Shining a Light on Honesty

New research shows that bright lights make people more honest, altruistic, ethical, and less selfish. People in a brightly lit room donated more than twice as much as those in a dim room, and were more likely to offer to help others.

“We provide the first experimental evidence showing that brightness appears to heighten the salience of morality to the individual, thereby leading people to perform ethical deeds,” say the researchers from National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, who report their findings in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

“We suggest that brightness may enhance the self-importance of morality and thereby increase ethical behavior.” The researchers carried out a series of experiments with three levels of brightness under 12, eight, and four fluorescent lights.

In one experiment, men and women were told they were playing a game which involved sharing money between themselves and a stranger said to be in another room. Those in the brightest room offered around 15 per cent more of the cash than those in the moderately lit room, and around 30 per cent more than the people in the dimmest room.

Researchers determined an 85.2 per cent honesty rate for people in the well-lit room, 70.4 per cent for the those in the moderately lit room, and 51.9 per for those under dim lighting.

Click here for the article.

Lying Can Make Your Health Suffer

Biblical lying about Joseph's cloak.

Researchers recently determined that avoiding lying can make you healthier. (As a side note, previous research has shown that the average American lies 11 times a week.)

"It's certainly a worthy goal to have people be more honest and more genuine and interact with others in a more honest way," says psychologist Robert Feldman of the University of Massachusetts. "That would be ultimately beneficial.”

Each week for 10 weeks, 110 individuals, ages 18-71, took a lie detector test and completed health and relationship measures assessing the number of major and minor lies they told that week.

Researchers instructed half the participants to "refrain from telling any lies for any reason to anyone. You may omit truths, refuse to answer questions, and keep secrets, but you cannot say anything that you know to be false." The other half received no such instructions.

Over the study period, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. When participants in the no-lie group told three fewer minor lies than they did in other weeks, for example, they experienced, on average, four fewer mental-health complaints and three fewer physical complaints. Mental health complaints included feeling tense or melancholy; physical complaints included sore throats and headaches.

Click here for the article.

Painting depicts Biblical story of Joseph's brothers lying about his blood-smeared tunic, by Diego Velazquez, 1630.

Cause-and-Effect and Magical Thinking

Our sense of cause-and-effect leads us to put credence into magical thinking, according to psychology writer Matthew Hutson, whose book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking was released this week.

Even the practice of voodoo ~ especially inserting pins into figurines to inflict pain or bad luck ~ gains strength because of the way we associate our actions with certain results. "When you do some symbolic action or perform some symbolic ritual, you tend to think it will bring about what it symbolizes," Hutson says.

According to Life’s Little Mysteries.com: 

In a recent experiment, psychologists monitored people’s perspiration levels as they cut up a photograph of a cherished childhood possession. Unsurprisingly, destroying a representation of their childhood made the participants sweat. One possible explanation for the clammy palms is that our brains have difficulty separating appearance with reality, Hutson said. 

A voodoo doll (or picture of your baby blanket) conjures in your head the thought of the actual person or object it represents, and so the mere thought of the person or object being harmed makes you feel like he or she, or it, really is being. 

Another possibility is that we get confused by the fact that, in the real world, causes are often similar to their effects. A big bolt of lightning causes a big crack of thunder. Red crayons draw red lines. Children look like their parents. "So we may then expect that if we perform some action, then some effect similar to the action will be caused," Hutson said.

Though it's important for us to be cognizant of real-world similarities between causes and effects, it inadvertently spurs magical thinking. While most of us consider ourselves to be rational, the research suggests remnants of the magical thinking we evolved with will invariably affect our thoughts.

Click here for the complete article.

Facebook No Help for Low Self-Esteem

You'd think Facebook would be great for people with low self-esteem because they can share information remotely. Not so. It seems low-self-esteemers behave counterproductively, bombarding their friends with negative tidbits about their lives and making themselves less likeable, according to a new study to be published in Psychological Science.

"We had this idea that Facebook could be a really fantastic place for people to strengthen their relationships," says Amanda Forest of the University of Waterloo.

Researchers investigated what students actually wrote on Facebook. They asked the students for their last 10 status updates, and each set of status updates was rated for how positive or negative it was. For each set of statements, a coder ~ an undergraduate Facebook user ~ rated how much they liked the person who wrote them.

