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Opposites attract -- unless you're in a relationship


Do I think I'm sexy? 

If we are in a relationship we are more likely to be attracted to faces resembling our own, but for single people, opposites attract. Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive. Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive, found a study published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Dr Jitka Lindová of Charles University in the Czech Republic and her team showed a series of photographs of faces to university students and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photographs were digitally manipulated so that the resemblance to the student was modified.

Images were of an individual of the opposite sex, whose face had been manipulated to look either more or less similar to the student. They were also presented with images of a same-sex individual manipulated in the same way.

"We found that single participants, those not in relationships, rate dissimilar faces as more attractive and sexy than self-resembling faces;" stated Lindová.

This was observed when participants rated both same-sex and opposite-sex faces.

"For the first time, we have observed how our partnership status affects who we find attractive;" she added.

"Our interpretation is that attractiveness perception mechanisms that give us a preference for a genetically suitable partner may be suppressed during romantic relationships," explained Lindová; "This might be a relationship maintenance strategy to prevent us from finding alternatives to our own partner, or perhaps self-resemblance becomes more important in terms of the social support we expect receive from relatives, which are known as kinship cues."

Little research has been carried out about how our perceptions change when we enter a relationship. These findings have important sociological and biological implications that require further study.

In addition, Lindová pointed out that this work may be of interest to the applied psychological sciences.

"For example, as those not in a relationship were not influenced by kinship cues and our findings might help to explain social phenomena such as parent and adolescent disaffection;" she said.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Frontiers.  Jitka Lindová, Anthony C. Little, Jan Havlíček, S. Craig Roberts, Anna Rubešová, Jaroslav Flegr. Effect of Partnership Status on Preferences for Facial Self-Resemblance. Frontiers in Psychology, 2016.
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Tired of poor eyesight? Try taping batteries to the back of your head.

Credit: © blackday / Fotolia

Brain stimulation temporarily improves visual acuity, according to new research.

As one who wears glasses, I know the dislocation experienced when I put on glasses with a new prescription.  It takes a bit of time to get used to the new vision.  Rather, it takes your brain a little time to reprogram itself to the new visual input.

If your brain can adapt rather quickly to this new experience, what can't the brain simply be stimulated to correct your vision without the need for lenses?

It can.  Using mild electrical stimulation to the visual cortex at the back of your head, researchers have learned that for several hours after the stimulation, people see better.  And, think better as well.

See where this is going?

Are we going to be able to implant devices inside the skull that permanently improve brain function without necessarily altering function?

Looks like it.

Here's the report with a link to the study in the attribution.
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A little spark for sharper sight
". . .those with worse vision see the most improvement."

Stimulating the visual cortex of the brain for 20 minutes with a mild electrical current can improve vision for about two hours, and those with worse vision see the most improvement, according to a Vanderbilt University study published this week in Current Biology.

"It's actually a very simple idea," said co-author Geoff Woodman, associate professor of psychology. "This kind of stimulation can improve cognitive processing in other brain areas, so if we stimulate the visual system, could we improve processing? Could we make someone's vision better -- not at the level of the eye, like Lasik or glasses, but directly at the level of the brain?"

Twenty young, healthy subjects with normal or near-normal vision were asked to evaluate the relative position of two identical vertical lines and judged whether they were perfectly aligned or offset. The test is more sensitive than a standard eye chart, and gave the researchers are very precise measurement of each subjects' visual acuity.

75 percent showed measurable improvement following the brain stimulation
The researchers then passed a very mild electric current through the area at the back of the brain that processes visual information. After 20 minutes, the subjects were asked to perform the test again, and about 75 percent showed measurable improvement following the brain stimulation.

The researchers performed several variations of this experiment to test the effects of different intensity levels, current directions and electrode placements. This third experiment was important because it confirmed that the electrodes had to be positioned specifically over the brain's visual processing center in order to affect the subjects' eyesight -- that the effect wasn't simply a response to stimulus anywhere in the brain.

They also measured how the stimulus changed the speed with which the brain processed visual information and whether the stimulation also improved the subjects' contrast sensitivity -- their ability to differentiate between multiple shades of gray.

The contrast experiment was notable because they found that the stimulation only improved contrast sensitivity at frequencies also associated with visual acuity, indicating that it was just the subjects' visual acuity that was being affected, not the contrast sensitivity.

