from their children) using mental imagery to investigate the impact of moral-injury outcomes in 71 Arabic-speaking refugees. Participants with preexisting high moral-injury beliefs about violations by oneself and/or others reported greater negative emotional responses after the PMIE simulation than those with lower moral-injury beliefs.  

Examining Linear and Nonlinear Associations Between Negative Emotional Reactivity to Daily Events and Depression Among Adolescents
Angela C. Santee and Lisa R. Starr

Negative emotional reactivity to daily events is associated with depression. To clarify this association, Santee and Starr tested negative emotional reactivity and depression among 232 adolescents for 7 consecutive days (i.e., cross-sectionally) and again 1.5 years later (i.e., longitudinally). After completing an initial depression assessment, participants rated their experience of emotions, daily hassles, and uplifts three times per day for 7 days. Depression symptoms peaked when their negative reactivity to daily hassles was either extremely high (heightened) or extremely low (blunted) and when their reactivity to daily uplifts was heightened (i.e., greater decreases in negative emotion). Heightened reactivity to daily uplifts also predicted worsening of depression 1.5 years later.

Climate Change and Children’s Mental Health: A Developmental Perspective
Francis Vergunst and Helen L. Berry

Vergunst and Berry review research indicating that threats associated with climate change might increase risk to healthy human development from the point of conception. They suggest that these nefarious effects on physical and mental health (e.g., famine, anxiety) are already occurring and that monitoring and mitigating them is a matter of social justice as well as crucial for developmental health. Highlighting the need for well-controlled studies, Vergunst and Berry discuss the conceptual and measurement challenges inherent in studies of climate-change-related exposures and children’s mental-health outcomes. They also describe priority research areas that would clarify the mechanisms through which climate changes influence psychological health and well-being throughout development.

Psychopathy and Moral-Dilemma Judgment: An Analysis Using the Four-Factor Model of Psychopathy and the CNI Model of Moral Decision-Making
Dillon M. Luke, Craig S. Neumann, and Bertram Gawronski

Luke and colleagues examined the relationship between psychopathy and responses to moral dilemmas that pit consequences for the greater good against adherence to moral norms. They examined how participants with varied scores in different facets of psychopathy showed sensitivity to consequences, sensitivity to moral norms, and general preference for inaction over action when responding to moral dilemmas. Individuals with higher psychopathy scores, especially in interpersonal and affective facets, were less sensitive to moral norms. However, psychopathy was not associated with sensitivity to consequences or preferences for inaction over action. These findings suggest that the relationship between psychopathy and moral-dilemma judgments may be more nuanced than previous research considered.

Evidence From the Trauma-Film Paradigm That Traumatic and Nontraumatic Memories Are Statistically Equivalent on Coherence
Andrea Taylor, Rachel Zajac, Melanie K. T. Takarangi, and Maryanne Garry

This research suggests that traumatic memories are coherent and equivalent to nontraumatic memories (i.e., not fragmented and jumbled). Taylor and colleagues used a trauma-film-paradigm, in which participants viewed films that they later recalled, evaluating their memory’s coherence. To properly norm the films used, Taylor and colleagues created a new set of materials that included two films of each of the following: traumatic events, negative events, positive events, and neutral events. They found that this new set of materials produced the intended effects and intensities, and that memories were fairly coherent and equivalent, regardless of whether they were traumatic.

Education, Financial Stress, and Trajectory of Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Yanping Jiang, Samuele Zilioli, Rhonda N. Balzarini, Giulia Zoppolat, and Richard B. Slatcher

Jiang and colleagues explore how financial stress and educational disparities affected mental health in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. They analyzed data from 2,204 participants in spring 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic, they found a relationship between lower education and worse mental-health outcomes mediated by increased financial stress. However, these relationships did not change over time. These findings indicate that addressing financial stress associated with pandemics might mitigate the relationship between educational disparities and mental-health outcomes.

Time to Pay Attention? Information Search Explains Amplified Framing Effects Under Time Pressure
Ian D. Roberts, Yi Yang Teoh, and Cendri A. Hutcherson

Different framing of the same choice problem can lead to different choices, an effect that time pressure can increase. Roberts and colleagues tracked participants’ eye gaze and found that time pressure produced shifts in visual attention toward reward-predictive cues (e.g., in graphics, colors associated with higher gains) that increased framing effects. Their findings were contrary to an influential explanation for the amplification of framing effects in which time pressure leads individuals to rely on automatic emotional responses. Instead, they suggest, time pressure may lead individuals to strategically allocate their attention in an adaptive strategic behavior.