People with low self-esteem were more negative than people with high self-esteem ~ and the coders liked them less. The coders were strangers, but that's realistic, Forest says. Research shows that nearly half of Facebook friends are actually strangers or acquaintances, not close friends.

Click here for the complete article.

Detecting Future Criminal Behavior in Children?

The demon Krampus marching naughty children to Hell.

Some criminologists are suggesting that children be screened with brain-imaging technology to identify violent tendencies. If the tendencies are present, the children would be treated … in some fashion.

They claim abnormal brain make-up could be a cause of criminality ~ psychopaths and criminals have smaller amygdala and prefrontal cortex, both of which regulate and control emotion and behavior. They also argue that children as young as four exhibit “callous unemotional traits” such as lack of guilt and empathy that suggest future bad behavior.

Linking these features with “conduct problems” such as throwing tantrums could be a strong way to predict who could be anti-social in later life.

Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University used data from more than 9,000 twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. Assessments of callous unemotional traits and conduct problems were based on teacher questionnaires when the children were seven, nine and 12. Information was taken from parents when the children were as young as four.

She found there was a correlation between risk factors at a young age and bad behavior at an older age.

A British criminologist, Adrian Raine, told the Telegraph he acknowledged the ethical implications of treating children before they had done anything wrong, but argued that “biological” causes of crime could not be ignored. “We could be ostriches and stick our heads in the sand but I believe we have to pursue the causes of crime at a biological and genetic level as well as at a social,” he said.

Click here for the Telegraph article.

Want Premonitions? Loosen Up

In his fascinating new book, Larry Dossey ~ a physician who strives to bring scientific understanding to the realm of spirituality ~ discusses the nature of premonitions, focusing on recent research into their nature and causes. His book is The Power of Premonitions, and one of my favorite parts is Dossey’s advice to those who want to be more open to premonitions:

So here’s my advice for those who wish to be premonition-prone: court difference, variety, and ambiguity in your life. Relax and let go. Don't try too hard. Give up your pet ideas of how the world should work. Dabble in poetry; play with metaphors; shun literalism. Avoid habits, ruts, and routines. Make a place for variety, risk, novelty, playfulness, generosity, and mystery in your life. As Rumi advises, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Don‘t be too attached to results, because this will lead to an attempt to control and manipulate outcomes, which is toxic to the openness and flexibility you are seeking. If you do these things, you will probably discover that the universe meets you more than halfway, perhaps with premonitions as its calling card.

Seems to me to be a good recipe, in general, for leading a richer, more fulfilling and more interesting life.

Lucid Dreaming May Help Heal Psychosis

Researchers are finding more links between lucid dreaming and psychosis, lending hope to the idea that dreams may be able to help cure a sick mind. According to ScienceDaily, citing data from the European Science Foundation (ESF):

Lucid dreaming ~ when you are aware you are dreaming ~ is a hybrid state between sleeping and being awake. It creates distinct patterns of electrical activity in the brain that have similarities to the patterns made by psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia. Confirming links between lucid dreaming and psychotic conditions offers potential for new therapeutic routes based on how healthy dreaming differs from the unstable states associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders.

New data affirms the connection by showing that while dreaming lucidly the brain is in a dissociated state … Dissociation involves losing conscious control over mental processes, such as logical thinking or emotional reaction. In some psychiatric conditions this state is also known to occur while people are awake.

"In the field of psychiatry, the interest in patients' dreams has progressively fallen out of both clinical practice and research. But this new work seems to show that we may be able to make comparisons between lucid dreaming and some psychiatric conditions that involve an abnormal dissociation of consciousness while awake, such as psychosis, depersonalization and pseudoseizures." said Silvio Scarone, from the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy.

Meanwhile, the previously discredited idea of treating some conditions with dream therapy has attracted interest from clinicians. An example is people suffering from nightmares can sometimes be treated by training them to dream lucidly so they can consciously wake up.

Click here for the complete ScienceDaily article.

Positive Emotions Expand Our Awareness

New research shows that when we experience positive emotions ~ love, joy, serenity, amusement, pride, as examples ~ our awareness expands.

“We literally see more, our peripheral vision is expanded,” says Barbara Frederickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book Positivity, which is based on her research.