Lead author Robert Reinhart, an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who conducted this research as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt, said this finding had interesting implications for future basic science. "Now we have a new tool that could be valuable for researchers investigating fundamental questions about how the visual system works," he said.

For their last experiment, the researchers wanted to see if the improvement they saw in the first experiment was significant enough to translate into a real-world task -- reading a standard eye chart.

They found that the stimulation effects improved the subjects' vision by an average of 1 to 2 letters, though Reinhart noted that there was significant variation between subjects. "We saw that those who came in with poorer vision, who might be on their way to needing glasses, had these big leaps, while others who came in with excellent vision showed no change."

Reinhart speculated that these findings could be explained in several different ways.

  • The prevailing belief is that the current might simply be boosting the visual signals so certain neurons can process them more rapidly, but Reinhart thinks it's also possible that the current essentially injects white noise into the visual system, which drowns out extraneous information and enables the brain to capture visual information more easily.

The researchers stress that much more research needs to happen in a clinical setting in order to confirm the safety of the procedure and that members of the public should never attempt to replicate the experiment at home.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Vanderbilt University, original written by Liz Entman.  Robert M.g. Reinhart, Wenxi Xiao, Laura J. Mcclenahan, Geoffrey F. Woodman. Electrical Stimulation of Visual Cortex Can Immediately Improve Spatial Vision. Current Biology, June 2016

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Write under natural blue light - you'll be sharper and more creative

Writers seem to be always on the search for ways to improve their work - regular exercise and writing while standing are but two methods many writers use to sharpen their prose.

According to this research, using a blue light also sharpens brain function -  something that any writer can adopt by purchasing bulbs that emit a shorter wave-length blue light similar to natural light.


Individuals exposed to blue wavelength 
lights experienced faster reaction times
Blue light exposure has a lasting effect on brain function

A new study found that blue wavelength light exposure led to subsequent increases in brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) when participants were engaging in a cognitive task after cessation of light exposure.

The results also showed that a short single exposure to blue light for half an hour is sufficient to produce measurable changes in reaction times and more efficient responses (answered more items correctly per second) during conditions of greater cognitive load after the light exposure had ended. Moreover, these improvements were directly associated with measurable changes in the activation of the prefrontal cortex.

"Previous studies only focused on the effects of light during the period of exposure. Our study adds to this research by showing that these beneficial effects of blue wavelength light may outlast the exposure period by over 40 minutes," said lead author Anna Alkozei, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona.

"Blue-enriched white light could be used in a variety of occupational settings where alertness and quick decision making are important, such as pilot cockpits, operation rooms, or military settings. It could also be used in settings where natural sunlight does not exist, such as the International Space Station.

Importantly, our findings suggest that using blue light before having to engage in important cognitive processes may still impact cognitive functioning for over half an hour after the exposure period ended. This may be valuable in a wide range of situations where acute blue light exposure is not a feasible option, such as testing situations."

The research abstract was published recently in an online supplement of the journal Sleep and will be presented Sunday, June 12, 2016 and Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Denver at SLEEP 2016, the 30th Anniversary Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC (APSS).

"These findings are important as they link the acute behavioral effects of blue light to enhanced activation of key cortical systems involved in cognition and mental control," said William D. S. Killgore, PhD, the senior author and principal investigator of the project.

The study consisted of 35 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 32 years. The participants were randomized to receive a 30-minute exposure to either blue (active) or amber (placebo) light immediately followed by a working memory task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Related stories:


Story Source:  Materials provided by American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "Individuals exposed to blue wavelength lights experienced faster reaction times: Blue light exposure has a lasting effect on brain function." ScienceDaily, 10 June 2016.
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Chivalry is not dead



Chivalry is not dead when it comes to morality
We're more likely to protect women than we are men

We're more likely to sacrifice a man than a woman when it comes to both saving the lives of others and in pursuing our self-interests, a team of psychology researchers has found.  "Our study indicates that we think women's welfare should be preserved over men's," observes Oriel FeldmanHall, a post-doctoral researcher at New York University and the study's lead author.