Where the Blame Lies: Unpacking Groups Into Their Constituent Subgroups Shifts Judgments of Blame in Intergroup Conflict
Nir Halevy, Ifat Maoz, Preeti Vani, and Emily S. Reit

This research suggests that people might assign more blame for intergroup conflict to groups that are presented as subgroups rather than as single, unified entities. In five experiments, Halevy and colleagues tested how different group presentations influenced the percentage of blame participants assigned to each group across three intergroup conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, racial tensions between White people and Black people in the United States, and the gender gap in wages in the United States. Results indicated that how the groups are presented can shape moral judgments in intergroup conflict.

Action Enhances Predicted Touch
Emily R. Thomas, Daniel Yon, Floris P. de Lange, and Clare Press

Previous research has suggested that predicted outcomes of tactile action are perceptually attenuated (e.g., that might be why we can’t tickle ourselves). Contrary to this hypothesis, the present findings suggest that predicting touch might enhance its perception. Participants moved their right index finger either to touch a button or toward the button (as if to touch it) and rated the subsequent intensity of a mechanical force that was then delivered to another finger. Results indicated that participants rated forces resulting from their own action as less intense than externally generated forces, but this effect reversed when there was no active finger contact with the button. In two other experiments, participants perceived expected touch during action more intensely than unexpected touch. Computational modeling suggested that expectations alter the way sensory evidence is integrated.

Attentional Guidance and Match Decisions Rely on Different Template Information During Visual Search
Xinger Yu, Timothy D. Hanks, and Joy J. Geng

How do we find the objects we are looking for? Theories of attention have suggested that we hold a template in our memory, similar to a photograph, of the target object that guides our attention to template-matching objects. In two experiments, Yu and colleagues found evidence for the dynamic nature of this template. By asking participants to search for target objects while using eye tracking to measure their attention, the researchers found that information used to guide initial attention appears to be coarse and “relational,” selecting anything that resembles the target. But participants’ decisions about whether an object matches a template use more precise and “optimal” information.

Naturalistic Face Learning in Infants and Adults
Xiaomei Zhou, Shruti Vyas, Jinbiao Ning, and Margaret C. Moulson

This research suggests that the attentional mechanisms critical for face recognition continue developing beyond the first year of life. In the learning phase of a study, adults and 6- to 12-month-old infants viewed videos of models reading a storybook. In a subsequent recognition test, participants saw the models’ faces paired with new faces. Zhou and colleagues used eye tracking and a novel facial-tracking program to measure participants’ face scanning. During learning, infants and adults were equally likely to prioritize the models’ faces over other elements in the video. However, infants showed less ability than adults to resist distractions during learning, which might have contributed to their poorer face recognition.

Noise Increases Anchoring Effects
Chang-Yuan Lee and Carey K. Morewedge

Anchoring effects occur when people are asked to make judgments about a numerical size or amount and their judgments are drawn toward a previously considered number (the anchor). These effects can occur in any situation, from responding to trivia questions to buying a car, and their size varies across the anchors and people making the judgment. Lee and Morewedge propose that higher noise in the mental representation of the target (e.g., targets with a higher magnitude of plausible values; large numbers) amplifies anchoring effects. In 11 experiments, they found that anchoring effects increased when people estimated larger numbers (i.e., had noisier representations) of familiar items, such as hotel prices, as well as more novel items, including counts in dot arrays.

What Might Books Be Teaching Young Children About Gender?
Molly Lewis, Matt Cooper Borkenhagen, Ellen Converse, Gary Lupyan, and Mark S. Seidenberg

This research suggests that children’s books may be an early source of gender stereotypes and tend to expose children to more stereotypes of their own gender. Lewis and colleagues analyzed 247 popular books for children (0–5 years old) and used word co-occurrence data and adult human judgments to quantify gender biases. Children’s books appeared to contain many words that adults judged as gendered, and some words’ co-occurrence also reflected gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine associated with emotions and masculine with tools). Moreover, many books also appeared to instantiate gender stereotypes (e.g., boys are better than girls at math).

Teacher Mindsets Help Explain Where a Growth-Mindset Intervention Does and Doesn’t Work
David S. Yeager et al.