Negative emotions, conversely, can actually shrink our mental capacity and perceptions. According to U.S. News & World Report:

She also finds that people who increase their "daily diet" of positive emotions develop closer connections with others, their resilience and optimism strengthens, and they become less depressed and more satisfied with life, compared with people who do nothing to experience them more frequently.

On average, "we all need at least three positive emotions to lift us up for every negative emotion that drags us down," she says, a "positivity ratio" that arose from work she and a colleague published in 2005. People truly in the "flourishing zone" surpass that mark, although most of us clock in at 2 to 1 or even lower, she says.

"There are multiple ways to raise your ratio," she says, by increasing positive emotions, reducing negative emotions, or both.

There earning to meditate can boost positive emotions, as do a run in the woods, dancing, or reading a new cookbook, as examples.

Evidence suggests that there's a correlation between experiencing positive emotions in life and living longer, says Fredrickson, who encourages people to visit her free website and track their positivity ratio nightly for two weeks to see what their average is. Doing so might help you learn the sources of your positive emotions and the triggers for your negative ones.

"The truth emerging from the science is that feeling good is a wise investment in our future," she says.

Click here for the U.S. News & World Report article.

Click here to test your positivity/negativity ratio on Frederickson's website.

More Money, Less Pain

According to new research, if you have ample money, you are more immune to physical pain and social slights than an impoverished person.

As reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, psychologists recently explored the psychological meaning of money in the laboratory. They ran a series of experiments to examine the effects of earning or losing money, social acceptance or rejection and physical pain.

According to Newsweek:

The psychologists used a ruse to prime volunteers' thoughts about money. The testgivers told subjects that they were taking part in a dexterity test, in which half of them counted pieces of paper and the other half counted a stack of $100 bills, a lab task well known to activate the idea of earning and having money.

Then they ran two experiments. In one, the volunteers all took part in a pain-tolerance test, which involved dipping the volunteers' fingers in very hot water. In another, they participated in a computerized ball-tossing game, which had been set up to shun certain players ~ much like kids are ostracized on the playground.The idea was to see if being flush with cash would lead to less painful feelings of rejection ~ and if it would salve actual physical suffering as well.

It did both, unmistakably. Those who had counted real C-notes reported less pain ~ both social and physical ~ than did those who had just counted paper.

So, why would this be the case?

The psychologists' theory is that social pain is merely a modern version of more basic physical pain. Our ancient brain evolved a pain detector to warn us away from peril, and as we became social animals, the emotional pain detector was piggy-backed on top. The modern brain mixes them up.

They further speculate that money is a social resource, interchangeable with popularity. Having money increases people's confidence in their ability to negotiate their social world. So having money bolsters self-esteem and defuses the pain of ostracism ~ and in the process diminishes actual pain.

Click here for the Newsweek article.

People Still Place Meaning on Dreams

"The Dream," by Henri Rousseau, 1910.

Here are excerpts from a group of psychological studies concerning dreams, as documented recently in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association:

• Researchers in the United States, India and South Korea asked 149 students to rate different theories about dreams. Across all three cultures, an overwhelming majority of the students endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world, a belief also endorsed by a nationally representative sample of Americans.

• In another study, researchers surveyed 182 commuters at a Boston train station, asking them to imagine that one of four possible scenarios had happened the night before a scheduled airline trip: The national threat level was raised to orange; they consciously thought about their plane crashing; they dreamed about a plane crash; or a real plane crash occurred on the route they planned to take. A dream of a plane crash was more likely to affect travel plans, and the dream of a plane crash produced a similar level of anxiety as did an actual crash.

• Researchers asked 270 men and women from across the United States to remember a dream they had had about a person they knew. People ascribed more importance to pleasant dreams about a person they liked as compared to a person they did not like, while they were more likely to consider an unpleasant dream more meaningful if it was about a person they disliked.

And yet another study demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider dreams where God spoke to them to be meaningful. Agnostics considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice.

Click here for the Science Daily article.