The research, conducted at Cambridge University's Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Columbia University, appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

In one experiment, study subjects read one of three versions of a "Trolley Dilemma" -- a commonly used technique in psychology studies and akin to the "Lifeboat Question" (i.e., if you could save only three of five passengers in a lifeboat, whom would you choose?). In the trolley scenario, subjects read one of three versions of the dilemma, where each vignette described a man, woman, or gender-neutral bystander on the bridge. The participants were then asked how willing they were to "push the [man/woman/person] onto the path of the oncoming trolley" in order to save five others farther down the track.

The results showed that both female and male subjects were much more likely to push the male bystander or one of unspecified gender than they were the female bystander.

In a second experiment, a new group of subjects was given £20 and told that any money they held at the end of the experiment would be multiplied up to 10-fold, giving them as much as £200. However, there was a catch. In the experiment, the subjects interacted with other individuals -- the researchers' confederates. The subjects were told that if they decided to keep the money, these individuals would be subjected to mild electric shocks. However, if they gave up the money, it would prevent the shocks from being administrated.

As with the first experiment, women were less likely than men to be subjected to shocks, suggesting an aversion to harming females--even when this came at the subjects' own financial expense. However, while both female and male subjects were less likely to shock females than they were males, women in particular were less willing to shock other women.

A third experiment was a survey in which a new set of more than 350 subjects was asked a series of questions relevant to the study's focus -- specifically, the researchers aimed to sort out the thought process that might explain the behaviors exhibited in the first two experiments.

The questions included the following: "On a sinking ship, whom should you save first? Men, women, or no order"; "According to social norms, how morally acceptable is it to harm (men/women) for money?"; "According to social norms, how fair is it to harm (men/women)?"; and, "According to social norms, how well do (men/women) tolerate pain?"

Overall, the answers of both female and male respondents suggested that social norms account for greater harming behavior toward a male than a female target--women are less tolerant to pain, it's unacceptable to harm females for personal gain, and society endorses chivalrous behavior. Furthermore, these perspectives were not linked to emotion--subjects found harming men and women to be equally emotionally aversive.

"There is indeed a gender bias in these matters: society perceives harming women as more morally unacceptable," explains co-author Dean Mobbs, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University.

Story Source:  Materials provided by New York University.  O. FeldmanHall, T. Dalgleish, D. Evans, L. Navrady, E. Tedeschi, D. Mobbs. Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2016.
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Words May Be All You Need

www.itsnicethat.com

Psychologists have discovered that when two strangers meet and
interact for the first time, the extent to which they develop mutual
understanding depends on how much they talk and ask questions
rather than on non-verbal cues such as gestures or exchanging glances.
Over my career I've read several books on or attended seminars about the importance of non-verbal communication as well as how to read a person's body language.  By implication, this knowledge helps control or model a person's own body language to communicate a wanted affect.

We each use these skills - most likely without thinking about it - in our own day-to-day relationships and are an important tool for investigators and interviewers - who do think about it.

But simply talking, asking and answering questions and listening is also very important.  According to this research, more important than reading or projecting body-language.

So here's a report on the research with a link to the full study in the attribution.


Strangers reach mutual understanding 
through talking and asking questions
. . .not from non-verbal cues

Psychologists at The University of Texas at Arlington have discovered that when two strangers meet and interact for the first time, the extent to which they develop mutual understanding depends on how much they talk and ask questions rather than on non-verbal cues such as gestures or exchanging glances.

The UTA researchers used a specialized linguistic program to measure the extent that two strangers "get in synch" linguistically, providing new insight into the processes that underlie how people come to understand each other when they meet for the first time.

"Beginning in the 1970s, many researchers touted the power of non-verbal communication in creating first impressions and connecting with others," said William Ickes, co-author of the study and UTA Distinguished Professor of Psychology. "Our research indicates that the exchange of words in conversation is all that is really needed for the development of common-ground understanding in initial, unstructured interactions."

Ickes, along with the study's lead author, Vivian Ta, and co-author Meghan Babcock, both UTA psychology doctoral students, recently published their results in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology as "Developing Latent Semantic Similarity in Initial, Unstructured Interactions: The Words May Be All You Need."

The first of their two studies focused on 26 female-female pairs and 20 male-male pairs, all volunteers from UTA undergraduate psychology classes, who were seated in a "waiting room" situation while their initial, unstructured interaction was covertly video- and audiotaped for six minutes while the experimenter left to run an errand before the session. A second study used a much larger sample that contained male-female pairs in addition to male-male and female-female pairs.