Growth-mindset interventions teach that intellectual abilities can grow. Yeager and colleagues examined how teachers’ mindsets may shape the success of growth-mindset interventions. The study delivered short growth-mindset interventions to math students in their first year of high school. Results indicated that the interventions led to better math grades among students whose teachers themselves had growth mindsets. These findings support the mindset-plus-supportive-context hypothesis, which suggests students’ growth mindsets must be supported by their teachers’ own growth mindsets. Thus, contextual support may be needed to foster growth-mindset effects.

Summary: Dilated pupils, sweating, and a rapid heartbeat are some of the physiological responses that people experience when faced with a threatening situation. New research used the immersive experience of a haunted house to reveal that these responses differ depending on the social context and other factors.

The so-called fight-or-flight response is evolution’s way of preparing the body to defend itself or flee from a real or perceived threat, like a lion in the tall grass or—in modern times—an overdue performance review.

Scientists have struggled to study the effects of genuine threats on people’s mental and physical state because of ethical and practical constraints of human lab experiments.

In new research published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers used a haunted-house experience to study participants’ subjective and physiological responses to perceived threats in a safe yet immersive environment.

In this haunted-house setting, which included 17 rooms with various threats that formed an uninterrupted experience, the researchers examined how the body responds to threats differently depending on the social context (whether friends were around), features of the threats (whether they were expected), and emotions (whether individuals felt afraid).

“There are a lot of factors that influence how human bodies respond to threat,” said Sarah M. Tashjian, of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the study. “We found that friend-related emotional contagion, threat predictability, and subjective feelings of fear were all relevant for the body mounting a response.”

All of these factors help increase a person’s ability to survive when under threat, but in the study, each had slightly different influences, which demonstrate the dynamic nature of the sympathetic nervous system.

To study the effects of frightening experiences, previous studies used scary images, mild electric shocks, or loud noises. In the current study, 156 participants went through the haunted house in small groups. During the 30-minute experience, they encountered situations that mimicked the threat of suffocation, an oncoming speeding car, and a volley of shots (with pellets) from a firing squad. 

Participants wore real-time physiological-monitoring wristbands to measure their electrodermal activity, or sweat-induced changes in the skin’s electrical characteristics, including skin conductance level and skin conductance response.

Before visiting the haunted house, participants rated their expected fear on a scale from 1 to 10. Afterward, they rated their experienced fear level on the same scale. From these data, four factors were examined, including group composition, threat imminence, intrapersonal factors of fear, and a “baseline orienting response,” or the participant’s sensitivity to threats.

Results showed a positive association between the number of friends in a group and tonic arousal, which reflects the body’s overall physical response to stress or emotion. On average, the more friends that participants had with them while touring the haunted house, the higher their physical response.

“We interpreted this to reflect fear contagion—if your friends are around, your body picks up on their signals and has a higher level of arousal even in the absence of specific scares or startles,” Tashjian said. “In the lab, it is difficult to study the effects of groups on physiology.”

Studies usually involve testing one person at a time or, at most, pairs of friends. In this study, the researchers had the unique opportunity to study how being in groups with different mixes of friends and strangers affected people’s perceptions of threat.

The researchers also noted positive associations between unexpected attacks, subjective fear, and phasic frequency. Phasic effects are rapid changes the body experiences as it responds to an event. Individuals who felt the most afraid during the haunted house had more peaks in these responses. “If your body is more cued-in to the threatening event, you also psychologically feel more fear,” Tashjian said.

Other findings revealed that participants with an initially strong response to the first room of the haunted house showed increased responses as they visited other rooms. Participants with more frequent responses in the first room showed decreased responses over time.

“From a results perspective, this study is distinct because we measure multiple aspects of skin conductance, including slow responding, rapid responding, frequency of responses, and level of responses,” Tashjian explained. “Most studies use just one of these measures, which limits our understanding of how dynamic the sympathetic nervous system is and how different factors exert different influences on biology.”

She added that the research is a “major advance for cognitive and social psychology,” because it furthers the understanding of how “naturalistic contexts,” such as the immersive haunted house experience, influence the body’s response to threats. Also significant is the finding that friends amplify the physical response.

“We show that friends increase overall arousal, that unexpected scares produce more responses and higher levels of responses in the body than predictable scares, and that more frequent responses from the body manifest as feeling more afraid,” Tashjian said. “And we show all of this using an intensive, immersive, live-action threat environment.”