Recession Raises Psychological Concerns

With the current worldwide recession battering Britain along with everybody else, the British Psychological Society devoted part of its annual meeting in Brighton last week to the impact of the economic downturn on people’s mental health. Here are some snippets:

Says Professor Stephen Lea of the University of Exeter:

"Money is a strong motivating force in society. Yet unlike other strong motivators such as food or sex, it has no apparent or direct biological basis. It can be seen not only as a useful tool for society, but also as a powerful drug. Modern money is, in a sense, a mutual confidence trick. Money and financial instruments like stocks and shares, only work because everyone believes that they will work.”

"Confidence in the supposed instrumental support for some kinds of money, or money-related tools, has collapsed resulting in substantial disorder in behavior. On the other hand, many people have suddenly been put in a situation where they are either in debt or are almost bound to go into debt. We need to consider whether there has been a mass psychology of both money and debt that has contributed to the credit crunch".

According to another speaker, Peter Cooper, chief executive of CRAM International and a fellow with the Market Research Society:

"For many people the recession is creating profound fears about loss of home, love, self-respect, and above all loss of meaning in their lives. Anxiety and depression are increasingly evident. Many blame the 'greed' of the past. Others see it as an opportunity for 'cleansing' and a 'new beginning'. However, many people lack the psychological resources to cope.”

"Psychological factors have played a part in the origins of the crisis, and are now critical in its resolution for individual and social well-being. Understanding psychological needs and working in partnership with organizations in fields like economics, ecology and politics can help forge the new world people are seeking."

Click here for the Medical News Today article.

Does Religion Reduce Perception of Error?

(The more I think about this article, the more I feel it's open for wide interpretation. If the subject interests you, I recommend you follow the link to the complete article for more details.)

A team of researchers recently took a close look at a small area of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex, or ACC. According to research leader Michael Inzlicht, the ACC tells us when something is wrong, as when we've made a mistake.

"When it's fired, the response engendered is 'uh-oh, pay attention, something is amiss here'," says Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto.

• Among his findings are that people of a religious persuasion have less of an ACC ‘uh-oh’ response than non-religious types when they make an error on a simple test.

• On the other hand, people with known anxiety disorders tend to show high activity in the ACC when they make a mistake.

One explanation is that people with a genetic predisposition to reduced ACC activity gravitate toward religion. "It's possible that if you're born with a certain kind of brain, you're predisposed to religion," Inzlicht says. A recent article in New Scientist adds:

However, Inzlicht suspects that religious belief is driving the association. In unpublished experiments, Inzlicht's team asked religious volunteers to describe in writing either their faith or their favourite season. Those who wrote about their connection to God exhibited reduced ACC activation, compared with people who described the weather.

Inzlicht says it would be interesting to test people as their religious devotion strengthens or weakens over time to see if ACC activation changes accordingly. This could help confirm the correct explanation for the lower ACC activity.

"It's a very provocative finding and it is consistent with a lot of other things we know about religion" says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This might explain why religious belief seems to blunt feelings of anxiety.

Inzlicht's team tested 50 university students from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Christians made up most participants, but his team also tested Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists.

Click here for the complete New Scientist article.

Is 'Full-Moon Madness' a Myth?

The familiar concept of “full-moon madness” is being examined in the harsh light of day by a number of scientists who now are concluding it’s mostly … well, lunacy.

Essentially, the scientists say the condition is a psychological urban legend, according to an article in the new issue of Scientific American. But if it’s just a legend, why is it so widespread?

• Media coverage almost surely plays a role. Scores of Hollywood horror flicks portray full-moon nights as peak times of spooky occurrences such as stabbings, shootings and psychotic behaviors.

• Perhaps more important, research demonstrates that many people fall prey to “illusory correlation” ~ the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. For example, many people who have joint pain insist that their pain increases during rainy weather, although research disconfirms this assertion. Much like the watery mirages we observe on freeways during hot summer days, illusory correlations can fool us into perceiving phenomena in their absence.

As for how the full-moon notion got started, the article quotes psychiatrist Charles Raison of Emory University:

According to Raison, the lunar lunacy effect may possess a small kernel of truth in that it may once have been genuine. Raison conjectures that before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside ~ including many who had severe mental disorders ~ of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras. So the lunar lunacy effect is, in Raison and his colleagues’ terms, a “cultural fossil.”

Click here to read the complete Scientific American article.

Hypnosis Proves Strong Mind/Body Medicine

Depiction of a 19th Century school of hypnosis.