A specialized linguistic program was used to analyze the transcripts of their conversations. This program measured each pair's latent semantic similarity, or the the degree to which they used words in the same way during their interactions. The researchers also recorded verbal and non-verbal behaviors seen in the video.

The results clearly showed that the pairs of strangers achieved higher levels of mutual understanding when they exchanged more words with each other and asked more questions.

On the other hand, pairs in which the partners looked at each other more did not achieve significantly greater "semantic similarity" scores than pairs where the partners looked at each other less, and the same was true when comparing pairs in which the partners acknowledged each other more versus less or where they gestured to each other more or less.

"We all know it's important to be able to establish common-ground understanding with the people you're interacting," lead author Vivian Ta said. "Our study shows that the key to this is verbal, not non-verbal."

Psychology Department Chair Perry Fuchs added, "This research on basic human interactions between strangers has implications for all aspects of our social lives and work contexts. It will be interesting to see how the researchers extend this work into the online space and telephone space where so many of our initial interactions are happening now."

The research reflects UTA's increasing focus on Health and the Human Condition within its Strategic Plan 2020: Bold Solutions|Global Impact and the psychology department's growing reputation in psychological sciences, including social psychology and personality.

Related stories:


Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Texas at Arlington. V. P. Ta, M. J. Babcock, W. Ickes. Developing Latent Semantic Similarity in Initial, Unstructured Interactions: The Words May Be All You Need. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2016
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Possible early Viking settlement in North America explored

The new Viking settlement was found on the edge of Point Rosee in
Newfoundland (illustrated above) 400 miles south of another site at
L'Anse aux Meadows. They suggest that the Vikings' mastery of the
seas allowed them to venture to North America.   
There is so much speculation on possible discoverers of the Americas ranging from Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese to French Merovingians to a lost tribe of Israel, ancient Egyptians and sailors from the lost continent of Atlantis.  There are two statements that need to be said about this:

  1. An extended family group first crossed from Siberia to North America some 14,000 years ago, and survived, built sophisticated cultures and societies, and left undeniable evidence of their presence.  To give credit where credit is due, they discovered the Americas and no one else.
  2. Until solid scientific evidence establishing other groups as having visited the Americas is produced and peer reviewed, it remains in the realm of speculation.  And, yes, I have watched the various television pop science shows (some would say pseudo science) that present evidence of other early visitors to the continents. Interesting? Yes.  Conclusive?  No.
This find adds to the possibility of Viking explorations to the Americas potentially adding to the evidence supporting this theory. 

Here's the report - with an announcement of television programming covering the research.
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Possible Viking discovery by archaeologist
could rewrite North American history

Using satellite imaging, an archaeologist may have found evidence of the 2nd Norse settlement in North America at a site in Newfoundland. With the use of pioneering satellite imagery analysis, excavation and investigation of archeological evidence, the team has uncovered what could be the first new Norse site to be discovered in North America in over 50 years. If confirmed by further research, the site at Point Rosee in Newfoundland will show that the Vikings traveled much farther into North America than previously known, pushing the boundary of their explorations over 300 miles to the southwest.

To date, scientists have known of only one other Viking site, found on the very northern tip of Newfoundland in Canada, at L'Anse Aux Meadows. In the 1960s, archaeologists uncovered the foundations of 1,000-year-old Viking buildings, signs of metalworking, iron nails and artifacts. The site appeared to pre-date Columbus' voyages to the New World by some 500 years, confirming that Norse explorers had reached North America as suggested in the Vinland sagas. For more than 50 years, scientists have searched for another Norse site.

Using infrared images from 400 miles in space, Parcak and her team looked at tens of thousands of square kilometers along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. Images taken in Point Rosee revealed possible human-made shapes under discolored vegetation. This intriguing evidence suggests the Vikings traveled farther south than previously known. The Newfoundland project was co-directed by Gregory Mumford, Ph.D., Parcak's husband and professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthropology. Preliminary excavations took place over a period of two and a half weeks in June 2015.