Reference: Tashjian, S., Fedrigo, V., Molapour, T., Mobbs, D., & Camerer, C. (2022). Physiological responses to a haunted-house threat experience: Distinct tonic and phasic effects. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211032231

The things we should have said or done in a given situation—or, more often, the things other people should have said or done—often seem obvious in hindsight, but when faced with a tough choice, we rarely have access to all of the same information that may come to light after the fact. This “curse of knowledge” can interfere with how we interpret other people’s thoughts and feelings, an ability known as theory of mind, and can therefore prevent us from accurately considering another person’s perspective. 

Theory of mind, a complex and essential social function, is made possible by numerous lower-level processes including executive functioning, working memory, and attentional skills. These abilities have been shown to be reduced in older adults, whether as a result of healthy aging or neurodegenerative disease. However, new research published in Psychological Science suggests that curse of knowledge may not weigh much more heavily on the old than the young.

Previous findings indicating a decline in older adults’ theory of mind abilities may have been exaggerated by the unrelated cognitive demands of certain experimental designs, according to Foyzul Rahman (Aston University) and colleagues. 

“Prior studies may have overestimated the decline of [theory of mind] in healthy aging because of experimental demands that are not essential for a functioning [theory of mind]. This information could inform support for older adults’ psychological functioning,” Rahman and colleagues explained. 

Theory of mind allows us to model how other people’s knowledge and perspectives might differ from our own, the researchers continued. This modeling requires us to overcome three sources of potential conflict: our own knowledge of reality (i.e., the “curse of knowledge”) and two types of differences in how one or more people might perceive a situation. These conflicts are known as other-other congruence when they involve comparing other people’s perspectives to each other and self-other congruence when they involve comparing other people’s perspectives to our own. 

Rahman and colleagues explored how age might influence our ability to manage these theory-of-mind conflicts through a study of 100 adults, half of them ages 18 to 29 and half ages 60 to 79. Each participant completed basic tests of their neurocognitive abilities, including reaction time, working memory, and attentional skills, in addition to a false-belief task. This task, designed to measure the accuracy of participants’ theory of mind when other people’s perspectives conflict with their own, involved making judgements about a ball hidden under one of three cups. The task consisted of three steps, each corresponding to one of the three common cognitive conflicts that may interfere with an accurate theory of mind.  

First, participants were given a hint about the location of the ball, which manipulated their knowledge of reality. In the reality-unknown condition, they were shown one cup the ball was not under. In the reality-known condition, they were shown which cup the ball was under. 

Then, participants were shown which cup two hypothetical people believed the ball to be hidden under. In the other-other congruent condition, the two people agreed on where the ball was located. In the incongruent condition, the two people chose different cups. 

Finally, participants were asked to indicate either which cup they personally believed the ball was hidden under or where one of the two other people believed it was. 

Overall, participants of all ages responded more slowly when they did not know where the ball actually was. They also responded more slowly and less accurately when their own knowledge of the ball’s actual location conflicted with another person’s belief. 

Older adults, who performed worse on measures of neurocognitive ability, responded more slowly and less accurately than younger adults across conditions. But contrary to previous findings, older adults’ existing knowledge of the ball’s location did not appear to influence their speed and accuracy any more than it did for younger adults. They did make significantly more errors, however, when managing perspectives that conflicted with their own or that of another person. 

“Our data show unexpected similarity between age groups when people are representing a belief incongruent with their own,” Rahman and colleagues wrote. “Given the association identified between age, cuing, and working memory, limits on processing speed, which declines with age, may explain this pattern of behavior.” 

Previous findings related to older adults’ reduced theory-of-mind abilities may at least partially reflect the cognitive demands of certain study designs, the researchers explained. For example, the ball-and-cup task used in this study requires participants to shift attention between multiple locations (the three cups) while simultaneously holding information about how multiple people’s beliefs map onto each location in working memory. The ability to keep track of all that information, while helpful, is not necessarily essential to having a functioning theory of mind. 

“This indicates that prior studies may have overestimated the effects of aging on [theory of mind] and highlights the need for carefully managing conflict in future studies of aging and [theory of mind],” Rahman and colleagues conclude. 

Reference 

Rahman, F., Kessler, K., Apperly, I. A., Hansen, P. C., Javed, S., Holland, C. A., & Hartwright, C. E. (2021). Sources of cognitive conflict and their relevance to theory-of-mind proficiency in healthy aging: A preregistered study. Psychological Science, 32(12), 1918–1936. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211017870