Hypnosis ranks alongside the placebo as among the most potentially effective mind/body medicines. The hypnotic trance, however, empowers the mind to control the body and can modify the messages the body sends to the mind.

“It has been used to counter the nausea of pregnancy and chemotherapy; dental and test-taking anxiety; pain associated with surgery, root canal treatment and childbirth; fear of flying and public speaking; compulsive hair-pulling; and intractable hiccups, among many other troublesome health problems,” according to an article this week in the New York Times.

Among the doctors the Times interviewed was Roberta Temes, a clinical hypnotist in Scotch Plains, N.J., who explains that hypnosis cannot make people do anything they don’t want to do. It can succeed only in helping people make changes they desire.

She’s the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hypnosis, and points out that you may not even have to be face to face with a hypnotist to benefit medically. She said hypnosis can be helpful even if done with a cassette tape or CD, or by telephone. Some good CDs and tapes are available online at The Hypnosis Network.

While not everyone is easily hypnotized, nearly everyone can slip into a therapeutic trance, Dr. Temes told the Times. One of her patients, Dr. Susan Clarvit, a New York psychiatrist, thought she could not be hypnotized — she believed she was too scientific, too rational a person.

“But I was desperate,” Dr. Clarvit said in an interview. “I was pregnant with my second child and too nauseated to be alive. Dr. Temes asked me what I held most often, and I said a pen. She hypnotized me so that when I held a pen I had an overall feeling of wellness. I held a pen all the time, even while driving, and didn’t feel nauseated.”

Under hypnosis, Dr. Clarvit was given a posthypnotic suggestion that linked holding a pen to feeling well. Such suggestions enable people to practice a new, desired behavior after being brought out of the trance.

As with any other profession, some hypnotherapists are more talented than others. Dr. Temes said word-of-mouth may be the best way to find someone practiced in hypnosis for the kind of problem you’re trying to solve. Also helpful is the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, at www.asch.net, which maintains a referral list of therapists, both certified and not, by location and specialty.

Click here for the New York Times article.

Narcissists Aren't the Leaders They Think They Are

Narcissus, by Michelangelo Caravaggio, ca. 1598.

Narcissists are most likely to step in as leaders ~ such as politicians or power brokers ~ but that doesn't mean they are the best leaders. Recent studies concluded that narcissists don’t actually outperform others in leadership roles.

They do, however, tend to be egotistical types who exaggerate their talents and abilities, and lack empathy for others.

"A person with high self-esteem is confident and charming, but they also have a caring component and they want to develop intimacy with others," lead researcher Amy Brunell, a psychologist at Ohio State University at Newark, told Live Science. "Narcissists have an inflated view of their talents and abilities and are all about themselves. They don’t care as much about others."

"It's not surprising that narcissists become leaders,” she said. “They like power, they are egotistical, and they are usually charming and extraverted. But the problem is, they don't necessarily make better leaders."

• In one study, 432 undergraduate students completed surveys that measured various personality traits, including aspects of narcissism. The students were put in groups of four and told to assume they were a committee of senior officers of the student union. Their task was to elect next year's director. Students who scored higher on narcissism were more likely to say they wanted to lead the group. They were also more likely to say they did lead the group discussion and said they were more likely to be viewed as leaders by the other group members.

• In a similar study, more than 400 students were told to imagine they were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and had to choose 15 items from the ship that would best help them survive on the island. Those who scored highest on narcissism again showed the most desire to lead the group discussion, rated themselves as leaders, and were viewed by other group members as the leaders. The researchers compared the 15-item lists with one prepared by an expert who has taught survival skills to the U.S. military. Narcissists did no better than their less self-centered counterparts at choosing survival items.

• A third study involved more than 150 business managers enrolled in an executive MBA program at a large southeastern university. The managers were grouped in fours and told to assume the role of a school board deciding how to allocate a large financial contribution from a fictional company. The MBA students who rated highest in narcissism were most likely to emerge as group leaders. The results held even when other personality traits, such as self-esteem and extraversion, were taken into account.

Wall Street traders could also have a high dose of narcissism, Brunell suggested. "There have been a lot of studies that have found narcissistic leaders tend to have volatile and risky decision-making performance and can be ineffective and potentially destructive leaders."

Click here for the Live Science article.