Parcak recently made international headlines when she was named winner of the 2016 TED Prize. She is an expert in satellite remote sensing for archaeology and wrote the first textbook in the field. Her methods have helped locate 17 potential pyramids in Egypt, in addition to 3,100 forgotten settlements and 1,000 lost tombs. She has also made major discoveries throughout the Roman Empire. She is a National Geographic Senior Fellow, TED Senior Fellow and a professor of archaeology at UAB. Parcak is also the founder and director of the UAB Laboratory for Global Observation.
The discovery is the subject of a two-hour special called "Vikings Unearthed." The program will first stream online at pbs.org/nova Monday, April 4, at 2:30 p.m. CT to coincide with the premiere of a 90-minute version of the film in the U.K. on BBC One. A two-hour U.S. broadcast will follow Wednesday, April 6, at 8 p.m. CT on PBS.
Related stories:
HISTORY & PREHISTORY
Human Development & Genetics

Story Source:  Vaterials provided by University of Alabama at Birmingham, original written by Tiffany Westry. "Possible Viking discovery by archaeologist could rewrite North American history." ScienceDaily. 1 April 2016.
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The basis of political ideology

Candidate Collage
http://www.jta.org/

Is your political ideology in your head?
The differences between conservatives and liberals may be psychologically fundamental

Conservatives and liberals know there is a chasm between their policy and social ideals. A new study indicates that the thought processes of political conservatives gives greater weight to negative information. Conservatives are significantly more likely to remember images that evoke negative emotions.

The research, led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Mark Mills, revealed that negativity bias -- where greater weight in our cognitive processes is given to negative information over positive or neutral information -- is stronger in political conservatives and that the negativity bias transfers to how well they remember stimuli.

In other words, conservatives in the study were more likely to remember things that evoked negative emotions -- images of war, snakes, dead animals -- than their more liberal counterparts.

First, study organizers placed participants on a political scale based on their degree of approval or disapproval on 20 hot-button political issues. They were then asked to study 120 negative, positive and neutral pictures in preparation for a memory test.

Afterward, participants viewed 240 pictures -- an even split of new and previously seen images -- and were asked to identify the pictures they had already seen.

Scientists hypothesized that they would see some difference in memory of positive and negative imagery between conservatives and liberals, but were surprised at the pronounced difference. The most conservative participants remembered about 91 percent of negative images compared with 80 percent of positive ones. The most liberal participants, in contrast, remembered about 84 percent of negative images compared with 86 percent of positive ones.

"There are lots of reasons why people differ in how they process emotion," said Mills, a graduate student of psychology in UNL's Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior. "One part of the study was trying to account for how much of that variance is explained by political ideology. That had been unknown up until this point."

Forty-five percent of variance between subjects was accounted for by political ideology, he said.

"It quantifies the size of the correlation between negativity bias and political ideology," Mills said. "Out of all the possible reasons in the entire world for why individuals would differ in how well they remember positive and negative images, political ideology alone can account for about half of these reasons."

Despite its name, however, negativity bias isn't a bad thing -- and everyone has it, the researchers said.  "If you ignore a positive stimulus in your environment, you might miss lunch," co-author Kevin Smith, a UNL professor of political science, said. "If you ignore a negative stimulus in your environment, you might be lunch, so there is good reason for why we have a negativity bias."

Smith said the latest study is another step in a line of research at UNL that examines the most basic psychological and physiological underpinnings of the differences between liberals and conservatives. Smith and Hibbing have broken ground with this research, which has spawned numerous papers and their 2013 book, "Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences."

"When conservatives get a negative stimulus and you track their physiology and their neurology, you tend to see reactions that are capable of distinguishing between liberals and conservatives," Smith said. "One area that we really haven't investigated is the cognition of the negativity bias. There hadn't been a lot done on memory.

"(The new study) explains even on an intuitive level why liberals and conservatives are different. There are distinct psychological differences between them."

The study was published this month in the journal Behavioural Brain Research. It was co-authored by political science graduate students Frank Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi and Benjamin Sievert; professor of political science John Hibbing; and associate professor of psychology Mike Dodd.

Related stories:
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Nebraska-Lincoln, original by Deann Gayman. Mark Mills, Frank J. Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi, Benjamin Sievert, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd. Political conservatism predicts asymmetries in emotional scene memory. Behavioural Brain Research, 2016.
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